Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World
A week ago I saw Dana Levin read in Eldorado, outside of Santa Fe. I liked her funny, experimental poems and she inspired me to create a new Pinterest page called Poets with Sexy Hair.
https://pinterest.com/poetmarymccray/poets-with-sexy-hair/
Can you help me think of more poets with sexy hair?
Gone is the world of ink and quill poetry. Well, actually there probably is a website out there dedicated to writing poems with ink and a quill pen; I just haven’t found it yet. But for the most part, poetry has entered the Internet age, like it or not.
And maybe this isn’t the end of the world. Ink writing, as can be seen in the graphic to the left, was a bit messy in its own way. When you start to dip into the world of poetry and literature websites, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and throw yourself into lamentations that there are too many poets, too many bloggers, too many people spouting their opinions.
You may say there are not enough readers (for your poetry, let’s be honest). But I’ve just spent hours and hours over the last few months visiting literally hundreds of writing, literature, academic and poetry blogs and websites and all of these folks are happily reading and reading ravenously. I don’t believe for one minute that it’s a shame so many people are blogging about literature and poetry. I think it means only that the Internet has felled the gates of the gatekeepers and the masses have risen to talk about their love of books.
Today we have to be our own gatekeepers. Which for those complainers, this might be a drag for you. It means more labor in the service of literature. (You don’t sit on your fat ass reading books for nothin!)
I have discovered, however, that most literature websites have very messy blog rolls (lists of their favorite websites). Believe me, I’ve dealt with these blog rolls quite intimately. You have no idea perusing them which blogs are good for news, which blogs are good for commentary, which are good for book reviews.
And this is what makes my blog roll superior, in my humble opinion. I’ve used the social bookmarking site StumbleUpon to house my blog roll and recently I’ve created handy lists to categorize all the many fine websites. My categories are based not on what a website or blog may have been created to provide, but what I personally find useful about the blog. For instance a blog may be a book-review blog but I find it more useful in keeping up with industry news and so I’ve categorized it as such.
Please feel encouraged to visit my blogroll and peruse or “follow” my lists or leave comments about the way they’re organized or what would be more helpful.
All 107+ of my favorite sites can be found randomly on my StumbleUpon Likes page.
You can view all 10+ lists on my StumbleUpon List page.
Here are the individual lists
Continuing on my journey of exploring poetry podcasts, I've caught up with two more programs.
To catch a poetry podcast, you can either visit iTunes and download episodes that appeal to you or you can subscribe to a podcast on iTunes and have the latest episodes (audio programs similar to NPR interviews), download automatically to your mobile listening device (iPod or iPhone or other brand) whenever you do updates. You can also listen to these downloaded audio files from your computer if you don't have a mobile thingamajig. Just visit iTunes (or podcast homepage if one exists).
Poets for Tomorrow – Recommended with Caveat
There are only five podcasts here and they stopped producing more in 2010 so these are a bit outdated. I listened to two podcasts on the topic of "The Self," both interviewing or showcasing a New York City performance poet. I felt the podcasts did not stay true to the Self topic and in one episode the sound quality was a bit raw. One episode interviewed a poet who grew up struggling to define himself in a land of NYC gangs and he was very much a new poet working his way through the world of performance poetry. For this reason, this podcast is not for the self-serious poet listener. If you have a hard time suffering newbies, go elsewhere for your fix. I liked that about this podcast, how democratic it was in interviewing experiences of poets on many levels.
The second podcast on The Self, blew me away. It was a 14-minute performance of a poem about the Philippines called "Colt 45" by Daniel Darwin, an autobiographical rant with heavy refrains. The poem covered a lot of territory both physically and intellectually describing American-Philippines conflicts, Asian sexuality, homosexuality and finally going meta by breaking the 4th wall. It was definitely a performance you had to hang in there for…but I was glad I did.
Depending on your poetic temperament, there may be finds in here for you.
Scottish Poetry Library – Highly Recommended
I listened to their 45-minute interview of Robert Pinsky. Best sound quality of all the podcasts I've heard so far. Very professional sign-ons and sign-offs. Pinksy had somewhat funny things to say like, "My voice is my instrument…I write with my voice." He talked about his love of jazz and his www.favoritepoem.org readers-reading-poems project which he stared when he was US Poet Laureate. I was intrigued by Pinksy's claim that he "doesn't advocate for poetry," meaning Why does poetry need an advocate? It's great! If people love it they'll come to it. I appreciated that kind of attitude, coming from a position of power as it does, very Riot Grrrl 3rd-wave feminist thinking-like.He said poetry does not need an ambassador, a defender, commercials. "It's like advocating singing."
I also appreciated how Pinsky threw love to pop culture icons like Sid Caesar as influences. He also talked about studying with Francis Fergusson and his ideas of art imitating actions, about Pinksy's idea of pitch in poems, musicality, and his Poem Jazz CD project.
This is definltely a podcast worth following.
See more reviews of poetry podcasts.
Back in 2004, Timberline Press, a handpress of books published by Clarence Wolfshohl, produced a book of my hauku (co-written by Julie Wiskirchen). Clarence also designed four zinc-cuts illustrations in the book.
So I was delighted to see news that Clarence and his friend Mark Vinz are putting out a new handmade book on the El Grito del Lobo Press. In Harm's Way are their dueling poems about quite different childhoods, Clarence's in San Antonio, Texas, and Mark's in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The poems almost read like little short stories narratives about doctors and childhood scabs, theology with a kid POV, teachers, grandparents, baseball and baseball cards, movies, food, learning to drive and a marvelous marble poems ("the one that rolled away") by Mark Vinz. Never knowing Clarence Wolfshohl grew up in Texas, I was pleasantly drawn to his poems that reflected a similar childhood to my early years in New Mexico, his talk of horned toads (we called them horney toads and tried to move a family of them out to the humid Missouri climate in 1977 where they all tragically died), his mention of caliche (who knows caliche outside of the southwest?) and Tex Ritter (my Dad loved "Blood on the Saddle" much more than I did hearing it decades later). I loved Clarence's poem about western idols, "Gunfight at the RKO Corral." I also loved his poem about Mexican food, "Starched in the Barrio." His poem "Under the Bridge" was also a good reflection on childhood imagination appreciating those who came before, petroglyphs under a bridge that:
amazed us, not as archaeologists
first led to Lascaux, but as a wandering tribe
alert we were not the first in this territory.
I also thought Clarence's graphic rabbit-hunting poem, "The Last Hunt," was somewhat chilling. Mark and Clarence both had strong learning to drive poems to end the book, Mark's description of his transcendent love for bumper cars:
All that mattered was racing toward
some car-free outer lane, where I
could circle, endlessly, lost to myself
and the road–all those years and miles
I was suddenly certain were coming.
This letterpress, hand-bound book also has two serigraph illustrations in the middle of the book depicting the poets as young innocents. To order, send $20.00 (postage paid) to:
Clarence Wolfshohl
6281 Red Bud
Fulton, Missouri 65251
Make checks payable to Clarence Wolfshohl. As Mark Vinz says in the introduction, (just like a Norwegian Minnesotan), this collection is "Quite the deal!"
My job at the Institute for American Indian Arts is set to end in a few weeks. I've been filling in as the Faculty Assistant until the school picked a full-time replacement. Mr. Big Bang and I will be moving in two months to parts as yet unknown. I figured I better peruse their library real quick to read those IAIA writers I've been meaning to read.
Linda Hogan's name came to me from one of my podcast explorations. She's an IAIA alum. From the library I chose her 1993 collection The Book of Medicines. Her poems in this book are flowing, meandering myths and stories, lots of fishermen and birth poems. The first poem, "The History of Red," covers the "wet mask of birth…already wounded/stolen and burned/beyond…how life stands up in this skin…This life in the fire. I love it./I want it,/this life." "Return: Buffalo" begins "One man made a ladder/of stacked-up yellow bones/to climb the dead/toward his own salvation./He wanted/light and fire, wanted/to reach and be close to his god."
"Harvesters of Night and Water" has the great line: "fire flashes from the gun/like a flower that blooms/madness/and is gone." And Ilove the opening of "Crossings," where "there is a place at the center of the earth/where one ocean dissolves inside the other/in a black and holy love."
The other side thematically repeats throughout the book: across a river, the sea bottom, the dangerous side, "in the land of the terrible other." Her poems read like incantations with the repeated verb formations of "it is" and "it has been." Her titles are spartan: "Skin," "Salt," "Bear Fat," Tracking," "Milk." Although all of this produces a calm, spiritual feel to the work, it also has a distancing effect.
My favorite poems where in the second section, "Tear" about torn femaleness and survival, "Chambered Nautilus" which is still mythy but more personal and dramatic with lines like "because everything that lived had radiance/like the curve of water and shell/of whatever animal/still inside/that has brought me here" and the poem "Drum" about hearing from the womb. The poem "Partings" has a great ending,
It is true our lives
will betray us in the end
but life knows where it is going,
so does water,
so does blood,
and the full and endless dance of space.
James Thomas Stevens is teaching currently in the Creative Writing department of IAIA. He gave me a copy of this book, Bulle/Chimére (2006) a few weeks ago and it felt serendipitous because I had just heard Sherwin Bitsui praise him on one of my poetry podcasts. In this book, Stevens displays a quiet particularity as he dissects the fragility of a new love affair. The poems are fantastically grounded yet infused with the scientific (and the French). The book is full of juicy words like "orblets of echo" and he plays on themes of the vulnerable bubble and the strange illusory nature of the "love artifact." I loved how he handles the physicality of love: with lines like the "stillness of your palms." Love becomes an abstraction but never loses the very corporeal experience of sex and of the touristic, alien place where the poems transpire.
His stanza and page breaks also serve the poems not only with moments of silence but give the poems scientific, almost Roman balance. The poems are brief, spartan and controlled with lines like this from the poem "Lac de Laffrey" where "Goats walk backwards/down the streets of Cholonge/and the tinkling returns to the bell" which is so particular in place. A line later in the poem zeroes down to love's fatal break, "Cupid/loses his bow/out the backseat window." The title sets of poems dissect the alternative meanings of Bulle and Chimére within the context of the relationship and its personalities, "Chimére I" stating, "I have stood at the confluence of two improbably rivers, the roaring and the meandering." By the time we read the poem "Thames," the lovers are in trouble, "And I am reminded that there is always a rabbit./Some frightened fancy fleeing zigzag before us." The lovers are "Flight-denied/and tethered to trees." In "St. James Lake" the heart has turned into "the frightened flocks we carry…How idyllic, how monstrous/the responsibility for these many birds." Every page is full of this symbolic surface tension and always startled by touch, all working to serve the very last line of the book. With it's ornate reasoning, these poems remind me of Anne Carson and I loved it.
I wanted to like the selected poems of N. Scott Momaday (founding faculty member of IAIA), Again the Far Morning (2011) more than I actually did, especially since everyone loves his novel, House Made of Dawn, and my husband told me he talks like George Takei. But honestly, it felt like required reading. There were many poems that didn't connect with me, although the book is rich in forms: iambic pentameter poems, rhyme schemes, ballads, quatrains, tercets, couplets, free verse, prose poems and list poems, all of which Momaday handles well. His poem "Colors of Night" reminded me of Hogan's "History of Red" and Natalie Diaz's "The Red Blues." There were also a few poems in here I did love, mostly the Zen-like pieces similar to this four-line poem, "The Gift"
Older, more generous,
We give each other hope.
The gift is ominous;
Enough praise, enough rope.
This feels ominously like where I exist today in this world of supporting poets. I love the inset of watercolors overwritten with poems. I loved "Prayer for Words" ending in a stanza that felt typical of his work: "I am the rattle or mortality./I could tell of the splintered sun. I could/Articulate the night sky, and I had words."One of my favorite prose pieces was #3 in "The Threads of Odyssey" about a homestead falling into ruin…"I want with all my heart to save it….for it is one of the homes of my spirit."
There were also cultural pieces I liked. In "Division" he says "The scales upon which/We seek a balance measure only a divide" and "The Modesty of Relics" is a succinct admonition to archaeologists,
How just wilt be my silence when
You look upon my hair and bone
Reflect upon my grace and then
Subvert my meaning to your own.
There's also a poem in memory of John Merrick, the Elephant Man which seems significant to me only because of an art tour I attended last year near Santa Fe. I met a woman who referenced her husbands writings on local history. When I asked him what he typically worked on, he deprecatingly stated he was primarily a playwright. I responded with a uncontrollably disappointed "oh." Later I find out he wrote the play The Elephant Man." During our conversation he name-dropped Momaday as a friend of his, a factoid that did impress the poet-fucker in me.
"Winter Arcs" feels like a good writing poem. "The Dead of Winter" is a good ghost poem. His "Notebook" blurs reminded me of Theodore Roethke's similar pieces in On Poetry and Craft, my favorite one being the very New Mexico description: "The village. The smell of piñon and juniper smoke. A black storm descending into the canyon. Pasole simmering. All is well."
Another favorite was the last poem, "The Rolling" which talks about words before meaning, words "not yet in our keeping." We don't have to slip into meaninglessness when confronted with the difficulty of naming. What is "beyond the mind's reach" can still be honorable.
Arthur Sze is a professor emeritus at IAIA. I've only seen him come by once or twice for a visit. From the library I picked out two of his books, The Ginkgo Light (2009) and The Willow Wind (1972), translations from Chinese poems. Ginkgo Light is full of East/West fusion, between Chinese history and New Mexico desert. Early poems "Chrysalis" and "Crisscross" are typical of how Sze gently strings together glimpses of things in collages or abstract puzzle pieces of a whole. From "The Gift,"
The pieces of life stay pieces
at the end; no one restores papyrus
once it has erupted into flame;
but before agapanthus blooms,
before the body scorches, razes
consciousness, you have time
to puzzle, sway, lurch, binge,
skip, doodle, whine, incandesce.
The past and present co-mingle in atmospheres of small actions. In the title poem, "each hour teems" and "love has no near or far" which shows how the collage congeals when I read the line as "love has no fear." Cool trick there. Sze pastes together juxtapositions of beauty and violence. He observes without comment and the comment lies in his choices. The poem "Power Line" shows the fusion of East/West: "a woman lays in an imperfection before/she completes her Teec Nos Pos weaving;/a sous-chef slices ginger, scallions,/anticipates placing a wet towel over dumplings." "Departures and Arrivals" is one of my favorite poems here and ends with "how we thirst and renew our thirst in each other." The second poem of "Completion" is beautiful in its brief tricking lines, "when is joy/kindling to greater joy?"
The Willow Wind by Sze is half translations of Chinese poets Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Li Yu, Tu Mu, Li Shang-yin, Wang Han, Liu Tsung-yuan and Yen Chen. The second half are original poems by Sze. I read the book in one sitting. In his own poems, he makes frequent use of the forward slant character "/" and I wasn't sure if he was depicting dichotomies or using the character as a kind of separator. The poem "Bird / Call" is indicative:
the circle of the sun
is clear
and I dare to
touch the rim
with my / distant hand.
It is interesting to see how Sze is influenced by the Chinese poems at the beginning of the book. I liked "Pacifia" with lines like "these stones are impenetrable. They open/only from the core, like seeds;/then the weight becomes magical,/medicinal, and green," and the poem "Be the Death of Me" about heroin, "Sliding Away" about death and the final poem, again seeming to connect me to New Mexico like spaces:
A singer with eyes of sand they said–
the western wind
sweeps me home,and I am carrying you, my desert,
in my hands.
Oscar Wilde Says Don't Give Up Your Day Job
A draft of one of Oscar Wilde's famous sonnets and his advice to a young writer surfaced this week. He said:
"The
best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for
their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no
wealth to the singer.
Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid but ask of art
to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you."
Read the full story at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9939664/Literary-success-Dont-give-up-the-day-job-advised-Oscar-Wilde.html
Rich Guy Buries Treasure in New Mexico and Puts Clues in a Poem
Millionaire Forrest Fenn was diagnosed with cancer and concerned that he couldn't take his loot with him to the afterlife. So he buried a for-real treasure chest of gold, diamonds and emeralds somewhere in the state of New Mexico. He's left nine clues to its whereabouts. But treasure seekers will have to spar with a cryptic poem called "The Thrill
of the Chase" to find them. He hopes this will inspire Americans to get their kids
"away from their little handheld machines." I like his idea but have a feeling people and their kids will use handheld machines and social media to find it.
Read the full story at: http://now.msn.com/forrest-fenn-has-buried-treasure-in-new-mexico
Washington Post Story About Poet Amiri Baraka
LA Times Article on Poet Paul Muldoon
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-muldoon-music-20130307,0,901450.story
Oxford American Does an Interview with Poet Miller Williams
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2013/mar/05/poet-interview-miller-williams/
NaNoWriMo,
or National Novel Writing Month (“Thirty days of literary abandon),
has received a lot of activity and press over the last few years when it occurs
every November. There are even social meetups associated with it where
people join up in large groups at pubs and crunch out fiction.
Did
you know there is now a NaPoWriMo, a National Poetry Writing Month challenge
for April? Where the Novel challenge is to write 50,000 words of
fiction without worrying about editing (just get it out there, man). the poets are challenged
to write one poem a day for 30 days. NaPoWriMo was launched by poet Maureen Thorson back in 2003.
NaPoWriMo
doesn’t get the press that NaNoWriMo gets, partly because poets are
marginalized, yes; but also (be honest) because poets suck at keeping
deadlines. I say this because poets I know suck at keeping deadlines. They love
to insist this is because they beat to a different drum. This reminds me about a story I heard from a man who was defensively insisting his way of working
with the world was correct and his therapist asked, “So how is that working out for you?” Not so good.
Well, get
your pens ready if you have the cajones. No one’s asking you to purge out
polished stones at one poem per day but that's the point. This idea is to just
“get er done.” Get your inner editor to shut the f*&k up for 30 days. Be
fearless. In May, you can edit to your little hearts content.
I’m going to try. And as I’m in the process of testing out Hello Poetry.
Every daily poem I create will be posted on Hello Poetry to be picked over by
the Hello Poetry community. Check
out my posts at this link: http://hellopoetry.com/-mary-mccray/.
More about National
Poetry Month
Each year,
publishers, booksellers, educators and literary organizations use April to
promote poetry: publishers often release and publicize their poetry titles in
April, teachers and librarians focus on poetry units during the month; and
bookstores and reading series frequently hold special readings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Poetry_Month
Need Some Writing Prompts?
More Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41
I've just posted a recent interview with poet Barbara Rockman.
This
interview talks about ways to write the mother-daughter poem, the child
and marriage poem, writing grief and the benefits of silence in a poem.
My friends and family have continued to make valiant attempts to spread poetry into the world of things, animals and the innocents who don't care about it.
Mary Anne Perkowski Reading Poetry to Columns at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC
Columns clearly so self conscience about their faux-finish that they worked hard to diminutize me and my words.
(March 2013, iPhone 5 Photo by by Minna Nathanson)
Mary Anne Perkowski Reading Poetry to Impressionable Minds
Mary Anne Perkowski reading poetry to small children who sometimes act like animals (according to their parents). The attention span of this 5-year-old in Arlington, Virginia, made it through 2/3 of "Helga Traveling."
(March 2013, iPhone 5 Photo by by Kay Moyer)
John McCray Reading Poetry to St. Patrick's Day Cupcakes in Santa Fe
Their sugar high creates attention deficit disorder in these cupcakes. Who can focus on poetry when you have that kind of buzz? Artist Dawn Chandler assits.
(March 2013, photo by Mary Anne Perkowski)
John McCray Reading Poetry to Easter Eggs in Santa Fe
These eggs have just been decorated by being wrapped in silk swatches and boiled in vinegar and water. They're too hot under the shell right now to suffer any poetry too.
(March 2013, photo by Mary McCray)
See the full set of things that don't care about poetry
Today I took a book off my shelf, Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, and randomly opened it to a page with this quote:
"The poet might have expanded the possibilities, even if he had to fictionalize the situation to do it." –– Richard Hugo
I know there are some poets who feel committed to their role as a poet who is a witness to the truth. And I honor and respect that path (although it is not the one I've chosen).
However, I submit to everyone that the imagination may know how to tell truth better than the facts. Or to put this in terms anyone who watches The First 48 on A&E can understand (I've been
addicted to that show for years and years now), you come to realize facts are often as nebulous as our memories or our imaginations.
Fact itself is a fictitious word. This is why the United States now is in fisticuffs over politics and bi-partisanship. One man's facts are another man's spin.
But this is no reason to give up all hope and start writing language poems (although I honor and respect that path, it is not the path I've chosen). The ultimate truth is out there. But maybe you just shouldn't rely on facts to take you where you need to go.
By the way, that First 48 cast up there is my favorite team, the Memphis homicide detectives: Tony Mullins, Lieutenant Toney Armstrong, mystery 3rd guy, Mitch Oliver and Caroline Mason (she's an investigative inspiration and a prototype of a character I'm working on for a novel…I love her!) I'm going to log off right now and watch another episode.
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