Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 1 of 64)

What is Poetry: Is Making a Poem Different From Making a Painting?

October 11, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

On we go through Elisa New’s questions about poetry from the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is, in full: “Is the making of a poem, that essential creative act, different from making a painting?” She goes on to wonder, “Is it different from playing an instrument? Does one, while making a poem, hold a little linguistic instrument while one makes a painting hold a little brush? Does one hold that brush in mental fingers? Ply language on some sort of cerebral tongue?”

This is a much more specific question than how poetry is similar and different to all the other arts. But as I said in the last Elisa New post, there seems to be more of a brain-to-body coordination necessary in fine arts like painting and sculpting or than in playing a musical instrument. Those all take physical and mental practice. Children learn to write pretty fast and it doesn’t take much time to learn to type on a keyboard.

Impulsively, conceptually, though, there may be similarities.

So da Vinci had opinions (as seen in the image above). Frank O’Hara also thought about this quite a bit, about the intersection of painting and poetry. Probably as part of his job description. He worked himself up through the ranks to curator at MOMA in New York City and was friends of many of New York’s abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s. Two of his painterly poems are “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “The Michael Goldberg Variations.” Funny I came across this later poem today because yesterday I finished The Loser, a novel by Thomas Bernhard which features the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and his performances of “The Goldberg Variations.”

I also wrote a poem about the conversation between painting and poetry while I was a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College (so this would be the mid-1990s at the house at the top of Brandt Terrace in Yonkers, New York), a poem that ended up in my first book of poems about space exploration to Mars, Why Photographers Commit Suicide (2012). I remember sitting on the floor writing this. The movie title, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, was on my mind and Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” was on the radio, which is where the bristle bone line appears. In fact, I think a workshop edit suggestion at the time was to change the verb unbreak to healing in order to further distance the poem from the song, which was getting a lot of radio play at the time.

On a Clear Day You Can See Jupiter

Mary McCray

Some nights when the universe dips in and out of my street
like a dancer, I can see Jupiter through my window.
And I wonder where you are and how things are for you,
like performing resuscitations on a dream.

And although we are together—fundamentally here
on the same hemisphere, you don’t have to answer me.
You don’t have to reply to this untethered planet heart.
It’s too late for us and I surrender to the war
of my fates—where poems burn into pieces of litter.

Take your watercolors and color my window with Jupiter.
Crack open the glass with your knives and turpentine.
Paint these words of mine, life-full of hue and value
and watch my heart healing like a bone
inside the tornado of a thousand bristles.

You don’t have to answer me. You just need to know—
on a clear day you can see Jupiter—in my eyes
and on your fingertips, where the universe
dips in and out of your street like a dancer,
in my words and through this window where I’m on the horizon.

I would probably change the bristles from a thousand to a hundred. That’s a bit much. As was the melodrama of too lateness already in my mid-20s. Wow. What did I know?

More conversation between O’Hara and his painters:

Poems in Pop Culture: Ted Lasso

October 11, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This summer I finally was able to watch Schmigadoon on AppleTV. I decided to watch Ted Lasso after that since I had heard so many good things about it. I finally finished the three great seasons last night. One of the best TV shows period. Music and poetry turned out to be artfully placed on the show.

In season 3, episode 11, there was a Philip Larkin poem, “This Be The Verse” about the ongoing trauma passed from parents to their children.

The poem marks a crucial point in the final two episodes, finally convincing Ted he should return to America to his son, thus wrapping up his whole adventure coaching a football team in Richmond.

Here is the poem:

This Be the Verse

Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Due to the popularity of the show (and the serious treatment of the poem in the plot), there are other sites who have explicated the poem and its placement in the show.

SCREENRANT’s explication says, “…in the series’ penultimate episode, Mae pulls through with some elderly insight for Ted that helps him get over a mental hurdle….which offers a perspective on the cycle of nurture and upbringing, a common theme throughout Ted Lasso. From Ted to Rebecca to Jamie, one of the show’s central concepts is about how adults are still effected by the way they were treated in their youth. In Ted’s case, he dealt with serious trauma regarding his father’s suicide at a young age, and his mother’s upbeat and positive personality prevented him from truly healing from the incident, instead repressing his emotions on the matter. This was similar to her upbringing, as she was raised against therapy and taught to never talk about difficult subjects. The poem in Ted Lasso season 3, episode 11 demonstrates a cyclical nature, implying that she is simply passing on the faults she received from her parents.”

The Pop Poetry blog, which looks very interesting, has a great overview of both the show, the poem and Larkin. The post says that Larkin is more well-known to British readers but I remember Larkin being a revered poet among the instructors of Sarah Lawrence College. Pop Poetry calls the poem Larkin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and puts the poem in context with his other poems. Go here to read the great post: https://poppoetry.substack.com/p/larkin-lasso.

Pop Poetry also has a post about how the show famously misquoted Walt Whitman (maybe on purpose): https://poppoetry.substack.com/p/ted-lasso-misquotes-walt-whitman.

More good stuff from Pop Poetry: https://poppoetry.substack.com/.

What is Poetry: Where Is the Poem?

August 28, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We are continuing through Elisa New’s queries on what poetry is, questions she posed in the Harvard Emily Dickinson MOOC. This week I’m actually going to combine eight of her questions into one, because they’re all related.

1) Is a poem still a poem if one only entertains one’s self with it internally?

This reminded me of Emily Dickinson. Does the poem exist in her chest (as in her bosom, as in a poem only internal to her) or in her chest (as in a very physical hope chest or chest of drawers where she hid 1800 or so of her poems during her lifetime)?

In the first scenario, the poem has not been physically written down yet, like possibly millions of other poems she never officially wrote out on paper. In the second scenario, she is still the only one (in her lifetime) entertained by them. Scenario #2 is still barely removed from “internally” and yet significantly different from “internally” because it is the only place that those poems have potentiality, the potential to be read in the future by another reader.

Once a poem moves from your brain to an external media, it assumes a future audience, even if you hide it somewhere. I feel the same way about journals, they assume an audience even if they are “private.” Only thoughts inside your head are truly private.

2) Where is the poem?

This question feels like a Zen Koan to me. I don’t even think we need to answer this one; we can just soak it in. But this question implies a poem taking up space in the world: where is it? A poem has a physical location. If a poem is only read aloud, does it have a physical location? Does a poem have to happen on paper to have a physical location?

3) Where does the poem really happen?

In my interpretation, this question implies a poem happening in time: a happening. “When” does it happen would be more accurate. A poem comes to be in a moment of time or a span of time. Is the time from thought to composition to appreciation all the time?

4) Where does a work of art really live?

This broadens the question out to all the arts and specifies its existence beyond being born in space and time. Where does it live out its life? In the collective mind? In our individual imaginations? Somewhere else? Some objective space (can it exist without other readers/listeners)? If a poem has been recited in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it…

5) Does it live in intention?

Here Elisia New starts to move through the stages of creation. The artist has intentions. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a great example of this. Twain specifically states that he does not have certain intentions for the novel:

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR”

All the readers disagreed. There was a moral. There was symbolism in the Mississippi River which he also did not want attributed to his work. Georgia O’Keeffe consistently claimed her flowers were not vaginas and penises. Viewers don’t agree. They have agency to interpret what they see.

So you could argue that author intention is practically never the place where a piece of art lives. Artists give it their best shot and then release it into misinterpretations and multiple-meanings. I think this is why artists associate their work with the idea of having children: birthed by them but ultimately beyond their control.

Besides, intentions often exist before any work has been committed to any media. Million of ideas never come to life. Intentions are just part of the morass of our minds.

6) Does it live in the throes of production or composition?

This is the most fascinating stage for me, drafts, editing, iterations. In some cases, new drafts even occur post-publication, like W. H. Auden’s later-day revisions and Marianne Moore’s undoing of her poem “Poetry.”

Sally Bushnell’s book Text as Process explores the meanings of drafts and versions and it’s fascinating. She goes through different kinds of draft versions and levels and theories of composition. And the book made me think immediately about the singer Cher’s demos and remixes. Cher’s demo for the song “After All,” although it was technically a draft, became the final, “canonical” version of the song (with Peter Cetera’s vocal added later).

Similarly, there are album versions of particular songs and then often a fleet of remixes for songs delegated as “singles” or potential “hits.” And sometimes these “versions’ get confused. For example, maybe it’s the dance remix of a song (“When the Money’s Gone”) that is the one to chart as the hit, not the supposedly “canonical” album version of the song. Other times, later remakes of an artists song can take on another life. Cher’s song “Bang Bang” has not only been covered many times by other artists but by Sonny and Cher themselves who created later-day versions on live and studio albums, sometimes with altered lyrics. Where do those songs live in this sense? Which song is the version?

Maybe songs and poems exist in a separate space above and beyond all their variations.

7) Does it live as it’s appreciated by a social body?

This is where art moves beyond the artist and into society. The social body could be as small as one person (for example, love poems exchanged between two people) to small aficionado groups (at some point Cher’s fans were a large group, then a small group, then a large group again), or a small workshop group to a huge group of social media fans or best selling and anthologized poems. The size doesn’t matter.

To me the debate is between question 6 or 7. Are drafts considered poems proper? In some cases, definitely yes. Some drafts (things considered unfinished) become famous products. Especially drafts left incomplete when the artist dies. Maybe not all drafts are “canonical” but some can be promoted to canonical pieces.

Drafts that are never seen by readers ever, neither by researchers documenting famous creators in process or drafts published in published anthologies, are those drafts not still poems? Like some kind of twin to their more famous later-day finished draft?

8) Does it live when it’s canonized and is cherished through the ages?

This is an easy no, for me. Fame and success widely wax and wane. This rubric would exclude many, many artists who were discovered sometimes long after their deaths, from Emily Dickinson (who took decades to gain respect) to colonial poet Edward Taylor (who had to wait 200 years upon discover) and this illustrious list of major writers. The canon is fickle…thankfully. Generations disagree on who the “important poets” are.

Alternatively, poets like Katharine Hepburn’s poet, Phelps Putnam, was one of the most popular poet’s of his day. Now he’s considered Katharine Hepburn’s poet, although she was not even famous yet when he wrote about her.

Canonization and being cherished by hordes is irrelevant to the existence of a piece of art. If one single other person read or hears the poem, it exists.

I find it interesting how instinctually most artists yearn to impress their elders, their mentors. Audrey Hepburn for Cher is a good example of this but every artist has their people. But consistently artists always impress their youngers instead, the fans who come up behind them. This is often because mentors are part of the past. And this can feel frustrating. Thwarted intent again.

It speaks to the timing of your influence. You want to be anthologized, awarded and feted in your lifetime, benefits that are typically bestowed by elders and mentors in positions of power over the canon. But the most famous of artists and the artists with the great longevity are always fetted by their fans and this often happens long after their own deaths. Fans are crucial to post-mortem reputations. Fans have kept Shakespeare in business forever.

And post-death, does the artist possibly even care? In that sense, poems are more permanent than their poets. And so maybe we should move on to the question: where does the poet live?

The Essay Project: Simplicity and Clutter

June 14, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 2 Comments

Two things about my mother: she was a stickler for grammar at the diner table. She made much ado over the difference between well and good. Which was well and good but like putting our elbows on the table, it seemed pretty strict at the time. She also kept a spotless house. I know this because I often cleaned it for money to buy record albums. (I also diverted my lunch money for that purpose, too.) To give you an idea of how particular my mother was, one time we were visiting a relative and she complained that the toilet-paper-roll holder hadn’t been dusted. I remember thinking, “you mean we have to dust that, too?!”

At least I was allowed to create big messes in my own space, spread out my Little People villages with my friend Krissy. We had a friend whose mother made us pick up all the toys at the end of every day, which was very frustrating if you were trying to carry over salacious soap-opera storylines from one day to the next.

Grammar and housekeeping.

There’s a famous Henry David Thoreau quote that I keep on my refrigerator about simplicity. I bought the magnet years ago while on a Thanksgiving trip to Plymouth, Massachusetts, with my friend Coolia and her Dad. We visited Thoreau’s Walden-Pond cabin nearby and hilariously, it had a gift shop where, without any irony, they sold magnets about simplifying your life.

It goes without saying life is made no simpler by the clutter of magnets on a fridge. And although I’m no hoarder, I can tolerate a certain level of clutter in my life and in my writing. My life-clutter is part of what writer Neil Gaiman calls the compost heap of ideas. The clutter of my words is more about wanting to evoke the style of a kaleidoscope instead of the style of a Japanese garden. And I love Japanese gardens but I don’t think anyone would confuse me with one.

My style is me. And it’s cluttered all right. So when I reviewed three chapters I found stapled together in the essay stack, all from William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of it.

He says, “Clutter is the disease of American writing.” And although he’s right about “circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon,” there is a kind of good clutter.

I just took a Smithsonian class on Moby Dick, (which I still haven’t read), and our professor, Samuel Otter of UC-Berkley, lovingly described the whale clutter of that novel. Proust is famously cluttered and frilled. Faulkner, too, has purposefully confusing and circular paragraphs.

Zinsser isn’t really talking about those writers, though. He’s talking about floundering students and the corporate writers who “inflate” business letters, medical plans and instructions for assembling toys. Zinsser’s cure is to

“strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what…”

I think that is a very good exercise. It is. But it’s also a good to exercise adding big words back in. And sometimes you do want to make the reader unsure of who is doing what. And although he’s correct that clear writing reflects clear thinking, most of the time we’re not thinking clearly and writing is allowed to reflect that too.

If, like Zinsser says, your reader is someone with “the attention span of about twenty seconds,” then yes, clear writing is crucial. Clear logic between sentences, avoiding missing links, knowing what you want to say…all good things to know how to do.

But for many writers the act of writing itself is trying to figure out what they want to say. They surely don’t set out knowing what it is. Zinsser is a definitely correct to say good writing takes self-discipline and self-knowledge, because the tricky part is knowing when to be clear and when to allow clutter, when to simplify and when to complicate, when the long word serves you better than the short word. This takes trial and error, rewriting and understanding your readers, all of them, the short-attention-spanners and the Moby Dick readers.

A good teacher should allow students to write convoluted, over-complicated sentences until they figure out how to write elegantly long-winded sentences.

Zinsser says “fighting clutter is like fighting weeds” and he calls editing pruning, which is a nice way to think about it. It makes editing sound more fun and artisanal.

He says to fight all jargon and “fad words” like “at this point in time” or prepositional clutter like “facing up to something” instead of just “facing it.” The problem is language is constantly evolving and the new fad words of today becomes card-carrying members of the canon tomorrow. There’s no stopping it. I don’t even consider phrases like “at this point in time” faddish anymore because there’s a whole new slew of slang words I’m trying to figure out, like “giving Cher.” Zinsser says “the game is won or lost on hundreds of small details,” except that it isn’t. Readers continue to demonstrate they’re willing to make do. We slog through everything from convoluted health care plans to wordless IKEA instructions. Clarity would be nice but…you gotta put together a bookshelf tonight.

Zinsser hates euphemisms, for example calling a slum a depressed socioeconomic area because, he says, it “blunts the painful edge of truth.” But oftentimes jargon is trying to blunt the painful edge of truth, you know, for the people who live there.

It’s simply nicer to call a “dumb kid” an “underachiever” just like it’s nicer to call someone “misinformed” than “an asshole.” And this is where judgement comes in: you get to decide when you want to offend and when you want to be nice. There’s a place for everything. (Even hoarders will try to tell you this.)

He lists some of the obvious rules; but every experimental writer will try to break them (like any good mechanic):

Use active verbs. Avoid passive verbs.
Most adverbs are unnecessary and redundant. You don’t need to “clench tightly” because there is no other way to clench.
Most adjectives are unnecessary and redundant, too, like “effortlessly easy.” All cliffs are precipitous. He says not every oak needs to be gnarled, not every detective hard-bitten.
Don’t hedge with timidities (I do this all the time): I wasn’t “too happy” or that was “pretty expensive.” “The larger point here is one of authority” (passive sentence, Zinsser) “…every qualifier whittles away some fraction of trust…be bold.” (Really? We’re not all trying to be alpha writers here.)
The period: “most writers don’t reach it soon enough.” (Sigh.)
He is right about the overused exclamation point…it doesn’t work when making a joke; “humor is best achieved by understatement, and there’s nothing subtle about an exclamation point.”
He loves the dash (over the semicolon) although he calls it “a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners.”
One of his worst rules is to avoid Latin words if Anglo-Saxon words convey the same idea. (One type of word is not inherently better than another.)

Clear writing is easily understood but also can be completely boring. Turns out there’s always the rhythm of the sentence to think about. Some of these fillers help the momentum of a sentence just as much as a killer verb will.

And writers need room to practice being bad in all directions, with long and short sentences, and hopefully come up with a balancing act of both. But Zinsser is very discouraging here:

“And don’t tell me about Norman Mailer–he’s a genius. If you want to write long sentence, be a genius. Or at least make sure that the sentence is under control from beginning to end, in syntax and punctuation, so that the reader knows where he is at every step of the winding trail.”

Yeah, don’t do that. Or save that for the later drafts. Go ahead and be messy for a while. Carve a few ridiculous things. Stack up the words like pile of books. Unpack all your boxes.

And then do what I do and when you get a visitor, furiously clean the house like your happy-homemaker mother is coming over.

Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt

June 13, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So there is a podcast happening in the house, Monsieur Big Bang’s conversations about anthropology with John Lehr. As a result, copious packages of books have been delivered on every conceivable topic. I asked how many books were needed per podcast. I was told ten. (!)

For an upcoming show on contraceptives, the following book arrived, (and of course I plucked it out of the stack to peruse), Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt, The Erotic Secrets of the Forbidden Papyrus. And I didn’t grab it just for the racy drawings (but there it did not disappoint). There are poems in this thing, specifically in a chapter called “Love, Eroticism, and Sexuality in Literature.”

I was hoping the poems would be as risqué as the drawings.

They weren’t.

Apparently “the people of the Nile had a great love of writing” and they wrote on everything: rocks inscriptions, leather, plaster-coated wooden tablets (which were erasable like white boards), earthenware vessels. And apparently they loved to make sexual innuendos and saucy insults (aww, they’re just like us). They even swore and said obscene things. For example, a common insult to a man was someone with his “testicles far away.” (Things never change.) Another ancient insult to women (especially older ones) was to call them an “old tube.” (Oy my! That is offensive!)

Anyway, you’d think some of that might be found in the poetry included in the book?

Alas, no.

Here are some samples (and it’s handy to know these Ancient Egyptians called their beloveds brother and sister):

The One, the “sister” who has no equal,
More beautiful than all the rest,
To look on her is to see the star that rises
At the beginning of a good year.
She of the radiant perfection,
Of the resplendent complexion,
She who gazes from such lovely eyes.
Sweet are her likes when she speaks:
She never says a word too many.
She of the delicate long neck over breasts in full bloom.
Her hair is veritable lapis lazuli.
Her arms surpass any gold
And her fingers are like lotus buds.
She whose back is so lithesome, her waist is so narrow,
And whose beauty her hips still stress.
Her bearing turns the head of every man who sees her
Happy is the man who embraces her….

I mean, okay, maybe this was erotic at the time, to labor over the idea of a woman “who says not a word too many.” (Sigh.) Myself, I love the word veritable, but it’s not very sexy.

Now if you want to explore the misery of love, there’s plenty to offer here: “an illness has taken over me,” nothing can cure me, I can no longer “walk like everyone else,” “my reason is troubled,” “your love turns me upside down. I do not know how to let it go,” “I am the servant…the captive of the beloved…she gives me no water,” and the very dejected “I no longer put on my shawl, I no longer make up my eyes. I no longer even perfume myself.”

There’s also joy, elation, exultation. salvation in some of the poems. But not an actual lot of body parts.

We get close with lines like this, “It is my desire to come down and bathe in your presence…” but there are likely many encoded provocations, like one verse about a man who braves crocodiles in a river to get to his lover on the far bank: “The river could flood my body/…a crocodile lies in wait on the banks/ [but] going down into the water, I wish to cross over through the waves/by showing great courage in the canal.”

Yes, one must take courage in the canal for sure.

And here we go:

my seeds are like her teeth
my fruits are like her breasts…
I remain constant in all seasons:
when the “sister” acts with the “brother”!…
While they are intoxicated upon wines and liquors,
And liberally sprinkled with oil and balm….
Though I still stand upright, shedding my flowers,
Those of next year are (already) in me.
I am the first of my companions,
[but] I have been treated like the second!
In future, if they again begin to act this way
I will not keep my silence on their behalf!

At least we get some booze and lubrication in there. And the last poem in the chapter is allegedly full of metaphors and innuendos whose meaning the author surmises we may culturally miss (err…not really though):

You must present yourself at the house of your “sister”
alone, with no one else.
Go up to her door…
It is up to you to master her lock…
Like one unlocks a reception room.
How splendid is her pergola!
She is provided with song and dance,
wines and beers of ceremony are beneath her shadow,
while the colonnade is open to the breeze.
It is through the wind that the sky displays itself,
it will bring her aroma [that of the “sister”];
her perfume spreads, intoxicating those who breathe it.
It is up to you to agitate your “sister’s” senses,
and bring them to a pinnacle during the night!
Then she will say to you: “Take me in your arms?
Dawn will find us in the same position.”
It is the Golden One who has presently appointed her for you,
so that you may put the finishing touches upon your life.

Well, we may have different ideas about what a reception room is, and I’ve never heard them called pergolas and colonades before. But architectural metaphors why not?

The whole chapter ends with this sentence, “With this delightful and poetic evocation of the first night of love for the young couple, we will close the shutter on the literature of pharonic Egypt.”

Those funny phallic pharonics.

AI Aiyee!

June 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve been telling people this week about what a dumpster fire my life is at the moment what with various things going awry, (job things, neighborhood things, sick friends, old dogs, and many, many more).

For example, I wanted long hair when I was young and my mother would not allow it, mostly based on her own aggravating childhood experiences of her mother brushing her long hair while she practiced piano but also because she said she knew me very well and I would never brush it. And if I didn’t brush it, spiders would nest in it. That’s what she said.

I thought, hmmm…not a deal breaker.

So what happens this morning? Ok, she was right. I don’t brush my hair very often, but seriously? I suppose you could say this is a dumpster fire of my own making but that’s not the point. The point is, that spider could have picked any other week to go for my long, unbrushed hair.

So anywho, I’ll be using a few dumpster fire pics to describe the new normal for poets and other writers in the shadow of Artificial Intelligence, another dumpster, another fire.

Everyone everywhere is talking about Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and the astounding (and creatively off-putting) gains it has made in the last few months with the release of ChatGPT.

When I was last in LA in April, my friends and I went to the Marina del Rey restaurant Dear Jane’s and our friendly waiter there, (who had just moved to LA from Atlanta), told us he was using ChatGPT to write a script for a sitcom about a restaurant where he was once employed. He said he just plugged in all the characters and some scenarios and bada-bing-bada-boom! The script was done.

Forget for a moment the cliché that every waiter in LA is writing a Hollywood script. We have more pressing problems.

I also have a friend from Sarah Lawrence who now works as an editor at a very prominent magazine in New York City. She told us the writers there are being told they have to use ChatGPT for first drafts (save us all time, you know). The writers there are very unhappy about it. Even the young digital natives are upset. Everyone can see the writing on the wall here.

For years, we’ve been letting AI learn from us everywhere from Grammerly to auto-correct to auto-suggest. And we’re so cheap and frugal. We’ll happily be lab rats as long as the App is free. As they once said in the documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” if you didn’t pay for the product, the product is you.

So here we are. Flood under the bridge.

I’ve been saying for years writers shouldn’t feel so threatened by AI since nobody wants to hear what machines have to say. We’re human beings wanting to connect with other human beings about the human being experience. I was even reminded of this while attending my niece’s graduation from Perdue in Indiana last month. We talked about AI there too. At dinner when someone suggested the commencement speeches might someday be written by AI, everyone noticeably cringed.

The table was full of engineers who had plenty to say about AI. First the engineers informed us it was really machine learning we’re talking about, not AI. (I still don’t know the difference.) My brother Andrew, his ex-wife Maureen and her best friend are all computer engineers and they had a mini-debate at the table about whether or not we could use tools to detect things created by AI.

That debate started because I lamented AI would probably affect all future literary submissions to magazines. Now this is one thing I hadn’t thought about before when I insisted people don’t want to hear poems, music and stories created by machines. We still don’t want to but what we want only matters if nobody ever lies.

And as we know, people love to lie.

So, for example, how will a literary magazine be able to tell, post ChatGPT, whether a submission has been written by a human being or a machine? We’re on the honor system now. And the problem is letting machines write your poems is easier than doing it yourself. And we all know people who care more about getting published than they do about authorship in the first place. Why wouldn’t they let a machine try to create something that would get their name in print and then just lie.

I didn’t think about the lies.

How do we even prove we’ve created something? I’m imagining a scenario like Melanie Griffith in the movie Working Girl where she’s explaining to Harrison Ford the long and winding way she came up with her business idea to prove her boss, the lying Sigourney Weaver, did not.

And what’s to stop a literary magazine from one day deciding to let a machine write the whole thing? It’s a lot easier than dealing with those pesky, needy writers. And who would even know? Who would even be able to tell? Do we even have the time to even try to figure it out?

My brother thinks we’ll soon have machine tools to be able to suss out tell-tale markers of creative AI content. My other brother Randy then said “But won’t AI then just get smarter to outsmart the tools?” To which Andrew replied that the tool will just get smarter then too.

Oy. Sounds like a lot of work.

And then having worked in the Internet business for a while myself, I can see how even AI might not be able to slog through the onslaught of information burying us these days, (AI could process it but could it find what’s meaningful for us?) or even more distressing, I can see how one bug in the program could cause a lot of damage. Happens every day. We’re not smart enough to make perfect AI. (Although some day AI could be conceivably smart enough.)

Some people are even worried AI could cause not only the loss of all our professions, but the demise of humanity itself! Some alarming scenarios are proposed in an article in this week’s The Week. I’ve been talking about some of these apocalyptic scenarios with my Dad (a former computer hardware mechanic and software programmer) for years. But he sides with the machines! “Good-bye to bad rubbish,” I think he said. No help or sympathy there.

I spoke to my cousin Mark about it last Saturday. He says what I hear most of my writer friends say, “I’m just glad I’m at the end of my career and/or life.” But if you believe at all in reincarnation, you’ll probably just get reborn decades down the line, right back into this flaming dumpster fire so that’s not a real hope of escape. Besides, I’ve got maybe 40 years left if my family genes hold up. I’m not planning on retiring from creating.

My cousin Mark also said he’s heard about people forming communities around the idea of only consuming creative material made before 2023. And honestly, if each of us just tried to consume the mountains of creative material at our disposal made before 2023, we’d never run out of music, poems, fiction, movies, or TV shows. We’ve surely got enough stuff.

But that’s still not very comforting.

Creators might have to live with creating on a much smaller scale, with just a small circle of readers. Because the joy of making art isn’t just in consuming it. Humans love to make it. Making it, in fact, might be the most pleasurable part. And at the very least, we know whether we made it or not.

It feels like a big dumpster fire in the making. Let’s just all stop brushing our hair in protest.

Essay Project: Words

June 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I can see looking at these next two essays, both chapters called “Words” from two different writing guides, that they are, (and we’re scraping the bottom of the stack here), not from the Sarah Lawrence essay class. I can tell this due to a teacher’s critical cursive scrawl at the bottom of one of them:

“Put all pages in a notebook This makes the unit look sloppy” (no punctuation which, ahem, makes her sentences look sloppy).

I had let these chapters exist free floating in my secondary education class assignment on “unit planning,” (it hurts my ears just to type out those two words), because I was envisioning photocopying them to waves of students over the forthcoming years. I was trying to avoid those photocopied, ghostly black ring-binder holes we all remember from the handouts of teachers who were much less sloppy than I was planning to be.

The whole enterprise was misguided though: the idea of me being a teacher and taking these education classes at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Earlier as a teen I envisioned someday having a big family; but I had never so much as babysat any kids before.

Well, once I did for my friend Charlotte in an emergency situation after a 10 minutes phone call that consisted mostly with me protesting to her that I’d never so much as babysat any kids before and her telling me her family had a very important event to attend and their usual babysitter had flaked out.

So I found myself entertaining three kids under nine and one baby. I had not a clue as to how to change the baby’s diaper and admitted as much to the three kids under nine. The oldest one, the eight year old, proudly announced she could do this and so she did. Later, I couldn’t convince them to go to bed; and so my friend and her family came home to find all the kids asleep on their parents’ bed. Charlotte seemed thankful nonetheless and at least we all survived, I figured.

So these handouts were from that time, one from a book called On Writing Well by William Zinsser. a book Howard Schwartz had us use in his intermediate poetry class at UMSL. The second book, The New Strategy of Style by Winston Weathers, was a book I loved from Mr. Moceri’s high-school composition class.

The “Words” chapter from On Writing Well, starts by chiding the “journalese” of periodicals like People Magazine with its “mixture of cheap words” and clichés.

“Never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive. The English language is rich in strong and supple words.” (Those shades sound sexy!) “Take the time to root around and find the ones you want.”

When Zinsser attacks lazy writing, he’s usually talking about lazy ideas versus words.

“If you find yourself writing that…a business has been enjoying a slump, stop and think how much they really enjoyed it…the race in writing is not to the swift but to the original.” (Except in journalism where you don’t have all the time…to be fair.) He recommends reading, (“cultivate the best writers”), and habitually using dictionaries, learning etymologies and their word branches, mastering the gradations between synonyms, (“what’s the difference between ‘cajole’ and ‘coax’?”), and heavily using Roget’s Thesaurus, although he seems to see the book as slightly ridiculous:

“Look up ‘villain’…and you’ll be awash in such rascality as only a lexicographer could conjure, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immortality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin. You will find rogues and wretches, ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, reprobates and rapscallions, hooligans and hoodlums, scamps and scapegraces, scoundrels and scalawags, jezebels and jades.”

That seems more fun than ridiculous to me. “Still,” he says, “there is no better friend to have around to nudge the memory than Roget…find the word that’s on the tip of your tongue, where it doesn’t do you any good….use it with gratitude.”

Also work on how you string words together, Zinsser says. Listen to how the word strings sound, not just how they read. Besides, he says, the inner ear always hears when you read. “Rhythm and alliteration are vital to every sentence.”

He references another canonical composition guide, E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, (which we read in college comp classes, too). He highlights White’s exercise of trying to rewrite Thomas Pain’s “These are the times that try men’s souls.” (“Times like these try men’s souls,” How trying is it to live in these times!” “These are trying times for men’s souls” and finally the funny, “Soulwise, these are trying times.”)

You must care about the “cadences and sonorities of the language,” he says. “Choose one word over another because [of its] certain emotional weight.”

If Zinsser is all about succinctness, (his chapter on words is only six pages long), Weathers’ chapter is comparable verbosity at eleven pages.

Weathers starts of talking about writing “with flexibility” depending upon your “rhetorical profiles” (I don’t know what that means). He encourages us to discover new words, review the ones we already know and even to create our own words or to revitalize old words by using them in new ways.

“Ponder the various connotations….few words have exact synonyms.” Keep “a large artillery” of short, simple words for clarity and longer, big words for “dictional, variation and emphasis,” large words that generate “more interest and excitement.”

Think about how a word contributes to the rhythm of a sentence, the “rise and fall of accents.” Also keep lists of “foreign words and phrases…literary expressions…quotations.”

He talks about using literary allusions, referencing texts we all know like the Bible, Shakespeare, fairy tales.

He talks about using tough, crude words for shock and surprise, playing around with words (using nouns as verbs, verbs as adjectives). He also recommends Roget’s thesaurus and that we “become sensitive to what are sometimes shadowy distinctions. Consider the connotative as well as the denotative value of words…emotional and associative meanings.”

He lists out types of words to avoid: idioms (give me a ring), vague words (business-speak words like basically, analysis, material, thing), tired, overworked words (he gives no examples), redundant and verbose words, however repetition for the sake of clarity and emphasis is okay.

He talks about pruning your sentences, which sounds more fun than editing them.

Drop spare words, reduce clauses and “prune inconsequential details.” He provides a list of cliches which includes a lot of good stuff I’d like to reuse for some reason. The list is like a poem unto itself:

acid test

at a loss for words

ax to grind

bitter end

blazing inferno

brilliant performance

bring order out of chaos

busy as a bee

depths of despair

dodge the issue

equal to the occasion

force of circumstance

hit the ceiling

it stands to reason

know the ropes

nipped in the bud

play into the hands of

quick as a flash

sad but true

sadder but wiser

shake like a leaf

think out loud

It’s okay to use cliches in fiction, he says, if the phrases are things your character would say.

Avoid “nauseating” pseudo-technical and pseudo-literary expressions,” he says, that are meant to “mainly impress readers,” word combos like “motivating factor” and “appreciable degree.”

And here is something many literary academic writers need to hear: “Remember, the more complex the thought, the more simply you must express it.” I feel many academic writers just like to show off their lit-jargon “artilleries.”

So That Happened

May 7, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So as of late last week, all my websites have been moved. I was delayed one week off the master plan by a nasty bronchitis infection and a last-minute trip to LA to meet with ICANN and visit the LA Times Book Festival. More to come on the book festival. And I know I also owe this site a review of the Joan Didion exhibit from the LA trip before that (it’s half done).

Cher Scholar is back up and pontificating and finishing up the four-year review of all Cher’s television shows from the 70s and 80s. And this site, Big Bang Poetry, is slowly waking up as well with a few new essays and reviews of essays. I have a big stack of poetry books to review. The last site to move, marymccray.com, was the most complicated lift (with all its axillary pieces), but I’m back to adding and continuing its digital explorations. The popular pages have been updated as well, like the Difficult Book page.

Buy oy vey! It’s been a trial. Maybe this is why I’ve been sick four times since Thanksgiving.

There’s still plenty of work left to do, like find and fix each site’s broken parts and figure out what to do about site measurement.

But the ordeal is officially over. I think we can all agree to pretend the last six months just didn’t happen. Boo. I’ll be working on some offline projects, too, including a long epic I’m working on, a history poetry project and I have to get some health stuff taken care of due to the aforementioned four take-downs, possibly some ICANN news coming up, a lot going on.

Thanks for hanging in there or returning to see the dust settle.

The Essay Project: Workshop Rules and Pastiche

April 11, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

When I lived with Julie at the Kelton house in LA, Julie started taking fiction writing classes out of the home of writer John Rechy. She took two or three of them as I recall and would always come home with funny stories about things he said. Back then, she passed along a few of his online essays to me and I just re-read them.

One is a very funny pastiche of famous writers if they had been tasked with rewriting the famous introduction “it was a dark and story night.” It’s very funny and well worth reading in its entirely.

The other essay was called “On Writing: The Terrible Three Rules” and the essay reconsiders the biggest cliches writing students are given: (1) show, don’t tell, (2) write about what you know and (3) always have a sympathetic character for the reader to relate to.

He calls the first point “major nonsense” and makes a very good case for exposition in some of our most famous works of literature. The rule “disallows setting” and without it would “obfuscate situation.” After all, we don’t call it story-showing, he says.

He then provides some tips on how to handle exposition so it doesn’t overwhelm a story.

I’m actually very glad he makes the point about “write what you know” because so many of us write into what we don’t know in a kind of effort to find something to know.

Who wants to discover what they already know? Granted, there are plenty of writers writing to show off to the rest of us what they already think they know, but I would argue those aren’t the best ones.

Writers write in many cases to get into the heads of characters they don’t understand and that’s where the humanity is half the time. This reminds me of seeing Werner Herzog speak before a screening of his movie Grizzly Man and admitting he hated the outdoors, absolutely hated nature. So his interviewer asked him why he picked a very flawed outdoorsman as his subject? And I’ll never forget what he said: to try to understand where someone so different from himself was coming from. That’s what he was interested in exploring.

Honestly, these are precarious times for this kind of project. We’re admonished all the time for not staying in our lane, especially our gender, sexual-orientation and racial lane. And we’re unintentionally self-segregating when we do this. And I don’t think this well-intentioned but short-sighted self-segregating will end well.

Anyway, I personally wouldn’t want to bother with fiction if I had to stick to writing characters who were mousy, straight, white, suburban females. But if we proceed to “write about what we don’t or barely know” we need to be open to (1) getting it wrong as writers and (2) extending more forgiveness as readers. Or else we will cease to have conversations and revert back to the eternal us v. them.

John Rechy lists all the writers who wrote about experiences they never had, experiences of war, crime, writing about other genders and a famous spinster who wrote one of our most indelible love stories.

And like...The Wizard of Oz. Fiction is “verisimilitude,” Rechy says, not reality.

For the last point Rechy lists all the unsympathetic characters we’ve loved to read, starting with Hamlet and Willy Loman, “Catharine and Heathcliff are horrors (and still manage—at times—to tear our hearts out),” Rechy says. They don’t have to be sympathetic, just fascinating.

Which is not to say any of this is easy, to create fascinating characters with artful exposition and verisimilitude. Which, I guess, is why Rechy was offering those fiction writing classes.

Short and sweet. I’m actually hanging on to these.

Music & Poems & Music Poems

March 31, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Some follow-up on this topic. While I was doing my long haul on Philip Levine, I came across some of his jazz poems in an essay called “Detroit Jazz In the Late Forties and Early Fifties,” the best of which was this one:

I Remember Clifford

Wakening in a small room,
the walls high and blue, one high window
through which the morning enters,
I turn to the table beside me
painted a thick white. There instead
of a clock is a tumbler of water,
clear and cold, that wasn’t there
last night. Someone quietly entered,
and now I see the white door
slightly ajar and around three sides
the light on fire. I remember once
twenty-seven years ago walking
the darkened streets
of my home town when up ahead
on Joy Road at the Blue Bird of Happiness
I heard over the rumble of my own head
for the first time the high clear trumpet
of Clifford Brown calling us all
to the dance he shared with us
such a short time. My heart quickened
and in my long coat, breathless
and stumbling, I ran
through the swirling snow
to the familiar sequined door
knowing it would open on something new.

I also came across this arresting line by James Harms in The Long Embrace, Contemporary Poets on the Poetry of Philip Levine. He’s talking about the great utility of expression in the Sonnet:

“Fourteen lines and a volta (along with meter and rhyme, etc.) might seem a confining set of logistics for exploring the intersection of the inner life and the lived moment, but aside from the three-minute pop song, what formal convention has proven more productive and flexible in addressing the lyric realities of our lives?”