Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 23 of 64)

Slow Learners and The New Yorker Magazine

September 27, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve always been a very slow learner. It took me a long time to learn to tie my shoes, use a zipper, tell time on anything non-digital, read, figure out what boys wanted, crack the mysteries of office politics. Really painfully slow.

But, and this is a big but, when I figure things out sudden enlightenment comes like a big aha and I go from the bottom of the hill to the peak instantaneously. I’m in remedial reading one day and not improving and then I’m in National Honors Society the following Tuesday and all my brainiac friends are like “WTF are you doing here?”

Okay, so tying my shoes is a bad example. I still can’t really do that very well. But in general I spend a lot of my time confused and in the dark and then…bingo….I get it.

And The New Yorker Magazine is another example of this. When I was at Sarah Lawrence all my writer friends seemed to be reading The New Yorker. I tried it then but there weren’t enough pictures. The text was oppressively text-y. The poems seemed obtuse. I even tried multiple times over the years since then. If some pretentious person had the magazine displayed prominently on their coffee table or if my writer friends still were subscribing, although always with the comment, “I love this magazine but I never have time to read it.” And then recently at CNM even my coworkers were talking about it and sharing links to it. Huh. What is wrong with me? You can’t force these things.

But suddenly in 2016 I was offered a deeply discounted short subscription to the magazine through the college and I’ve been glued to it ever since. All the other magazines coming into the house, (I’m being gifted quite a few right now), are being literally ignored, except for the celebrity rag I’m reading in the bathtub because I don’t care if it gets wet. I even stopped my subscription after 6 months because I was feeling anxious that it would take me two years to get through just 2016 issues and I didn't want to miss anything. So I cancelled it because I liked it.

My favorite articles are pieces about visual artists and writers. There have been three good articles on poets and writers so far.

Insurance Man: The life and art of Wallace Stevens

Like The New Yorker, I’ve often tried to like Wallace Stevens. People I know who love Wallace Stevens love him very passionately. They work hard to understand the poems and they feel like extra time is worth it. Two classes I've recently taken in Modernism helped me find a few poems to get into, my favorite is probably "The Man on the Dump." But I’m not rushing out to find any Wallace Stevens books. This book review didn’t really change that feeling but it was very interesting for two reasons:

For uncovering his political beliefs:

“Stevens made haplessly clumsy allusions to social and political tensions of the time, though he was “a Hoover Republican,” Mariani writes, and also an admirer of Mussolini for rather longer than is comfortably excused as a common myopia of the time. He was no better than most white men of his class in point of casual racism and anti-Semitism, though fewer such toxins leak into his poetry than into that of Eliot or Pound. In verse, Stevens transcended anything mean or petty in himself, but for art’s sake; he wasn’t much given to moral scruple."

And his office personality:

“Stevens continued to go to work each day into his seventies, even after surgery for a stomach obstruction revealed a metastasizing cancer. He was too august at the firm to be let go, but he was never popular there. His boss remarked, “Unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart.”

Ouch.

Design for Living: What’s Great About Goethe?

This was another good piece of biography which also covered the reasons why Goethe isn’t so popular now with English-speaking readers, possibly due to his obsession for leading a mentally healthy life. That sort of impulse is not very en vogue with us this century after we re-imagined our judgements about mental illness. In our time, artistic madness is appreciated, the whole “living on the edge” thing. The author compares the sentiment around madness before and after Beethoven, a contemporary of Goethe, came on the scene. Fascinating.

Another good one in these times of political anxiety: Adrienne Rich’s Poetic Transformations.

Like Wallace Stevens, I’ve also struggled to connect with Adrienne Rich, although I appreciate writers' appreciation of her. I had a book signed by her once at The Dodge Poetry Festival back in the 1990s and she seemed a bit stern and cold while signing books. But coming across Rich in continuing education courses keeps me trying.

Someday I’ll get it.

Political Poems Keep on Happening

September 14, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Poems About Dictators

So you may know I’ve been reading anthologies of political, protest and resistance poetry, both new and old. As I’ve done this, I’ve been sharing excerpts of particularly prescient or arresting lines to my friends on Facebook. So that got me beginning my own catalog of poems about dictatorships and lawless regimes. As I continue, I'll keep updating it. Check out Poems About Dictators.

It includes excerpts from poems like this amazing one by Czeslaw Milosz: “Child of Europe.”

Orthodoxy

I also read a good piece on Leftist Orthodoxy and Social Justice from Medium by an activist named Heartscape and it contained a rewrite of a poem called "If I can't dance, It's not my revolution" by Emma Goldman. It's an extension of the article which is about inclusiveness, creativity and intolerance within a political movement, not a heavily figurative poem but the kind of poem that clearly communicates frustration within a group of opinionated activists.

If I can’t fuck up and learn from my mistakes, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t disagree with you, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t ask questions, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t decide for myself what tactics I will use, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t be femme, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t choose my own friends, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t bring my family, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t bring my culture, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t bring my ancestors, then it’s not my revolution.
And if it’s not our revolution, then let’s build a new one.

The Lazarus

Poet Amy King also recently helped organize a project of poets writing poems inspired by the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus' poem. This became a controversy recently when the White House senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, disparaged the poem as not containing foundational ideas about America.

Read the resulting poems collected by The Guardian.

More Political Poetry News

Why All Poems Are Political (Electric Literature)

Poet for the Age of Brexit, Revisiting the work of A. E. Housman (The Atlantic)
Today, in the age of Brexit and the renewed movement for Scottish independence, the question of what Englishness means is once again up for debate.

Punk Poet Eileen Myles on Combating Trump, Capitalism With Art (Rolling Stone)
With a new generation of fans from Twitter and 'Transparent,' the legendary artist is basking in latest literary renaissance

Celebrities Reveal Their Immigrant Stories In 6 Powerful Words (Huffington Post)

The Way We Protest as Poets’: Gynecologist Monument Sparks Anger, Art (Free times)

And this is not sstrictly political but something cool to check out: y cousin sent me this link for African American poets from the Appalachian area: http://www.theaffrilachianpoets.com/

Also big in poetry news, (although not a protest poet), poet John Ashbery has died. Read his obit in The New York Times.

Poetry Card Week 15 (Japan, US, France, UK, Greece)

September 12, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I took the summer off (my parents visited for five weeks) but I kept going through the poetry cards so we can finish the last few posts this year.

"Not knowing
The name of the tree,
I stood in the flood
Of its sweet smell.”

Matsuo Basho from “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”

Known to be the greatest of the Japanese haiku poets, Basho was influenced by Zen Buddhism and wanted miniature perfection in a poem. This required only seventeen syllables broken into sections of 5-7-5. In later years, he journeyed through Japan doing travel sketches tied together with his haiku. When translated, the poems lose their original syllable configuration.

“A poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war…”

“A Poem is a City” by Charles Bukowski

I love how these poems bump up against each other. Two travelers, two poems. The card talks about Bukowski's “pure, undiluted voice from the street, attached to no school, tradition, or ideology save that of day-to-day survival.” The “unflinching honesty” of his poems dealt with bus terminals, boarding houses and racetracks. The movie Barfly was based on his writings. There's also a very cool database of his work.

"Like a clamorous flock of birds in alarm
All my memories descend and take form,
Descend through the yellow foliage of my heart
That watches its trunk of alder twist apart,
To the violet foil of the water of remorse
Which nearby runs its melancholy course…"

Paul Verlaine’s “The Nightingale” (a video and alternate translation)

The card says his credo was “music before all things” and he spent a life of rages, romantic obsessions, alienation, and prison time for shooting Arthur Rimbaud (see the movie Total Eclipse or Big Bang Poetry's review) because he was full of “inner turmoil.”

“He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The memory sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a cold dark day.”

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by W. H. Auden

Auden emigrated to America, the card said. This was my first clue (aside from the stats below) that this is an English deck. Auden's famous saying, “poetry makes nothing happen” was misunderstood and what Auden meant was "that poetry had no hand in the evil events taking place in Europe at the time—the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany and the impending war." He meant instead that poetry was “a way of happening, a mouth.” If you understand that, let me know. I'm still having trouble with it.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

“The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats

Ireland’s greatest literary figure, says the card. Yeats was a collector of folktales and legends, a senator and a self-styled oracle. This poem was his reaction to the Black and Tan War in Ireland where British troops came to quell an uprising.

“If I meet you suddenly, I can’t
speak—my tongue is broken;
a think flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,
hearing only my ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body
and I turn paler than
dry grass…”

Fragment 2 of Sappho

Sappho was from the Greek island of Lesbos and was the aristocratic head of a poetry school. She was once as famous as Homer. She was allegedly bisexual and her love poems were “meant to be sung in the Mixolydian mode she invented.”

“Call the roller of big cigars
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.”

From “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens

This was a jarring paring against Sappho! Stevens was an American modernist and insurance executive. “Stevens chose to lead a life of quiet middle-class conform in order to make room for his real vocation, poetry.” His first book was published when he was 43. He wrote that this poem had “something of the essential gaudiness of poetry…obviously not about ice cream.”

Week stats:

1 black American female
2 black American males
8 white American females
9 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
10 white English males
2 white English female
2 white French males
1 white Greek male
1 white Irish male
1 white Italian male
1 Japanese male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 500s BC poet
1 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
2 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
13 1800s poets
24 1900s poets

Poetry Card Week 14 (US)

June 28, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

“What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?”

“Heritage” by Countee Cullen

Cullen was a Harlem Renaissance poet (1920s) and the most traditional of the Harlem Renaissance poets. He was an admirer of Keats, Housman and St. Vincent Millay. He was conflicted about being a spokesperson for the black community but he was never ambivalent about his message.

“Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!”

Claude McKay’s “America”

Two Harlem Renaissance poets together! Maybe I didn't shuffle these cards. We actually studied both of these poets in Harvard's EdX online Modernism course. Jamaica-born, McKay was involved in politics and felt anger at the oppresive systems of America, the subject of this sonnet.

“The grass is walking in the ground.
Soon it will rise and blow in waves—
How can it have the heart to sway
Over the graves,
New graves?”

“Spring in War-Time” by Sara Teasdale.

Teasdale is from St. Louis but I had never heard of her until many years after I moved away. “Known primarily for her forlorn poems of love, (ex: “My soul is a dark ploughed field in the cold rain”–yikes!), and “tempestuous epistolary affair" with Vachel Lindsay, a poet I’ve come across a few times in the roster of New Mexico poets in the 1930s and also as an early poet of the Chicago circle who contributed to early issues of Poetry magazine. Everyone seems to have had an opinion of Lindsay and you either loved or hated him. Teasdale apparently loved him if not his poetry. They both committed suicide. I did not know that. Now my interest is piqued and I will look into this dramatic story. This excerpt, according to the card, is one of her most famous poems, not about love but about World War I and was “widely distributed among the soldiers on the front lines.”

“This is the soldier home from the war.
These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is round or flat.
This is the Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances carefully down the ward,
walking the plank of a coffin board…”

“Visits to St. Elizabeths” by Elizabeth Bishop

I just saw the film Reaching for the Moon. This poem is about her visits to see Ezra Pound while he was in the hospital for psychiatric treatment. The poem was modeled after Ravel’s Bolero and “The House That Jack Built.” Not much biographical info is on the card which simply lists her places of residence. Interesting.

Week stats:

1 black American female
2 black American males
8 white American females
7 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
9 white English males
2 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
12 1800s poets
20 1900s poets

Smarting It Up

June 28, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Some people call it Hermioneitis (after Harry Potter), some call it Insufferable Syndrome or Smarty Pants Disease. My grandmother had a family friend from Arizona who came to visit her in St. Louis and her friend was very educated and published in southwestern American Indian culture. He was spouting off his knowledge in her living room and it was very impressive and we were all enraptured and his wife turned to my parents and said, “Isn’t he a smart son of a bitch?”

We love that story and whenever someone sits too high on a horse we say that, "Isn’t he a smart son of a bitch.” It’s very handy because pontificating on some subject or other is addictive. So you always need a wing man near by to disparagingly reprimand you when you’re sounding too much like a smart son of bitch.

I’m full of opinions that I can carry off with a tone of rightness, but honestly I’m wrong I’d estimate about half of the time and the phrase "Did I say that?" is a common pre-apology for thinking too much through my mouth. I take solace in the idea that nobody's reading this anyway, right?

Recently in the magazine The Baffler, Rick Perlstein took all the smarty-pantses to task in his article, "Outsmarted." Some excerpts:

"Even as we moderns spend enormous amounts of our conscious energy making evaluations about who is sophisticated and who is simple, who is well-bred and who is arriviste, and who is smart and who is dumb, these are entirely irrelevant to the only question that ends up mattering: who is decent and who is cruel."

"Whatever 'smart' actually is, it bears absolutely no necessary relation to fundamental decency. But that's a psychological, or even spiritual, lesson, not an intellectual one."

This is the cause for many moments of head-in-the-hands for fellow Hermiones. Many of whom are poets.

And so with that I'm going to complain about this recent online article called "Why All Poems Are Political" by Kathleen Ossip.

Calling the writing of poetry in any genre a political act sounds groovy at first but that's spreading the net a bit too wide, like saying playing video games instead of getting a job is a political act. It can be, but it isn't always. Not all poets write as a political act, not all poets care about political acts. And you could also say being a poet of any political bent or of no political bent is all still a political bent. You wouldn't be wrong there but you also wouldn't be saying anything. Political intention is important. What kind of political act is it? It's like saying writers have agendas. Writers want to persuade. Poetry can be awfully un-rebellious and supportive of the status quo. They can also be rebellious for no purpose.

I do agree with Ossip that the Poetry is Dead meme is dead itself at this point and out of step with the times. There are more writers if not readers of poetry these days, lots of poetry literacy online, and, as my survey of news stories last year indicated, plenty of news outlets are printing stories about poetry and poets beyond the Poetry is Dead story. Just do a Google search for "poet" every seven days. Society does not only turn to poetry in times of crisis, although in times of crisis it surely ramps up (see the protest poetry phenomenon happening now).

You could say people, for the most part, also only get politically active in times of crisis. So if you believe those two things are related, (poetry and political acts), it shouldn't be a surprise that political poetry gets attention in a crisis.

But I do get tired of the lament that wants to compare poetry to other media. Ossip asks why we don't wonder Does Television Matter or Does Football Matter or Do Restaurants Matter. Does Cable TV Matter is actually a conversation happening as we speak and many people have given up television altogether after asking this very question. Every football season I have the argument with Monsieur Big Bang: does football matter. I ask the questio, do games matter all the time, especially ones for which we willingly spend billions of dollars. We do have a plethora of TV shows that ask the question do restaurants matter, particular ones with Gordon Ramsey yelling inside them and in general now that we've endured a flood of restaurant and cooking shows and the world falling apart. Do foodies matter? Is there foie gras after fascism? (I just used that for the alliteration. Foie gras is terrible with or without fascism.)

In fewer words, yes these conversations are happening.

Ossip's article then lists a set of un-numbered questions attempting to challenge mainstream ideas about poetry. Ossip points out that poetry can be an antidote to toxic and numbing culture. But some of her questions play into the same assumptions that proponents of Poetry is Dead succumb to, perpetuate the same stereotype of the obscure poet, especially around the issue of difficulty. Difficulty is not a crime, but it is also not a necessary ingredient of poetry. Difficulty is useful for that particular class of difficult poetry. "Can something be pleasurable and difficult." Yes it can, but it can also be easy and pleasurable. Not all poets traffic in difficult poems. Not all poems are difficult. Not even half of all poems are difficult.

And I think, (because here I am over-thinking again), that this favored idea of poetic difficulty ties back to Perlstein's article and our need to come off as smart thinkers outweighs the benefits of our brilliant new ideas.

And yes, my head is in my hands right now. It's a tragic problem. Smart can be wonderful. Smart can be alienating. Smart can be deadly.

Am I being melodramatic? Can smart poems kill someone? In local news, police are making pleas to the zillionaire who has hid a fortune of coins in northern New Mexico and presented his clues in a too-cryptic poem. Two people have already died trying to find it.

The poem is too hard. The thirst to understand it is too great.

Most Popular Search on BBP

June 28, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I tallied up the search results from an entire year on both of my blogs and 649 people made that search for the song "Cherokee People" or "Cherokee Nation" on my Cher blog.

Popular posts on this blog include searches for:

- Sex poems
– Poems about language
– The Miroslav Holub Poem "Brief Thoughts on a Test Tube Analysis"
– But Bob’s Burgers poem searches are the clear winner. It's not surprising considering the popularity of the show. The topic received between 120 and 140 searches within the last year.

Terms folks use to search the poem:

happy things we should send into space
aunt gayle poem
little cat you're just like me
you're my cup of tea poem
gayle bob's burgers jar of mayo scott baio line
scott baio bob's burgers

There is obviously a diminutive need we will continue to try to serve.

Quotes for the Summer of ’17

June 12, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Here is another slew of quotes to ponder, many from the Bob Sacks media newsletter.

Craft

"An artist’s limits are quite as important as his powers. They are definite assets, not a deficiency, and go to form his flavor and personality." Willa Cather

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." Robert Louis Stevenson

"To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Carl Sagan

"Act with the authority of your 16 billion years." Joanna Macy

"Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess." Edna Woolman Chase

Reading

"A book ought to be an ax to break the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka

"I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget." William Lyon Phelps

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." G. K. Chesterton

"We can spend our whole lives fishing only to discover in the end it wasn't fish we were after." Henry David Thoreau

Thinking Better

"I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Albert Einstein (attributed)

"How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality." Norman Douglas

"Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance." Plato

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." Paul Dirac

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated." Poul Anderson

Bearing the Business

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." Winston Churchill

"Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community." Simon Mainwaring

"An over-reliance on past successes is a sure blueprint for future failures." Henry Petroski

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Winston Churchill

"There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny." Frederick William Robertson

Living a Life

"I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?" Ronnie Shakes

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." Groucho Marx

A Book About Plutonium and the Nuclear Family

June 1, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Ann Cefola's new book-length poem, Free Ferry on Upper Hand Press, is about the secrecy behind the development of plutonium alongside poems about growing up in 1960s suburban America. The plutonium and family pieces are separate but Cefola creates a matrix between them which explores the impact of scientific development and cold-war fears on living families. Cefola drew material and inspiration from technical publications and her father-in-law, who worked on the plutonium project.

The plutonium story runs along the bottom of the book's pages–Cefola calls this the "bottom narrative" which interacts with the more traditionally displayed family poems on each page. The architecture works like an assemblage, where ideas from the plutonium fragments are collaged next to relevant family stories. This structure gives you all sorts of opportunities to read the poems horizontally and vertically. Hot and cold contrasts are explored, dichotomies between the vibrant and the flat, intellectual science transposed next to suburban parties. Two stories are being told at once, woven together and they ultimately merge.

Cefola investigates emotional exposure and chemical exposure, tenderness and brittleness, disasters both emotional and physical, and rivalries between siblings and poems. The family poems themselves are a vibrant survey of 60s Americana: television (and love of TV dinners), dishwashers, vacations, neighborhood lawns and personalities.

When Cefola uses details, they are always heavy with extra significance, like the wine glasses in the cabinet stacked as if in the middle of a can-can dance, or the idea of "children like lava" over the death of a dog, or Ed Sullivan pronouncing 'show' as 'shoe." This reminded me of Sonny & Cher's first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show where Sullivan mispronounced Cher's name as 'Chir.'

And then there's a scientific formula printed in all its glory at the climax of the book. The ending leaves us with the smell of firs and the desire to protect all that has been explored, the physical and emotional vulnerabilities, the fireflies.

There is no other poet like Cefola. Her tight, article-free lines zero in on ideas like a microscope and the style of brevity intensifies the action. She sprinkles in italics where ideas almost glow.

More About Ann

The Big Bang Poetry Interview (2013)

Ann Interviews Howard Mandel on Astrud Gilberto and the Bossa Nova (2017)

Ann's website and her blog annogram.

Buy Free Ferry

Poetry Card Week 13 (UK, US)

May 26, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Continuing in 2017 to work through the Poet’s Corner card deck series. Getting toward the final third of the deck. Continue to be surprised by serendipity!

“If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing your and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
   But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise… ”

“If” by Rudyard Kipling.

I've just been talking about this poem on two blogs…like this week! And here it came up as the next card I pulled from the deck. Anyway, the card says Kipling was an English poet born in Bombay. He was an idealist authoritarian, a romantic imperialist. His style was plain, without irony. George Orwell called “If” the “finest example of ‘good bad poetry.’” And I don't know what that means.

“Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.”

Walt Whitman's “O Captain! My Captain!"

Whitman’s famous poem about the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 which was also eulogized in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The poem is about a captain guiding the national ship through the Civil War. Whitman would often see Lincoln walking down the street in New York City, and later Whitman gave popular lectures on Abraham Lincoln and recited this poem after the end of each lecture. By that time he claimed to hate the poem. He sounds like Cher of late. You may think that's pure silliness, but a hundred bucks he would have been a fan.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

Aside from Shakespeare’s Pizza in Columbia, Missouri…is there any other Shakespeare in the whole wide world? Although the sonnet form was the most popular poetry form in Europe in the 15th and 16th century (the Petrarchan variety) , Shakespeare’s sonnets were only privately shared and became famous only in the past century. I did not know that. Thank you poetry cards.

Week stats:

1 black American female
6 white American females
7 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
9 white English males
2 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
12 1800s poets
16 1900s poets

Adventures in the Difficult

May 26, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

E Poetry & Fiction

I’ve continued with explorations of digital poetry as I'm still interested in how readers process narratives, multi-sensory experiences and the playful and participatory. I'm also getting my mind blown by the frame busting.

I’ve just started to read the textbook, New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Morris. It's just as nerdy as you would expect but I'm really lovin it.

I also recently tried to introduce a digital novel into my Difficult Book Club (more on that below). Before I mistakenly chose the books we read, I tried to contact a few members of the Electronic Literature Org to find out what they might recommend for introducing to book-bound club to electronic literature. But I consistently received no response so we picked a PDF novel with a image archive and the group choked on it. They hated it. Granted the execution of the narrative wasn’t very good, but they weren’t even interested in the concept of it or the opportunities for escaping the limitations of their chosen media.

Since then, I’ve received a copy of the digital novel Wallpaper (now touring in art installations in Europe) but I haven’t been able to run it yet, finding too many technical limitations from one computer to another. You can see some online “short stories” from the story's creator at Dreaming Methods. Click 'Portfolio' in the top menu.

Monsieur Big Bang and I are also going to tackle House of Leaves shortly after we finish the Gormanghast novels. I know this sounds more like The Masochist’s Book Club than just The Difficult Book Club but you can peruse our evolving reading list.

I’ve also been reading more about poet Stephanie Strickland. Here is a good example of her work: “Sea and Spar Between”

About the poem.
The Poem

The poem is based on Emily Dickinson poem “each second is the last” below:

Each Second is the last
Perhaps, recalls the Man
Just measuring unconsciousness
The Sea and Spar between.

To fail within a Chance –
How terribler a thing
Than perish from the Chance’s list
Before the Perishing!

Unlike Emily Dickinson poems, this one is 225 trillion stanzas long (yeah, you heard that right), impossible to read fully which is part of the point. It’s still fun to “skim across the surface” of it and experience the responsiveness of your computer mouse as the poem’s stanzas flutter away. You can use your A and Z keys to zoom in and out.

Here is Strickland’s essay from the Poetry Foundation website, “Born Digital,” where she lists 11 ways to identify and conceptualize digital poetry.

I’ve also come across The Iowa Review Web that seems worth exploring, an online journal of digital pieces from 2000-2008. Browse the archive: http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/judymalloy.php

More Difficult Books

These three recent reads also classify as difficult if you're feeling adventurous.

A Poetical Dictionary by Loren Green (Amazon)

When I first started to read this, I gave up. I wasn’t in the mood to read something that slowly. It’s all timing with these difficult books. A year or two later, I started again. This is a short book and well worth the effort of going slow with but its only 42 words long. Fascinating if you’re in any way into etymology (or the study of words). Word nerds, dictionary nerds.

Don’t skip the preface, it’s full of prose poetry. Beautifully printed, pronunciation tips that are pure poetry, historical word history followed by lyrical explorations of the chosen words. A sprinkling of dictionary abbreviations I had to look up…I’m no dictionary snob. So observant. We should all do this exercise with our favorite words.

Don’t miss the charts at the end! Never have I found charts so moving.

Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti (Amazon)

I read this book and then lost it in my book-stuffed house (which makes me a hoarder). Google Books explains this book well,

"The 'great iconoclast of literary criticism' ("Guardian") reinvents the study of the novel. Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. …For any given period, scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture. Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres – the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed…”

Not everybody's chosen literary vantage point but it is well-suited for a data-obsessed culture. And there are some surprising trends you can see when you look at data from outside the matrix (and contemporary lit criticism is nothing if not a matrix). This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s a data set story and my eyes glazed over more than once. That said, it’s a revolutionary look at how the novel has evolved…using real data. A new story emerges.

Some examples. Click to enlarge.

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson 1980 (Amazon)

A common theme in the American Women Poets in the 21^st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2013) with a few of the language poets represented were comments around the failures of metaphor in language and the capricious pursuit of newly minted metaphor.

Lakoff and Johnson’s book is lots of theory but the book dissects how metaphor is absolutely ingrained not only in our language but in the very way we conceive of abstract ideas, even simple ones. The authors categorize orientation metaphors (happy is up, sad is down), motion metaphors, war metaphors.

Metaphor construction is a “fundamental mechanism of the mind” and one that language poets like to toy with. Could we communicate without them?

Yesterday I even came across the 2012 Lexicon Valley podcast on the same topic, episode #23, "Good Is Up." One listener to the show commented that "much of language is fossilized metaphor.” A very metaphorical response. The podcast covers Lakoff and Johnson book and also interviews James Geary who has probably a much easier read on the topic, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. (How the paperback is more expensive than the kindle version, we'll never understand.) But Geary says every 1-25 words. The differentiate between literary metaphors, intentional metaphors and unintentional so ancient and subconscious metaphors. During the podcast, the hosts quote from three poets. In trying to describe metaphors of time, Bob Garfield, (who you may recognize as the host of NPR's national show "All Things Considered") found this quote from Ralph Hodgson poem "Time, You Old Gipsy Man"

Time, You Old Gypsy Man
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

Mike Vuolo found this quote:"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day" from Pink Floyd’s lyrics to “Time” to which Bob replied, “Okay you win; I am a nerd loser.”

The culture positioning between songwriters and poets is constantly happening.

Later Mike Vuolo quoted Virgil: "But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail," (I could not find a good source for that translation). to explain the metaphors of time as movement, where time moves forward (for humans who walk forward) and from left to right on line graphs, which takes us back to Graphs Maps and Trees!

Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 23 of 64)

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