Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 28 of 64)

The Cocktail of Poetry Memoirs

August 4, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Never before have I read two memoirs that seemed to go so well together, two books that tell the same story with different voices and different perspectives.

The book Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy came out in 1994. As a young girl, poet Lucy Grealy had a large portion of her jaw removed due to Ewing’s sarcoma. Her autobiography covers her childhood hardships, college experiences as Sarah Lawrence College, her beginnings as a poet and her time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she lived with poet Ann Patchett. Grealy's book experienced great success in the 1990s. Unfortunately, various reconstructive surgeries led to addictions which led to Grealy's death by overdose in 2002.

The book Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett came out in 2004, two years after Grealy's death, and looks at the challenges and qualities of their friendship from Patchett's point of view.

Read the Grealy book first, then dive into Patchett's take. Or for more information on how the two books play together, read a review by Joyce Carol Oats from The New York Times Review of Books.

Thinking About Starting a Poetry Podcast?

August 4, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

It seems so tempting, right?

Every time I encounter a cool do-it-yourself project someone else has done, I feel an almost irresistible urge to want to do my own version of that project. Take for example the board game Monsieur Big Bang game me for my birthday last week, The Collector Game. It was created by a hobby board-game maker using the tool BoardGameDesign.com. More fun than the actual game is the idea of designing my own game! All my trivial hobbies could be brought to bear on the designs for various board games!

Total nerd-out!

I’m also taking an online Electronic Literature class and every example sparks the same bubble-cluster of ideas for programmed lit pieces. The list of things I want to try has gotten a bit overwhelming, frankly, especially for potentially time-consuming projects.

Podcast envy is yet another consuming type of endeavor that always sounds so appealing. Like, wouldn't it be lots of fun to start a restaurant?

For the last few years I’ve been dipping my toes into the podcast subscription world and I have a library of political podcasts, poetry podcasts, the Serial podcast was infamous last year and I too was engrossed in that first crime solving season. Lexicon Valley is also a favorite word-nerd podcast that has been very educational and entertaining.

I even finished a brief how-to-podcast class this summer from Treehouse and I learned Podcasts are not impossibly hard to produce. Theoretically anyone can do it. Technically I could do it. But the big challenge about producing a podcast isn’t the technological barriers, it’s the mental ones. It's hugely taxing and overwhelming to produce the content week after week, month after month. Planning, editing and promoting podcasts takes more time than you’d imagine, which is why the majority of podcasts don’t last longer than three months!

But here are some tips from the class if you'd still like to try launching a poetry podcast:

Plan out your topics and guests three to six months (maybe even a year if this is feasible) in advance.
Invest in affordable yet professional equipment. You don’t have to be a corporate entertainment company to sound great. And a great sounding conversation is addictive. Note how deliciously good NPR shows sound.
Learn how to edit audio files. A lot of mistakes can be corrected with editing.
Assign mandatory podcast work hours for each week so you don't fall behind and give up.
Test your recording with your guest at the start of each session: check sound levels, check for background noises. Listeners will bail out of a podcast that has low or difficult sound.

I was trying to access The Missouri Review's Soundbooth podcast a few weeks ago. All the latest episodes are not dowloading to my iphone for some reason and when I opened an older episode from 2015, the sound of the guest was so low and hard to hear I gave up in less than two minutes.

Most people listen to podcasts while they're multitasking: driving, walking, cooking, getting ready in the morning. A good, loud sound recording is the bare minimum.

You can then promote your podcasts on your website, iTunes or SoundCloud.

Lifehacker can tell you step-by-step how to start your own Podcast show.

Cory Booker Quotes Maya Angelou Last Night at DNC

July 26, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Closing his rousing Democratic National Convention speech last night, Cory Booker very movingly quoted the Maya Angelou poem "Still I Rise." Here is the poem in full.

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Quotes For Thinkers: Summer 2016 Edition

June 30, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I posted a list of quotes for thinkers about six months ago and it seemed popular so I’m doing it again.

Quotes and aphorisms can be very helpful little teaching moments for writers and other creatives, basically all of us thinkers. They’re also really good reality checks. Many of these are again from the Bo Sack’s marketing newsletters I get on my day job and they all involve skills you need as a writer, especially as a poet.

Marketing

"Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed." Reid Hoffman

Work Ethic

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas A. Edison

"I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process." Vincent Van Gogh

Both Maya Angelou and Edith Wharton read books as children even before they understood the meaning of the words printed in them. The loved language and they loved it pre-meaning. “You can only become great at that thing you can really sacrifice for.” Edith Wharton

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin

"Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." Vince Lombardi

Being Flexible

"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change." Thomas Hardy

"If it's free, it's advice; if you pay for it, it's counseling; if you can use either one, it's a miracle." Jack Adams

"Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it." Lao Tzu

"Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it." Eric Schmidt, University of Pennsylvania Commencement Address, 2009

"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

"Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together." Yo-Yo Ma

Being Positive Instead of Negative

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. Thomas Jefferson

"To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me […] a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another." John Updike

"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations." Steve Jobs

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they're not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." Steve Jobs

Thinking

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." Upton Sinclair

"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." Alfred North Whitehead

"Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion." Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle." Ken Hakuta

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." Scott Adams

"The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present." John Naisbitt

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man." Francis Bacon

"If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done." Bruce Lee

"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life." Charles de Gaulle

"The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure." Laurence J. Peter

"In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson." Tom Bodett

"Data is not information, Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not understanding, Understanding is not wisdom." Cliff Stoll & Gary Schubert

"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us." Marcel Proust

I wanted to end on how we think, how we process and how we write in order to list a few new articles on processing and keyboards. This first link is an insight graphic from an analytics blog I follow.

Next up is an article dealing with the fact that handwriting initiates thoughts in ways typing on a keyboard does not. From The New York Times, Why Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age. And what about that keyboard? Why are the letters scattered around like they are? And who was thatfirst writer to think with it? The New York Times also published in their daily digest about the history of the keyboard.

The layout of the keyboard you use today has a lot to do with a machine that you very likely haven’t used — or maybe even seen — in years. That invention, the “Type-Writer, 1868,” was granted a patent on this day. With its ivory keys, it looked like a mini-piano and took up an entire table. It wasn’t very successful, partly because typists couldn’t go very fast. The keyboard was laid out alphabetically, and the keys would lock up if letters that were close together were struck too fast in succession. The solution that the inventor, Christopher Latham Sholes, came up with in the 1870s was to spread out the most commonly used letters across the keyboard to prevent the jams. It was called the Qwerty keyboard, after the first six letters of its top row, which also has all the letters needed to spell “typewriter.” This may have been done so salesmen could more easily type the new word. The Qwerty keyboard has long been criticized as inefficient, but it has been the most popular form of English-language typing since Mark Twain typed out “Life on the Mississippi” (1883), by some accounts the first time an author handed in a typewritten manuscript to his publisher. Early on, typewritten messages were seen as impersonal. Anyone who has received a handwritten letter is likely to say that still holds true today.

How to Submit Poems to Journals

June 30, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

How exciting it is to be sending out poems! No matter how often you receive rejections, keep focusing on the fun of researching, organizing and sending poems out into the universe.

Here are some step-by-step guidelines for you.

Step 1: Take a look at your poems and classify them by:

Writing style: are they rhymed or rhymed, are they traditional meter (if so what kind of meter) or free verse, are they conventional in language and tone or are they experimental?
Content: what are your poems about, what’s the subject matter?

Different poetry journals cater to a variety of these possibilities.

Step 2: Research poetry journals to find ones that match these poetry styles. There are two ways to go about this:

The best way is to visit the periodical section of your local libraries or bookstores (if you have any) and read some of their poetry journals. If you don’t see any that match your work, don’t worry about it. Your poems might fit a niche journal the library doesn’t carry. But this will give you a good idea about current popular poetry journals, the top tier to aim for someday.

You can also search some very good databases online to find journals and what they publish:

http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines
https://duotrope.com/

The old school way was to buy a copy of Poet’s Market but you’ll have to do this every year or two to get current listings (things change fast out there in poetry land). I found this was not a feasible option for me long term. Plus, what to do with all the old issues? Your library might have an up-to-date copy.

Create a list of possible journals from this research.

Step 3: Create your cover letter. You can list previous publications here or note that this would be your first publication. Different journals aim for different kinds of writers. Some want established writers and some want to find the next new discovery.

Some guidance on cover letters.

Everyone has differing ideas on the details needed in a cover letter. Feel free to experiment but keep this in mind: journals have seen it all. Literally, they’ve already read thousands upon thousands of “creative” cover letters. Don’t pour all your creativity into this. It’s a functional document.

Step 5: Submit

When you find journals to submit to, peruse their websites for submission information. Sometimes I search Google for “[journal name] + submissions” to get a link directly to the submission information page (because some journals hide the stinker pretty far into their site).

Pay special attention to how they want submissions submitted. They’re all different. Determine what format they want the submission to be sent: printed and mailed, attached as a word or PDF or Word doc, or included in the body of an email. And note the maximum number of poems they will accept.

Many journals these days only take submissions through an online service called Submittable (http://www.submittable.com/) so go ahead and sign up for an account there. It’s free and the site helps you keep track of every place you’ve submitted poems and what the result was so you don’t have to create an XLS Spreadsheet or other document to keep all that straight, although maybe you should create a spreadsheet or notebook anyway for the few email and mailed submissions you might also send out.

More information on submissions:

6 Submission Shortcuts You Should Be Using (And 3 You Shouldn’t)

10 Rules for Submitting to Lit Mags

Empty Mirror’s Complete Guide

The Regard for Poetry…Right Now

June 15, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Poetry has been all over the news the past few weeks but if you weren't paying attention, you will have missed it. Poetry is intricately linked into our lives whether or not we think it’s commercial or relevant or goes sadly unnoticed. My news clippings on Big Bang Poetry over the past years prove, (to me anyway), that poetry is not ignored in major magazines and culture. In fact, it's there in times that are both disastrous and calm and is especially prominent during our days of national failings and tragedies.

On Massacres

This LGBT Poet Stunned A Packed Room With Her Thoughts On Orlando Shooting (DNA info)

The English poet who inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tonys speech – and why it's a literary masterstroke (The Telegraph UK)

Seeking solace in poetry after a mass shooting (PBS NewsHour)

Those refer to the Orlando shooting at the Pulse nightclub. But don't forget there was a UCLA shooting this month as well.

'Where We Find Ourselves': Juan Felipe Herrera's poem on the shooting at UCLA (The Los Angeles Times)

On the US Election

On the radio last week regarding Trump's most current political speeches I once again heard this sobering poem invoked, "First They Came" by Pastor Martin Niemöller.

On Our Heroes

And poetry was invoked multiple times in stories commemorating the life and death of versifier/boxer Muhammad Ali:

Muhammad Ali, the Political Poet (The New York Times)

Muhammad Ali: A Poet In And Out Of The Ring (NPR)

Muhammad Ali, An American Poet (WLRN)

And as you may know I also blog as Cher Scholar somewhere else. When Ali died, this video of two of his poetry performances, one on a 1977 episode of the Sonny & Cher Show found it's way around Facebook.

Even in pop culture.

College Reading on Humility

June 1, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I'm very appreciative that Joshua Ebert took the time to leave a review on Smashwords for Writing in the Age of Narcissism . (May, 2016)

"The influence of narcissism on today's pop culture has warped the way people interact. The author's commentary was smart and relevant. It caused me to think about the way I treat other people. Even as I criticize vapid, self-aware narcissism, I'm sure I still act that way out of a desire for validation. Like they say, "everybody wants to be special." If I was a college professor, I'd have my students read this book. It provides a good lesson in humility."

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/511496

Writing in the Age of Information Overload

May 31, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
— P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937), "The Call of Cthulhu", first line

The inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. Lovecraft actually sees this as a mercy.

A few months ago, a friend of mine sent me this article by K. Dipalo about how to arrange your head-space in an environment of too much information and task overload. We are not built to deal with this much information coming at us in emails, Internet articles, books, TV streams, radio shows, podcasts, apps….

Dipalo recommends mindfulness as a way too offset noise overload:

“Just as the pioneering work of Clifford Nass points out, we are not built to multi-task, forever parsing up our attention into smaller and smaller bits. We are not designed to automatically deal with the surging tide of information around us. What is more like likely to happen is smart people will learn to change their behaviors or devise clever short cuts to maintain focus and, more importantly, a sense of sanity."

His specific advice:

Have the mind of an editor: a skilled editor cuts away what is not needed and sharpens what is required.
Maintain the focus of an athlete: a true athlete is clear about what will bring him to his goal and keeps that clarity front and center.
Cultivate the patience of a teacher: a great teacher understands that knowledge sometimes appears in the midst of noise and its appearance cannot be forced.

In another article by Dipalo, the benefits of boredom are highlighted:

"Information overload is the red-headed stepchild of the mobile age. We are literally bombarded every day, every hour, every minute with information. Are we smarter, faster and more informed because of all this effort? Not really." (I would argue less informed.) "In 2010, Lexis-Nexis released a global study that found, on average, workers spend slightly half their days receiving and managing information vs. using information to do their work. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed admitted that their work suffered at times because they couldn’t go through the information they receive fast enough. There are even apps available to help people cut down on their fascination with online and mobile information, including, well, their use of apps.

…move to the edge of occasional boredom; just enough to spur some brilliance. Brilliance, by the way, is a form of connection that is pure magic. And pure magic is a good thing for any professional, or any enterprise, to experience."

Singer-songwriter James Taylor seems to agree. In his Oprah Master Class interview of 2015, he maintains that in order to find space to create, you need to hang out in boredom.

From the Huffington Post review of the show:

“When writing a song, I need quiet,” Taylor says. “I need those three days of boring nothing-happening before I start to hear them.”

Soon, the chords begin to surface and the words begin to swirl. It’s not instantly a complete song, but the elements are there. This is when the quiet is especially important, Taylor explains.

“You get these pieces, and then you’re going to have to sequester yourself somewhere, find a quiet place and start to push them around,” he says.

In Taylor’s opinion, he isn’t the only artist who benefits from this type of isolation in the creative process.

“I think in order to create, artistic people need to be alone,” Taylor says. “They need to have time to themselves. Isolation is key.”

While there is a difference between being alone and being lonely, Taylor says artists shouldn’t fear the latter.

“If you have to be lonely in order to be free, learn how to tolerate a little bit of loneliness,” he says. “It’s hard, but you’re strong. You can do it.” Watch the video.

My friend Coolia attended the AWP Conference this spring in Los Angeles. What an awesome location of info-overload as she described it: 500 panels! She sent this satirical article of "AWP events not to miss" which highlights the absurdity.

Think of it: thousands of panelists and thousands of points-of-view. How can you effectively process them? Or not be paralyzed by the choices?

For an academic book on how poets have dealt with information overload historically, pick up “The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing" by Paul Stephens. He tracks the early origins of poetic digestion going back to World War I.

The fantastically entertaining and poignant twitter blog So Sad Today is another good example from a poet of how we now actually have one-thousand ways of looking at a blackbird. Was 13 enough?