Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 1 of 3)

What is Poetry: Is the Making of a Poem Largely Interior?

December 12, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So we are back to these questions Elisa New posed in the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is pretty short: is creating poems “largely” interior?

Is anything “largely” interior?

It sure feels that way. But I would argue it really isn’t. I would argue it’s impossibly interior and “largely” exterior. By design or accident.

I keep coming back to this quote , “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.”

This quote is often misattributed to the French leader Charles De Gaulle but in fact it originated from the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis from “Greek poet’s odyssey”, 17 Jan 1964, LIFE Magazine, ‎Vol. 56, No. 3, Page 75 (according to Wikiquote).

We are so full of influences, how would we even know where ideas are coming from. That’s why it’s so easily believable to be divine inspiration. You could say maybe the synthesis is largely an interior process. But the edges of that are even fuzzy.

Where do we end and the rest of it begin?

Of course, I’m writing on the other side of the narcissistic outcome of a 2024 U.S. election, so I can see how this idea will lose traction soon, as it is losing ground even as we speak. More self-centered ideas of supreme authorship will come back into popularity, I predict. Actual studies about how the brain works during creativity and the human psychology of knowledge will become suppressed as there seems to be a new surge in locating one’s particular life experience as the center of the universe.

A lifetime of ads telling us we deserve it “our way” has come to envelop belief systems now. Good times.

But I’m asking myself these questions so…yeah.

That awesome print above by Loreillustration can be purchased in various formats on Etsy.

Cher v. Poetry

November 22, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This Frieda and D.H. Lawrence photograph reminds me of this Sonny & Cher photograph, which is also a play on the fact that Sonny bamboozled Cher into thinking his name Bono was shortened from Bonaparte. Those crazy kids.

So anyway, Cher was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month and is creating a sensation this week with her new memoir and so what is the first thing I want to do after after all this? I want to do a poetry post. I’m literally two months behind blogging about Cher events and I’m itching to talk about this topic instead.

Why is that?

Well, for one thing, the list of Cher stuff has become somewhat overwhelming. It will surely take me four months just to catch up on the two months of activity. That makes me sleepy just thinking about it.

But also I’m really enjoying it all and the idea of blogging about it is like putting a cap on it and moving on. I’m not ready to wrap it all up just yet.

And then there’s the fact that the poetry side of my life is the yen to the yang of my fandom of pop culture. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in light of recent political events and my sudden lack of desire to be a writer in this world anymore. Considering the things most people care about. I suddenly feel a great urge to draw in. I don’t really want to be a tormented poet in a tormented world. I’ve always wanted to be a happy poet in a happy world.

But this year has been unprecedented, full of hives and worries and pending departures and disappointments and a long, slow heartbreak. I’m just wondering what’s it all for, these little blog posts in the backwater of a rapidly, putrefying Internet and people preferring when poems are written by A.I. Oh, and speaking of the Internet, my job. That hasn’t been a beacon of wellbeing either on multiple levels (see hives above).

And speaking of that, in April some poet colleagues of mine recommended I remove my online experiments due to A.I. concerns, so those will be moving behind a password wall. So depressing, all of it.

And I can’t resolve any of those issues right now. But I do know one thing: the poetry blog helps me be a Cher fan and the Cher blog keeps up my interest in poetry. And that has always been true.

When writing about Cher or pop culture and it all becomes too ridiculous, turning to write about poetry feels very satisfying. At least the poets are charging respectable reprint fees and are not insisting people avoid eye contact in rooms with them.

But then when poetry starts to take itself too seriously (which doesn’t take very long), I move back over to Cher and pop culture. At least they’re making some money over there as pop stars.

But OK maybe there’s too much money over there. Poets aren’t getting exposed in sex trafficking scandals. (Well, except for maybe Byron.)

But poets can be very annoying and competitive considering how low those stakes are on their side. The egos certainly don’t match their bank accounts.

You see how this goes. It’s very convenient, really.

Occasionally it’s delightful when Cher and poetry come together. Like when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I could write about it on both of the blogs.

Or when Cher recites Rudyard Kipling’s “If” poem.

Throughout the years I’ve found Cher in quite a few poems:

Or Cher playing Rusty Dennis in the movie Mask trying to avoid hearing her son Rocky’s poem.

Here is the poem:

These things are good:
ice cream and cake,
a ride on a Harley,
seeing monkeys in the trees,
the rain on my tongue,
and the sun shining on my face.

These things are a drag:
dust in my hair,
holes in my shoes,
no money in my pocket
and the sun shining on my face.

Watch Eric Stoltz as Rocky read the poem in the movie.

What is Poetry: Is Poetry Like the Other Arts?

September 30, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Art, Artifice and Ancestry

“They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.
We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.”

This is from John Ashbery’s greatest hit, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a great contemplation of art for any self-portraiture artist.

I guess you know when any blog post begins with an Ashbery quote, this is going to take a minute.

After a bit of a break we are moving on ahead with Elisa New’s questions about poetry from the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is about how poetry is like or different from the other arts. I started with this post last week and stalled after the brief categorical musings below.

I started by listing out all the arts I could think of: the so-called plastic arts (3D things like sculpture), drawing and painting, photography, the fabric arts, music, film and animation, theater and dance and the writing arts. There’s also decorative arts (furniture and home goods), experiential art (like happenings), digital art (including game design) and fashion design. Some would include architecture. There are probably more I’m missing.

I guess the answer to a question like this is sort of hierarchical, (and I’m going to come back to this later), because on some level the impulses to make art are all the same. And there are mashups happening between all these art forms. So in that way, it’s very fluid.

You could argue that writing is very verbal and verbal arts would include poetry, prose, theater scripts, screenplays and the lyric part of songwriting.

Some physical artists use word play as well, either as abstract material or as literal content to add another layer of meaning to physical objects. Likewise, some writers work with spatial ideas on paper.

I’ve always thought writing entailed the least amount of physical skill. Many of the arts demand a good deal of hand-eye coordination. Magic fingers. The physical arts are very tactile obviously. Writing happens mostly up in your head.

Of all the arts, music seems the most abstract and nonverbal (apart from lyric writing). But many of the other arts can be plenty abstract, as can writing itself if words are separated from the things they attempt to signify.

And here is where I hit a wall last week. What else is there to say about this? I am always trying to figure out the buckets and usually find out buckets themselves are problematic. If you ever have to make an arbitrary bucket choice in your categorization scheme, something is wrong with your buckets.

Over the last few weeks, my friend Jen has been conversing with me over email about the 2024 Joni Mitchell book Traveling (Ann Powers) and about jazz fusion and purism. For example, in the book we learn that many jazz purists insist that what Joni Mitchell was doing was not jazz but jazz fusion. I was telling Jen today that I never really understood what the word fusion meant, (just one of those obscure jazz words, you know) before we started talking about it. And I went down a rabbit hole last week wondering about the other music genres. Did they all have a sort of renegade fusion gang pulling at their neatly sewn seams?

Like is there blues fusion? I often research Cher’s 1970s torch catalog for my other blog and many of those songs are defined as blues songs, but they seem more like pop/blues. Would torch songs be considered a kind of fusion? Is there a rap fusion, a classical fusion (would Liberace sit here?). Does fusion just mean a mashup?

I was telling Jen today that I think my whole problem is that I can’t see the boundaries of anything. I really struggle with this. Music genres, movie genres, writing genres. Where are the boundaries of the western or horror genres? How is a prose poem different from flash fiction? What the hell is fictional memoir?

The Exorcist is a prime example for me. It’s mostly a mid-1970s auteurist drama IMHO. I just Googled that term to see if it was a thing. Not only is it decidedly not a thing, but the first movie that came up for it was Al Pacino’s comedy Author! Author! which I love for predictable reasons: it’s got a dramatic actor in a comedy pretending to be a wacky family drama but is ultimately about a completely failed family system. What’s not to love about that??

But back to The Exorcist, which is a slow burning candle depicting mainly the breakdown of single, working mother with a few scary scenes thrown in that tap into the horror genre and were so remarkable that they captured our idea of what genre that movie was.

It’s very fuzzy for me, as you can see. And so when anyone exploits the complexity of the buckets we’ve culturally created, (with a comedy horror or a western horror movie, for example), I’m delighted. I’m in my space.

And I think my problem with buckets is not just because I overthink my buckets (which I do), but because of the way my brain works to categorize anything. Should we categorize the Lucky Charms marshmallows by color or shape?

But also I struggle for a plethora of other reasons, like living through postmodernism, being part of the Gen X group, influences I have encountered starting with my father, who himself organically resists buckets and loves both Lucinda Williams and ABBA songs.

As I was thinking about all these issues: fusion and types of art, I was also working to understand my poetic ancestry. Poets like Joy Harjo have been calling for poets to create a written genealogical chart of our writing influences. And I’ve been having trouble with this, too, because I’ve been mistakenly focusing on my teachers and mentors, who did influence me but not really my taste (or lack thereof). I kept trying to draw up from Howard Schwartz to his teacher and then up to that man’s teacher, all the way back to Theodore Roethke. But that never feels right. I don’t think my experiments are really related to those people at all. They were just guides and mentors, (versus textual influencers), trying to help me do my own thing not something like their thing. My poetry is really nothing like Howard Schwartz’s or Theodore Roethke’s poetry.

When I’ve talked about my interest in Queer Culture, (most recently in my Cher blog), this has probably been my greatest influence. Even if you’re not LGBTQ+, you can have a queer sensibility, (see the book Camp Grounds, David Bergman). And I think this has to do with the gay male culture I’ve been exposed to as a Cher fan and my sympathy not only with those artists politically, but very importantly aesthetically. And the aesthetics very broadly include camp, drag, the celebration of guilty pleasures but also the idea of textural resilience and bullying, and as a woman who was pressured in many ways to be a “sweet Mary,” the tools of subversion.

So this morning I was reading an essay on the New York Poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler), and I realized I was unavoidably influenced by these poets (and a plethora of ancestors between them and me) and their ideas of genre fusion, their slippages in tone. Were they being serious or funny in their poems? Were they making fun of pop culture or revering it? I feel I can fundamentally understand that they were doing both at all time. Because I too, cannot fairly see the boundary between comedy and drama or pop culture and anything else. And it’s not surprising that the two pillars of this school (Ashbery and O’Hara) were gay men.

The New York School poets targeted the boundaries between high and lowbrow art, including poems that reference movies, symphonies, French fiction, pornography, epics, cartoons (this is Brian M. Reed’s list from this morning’s essay in The Cambridge History of American Poetry)…and most famously abstract expressionists paintings.

Reed goes on to say these writers adopted “the same impassioned tone toward both elite and popular culture which can leave a writers taste level in doubt, as well as lead to a reservation considering his or her fundamental aesthetic values.”

Or I would argue a reservation considering the idea of fundamental aesthetic value itself.

Or the fact that some of us can only see one bucket.

Later Reed says, “the poets permit themselves to scramble, invert, reinvent, and otherwise tinker with every available discourse without respecting any of them as sacred or outside the limits…[and they] exalt in this freedom by making artifice and artificiality a central theme in their work.”

Later Reed says the New York School poets would also “draw attention to the problem of artifice, probing its zero degree, the boundary between art and nonart.”

So this problem is hierarchical, we can see again. Where is the boundary between say rap and pop or comedy and drama? Then where is it between movies and photographs? Between poems and song lyrics? Between high and lowbrow? Between art and nonart? The good and the bad? A yen and a taste? The opinions of ourselves and the opinions of others we love and admire? The border between the self and others period?

It all feels irrelevant then when you can’t find the edges.

The sculpture at the top is “Rethink Plastic” is by the artist Javier Jaén.

What is Poetry: Should Poetry Be Heard or Read

August 21, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re making our way through Elisa New’s queries on what poetry is, questions she posed in the Harvard’s Emily Dickinson MOOC. Here’s the next question in the list: is poetry language other human beings necessarily hear or read?

It’s interesting that New specifies “human beings” because obviously animals overhear poetry spoken by humans, like a racoon stuck in an attic overhearing a poetry reading downstairs. It must sound like pure music for them, like listening to any unfamiliar language. But it’s humans who need to experience their language as poetry or want to. And there are humans who are satisfied to experience poetry simply as nonverbal music. Fans of Gertrude Stein, for example.

New also specifies the word “necessarily” as if this is the way we have to experience poetry, as a necessity, and the other way is possibly superfluous.

It’s probably not necessary to overthink New’s casual questions here but the fact is the hoomans have never been able to agree on an answer.

Some of us believe poetry is best experienced as spoken word. Poetry is primarily aural in this case. Some of us believe the page is where the poem is set in stone and formalized. And the page itself, the white space, the visual is crucial to its meaning.

And they both have a point here. Much depends upon what properties of a poem the author was working with, sound or visual tricks. It’s hard to bring visual chicanery to life in a spoken performance. On the other hand, you can get a slight idea of the sound effects when reading a poem silently, but you get a better understanding of them when you read a poem out loud.

Poetry predates printing and so spoken word and memorization is at the heart of its history. Musical elements made it easier to perform and pass along poems. Often, it’s the musical elements that set poetry apart from prose.

But then the printing press happened. Poems could come alive in the minds of readers and not just in the ears of listeners. Now we have even newer publishing platforms like web browsers and interactive applications.

In one MOOC I attended on Electronic Literature, the teacher talked about “affordances” which were like beneficial properties of any one platform. For example, you can take a book to the beach, get it wet and it won’t conk out on you. It’s still a very usable media platform even when damp.

On the other hand, a book in an e-reader might short-circuit when wet, but is weightless and doesn’t take up room in your house if you decide to keep it. You can also search it for content very effortlessly and quickly.

Likewise, our mouth is a platform with some very beneficial affordances.

Everyone has a greater need toward one or another affordance. I personally like the look of books in my rooms. I like the feel of books and paper.

Interestingly, I was going to search images for this post, one for “poetry reading” (as in the live event) and “reading poetry” (as in the book). But the search engine, of course, didn’t know the difference. So putting the words “poetry” and “reading” in the search field brought back everything and that is kind of metaphorically nice.

These are pretty stereotypical images of both options. The dark room with a spotlight and a dramatic performer gesturing with their hands. Contrast this with the manicured reader, enjoying nature no less with a latte with some artfully applied whipped cream.

So every one will have their own personal answer to this question; and how could it be otherwise? We all have different aesthetic needs.

For me, music itself satisfies my need for music. And the music of poetry often overwhelms me during poetry reading performances. The rhythms send me drifting off into my imagination and I come back a minute or two later having missed whole sections of the poems. There’s also the poetry reading grunt that I find pretty grating.

But then again I love to attend public discussions of poetry and literature, like the sessions of The Los Angeles Festival of Books and I like Ted Talks and stand-up comedy. So I do like the physical human presence of communication. It’s a fine line between that and other forms of spoken word.

I’m much more interested in poetry as a visual artifact. So for me, the page trumps the performance. Whereas for the live performance of a conversation, lectures or the performance of music itself, this is not the case.

Music has such a strong nonverbal element, regardless of its lyrics, a strong energy of spirit (in all its variation). Poetry, albeit with its own kind of spiritual effect less powerful, is more verbal and idea-based, despite experiments exploring the boundaries of that with either nonsensical or mostly musical writing.

For me, music does music so well. And reading platforms give poetry more opportunities to do what it does so well.

What is Poetry: Deliberate Craft Controlled by the Maker

August 14, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re working through Elisa New’s very interesting questions about poetry from the Emily Dickinson Harvard MOOC. The next question is a big boy: “Is poetry a deliberate craft controlled by a maker?”

And here I think Elisa New is asking about how much control we have over our creations, how much of the poem comes from inside us versus how much comes from something outside of us. And this is really a spiritual (and biological) question about where our consciousness begins and ends.

You might believe you are a singular entity, biologically and mentally speaking, or you might believe you are part of a larger system of energy or thought.

I personally am agnostic in pretty much every spiritual sense: not ruling anything out but not fully accepting of any belief system. I’m spirit-curious, as it were. Non-committal. I have commitment issues, religiously speaking. I was raised by one stalwart atheist and one reluctant atheist.

I believe it was the writer Will Storr who said it takes just as much faith to believe in ghosts as it does to not believe in them. And you could pretty much take that perspective to any kind of spiritual dilema.

Anyway, as it pertains to writing and creative thinking, I have had three kinds of experiences around this.

1) Writing with the conscious mind: this includes a conscious effort to brainstorm, organize, draft and edit work.

2) Subconscious accidents and architectures: these are unplanned things that happen but that are traceable back to training, experience, expertise and other subconscious activities happening in your own brain. Sometimes natural, serendipitous connections and subconscious decisions are made with details and architectures.

3) Outside contributions: here is where it gets a bit spiritual. Some writers believe in a real external muse, a mystery or a loved one or maybe input from God or ghost writing. Poet James Merrill believed his content was being provided by a Ouija board in his book The Changing Light at Sandover and poet Jack Spicer was another major poet who believed language was “dictated” to him and he was not “an agent of self-expression.”

This question has prompted me to go back through my own experiences in writing poems (from high school to now) and make a survey of my various “phases.”

High School Phase in St. Louis: this was my first, exploratory, practice of poetry (reams of it!) handwritten in notebooks, a lot of high-school love stuff and play with free association. It’s marked by a lack of training and very little reading of other poetry. And not a lot of thinking about how creativity works.

Undergraduate College Phase in St. Louis: these were my first advanced classes in the explication of literature, my first poetry-writing workshops, the happy discovery of writing mentors/teachers (the first encouragements I received to continue on). I started to meet other poets (amateur and professional), started to read poems (contemporary and the canon). This period was marked by my revolt against the idea of a poems written in a series (no idea why; it seemed pretentious) and embracing metaphorical writing, especially the extended metaphor poem. My word choices became more conscious as I had discovered the magical uses of a thesaurus. All this was firming the muscle of my conscious writing skills.

Graduate School in Yonkers: I was getting continued encouragement and realizing I was wrong about the series-based poem thing. I actually loved doing series work and would continue to do basically that going forward. I was also learning to write narrative poems (the Mars poems) and telling small stories. I was doing more conscious-writing skill-budling.

Post-Grad School in Los Angeles: here I started a deep dive into Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and was developing an interest in telling my family history on my father’s side, having an epiphany of confluence for those two interests while reading Zen and the Art of Falling in Love by Brenda Shoshanna, which eventually resulted in the cowboy book. The family history got dropped and I was practicing more long-form narrative poetry instead. This to me was some unconscious work starting to happen, some happy accidents, integrations and conflux of various separate interests and ideas.

Writing in New Mexico: this period is marked by starting on the NaPoWriMo challenges while I was temping at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. These were yearly explorations in form prompts and series poems on speed. After moving to Albuquerque, I started to take MOOC surveys on the history of American poetry, the final phase being “Electronic Poetry” or digital poetry after which I began exploring browser-based poems.

Now, from the beginning to this point I had never experienced anything like writer’s block on any writing projects except maybe day-job assignments in marketing (which were miserable experiences). For good or bad, I’ve always had plenty to say, a lot of obnoxious opinions. Maybe once in a while I’ve had a problem with a plot point or a spot of rhythm or word choice, usually needing help ordering a series or a book. For spelling and punctuation, I will always need another set of eyes (if I can find them).

But here is where it starts to get weird. For all the NaPoWriMo projects from 2013-2021 and including 2024, the writing was mostly directed by me. I had complete authority over those poems (in my mind at least). There were some subconscious happy accidents, some parallelism I didn’t consciously intend or a clever plot point that designed itself.

In 2021 I started what turned out to be a two-year project of dictionary poems. This was a project inspired by Lohren Green’s Poetical Dictionary (2003) and I had assumed I’d have complete authority over not only the the containing poems but the words themselves.

I soon found out that I was unable to insist upon any of my own words. If I picked out a word I wanted to use, I would always get writer’s block. This was the first time in my life experiencing a block over anything. What the hell! I could pick as many words as I wanted but poems went nowhere over and over again. There was no rational argument I could make to the mysterious muse.

And it’s not like words just came to me from the outside. That didn’t happen either. I would come up with a few words every few days and a voice (that didn’t seem to be me) would almost nudge me with an encouraging voice telling me that “maybe you should explore that word.” And I would have to wait for that nudge or I couldn’t proceed. So f**king weird. And I had no control over how often words would be sort of “approved” by this voice. How frequently they would come or not come.

At the same time I was working on another series, NaPoWriMo 2022. I was pretty busy doing that and hoping to put the dictionary poems on hiatus. But that month a large bunch of dictionary words came in a fury and I found myself often posting two poems a day, one NaPoWriMo poem and one (or more) dictionary poem. It was crazy-going until I finally appealed to the voice (or whatever it was) to stop sending me dictionary words.

Almost in a huff, the words stopped and they stopped for what seemed like months. Was this myself in a huff with myself?

I can’t characterize much about the voice but it almost seemed to have a gender and an age. But hey, let’s not go there.

For that NaPoWriMo year in 2022, I had a similar but not identical experience with “the voice.” These poems were based on pop and rock songs and I did determine (for the most part) which songs I was going to write about. I also felt I had authority over the hook for each poem and their narrative direction.

The voice (and it did seem like the same voice) appeared only to help me with particular problems. For example, I had a big problem with the poem for the song “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” That poem was a hot mess involving literally a shipwreck. Figuratively, the poem was a wreck itself. I opened up my mind to suggestions from outside of myself and I received back the idea to use Theodor W. Adorno’s famous quote about “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” as a alternative guiding principle for the poem. Big help. Thank you very much.

Similarly, I became stuck with the poem for the song “Could It Be Magic.” I couldn’t get a direction or any traction with it. All I knew was that the poem was half-written and I got very angry every time I worked on it. Why was I getting so angry? Then one day while I was in Cleveland, Ohio, visiting my parents an answer popped into my head like a gift.

It was the song making me feel angry. Incredibly, the response I needed was not only the answer to my question, but it was the answer to the poem and the whole set of poems. It was amazing!

In another section of the set, the muse was completely unhelpful. I had a placeholder song for a poem (and a placeholder story to go with it) that I did not want to use. I wanted to use another song by that artist but I couldn’t yet find it. Also, the story was too enigmatic. It didn’t fit with the other more direct poems in the set. I was blocked again.

I opened up again for help. The voice returned but this time with an adamant no in response. The voice said unequivocally, “this is the song and this is the story you get.”

Well, I couldn’t believe this was true. Surely, open-mindedness would prevail and another song by that artist would come with and new idea, just like it did for those other problematic poems. This artist had many songs, after all, and I had months to prepare. As the day of publication kept getting closer, I felt nervous but never resigned. I kept checking in; the voice kept saying no. This is the song; this is the story. So aggravating! Up until the day of publication, I kept hoping for a new idea and that voice never waivered. To this day, I see that poem like the flaw in the Navajo blanket, the open door that defines the whole set.

I have not experienced either of these experiences since those projects of 2021 to 2023.

And I can’t honestly tell you I even believe in this voice or the idea of an external muse. It’s not very rational and human perspective is so limiting and easily misled. Maybe I just have a very active imagination. Maybe I have a deep, subconscious creativity.

Maybe the longer you practice writing, the more deeply you go into your thinking mechanisms and the weirder that might seem. On the other hand, maybe the longer you practice writing the more you are able to tap into intelligences beyond yourself.

So in answer to this question of whether poetry is a deliberate craft controlled by its maker, I really couldn’t say.

What is Poetry: Language or Music

August 8, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re working through Elisa New’s very interesting questions about poetry from the Emily Dickinson Harvard MOOC. The second question is really two of her questions: “Is poetry native language at all? Is poetry a kind of music?”

We’ve argued about this previously, most notably when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Price in Literature in 2017. Well, I guess it was just me arguing with the points made by New York Times poetry critic David Orr. I can’t paraphrase it all here. Suffice it to say I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks poetry is not music and language both.

The use of “Native” is interesting in the first question. Does this mean pre-language versus learned language, like toddler-speak? Or does it mean pre-history language like petroglyphs? Or some kind of under-language that is always with us, some emotional language?

Poetry for me has a pretty big umbrella and it involves an implication of permanence. I mean every writer intends a kind of permanence for their work, (a possible stay against death), but poetry tends to have a greater shot at a longer shelf life. Poetry is not inherently disposable like, say, political opinion or podcast reviews. The topics are more universal, the tone meant to strike more deeply into the psyche.

I am always considering the place of petroglyphs as poetry, too, and our hesitancy to label American Indian verbal rituals as poetry. Unlike verbal ceremonials, someone took the time to write out concepts in petroglyphs. I have some petroglyphs on the hill behind my cul de sac. And as far as “native” language goes, (in all senses described above), they “feel” like poetry to me. They explore something intellectually serious and they strive to be permanent.

Often they intend to commemorate a special occasion or idea. As does music.

Poetry has always challenged the boundaries even poets have tried to attach to “poetry.” Poetry should this and poetry should that. Always they are trying to contain the idea of poetry around themselves, their work or their taste. Musicians do this, too. Maybe so did the petroglyph writers. Humans love to tell each other what to do.

Is poetry simplified language? Except that it can be delightfully complex and convoluted. Is it a simplifying of our experiences? Except that it can illustrate the complexity of our experiences. Is it elevated language? Except that it can be coarsened language. Is it a narrative? Except that it can be non-narrative. Is it form? Except that it can challenge the idea of form.

It uses words. Except sometimes it tries to loosen words from their moorings. And it can be gibberish. It can be written in any language system (petroglyphs). It can be pictorial sometimes or can employ the same intention with symbols (petroglyphs).

It is not music. Except that it often is imbued with music. It’s almost impossible to separate poetry from any trace of music, any occurrence of rhythm and rhyme.

It may even be a third thing, a hybrid teetering in-between and pulling from native pre-language, sophisticated layers of modern languages and also ice-skating with tropes of music. If not an in-between thing, it is maybe an ever-morphing thing that grabs from all of its neighboring communication systems. It is possibly undefinable.

We could let it go, this attempt to nail it down. But tell me what’s the fun in that?

What is Poetry: What is it Made Of

July 29, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

(Atom sculpture)

Years ago I took some Harvard MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) with Elisa New. And during the class on Emily Dickinson she went through a list of very interesting questions about poetry.

She noted that certain Dickinson poems theorize about “what poetry is, what poetry is made of.” And then New goes on to ask multiple questions around the substance and boundaries of what poems are, what poetry is.

I’ve collected these questions and we’ll be exploring them for the rest of the year, starting with the opening inquiry: what is poetry made of…

….which you can’t very well answer, by the way, without speaking figuratively.

I would answer this by saying poems are made of heart and brain matter, the substance of yearning, suffering and joy, the desire to nail down the salty, sugary in-betweens-ness of our lives.

It is made of nothing from the periodic table of elements, not even the breath or paper it finds itself delivered upon. It is both a voice and not a voice in every sense of the word. It has no DNA or nucleus.

It has a big charge without any atoms.

It has no matter and yet it does.

Poetry is one of the only human things on Earth not made of carbon.

And this reminds me of a love poem from my first book, Why Photographers Commit Suicide, “Monogamous Carbon: A Classified Ad” written back in the early 1990s when I lived in Yonkers, NY, and was writing science poems for my MFA at Sarah Lawrence.

Ask a Poet: Hope is a Muscle

July 11, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Awhile back I had a string of questions to Big Bang Poetry. And I can’t find them now. But here’s a new interesting one that just came in.

Hi, as a class, we just finished reading In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle [by Madeleine Blais, 1995]. My teacher said that the title was based on an Emily Dickenson poem. I have looked high and low, and I haven’t found it. Since you’re an expert, I was wondering if you knew where it came from. Let me know.

This was an interesting question. Emily Dickinson thought a lot about hope but not so much about muscles. I did a google search for “Emily Dickinson” and “muscles” as a cursory check. Nothin.

She has a famous “hope” poem though which I figured was the most likely culprit but with a twist for the basketball team and the Amherst connection in the Blais book. Then I found an article where the author confirmed as much herself: https://www.thepostscript.org/p/madeleine-blais-heart-is-an-instrument

“The title In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle was also inspired by a writer, Emily Dickinson, the poet who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, the setting of the high school basketball team whose championship season I covered. Her famous poem claims “hope is the thing with feathers,” though Woody Allen has a joke about that thing with feathers is his nephew in Zurich who thinks he is a bird. I, obviously, had my own definition.”

According to Google’s Ngram viewer, Blais’ book is probably the first use of the phrase in 1995.

There is also an oft-revested quote by Krista Tippett: “Hope is a muscle, a practice, a choice that actually propels new realities into being. And it’s a muscle we can strengthen.” But from all I can see online, this seems to be a more recent quote.

There’s also a Bjork song using “hope is a muscle” from her 2022 Fossora album that is a very good read (https://genius.com/Bjork-atopos-lyrics) but a pretty typical Bjork experience to watch.

Literary Recipes

June 23, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve been meaning to do this post for many months now but was unable to carve out the time. Recently, there was an Intro to Anthro With 2 Humans podcast about Roman food (“Pour Some Garum on Me“) and just like the Egyptian sex poems book, I was able to find literary crossover as a stream of books come through the house.

As I flipped through one book called Gastronomical Time Travel, I also happened to be reading The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook and I realized some of these recipes were related to famous literary works.

So I thought I would list some of them out.

Absinthe

I visited an Absinthe bar in Paris in 2008 and since then I’ve been noticing references to absinthe in paintings, novels and biographies. Painters and writers include Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Paul Verlaine, Picasso Vincent van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant and Oscar Wilde.

Absinthe recipe

The Mint Julep

The Mint Julep was made famous in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Here’s a Medium article on “The mint julep’s jaunt through literature.”

Mint Julep recipe

The Madeleine

The Madeleine is probably the most famous depiction of food’s impact on memory and the sublime, from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way.

Madeleine recipe

New England Clam Chowder

New England Clam Chowder as depicted in Moby Dick. I’m going to Boston in early August and hope to have some thick, creamy New England clam chowder!

New England clam chowder recipe

Fried Chicken, Cold

Cold Fried Chicken appears in many novels from Pride and Prejudice to A Moveable Feast.

Make the fried chicken recipe, then refrigerate.

Haggis

From the Robert Burns poem, “Address to a Haggis.”

Poets love to write about food. Here are 10 anthologies of poetry about food:”10 tasty food poetry anthologies for hungry readers.” I have The Hungry Ear which has anthologized food poems by contemporary poets.

Haggis recipe

Oysters Rockefeller

In The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Toklas talks about Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s return to America from France in 1934-5 and their discovering the new foods Americans were eating. One of the dishes was Oysters Rockefeller and Toklas captured a recipe for it. Mark Twain was also extremely fond of oysters in any dish, including the Oysters Rockefeller.

The Decades-Long Comeback of Mark Twain’s Favorite Food

Oysters Rockefeller recipe

More Lists of Literary Foods

Learning New Things

June 15, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I am still making my way through a year’s subscription of New Yorker from 2021 but I only have a few issues left. I came across a good article last week called “Starting Fresh” by Margaret Talbot and it’s about learning new things as an older person and how this is good for preventing cognitive decline. This article interested me for a few reasons:

One, the women in my family have always been keen on preventing cognitive declines. My grandmother Ladd did this by religiously doing crossword puzzles and keeping track of storyline plots of soap operas. My mother does it with online games like Words With Friends, and cooking when she is able to still do that.

Secondly, I had a brain explosion many, many years ago when I took a ceramics class and got over the daunting idea that I would never be good at it. (See raspberry mask above.) We live in a society that instills in us a terror of attempting anything we might fail. So most of us like to stay in our comfort zones.

But as a writer working my way through my later years, I feel the need to keep exploring, as best I can anyway. This article talks about the benefits of learning new things later in life beyond the spiritual resetting of embracing a beginner’s mind. And also of the dangers of perfectionism earlier in your life.

“Maybe it could be an antidote to the self-reported perfectionism that has grown steadily more prevalent among college students in the past three decades. Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, the authors of a 2019 study on perfectionism among American, British, and Canadian college students, have written that “increasingly, young people hold irrational ideals for themselves, ideals that manifest in unrealistic expectations for academic and professional achievement, how they should look, and what they should own,” and are worried that others will judge them harshly for their perceived failings. This is not, the researchers point out, good for mental health. In the U.S., we’ll be living, for the foreseeable future, in a competitive, individualistic, allegedly meritocratic society, where we can inspect and troll and post humiliating videos of one another all the live-long day. Being willing to involve yourself in something you’re mediocre at but intrinsically enjoy, to give yourself over to the imperfect pursuit of something you’d like to know how to do for no particular reason, seems like a small form of resistance.”

Yes it does.

Talbot talks about what kinds of cognitive abilities decline with age and which ones improve with age. There’s no perfect age, as it turns out, for the best cognitive ability in all areas. “Fluid indigence, which encompasses the capacity to suss out novel challenges and think on one’s feet, favors the young. But crystallized intelligence–the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise and Fingerspitzengefühl—is often enriched by advancing age. And there’s more to it than that: particular cognitive skills rise and fall at different rates across the life span…”

The article states that your overall cognitive function will also improve if you try to learn a few new things at once. You don’t even have to be good at it. Just the attempt to do it. And researchers think this is because the act of learning multiple things at once replicates how children learn.

I’m fascinated watching how children learn things cognitively and socially. Following early child development educator Dan Wuori on Twitter is just as interesting as watching people try to solve mysteries or design things on TV. It’s watching the wheels spin. You can see it on countless reels of little kids. The first Dan Wuori video that hooked me was a little kid learning how to sort bags of different kinds of snack chips and it was compelling. The face of someone thinking is a wonderous thing.

Which is all to say I’ve started learning how to type on a braille typewriter I bought a few years ago. Back then I invited a friend over who works at a local school in Albuquerque where kids have some disabilities. So she has to take a braille test every year. It was a daunting lesson. First we had to figure out why the machine wasn’t working. Then she had to show me how hard it was to use!

I did a series of typewriter poems a few years ago and it took me like 60 pieces of paper to type out 6 poems. But I’m a comparatively good typist so that was easy compared to working with braille. There’s the same high expectation that there be no errors, (no white out sheets for my typewriter poems!), but you have to learn to type very slowly with multiple fingers engaged for every single word.

It took me quite a while to write a poem I thought worthy of the thing. Years. Then I used an online text to braille translator to map out the poem this week. Now it’s just days and weeks ahead of making many mistakes.

Wheeee!