Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World
Did you know you can enter to win free books of poetry on the site Goodreads?
I know because I listed my book there as a giveaway and got 413 people entered from the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia! Goodreads chose the winners randomly.
Wow. Go and get thee some free books!
While I've been at the Institute of American Arts this fall, I've had the opportunity to see some visiting poets. I've since read their books and all were completely unique.
dg nanouk okpik is an Alaskan Inuit alum of IAIA. In Corpse Whale, okpik's experimental verses make use of stacking verbs and pronouns to narrate with a sense of simultaneous voices, dimensions and time. The book is packed with Alaskan-ness. There are hyenas, wolves, whale blubber, seal skin, salmon,caribou, falcon, the ice shelf, sponge lichen, puffins, egrets, sea cows, eels, sea spiders, ravens feature prominently. This book could serve as an animal guidebook to Alaska. The poems are also full of juicy words like marrow, notched bones, and peat soil. Her use of stacked pronouns and verbs, along with creative spacing, italics and repetition, give the poems a surreal thrust. Her narrative is shaved down to almost shorthand, decidedly mythical. There exists an emotional constancy although the narrative zig-zags can be frustrating. Their strength is that poems are so stuffed but feel so light. Whether they are experimental or in traditional stanzas or in prose poems, they all read the same.
My favorite poems were "Cell Block on Chena River" for okpik's experiment solidly mapping as a form to an emotional strata, "Ricochet Harpoon Thrown Through Time Space" for simultaneously giving us modernity and history "and the evocative "A Cigarette Among the Dead." At the end of it all, I'm not sure where okpik's true center lies as the poems devolve into centrifugal wordiness. But I felt something etheral about the collection as a whole, as the poem "Her/My Seabird Sinnatkquq Dream" ends,
It's ash, ash all of it.
Nathalie Handal came to IAIA as a visting writer. Now living in New York City, Handal is a French-speaking Palestinian with Spanish heritage. Her book Love and Strange Horses has overtly erotic pieces created to be metaphors of political/international conflicts. Honestly, I wasn't getting that until Handal explained it to me. But the suggestion changes how you a consider a line like this from "Entrances and other Endings,"
the piling up of bones against our kiss
Handal makes use of the multiple languages she knows to decorate her poems, but her love and comfort with Spanish shines throughout. In fact, this poetry has a particularly Spanish flavor. My favorite pieces "Listen, Tonight" with the line
and answer me why we pretended/when we measured the earth/and there was no space for both of us.
and "Don't Believe" with the haunting line
Believe in the divided breaths of untitled men/and wait for the torture to believe in you.
Other good poems: "Intermission," "Portraits & Truths" and "Map of Home." In a way, the book speaks like a subconscious map to reconciliation. In "The Songmaker–19 Arabics,"
Who said we needed to be strangers when we listen to the same music?
(I've always felt that way about food. How can people who all eat baklava and humus hate each other so much?) There's a haunting abstraction going on throughout the book, with lines like this from "Dream of O'Keeffe's Dream,"
We are the suspension we believe in.
My favorite 
visiting writer of the three was Natalie Diaz, who came to read from her book When My Brother Was an Aztec. I'm thinking my attraction to Diaz has to do with her direct, aggressive writing style and her 3rd-Generation feminist language and perspective. You got your balls-to-the-wall bravery mixed with pop-culture references (army men, the ceramic handprint art piece of our toddlerhoods, Lionel Richie) and I'm hooked. I've been waiting a long time to read a poet I could identify with generationally.
Some of my favorite poems were pieces Natalie read at IAIA: "Hand-Me-Down Halloween," and "The Red Blues." I loved her anger, I loved her riffs, I loved her poems about her brother and sibling drama, I loved her erotic love poems (which were almost ghettoized to the back of the book) exploring the fleshiness of love with apples being devoured, thighs and shoulder blades and lines like "drag me into the fathoms." For me, she was the poet most in control of her words. She moved in front of them, not behind them. And her poems were filled with great lines like,
as I watch you from the window–
in this city, this city of you, where I am a beggar–
Or the final line in the poem about her veteran brother:
He was home. He was gone.
The centerpiece of the book are the poems about the drug addiction of another brother and how his drama depleted the souls of her parents. Every one of those poems works the problem at a new angle. The most amazing one was "No More Cake Here" where the narrator envisions the death of her troubled brother, the memorial party for the dead sibling complete with cake, which becomes a kind of coping, wishful thinking.
The book also deals with race in satisfyingly stark ways in poems like "Hand-Me-Down Halloween," "The Last Mojave Indian Barbie," and "The Gospel of Guy No-Horse."
It's always a gamble with those people.
Definitely one of my favorite new books of poetry.
I've been spending time researching what others have written on the topic of science and poetry and have found some interesting pieces.
In New Scientist, "Rhyme and reason: the Victorian Poet Scientists," Paul Collins provides excerpts of verse from men of science. There was a bit of antipathy about the union of poetry and science:
"The
aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler
way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible
way. Thus, the two are incompatible." — Paul Dirac to J. Robert
Oppenheimer
At Liverpool's Centre for Poetry and Science, Alison Mark explicates the writings of poet Veronic Forrest-Thomson and would disagree with Dirac saying, "Poetry and science are perhaps most intimately linked through the mathematics of metre, and one of [Forrest-Thomson's] processes was what she called smashing and rebuilding the forms of thought through technical experimentation with poetic form…As she said, 'the question always is: how do poems work?'"
In a good piece from The New Atlantis called "The Scientist and the Poet," Paul A. Cantor surveys Romantic poets writing about science and the great transformations of the Industrial Age, what poets had to say about it with the words of Goethe, William Blake, Tomas Love Peacock, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelly, Lord Byron and Mary Shelly.
Which is all so similar to the transitional pains we feel today with our technological revolutions. Cantor says, "the Romantic generation experienced the chief distinguishing
characteristic of modern science: its link to modern technology and its
effort to transform the world from the ground up in material terms. The
Romantics are famous for reacting to these developments with hostility." As Wordsworth is famous for saying, "We murder to dissect."
Cantor continues, "Beginning in the nineteenth century, science and poetry began to compete for prestige and authority in Western culture, and there is little question that in this competition science gradually won out."
"If people in the nineteenth century had been asked: 'Who is the wisest
man in Europe?' many would have answered: 'Goethe.' But in the twentieth
century, if the same question had been posed, I very much doubt that
many people would have offered a poet, or any imaginative writer, as
their answer. I would venture to say that the most common answer in the
twentieth century to the question: 'Who is the wisest man?' would have
been: 'Albert Einstein.' That is a rough indication of how in the course
of the nineteenth century science replaced poetry as the central image
of wisdom in our culture. 'No wonder the poets are so hostile to us,'
scientists could say: 'We stole their thunder.'"
Thomas Love Peacock believed, "poetry has gone wrong in the nineteenth century precisely because it insists on producing myths in a de-mythologized world: 'A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He
lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings,
associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and
exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a
crab, backward.''"
Cantor says, "I have quoted Peacock at length to show that the quarrel between science and poetry did not begin in the twentieth century…"
But some Romantics defend poetry for having widsoms science could never have.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge says in Lyrical Ballads:
"The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the
Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art
as any upon which it can be employed…. If the time should ever come
when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be
ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will
lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration."
Percy Shelly "identifies the purely technical nature of scientific thinking as its chief defect. And Mary Shelly agrees. "The basic lesson of Frankenstein can teach us is this: science can tell us how to do something but it cannot tell us whether we should do it. To explore that question, we must step outside the narrow range of science's purely technical questions and look at the full human context and consequences of what we are doing….literature is better at imagining the human things."
In our times of great change, poets should be documenting these human things. We might find we are brought right back to the ideas and thoughts of the Romantics:
Like Percy Shelly saying, "Our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest…man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."
Cantor agrees saying, "as human beings lose control of the products of their technological imagination…perhaps [they] end up serving the very forces that were meant to serve them."
Wow. Sound familiar?
Another good piece is from Ruth Padel in The Guardian, "The science of poetry, the poetry of science." Both poetry and science depend on metaphor she says, which is "a new mapping of the world."
"Science was born in poetry…the project that science had in common with explanatory verse was revealing 'the secrets of nature'….[both] Scientists and poets focus on details."
Some books of science-realated poetry listed in Padel's article:
Why Photographers Commit Suicide is out today on Amazon and in eBooks from Amazon and Smashwords.
The book explores, in small narratives and lyrical poems, the American idea of
Manifest Destiny, particularly as it relates to the next frontier—space
exploration. We examine the scientific, psychological and
spiritual frontiers enmeshed in our very human longing for space,
including our dream of a space station on Mars. These poems survey what
we gain and what we lose as we progress towards tomorrow, and how we can
begin to understand the universal melancholy we seem to cherish for
what we leave behind, the lives we have already lived. We unearth
our feelings about what it means to move ahead and stake out new
territory, and what it means to be home.
What an amazing experience this has been. If you've been following this blog over the last few months, you've been reading about the trials and the amazing learning experience that was putting together a book of poems.
I love so much about how this book turned out: the press logo (thank you Jeff), the artwork (thank you Emi!), the introduction (thank you Howard!).
I'm so appreciative of all the help I received from other poets, artists and the universe itself, which has poked me ever so gently down this path.
Why Photographers Commit Suicide
by Mary McCray (2012)
Trementina Books
ISBN 0985984503
87 pages/8 illustrations by Emi Villavicencio
9×6/paperback and eBook
Paperback $13.00 Buy
Kindle $2.99 Buy
Other eBook formats $2.99 Buy
Another poetry blog I was reading Monday alerted me to this New York Times Bestseller: Steal Like an Artist, 10 things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon.
There's a zillion books out there on creativity but Kleon's take is brill: organize it with a simple list structure combined with the revelation of some secret, previously withheld knowledge and add overt permission to pilfer slapped like a bow on top.
Who can resist?
All the great ones steal. Just ask Meryl Streep and Michael Caine.
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So we've been talking about how working on thinking skills can help your poetry. I know there is some resistance to this idea, as if the creation of poetry is only natural thinking, without effort. I agree that some degree of organic inspiration is involved, however thinking about thinking is still a crucial component of both gaining wisdom and communicating your wisdoms. Consider the competitive runner. Although "getting into the zone" is important, so is practice and the harder she pushes herself (within safe limits), the more races she will run.
Which brings me to the next point: reading essays and books about theory and thinking can be dry and difficult. "It's too hard! It feels like college!" my fellow writers whine. Don't fret over the stuff that's too dense to penetrate right away. Read through it and glean what you can. As long as you're always learning, as long as your mind is always working and thinking and making some connections–you don't have to understand all of it. The next babble of theory will get easier.
I hit the same wall when I started reading pop-culture theory this year (I am also, after all, Cher Scholar). Pop culture books can be even more esoteric. But if you keep coming at concepts and ideas from different angles, the better you'll run.
Thinking in Writing by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan is, as I've mentioned before, a good overview on ways we organize our thoughts.
For years I've had Literary Theory, A Very Brief Introduction by Jonathan Culler on my bookshelf. Last week I started reading it and although it was a hard slag at first, it should be required reading for all writers, especially poets.
To understand how the car runs, it's always good to know how the parts all work together. How do poems create meaning?
"…theory involves a questioning of the most basic premises or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted: What is meaning? What is an author? What is it to read?"
Although you may not think these big ideas matter to your little poems, thinking about these things can take you down some new and amazing intellectual paths. And it's helpful to know how the critics and theorists qualify various rhetorical tropes.
Many lament the fact that college curriculums (not to mention bookstores and large book-fest events) focus almost entirely on fiction, while poetry (once the definition of literature) gets the short shrift. Culler elaborates on why this is:
"This is not just a result of the preferences of a mass readership, who happily pick up stories but seldom read poems. Literary and cultural theory have increasingly claimed cultural centrality for narrative. Stories, the argument goes, are the main way we make sense of things."
So you see, this is what we are up against as poets, this is what our own intellectual peers have surmised about the value of poetry versus fiction. Ignoring the reality won't help poetry as a art form and it probably won't serve your individual poems much either.
Sitting on my desk at IAIA, stuffed behind one of those ancient phone-message books (the ones with carbon copies no less), I found a little blue mini-book called The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking, Concepts and Tools. What a find! I haven't cracked it yet but I did skim through the graphics, great overviews of thought like this one (so sorry my scanner sucks!):
In a recent article I found for this week's poetry news, poet Katy Lederer provides an indispensable book-list of books on poetry:
ical dismantling of poetic language and practice)That should be a good syllabus for winter's reading.
Over the weekend I was checking out the hours of my local bookstore and I noticed on their homepage that Joy Harjo has a memoir out called Crazy Brave. In fact, I had just missed her reading at the bookstore this weekend. Fudge!
I love Joy Harjo. I don't know when I first heard about her but I have her book of poems The Woman Who Fell From the Sky and I went to see her one-woman show in Los Angeles a few years ago at The Autry Museum, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. I felt like crying through the whole show I was so moved. Afterwards I asked her to sign my book and my husband talked to her about Muskogee history. I felt like an oddball fan the whole time.
The memoir is published by Norton (which is big and impressive). My husband and I went to the bookstore this morning and I saw the memoir but I talked myself out of buying it…although I kept looking at it longingly and pathetically. My birthday is next week and my husband surprised me by just buying me a copy when he checked out. He said it was an early present to launch birthday week.
I was so tickled! Going to start reading it today.
Books by Mary McCray
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