Category: Books to Read (Page 4 of 14)

More Books About Writing

April 10, 2019 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This is a major book review catch-up. As I've been switching work situations, I kept on reading but couldn't keep up with blogging. So here we go…

The World Broke In Two, Bill Goldstein

The book cover looks very retro but this book actually came out in 2017 and it's about the year 1922, right after Proust had been translated into English and James Joyce has published Ulysses. Many established writers were disrupted (as we would say today) and Goldstein covers the comings and goings of four of those writers: Virginia Woolf (working on her Mrs. Dalloway novel), T.S. Eliot (writing his epic poem "The Waste Land"), E.M. Forster (working on A Passage to India) and D. H. Lawrence (roaming the earth, particularly his visits to Italy, Australia and Taos, New Mexico).

Although I loved getting context on D.H. Lawrence's inability to like anything, (he's the favorite writer-visitor of the state of New Mexico and I'm always trying to figure out why), I don't really see how his chapters fit in with the others. He wasn't influenced by one of the two landmark books as the others were, the other's had of a circle of friendships (which he was not a part of), and nothing of a modernist masterpiece came out of his work during that time. So why was he included?

But anyway, the biographer does penetrate the time very well, including all the letters going back and forth, discussions about writing and figuring out how to be modern.

New Directions in Digital Poetry, C.T. Funkhouser

This is one of those books I've been trying to find for a while. Copies are usually too expensive, which happens with certain books that are used as textbooks. For some reason the world thinks it's okay to extort shameful fees from poor students.

Anyway, this 2012 book is pure textbook stuff. Not for the disinterested. Most of the online pieces I tried to look up were already unavailable, with screenshots at best (example, Angela Ferraiolos pieces and works by Mary-Anne Breeze). So the book is basically descriptions of cool digital pieces (mostly in Flash) that you have to imagine in your head.

I was able to access the digital poem "Vniverse" by Stephanie Strickland (now an app form) and that was enjoyable. Jim Andrews has a piece dbCinema that is still online.

If you have Flash enabled, you could view interesting things by Deena Larsen, Serge Bouchardon and Jason Nelson.

I love the possibilities for digital poems, but it still seems that many talented writers are fiercely disinterested in exploring digital media. And likewise, the writers who do explore these terrains are often programmers first. As Funkhouser admits,

"…many digital poets do not aspire to reify lofty historical norms. Instead they employ different sorts of patterns, wherein programmatic randomness and machine cognition combine to synthesize network/media resources into a digital event almost guaranteed to contain turbulence. Readers may intuitively acclimatize to fragmentation and the absence of conventional syntax, traits not foreign to modernist and experimental poetry in the last century."

I have plenty of thoughts about this and the values experimental programmers bring to poems versus the value that writers would pursue. More on that later. But for now, it's just interesting to note that poets are willing to do experiments on paper that they're shy of doing in other media for some probably techno-phobic reason. And although I sympathize with that (as a lover of books and the machine of books), it's shortsighted and willfully missing out on understanding the possibilities of different platforms and media. And it misses, by a mile, the issues of our times, particularly similar interests in the realms of abstraction and the role of authorship in web reading and how "the signal to noise ration…is often fraught with diversion and dead ends." Better writers could explore digital opportunities, "orchestrating a textual experience that undermines its facade."

Most digital poets and experimental traditional poets have the same end goal: they want their pieces to "cause thinking" or "incite thought." And digital lit isn't always a criticism of traditional modes, although sometimes it is.

New & Selected Essays, Howard Nemerov

I really enjoyed one of Howard Nemerov's essays in the compilation Poetics, Essays on the Art of Poetry and so I bought his collected essays from 1985. Nemerov is the sister of famous photographer Diane Arbus (who claimed they had a sexual relationship as teens), and was a distinguished professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis from 1969 to 1991. This book would have come out when I was 15. The likelihood of my attending Wash U was slim. It was St. Louis' ivy league. But to think I could have studied with him if I had been more aware of my surroundings…

Anyway, this book is dated in many ways (one essay is on the horrors of in-vitro) and there is an extremely unilluminating love-fest of essays between Nemerov and poet Kenneth Burke. But there are some great things in here:

– A great fictional conversation between an advertising copywriter and a poet.
– Good comments throughout (and one full essay) on Wallace Stevens.
– Big topic areas like middle-aged poets used to write about in the 80s: the arts vs. religion and another essay on how poems operate like jokes (you know I love that stuff!).
– A comparison between human imagination in Blake and Wordsworth.
– He also tackles essays on metaphor, figures of thought and making meaning.
– There are also essays on newsworthy topics of the day, speeches, commentary on fiction, meter in poetry, and essays on Dante, Rilke and Randall Jarrell.

Some good quotes:

"The great babble of the world goes incessantly on as people translate, encipher, decipher, as one set of words is transformed more or less systematically into another set of words–where upon someone says, 'O, now I understand….'"

"To view the poet as a magician is fair, if we remember that magicians do not really solve the hero's problems, but only help him to confront these…"

"A joke expresses tension, which it releases in laughter; it is a sort of permissible rebellion against things as they are–permissible, perhaps, because this rebellion is at the same time stoically resigned, it acknowledges that things are as they are, and that they will, after the moment of laughter, continue to be that way. That is why jokes concentrate on the most sensitive areas of human concern: sex, death, religion, and the most powerful institutions of society; and poems do the same.

"…as Mr. [William] Empson said (in a poem), 'The safety valve alone knows the worst truth about the engine.'" [There's a whole magazine predicated on this very quote!]

"…In general, to succeed at joking or at poetry, you have to be serious; the least hint that you think you are being funny will cancel the effect, and there is probably no lower human enterprise than 'humorous writing.'" [Thank you.]

And in reference to the book above, this quote seems apropos here:

"A.M. Turing [the godfather of digital lit, by the way] once said that the question 'Can machines think?' was too meaningless to deserve discussion, and suggested that the proper short answer was 'Can people?'"

"…the posture of the literary mind seems these days to be dry, angry, smart, jeering, cynical; as though once people had discovered the sneaky joys of irreverence they were quite unable to stop" and he warns that "the intelligent and crafty young at last, as Ulysses says, eat up themselves."

Two novels about people writing: The Anthologist/Traveling Sprinkler (Nicholson Baker, 2009) and The End of the Story (Lydia Davis, 1995)

These books are so similar in a way I feel I need to compare them. In the Baker story, the main character is a man, a poet and musician going through a breakup and unable to finish the introduction to an anthology of metered poetry. In fact, the whole piece is pretty much about his avoidance of writing or his struggling to learn a new instrument. He's not very likeable and he thinks a lot about poetry and music (there's some great meditations on the history of poetry here converging back to music) and discussion on the history and meaning of many poets and poems. And although the character is a bit of a mansplainer, that annoyingness is part of the point. He knows so much he can't move. He can only ruminate. It's enjoyable but I had to take it in little bursts because he does drone on and the novel melds into a kind of free-form essay on poetry and music. Luckily the chapters are short. The book resolves but somewhat unsatisfactorily. It just kind of runs out of steam. And although the novel is a nice enough way to spend some time, I haven't recommended it to anybody. But I'm keeping it, so that says something.

The main character in Davis' book is an academic woman, a translator of French, and a novelist who is struggling to write the very novel you have in your hands. Although you never fully believe the story is a fiction and she ruminates herself about the borders between the forms. Like the character above, this story involves a very painful breakup told in excruciatingly but amazingly exacting psychological detail. Think Proust in "Swann's Way." Davis is interesting in that she's a Proust scholar (she's re-translated his first book, to date) but she writes with a very limited vocabulary. Not quite like Hemingway but closer to that than to Proust. Her topics get a lot of coverage but not in a vocabulary-rich, long-sentence way. Which is perfectly fine. That entirely serves the character, who is even less likable than Baker's main guy. Our character here has hit rock bottom in the relationship arena and so there's no 'splaining at all, just wading through the all-too familiar confusion of a sudden collapse of a love affair. There are no chapters here…it's just one long mess with section breaks; but thankfully it's a short book. There are great passages about novel writing and character construction and although the story doesn't resolve, the end seems pretty perfect. It was heartbreaking and I've been recommending it to everyone I talk to.

Plainwater (Anne Carson, 1995)

Carson's covers are so demure. I'm including this because there's not an Anne Carson book I've read that doesn't inspire me to try one of the same epic forms she invents from piece to piece. I can't not think about writing when I read her books. They never disappoint even though often they're often above my head.

This books seems like her most personal. She calls the pieces essays and poetry but it's hard to tell what's what. The cornerstone piece, "The Anthropology of Water" is about modern pilgrimages and amazingly threaded together with great commentary on love and traveling. The love poem, "Canicula di Anna" is also another good piece of brain food I'm still deciphering.

Her books have real re-readability for me because even the fragments I can manage to understand are plenty thought-provoking.

I also just finished her chapbook, The Albertine Workout, which considers Prout's character Albertine from many angles.

Books to Read: Confessional to Experimental

February 12, 2019 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Even though my life was out of control last year, I did manage to keep reading…to keep sane! These books below were worth talking about.

Who Reads Poetry, 50 Views from Poetry Magazine

This slim book is an anthology of essays from Poetry magazine, non-poets who read poetry and what they get out of it, from scientists to doctors to war correspondents. It was a bit dry but interesting to me. I like that Poetry magazine is searching for relevance outside of poetry writers. I'm not sure what was missing for me, but something was. I'll keep thinking about it. The essays are filled with great thoughts though, lots of quotable material. A few examples:

American Philosopher Richard Rorty talks about poetry as friendship, “I now wish I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose…rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts–just as I would have if I had made more close friends.”

Tex expert Xeni Jardin talks about poetry like a machine, “Poetry is, you might say, the command-line prompt of the human operating system, a stream of characters that calls forth action, that elicits response.”

PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown quotes Haitian poet Frankétienne with a very pragmatic view, “Words cannot save the world” and Brown continues, “Look around you, see the destruction, the stupidity, the despair, and you have to believe he’s right. And yet an account must be given.”

Residuum by Martin Rock was finally a poetry experiment worth reading. These are cross out experiments that read like real time edits. Poems go in multiple directions at once. Some edits are around truth or specificity or political correctness or just the political. My first fear was this is gonna suck. It did not suck. The branches were illuminating. There are not so many poems in the book that it feels overwhelming. Also, each poem is framed by a black and white photo of a machine circuit and a body circuit which plays on the idea of circuits in thinking and the writing process.

There are probably many strategies for reading these, but I approached it by reading the crossed out words first and then backing up and reading the rewrite. It can be read like conscious corrections of the unconscious. They’re impossible to quote, but here are some examples (click to enlarge):

Twin Cities by Carol Muske-Dukes

Taking about Residuum to a friend, we also discussed how tired we were of reading generic confessionals from the 80s, the cryptic one and a half pagers we all used to write (and I still do!). The form is dead and old, we decided. We were hungry for experiments done well.

When I picked up this book I thought it would be more of that. And there are poems like that, Muske-Dukes process the death of her husband and a childhood in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. But there were some great things in here too, like “Condolence Note: Los Angeles” about sending condolences in the modern era, “River Road,” a compact thing of grief, “Heroine” a poem essay about Jane Eyre and Rochester and the problems of this couple:

"Except for the matter of the thread, the breath-colored
Filament linking two hearts with pretty much nothing
In common. The thread pulses like a Bronte umbilical,
Which it is.."

There’s also a great poem about hate mail, called…"Hate Mail.” And the best poem was almost a kind of response about the limits of confessional poems, a poem called “Parrot” which ends:

I think I know, the Parrot protests. I honestly think
I know, but I am so tired of squawking the same
Profound shimmering insights–& nobody listening!

So the old style does not lose value with the new.

Early last year while visiting Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, for a hot springs soak at Fire Water Lodge (they accept pets), I found this used book, Poetics, Essays on the Art of Poetry, edited by paul Mariani and George Murphy. It’s filled with the essays of poets extolled in my undergrad and graduate classes and is filled with the au courant thinking about poetry circa the late 70s and early 80s.

Jonathan Holden talks about “where we are now” with modernism and postmodernism: “…the revolution has left the poet in America a bureaucratic specialist isolated in a university as in a laboratory, conducting endless experiments with poetic form, and in an adversary relation to general culture.”

Paul Breslin talks about how to read a contemporary poem: “It has a stock rhetoric of portentousness, and all too often its mysteries are only the trivial mystification of cant and code.”

Charles Simic talks about negative culpability, uncertainties and the positions you take as a poet: “One can say with some confidence that the poet writing today can no longer be bound to any one standpoint, that he no longer has the option of being a surrealist or an imagist fifty years after and to the exclusion of everything else that has been understood since.”

Brendan Galvin writes about compassion and writing “close to the bone” that becomes self indulgence: “…real frisson doesn’t come from hyperbole, but from understatement.”

Galway Kinnell writes about self absorption and the school of self dissection: “The poetry of this century is marked by extreme self-absorption. So we have been a “school” of self-dissection, the so-called confessional poets, who sometimes strike me as being interested in their own experience to the exclusion of everyone else’s.”

Tess Gallagher writes about poetry as a reservoir for grief and the communication of poems to their audiences: “Poems, through ambiguity and the enrichments of images and metaphor, invite our returns.”

Sandra Gilbert talks about the poems of self-definition and modern views about female confession and the madwoman trope: “Men tell her that she is a muse. Yet she knows that she is not a muse…men tell her she is the angel in the house, yet she doesn’t feel angelic, and wonders, therefore, if she is a devil, a witch….Men tell her that she is Molly Bloom, Mother Earth, Istar, a fertility goddess…They tell her….that she should not mean but be.”

Alicia Ostriker talks about the female divided self and covers poets from Anne Bradstreet to Lucille Clifton in four categories: authenticity, anatomy, sexual politics, and love poetry: “Raised up to be narcissists, which is a game every woman ultimately loses, we must laugh that we many not weep.”

Howard Nemerov talks about image and metaphor (loved this so much I bought his book of essays): “I will add that one can love a poet without being either cajoled or bulldozed into believing his theories.“

Robert Hass talks about rhythm and prosody: “Free-verse poems do not commit themselves so soon to a particular order, but they are poems so they commit themselves to the idea of its possibility, and, as soon as recurrences begin to develop, an order begins to emerge.” and “Two is an exchange, three is a circle of energy, Lewis Hyde has said, talking about economics.”

Stanley Plumly talks about silences: “That remarkable tension between how and why, the lyric and the dramatic, between lingering and needing to go on, between the horizontal rhythm of the line and the vertical rhythm of the story, with the balance always favoring the movement down, is what gives free verse its authority."

Stephen Dobyns talks about metaphor and memory: “…it is the ability of metaphor to elicit large non-verbal perceptions that is one of the great strengths of poetry and what can make a poem immediately convincing.”

William Matthews writes about poetry as knowledge: “A writer who speaks of having something to say is almost always doomed by that obligation to bad writing, unless he or she is willing to append: ‘but I don’t yet know what it is.’”

William Stafford writes about diction: “Where words come into consciousness, baffles me.”

Michael Ryan talks about primordial images: “I think if there is anything in us that is purely preliterate and unconscious, it is rhythm. We are subject to its influences incessantly, and our lives depend on it”

Lisel Muller talks about germanic and romance words (my copy is missing the final pages of this essay but I really enjoyed it): “The tradition of French poetry, Bonnefoy says, is abstract; it deals with essences. French poets want generic words, unlike English ones, who want the specific.”

Robert Pack talks about silences, Caesuras, and ellipses.

Denise Levertov writes about the function of the line: “The fact is, they are confused about what the line is at all, and consequently some of our best and most influential poets have increasingly turned to the prose paragraph for what I feel are the wrong reasons–less from a sense of the peculiar virtues of the prose poem than from a despair of making sense of the line.”

Marvin Bell writes about re-reading and learning about rhetoric: “…the great achievements of American poetry have been essentially rhetorical, those of rhetoric rather than of image and metaphor, or of imagination, structure and vision” and “…the poem is primarily a set of rhetorical maneuvers.”

2018 Book Reviews

October 25, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I haven’t been blogging but I have been reading. Here's a roll-up of some of the books of poetry I've read this year.

Southwestern Poets

Looking Back to Place

This is a very small run of an anthology of New Mexico poets, published by the Harwood Arts Center in Albuquerque. I couldn't even find a photo of the book jacket online. Lame. The back cover talks about people’s relationship to place and how place is sacred, etc. But it wasn’t a very satisfying look at the place that is New Mexico. There were few good NM poems but the scope was not limited to this state. Jill Battson had two good poems: “Lightning” and “As Seen from New Mexico” and Maresa Irene Thompson’s “What Water Means to Desert People” was great. I probably has higher expectations since the project was such a locally produced one.

High Plains Poems

I found the complete opposite result with Inez Hunt’s High Country Poems. Obviously self-published but I managed to find that cover online! This is a book I found in Las Vegas, New Mexico, at the very fine local bookstore there, Tome on the Range. Yes, the book looks awfully self-published and by that I mean bad graphics, bad layout, bad titles and really distracting backgrounds. The book practically reeks of bad design ideas. Did I mention the complete font overdo on every poem? But guess what? Looks are deceiving. Yes, the poems are classic, stereotypical western poems. But the writing was so much better than your average cowboy poet. I now wildly speculate that Inez Hunt was simply out of print and some friend or family member put together this anthology of her best poems out of kindness and respect. I’m not 100% on this theory but she apparently did leave poems to her daughter and now here we are with this great thing.

Excerpts from "Ghost Town House"

…storms strike hard
To shake the chinking loose
And cold settles in a down-draft
Through a sodden flue.
Glass shatters or is stolen,
Leaving hungry holes.

The floors break through
Where memory grows too heavy for the joist.
The rats gnaw tediously along with Time
In little bites.

With the River on Our Faces

On a recent trip to Arizona, I picked up With the River on Our Faces by Emmy Perez at the University bookstore in Tuscon. Perez’s poems of place depict Southern Texas and El Paso. Perez also writes Rio Grande poems and poems about border politics. “The History of Silence” was the best poem inside and I wished I could find the long poem transcribed online so I could include it in my Poems for Dictators list. Her poems are meandering like rivers and occasionally remote. Some of her gaps are too mystifying and obscure, but there’s a 2016 poem that mentions Trump’s wall.

Aqua Santa, Holy Water

Pat Mora books always feels like a good poetry deal to me. This book covers all forms of water topics: the sea, rivers, rain, birth and general wetness. It’s about women and water, about danger, slyness, erotica, Frida Kahlo. The poems have some great titles, like “Coatlicue’s Rules: Advice from an Aztec Goddess” and “Malinche’s Tips.” This poem invokes the landscape of the southwest that I feel and smell everyday. Mora also gets political about borders in poems like “La Migra” ("Let’s play La Migra /I’ll be the Boarder Patrol.”)

The amazing poem “Let Us Hold Hands” is often posted online as a healing or political poem performed in a convocation.

Buzzing Hemispheres

I also picked up the book Buzzing Hemisphere by Urayoan Noel in Tuscon under the faculty authors section. This is an amazingly experimental book about translation. Poems are in Spanish and English but never strictly translated. Noel takes liberties with his own poems! The book is also about borders between hemispheres, politically speaking, and the hemispheres of the brain. Noel uses language experiments with word play, spacing, bolding, layout, numerics, letter casing, and experiments in word choice for his translations. For instance, in English the word might be “musicians” but in Spanish the word is “mercenario.” So translations become inter-textural! And some of these experiments are no small feat (pun intended). There’s a form he calls a Sunnet in there, a syllabic staircase sonnet that manages a mono-rhyme poem with the correct syllabics in both Spanish and English. There are also poems that use Google Translate, anagrams created with anagram apps (one called United States shaped into a concrete poem), poems translated from spoken word. English and Spanish are shuffled around.

For anyone interested in the art of translation, this is a great book for you.

Poets and Poetry

This year I also read Mary Oliver’s primer on formal poems, Rules for the Dance. This is a good textbook for writing in meter and forms with plenty of sample poems at the end.

Recently, my parents moved from Lancaster County in Pennsylvania (where they retired) to Cleveland, Ohio, where my brother lives. I spent two weeks in late 2016 helping them comb through 30 years of stuff and stage it for removal to local charities or trash. My mom and I have never particularly shared the same interests in books. She likes historical fiction and I like experimental fiction (as a kid I liked scary fiction!). But anyway, in her stack of books to give away she had a book called Poe & Fanny, a novel by John May, an historical novel about a literary figure, Edgar Allan Poe, about a particular time in his life. So as historical fiction, the story is highly speculative but it portrays a very historically detailed account of Edgar Allan Poe’s time in New York City.

It takes place right at the time his most famous poem, “The Raven,” had been published. Poe was living with his wife and mother-in-law (who were also his cousin and Aunt) and explores an affair he was having with one of his admirers, up-and-coming poet Fanny Osgood. The novel doesn’t really prove an affair happened but offers an interesting possibility.

Chapters switch points of view between Poe, Fanny, his mother in law and his editor friend Willis.

The books reads like a historical fiction but there are interesting parts of academic considerations, like on page 25 where you learn in detail about the feud between Poe and Longfellow, which apparently was more of a paid editorial intended to drum up subscriptions for the offending paper. Author John May considers what Poe might have really thought of Longfellow as a writer, his meter, awkwardness and poetic ambition.

Pages 39 and 52 talk about “The Raven” specifically, it’s reception and explication. Fanny meditates on the poem’s sorrow, finds it emotionally compelling, and appreciates its vitality and gravitational pull. She insists the meter is a reflection of the heartbeat. Poe’s friend Willis later considers the poem's use of the name Lenore as a rhymed code word for Poe’s wife Sissy. Willis explores connotations and word derivations in the poem and about Poe’s wife’s impending death of tuberculosis.

Page 64 depicts Poe’s famous recitations of the poem and his affinity with women.

The end of the book includes real poems from Poe and Fanny both referenced in the novel and poems that might reveal evidence of an affair.

Politics

The violence and violent rhetoric in America has been very depressing this year. So it was comforting to read the book Revolutionary Memory, Recovering the Poetry of the American Left by Cary Nelson. I learned about this book from a MOOC I took last year on Modernism from the University of Illinois. Nelson hasn’t published an anthology of labor poems yet (and most of these poets are out of print) but this book serves as a veritable introduction to leftist poetry and how it was suppressed out of public consciousness in the 1950s.

Many of the new MOOCs on Modernism are starting to explore more marginalized poets as a refreshing alternative from the academic canon. This includes poets of color writing at the time, not just the Harlem Renaissance but writers who are Asian and American Indian. Nelson also explores the political writers who were all persecuted during the McCarthy Red Scare era which hit hard both Hollywood and academia. Turns out, McCarthyism is still hitting academia hard because these poets are never taught as part of the Modernist era, although they were published in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Langston Hughes is the exception that proves the rule. He is taught widely as part of the Modern Harlem Renaissance but his most most political poems are always excluded.

Nelson reintroduces many poems written about and during the early 20th century labor movement, poems about the Spanish Civil War, and poems about political speech, all which have been essentially erased from our social memory but also from the history of American poetry.

This is a fascinating look at a whole lost genre of poetry, which oddly wasn’t even recovered and repurposed during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

More Adventures in E Lit

October 25, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So last May I took a four week, online class called Reading Literature in the Digital Age on the Future Learn platform. It was taught by Philipp Schweighauser at the University of Basel. It was great, except that Schweighauser was doing a Simon Schama impersonation in every video.

The class was about different reading strategies people employ when reading academically or surfing on the web or in social settings. I learned more about deep reading, distant reading and hyper reading. And I’m a practitioner of all of it, for better or worse.

In fact, I've been noticing reading trends particularly around work groups for almost 30 years. When I started working in offices, desktop computers were rare and windows wasn’t even widely available yet. This was before email and the end of paper memorandums delivered into in-boxes actually sitting on corners of desks. I remember hand delivering stacks of memos.

My job now depends on a light understanding of a plethora of web and project management tools. And instead of seeing an increase in customer service with CRMs, better decision making with data-gathering tools, or quicker decision making with mobile access, I've seen a steady decline in productivity, efficiency and customer service and a steady increase in decision paralysis as each year goes by.

This is primarily because tools (and the frantic drive to develop the next hip one) have become a distraction from the work itself and, more specifically, a distraction from deep thinking and solving problems. We are now so pressed for time due to these "time-saving" tools that we’re forced into a reading survivor mode: skimming, winging-it, the bullshitting that has become prevalent in offices everywhere, the bullshitting that signals immediately: I haven't read it. Add to that the attention deficit introduced when spreading our eyeballs over various online media sites and indulging in fun online things which require even more skim-reading. We're now inundated with noise and a barge of "you should read this."

And it’s causing already bureaucratic organizations to crack from the lack of deep consideration over real business problems. Hyper-reading seems to me both the cause and the symptom of our online agonies. Here's an interview with Schweighauser about the class.

XKCD published this cartoon last year about the Digital Resource Lifespan:

Visit the hosted cartoon at https://xkcd.com/1909/ and roll over the graphic for some funny.

I keep coming back to this graphic and sending it around because it's all about intellectual perishability. The Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, once warned us that decades of intellectual property would someday perish because it's stuck on outmoded formats. Electronic Lit is particularly vulnerable and perishable.

The quote above says it all: “It’s unsettling to realize how quickly digital resources can disappear without ongoing work to maintain them.”

Digital is more labor intensive and perishable than books are for this very reason. And as corporations constantly ask us to switch to new media, we spend money re-buying the same things we already have. And why? As a cross-over example from my other blog interest in Cher, one early Cher album from 1965 has since possibly seen six formats: mono lp, stereo lp, 8-track tape, cassette tape, compact disc and mp3. I have a box of my mother's old 78-records but I can't play them. I have many odd boxes of various types of computer storage systems: 8-inch floppy discs, 3 1/2-inch floppy discs, backup zip cartridges, writable CDs, SD cards, external hard drives, memory sticks. I even have some of my mother's recipes printed on the back of old fortran punch cards my Dad used to bring home from work. Read about the history of removable computer storage.

I also find it interesting that retail stores are now finding “the digital space so crowded” they’re going back to printed catalogs.

It's good we're not killing trees anymore, no doubt. But how to invent a permanent device that beats it for durability; it's hard.

The Poems of House of Leaves

October 9, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve been majorly waylaid from blogging about poetry by a punishing amount of life events. But I’ve kept on reading. Like Nettie sobs to Celie in The Color Purple, "Nothing but death can keep me from it."

The difficult book club has kept moseying along, which is all you can do with difficult books. My third turn running it, I picked the interactive novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. And for those of you who haven’t read this novel about monsters and academia, there are plenty of poems in it. First of all, the character Zampano has a whole appendix of them, Appendix 1-F, pages 558-565, which feel like satirical send-ups of contemporary confessional poems.

The book is about overthinking, the plethora of ways to overthink and over-research (I scored high in 'Input' in the Strength Finders test so I'm a particularly bad case), information overload, all as a sort of avoidance of the heart and its useful information. And posturing, lots of posturing. Poems fit smack right into this hot mess.

There’s one poem in another appendix set called The Pelican Poems, Appendix II-B, pages 574-580, that explains the inspiration for the title "house of leaves" (page 563) and another poem there exploring roots of a tree as an idea for both family tree and the scary labyrinth under the house (page 565). I never did find out who Pelican was or how those poems tied in to the book; but frustrations over fragmentary information is also a theme of the story. The Pelican Poems themselves are also satirical but in a formalized, jet-setting, European style.

There are also appendices that read like poems, a chapter of letters from Johnny's mother reminiscent of long prose poems and an appendices of quotes full of found poems (pages 645-656). 656! Yes, this was a long book.

There are also excerpts of real poems from Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath and Jane Hirshfield which further clarify the book’s themes and Danielewski's inspirations. The book is full of narrative layers, footnotes and typographical accents. Danielewski's sister, rock artist Poe, also created a companion album that provides yet another source of narrative input.

Release Date for Cowboy Meditation Primer

August 28, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The release date is finally here!

Next Tuesday, September 4 on Amazon.com!

You can also download the 70+ page reader's guide (which is also a traveler's guide through the Goodnight-Loving Trail) for free. Download it at marymccray.com.

Edits and Edits and Edits and Edits

August 28, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

….so then we found out we had to move. On top of everything else. Criminy! The fact that this book is coming out this year is a miracle. It's been rough. The last few months have been packing and planning a move. Not what I had in mind for this year at all.

But we've had a lot of help from friends and family and I'm grateful for that because it's kept things with this book on track, but barely.

But I would not advise putting out a book of any sort in the same year you have to move. It's financially and physically not a good idea. Had I known.

Anyway, I also want to point out how many edit drafts this process went through. If you don't love editing, don't self-publish. End of story.

This manuscript was originally written in 2014 and went through two (2) drafts of editing by myself and Monsieur Big Bang way back then.

This year the manuscript was professionally edited (probably the most expensive part of the venture apart from cover design). That was edit number three (3). Then I edited the manuscript one final time as I was laying it out for proofs. That was the fourth (4) edit.

You can see from the post-it notes above, proofs needed many edits too. As of today there have been six (6) rounds of proof editing.

We're at a total of twelve (12) rounds of edits. In the very last versions, you're often only editing one or two things, but it's time consuming. And you have to enjoy making small changes over and over again. Which I actually do. I really enjoy editing. I find it relaxing and productive. You wouldn't know if from all the typos in this blog but if I had the time I would take every post through 4-5 rounds of editing. But it's a free blog, so you get what you pay for.

This book isn't free and it needs to be error-free.

Difficult Poetry Essays

February 20, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’m really excited about the latest essays I’ve been reading. At the end of last year I concentrated on books by Louise Glück, starting with American Originality: Essays on Poetry (2017). I was prepared to not like it because of one reviewer claimed it was a defense of American Narcissism. The reviewer turned out to have read only the first short essay, (lame reviewer), and Glück was not even defending narcissism, but explaining how America got hooked on it.

In any case, I was forced into a crash course on reading Glück prose, which is difficult and abstract and even though her essays are often short and tiny, they always required slow, concentrated reading. She reminded me of C.K. Wright in that way, their dense, packed gems of thinkings.

There’s also a big of sexism in me that prickles when women write like word-tangled academics, as if being complicated is an attempt to keep up with "Professor Guy," who throws his weight around with unnecessarily big words and complicated sentences, doing little to communicate anything but intimidation to his readers. I said the word obtuse earlier incorrectly but I was searching for willfully obscure and esoteric. Inaccessible.

Stupid me, this is not what Louise Gluck is doing at all. She is just very precise and particular. In fact, I came away thinking Glück prose is probably the smartest, most perceptive writing on poetry I’ve yet come across. And I fully appreciated her willingness to write about modern poetic realities instead of the same ole easy targets, like lamenting the state of current readerships. Her ability to parse modern conundrums might just take the top off your head.

Well, at least half of it will. The other half contains introductions to book contests Glück has judged over the years. Although including them in these essays feels like a generous impulse, book introductions are hard to like. They’re not journal or magazine reviews, which tend to be more holistic about a writers life or themes. Introductions are also not fully satisfying out of context and if you haven’t read the book’s they refer to, the quotes leave you feeling more disoriented than enlightened. They also don’t quite whet your appetite for the book the way book reviews do. That said, in many of these introductions Glück presents a formal or stylistic challenge each writer has overcome and you get a few paragraphs on the drawbacks of each style or form, including some good conversation around things like nonsense writing and irony, (“Irony has become less part of a whole tonal range than a scrupulous inhibiting armor, the disguise by which one modern soul recognizes another…characterized by acute self-consciousness without analytical detachment, a frozen position as opposed to a means of inquiry”). See what I mean? It’s tough chewing but worth slowing down for that.

Other big topics she tackles: American ideas of originality and self-creation and how ironically the “triumphs of self-creation (and uniqueness) require confirmation, corroboration,” confessional poetry and self-absorption and what is narcissistic and not narcissistic: “the sense that no one else is necessary, that the self is of limitless interest, makes American writers particularly prone to any version of the narcissistic. Our journals are full of these poems…a net of associations and memories, in which the poet’s learning and humanity are offered up like prize essays in grade school.”

She talks about what being really smart means and the thirst to be perceived as a smart poet: “Central to this art is appearance: less crucial to think than to appear to think, to be beheld thinking.” And later she says, “This means that certain brilliantly intellectual writers are not treated as intellectual writers because they don’t observe the correct forms…it does not conform to established definitions of intellectual daring.” In this, she includes poems that are “too lively” or “grammatically clear” or “not on the surface difficult.” This reminded me of the New York Times Magazine’s essay on “thirst.”

You could also say all the same things about comedy writing and the false hierarchy of value in all forms of writing and thinking.

She also covers language poetry and fragments: “in the absence of context, fragments, no matter how independently beautiful, grow rapidly tedious: they do not automatically constitute an insight regarding the arbitrary….[they are] a strange hopefulness…born of a profound despair, the hope that, in another mind if not one’s own, these images will indeed cohere…the hope that if one has enough memories, enough responses, one exists….the longer the gesture fails, the more determined the poet becomes.”

She even lists out the tactics of language projects: incompleteness, focusing on the what-is-missing in human communication, aborted attempts, gaps, the unspoken. She tracks how quickly those strategies “turn rote, how little there is to explore here.” She says, “the problem is that though the void is great the effect of its being invoked is narrow.” She says, “the paradox is that the named generates far more complex and powerful associations than does the unnamed.”

This is particularly good: “The unfinished alludes to the infinite…the sense of the perpetually becoming is conceived as a source of energy, also a fit subject for intellectual speculation. The problem is that there is nothing to say once the subject has been raised.” At the end of the day, “the experience of reading a stanza is not different from the experience of reading forty stanzas.”

It’s sort of shocking to me how old these essays are (late 90s) and how we’re still being asked to read forty more stanzas of the same language experiments year after year.

She also covers myths, personas, narrative, image poetry, fear of closure and the embrace of chaos. And her comment here jives with what David Foster Wallace once said in defense of sentiment: “Distance for sentiment, anxiety at the limitations of the self, create contempt for feeling, as though feeling were what was left over after the great work of the mind was finished.” Yes! Thank you!

She talks about political poetry, too often compared, she says, to the lyric and she feels these “distinctions are a matter of degree.” She talks about the cult of beauty’s lack of insights versus projects that explore puzzles and arguments.

Probably the most moving section covered why we write: the idea of personal growth and healing compared to reflections on loss and suffering, unhappiness in art, true risks of happiness, authenticity, the creative being and suppression of all other selves. Contrary to the idea of the troubled artist, Glück says the happy spirit, “fortified, can afford to go more profoundly, more resourcefully, into the material, being less imperiled.” “Well-being,” she says, “seeks out the world, a place likely to be more varied than the self.”

Wow. All this in a 200 page book!

And that book led me to her earlier essays, Proofs & Theories (1994), which was very similar in its intellectual density, including essays about:

Wanting to write, influences, biography, ambition, process,
Comparisons of T.S. Eliot vs. William Carlos Williams, George Oppen vs. William Carlos Williams and explications of John Keats, John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Berryman, Hugh Seidman, Robinson Jeffers, Stanley Kunitz, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sextion, and Emily Dickinson,
Truth vs authenticity, voice, courage and risk, survivor poetry, (Martha Rhodes vs. Frank Bidart),
Disruption and the cult of data, (John Berryman, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot and George Oppen),
Depression and how attitude changes wording.

My favorite quote from this book: “Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit. I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.”

The Machine That Writes Haiku

November 29, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This year in the New York Times Book Review I read about a book that combines my interests in haiku and electronic poetry. It's called Comes the Fiery Night by David H. Cope. The author compiled 2,000 haiku (yes, two thousand), some of which were written by human haiku masters, (Issa, Basho, Buson), and some which were composed by a machine.

The challenge, according to Cope, was to figure out which haiku had meaning and which were "worth while." In the preface, he directed you to look for humor, pith, happiness, sadness, and history. He also warned you that his computer made typographical mistakes.

So I looked for all that and also decided to look for connective tissue between the three lines, an overarching story or lesson across three lines (preferable a Buddhist or Zen lesson), cohesion in grammar, tenses, repetition or sense, what might seem too abstract for ancient haiku writers, indefinite pronouns, and common subjects of haiku (like nature). I felt I had a pretty strong rubric going for me. Although some days of reading were easier than others, I must say I felt pretty confident that I could track the real McCoys.

I went the extra electronic step and purchased the book for my Kindle. This made the process extra challenging because Cope's eBook kept crashing my Kindle after poem 200. So I stopped after getting 500 done and emailed the author with my guesses. Cope won't give you the exact answers, but he will tell you how many you got right or wrong.

His response:

"Of the 221 identifications of the sources as human you got 21 correct. Given you only used 500 that's pretty good even though to you it might look very small. It's tough to win this game."

I got 21 out of 221 right! Can you hear my heart breaking? That's a pretty intense brain whopping I just got from a machine. If it's any consolation, the proceeds of the book go to Greenpeace, saving the environment and not poetry machines.

More about David Cope.

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.