Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Craft (Page 1 of 18)

Developing Translations

I’m finishing up two other poetry books today, serendipitously both combined works of poems and essays, albeit each organized differently. One is La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge, Poetry y ostras movidas by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and the other is Marilyn: Essays & Poems by Heidi Seaborn. For the most part, I have liked the essays better in de Alba’s book and like best the Seaborn poems that delve into Marilyn Monroe’s biography, although Seabourn’s investigations into her own personal insomnia are interesting, there’s just a lot of that to read through.

But last week I found out my friend, the poet Ann Cefola, has a new book of translations available with the French poet Hélène Sanguinetti, Alparegho, Like-nothing-else, so that book has been moved to the top of my to-read stack.

To launch the book Beautiful Days Press hosted a transnational, bilingual poetry reading between Cefola (in Long Island, New York) and Sanguinetti (in Arles, France) held on Zoom with attendees from all over the world.

The publisher began by quoting from prior reviews calling Cefola’s prior translations of  Sanguinetti “splendidly nuanced” and created “with scrupulous fidelity.”

Which sounds like well-made translations to me and I’m fascinated with this whole process of translation, especially as it was described in this Zoom reading.

Cefola talked about how Sanguinetti’s words have “muscle” and that “they struggle on the page.”

Sanguinetti and Cefola then each read the same section, first Sanguinetti in French and then Cefola in English, Sanguinetti beginning using a finger drum and that followed by a very impassioned reading.

I was able to attend the first Cefola/Sanguinetti reading years ago in Los Angeles for their first book-length effort (Hence This Cradle). Back then we gathered at the Otis College of Art and Design and it was 2007, which seems like many lifetimes ago in the world of Hélène Sanguinetti.

Based on the comments of the attendees on the Zoom call, I will be expecting a collection of experimental quest poems. One reviewer called it a mock-epic. Sanguinetti talks about the quest being the “adventure of our lives.”

After they both read from the book, one attendee said the poem was “lovely to the ear in English and French.”

When asked about how Cefola works with Sanguinetti as a translator, Cefola said “the tracks are there” and that she understood how different English was with its often harsh, Anglo-Saxon sounds. Her job was to mediate between the English and the French but in doing so she had to get “rid of a lot of prepositions that make French so lyrical and beautiful.”

Cefola said her first pass was to capture “accurate words” and then a second pass was made to choose words that “fit the sound,” words that would “resonate” with Sanguinetti’s French.

Cefola admitted she wanted to make Sanguinetti sound more lyrical in the beginning but Sanguinetti told her “this is not what I’m doing,” that Sanguinetti wanted “a struggle on the page” and so Cefola had to “let her work be difficult” and in doing so she had to “set aside [her] own traditions.”

Which is a larger exercise (and lesson) in human understanding and empathy.

Another attendee asked about the idea of a bridge being used as a symbol in the book and Sanguinetti talked about how it could illustrate courage and the unknown. Cefola later told me that “the broken bridge is also about the writing process” and how the “rider has to make leaps even if the way ahead is ‘broken.’”

Sanguinetti  says “Alparegho” is an invented word that is both “similar to myself” and “similar to nothing” and she talked about paradox, which feels like much of her work to me.

She noted with mild frustration that people have told her they understand her poems better when she reads them aloud. And the performance of her poems is definitely worth watching but the look of her words on a page is equally interesting.

She then showed us an abstractly human-formed sculpture. She said she makes objects with clay and plaster and this was a character she made covered in yellow acrylic paint with a bird’s head and horns. She said she gave it a red stain for a heart and added a pebble and a button. When it was done she asked it, “who are you?” And this figure became was a starting-point for her character Alparegho, “a point of departure, half sun, half moon.”

She talked about Alparegho rhyming with the word escargot (and how the book contains a snail’s journey) and the hermaphrodite nature of the character.

As an aside, this point of departure reminded me of Georgia O’Keeffe and how her paintings were often influenced by music. The O’Keeffe gift shops in Santa Fe and Abiquiu even sell a CD compilation of some of her favorite pieces, Georgia O’Keeffe, A Musical Perspective, which includes work from Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Stravinsky, Copland, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gershwin and Vivaldi. There’s also a Joel Goodman piece on the CD called “O’Keeffe’s Colors.”  I was disappointed the CD booklet did not (or could not) trace specific music works back to certain O’Keeffe paintings. But the bridges that form between music, words and art is yet another kind of translation that is fascinating, and O’Keeffe shared it with other painters, sculptors and photographers. She also developed close friendships with writers.

In a second question to Cefola, she explained more about her translation process, that she doesn’t read the poem in full in French at the begining, that she translates it as she goes, a very “basic translation” and that the poem then “develops like a photograph” in a darkroom.

“I see it as I translate,” she said. In the second pass, Cefola will “fine-tune” the meaning and the language “to convey the spirit to an English-speaking audience. She said “accuracy” was more important than any kind of “meaning” and it’s interesting to think about the fine-lined difference between those two concepts.

Sanguinetti then expressed her admiration for Cefola’s translations, called them “incredible” and said she felt they read better in English than in French to which Cefola interrupted with an emphatic “no, no, no.” Sanguinetti said there was sometimes a word or two that was translated in a way that gave an unintentional meaning but that through the translation process she often discovered aspects of the work she hadn’t seen before.

How great is that? Looking forward to reading this book.

More reviews and a synopsis: https://asterismbooks.com/product/alparegho-like-nothing-else

To see a recording of the book launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8HPP10pdLk

Purchase the book here.

Discovering Brian Eno and Oblique Strategies

Like I said on Cher Scholar, I am now publishing blog alerts and new content on Substack due to recent political and news events. So discovering a three-hour Brian Eno documentary (“The Man Who Fell to Earth”) last week feels like a good moment of refreshment for Big Bang Poetry. Some fresh projects, a fresh bulletin board.

Not only was the documentary long, but it only covered 1971-to 1977!!  Monsieur Big Bang is a Brian Eno fan and picked it out to watch. Whenever we talk about Roxy Music, he will say “Roxy Music was better with Brian Eno in it.” And now I understand why he feels this way (although I still like the later-day Roxy Music).

This post could almost cross-pollinate with Cher Scholar in the ongoing arguments over the use of voice-manipulation-technology in “Believe” (and also Eno often planning an up-tempo record side and a downbeat side which Cher tried with Closer to the Truth and I hated it), which has a tiny but direct lifeline back to the ethos of Brian Eno, a self-described non-musician who has managed to spend his whole career working with technology in music as an art form in a very commercial space.

The avant-garde’s attraction to technology is one of the main controversies of our time. Like the defenders of “Believe,” the documentary’s talking head pointed to the emotional connections of Brian Eno’s music, one commentator pointing out the way Eno can explore work with machines to produce “great humanity and warmth.”

The documentary also discussed ideological tensions around the idea of virtuosity and yet Eno works with practiced musicians. So it’s complicated. You can feel the threat of AI coming now while watching; and the contempt of craft that comes around every few decades. But there is also something interesting about the idea of play. As was said of Eno and an instrument or machine, he “plays with it versus plays it.” It reminds me of the kind of digital “poetry” that uses vocabulary as a material but words separated from grammatical meanings, making it more a visual art using words like a material object. The same thing could be working here for Brian Eno (he uses sound for art’s sake versus music’s sake) except that I think his work appeals to musicians more than digital poetry appeals to other poets.

The documentary explores early technology experiments with Pink Floyd and Kraftwork and Eno’s work with Roxy Music, Robert Fripp, Cluster, David Bowie and the Talking Heads.

The doc also draws a line from Erik Sartie (and his “sound furniture”) to the chance operations of John Cage (who crosses over to LANGUAGE poetics and mesostics) to Brian Eno’s ambient music. I made a list of albums to listen to and have only yet finished No Pussyfooting (with Fripp).

But there were a few things that really appeal to me about Eno. One was his stance against rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Having grown up romanticizing rebellion (heroizing it even), I’m ready to look at another way.

The other thing was the Oblique Strategies cards, which are all about generating new inputs if you are stuck. He made them with painter Peter Schmidt from their separate notebooks of ideas they used when they were stuck on something.

The randomness of cards, the tactileness of cards has always attracted me. Growing up in a poker-playing house, I was only interested in the cards at a tactile level, the way the sounded on the shuffle, the feel of the slide, the many ways to paint them.)

Anyway, I went looking for these cards on eBay and they are very, very expensive, prior editions going for hundreds of dollars, the original edition for over a thousand. Brian Eno is selling new decks from his website for only $50.

But I decided to dig out some unused business cards in my office closet (who needs them after VistaPrint?) and hand-write my own set. This would also give me a chance to do another archaic thing I love to do: laminate shit.

Considering Eno is a technology artist, the cards are a very beautifully physical tool to use. I love that about the context of the whole endeavor. It reminds me of my own need to play around with browser poems and then hand-write haikus.

Version 1.0.0

The set of 115 cards were written to be recording studio aids for when artists get stuck, when things just are not working. But I think they would be just as useful as writing aids, like the Creative Whack Pack or Stones for the Muse.

Reading them over, I came up with the following example categories and my thoughts about some of the cards:

Shake the creative jar:

  • Change instrument roles (that sounds interesting)
  • Abandon normal instruments
  • Reverse
  • Use fewer notes (Is that the Emperor talking to Mozart in Amadeus?)
  • Look at the order in which you do things
  • Faced with a choice, do both
  • Convert a melodic element into a rhymical element

Do some abstract thinking:

  • A line has two sides.
  • Repetition is a form of change
  • Always give yourself credit for having more than personality
  • Do we need holes?

Beginner’s Mind:

  • Ask people to work against their own better judgement
  • Use unqualified people
  • Don’t be afraid of things because they are easy to do
  • Idiot glee
  • Question the heroic approach

Some of the Beginner’s Mind ideas do work against our narcissistic tendencies but I’m now questioning some of these impulses, which have been popular for some years now. The problem is that this kind of chaos-creating has got us where we are now socially and politically because it has led us into to a fear of expertise or maybe a distrust of expertise. (This is the essential tug and pull of an artist like Brian Eno).

In truth, we need to beware of our fear of expertise as much as our glorification of it. Because it’s almost like someone is trying to run a country this way and it can cause a massive-scale of suffering. The beginner’s mind is a way to break out of the spell of a creative block, not a system-entire operating strategy (or at least it shouldn’t be). We’ve come this far as humans by figuring things out. I don’t need to understand quantum physics but someone should. And I should respect their understanding that is beyond mine.

Where are the cards for tapping into all that we know and allowing others to contribute their expertise to our enterprise? Not that these cards are the antithesis to that. They’re not.

Jump starting the brain by adjusting the body and other sensory adjustments:

  • Breathe more deeply
  • Water
  • Ask your body
  • Put in earplugs (a personal favorite)
  • Shut the door and listen from the outside
  • Remember the quiet evenings
  • Twist your spine
  • Get your neck massaged
  • Do the washing

Stop stopping (or guarding) yourself (this is a big one):

  • Don’t be frightened by cliches (I have a poem in a new collection that says the same thing)
  • Allow an easement (I think this might make more sense to a songwriter)
  • Honor thy error as a hidden intention (the power of failure)
  • What would your closest friend do?
  • What wouldn’t you do?
  • Discard an axiom
  • What mistakes did you make last time?
  • Emphasize the flaws
  • Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them (one of the laws of mining for comedy)
  • Go to an uncomfortable extreme and then move back to a comfortable place
  • Be less critical more often
  • Accept advice
  • What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate. (honesty, truth)
  • Trust the you of now
  • Courage? (perhaps the most valuable card in the deck)

What Is Poetry: To Reveal the Self or Disclose the World?

This is our last blog post covering questions about what poetry may be. We ran out of Elisa New questions (from the Harvard Emily Dickinson MOOC) in the last post. This question is a bonus question I cobbled together somewhere between reading about Gary Snyder and Jack Spicer last year, a question poised somewhere between the Confessional/Beat poets (who make appeals from the self) and the LANGUAGE poets (who try to reveal a reality which does not include ego-driven ideas of the self).

I find this a very interesting, advanced question: what is the purpose of poetry, to reveal the personality or to disclose the world as authentically as we can (in all its scary nebulousness), to explore our many personas or to abandon the idea of individuality altogether?

Poetry camps each feel very strongly about this. And, as you can predict, I hate to take sides in these poetry matters. Again, how can you choose? Like all these attempts to define what poetry is and what poetry does, there are easy cases to be made outside of any staid definition.

If we’re honest, most humans can’t really function outside of a sense of self, despite the precariousness of the self in any biological sense. Psychologists can show how and why we construct our ideas of ourselves so we can mentally move through the world. And we need the idea of other selves to help us come to terms with the mysteries of human behavior in others.

But some (very Zen) humans can also operate with a more fluid sense of self, of being part of a collective self (without feeling threatened by losing the assurance of an ego). Other people need a strong sense of self, a bolster that helps them understand where they begin and end in the world. And then some people just want to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

So this determines the kind of poetry each type of person needs to write.

It’s probably a healthy practice to try both kinds of consciousnesses and write poems that explore each point of view (or pointlessness of view).

After all, without personalities to communicate from and to why bother? On the other hand, with an intransigent sense of self, you are going to get stuck in the pointlessness of that as well. Without being willing to a kind of fluidity and openness to changing your mind, why try to communicate with others? Because if your goal is just to force your perspective on everybody else, you are doomed to fail and feel alienated as a result.

What Is Poetry? One Moment or an Eternity

We are to the last of our Elisa New questions from the Emily Dickinson MOOC. We have one more bonus question later but this is the last in New’s string of musings to her students about what poetry is or how we can define it.

This last question is long: “does a poem live more fully in one distinct moment of performance, like a theatrical performance, like a dance performance? Or does a poem live across time, such that any one performance is inadequate to what the poem actually is?”

Unlike how poems were originally transferred from person to person before the printing press was invented, and unlike how music, theatrical and dance performances operate as one-of-a-kind, communal experiences, poetry can also be transmitted by the technology of books, its own machine of mediation.

So “performance” takes a different meaning if you consider the “performance” on the page. How does a poem perform across and down the white space of paper and across pages? A private reading is also a kind of performance in your own head, in your own imagination. You are the eternal performer in all your readings.

Live events are communal events. Who hasn’t felt the energy of being part of an enthusiastic audience? Any piece of work that has been preserved and then experienced in another time and place through a mediated device is a different experience. Just as experiencing the plays of Shakespeare are unique to their time as opposed to their very first performances. The cultural context has changed. Time changes culture which changes the context of reading any art.

The media also affects the experience, changes in books, new technologies. Watching a video on MTV in the 1980s is a different experience than watching it on YouTube. Hearing AI read a poem aloud is quite different than hearing a monk read it centuries ago. A paperback book is different than a computer printout which is different than a book that was handwritten. These are both intellectual and emotional differences. They land differently in our heads and hearts.

Are all these pieces of art different if differently experienced? They may use the same words from context to context and medium to medium. Does even the reader change what is read? I recently read a allegory for fandom that described two people riding a roller coaster. Their bodies experience the same ride in the same objective way but one loves the ride and one hates it. Their interpretations are based on their personalities and expectations of pleasure.

So one set of words could have infinite performances across time and media, and infinite performances even in one moment across the array of an audience.

What Is Poetry: Is a Poem a Container?

We have three more of these to do, three more Elisa New questions from her Emily Dickinson MOOC many years ago. This time we have two related questions she asked: Is a poem a container that holds a set of meanings or is it an expansion or dissemination that defies all containment?

I feel like this must be the easiest question she’s ever asked us. Because nothing is a container. Not even a Tupperware container. And yet…poems can be usefully seen as tight little containers (compared to novels, for example).

Maybe formalists build poems to be containersBut nothing we really do or say can be hermetically sealed. Even, I would argue, if we never ever share that poem with a single other person. It disseminates and expands into us as creators.

Like man, no poem is an island. And yet it is truly maddening for some people to think about how porous the borders of all things are, even their own skin.

Often people rely on black and white thinking, probably the most popular coping mechanism devised by the human mind for all of time. But like trying to seal the unsealable, black and white thinking is very unreliable, if not just plain self-sabatoging.

Things are not either yes or no. They are always yes and no.

I learned this at a very young age. It’s a story that has to do with a family member with depression and it’s not a story I can tell in a forum like this but suffice it to say the experience taught me a foundational lesson in what we call a paradox: two seemingly contradictory facts often can be, nonetheless, true at the same time.

And not only did I learn this lesson at a very young age, I also found out that once you see a paradox in one place, you can’t help but see them everywhere. It’s all or nothing. Which is why my thinking often hops from a definitive statement to “well, but except for this….”

This is the kind of thing that sends men out babbling into the street. It’s mentally hard to reconcile with. It’s emotionally hard to reconcile with. Enter black and white thinking. As I see it, people have three choices in this world when dealing with life’s plethora of paradoxes: (1) go nuts, (2) retreat into black and white thinking or (3) do what Georgia O’Keeffe calls “walking on the edge of a knife.” It’s the hardest of the three things for sure.

Speaking for myself I can’t use black and white thinking. It would be a constant argument with reality for me and I don’t have that kind of energy. I also prefer not to go crazy, so that leaves the knife.

And speaking of Georgia O’Keeffe, Gene Hackman who recently passed in Santa Fe, was one of O’Keeffe’s Santa Fe museum’s celebrity supporters, serving on the museum board from 1997 to 2004 and narrating the museum’s video that was played multiple times a day for many, many, many years there. I’ve taken quite a few people to that museum and watched that welcome video so many times.  It explains northern New Mexico, my family’s terra sancta, like no  other I’ve ever seen. It’s in this video that O’Keeffe talks about walking that knife. And that’s why I’ve always remembered it.

It applies to more than painting and writing. Nothing is simple. Nothing is simply its own self. Nothing is only one way or another. And that is both immensely frustrating and incredible beautiful, as any paradox is.

R.I.P. the great Gene Hackman (and also the great Georgia O’Keeffe).

Turn and Face the Strange Changes

Well, the world is feeling like a Goya painting right about now. And it’s been a while since I posted. The dregs of 2023 turned into the insanity of 2024 which became the horrors of 2025.

But I’ve been meaning to talk about a stack of books I have on my office floor. Some books I recommend and a book I just can’t break into after many years and many attempts.

My big problem is that I’ve hit up against more pressure that extends my crisis of mission with this blog.

First of all, what does it mean to be a creator in the new world of AI where if you create a poem without AI, could you prove it?

And how can you be a public writer (an Internet writer) in a world where AI scrapes what you create in order to take creativity out of the hands of the creators? My little corner of the universe, rarely visited, has always seemed a perfectly safe corner, secured from a largely disinterested populace. But from scarper bots, not so much. From a government that has ceased to believe in human rights and privacy, very much not so.

Last year ended badly, with the convergence of advice from other writers to protect my online writing. (Actually that advice came during a writer’s retreat in Winslow last spring, which then set to nagging at me). Then there was the scary research being done by Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans about AI (which I could feel myself wanting to avoid in conversation but from which I was unable to stop listening or support the poor soul who was reading the worst of it).

Then there was a novel I chose to read in December about the abuse of social media to kidnap people (which freaked me out enough to made me want to go off the grid immediately), a book which was unfortunately immediately followed by a novel given to me by my bestie for Christmas about smart women who fall for amorous predators (the story did not end well) and other stranger dangers; and add to that a family identity theft, a health scare, government shutdown predictions, threats of job outsourcings and well isn’t that enough?

No. The universe said, I give you 2025: plane crashes, fires, fire-related insurance dystopias, data theft, government coups. Now all my friends are also having a bad year and not just me. Isn’t that swell.

I have to change my life. I have to change how I sell books. I have to change how I distribute my thoughts. I have to accept that my time in that world may have to come to an end. Because I have to remember how I was living before the Internet and social media and free shipping and the world being delivered to my feet.

The fact is the Internet is a very public space, and likely no longer a safe space. There are new articles around instructing us how to make our lives more secure and this has to do with removing our public selves from the Internet and going private. This is, honestly, very challenging for me. I am not a public figure by any means, but I am a public person. I have loved meeting strangers and making connections. I have loved sharing and helping others through words and with my sites and blogs. And I believe, in maybe a very small personal way, I have made a positive contribution. I hear from poets and Cher fans throughout the year and I am moved to help and to be informed how I have helped people in even small, informal ways by an idea or a tone of response.

I’m a helper bee to the core. I had to always make that clear in interviews for admin jobs in Los Angeles, where everyone was looking for gate-keepers. I had a boss at ICANN who literally had to tell me where all the gates where so I could resist helping people. It’s just not my natural disposition. I seek to help. But what does that even mean in a world gone mean?

On the Intro 2 Anthro with Two Humans AI podcast episode Monsieur Big Bang says somewhat significantly that as a person committed to lifelong learning and creating, “I can feel myself disappearing.”

I feel the same way.

The only difference is that I see a small ray of hope where he does not. I think this dystopian situation will push us toward more local and in-person lives again. Speaking for myself, I have taken some small steps to regain stable ground as a person in this world, I have made changes to the stores I shop at, the browser I use, the email service I use.  (And doesn’t it seem when you move from email address to email address in this life, or from social platform to social platform, part of your life history disappears with it?)  I’ve secured some unsecure things. I now think twice about adopting free services and I now opt to pay for more secure products. I’ve moved a lot of content behind passwords.  I’ve printed down important documents and am in the process of removing my content from many cloud-based services.

I am becoming a physical, meat-space person again.

I am also “unfriending” people who seem to be taking delight in the suffering of others right now.  Because just being around them leaves me feeling that the world has become a grotesque place. Which maybe it has.

In fact, to motivate myself forward, I’ve instituted Outing Day for myself every Friday. It’s a day where I gather a list of things I would have purchased on Amazon or other delivery sites and I get the hell out of my house and go to brick and mortar stores to buy all my shit, sometimes compromising on what I wanted to accept what I can find. It’s beyond the idea of supporting my local, small businesses. In the last few months, I have seen many ways big national and international corporate companies are failing in their bigness. So it’s just as much about protecting myself as it is supporting smaller things.

This is why on most Fridays you will find me visiting Books on the Bosque, probably the smallest new-title bookstore I have ever been to. I’m making friends with the man at the front desk as I give him my weekly list of books I would like to order. The out-of-print-rest I get now from Thrift Books. (Abe’s is now owned by Amazon.) And then I wait for them to arrive, sometimes for a whole week!  Brave new world.

Anyway, aside from all that, here are the books from my office floor I want to talk about today.

The Book I Can’t Read

As part of my cowboy poetry collecting, years ago I bought a very used copy of “The Land” by V. Sackville-West (1927) and every few years I try to read the thing. It’s written in four very long poems (based on the seasons) of very dull impenetrable, tangled blank verse. I am giving up on it yet again, but once in a while I pull it off the shelf and read a random page and somehow that makes more sense.

Recently I did find a cowboy poetry anthology on the shelves of my parents new independent living library in Ohio. I have purchased my own copy and will be attempting that one next.

Black History Month Books

There are a few black writers that I’ve been reading over the last two years in this stack as well. And since it’s Black History Month, an effort currently being attacked, I feel this is a good time to highlight these books. In fact, while I was in the Cleveland area recently I heard a radio DJ there joke that night itself will soon be made illegal because it is so black. He was joking but it’s not really that funny in light of all the books on slavery and civil rights that are being banned from American school libraries as we speak.

Percival Everett is a popular author in my Difficult Book Club (our book list is one of my most popular pages). I recently had a chance to read one of his books of poetry, re:f (gesture) from 2006. I didn’t love it. In fact I mailed it to our group’s Everett superfan over Christmas. It seemed simultaneously thin and unwieldy. But I will definitely keep trying his other poetry and highly recommend his novels (of which I’ve only read three so far but he is one of those authors, like Murakami, Twain, David Foster Wallace, Anne Carson, Albert Goldbarth and Thomas Bernhard that I keep craving every once in a while.)

For my intentionally woke book club (we call it the anti-racist book club), my two St. Louis friends and I read a book of erasure poetry called the ferguson report: an erasure by Nicole Sealy (2023). My two friends are from nearby Ferguson in St. Louis (Black Jack) and they are very heart-invested (as two white catholic school girls who grew up there) in that now mostly-black community. I was from West County, an area between the small suburban cities of Creve Coeur, Maryland Heights and the more affluent Chesterfield. St. Louis (and the state of Missouri) is a pretty racist place so that gives our book club some solidarity. West County tends to be obliviously privileged so that makes me a very proud graduate of the DEI-since the beginning-of-time UMSL college.

The eight poems of the book are lifted from a reprinting of the official Ferguson Report from the riots of 2014. The report itself  has been grayed out and a handful of words and letters pulled through. For this reason the book is not like other erasure poems with a higher concentration of words per page. And because the report is not really readable itself, my two friends took the extra step of downloading the report separately and reading it. I was unable to do that last year because I was tied up with trips to Cleveland and the contemporaneous act of losing my mind. But I should because my friends tell me the report was actually a more meaningfully and impactful read than the poems. But that said, we all liked the resulting eight “lifted” poems which are also reprinted in the back. It was an interesting and worthwhile experiment.

The book I would most highly recommend, Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (2008) is about the black experience during Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005 in New Orleans. The narrative thrust of it, the tribute to the city and the meaning Smith can always draw from public and pop culture events all make the book a amazing read. Poems take the voices of many characters, including a dog named Luther B and the hurricane itself.

It’s heartbreaking and monumental and one of America’s best poem sequences.

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

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.

What is Poetry: Is Making a Poem Different From Making a Painting?

On we go through Elisa New’s questions about poetry from the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is, in full: “Is the making of a poem, that essential creative act, different from making a painting?” She goes on to wonder, “Is it different from playing an instrument? Does one, while making a poem, hold a little linguistic instrument while one makes a painting hold a little brush? Does one hold that brush in mental fingers? Ply language on some sort of cerebral tongue?”

This is a much more specific question than how poetry is similar and different to all the other arts. But as I said in the last Elisa New post, there seems to be more of a brain-to-body coordination necessary in fine arts like painting and sculpting or than in playing a musical instrument. Those all take physical and mental practice. Children learn to write pretty fast and it doesn’t take much time to learn to type on a keyboard.

Impulsively, conceptually, though, there may be similarities.

So da Vinci had opinions (as seen in the image above). Frank O’Hara also thought about this quite a bit, about the intersection of painting and poetry. Probably as part of his job description. He worked himself up through the ranks to curator at MOMA in New York City and was friends of many of New York’s abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s. Two of his painterly poems are “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “The Michael Goldberg Variations.” Funny I came across this later poem today because yesterday I finished The Loser, a novel by Thomas Bernhard which  features the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and his performances of “The Goldberg Variations.”

I also wrote a poem about the conversation between painting and poetry while I was a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College (so this would be the mid-1990s at the house at the top of Brandt Terrace in Yonkers, New York), a poem that ended up in my first book of poems about space exploration to Mars, Why Photographers Commit Suicide (2012). I remember sitting on the floor writing this. The movie title, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, was on my mind and Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” was on the radio, which is where the bristle bone line appears. In fact, I think a workshop edit suggestion at the time was to change the verb unbreak to healing in order to further distance the poem from the song, which was getting a lot of radio play at the time.

On a Clear Day You Can See Jupiter

Mary McCray

Some nights when the universe dips in and out of my street
like a dancer, I can see Jupiter through my window.
And I wonder where you are and how things are for you,
like performing resuscitations on a dream.

And although we are together—fundamentally here
on the same hemisphere, you don’t have to answer me.
You don’t have to reply to this untethered planet heart.
It’s too late for us and I surrender to the war
of my fates—where poems burn into pieces of litter.

Take your watercolors and color my window with Jupiter.
Crack open the glass with your knives and turpentine.
Paint these words of mine, life-full of hue and value
and watch my heart healing like a bone
inside the tornado of a thousand bristles.

You don’t have to answer me. You just need to know—
on a clear day you can see Jupiter—in my eyes
and on your fingertips, where the universe
dips in and out of your street like a dancer,
in my words and through this window where I’m on the horizon.

I would probably change the bristles from a thousand to a hundred. That’s a bit much. As was the melodrama of too lateness already in my mid-20s. Wow. What did I know?

More conversation between O’Hara and his painters:

What is Poetry: Is Poetry Like the Other Arts?

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: Where Is the Poem?

We are continuing through Elisa New’s queries on what poetry is, questions she posed in the Harvard Emily Dickinson MOOC. This week I’m actually going to combine eight of her questions into one, because they’re all related.

1) Is a poem still a poem if one only entertains one’s self with it internally?

This reminded me of Emily Dickinson. Does the poem exist in her chest (as in her bosom, as in a poem only internal to her) or in her chest (as in a very physical hope chest or chest of drawers where she hid 1800 or so of her poems during her lifetime)?

In the first scenario, the poem has not been physically written down yet, like possibly millions of other poems she never officially wrote out on paper. In the second scenario, she is still the only one (in her lifetime) entertained by them. Scenario #2 is still barely removed from “internally” and yet significantly different from “internally” because it is the only place that those poems have potentiality, the potential to be read in the future by another reader.

Once a poem moves from your brain to an external media, it assumes a future audience, even if you hide it somewhere. I feel the same way about journals, they assume an audience even if they are “private.” Only thoughts inside your head are truly private.

2) Where is the poem?

This question feels like a Zen Koan to me. I don’t even think we need to answer this one; we can just soak it in. But this question implies a poem taking up space in the world: where is it? A poem has a physical location. If a poem is only read aloud, does it have a physical location? Does a poem have to happen on paper to have a physical location?

3) Where does the poem really happen?

In my interpretation, this question implies a poem happening in time: a happening. “When” does it happen would be more accurate. A poem comes to be in a moment of time or a span of time. Is the time from thought to composition to appreciation all the time?

4) Where does a work of art really live?

This broadens the question out to all the arts and specifies its existence beyond being born in space and time. Where does it live out its life? In the collective mind? In our individual imaginations? Somewhere else? Some objective space (can it exist without other readers/listeners)? If a poem has been recited in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it…

5) Does it live in intention?

Here Elisia New starts to move through the stages of creation. The artist has intentions. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a great example of this. Twain specifically states that he does not have certain intentions for the novel:

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR”

All the readers disagreed. There was a moral. There was symbolism in the Mississippi River which he also did not want attributed to his work. Georgia O’Keeffe consistently claimed her flowers were not vaginas and penises. Viewers don’t agree. They have agency to interpret what they see.

So you could argue that author intention is practically never the place where a piece of art lives. Artists give it their best shot and then release it into misinterpretations and multiple-meanings. I think this is why artists associate their work with the idea of having children: birthed by them but ultimately beyond their control.

Besides, intentions often exist before any work has been committed to any media. Million of ideas never come to life. Intentions are just part of the morass of our minds.

6) Does it live in the throes of production or composition?

This is the most fascinating stage for me, drafts, editing, iterations. In some cases, new drafts even occur post-publication, like W. H. Auden’s later-day revisions and Marianne Moore’s undoing of her poem “Poetry.”

Sally Bushnell’s book Text as Process explores the meanings of drafts and versions and it’s fascinating. She goes through different kinds of draft versions and levels and theories of composition. And the book made me think immediately about the singer Cher’s demos and remixes. Cher’s demo for the song “After All,” although it was technically a draft, became the final, “canonical” version of the song (with Peter Cetera’s vocal added later).

Similarly, there are album versions of particular songs and then often a fleet of remixes for songs delegated as “singles” or potential “hits.” And sometimes these “versions’ get confused. For example, maybe it’s the dance remix of a song (“When the Money’s Gone”) that is the one to chart as the hit, not the supposedly “canonical” album version of the song. Other times, later remakes of an artists song can take on another life. Cher’s song “Bang Bang” has not only been covered many times by other artists but by Sonny and Cher themselves who created later-day versions on live and studio albums, sometimes with altered lyrics. Where do those songs live in this sense? Which song is the version?

Maybe songs and poems exist in a separate space above and beyond all their variations.

7) Does it live as it’s appreciated by a social body?

This is where art moves beyond the artist and into society. The social body could be as small as one person (for example, love poems exchanged between two people) to small aficionado groups (at some point Cher’s fans were a large group, then a small group, then a large group again), or a small workshop group to a huge group of social media fans or best selling and anthologized poems. The size doesn’t matter.

To me the debate is between question 6 or 7. Are drafts considered poems proper? In some cases, definitely yes. Some drafts (things considered unfinished) become famous products. Especially drafts left incomplete when the artist dies. Maybe not all drafts are “canonical” but some can be promoted to canonical pieces.

Drafts that are never seen by readers ever, neither by researchers documenting famous creators in process or drafts published in published anthologies, are those drafts not still poems? Like some kind of twin to their more famous later-day finished draft?

8) Does it live when it’s canonized and is cherished through the ages?

This is an easy no, for me. Fame and success widely wax and wane. This rubric would exclude many, many artists who were discovered sometimes long after their deaths, from Emily Dickinson (who took decades to gain respect) to colonial poet Edward Taylor (who had to wait 200 years upon discover) and this illustrious list of major writers. The canon is fickle…thankfully. Generations disagree on who the “important poets” are.

Alternatively, poets like Katharine Hepburn’s poet, Phelps Putnam, was one of the most popular poet’s of his day. Now he’s considered Katharine Hepburn’s poet, although she was not even famous yet when he wrote about her.

Canonization and being cherished by hordes is irrelevant to the existence of a piece of art. If one single other person read or hears the poem, it  exists.

I find it interesting how instinctually most artists yearn to impress their elders, their mentors. Audrey Hepburn for Cher is a good example of this but every artist has their people. But consistently artists always impress their youngers instead, the fans who come up behind them. This is often because mentors are part of the past. And this can feel frustrating. Thwarted intent again.

It speaks to the timing of your influence. You want to be anthologized, awarded and feted in your lifetime, benefits that are typically bestowed by elders and mentors in positions of power over the canon. But the most famous of artists and the artists with the great longevity are always fetted by their fans and this often happens long after their own deaths. Fans are crucial to post-mortem reputations. Fans have kept Shakespeare in business forever.

And post-death, does the artist possibly even care? In that sense, poems are more permanent than their poets. And so maybe we should move on to the question: where does the poet live?

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