Category: Craft (Page 11 of 18)

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.

Dog Haiku and 19 Chinese Poems

October 9, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Remember I was going to do a haiku challenge this year starting in June? WTF, 2018! Things just didn’t turn out as expected this year. But I’ve stayed on track with haiku meditations.

Wes Anderson released his beautiful Isle of Dogs this year. Fabulous animated version of a Wes Anderson movie (in look, humor and tone). I own the DVD. I have the giant poster. I wear the t-shirt.

But there were two satirical haikus to open and close the movie.

I turn my back
On human kind
Frost on window pane

And then at the end:

Whatever happened
To man’s best friend
Falling spring blossom.

I loved it. I also tracked down Issue 47 of Rattle Magazine for its catalog of Japanese forms. In the back, there's an excellent dialogue on haiku between Timothy Green and Richard Gilbert. They specifically discuss Allen Ginsberg’s famous translation of the Basho frog in a pond poem, explicating its last line, “Kerplunk!” Gilbert says, “the wetlands of Connecticut have bullfrogs and they do kerplunk! And Allen’s from New Jersey and they kerplunk there, but in Japan they don’t kerplunk.” And he goes on to discuss why this translation, however charming, accidentally and significantly changes the meaning of the original poem by altering the size and sound the frog makes when diving into the pond.

And I finally finished a book about translations of a Chinese poem by Weng Wei, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, How a Chinese Poem is Translated by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz. This overpriced, 50-page book had been on my wish list for a while. And it was an interesting dissection of translation problems with examples of 19 attempts to translate a 1200-year-old 4-line poem that was part of a landscape scroll. The authors provide notes on the Chinese language and how word choice and meter may affect reading. They start with Ezra Pound’s contributions, explain transliteration (word for word or character by character) and then dive into translations chronologically by W.J.B. Fletcher (1919), Witter Byner and Kiang Kang-hu (1929), Soame Jenyns (1944), G. Margoulies (1948) which was French so even the translation needed a translation, Chang Yin-nan and Lewis C. Walmsley (1958), C.J. Chen and Michelle Bullock (1960), James J.Y. Liu (1962), Kenneth Rexroth (1970), Burton Watson (1971), Wai-Jim Yip (1972), G. W. Robinson (1973), Octavio Paz (1974), William McNaughton (1974), Francois Cheng (again French, 1977), H.C. Chang (1977), and Gary Snyder (1978).

Here is a succinct quote about the situation:

“…translations are relatives, not clones, of the original. The relationship between original and translation is parent-child. And there are, inescapably, some translations that are overly attached to their originals, and others that are constantly rebelling.”

But Weinberger and Paz were way too dismissive about the translations they don’t like and too laudatory over translations they themselves contributed. Their was a glaring unfairness built into the project: all the other translators didn’t nearly the same amount of space to describe their choices as the authors provided themselves. And then they used highly subjective judgement words like “dull.” They made inexplicable leaps, attributing to a translator “unspoken contempt for the foreign poet” if the translation stayed too far from the original. Weinberger and Paz called for the “dissolution of the translator’s ego” (as if such a thing were possible) all while ignoring the fact that their own statements were rife with ego. Later in the book they insist of Kenneth Rexroth that he “ignores what he presumably dislikes.” There's a shitload of presuming is my point.

I appreciate the detail and close readings this book provided but some comments were willfully enigmatic like this one

“…taken from a three-volume set, all by the same translator, and published, oddly, by Columbia University Press…”

The fact may indeed be odd but you’d have to be an insider to understand why.

But there was a wonderful keeper quote from poet Gary Snyer:

“The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a re-imagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. And no individual remains the same, each reading becomes a different—not merely another—reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.”

You can't dip your foot in the same river twice. The same poem cannot be read twice. Wow. Given that sentiment you’d think the authors would have been more open to the personalities of these translations that were different than their own.

I hope to get "52 Haiku" back on track next year.

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.

Hercule Poirot and the Problem with Close Reading

May 4, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Two things have been happening: Monsieur Big Bang has been watching copious amounts of British mystery shows, (I’m attributing this to his turning 50 and needing to feel a sense of justice in the world), and I’m taking an open, online class about how reading has changed, for the better or worse, with the introduction of digital devices.

These two things came together beautifully this week when our class starting talking about all the various reading strategies people employ on different mediums, including academic “close reading” which is particularly relevant to poetry. This is a strategy coined by the Formalists or New Critics, a faction of Modernists in the 1930s/40s with practitioners such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren and tangentially T. S. Eliot and Imagists like Ezra Pound. Close reading focuses solely on poems with a careful explication of word choice and scansion, all other contextual information, (cultural, biography, psychology, whatever), to be completely excluded as beside the point. New Critics believed poems were whole and separate systems unto themselves. Likewise, they tended to believe the same politically and socially. Self-reliance. Each poem for himself.

I was trained to do close readings and I have a nerdy passion for breaking things down to their connotative, syllabic operations, but I’ve never liked these guys or their grand theories and so I tried to work it out this week in our forum discussions: what was it exactly that I didn’t like?

Close reading focuses on qualifying word choices, word types, word order, systems of meaning between words, how words look and sound together, in other words, how the machine of a poem operates. It's fascinating to track the craft of a poem this way, to explore the connotations of words and the denotations.

However, words themselves are historical and political systems. Their meanings evolve for cultural reasons and due to cultural pressures. The word “fag” is a perfect example. And words are chosen by a poet for biographical reasons, even if subconsciously.

Our professor in his lecture on close reading referred to plants and humans, suggesting they are individuals like poems. But we know with certainty that plants and humans aren’t at all individual, self-sustaining systems and neither are poems; they are parts in a larger system and the more you "look closely" at them, the more you see how hard it is to define where a plant ends and water, air and soil begin. If you look closely at a person, you see they are not only the physical sum of water, air and soil, but the social sum of all the help and influence of thousands of other people they’ve known in their lives. You couldn’t survive 3 days after birth without the help of another person. The same with a poem: it’s a complicated system. A close reading is one tool of many exploratory tools to understand how it works. The study of biographical, historical, political context are other tools among many. To ignore all the other tools would be like a detective insisting he would only limit his knowledge of a murder to the physical scene of the crime.

The Map of the Cowboy Meditation Primer

April 10, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So I have been plugging away on my upcoming book project and meanwhile an unexpected work-life reorganization happened. It caused a definite shift in work-life and became an occasion to send to some colleagues the following poem I found around the same time written by Greek poet C.P. Cavafy:

As Much As You Can

And if you cannot make your life as you want it,
at least try this
as much as you can: do not disgrace it
in the crowding contact with the world,
in the many movements and all the talk.

Do not disgrace it by taking it,
dragging it around often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationship and associations,
till it becomes like an alien burdensome life.

So I'm in the middle of processing the job changes and continuing to work on this book and working on NaPoWriMo poems. It's been very hectic and exhausting.

But here's my official book description:

It's the late 1870s and Silas Cole is a heartbroken journalist who joins a cattle drive in order to learn how to be a real cowboy. He meets a cattle company traveling up the Goodnight Loving Trail in New Mexico Territory. Not only do the cowboys give Silas a very real western adventure, they offer him a spiritual journey as well.

This book has been in progress over ten years. I started it shortly before I met Monsieur Big Bang while we were both still living in Los Angeles. The project started as an amalgamation of family history and the reading of (literally) 40 books on Zen Buddhism. Surprisingly, the family stories fell completely away and the set of poems became a fictional account of a cattle trail ride up the Goodnight Loving Trail, a few years after Charles Goodnight had stopped using it.

You probably know the trail and its cowboys, Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, from the famous miniseries, Lonesome Dove, based on the Larry McMurtry novel fictionalizing their experiences in the late 1860s after the Civil War.

I've discovered there are no good maps of the Goodnight Loving Trail, especially as it travels through the state of New Mexico. I've even gone to the Charles Goodnight museum in Texas and various museums of cattle history to try to find a better one. No dice. These two maps attached are the best I can find online.

The well-known portion of the route started in Texas and traveled to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, then up the mountain route of the Santa Fe Trail through Trinidad in Colorado and stopped initially in Pueblo and later went on to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

In the book he collaborated on with J. Evetts Haley, Charles Goodnight talks about an alternate route he used in order to avoid Uncle Dick Woottons pretty steep Raton Pass toll. Goodnight's alternate route veers off from Fort Sumner to the ghost town of Cuervo, New Mexico, up through what is now Conchas Lake and the famous Bell Ranch, up the mesa near Mosquero, New Mexico, and then up to the grassy plains around Capulin Volcano and through another mountain pass north of Folsom, New Mexico, (which is famous for prehistoric Folsom man and a famous flood where the switchboard operator died trying to save all the village people.)

My poems follow this alternate trail and swerve back to meet the original trail in Trinidad, Colorado. I'm not sure that's what really happened (Trinidad specifically). Goodnight's story is vague on that detail. But he does mention specifically the New Mexico locations of Fort Sumner, Cuervo, Fort Bascom, Capulin Volcano and Folsom. There's also a historical marker in Mosquero confirming the trail came through their town. In his book, Goodnight also talks about a hill that is probably located along the mesa that rises up from Bell Ranch to Mosquero, that particular hill having been named "Goodnight Hill" in his honor, but no local histories or local people I've asked have ever heard of a hill by that name.

Along with stories of the Goodnight Loving Trail, these books also contributed a great deal to the new poems:

"The Prairie Traveler" by Randolph Macy, which was an official rewrite of the highly misleading and inaccurate book "Emigrants Guide to Oregon & California" by Lansford Hastings, more famously known as "The Hastings Guide."

"The Log of a Cowboy" by Andy Adams which was the personal story of one of the cowboys who allegedly traveled with Charles Goodnight.

The book's permissions are sorted out, the book has an ISBN number. The editor has come back with edits and the layout is pretty much finished, which always forces some pretty tough choices to be made around orphan, window and longer lines.

I'm waiting for the proofs to be sent out for blurbs and we're also working on the cover design and photos.

If all goes well, I'm hoping for a September publication.

I'm taking lots of deep breaths in the meantime, deep breaths at home, at work, probably in my sleep…

Haiku and NaPoWriMo 2018

March 22, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

32 Women

NaPoWriMo will be upon us in just about a week. I probably won’t post much on Big Bang Poetry during that month as I’ll be furiously writing disposable poems. I did the prompts last year and it was a bit unsatisfying due to the fact that everyone is now creating their own prompts. So this year I decided to return to a project, one based on a poem I did many years ago for my friend Michelle Sawdey after hearing she passed away and while I was on a writing retreat and found a notebook she had given me and being moved by her inscription.

My NaPoWriMo project is called “32 women” and I’ll be writing each day about a woman who has been a part of my life, plus 2: one intro poem I’ve already finished for March 31 and the original Michelle poem for May 1. As we progress, you can find them here: https://hellopoetry.com/mary-mccray/

52 Haiku

Then I have another project lined up to start maybe in June called "52 Haiku." I’ll be posting a prompt each week for a year. Each prompt will initiate a meditation, a haiku, and a small sumi-e ink drawing. I so suck at drawing, this should be interesting. As a guide I’m starting with some of the prompts in Zen by the Brush and I'll be using an ink kit I found online.

What I love about haiku is that if feels like the opposite of eLit: offline, quiet, single minded.

And yesterday I came across this interesting page surveying Shambhala Publications haiku catalog. Food for thought while we prepare for 52 Haiku in June.

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.”

Your Education in the History of American Poetry

February 7, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

What a year so far. I came back online January 2nd to a tonnage of things to finish. ArtBrawl is in full swing, the Difficult Book Club is still kickin' it. Work has been crazy busy at CNM. Family trips are happening. I'm already exhausted in month two.

In fact, the group I started last year, ArtBrawl, has grown by a few folks and last year we designed a poster that we unveiled at our local Women’s March last month. The posters are free to download in many sizes in red or blue. You can visit artbrawl.org to snag some!

What a cool flag shelf I found today (see above) from the site rebloggy while looking for an image about American poetry. The quote on the page says, "(To all my American book friends) Let's all take a minute to appreciate that we live in a country where we have the freedom to read whatever we want. Because not everybody gets to do that." Awesome image and very well said.

If one of your resolutions this year is to be more informed about American poetry history, (or even political poetry history), you can take the whole history online for free. How awesome is that? And from good universities, too. Over the last three years I’ve taken as many MOOCs, or massive open online classes, as I could find, (no international poetry classes yet but stay tuned). I’ve come up with the following itinerary for an imaginary degree in American Poetry History from these online sources. And it’s kind of like an American history degree, too…as told with poetry.

The first thing you need to do is find out when the classes are open. Some are archived and self-paced, some you take with cohorts, and some open sporadically. Some even offer "official" certificates. I’m not sure what those are worth; some certificates are free and some want chump change and I honestly can't think of an academic market where they'd be valuable in. (EdX charges $99 for certificate and Coursera charges $49). I took them all for free.

In-progress classes can be stressful with due dates and discussions in forums with other people. Archived ones are usually just watching the videos and reading poems on your own time. On the other hand, sometimes the archives have fallen into disrepair and the videos and links are broken. But just a few broken things here or there. In any case, you’re never required to do more than you want, which in some cases could just be listening to all the lectures and reading poems.

Courses are offered on various learning platforms:

EdX: Harvard (https://courses.edx.org) – This is the best platform and they offer an annotation tool, (which doesn’t work on iPads), class videos, field trip videos, A-list guests like famous artists, former presidents and senators, discussion boards if the course is in-progress. It’s hit or miss when you can get into the archived classes, but keep trying. They’re worth it.

University of Pennsylvania (https://www.coursera.org/) – Offers the most famous poetry MOOC with Al Filreis and provides videos of his class sessions with very bright, young students, audio lectures, forum discussions and required papers. The class is not archived but its offered every September.

University of IL (https://www.coursera.org/) – This school offers quizzes and discussions in forums, (but they forums are clunky and in my session nobody participated). The videos are not quite lectures but professors reading from academic papers. It sounds dry (and it is) but it’s quality stuff.

EdX: Davidson (https://courses.edx.org) —This was the most interactive platform, with videos and links to online content, interactive feedback and data gathering where you’re part of the study!

I went through college and never had such good training on American poetry history. Usually, my classes as University of Missouri focused on smaller surveys of American fiction or the British Romantic poets and that was it for poetry. Thousands of students are attending these MOOCs so I wonder why colleges don’t offer similar courses for students who are obviously interested in them.

Keep in mind these courses are, for archived classes, self-paced so the weeks mentioned below are simply guides, how the professors organized the classes. You can take double the time or half the time if you want.

The Imaginary Degree in American Poetry History

The Poetry of New England (Colonial poetry)
Covers the influence of religion, the wilderness, and other concerns of Puritans.
Harvard via EdX (4 weeks)
Nature and Nation – Nation Building
Covers Emerson, Poe, The Fireside poets, and the struggle around nationhood, with controversy between intellectual British dependence versus American independence.
Harvard via EdX (5 weeks)
Civil War Poetry
Harvard via EdX (3 weeks)
Walt Whitman
Harvard via EdX (3 weeks)
Emily Dickinson
Harvard via EdX (4 weeks)
Modern Poetry (The Modernists, 20th Century)
This course covers the geographical landscape of modernism, featuring New York City, London, and Chicago and focusing on how science and technology began to be an influence; an overview of the canon. A good introduction.
Harvard via EdX (8 weeks)
ModPo (Modern and Contemporary Poetry)
Time this one for completing September-December. This is a challenging and mind-bending course, non-lecture style. Students do some lifting here. There’s also no archived vision. It’s truly a massive and international group of students. And this course traces how modernism has led to the contemporary era.
University of Pennsylvania via Coursera (10 weeks)
Modern American Poetry
This amazing course upends the modernist canon, exploring early feminist and political poets, American Indian, Asian and Harlem Renaissance poets who were pushed aside by the apolitical, white male canon. You also delve into 1930s social poets and even neglected “canon” types like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane. Also, lots of academic voices represented. On the downside, it was challenging to concentrate on teachers literally droning through their academic papers. It was disappointing that University of Illinois thought an academic essay equals an online class. They could have easily posted links to the papers as homework. Also, forum comments depended on having copies of the poems to reference providing zero links to these poems and you never knew if the poems you found online were accurate versions. Imagine a poetry lit class with no poems? You spend a good few hours tracking down the poems referenced. All that said, this class was still worth it. It opened my eyes to whole forgotten eras and poets.
University of Illinois via Coursera (4 weeks)
At this point you may be asking yourself, why would I take three modernist poetry classes? Because the modernists are still a massive major influence on what poets are doing today and it was a massive break from the traditions that preceded it. It’s fascinating to see how each school tries to conceptualize the 20thy century of poetry. You might want to spread out these modernist classes. You could do #6 before #1 like I did and then #7 and 8 interspersed elsewhere.
Electronic Literature
You should finish with this course, a look at the possible future of literature, a truly contemporary set of works. The teacher is very charismatic and helps make electronic poetry very accessible and inspiring.
Davidson College via EdX (6 weeks)

Apparently University of Illinois has a class coming in Contemporary poetry. Stay tuned for that. I’m also signed up for “Reading Literature in the Digital Age” this spring with the University of Basel in Switzerland (6 weeks).

You may come across some annoying technical issues with these platforms. Coursera crashed twice on my iPad. My Udemy classes crash a lot too. Often the transcripts don’t match the video, which is tragic for poetry discussions with words like iambic and trochee. Nobody seems to proof them or take into consideration accessibility issues. At University of Illinois, this was stupefying since all the lectures were basically teachers reading essays. They could have simply uploaded their essays as video transcript text. In some cases with U of I, the assignment pages were duplicated incorrectly and there was no way to alert anybody.

Just remember, these are free classes but they’re also challenging. Only a true poetry nerd will enjoy them.