Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Craft (Page 12 of 18)

Electronic Poetry, Haikus, Travel & Humor

Dead-bookElectronic Poetry

I’ve been investigating electronic poetry and I’ve started tracking my favorite pieces on this list. I’ve broken up them down into auto-generated, visual poems, video things, apps, and interactive.

This summer, a story about auto-generation came out that might disturb some of us. There’s this thing called a Bot Dylan, inspired by you-know-who, that creates machine-generated melodies. Scary thought. And I know auto-generation makes everyone (but auto-generation artists) a little anxious.

But I wonder if it’s really that much of a threat. My Dad and I have this ongoing argument about it. He worked with computers vocationally, (both fixing IBM machines and programming them) and he often thinks about them often conceptually, especially the new artificial intelligence developments with smart phones and Siri.  Does he think auto-generated art will ever replace human art?

I, myself, don’t think it will, (even if it turns out to be well made and aesthetically interesting), just for the fact that we go to human-generated art for the main purpose of connecting with other humans, to hear what other humans have to say about the experiences of being human. If we wanted to know what it felt like to be a machine, we'd ask a machine. It doesn’t matter what the machine is saying. We want a human to be saying it. This is why we feel anxiety around it.

However, my Dad is not so sure and he’s a pretty smart guy so we should probably keep tabs on the situation.

The Bot Dylan

“We didn’t expect any of the machine-generated melodies to be very good,” Dr. Oded Ben-Tal, a music technology expert at Kingston University in London, told The Daily Mail. “But we, and several other musicians we worked with, were really surprised at the quality of the music the system created.”

Of course, electronic literature is technology dependent. Which is a real bummer sometimes. My Kindle keeps freezing on me at lunch and I can’t even read when my Kindle's batteries are dead. I was reading one book the other day and the Kindle crashed and I lost all my underlining. Which was copious! That shit doesn’t happen with paper books. They’re always charged and you never lose your marginalia unless it catches on fire or you accidentally throw it in a river.

eLit is also often very complex, cerebral and meta. I actually like that about it. But a lot of effort goes into making eLit pieces: coming up with a new ideas, programming the thing, distributing it, keeping it from becoming technologically outdated. They are very labor intensive projects.

Haiku

In contrast, you have the haiku. It’s tech free and very simple to write and comprehend. You only need a piece of paper and not all that much ink. Haiku is also something you can tie to your meditative practice. Haiku can be healing and calming. You can spend all your time creating haiku on a train, in a park or on top of a mountain. In contrast, eLit requires some kind of computer and the whole thing might give you carpel tunnel.

I spent the summer with these haiku books:

100frogsOne Hundred Frogs by Hiroaki Sato (1983)

I bought this book used at the 2016 Los Angeles Festival of Books. It’s a collection of translations and re-tellings of the famous Basho haiku about a frog jumping in the water. The book is also a flip-book of sketches of a frog jumping into a pond. I enjoyed the marginalia from the prior reader and tended to like the same meta poems that this person put smiley faces next to.

And it was very meditative to read the same poem written a hundred different ways, as well as a good lesson in various writing styles: couplets, sonnet, limericks, concrete versions, word-for-word translations, transliterations and trans visions (still learning what those are). Basho did his own elongated version, Allen Ginsberg uses the great word “Kerplunk!," one version explicates the poem in terms of samsara, satipatthana and nirvana, one is a pre-modernist variation of formal poetry, one is done in overwritten prose.

Haiku-artHaiku, the sacred art, A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines by Margaret D. McGee (2009)

I also found this on sale at the 2016 book festival. I was reading it with my friend Natalie as part of a healing haiku project we were doing. I finished it recently as part of ArtBrawl political haiku project we started and never finished. The book is a real fusion between Zen, Christianity and a writing guide.

I was at first put off by the biblical passages, feeling it didn’t jive fully with the Buddhist lines. But I started to appreciate McGee’s intention and her wide knowledge of haiku and its connection to Zen Buddhism, and also her willingness to incorporate them into another paradigm, Christianity. She writes from a place of openness and her church seems very inclusive. It’s a short book with haiku exercises and it often explores the spiritual and healing aspects of haiku. She provides both self and group exercises.

BrandiThe World, the World by John Brandi (2013)

I got this book in Santa Fe and it has a good collection of haibun poems. Haibun, a cousin of haiku, are comprised one block of prose followed by one haiku. I did a bunch of them once on a Georgia O’Keefe Museum writing retreat near Abiquiu, New Mexico, and they were fun to do. 

Brandi is a local author and his book includes poems about hiking in Northern New Mexico. He also writes poems about Zen. One poem plays with the idea of hiking as opposed to spending time on LinkedIn. Brandi is also a painter and there are some poems about painting and art culture.

Travel Poems

The second half of the book is where Brandi visits Tibet and India and…they become travel poems. Travel poems are always problematic. They’re a drag to read (unless you’ve been to the location yourself) and I think this is because travel poems are essentially not about the place at all but about the experience of traveling. And almost always these poems are devoid of any self-deprecating humor. They’re overly serious and posturing, even when the poet tries really hard not to be. Somehow they’re like 1950s slideshows that put your parents' friends and relatives to sleep. Poets make great pains to try to avoid this, especially if the trip sounded expensive. They try not to sound like they’re bragging subconsciously about their amazing time and transformative journey. (I attempted a satire of this type of poem in Why Photographer’s Commit Suicide.) Poets are usually self-conscious around issues of privilege and so they try to spin their travel poems in ways to make them sound more like pilgrimages, like there is some kind of universal spiritual experience to justify the poem’s existence. But it never comes across. It always feels contrived.

Humor in Poetry

A good anecdote to this situation would be…a sense of humor, maybe even a self-deprecating one. Humor would make an emotional connection with the reader that would offset the travel-bragging thing. But unfortunately there are some poets, particularly travel poem writers, who are loathe to add any humor into their poems because of a highbrow belief that humor is a cheap strategy or a lesser form of language.

Which has always mystified me because I was raised to believe humor was a higher level of thinking, elevated conceptually and more difficult to devise. It was right up there with logic puzzles and math for my peeps. So to go out into the world and find out “comedy” was a "lesser than" art – this was a shocking eye-opener for me and I have tended to gravitate toward funny writers. I've been lucky because there are plenty of GenerationX writers who specialize in melding highbrow fiction with funny.

In my experience it takes a sophisticated and agile intelligence to be funny. It takes an ability to see the world from other level in the matrix and then to skillfully perform language in a timely way that invokes laughter. It’s hard to do, and I think this is why many writers disparage it. Humor can also disguise great hatreds and aggressions. It can be pretty violent. And likewise, it takes a certain smartness to perceive when that aggression is actually occurring. We don’t say jokes are “over someone's head” for no reason.

So I’m always on the lookout for what academic poets have to say about the craft of funny. I recently read Louise Glück’s new book American Originality: Essays on Poetry. (I’ll do another review of it separately because I have so much to say about it). But in one of her essays, she marks similar anecdotes for the narcissism of confessional poems:  modesty, detachment and humor. She singles out Mark Strand as an example of humor, but she makes sure to note: “not to say he has turned himself into a comedian.” Because that would be bad. A "comedian" is lesser than a serious poet.

Completely mystifying.

And another strange thing about comedy, there are quite a few comedians who hate to explicate the language of comedy. They’re not that dissimilar from poets who hate to explicate poetry (Albert Goldbarth). However, language nuts do like to do this because we like to dissemble sentences to see how language works. So I’m also fascinated by scholars of the funny. WoodyallanWe’ve studied our anger, we’ve studied our guilt. Humor is so much more mysterious. Philosophers have studied humor, including Plato and Aristotle. There was a superiority theory, Freud’s relief theory, the incongruity theory (the unexpected funny). Some reading I was doing for work led me to this very interesting Slate essay on theories of funny including the benign violation theory which addresses angles of comedy that even baffled Aristotle. The essay includes this funny video example to prove one of their theory.

I found another very great intersection of poetry and comedy while watching the TV special Woody Allen Looks at 1967. You can see the full show here.

Fast forward to minute mark 41:50 where there’s a very funny Bonnie and Clyde satire with Woody Allen, John Byner and Liza Minnelli. There’s a short exchange about poetry between Liza Minnelli and John Byner at mark 47:45. It’s not all that long but it explores our ideas of poetry, class consciousness concerning the lowbrow and the highbrow and it does this all within a joke that last less than a minute. Pretty smart.

Adventures in the Difficult

SsE Poetry & Fiction

I’ve continued with explorations of digital poetry as I'm still interested in how readers process narratives, multi-sensory experiences and the playful and participatory. I'm also getting my mind blown by the frame busting.

I’ve just started to read the textbook, New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Morris. It's  just as nerdy as you would expect but I'm really lovin it.

I also recently tried to introduce a digital novel into my Difficult Book Club (more on that below). Before I mistakenly chose the books we read, I tried to contact a few members of the Electronic Literature Org to find out what they might recommend for introducing to book-bound club to electronic literature. But I consistently received no response so we picked a PDF novel with a image archive and the group choked on it. They hated it. Granted the execution of the narrative wasn’t very good, but they weren’t even interested in the concept of it or the opportunities for escaping the limitations of their chosen media.

Since then, I’ve received a copy of the digital novel Wallpaper (now touring in art installations in Europe) but I haven’t been able to run it yet, finding too many technical limitations from one computer to another. You can see some online “short stories” from the story's creator at Dreaming Methods. Click 'Portfolio' in the top menu.

Monsieur Big Bang and I are also going to tackle House of Leaves shortly after we finish the Gormanghast novels. I know this sounds more like The Masochist’s Book Club than just The Difficult Book Club but you can peruse our evolving reading list.

I’ve also been reading more about poet Stephanie Strickland. Here is a good example of her work: “Sea and Spar Between”

About the poem.
The Poem

The poem is based on Emily Dickinson poem “each second is the last” below:

Each Second is the last
Perhaps, recalls the Man
Just measuring unconsciousness
The Sea and Spar between.

To fail within a Chance –
How terribler a thing
Than perish from the Chance’s list
Before the Perishing!

Unlike Emily Dickinson poems, this one is 225 trillion stanzas long (yeah, you heard that right), impossible to read fully which is part of the point. It’s still fun to “skim across the surface” of it and experience the responsiveness of your computer mouse as the poem’s stanzas flutter away. You can use your A and Z keys to zoom in and out.

Here is Strickland’s essay from the Poetry Foundation website, “Born Digital,” where she lists 11 ways to identify and conceptualize digital poetry.

I’ve also come across The Iowa Review Web that seems worth exploring, an online journal of digital pieces from 2000-2008. Browse the archive: http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/judymalloy.php

More Difficult Books

These three recent reads also classify as difficult if you're feeling adventurous.

PdA Poetical Dictionary by Loren Green (Amazon)

When I first started to read this, I gave up. I wasn’t in the mood to read something that slowly. It’s all timing with these difficult books. A year or two later, I started again. This is a short book and well worth the effort of going slow with but its only 42 words long. Fascinating if you’re in any way into etymology (or the study of words). Word nerds, dictionary nerds.

Don’t skip the preface, it’s full of prose poetry. Beautifully printed, pronunciation tips that are pure poetry, historical word history followed by lyrical explorations of the chosen words. A sprinkling of dictionary abbreviations I had to look up…I’m no dictionary snob. So observant.  We should all do this exercise with our favorite words.

Don’t miss the charts at the end! Never have I found charts so moving.

GmtGraphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti (Amazon)

I read this book and then lost it in my book-stuffed house (which makes me a hoarder). Google Books explains this book well,

"The 'great iconoclast of literary criticism' ("Guardian") reinvents the study of the novel. Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. …For any given period, scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture. Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres – the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed…”

Not everybody's chosen literary vantage point but it is well-suited for a data-obsessed culture. And there are some surprising trends you can see when you look at data from outside the matrix (and contemporary lit criticism is nothing if not a matrix). This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s a data set story and my eyes glazed over more than once. That said, it’s a revolutionary look at how the novel has evolved…using real data. A new story emerges.

Some examples. Click to enlarge.

Linechart Politics Space

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MwlvMetaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson 1980 (Amazon)

A common theme in the American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2013) with a few of the language poets represented were comments around the failures of metaphor in language and the capricious pursuit of newly minted metaphor.

Lakoff and Johnson’s book is lots of theory but the book dissects how metaphor is absolutely ingrained not only in our language but in the very way we conceive of abstract ideas, even simple ones. The authors categorize orientation metaphors (happy is up, sad is down), motion metaphors, war metaphors.

Metaphor construction is a “fundamental mechanism of the mind” and one that language poets like to toy with. Could we communicate without them?

Yesterday I even came across the 2012 Lexicon Valley podcast on the same topic, episode #23, "Good Is Up." One listener to the show commented that "much of language is fossilized metaphor.” A very metaphorical response. The podcast covers Lakoff and Johnson book and also interviews James Geary who has probably a much easier read on the topic, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. (How the paperback is more expensive than the kindle version, we'll never understand.) But Geary says every 1-25 words. The differentiate between literary metaphors, intentional metaphors and unintentional so ancient and subconscious metaphors. During the podcast, the hosts quote from three poets. In trying to describe metaphors of time, Bob Garfield, (who you may recognize as the host of NPR's national show "All Things Considered") found this quote from Ralph Hodgson poem "Time, You Old Gipsy Man"

Time, You Old Gypsy Man
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

Mike Vuolo found this quote:"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day" from Pink Floyd’s lyrics to “Time” to which Bob replied, “Okay you win; I am a nerd loser.”

The culture positioning between songwriters and poets is constantly happening.

Later Mike Vuolo quoted Virgil: "But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail," (I could not find a good source for that translation). to explain the metaphors of time as movement, where time moves forward (for humans who walk forward) and from left to right on line graphs, which takes us back to Graphs Maps and Trees!

Bob Dylan & Poetry Part Godzillion

OrrI continue to be obsessed with arguing this issue. Recently, I read a New York Times Book Review article by poet David Orr, a very well written essay on why Dylan shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize. It’s well written but I didn’t say it was well thought-out.

Ah snap! Just kidding. David Orr is the New York Times poetry guy. He’s pretty respectable. But I still don’t buy all this protest. Orr hit the thing from many different angles, so let’s go through all of his points one by one.

One: Orr starts by criticizing the prize panel for two of their previous supposed flubs: one–ignoring Robert Frost, a very popular poet and two–honoring a more obscure poet, Erik Axel Karlfeldt.  Well, the Nobel list of winning poets is a complete hodgepodge of the famous and forgotten. Orr seems to be making the argument that popularity should determine this prize. It shouldn’t. If it did, poets would hate that and the committee would be accused of pandering to popular taste.

Two: I actually think this comment about the controversy is very funny: “Various Dylan fans continue to be pleased, various English-language novelists continue to be annoyed, and various American poets continue to say something or other that no one is paying much attention to.” Yeah, I actually agree with this…and that’s me and Orr both.

Three: Orr says “Beneath the surface of this amusing situation [the word choice ‘amusing’ sounds a bit haughty but whatever]…is an intriguing tangle of questions about high and low culture, the nature of poetry, the nature of songwriting, the power of celebrity and the relative authority of different art forms.” The arguments of post-modernism going on since the 1960s pretty much have dispensed with the divisions between low vs. high-brow culture to young audiences, so this is not-so-much an issue anymore. And I wonder if this is really a power struggle between the relative authority between song lyrics and poems, a subjective and unwinnable fight. Who could judge? Celebrity is a problematic concept, as well. What obscure writer could ever win? Even the aforementioned Karlfeldt was known in his time.

Four: Orr agrees that lyrics look like poems but they are rarely printed on a page to be read as poems, unless you can’t decipher them on the radio. I don’t see the relevance of this. Many electronic and eBook poems are never printed either. Many art pieces, performance and slam poems are never printed. This doesn’t make them not poems. Orr might say you never did see a slam poet winning the Nobel and you haven’t yet; but that doesn’t mean this should be out of bounds. The Pulitzer is a good contrasting example–a prize for specific listed types of literature, books, papers, magazines, online journalism or musical compositions. Hey, they even include musical compositions! The Nobel is a somewhat more nebulous prize to an author.  I took a class once on Nobel Prize Winning Poets and a big question for us was whether the poet had won for a single poem, a book, a lifetime of work, or a lifetime in service to poetry. The award just says it’s for an“ outstanding work in an ideal direction.” That doesn’t mean much. It’s not clear and that’s the nature of the prize. So you can’t insist it must be for a printed work.

Five: Orr believes screenplays and theatrical plays resemble each other more than songs and poems do. However, all those pieces can be classified as Literature, which this is a prize for. Why exclude lyrics from that definition? Would you exclude screenplays to musicals because those works also include music? According to Wikipedia, “Literature is any piece of art deploying language in ways that differ from ordinary usage.”  Oxford’s definition is more exclusive singling out written works and would exclude electronic literature. Maybe Orr would too. But that’s incredibly outdated right now and, as we shall soon see, Orr doesn’t want us to be outdated.

Six: He says the ancient Greeks didn’t distinguish between poems and songs but “the fact that a group of people thought about something a certain way nearly three millenniums ago doesn’t seem like a compelling argument for thinking the same way today.” Good argument. That’s exactly why we wouldn’t want to exclude electronic literature in the realm of Literature. And it we include Electronic Lit, we’re opening the door to paperless pieces. The truth is poets love origins: poem origins, word origins, form origins. And inclusiveness is a modern idea, the blurring of borders is also a very popular contemporary tradition.

Seven: Orr says that lyrics and poetry both incorporate rhythm and rhyme but that poetry has the “relatively straightforward challenge of poetic meter [where] songs are a unity of verbal and musical elements.” This is true. Songs get a leg-up with a clever melody that can obscure flat lyrics and as Orr says, an “attractive tune can rescue even the laziest phrasing.” All true. Not all songs are Literature. Not all poems are literature for that matter either. Sometimes an attractive line break can rescue even the laziest vocabulary.

Eight: Orr says people don’t really think of songs as being poems, or of songwriters as being poets and then delves into the difference between saying a thing is metaphorically Poetry (ex: “that jump was sheer poetry”). But poets and other writers do say Dylan is a poet (all the time in fact) and not just in a metaphorical sense. He’s also a published poet which no one is mentioning right now because poets have an aversion to celebrities publishing poetry. See the outrage over Jewel’s published book of poetry during her height of popularity.

Nine: Orr acknowledges that as readers and listeners we experience similar feelings, “a distillation of overwhelming emotion” from poems and songs but that “Poetry has one primary asset: it’s the only genre automatically considered literary regardless of its quality.” I don’t agree with this. Meet dogrel.  There are poetry equivalents to Shooby Taylor.

Ten: But Orr’s last argument is the most compelling and discomforting and is, I think, the real root of this entire controversy. Popular songwriting, in contrast to even the most popular poetry, has “money, fame and Beyoncé.” This is what is being implied: why do they need Nobel prizes too? It isn’t fair. Which is why poets hate celebrity books of poetry out of hand. Orr says songs ending up in poetry anthologies are a win-win because the poet anthologizers gain hipness and street cred and songwriters get that faint glint of Literary Status. Everybody’s standing is improved. But the fact is many songwriters write poems, and many of these poems become lyrics. Some don’t. Joni Mitchell published her complete lyrics together with her poems in one book. What academic 200 years from now will parse those apart?

Orr says “this is a risky game for poets,” to be so hospitable to songwriters when we might instead want to close ranks. “Culture,” he says, “is less a series of peaceable…art forms than a jangle in which various animals claim whatever territory is theirs for the taking.” He says poetry is like a fox trailing behind the massive tiger of popular music.

But is this even true? Are we even talking about the popular songs of past eras as often as we talk about its poetry? Or we explicating Irving Berlin songs like we’re explicating Wallace Stevens poems? At least we haven’t yet. Sure, songwriters get a hall of fame that people of the future may or may not visit. But poems will float their lazy way into schools and bookshelves and academic papers. Maybe now Bob Dylan lyrics will too. But is it the fame that poets really crave, the kind of fame Bob Dylan has as a “counterculture poet?” And that’s the dangerous game we play right there. Longing for fame. We can’t help fame. Sure, we can chase after it but then we can’t control it even if we get it. Fame can often turn out to be a bad deal unless it happens after you’re dead. Poets are good at posthumous fame; but who doesn’t want a big house in the south of paradise? Apparently bitter poets do.

It bears repeating here that I don’t own a single Bob Dylan album.

Journals & Books 2017

SickintheheadOver Easter weekend I read Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow, a collection of interviews he’s been doing with comedians since he was 14 years old. Here are some good discussions with Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Albert Brooks, Chris Rock, Gary Shandling, Harry Anderson, James L. Brooks, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Key and Peele, Louis C.K., Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Steve Martin and many others.

I feel, from a craft perspective, these conversations are pertinent to writing poetry. Gary Shandling, for example, talks about how it took him almost a year working on one joke and how it evolved over that time. Comedians place close attention to word choice and rhythm plus other elements of creative thinking: how long to write each day, where the best writing spots are. So it’s a good craft read.

This year my journal explorations have led me to Ploughshares. I’m really enjoying poems and the essays but not so much the fiction. One Story still sends the best short stories. Even The New Yorker stories are hit and miss for me, (I’ve saved up a year’s worth from an old subscription).

I love the essays in Ploughshares but they are not literary essays like those from American Poetry Review.  I loved the essay on obscure playwright Susan Glaspell, the one by a sister who had a brother with mental illness,  and "Breath" by Mimi Dixon which was about breathing and her father who was a Ploughsharesprominent musician and teacher.

Ploughshares also gives you a generous amount of content. I look forward to digging in each issue as it comes.

And I love all The Poetry Foundation does, but I still have unread Poetry magazines from that subscription two years ago. So far, for my taste over the past 4 years, the journals break down like this:

Rattle: best poems, but no essays or fiction.

One Story: best fiction

American Poetry Review: Best literary essays but mostly by the same people.

Ploughshares: Pretty good poetry, great non-literary essays.

Songs and Poems, Redux

MicI guess this will be an evolving conversation. Or maybe this is just a topic I've become entangled with after defending Bob Dylan as a Nobel-Prize-winning poet. It's been my longtime experience that poets and songwriters, neither one, like to talk about the permeable in-between-ness of what they do.

Here are my latest arguments:

  1. The first ancient writings we consider to be poems were either recited or sung. Poetry predates literacy and recitations needed to be mnemonic. They were usually metrical or musical. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poetry)

  2. The word ballad itself points back to poems and songs. There are both musical and poetry ballads, showing their shared history. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad)
  3. Both songs and many formal poems arrange themselves in stanzas. Another word for stanza, according to poet and poetry historian Edward Hirsch, is stave or staff, which is another connection to music. According to PoetrySchool.com, (OMG, I could get lost on that site): 

    "what we would now understand as lyric poetry can be traced back to a way of performing in which an individual poet would accompany themselves on a lyre while they sang their verses. What we now call the stanza was a group of lines in a set meter whose pattern was repeated, most likely to be sung to the same repeated melody, like the pop lyrics of today."

    Mic drop.

  4. Poetry forms employ more repetitive elements than free verse: rhymes, repeated lines and metrical structures. Forms add constraints. Forms and free verse each have affordances, a set of possibilities and limits to their structures, such as these:

    Forms are easier to memorize.
    Forms are easier to set to music.
    Forms look organized and clean on paper.
    Forms are more predictable.
    Free verse often sounds like it rambles.
    Free verse sounds less sing-song-y and therefore more serious.

    It’s an art of stretching or stuffing whatever structure you choose to work with. Joni Mitchell songs sound more like free verse, (and her lyrics also work as poems, which is why she published them in a big beautiful book that I own, Joni Mitchell, The Complete Poems and Lyrics).

  5. Here's a rubric I like to use: does this lyric rise to the level of fooling anyone who might not know it's a song? If you read an unfamiliar lyric and mistook it for a poem: Booya! It’s hard to test this theory out with music snobs but I did pass off a Bernie Taupin lyric in an anthology of my favorite poems in graduate school, as I did with a Gary Shandling joke that I broke up with line breaks.
  6. There’s a big difference between "You Take My Breath Away" and "Whiter Shade of Pale." Consider this recent example I've been using with my Cher friends, two very different kinds of social-consciousness lyrics:

    Prayers
    The first link is Cher singing some vague generalities in her newest song written by Diane Warren, "Prayers for This World" (2017)

    BackstageThe second link is Cher singing some lyrics of chilling specificity in her version of "Masters of War," written by Bob Dylan (1968).

     

Some songs are just songs and some songs are poetry.

Some will argue that the test above was not a fair contest. And I agree. Because one of these writers is a poet.

I've been talking a lot about Mary Pipher's book, Writing to Change the World. As a therapist, she talks about the difficulties of persuasion and change. In the end of the book she addresses both music and poetry and points out some very interesting differences that are relevant here:

“The auditory circuits that carry music to the brain are proximate to the part of the brain that controls emotions. Music causes both to vibrate, and literally moves us to feelings. Because music burrows so deeply into our psyches, singing adds power and richness to words. Test this theory for yourself by reciting, then singing, 'Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.'

"Music is connected to memory in different ways than speech. Alzheimer’s patients who no longer remember names can still sing songs. People in deep comas often can respond to music. Songs transport us back to our mother’s cradling, our first day of school, making out in our parents’ basements, or our trip to the ocean. Songs carry us back in time to the Civil War, the Irish potato famine, the early days on the Great Plains, the Great Depression, or World War II…

"Music taps into galaxies within us all. And music entrains our rhythms with those of other people, causing us to breath together. Singing together builds community instantly. Singing in harmony literally creates harmony. Pete Seeger said, ‘Singing together you find out that there are things you can learn from each other that you can’t learn from arguments or any other way.’”

Here’s how she describes poetry:

“Poetry has the gossamer quality of a snowflake and the power of a sword….poets write precisely and close to the bone."

Anyway, that's all for now…sure to be continued.

  

Mark Doty Visits Albuquerue and D.H. Lawrence

DotyMark Doty recently visited Albuquerque to give the inaugural speech for a new D.H. Lawrence Ranch (in Taos, NM where he is buried) restoration project. The event was hosted by the University of New Mexico alumni association and was well attended. Turns out Doty is a fan of D.H. Lawrence, (a rare thing among poets lately), had previously stated in a Facebook post that Lawrence's poetry wasn't read nearly enough.

Doty connected him to Walt Whitman and William Blake and praised his directness, intensity, willingness to rage, and admired the time Lawrence allowed to spend studying something, (rather, looking at something), in a poem. Doty stated that ordinary poetry workshops would chop Lawrence up today.

Doty contrasted Lawrence to the most famous modernists of his day, T.S. Eliot whose narrative Doty considered chilly, dry, ashen, containing no blood or juice. Plus, Doty said, Eliot was a cat person. 

DogThis is a good time to plug Mark Doty's "Dog Years." I give that book away as a gift all the time, a book that is both a memoir about his partner's death as it is an ode to dogs. 

Doty said Hart Crane was basically an answer to Eliot's "Wasteland:" as if Crane is responding, "I LIKE cities and bridges, thank you very much!"

Poems Doty read:

Then Doty read some of his own poems that he felt were answering DHL:

When asked if he wrote in forms he said all poems are formal, formal objects with patterns and design.  Someone asked him who his favorite poets were and he named Marie Howe and her book What the Living Do and said her new book coming soon, Magdalene, was very good.

 

10 Things That Aren’t Writing but Will Help Your Poetry

MandallaSometimes poets need to practice a mindset that is calming and contemplative, sometimes one that is disruptive and mind-altering. There are many ways and modes of thinking, ways to calm over-thinking and ways to shock under-thinking. Practice a few and see if it changes your writing.

 

  1. Expand your reading to new subjects or genres.
  2. Think about words in a new way: as objects, interact with braille, learn about the process of creating books and experimental poetry-reading events.
  3. Work on a garden. Ross Gay talks about poets and gardens
  4. Participate in meditative arts: pottery, needlepoint, weaving, mandala coloring books.
  5. Start Yoga or Tai Chi; think through movement.
  6. Visit some Dharma Talks online or at your local Buddhist center; listen to any kind of re-centering lecture.
  7. Star a community activity, host a party or take a walk in the park where others are walking, volunteer in group activities or meetup projects, spend one of your visits just listening.
  8. Walk a dog. Think like a dog for fifteen minutes. Full on curiosity and enthusiasm!
  9. Cook something very slowly.
  10. Clean your dishes. Figure out how to enjoy cleaning your dishes.

   

Metaphors, End-of-Year News and Rattle

MetaphorsMetaphors

Just finished a great, challenging book, Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Not a new book but one to revisit when thinking about how deep metaphors go down into our conceptual thinking. The book covers objective and subjective philosophies and offers a new way of thinking about a knowledge that's neither objective or subjective but a mix of both.

Rattle and Votes for Poetry

I've really enjoyed my year-long subscription to the Los Angeles-based poetry journal Rattle. I'll be moving on to another journal next year but will probably touch base with Rattle again someday. My last issue published a contest winner and asked the readers to vote on five or so runners up published in the same issue. I felt weird about this and I can't completely sort it out. I love that Rattle is demurring from its role as gate-keeper here. It's a real "let the people decide" moment and it feels democratic. But something in me didn't want to have winners and losers among all of the strong and interesting poems. That's just life, right, winners and losers? So much in life has become an American Idol competition: singing, sewing, cooking, and on and on. It's fatiguing. Does everything need to be a competition? Maybe it does. You can't have it neither way.

News

The end-of-the-year news roundup and it's actually pretty hopeful in some small way (go figure):

Donald Trump has roused the poets to stinging verse (Los Angeles Times)

Native poet speaks the language of Standing Rock — and explains how a presidential apology falls short (PBS Newshour)

Best poetry collections of 2016 (Washington Post)

Through Poetry And TED Talks, Clint Smith Probes Racism In America (WBUR.org)

Still, Poetry Will Rise: The aftermath of the 2016 election has found many Americans seeking solace—and wisdom—in verse. The editor of Poetry magazine has some ideas why. (The Atlantic)

Don’t Look Now, But 2016 Is Resurrecting Poetry (WIRED)

Verse goes viral: how young feminist writers are reclaiming poetry for the digital age (The Guardian)

Older News

Italian town apologises for its part in persecuting Dante, 700 years after the poet's expulsion from Florence (UK Telegraph)

Why (Some) People Hate Poetry (The Atlantic)

'How I accidentally became a poet through Twitter' (BBC)

The Anger and Joy of a Native-American Poet in Brooklyn (The New Yorker)

A Poet’s Mission: Buy, and Preserve, Langston Hughes’s Harlem Home (New York Times)

A poet’s ode to the meaning of work (PBS Newshour)

Eileen Myles on getting a poem in the New Yorker (e-flux)

Syrian poet Adonis says poetry ‘can save Arab world’ (The Times of Israel)

Online Poetry (Books v. Bytes)

EpoetrySo I finally finished my year-long dive into open online poetry classes.

The HarvardX Poetry in America classes were an amazing survey of U.S. poetry history. The series was so generous is scope: a variety of videos, talks and locations, ways to read difficult poems, links to the poems and they even tried to build a tool that allowed you to do explication exercises online. Unfortunately this tool never worked with an iPad. And who wants to watch poetry videos sitting upright? Not me.

The Poetry of Early New England class was about the Puritan poets mostly. I worried, from my college lit experiences, that this would be a very dry experience. But I really enjoyed Elisa New's perspectives on this group, their biases and challenges.

Nature and Nation, 1700-1850 covers poets before and after the Revolutionary War, nation building and identity forming, including Emerson and other transcendentalists, the fireside poets and Edgar Allan Poe.

The Walt Whitman class was the first one I took on the EdX platform. While I was commuting to ICANN in Los Angeles back in 1999 I had already taken the CD class from Modern Scholar on Whitman and this really helped me break into his poems for the first time. But the HarvardX class approached the subject from different angles.

I followed that with the Emily Dickinson class. The only other ED instruction I've ever had was from the ModPo MOOC that got me started on this whole crazy, online poetry journey. I thought Elisa New's instruction was a bit more accessible than Al Filreis. It seems like a personality issue. Filreis' classes are very exciting but I learned more from the straight-shooting Professor New.

The Civil War and Its Aftermath. I was never able to take this class. It's been consistently closed.

Most of the classes were around 4 or 5 weeks, but the Modernism class was 7 weeks! Brutal! And this is the only class that competes directly with Al Filreis' ModPo MOOC but I would actually recommend taking them both. Filreis and New both choose different material to study and have different tactics for helping you get through some difficult stuff. Also, Harvard's class stops short of anything contemporary.

Click on some of those links and you'll see some of these classes are archived but closed. I could never figure out why some courses were closed even though they were archived already and some were open. Access seems hit and miss with the HarvardX classes.

After I finished the HarvardX stuff, I took the 6 week Davidson College class on Electronic Literature. And this class blew my freaking mind. I had to slow down the experience because my mind was smoking too much. I got headaches trying to wrap my head around this stuff. And before taking this class I had never considered having done any E-Lit myself; but then I remembered some of the pieces we did for Ape Culture, specifically our Choose Your Own Celebrity Adventures (1998-2002) and the Michael Jackson Fan Hatemail Generator we created in 2002.

The E-Lit class asks you to explore the idea of what a book or poem really is and how writers have always been design reading experiences. And what exactly happens when you change your reading platform. I collected some amazing links from Professor Mark Sample and this class. But it's no substitute for actually taking it, which I encourage you to do because it's currently open enrollment.

E-Lit Databases and Anthologies

Recommended Authors

I'm still working my way through some of these. Many require pesky plugins.

Poetry

Interactive Stories

  • The Baron, by Victor Gijsbers (2006) – we did a walk-through of this story in class and it was alarming in its effectiveness to take you somewhere you'd never thought you'd go. It's helpful to take the walk-throughs in the class to learn how to interact with these stories.

We also learned about Lit Bots

and Twines

Around this time I found a good related article from my marketing life, "User Memory Design: How To Design For Experiences That Last" and I keep wondering, should reading experiences be designed? Should memory be manipulated?

Are Books Dead?

Don't believe it. One of the most awesome aspects of the E-Lit course were the first few lectures on the technology of physical books. Some more book talk:

English Teacher Re-Titles Classic Poems As Clickbait In Last-Ditch Effort To Trick Students Into Learning

Why Do Teens Prefer Printed Books to eBooks?

The PEW demographic study of book readers.

Happy studying!

Problems of Translation: A Slate Lexicon Valley Podcast

AkLast year I convinced Monsieur Big Bang that we should be listening to Great Courses on the way into work. He wasn't keen on this nerdy idea but we got wrapped up in etymology classes, one of which lead us to the entertaining and informative Slate podcast called Lexicon Valley and we've been working through something like 99 podcast episodes that have been airing since 2012.

Last week, we came upon the 2015 "The Many Lives of Anna Karenina with Masha Gessen" episode which is a great, succinct outlining of the issues surrounding creating translations using Anna Karenina as an example, how different translators are making different word choices based on meaning and tone.

The official show blurb:

Last November saw the publication of two new translations—by Marian Schwartz with Yale University Press and Rosamund Bartlett with Oxford University Press—of Leo Tolstoy’s epic love story Anna Karenina. But why does a novel that already has at least six or seven English-language editions need yet another update? Journalist and author Masha Gessen discusses the difficulty of translating a literary masterpiece and argues the more the better.

You can access it online at Podtail or via iTunes.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Big Bang Poetry

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑