Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Craft (Page 12 of 18)

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.

Learn About Your State’s Art History

BookOkay so New Mexico has a particularly incredible art history. But I'll bet every state in America (or province of the world) has an interesting art story, too.

While working on a novel about landscape, I decided to quit my sporadic library education on New Mexico art history and actually take a class here at CNM. I was on a quest to learn about the ways other artists describe the landscapes here.

Grabbing library books was great but taking a class can give you a more comprehensive overview and lead you to some art subjects you might not normally investigate. A broad history could even bring in international elements of the story, which my class did. Not only did we touch on prehistoric and modern Indian art but colonial and modern Hispanic art tracing its roots back to the Islamic Moors in Spain, as well as immigrant European influences.

So much was mind blowing in this class.

We watch a Hung Liu Video from a Kansas City museum, not this one but a similar one. In the video we learned:

  • About being both careful and careless at the same time.
  • That gravity can be a secret collaborator.
  • About using intuition with color.
  • And how a good brush stroke is such a satisfying thing, not least of all a physically recorded moment of your life.

You can see how some of these ideas might benefit a writer.

We also watched a video about making manuscripts by hand, an amazing video if you love books as objects.

PoemMy main focus in taking the class was to learn about modern New Mexico art, but I ended up really getting into colonial and territorial Spanish pieces and ended up doing my class paper on a tinsmith named Higinio V. Gonzales. I picked him because he was also a local poet and a local museum exhibited not only his tin pieces but one of his poems painted out as an object of art. Turns out he has an interesting poetic legacy in territorial New Mexico as well, having published poems about how the state should be named, poems about relationships and local Las Vegas, NM, politics, and one reminiscent and far predating in structure the Beach Boy's "California Girls."

His lifespan was also incredible in how he brushed against many iconic historic New Mexico figures. He was a teacher, an artist, a writer, and served in the military during the Civil War. To read more, visit:

AmI also veered off at one point reading about painter Agnes Martin, who left the art world and came to New Mexico to lead a monastic life of painting.  Agnes wrote poems, too, but I haven't been able to find very many of them.

In the class also fell in love with straw applique, colcha embroidery and bultos carvings (along with retablos and reredos paintings), all colonial Hispanic carved Catholic pieces made predominantly in New Mexico in the 17th century for homes and local missions. Coincidentally around this time I came across Dana Gioia’s poem about a bulto,“The Angel with the Broken Wing" which was published in Poetry magazine.

And you may think none of this ties back to landscape painting, which set me off on this class journey in the first place. But it does. All these pieces were devised locally in response to the landscape, the distance of the New Mexican community from either Spain, Mexico City or the United States and the shortage of gold, silver and other materials with which to create art objects. These forms wouldn't exist without the harshness of the landscape and its remoteness from civilization at the time.

Tin frame made from railroad delivered tin cans:

Frame2

Bultos (or Santos), Retablos, and Reredos (for Church altars):

  BultoRetablos Reredos

Thinking About Starting a Poetry Podcast?

PodcastIt seems so tempting, right?

Every time I encounter a cool do-it-yourself project someone else has done, I feel an almost irresistible urge to want to do my own version of that project. Take for example the board game Monsieur Big Bang game me for my birthday last week, The Collector Game. It was created by a hobby board-game maker using the tool BoardGameDesign.com. More fun than the actual game is the idea of designing my own game! All my trivial hobbies could be brought to bear on the designs for various board games!

Total nerd-out!

I’m also taking an online Electronic Literature class and every example sparks the same bubble-cluster of ideas for programmed lit pieces. The list of things I want to try has gotten a bit overwhelming, frankly, especially for potentially time-consuming projects.

Podcast envy is yet another consuming type of endeavor that always sounds so appealing. Like, wouldn't it be lots of fun to start a restaurant?

For the last few years I’ve been dipping my toes into the podcast subscription world and I have a library of political podcasts, poetry podcasts, the Serial podcast was infamous last year and I too was engrossed in that first crime solving season. Lexicon Valley is also a favorite word-nerd podcast that has been very educational and entertaining.

I even finished a brief how-to-podcast class this summer from Treehouse and I learned Podcasts are not impossibly hard to produce. Theoretically anyone can do it. Technically I could do it. But the big challenge about producing a podcast isn’t the technological barriers, it’s the mental ones. It's hugely taxing and overwhelming to produce the content week after week, month after month. Planning, editing and promoting podcasts takes more time than you’d imagine, which is why the majority of podcasts don’t last longer than three months!

But here are some tips from the class if you'd still like to try launching a poetry podcast:

  1. Plan out your topics and guests three to six months (maybe even a year if this is feasible) in advance.
  2. Invest in affordable yet professional equipment. You don’t have to be a corporate entertainment company to sound great. And a great sounding conversation is addictive. Note how deliciously good NPR shows sound.
  3. Learn how to edit audio files. A lot of mistakes can be corrected with editing.
  4. Assign mandatory podcast work hours for each week so you don't fall behind and give up.
  5. Test your recording with your guest at the start of each session: check sound levels, check for background noises. Listeners will bail out of a podcast that has low or difficult sound.

I was trying to access The Missouri Review's Soundbooth podcast a few weeks ago. All the latest episodes are not dowloading to my iphone for some reason and when I opened an older episode from 2015, the sound of the guest was so low and hard to hear I gave up in less than two minutes.

Most people listen to podcasts while they're multitasking: driving, walking, cooking, getting ready in the morning. A good, loud sound recording is the bare minimum.

You can then promote your podcasts on your website, iTunes or SoundCloud.

Lifehacker can tell you step-by-step how to start your own Podcast show.  

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