Category: Craft (Page 13 of 18)

Quotes For Thinkers: Summer 2016 Edition

June 30, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I posted a list of quotes for thinkers about six months ago and it seemed popular so I’m doing it again.

Quotes and aphorisms can be very helpful little teaching moments for writers and other creatives, basically all of us thinkers. They’re also really good reality checks. Many of these are again from the Bo Sack’s marketing newsletters I get on my day job and they all involve skills you need as a writer, especially as a poet.

Marketing

"Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed." Reid Hoffman

Work Ethic

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas A. Edison

"I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process." Vincent Van Gogh

Both Maya Angelou and Edith Wharton read books as children even before they understood the meaning of the words printed in them. The loved language and they loved it pre-meaning. “You can only become great at that thing you can really sacrifice for.” Edith Wharton

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin

"Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." Vince Lombardi

Being Flexible

"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change." Thomas Hardy

"If it's free, it's advice; if you pay for it, it's counseling; if you can use either one, it's a miracle." Jack Adams

"Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it." Lao Tzu

"Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it." Eric Schmidt, University of Pennsylvania Commencement Address, 2009

"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

"Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together." Yo-Yo Ma

Being Positive Instead of Negative

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. Thomas Jefferson

"To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me […] a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another." John Updike

"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations." Steve Jobs

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they're not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." Steve Jobs

Thinking

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." Upton Sinclair

"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." Alfred North Whitehead

"Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion." Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle." Ken Hakuta

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." Scott Adams

"The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present." John Naisbitt

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man." Francis Bacon

"If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done." Bruce Lee

"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life." Charles de Gaulle

"The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure." Laurence J. Peter

"In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson." Tom Bodett

"Data is not information, Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not understanding, Understanding is not wisdom." Cliff Stoll & Gary Schubert

"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us." Marcel Proust

I wanted to end on how we think, how we process and how we write in order to list a few new articles on processing and keyboards. This first link is an insight graphic from an analytics blog I follow.

Next up is an article dealing with the fact that handwriting initiates thoughts in ways typing on a keyboard does not. From The New York Times, Why Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age. And what about that keyboard? Why are the letters scattered around like they are? And who was thatfirst writer to think with it? The New York Times also published in their daily digest about the history of the keyboard.

The layout of the keyboard you use today has a lot to do with a machine that you very likely haven’t used — or maybe even seen — in years. That invention, the “Type-Writer, 1868,” was granted a patent on this day. With its ivory keys, it looked like a mini-piano and took up an entire table. It wasn’t very successful, partly because typists couldn’t go very fast. The keyboard was laid out alphabetically, and the keys would lock up if letters that were close together were struck too fast in succession. The solution that the inventor, Christopher Latham Sholes, came up with in the 1870s was to spread out the most commonly used letters across the keyboard to prevent the jams. It was called the Qwerty keyboard, after the first six letters of its top row, which also has all the letters needed to spell “typewriter.” This may have been done so salesmen could more easily type the new word. The Qwerty keyboard has long been criticized as inefficient, but it has been the most popular form of English-language typing since Mark Twain typed out “Life on the Mississippi” (1883), by some accounts the first time an author handed in a typewritten manuscript to his publisher. Early on, typewritten messages were seen as impersonal. Anyone who has received a handwritten letter is likely to say that still holds true today.

Writing in the Age of Information Overload

May 31, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
— P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937), "The Call of Cthulhu", first line

The inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. Lovecraft actually sees this as a mercy.

A few months ago, a friend of mine sent me this article by K. Dipalo about how to arrange your head-space in an environment of too much information and task overload. We are not built to deal with this much information coming at us in emails, Internet articles, books, TV streams, radio shows, podcasts, apps….

Dipalo recommends mindfulness as a way too offset noise overload:

“Just as the pioneering work of Clifford Nass points out, we are not built to multi-task, forever parsing up our attention into smaller and smaller bits. We are not designed to automatically deal with the surging tide of information around us. What is more like likely to happen is smart people will learn to change their behaviors or devise clever short cuts to maintain focus and, more importantly, a sense of sanity."

His specific advice:

Have the mind of an editor: a skilled editor cuts away what is not needed and sharpens what is required.
Maintain the focus of an athlete: a true athlete is clear about what will bring him to his goal and keeps that clarity front and center.
Cultivate the patience of a teacher: a great teacher understands that knowledge sometimes appears in the midst of noise and its appearance cannot be forced.

In another article by Dipalo, the benefits of boredom are highlighted:

"Information overload is the red-headed stepchild of the mobile age. We are literally bombarded every day, every hour, every minute with information. Are we smarter, faster and more informed because of all this effort? Not really." (I would argue less informed.) "In 2010, Lexis-Nexis released a global study that found, on average, workers spend slightly half their days receiving and managing information vs. using information to do their work. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed admitted that their work suffered at times because they couldn’t go through the information they receive fast enough. There are even apps available to help people cut down on their fascination with online and mobile information, including, well, their use of apps.

…move to the edge of occasional boredom; just enough to spur some brilliance. Brilliance, by the way, is a form of connection that is pure magic. And pure magic is a good thing for any professional, or any enterprise, to experience."

Singer-songwriter James Taylor seems to agree. In his Oprah Master Class interview of 2015, he maintains that in order to find space to create, you need to hang out in boredom.

From the Huffington Post review of the show:

“When writing a song, I need quiet,” Taylor says. “I need those three days of boring nothing-happening before I start to hear them.”

Soon, the chords begin to surface and the words begin to swirl. It’s not instantly a complete song, but the elements are there. This is when the quiet is especially important, Taylor explains.

“You get these pieces, and then you’re going to have to sequester yourself somewhere, find a quiet place and start to push them around,” he says.

In Taylor’s opinion, he isn’t the only artist who benefits from this type of isolation in the creative process.

“I think in order to create, artistic people need to be alone,” Taylor says. “They need to have time to themselves. Isolation is key.”

While there is a difference between being alone and being lonely, Taylor says artists shouldn’t fear the latter.

“If you have to be lonely in order to be free, learn how to tolerate a little bit of loneliness,” he says. “It’s hard, but you’re strong. You can do it.” Watch the video.

My friend Coolia attended the AWP Conference this spring in Los Angeles. What an awesome location of info-overload as she described it: 500 panels! She sent this satirical article of "AWP events not to miss" which highlights the absurdity.

Think of it: thousands of panelists and thousands of points-of-view. How can you effectively process them? Or not be paralyzed by the choices?

For an academic book on how poets have dealt with information overload historically, pick up “The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing" by Paul Stephens. He tracks the early origins of poetic digestion going back to World War I.

The fantastically entertaining and poignant twitter blog So Sad Today is another good example from a poet of how we now actually have one-thousand ways of looking at a blackbird. Was 13 enough?

The Los Angles Times Book Festival

May 11, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

It’s been exactly six years since I’ve been to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Since that time the festival has moved from the UCLA campus to USC. It's always had a reputation for being the biggest book festival in the country and I’ve always found its free lectures and panels highly stimulating and enjoyable. This year, however, the turnout seemed low. This could have been because the comparatively-massive AWP conference was just in town weeks earlier, (my friend Coolia tells me it was much more poet friendly, if not outright revering) or it could have been the unusually drizzly LA weather.

The last conference I attended was in 2010 and was memorable for two reasons. First, I had just purchased my first smart phone and when I forgot to bring paper to the lectures I was happily able to take notes on the iPhone. How fun! Secondly, I experienced my first carpel tunnel attack the following days. Was it all that iPhone typing? Was I carrying around too many heavy books in my big backpack? Was it just bad timing? Who knows but so severe and depressing was the situation and resulting psychological connection, I never looked at those note files again until I returned to the festival last month, six years later.

Actually, the LA Book festival has always felt transformative for me. One panelist there, in fact, convinced me I could learn Smashwords and self-publish certain projects.

This year I immediately walked over to the what I call the poetry pit, (formerly I called it the poetry nook at UCLA) where Ron Kortege was reading to a tiny, tiny crowd (see pic above). There seemed to be even fewer chairs than I remembered at UCLA. And it definitely took more effort to get down into the pit than it did into the nook, (which was near a major thoroughfare). Jorie Graham was scheduled to read next but she was sick and bailed so the pit organizers decided to read her poems during her set. I didn’t stick around for that. I can read aloud my own Jorie Graham poems.

I toured the poetry tents nearby and bought some books at a haiku tent. I learned about the group Haiku North America who will be having their 13th conference in Santa Fe in 2017. A tiny flyer advertised presentations, readings, workshops, demos, art and music for the Sept 13-17 dates at the Hotel Santa Fe. The flyer advertised their website but it has absolutely no information about the conference yet there. I also bought a Poet t-shirt from the Get Lit tent, a teen literacy group sponsored that day by the LA teen slam team. This is their tag line: "Find your voice. Discover your poem. Claim your life."

Next I went to my first panel discussion, a “Conversation with US Poet Laureate Juan-Felipe Herrera.” Herrera told long, drawn out stories. He talked a bit about his family history, anthropology, cultural social spaces in California then and now, and he spoke charmingly about how he uses hotel note paper to write his poems, almost he said like the hotel pads are kind of press imprints. He talked about putting your self into motion. People asked him what the U.S. Poet Laureate job description entailed and he talked about his House of Colors all-language project and his Washington, D.C. office overlooking the White House. People asked him about stereotypes regarding California writers, (which are plenty but he demurred) and unlike Billy Collins, Herrera's attitude was not that there are too many poets. Herrera insisted there is a lot of room in everything. And he said, “Things are only impossible 60% not 100%. Forty percent is possible." He did the Iowa MFA program at 40.

Next up was "The Sacred and the Profane in 21st Century Poetry." Carol Muske-Dukes led the discussion. I’ve seen a few times at book fest. I really like her essays and non-fiction and I just bought a book of her poems at the festival. I loved her book about her husband. But she can be annoying in a panel because she always kvetches about the title of the panel and how meaningless and constraining it is. This time the technology of the mic kept confounding her and she seemed irritated more than amused by it. Finally, another equally annoyed audience member yelled for her to just “hold it” and thankfully that fixed the issue.

Harryette Mullin filled in for the sickiepoo Jorie Graham and was generous and illuminating. Instead of reading her own poems on the topic, (the sacred and the profane), she read "The Pope's Penis" by Sharon Olds and “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” by William Butler Yeats.

Ron Koertge was also on the panel. I’m normally a fan of Koertege and I love the poem "Guide to Refreshing Sleep." But he turned every question around to himself in a somewhat suffocating way. This was jarring when juxtaposed against Mullen self-effacement. I experienced my typical disappoint when I see poets in person that I’m a fan of. This happened with Stephen Dobyns who I saw read grumpily at Sarah Lawrence College and Albert Goldbarth who was on an LA Bookfest years ago and refused to talk craft. Why attend a craft panel then? Anyway, I still read and like those poets. I just wont go see them read again (or see them participate in craft panels).

Dana Gioa was the fourth panel member. So here’s the reverse phenomenon going on. I read Gioa’s essays and am consistently irritated by them but then I always end up liking him better in person. This time I decided his facial expressions remind me of actor George Segal. Anywa, I just took a class in New Mexico art history and learned all about bultos and santos, little carved saints Catholic woodcarvers in New Mexico created in the 17th century for local missions. Gioia talked about his Mexican heritage, (did he say Hispanic? I can’t remember), and read a santos poem. “The Angel with the Broken Wing" which was published in Poetry magazine.

As you can see I took very bad photos with my camera phone. I was amazed at how brazen I had become in six years to even take bad photos.

The panel started with pretentious paper shuffling from the poets, something that fiction panels never do. “We are all doing stuff of import!” They discussed the role of religion in poetry and when and where they might have used something sacred or profane. Carol Muske-Dukes asked, “Is all art in a way religion? Do the sacred and profane come together in poetry?” Ron talked almost exclusively about this own childhood. Dana talked big picture stuff about all of our metaphysical longings, the material versus the divine, and about how people are leaving behind spiritual codes but are still feeling a spiritual hunger. And I can’t help but explicate everything he says in order to determine where the coded politics is bleeding through. He claimed anthropologists have yet to find a culture without poetry. I asked my anthropologist husband about this and he said this sounded like an overstatement and was probably not true. I added that since you can’t really control the definition of what poetry even means, we’ll never be able to verify or disprove such a statement. Dana and Carol Muske-Dukes argued about whether W. H. Auden was religious.

Late in the day Ross Gay gave a reading in the poetry pit and it was lovely and amazing. Smile: check. Working the audience: check. Wearing a Poetry t-shirt similar to the one I just bought: check. Captivating reading: check. He didn’t do a “performance” reading per se. He read. But he read really well. I still haven’t finished his book which I bought on my eReader so I couldn’t get it autographed. Bummers.

The next day I attended “Poetry and the Arts: The Influences of Music, Cinema, and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Poetry.” Hands down, the best LA book fest poetry panel I’ve ever been too. And note to Carol Muske-Dukes, the poets on the panel embraced their topic.

David St. John was funny and said he liked listening to performances, seeing artworks, and was able to make profound connections mostly through film influences. He said he found his voice by watching films.

Elena Karina Byrne’s parents were artists and she was raised on contemporary and conceptual art and these were her early, primitive experiences. Her father was a famous figure drawing teacher to Disney animators. She said all art is a dialogue with the world, the self and history. She quoted Magritte to say "art is a dream for waking minds" and Mark Doty who said "you can cause time to open by looking." She said Mark Strand began as a painter from Yale.

Ralph Angel was an enjoy-the-moment, slow talking guy, wholly present but almost boring he took so long to get to a point. He read a poem by Agnes Martin, a painter I've been studying in my New Mexico art history class. I didn't know she wrote poems but she did, sometimes about her paintings. He referenced John Coltrane a few times and said he was inspired by essays, novels, a walk, film, music…."so many guides."

Fiona Sze-Lorrain was a very interesting Chinese French author/poet/harpist also on the panel. She said that no art exists separately. She said she started with notes before words and appreciated music’s precise syntax and tempo changes. She liked working with an instrument bigger than herself. She talked about the shape of her breath and architecture. Musically she liked Bach, Debussy, Beethoven, and Joni Mitchell. She said poems fail when they start to describe painting, they become autobiographical. Then I wondered if she said Joan Mitchell or Joni Mitchell. Both were painters. She also plays the zither – a rare Chinese instrument, and I was reminded of my favorite Billy Collins poem, Serenade.

At this panel I noticed many more differences between fiction writers and poets. Poets don’t go to each others’ panels like fiction writers do. Does that say something about the poet character? Poets also don’t talk as casually before their panels. There was no talking together before this one and two of them were even friends. Very few people attended these poetry panels, sadly. Someday I hope to compare these panels to AWP poetry panels.

Some notes form the fiction panels I aggended:

My friend and fest-mate had a crush Crush on the new fiction writer Matt Sumell (see pic right) and he did have a charming New York vibe going on. He also looks and talks like Jon Stewart. In this panel the writers talked about unlikable characters, mostly defining what they are. Sumell said "Bad choices make good stories."

In another panel on Creative Storytelling, Tony-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl talked about how plays have shapes that emerge two-thirds of the way into writing them, sometimes real geometric shapes. They don’t always follow the Aristotle arc she said. She also noted that our culture is obsessed with originality to its detriment. John Scaret Young said “Don’t tie up everything” and Mark Haskel Smith said it’s "all about energy so don’t edit as you go."

In the panel Writing the Writer, two writers admitted they were afraid to show the writing samples of accomplished, brilliant characters who were writers, as if they couldn’t live up to their descriptions of the talent. Someone said they wrote about writers because they wanted to explore the life they didn’t have. Another said he wanted to write about someone like himself. Paul Kolsby said to learn how to get out of your own way.

Another thing I noticed this trip: to be a panelist it seems you need to be peddling a recent book. This kind of made the whole thing feel like a publicity event more than an educational one.

The Quote-Unquote Golden Age

February 25, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I follow a marketing newsletter which last year alerted me to this gem of an article from Ad Age, “There Was No Golden Age of Advertising, So Quit Pining for It, If You Haven't Seen Any Good Work Lately, Then You Don't Know What It Looks Like”

Wow punks! The title says it all. Do we even need to read an piece after this? Well, okay….it has good stuff, too. And remember, this all applies to the state of poetry, too.

Ken Wheaton says,

“Remember back in the day when everything was better? The air was clean and a golden light shone on everything, including advertising. Especially advertising. Every once in a while, we'll get a letter at Ad Age or, more likely, a web comment on one of our stories, bemoaning the passage of the golden age of advertising, when Creative Giants roamed the offices, brilliant ad copy trailing in their wakes. Their worst ideas were better than anything these young punks are putting out today, what with their bits and bytes and snap-tweets and Huluzons and what have you. Why don't you all just get off my lawn?!? Wait. I got carried away. The fact is, there was no golden age. It didn't happen in learning, religion, world peace or advertising…. So instead of hunting for a past golden age, do your best to make future generations think this was their golden age."

Here's another quote for thought:

"Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present." – Bil Keane

Ah, the golden years.

How to Become Well-Rounded Poet

February 25, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Here's an idea: the way to becoming a well-rounded poet is similar to the way to becoming a well-rounded person. And spring is the perfect season to broaden your horizons.

In the movie about the collaboration between W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, Topsy Turvey, Gilbert is accused of being in a rut, writing the same ole story over and over and his composer Sullivan just doesn’t want to do it anymore. Meanwhile, Gilbert's wife goads him into attending the local Japanese Expo where he witnesses a new culture for the first time. One of the great, great scenes in the movie is a closeup of Gilbert as this new cultural information translates into a novel idea for him. Literally, Gilbert enacts the moment when a new thought appears like a sparkle in his eye. Jim Broadbent plays Gilbert and gives an amazing performance of this experience. Their musical The Mikado is the result of this inspiration.

Spring is the time for new input opportunities for your eyes, ears and smells!

Go to see new art exhibits at local museums and galleries.
Rent art documentaries from your local library.
Take an online class on a composer or find music documentaries from your local library.
Find out when your nearest city is having their Restaurant Week and price fix on fine dining for a fraction of the cost. Search Google for "Restaurant Week" and your city name.
Go see the Oscar Shorts at your local theater or online. Oscar shorts are the short films nominated for Oscars in the categories of live action, animation and documentary. They tend to be very poem like in their constraints of length and storytelling.

Often art-changing inspiration can be found by taking a chance on something completely new.

New Year, New Poetry Magazines

February 10, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So for the last two or three years I’ve been trying out poetry journals, newsletters and organizations. Really learned a lot but I’ve made some changes this year. In review:

The Scottish Poetry Library newsletter was great, friendly and full of awesome community outreach programs and activities but was pretty pricey if you live stateside. I had to give it up for a while.

The Poetry Society of America provided not much return for your membership (except a membership card) unless you live in New York City and can take advantage of their programs and outreach. For instance, when I lived there in the 1990s I enjoyed their poems on posters in the subways.

The Academy of American Poets, who publishes the 2x–a-year American Poets magazine which has really good brief essays and a nice variety of poems and enticing, yet brief reviews. But that only comes out a few times a year. And the price is high considering. But you also get copies of their award-winning books, depending on your membership level. Of all the books I’ve received over the last few years, I only liked one of them. The majority were experimental, language-y books, which I don't dislike but not as a majority of what I read. I will probably go back to them at some point. You also get their National Poetry Month poster with your membership but you can get that separately from their website.

Poetry magazine. I feel torn about this one. Sometimes I loved it. But usually I didn’t. I tended to enjoy more their themed issues. The essays were hit and miss, sometimes affectedly esoteric. The visual content was always good. The key for me was when the thing arrived in the mail. Did I feel burdened about its arrival or excited? The truth was I never felt excited. Does this mean I’m not a sophisticated poetry reader? The Costa Rican poet Luis Chavez from the October 2015 issue, however, proves to me why Poetry is an indispensable journal. He felt like a miracle to find and he’s available nowhere else in translation yet.

American Poetry Review. Now this magazine I was always excited to receive, mostly for its essays which hit just the right tone and variety. However, after two years or so years reading it I’m still seeing the same authors over and over again. This, too, I will probably return for at some later time but if exploring is my goal and money is limited, I have to quit some of these journals for a time.

The only holdover is Poets & Writers which feels indispensable and community-connecting. I’m also keeping One Story. I enjoyed every issue from last year, its inexpensive and a subscription I'm sharing with friends.

My new journals this year are Rattle, Lapham’s Quarterly and The New Yorker, which I haven’t ever enjoyed previously but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

New Year’s Resolutions, Laurie Anderson, the Brand of You, eBook Sales

January 11, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Happy New Year! This very blog and all my sites were just given responsive re-vampings over the holiday break so they should be more accessible on mobile devices. This makes it a good time to revisit what this blog’s mission really is. I’ve been looking at it lately like a poetry toolbox, lots of little ideas being fashioned as tools poets can take forward into poetry projects.

Self-publishing and eBooks

I read quite a few stories toward the end of 2015 about how eBook sales have stabilized and experts surmise that they may have found their permanent sweet spot. It’s too early to tell as techno-babies continue being born. It also contradicts other reports, such as this one about “slightly fewer Americans are reading print books, new survey finds.” Smashwords also did its annual survey of the previous year's eBook sales.

And here’s a smattering of other content I came across before the end of 2015:

A short treatise on commas from the Grammar Diva
Why Author Open Mic Night Doesn’t Have to Suck (tips on how to perform at an author reading)

Laurie Anderson

Monsieur Big Bang and I went to see Life of a Dog in December. This is the new movie by Laurie Anderson, a beautiful visual poem reflecting on the nature of life and death, a project that had been inspired by the recent deaths of her husband, Lou Reed, her dog and her mother. I was so enraptured by the movie I immediately went online afterwards to get "the book" on Laurie Anderson, the coffee table book, the biography, anything! But there was none to be found. Five or six books exist on Lou Reed however. WTF?

Anyway, all I managed to find was an article here from The New York Times on her projects during the 1980s! I also found another good piece on Laurie Anderson that’s more current from NPR. It had some great life advice:

"One of the things that I had to do when I inducted Lou into – or gave a speech when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few months ago was first of all, that's a very boring ceremony. It's – just goes on for, like, so many hours. And I was trying to shorten the speech because it was getting so dull. So I tried to shorten it, shorten it. And then I thought I'm just going to mention these three rules that Lou and I had. We made them up, and they had to do with how to live with your life 'cause, you know, life goes by so fast. It's really – and a lot of times things happen so fast you don't know – how should I react? What should I do? I'm in a panic, you know. So we came up with these, and they're time-tested rules. And I'll tell you what they are. So the first one is don't be afraid of anyone. Imagine your life if you're not afraid of anyone. Two, get a really good BS detector and learn how to use it. Who's faking it and who is not? Three, be really tender. And with those three, you're set."

At the end of the movie Life of a Dog Anderson invokes the old Huck Finn quote about "lighting out for the territories." I thought about that for a long time. The new year is, after all, a time to begin anew. It’s something we say when we’re in need of a life change, light out for the territories. We’ve been in that mindset now for over 100 years. But where does one go anymore? Where can you go to start over? California is pricing out even its natives. Portland is the new “it” but is it crowding up, too? Are cities the right answer anymore? Do we start to question ownership now? Should we just start going inside? Where are the territories? Does starting a garden count? It’s also true that all of humanity didn’t, in fact, all light out. This was an idea sold to us as hip and adventurous, which is was. But is it still?

Writer Brands

There’s an old marketing adage that you can“frame or be framed” meaning if you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you and you might be framed in a negative sense or literally framed for the crime.

My friend and fellow poet Christopher and I have been having good conversation about the trend of writers trying to develop their brands. He sent me an article about Diana Vreeland's heirs who have branded perfumes (and other things) under her name. With the new documentary about her (Diana Vreeland, The Eye Has to Travel) it felt the family was attempting to turn her life story into a brand.

Christopher commented that branding humans feels, well, very inhuman: "I don't think I have sufficient words to express how much I detest the prevalence of all these people fretting over their brands. It's such an un-repentantly cynical approach to furthering one's reach in the world, a mission largely predicated on realizing greater profits, whether it be of the individual or corporate variety. Indeed, that is what is so troubling to me about it; people have become so inured to the heartless devices and practices of the corporate hegemony, they are now gladly adopting the same in order to best capitalize their own sense of self-importance, or more bluntly put, their product. Self as Product. Yes, we try to "sell" ourselves everyday–to prospective employers, to colleges to which we're seeking admission, to potential mates…the list goes on and on–but this concept of purposely disembodying/distilling oneself into an aspirational brand for others to follow, covet or purchase–it smacks of such inflated self-regard."

I submitted to him that writer brands are all the rage these days on book marketing sites. The rumor out there is you can't get a non-fiction publishing deal unless "you already have a viable brand." I did a short search today and came up with these sites about the need to develop your writer brand:

What bothers me about it is how commodified we have let our art become. Instead of art being a moment making a connection between people over a painting or a book, it's full-blown capitalism from intellectuals who profess to know better and want better. You really get a sense of their attitude toward you: you're just an email address, a body to market to. I think this is partly a reflection of how cut-throat authorship is out there and, yes, part narcissistic self-regard. But it's what the "experts" are pushing in order to solve the problem of low demand and a plethora of product.

Full disclosure: I’ve been dutifully working on my brand but, to be honest, it feels ridiculous. But then is that now part my brand?

Food for Writerly Thoughts 2015

December 9, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

For the past few months for work I’ve been reading the Bo Sacks newsletters on marketing and publishing issues. Here’s a sample of one of Bo Sack's pieces.

He posts a plethora of good quotes that apply to writers and thinking. Here are my many favorites so far:

Living a Life

"My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger." Aldous Huxley

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." Isaac Asimov

"If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe." Lord Salisbury

Thinking Better

"The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions." Claude Levi-Strauss

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." Henry David Thoreau

"Anyone can negatively criticize – it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires." Chuck Jones

"The golden age is before us, not behind us." William Shakespeare

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." John Locke

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions." Leonardo da Vinci

An interviewer once asked Ursula K. Le Guin advice for writers, and she replied: "I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work."

The final one is a quote from James Taylor on a recent Oprah’s Master Class episode: “Those days the amount of time to consider, experiment without distraction was a lot longer. It’s very easy today to be distracted. You actually have to really defend your time in order to have a long thought.”

Reach

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie." Stephen King

"A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience's attention, then he can teach his lesson." John Henrik Clarke

"If you're riding ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there." Old West Proverb

Bearing the Business

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." Rene Descartes
("The reading of all good books on any substrate is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." BoSacks Corollary)

"A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success." Bo Bennett

"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things." Leonardo da Vinci

"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else." Albert Einstein

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." Isaac Asimov

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Winston Churchill

"The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck." Channing Pollock

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith." Steve Jobs

"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." Leonardo da Vinci

What Language Poems Used to Be About: Piet Hein

December 9, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In the last few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of encountering poetry in unlikely places. I was visiting my Aunt Nancy in Socorro, New Mexico, while she was selling her photographs at a craft fair coinciding with The Festival of the Cranes.

My aunt takes amazing bird photography around the Bosque del Apache area. One of the local gallery owners came up to her for the sole purpose of reading some poetry to her. He was excited about a new find. He saw us and hesitated. I told the main I was also excited about poetry and he introduced us all to the work of Danish poet, scientist, mathematician, inventor Piet Hein and Hein's own form of poetry called “grooks.”

Here is the poem read to us in the middle of the craft show floor:

Timing Toast

There's an art of knowing when.
Never try to guess.
Toast until it smokes and then
twenty seconds less.

Here are some other samples I found online:

Those Who Know

Those who always
know what’s best
are
a universal pest.

A Moment's Thought

As eternity
is reckoned
there's a lifetime
in a second.

Ars Brevis

There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
with art-
lessness.

The Road to Wisdom
The road to wisdom?
— Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.

Hein’s Wikipedia page had this to say about the more serious layer of his poetry:

“The Danes, however, understood its importance and soon it was found as graffiti all around the country. The deeper meaning of the grook was that even if you lose your freedom ("losing one glove"), do not lose your patriotism and self-respect by collaborating with the Nazis ("throwing away the other"), because that sense of having betrayed your country will be more painful when freedom has been found again someday.”

Consolation Grook

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.

On our way into work, Monsieur Big Bang and I were listening to a class on the history of the English language in a Great Course class called "The Secret Life of Words" by Anne Curzan. Curzan was introducing a section on wacky English spelling and she alerted us to this poem by an unknown author called “English is Tough Stuff.” The spelling anomalies in the poem really challenge your ability to read it.

A sample:

   Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
   Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
   Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
   Exiles, similes, and reviles;
   Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
   Solar, mica, war and far;
   One, anemone, Balmoral,
   Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
   Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
   Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

A Book About Paradox, Surprise and Uncertainty in Poetry Craft

November 19, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Just like the book Nine Gates (which I reviewed in 2014), I loved this book of Hirshfield essays although they were difficult. Did the book live up to its subtitle? Probably not but maybe it's a miracle the book had a subtitle at all considering the nebulous, ethereal subjects they explore. This book is not really for beginners; it’s strategy is so particular and pensive and one which requires good amounts of concentration.

Here is my take on what the essays cover and a quote from each section, although I don’t think cover is really the right word, more like "make exploratory expeditions into."

1. How a poem “sees”

“Poetry’s generative power, then, lies not in its ‘message’ or ‘meaning’ nor in any simple recording of something external to its own essence. It resides within the palace of its own world-embedded, intertwining existence.”

2. Poetic statement

“…the narrow alleyways of rhetoric, the differing fatigues of failure and success. There is no way of telling in advance what part of our knowledge will be needed at any given moment.”

3. An introduction to Basho

“Basho’s haiku describe and feel, think and debate. They test ideas against the realities of observation; they renovate, expand and intensify both experience and the range of language.”

4. The idea of the hidden in poetry

“The union, like all metaphor, brings revelation and addition, while it also covers, complicates, veils.”

5. Poetry and uncertainty

“For those willing to let themselves feel it, any story leaves behind an uneasiness, sometimes at the center, other times at the edge of perception, and like the remainder left over in a problem in long division, it must be carried. Literature’s work, and particularly poetry’s, is in part to take up that residue and remnant, to find a way to live amid and alongside the uncertain.”

6. Windows in poems

“…a window can coincide with the poem’s emotional center of gravity and pivot.”

7. Poetry and surprise

“Cognitive and creative discoveries are made in the same way as much of biological life is: by acts of generative recombination. Disparate elements are brought together to see if they might make a viable new whole.”

8. What is American in Modern American Poetry

“…there is the migrant traveler’s perennial hunger and search for what can be made known, made home, that leads American poets, more often than not, toward the respite and sustenance of the local and radiant detail.”

9. Words’ transformative power

“Beauty unbuckles pain’s armoring. Unexpected startlement unfastens the psyche’s fortifications.”

10. Poetry and Paradox

“Art makes open cases, not closed ones.”