Category: Craft (Page 15 of 18)

Crafty March: Persuasion, Cognitive Biases and Technology

March 1, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

A Poem's User Experience

My day job is posting and editing web content so I'm always interested in user experience design and testing. I've read a few books on the topic, like Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, The Art and Science of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen and Information Architecture by Morville & Rosenfeld. But to brush up for my new job I've been taking an online class on user testing and reading The Hipper Element's UX Crash Course in 31 days.

What is most fascinating to me is that user experience can be applied to anything, especially writing poems.

The Hipper Elements article #26 on persuasion is particularly interesting for those of us interested in how to speak with authority through a poem.

This list of cognitive biases is also something every poet should read. We all write with these biases and read with them.

Everything involves user experience…even a poem. Think about a poem’s user experience.

Thinking Back to the Book

For my job, I also read the latest edition (with illustration by Maria Kalman) of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I thought I had read it before but turns out I get this book confused with On Writing Well by William Zinsser which we read in college composition class. Both of these are great book to re-read and yet Strunk and White's aim toward brevity leaves my Proustian sensibility feeling somewhat chilly. Absolute clarity is sometimes a route devoid of any atmosphere. Colloquialisms have power. And some superfluous words work to add emphasis and personality which a flat Stunk and White sentence lacks.

I took exception with the books distaste for the word offputting as in "That gesture is offputting. I am put off by it." I can visualize it. Personally is another emphatic word I would make an argument for, as in "Personally, I liked it." Yes, it's redundant but it lets the stress sit on the speaker when over-emphasizing the word I sounds silly.

In news related to words and the Internet, father of the Internet Vint Cerf says we may be entering a digital dark age. Read the full BBC News article.

Think about all your poems lost on floppy discs and you will understand his point. At some point in the future we will have devices that can't read our poems in outdated Microsoft Word files from 2007. Aren't you already annoyed by .docx files you can't open from your older computers?

While Cerf and others are working on very smart solutions to keep the world's content (including poetry) accessible, consider this when saving and publishing electronically.

On some level, I feel we might be over thinking a problem we created ourselves. After all, aren't books so far the most sturdy, eternal and accessible technology? Sure, they're burnable in libraries. But it would be pretty hard to destroy every copy of a popular book like the Bible or Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities which is still doing pretty good on the list of best-selling books.

Books consume trees, but technology creates the physical trash of discarded plastic phones, computers and eReaders.

One drawback of the emerging technologies is their very asset: they continually improve. Our current content technologies are never static. Web browsers, software and hardware become outdated and unusable. eReaders will probably suffer the same fate. And the corporations pushing them are always itching to make prior evolutions archaic in order to force consumers to make a repurchase every few years.

Books, being pretty simple, seem to be immune from this dastardly cycle of expiration. It may get smelly, but I can still pick up a book from a hundred years ago and access its content.

Interactive Poetry Games

February 7, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Sometimes poetry can be a very head-to-paper activity. Sometimes it good to inject something tactile in between.

I've had these games for year and sometimes I take them to small, informal writing groups.

Roger von Oech’s "Creative Wack Pack" are great cards to stimulate creative thinking. There are blue Exporer cards (a man with binoculars) that cover aspects of how we go looking for inspiration. The orange Artist cards (a head with its hair exploding) cover idea generation. The green Judge cards (an old man with a gavel) deal with evaluating our ideas. And finally, the red warrior cards (a warrior helmet) give tips for inventive ways to implement ideas.

Included is a book of ideas on how to use the cards, either as individual exercises, in group workshops, or as an oracle.

Each card tells a story with a final lesson learned.

Here’s a sample of one from each group:

Explorer card, Get out of Your Box: the story is about cutting across disciplinary boundaries and borrowing for ideas.

Artist card, Reverse: reverse how you look at something to dislodge assumptions, the example being when everyone else looks one way at a sunset, look behind you into the darkness. How can you reverse the way you look at an idea?

Judge card, Conform: the story is about St. Augustine being told "When in Rome…," the question being to what standards should you be conforming?

Warrior card, Do the Unexpected: the story is from 1334. Hochosterwitz castle was being besieged and a commander did the opposite of what was expected by the enemy, the lesson being use a surprising tactic to reach your objective.

I also have a game called Stones from the Muse, Runes for the Creative Journey. There are 10 double-sided rune stones in a bag and a book. You can draw one stone a day. Yesterday, I drew the Tool rune (a crude pick axe) which is about taking action. Or you can draw three or four stone configurations. I drew two more to do a reading called "immediate picture, big picture, action required." My second rune looked like a tadpole (the transformation rune) and the third looked like a swirl (the seed rune) which dealt with idea composting and fertility. The booklet has long descriptions of each rune and ideas for action steps.

The first creative oracle I purchased in college were these phoenix cards. The idea behind them is that you will draw the card that most represents your past life culture and its influences on your current life. For years, I have always been drawn immediately to the Zen Buddhist card. For years I researched Zen to figure out what that meant.

The cards each have radically different cultural aesthetics and most people only gravitate toward one or two of them. Strangely, when I used the cards to read everyone in my Bronxville, NY writing group years ago, the writers did claim the readings were pretty good. One friend said her reading was more like her than any of us could ever know.

I’ve ever only gravitated to the Zen card. Eliminating that card today, I picked the Medieval Illumination. And I have to say, its description of me wasn’t too far off either.

Anyway, fun games for creative types.

Crafty-Links: The Art of Daring, T.S. Eliot and Online Poetry Classes

January 19, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

For all the talk of poetry being invisible in big media stories, I am continually finding really good features and news stories on poetry and poets in the major American (and UK) newspapers.

The Art of Daring

"In August of last year Graywolf Press released the tenth volume in their acclaimed "Art of" series, this time authored by poet and four-time National Book Award finalist Carl Phillips." (The Huffington Post)

“The Triumph of Bullshit" by T.S. Eliot

"TS Eliot, once a subversive outsider, became the most celebrated poet of the 20th century – a world poet, who changed the way we think. Yet, fifty years after his death, we are still making new discoveries about him." (The Guardian)

…

"Fifty years later, “difficult” remains the word most people attach to his verse. Yet we quote him: “Not with a bang but a whimper”, the last line of Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” is among the best-known lines of modern poetry. “April is the cruellest month” begins The Waste Land with unsettling memorability; no reader forgets the strangeness of the “patient etherised upon a table” at the start of “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”."

…

"Through allusion, quotation, echo and resonance, modern life is presented as a repeated ritual, one we can hear more deeply than we see it. To a greater or lesser degree, this is still how poetry works. It’s not so much that knottily difficult poets including Geoffrey Hill and Jorie Graham embed one resonance within another as they write, as that even poets very different from Eliot inherit an acute self-consciousness in their language. Poetry manifests an awareness that language – in its play of sound as much as in its denotation, its meaning – spools and unspools the self."

The Web Poet's Society: Can an online course revive interest in the classics?

This is an article on the University of Pennsylvannia Modern Poetry MOOC course (The Atlantic)

"Skeptics of online education still question if academic subjects, let alone poetry, can be taught on the web. They stress that true scholarship takes patience and time—values that aren’t inherent to online education. Even though many MOOCs offer certificates of completion, only 5 percent of of those who enroll actually stick to it. And, despite their popularity, both UPenn and Harvard’s poetry classes have experienced high dropout rates as well.

But Filreis suggests that the courses’ objectives are more important than their measurable outcomes. ModPo, he said, isn’t about the number of people who complete it—and it certainly isn’t designed to replace a traditional college seminar. After all, data indicates that most of the students who sign up already have some formal higher education under their belt. Rather, ModPo—and Poetry in America—are about reaching more minds and opening more people to the possibilities of language. They're about finding Whitman not only under boot soles but on smartphones, too."

Self Publishing Report from Smashwords, Expensive MFAs, Word Crimes

January 12, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I've been following Mark Coker’s publishing predictions for a few years now. He's just come out with his 2015 points. I like that he studies his data for these things and that he updates his predictions as the data changes. He doesn't have an ideological agenda. Well, he might, but he's willing to adjust his assessments, for instance he predicts screen reading increases might slow down this year.

Last year he was still promoting the power of making books free to raise your profile. This year, with traditional publishers finally getting wise, the idea of free might lose some steam.

Check out all 12 predictions.

In 2008, College Crunch listed Poetry as the number one most expensive and useless degree in America.

And they provide a depressingly sad-sack example.

I found that link over the holiday break going through my email. I found a few old fad links I'd missed over the years, like this video from Weird Al. If you’re a word-nerd, his "Word Crimes" video is for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc

Article Watch: Tenses, Confessionals, Narcissisms, MFA-Alternatives

November 16, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The November 2014 issue of The Atlantic has a good article called "Passive Resistance" written by Steven Pinker about how "the active voice isn't always the best choice.

American Poetry Review Sept/Oct 2014 has an article by Jason Schneiderman on the friendship between Agha Shahid Ali and James Merrill and talks about Merill's ouija board book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover." This poem is not included in his collected works, by the way. In the same issue there's an essay about the grotesque in poetry by Anna Journey. There's also a special suppplement of poems and commenorations on Stephen Berg, one by David Rivard and one by Edward Hirsch.

And finally the issue has a good overview of the most famous confessional poems and how their writers use pronouns and a retrospective of Pete Seeger.

Poets & Writers Sept/Oct 2014 Issue

This issue has interviews with both Edward Hirsch and Louise Glück. Hirsch says:

"I think to have poetry, you need to have all kinds of different poets. We need poets to write playful, funny poems, poets who write light verse; I don't think we should neglect that. But should that be the defining feature of your poetry? Is that how you want your poetry to be remembered? I guess that's up to people in the culture. But it's also true that we live in a very superficial culture. We live in a culture that's driven by entertainment, by celebrities, so there's plenty in the culture to distract us and lighten us up. People who turn to poetry, I don't think y're looking for something gloomy, but I do think they're looking for something deeper than the superficial exxperiences you get in the culture every day."

Also, three poets discuss keeping a journal. There's a great essay on narcissism and entitlement by Steve Almond and an article on the Savvy Self-Publisher and another one on MFA alternatives that talks about classes in urban areas outside of the college system:

The combination of innovative pedagogy, lower costs, and a focus on the craft of writing can make private writing workshops an attractive alternative to traditional MFA programs.

Just as happened with iTunes, Air B&B and Uber, the high cost and low-return (and greed of executives at the top) of bloated organizations will be driving customers to startup alternatives.

You can check your local library for older issues of these magazines.

Wisdom in the Magazines

May 20, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The Spring/Summer issue of American Poets (re-branded as plural) arrived and is one of the best issues yet. Carolyn Forché has an essay about the poetry of witness that has a great last paragraph:

"Poets and artists are conversant with centuries of their kind, and their visions may address the most pressing need of the epoch: that of saving the biosphere of Earth. Poetry needs no other justification."

Alberto Rios talks about the role of the poet in our culture:

"I would like to use a curious word: surpriser. At their best, poets today do the old work of making the familiar new to us. But what I love is that it works, even now. It works. It is not a trick and I am changed by the ways poems and poets make me constantly re-see everything."

Khaled Mattawa says to the same question:

"Whether writing in traditional forms or exploding the language, taking an ironic stance or an optimistic one, focusing on the personal or the sociopolitical, the poet’s role is to fuse her or his feelings with the world’s ache and to speak in dignity with that doubled timbre."

I also caught up with the latest Copper Canyon Reader. Some favorite lines:

The gleam poured through my pupils
into this small, temporary body,
my wrinkled brain in its eggshell skull

—Ellen Bass

"The ultimate aim of my writing is to create an environment of empathy, something that would allow the miracle of empathy to take place, where human beings can seem to rise out of themselves and extend themselves into others and live within others."

– Kwame Dawes

“put faith/in making, each poem a breath/nailed to nothing."

–Bob Hicok

“There is no such thing as a final translation.”

–M.S. Merwin

It is not the dead who haunt us.
There is no further damage they can do.
We have seem them to death’s door.

…

It is the not-yet-born
we are up against.
They’ll be the first to forget us.

–Dennis O’Driscoll

I'm still catching up on American Poetry Review but I did finish the March/April issue.

Arielle Greenberg has an essay on translation for those following studies on translation.

Stanley Moss uses the phrase "charge d’affaires" in a poem called “What.” This is odd because I had never heard that phrase before, even in years of French class. But I came across it months ago perusing Cher's latest concert program. This is the term she assigns her long-time entourage of girlfriends.

There's a very, very good essay by Martha Collins about why white people hesitate to write about issues of race. She talks about appropriation, issues of invisibility (taking race for granted). She quotes Lynne Thompson who says, “white America has to come to grips with the same legacy as do African Americans.”

Collins says, "Deeper than the fear of appropriation is another fear. If the culture creates a sense that race is somehow not white people’s territory, that sense is reinforced by a fear of “getting it wrong” if we do enter the territory.

There's a good essay by Tony Hogaland (from his upcoming book) on the collage or composite poem. He says,

"Locating the poetry in worldly information, and implanting worldy information inside of poems, might not be easy, but if contemporary poetry is to claim the status of onging relevance it must interest itself in the stuff of mortgage crisis, insurgency sponsorship, and lithium batteries. Pitfalls of using too much or too little in your collage. Pitfalls of many and examples of good ones."

I recently started a subscription to Poets & Writers. TheMarch/April issue included a guide to off-the-beaten-path writing retreats. Aside from having an interesting vacation, I really question the value writing retreats provide considering their steep costs. The retreat lifestyle seems to just divide the haves and the have-nots.

Poets & Writers usually has good articles on international and exiled writers and interviews with agents. In this issue, Nate Pritts defends the sentimental in writing.

The May/June issue features a guide to free writing contests, but of the 96 listed, I qualified for zero.

Some interesting websites were featured:

Byliner for binge reading
Scratch Magazine to find out what other writers are getting paid and who is paying

Benka Banks explains why the Academy of American Poets has re-branded and there's an invaluable piece by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon on the process, pains and pleasures of putting together an anthology including a nice list of Dos and Donts.

Craft in May: Working with a Thesaurus

May 20, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I'm working on the second draft of my next book of poems and was back to using my old Thesaurus (my copy looks like the one far left).

This got me to thinking about how I use different kinds these days and which ones are better than others.

The big black one to the left is the copy my dad bought me when I was about 16 years old and needed one for writing poems in high school. Definitely this one is the best and not because it has the most words. I suppose electronic versions probably have 85-95% of the same words.

The book version is better because it forces you to scan over so many other words before you get to the word you're trying to find.

I do some composing in Microsoft Word: essays and quick poems like the ones I've done for NaPoWriMo. In these situations you need a very quick and efficient thesaurus. You don’t have time for the big black book. You are less particular.

When I am looking for something more particular, I'll use the online site Rhyme Zone. I use this site primarily for finding rhymes quickly. But it also has a thesaurus. I'll go here if MS Word fails me.

But the best poems get the big book. This book is musky, dog-eared and pieces of the paperback cover have fallen off. The strength of the book is all about the detour. Using the book slows you down. This gives you time to think more about your missing word. You constantly bump into alternate words. You're quickly judging all the other words in the vicinity.

Great poems are made by detours. The irony of poetry is that poems are not about efficiency. They're about what the detours help you find.

Saturday Moment of Craft: Thought as Ordering

March 15, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Years ago at a library booksale, I grabbed this paperback 1959 book, Poetry, A Modern Guide to its Understanding and Enjoyment by Elizabeth Drew from The Laurel Poetry Series.

I was struck by how tiny the page font was all the way back there in modernity.

Opening to a random page to find my marginalia, I came across a great passage on ordering, which hearkens back to one of my favorite guides, Thinking in Writing by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan.

This quote is from the chapter on Imagery, which starts with the phrase quote "Saying one thing and meaning another" by Robert Frost.

It was Aristotle who first said that metaphor was essential to poetry and was the one thing that the poet could not be taught. It's an intuitive perception of similarities between dissimilars…

…"All thought is sorting," says I.A. Richards, and the poet's achievement is the result of this process"…

Drew then paraphrases T.S. Eliot in saying:

the fine poet doesn't take everything he finds as of equal value. He "sorts" it. It is quite as easy to have too many images as too few. Unlike a logical argument, a poem is not the sum of its individual parts; it's a pattern of living relationships among statements and images, the way they kindle or support of modify one another by the poet's arrangement.

In relation to my response to Susan Howe's organization of her thoughts on Emily Dickinson over the last two weeks, I've been thinking of all the pleasures I get from acts of sorting: sorting papers from an old box found in the garage, sorting during spring cleaning or before a garage sale, sorting laundry, sorting my candy skittles by color before eating them, sorting my lucky charms. Not all poets enjoy the sorted world or the futile act of trying to sort out the world. I've noticed this seems to stem from a fact of temperament.

On the Strength Finders test, one of my five strengths was connection. I naturally zip to what is "like" versus what is "unlike." I'm like this in work and social situations, as well, always thrilled to find out what I have in common with those I meet.

One of my best friends tested high in naturally seeing difference between people, honing in on individual singularity. I feel this would make her a great novelist. She's a connoisseur of characters while my mind is busy creating bridges.

Sunday’s Moment of Craft: Keep Up the Curiosity

January 12, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Poetry is just as much about exploring as driving across the country is. My husband and I took our two dogs on a cross-country road trip this holiday season from New Mexico to Pennsylvania in order to visit my parents in Lancaster County. On the way we listened to music, discussed history and pop culture and came up with a list of things we planned to look up when we got home.

Now our list of questions isn't earth-shattering but I think the important thing to keep in mind is that you should always have a list of some kind, always be looking to learn about random things, always have silly questions you need answering.

Here was our final list. I don’t know how our it ended up so gay-centric, but it did:

Is Chris Daughtry still married? (Monsieur Big Bang had doubts but he is.)
What did Peter Allen die of? (AIDs-related throat cancer. We love the song "Tenterfield Saddler.")
How did Robert Palmer die? Was it onstage? (I was wrong; he died in his hotel room, not onstage, from a heart attack.)
Are The Gossip Girls (the band) gay? (The kickass lead singer is out but I never found out about the others.)
How did Robert Reed (of the Brady Bunch) die? (AIDs-related colon cancer.)
What is the kid from Deliverance doing now? (He’s a working actor and quite normal-looking, actually. Special effects were used to make him look so creepy.)
What do people do for a living in El Reno, Oklahoma? (Never figured this one out but the town is unusually big. We got lost there looking for gas.)
Who is singing with Miles Davis in the song “Blue Christmas.” (Turns out this is Bob Dorough, the composer and singer of the Schoolhouse Rock cartoons.)
Whatever happened to producer David E. Kelly? (He married Michelle Pfeiffer and is now the producer of that awful-looking Robin Williams sitcom.)
What hotel did Liberace play in? (The Hilton. We just watched Behind the Candelabra)
Did Eric Clapton play lead on the Beatles song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (I thought so but wanted to be sure. He is.)
What was the Mason-Dixon line created for? (It settled a dispute between the colonies and the British in 1767. Later it was used to divide the North and South during the Civil War.)
Why do we yawn? (They still don’t know! But there are many theories.)
Do birds yawn? (Yes.)
Is it me or does Zee Avi sound like Zooey Duchamel? Who sings the song in the movie Elf? (Zooey sings in the movie and there are many others who are confused by by this issue.)

Notes on Translations II: Imaginings and Struggles

September 29, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Although I didn't love this book, it was an interesting project edited by Alan Michael Parker: twenty-two poets were asked to invent a purely fictitious poet and pretend to do a translation of that poet, including an introduction with a life story and why they appealed and a sample poem or two. The editor wanted to explore issues of narrative and translation, to call "into question the axioms of translation and the use of fiction-in-poetry, the work that…allows the contributors to slip between speaker, self and other."

Many of the poets conjured up their ideal (or so it seemed) poet, one of a choice between progressive-woman-before-her-time, political radical, resistance fighter, suppressed refugee, or one of the exploited or insane.

My issue with the result was boredom. If you go to poetry to get inside a living person's idea of themselves or their processing of an experience, or to understand a foreign experience…this might leave you cold, too. It sort of proves how we come to fiction and poetry with different needs. Also, it proves how hard it is to get away from your own voice: "Readers familiar with the poems of any of these writers will surely find affinities between their self-signed work and the work of their imagined poets; perhaps it is…true that no matter what we do, we cannot run from ourselves."

I'm pretty sure the poets were trying real hard to escape themselves, too. And then there was the problem of invention: were these poets really all that good at it? A few fictions were hilarious, rarely did they become profound, but mostly they just felt like practicings.

In some cases, pertinent points about translations arose: Laure-Anne Bosselaar talked about how literal to go, preserving the stanza form or rhyme scheme or syllabic count and maintaining the poem's tone. And she showed multiple attempts. Martha Collins talked about the problem of translating emotion, linguistic accidents of meanings over two languages, and how the monosyllabic Vietnamese language "has much less connective tissue than European languages." Judith Hall talked about wimpy translator "mea-culpa" concessions about translation failures but then herself concedes that there is no perfect translation of poetry. Translations metamorphize in keeping, hopefully, with an original spirit. But then she dismisses the "translator's dilemma" to "secondary and debatable scholarship. What the reader wants to remember is not a process but a poem."

Well, that depends upon the reader.

I loved Maxine Kumin's poem "Inge, in Rehab." She talked about voice and the work of enjambments and slang. Overall, I loved the fictions best of Mark Strand and Annie Finch. And I liked Eleanor Wilner's poem "Pandora Novak."

Soon after reading this book, I dug out an old Poetry Magazine issue I had not read, "The Translation Issue" from April 2008. This was my first reading of Poetry and I loved the format of reading a poem or two and then reading the translator's note on it. You never see the original poems.

David Harsent translates Greek poet Yannis Ritsos and talks about translations being not another version but a re-imagining and how Ritsos poems are "indelibly Greek."

Stephen Edgar translates Russian Anna Akhmatova and talks about the difficulty of forms and rhyme schemes that, when kept, can distort sense. He wonders what should be sacrificed. "A poem is about many things and the literal sense is only one of them." Meaning might only be a hanger for rhetorical or musical features. He feels some poets, like Akhmatova, lose most of their magic in their translations. He says he first does a literal translations and "them begin[s] the remoulding."

Michael Sells translates Arabic poet Ibn Al-Arabi and talks about playing syntax against line breaks to recreate rhythmic play of syntax against meter. I'm not sure what he means.

Peter Cole translates Hebrew poet Natan Zach and says, "A Zach poem…is both a thing in itself and a demonstration of what makes it that thing…therein lies the challenge of translation–accounting for that aural intelligence as it moves along the lines."

Don Paterson translates Cesar Vellejo and says most "faithful" translated versions are "mere hommage; they really belong to a category of meta-poem."

Finally, this week I finished my new issue of American Poetry Review. I really liked the Cynthia Cruz poems. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence so I find it very ironic that she capitalizes every line of her poems, when everyone in Kate Johnson's class there in 1995 really came down on me hard for being an impossibly outdated conceit. Arielle Greenberg finishes her essay series on the differences between second and third-wave feminist female poets (highly recommended). Tony Hoagland's new poems take on language poetry (is this a lengthy bitch fight between lyricists and language poets?).

In any case, the essay by John Felstiner about translating a near-death Neruda is interesting here in that he talks about how his translated lines "strangely seem like my own creation, speaking not only through me but for me" and he calls this a "foolish kind of occupational hazard." He says, "What's worse, if I turn back to Neruda's Spanish it seems an uncannily good translation of my own poem!"

Translations are so interesting.