Category: Poetic Realities (Page 2 of 10)

What is Poetry: Language or Music

August 8, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re working through Elisa New’s very interesting questions about poetry from the Emily Dickinson Harvard MOOC. The second question is really two of her questions: “Is poetry native language at all? Is poetry a kind of music?”

We’ve argued about this previously, most notably when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Price in Literature in 2017. Well, I guess it was just me arguing with the points made by New York Times poetry critic David Orr. I can’t paraphrase it all here. Suffice it to say I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks poetry is not music and language both.

The use of “Native” is interesting in the first question. Does this mean pre-language versus learned language, like toddler-speak? Or does it mean pre-history language like petroglyphs? Or some kind of under-language that is always with us, some emotional language?

Poetry for me has a pretty big umbrella and it involves an implication of permanence. I mean every writer intends a kind of permanence for their work, (a possible stay against death), but poetry tends to have a greater shot at a longer shelf life. Poetry is not inherently disposable like, say, political opinion or podcast reviews. The topics are more universal, the tone meant to strike more deeply into the psyche.

I am always considering the place of petroglyphs as poetry, too, and our hesitancy to label American Indian verbal rituals as poetry. Unlike verbal ceremonials, someone took the time to write out concepts in petroglyphs. I have some petroglyphs on the hill behind my cul de sac. And as far as “native” language goes, (in all senses described above), they “feel” like poetry to me. They explore something intellectually serious and they strive to be permanent.

Often they intend to commemorate a special occasion or idea. As does music.

Poetry has always challenged the boundaries even poets have tried to attach to “poetry.” Poetry should this and poetry should that. Always they are trying to contain the idea of poetry around themselves, their work or their taste. Musicians do this, too. Maybe so did the petroglyph writers. Humans love to tell each other what to do.

Is poetry simplified language? Except that it can be delightfully complex and convoluted. Is it a simplifying of our experiences? Except that it can illustrate the complexity of our experiences. Is it elevated language? Except that it can be coarsened language. Is it a narrative? Except that it can be non-narrative. Is it form? Except that it can challenge the idea of form.

It uses words. Except sometimes it tries to loosen words from their moorings. And it can be gibberish. It can be written in any language system (petroglyphs). It can be pictorial sometimes or can employ the same intention with symbols (petroglyphs).

It is not music. Except that it often is imbued with music. It’s almost impossible to separate poetry from any trace of music, any occurrence of rhythm and rhyme.

It may even be a third thing, a hybrid teetering in-between and pulling from native pre-language, sophisticated layers of modern languages and also ice-skating with tropes of music. If not an in-between thing, it is maybe an ever-morphing thing that grabs from all of its neighboring communication systems. It is possibly undefinable.

We could let it go, this attempt to nail it down. But tell me what’s the fun in that?

What is Poetry: What is it Made Of

July 29, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

(Atom sculpture)

Years ago I took some Harvard MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) with Elisa New. And during the class on Emily Dickinson she went through a list of very interesting questions about poetry.

She noted that certain Dickinson poems theorize about “what poetry is, what poetry is made of.” And then New goes on to ask multiple questions around the substance and boundaries of what poems are, what poetry is.

I’ve collected these questions and we’ll be exploring them for the rest of the year, starting with the opening inquiry: what is poetry made of…

….which you can’t very well answer, by the way, without speaking figuratively.

I would answer this by saying poems are made of heart and brain matter, the substance of yearning, suffering and joy, the desire to nail down the salty, sugary in-betweens-ness of our lives.

It is made of nothing from the periodic table of elements, not even the breath or paper it finds itself delivered upon. It is both a voice and not a voice in every sense of the word. It has no DNA or nucleus.

It has a big charge without any atoms.

It has no matter and yet it does.

Poetry is one of the only human things on Earth not made of carbon.

And this reminds me of a love poem from my first book, Why Photographers Commit Suicide, “Monogamous Carbon: A Classified Ad” written back in the early 1990s when I lived in Yonkers, NY, and was writing science poems for my MFA at Sarah Lawrence.

The Essay Project: Concepts vs. Identities

June 1, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I hear there’s a saying in recovery therapy that says, “don’t should on me.”

And I think about this phrase a lot when I’m reading and hearing how poems should be this way or that way, how people should be this way or that way, or how the problem with X,Y or Z is that it should be. Men should be. Women should be. The Other Side should be.

I’m slowly reading a book called Advanced Poetry, a sort of poetry course put together by Kathryn Nuernberger and Maya Jewell Zeller.

Each chapter has writing exercises and extra readings online and so reading it is taking me time. In fact, I’m only up to the chapter about a poet’s “voice” where they spend time discussing the New York School poets, specifically Frank O’Hara and all the experimental alternatives to writing confessional poetry. The chapter explores the tensions between the two exercises, writing confessional/identity poetry and writing experimental/modernist poetry, illustrated most clearly in two essays the author’s have included online.

“Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” by Cathy Park Hong was a somewhat ground-breaking article that calls out conceptual or experimentalist poets for being clueless, and alternatively insensitive or rude, on the issue of identity politics, for not producing pure-language experiments, as they do, or for writing, as Stephen Colbert’s character would say on his old Comedy Central show, from the vantage point where “I don’t even see race.”

However you feel about the term “identity politics,” marginalized groups sharply feel their status in the world. For example, I can’t forget at any time that I am a woman. Honestly, I’ve led a pretty easy and privileged life. But I can still face obstacles as a woman. What if I get pregnant? What if I apply for a manly job, like kicker on a football team? What if I piss-off either other women or men but saying something perceived to be wrong for my gender? My womanness is very much a part of my idea of myself.

And my ideas of myself are always tricky. I get tangled up in them when I try to seek out a religious or cultural identity for myself because my father grew up on Indian reservations (as a white boy) and passed a lot of cultural artifacts down from the Hopi and Tohono Oʼodham (which is the childhood and young adulthood he experienced). That was passed down with our New Mexico heritage which is very hybrid as well. However, genetically I am not Hispanic or Native American. So what am I, culturally speaking? You can’t escape focus on your identity when it is blurred or marginalized or hated. You don’t have the luxury to not think about it. The world forces your identity upon you. And then you can criticized for talking about it.

From the point of view of modernists and experimentalists, we should be able to shred our identities and write in an authorless, language-based way. Hong calls this out as clueless. It is possible we will never get to a place of social equity ever and pretending this can be so (through art manifestos) doesn’t ever make it so.

The other essay is “Delusions of Progress” by Daniel Borzutsky which really takes some time to unpack Hong’s statements.

The experimentalists (or conceptualists) are pretty cliquey. That’s another issue. They can be pretty dismissive of other poetries. On the other had, political writers operate with such urgency, they often feel the same way. And their point can be well taken. For example, if we don’t solve the environment crisis and we all die off, there will be no humans to make the poetry experiments. So there.

This is not a new problem. I’m also reading about the beginnings of modernism. Modernist poets like T.S. Eliot wanted to push back against “sentimental poets,” women poets of the time. Poetry should be to escape the personal, he believed. Confessional poetry sprouted up to push back against that. Also, there were some women and minority poets during the time of Eliot who were using non-experimental or traditional forms and structures to talk about their lives in political ways.

It has always seemed to me more a matter of privilege than overt racism, although you could draw political lines between the two groups. The modernists were ironically very politically conservative. Eliot and Pound were famously antisemitic during WW2. They latter-day New Critics not only believed a poem should stand as an artifact free of biography, but as a critical force they shut down the poetry of the political left which disappeared from the canon and the academy for almost 100 years, along with popular poets of the day, whatever their politics were, poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan…etc. More recent modernists evaluations and anthologies in both America and England are just beginning to bring those poets back into our critical awareness.

This is not to say some experimentalists are not racist. But many of them just have the privilege of their race or sex not being a barrier or under threat. They can’t or don’t want to write about their whiteness. So they tool around with words instead. I just want to say that their doing this isn’t the problem. Their experiments in and of themselves are not clueless or wrong. It is all their critical judgements, their exclusive shoulding, their grand ideas about their own place in the poetry canon that is clueless.

I do get energized, myself, from procedural and language experiments but I have always sympathized with poets who want or need to write poems of witness and social concern. And now that I feel my own future jeopardized as a person in the new era of aggressive incels, I understand this much more viscerally.

Borzurtsky’s article is a good discussion on these struggles and he comes to conclude that maybe this isn’t a discussion about poetry at all, but how you “position yourself in the world, about how you want to live your life.” He says, “the politics of form is really a discussion about the politics of content.”

To dismiss identity poetry is tragic, he feels, because he has seen “poetry have a transformative effect on individuals because of a poet’s willingness to speak, directly and honestly and vulnerability, about ‘identity,’ about political and social experience, about what it means to survive in a world that wants to kill you.” (or enslave you, or make rape legal…)

And we have to remember, in some countries you were (and still are) killed or jailed for writing witness or political poetry. To say this kind of poetry isn’t “serious” enough is just absurd. No government is going to kill you for writing a procedural poem.

Borzurtsky goes on to say “I think about how small and incremental it feels to write poetry in our over-saturated, a-political landscape.”

Which reminds me of the joke, “Why are poets so cutthroat? Because the stakes are so small.” Poets are already marginalized. This becomes a nonsensical skirmish at some point. Because I would never want to see the poetries of witness vs. experiment made into opposing camps. Not only are there excellent and important poets who traffic in both exercises, we desperately need them both to exist.

I’ll say that again: we desperately need them all to exit.

We absolutely need a poetry of witness, identity, and social concern. But we also need the laboratory poets, the scientists’ scientist, the poets’ poets like Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein (who ironically supported some antisemetic bad actors herself because she was so vehemently anti-left). Many Harlem Renaissance writers and women writers at the onset of modernism used traditional poetry forms to protest the idea that they were not smart or genius enough to write in forms (Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay). We need all the things.

Forms (like music genres) have no politics. It’s the judgement about them that has politics.

By the way, Advanced Poetry as a text-book is happily inclusive of British and American poets of all kinds. It really puts the “trans” in trans-Atlantic.

NaPoWriMo Starts Soon

March 30, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Ok…so my life is a series of slow-burning calamities at the moment. I just lost my favorite fella last Wednesday and my mother has been in and out of the hospital for the last two months, with that situation ongoing,

I had to bail suddenly on a dying computer last Tuesday and set up a new one quickly in case I will need to return suddenly to Ohio. And plenty of other dramas are going on concurrently. In fact, this year is proving to be the worst one yet. I have been wallowing in funny animal and baby reels via Facebook and I’m not sorry at all about that.

The world needs more funny baby and animal videos right now. It’s something we can all get behind, no matter what our ideologies. My favorites have been the voice-over antics of Rxckstxr and following the adventures of Branston Pickle and Gizmo or any reels of Dads doing silly things for their little kids.

But I do not want to postpone my final NaPoWriMo another year. Absolutely not. So God help me I will begin the final set of poems starting Monday, April first.

I may not finish them by the end of the month. I may not finish them by the end of next month either. It may take me until July to get them all up, but finish this we will.

Check here periodically for postings of the as-yet-untitled set of poems: https://marymccray.com/napowrimo-2024-by-mary-mccray/.

Why Do I Write?

January 27, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Sometimes when I need to find a page quickly on my website and I don’t know where it is I’ll just google it. Like “Mary McCray NaPoWriMo.” It’s faster than browsing around for things. I learned this trick at ICANN because the site has tens of thousands of pages (full transparency, you know).

If I search my name on Bing, that search engine asks me very politely “are you sure you don’t mean porn star Marie McCray?”

If I search my name on Yahoo!, that engine just gives me results for porn star Marie McCray. (“Surely that’s what you want, right?”)

If I search my name on Google (and this is why Google is king, I guess), I get a handy information card to the right that actually returns Me. But Google has decided for some reason that I’m a Journalist. Which is very funny because I’ve never written a piece of professional journalism in my life, unless you count those old reviews on Ape Culture (which had the grand distinction of not being very good).

I can see now that I need to get new pictures. One of the things I dread doing (more on that below).

I have some good friends on the East Coast who I saw last August. They’re a couple: one is a writer/poet and the other is a musician. I’ve known them since back in the Sarah Lawrence days. We’ve had some great conversations over the years about being artists and I remember touring the lair of the musician last summer and the two of us got to musing about why we keep working even though we haven’t “succeeded” and how we would still keep doing it whether we were successful or not. Because we love the doing part and we probably couldn’t stop even if we tried.

I figure feeling this way helps us forego the constant assessments of our value. It’s more about what we value. But this doesn’t make it easy.

It’s tough out there. I know three graphic designers (web and print) who struggle to find work because the Internet has decimated their opportunities, just as it has for writers.

But often I have to remind myself that for poets, it’s been this way for about 100 years already. We were once on top of this culture heap, but then dime-store novels sent us packing; and then motion pictures arrived to soak up everyone’s leisure time. And then TV came. And then the computer games. And then the Internet.

And motion pictures were far from the first disruption to human kind. The printing press put those monks out of business, which was a shame because apparently they were drawing little hidden penises in everything).

Media change is relentless. And we find ourselves in the middle of yet another disruption because annoying human beings keep inventing things like stone tools.

But considering there are still thousands of poets writing and reading poetry even though it’s been 100 years of deeper and deeper losses, we must be working with a different rubric of success. But if you want to join the Irrelevant-Media club, you know where we are. We keep on like dysfunctional little windups.

Alternatively, I know two writers, (one of them lives in my house), who, if there’s no money or promise of money down the line, they do not write. Period.

Another close friend I spoke to recently works in a medium that I would consider mostly a labor of love. And for years they’ve been doing it just because they love doing it, they said. Recently, this changed to working for “something big,” a term that is a vestige of this person’s former life in Show Business.

It’s such a commonly ringing bell lately, I can’t help but think that, despite what anybody says, fame and money are what everybody wants.

Sometimes I even doubt myself. I mean even those monks wanted to be remembered by someone, otherwise they wouldn’t have been drawing all those funny little penises in all those old books.

I’ve been reading an essay about Robert Frost over the last few days, “Robert Frost and Tradition” by Siobhan Phillips.” Phillips says “Frost courted fame on the widest scale and became by some measures the most well-known English-language poet of the twentieth century.”

Frost said, “there is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips.”

And esteem buys you no butter, that’s for sure. You can’t argue with that.

I have another visual artist friend I’ve know a very long time, a very talented artist, but this person has what I would call a problem of self-motivation and over the decades hasn’t produced very much. Recently I had dinner with this person and they said apropos of nothing, “I really thought I would be famous by now.” I had some very unfriendly thoughts at that point and then when I got my sea legs again I said, “So how is Becky?”

I mean I have problems of my own but I have some self-awareness about it. For example, I also another friend who gives good advise about networking: go out and hob-knob with other poets (oy!), join poetry groups (no), give readings (good lord!), network through teaching (I’ve seen that and I consider it a Faustian bargain). I didn’t want to do any of that. And that’s on me. I like to think of it as a handshake with mediocrity.

I’m also been reading a poetry anthology sprinkled with rediscovered poets going back to the Colonial era, poets who never published in their lifetimes but are being uncovered even now like hidden treasures. And I think how nice that sounds to me sometimes. You get the fame if not the money and you don’t have to deal with any of the bullshit, like poetry grunts at public poetry readings. (Thank you to Ann who reminded me I sent her that poem many years ago and completely forgot about it.)

But I’ve been thinking more deeply right now about where this ambivalence around success comes from. And like most things, it probably resides in my early childhood experiences, particularly with bullies. I grew up in a place where you would be a target if you won or if you lost. So the safe spot was right in the middle. When I learned what grey rocking was I was like Yes! I am a master of grey rocking. I imagine a little black belt around my little inner grey rock. Literary grey rocking. It’s perfect.

Robert Frost also wrote a great deal about futility, from the futility of building a fence to the futility of conceiving a child (he lost three, arguably four). However, he saw no futility in poetry. He famously said, “every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” And how does one monetize that?

I was writing something the other day and I referenced the game Mousetrap. I played this game with my friends Diana and Lillian when we were kids. We didn’t even bother playing the game. We just set up the mousetrap and set it in motion to see all the ways it wouldn’t work. Due to small manufacturing mistakes, the contraption rarely did work. In fact, it was an exciting miracle if it ever did.

I started writing for reasons that are not all that flattering to me. It was over a boy, of course.

You know that thing you do when you find out somebody you like enjoys some activity or experience and so you try to get into that thing so that you can build a kind of bridge with that person?

I have a bad history of these bad ideas around boys. But in this particular case, through a series of happy and sad Mousetrap-like events, I started writing poems which randomly sent in play a boot kicking a yellow bucket, knocking out a silver rolling ball down a green staircase and through the red slide, knocking the green man off the blue diving board and into the yellow tub which shakes down the red mousetrap. And here I find myself 39 years later having written many hundreds of miraculous poems.

When I first started writing, I firmly believed you had to be a dead poet to be famous poet. (I didn’t know any but dead ones.) And misguided by that belief, I did not stop writing. I just lowered by expectations.

Real, real low.

Of course, there are many very well-known poets, but nobody in my immediate family would be able to tell you the name of a single one.

It’s all relative.

Romanticism idealized both eschewing fame and expecting it. And many of us are stuck there in that perplexing purgatory.

In the forward to Margaret Atwood’s book Negotiating with the Dead, a Writer on Writing she lists two full pages of reasons why writers write including some really funny examples:

To show those bastards
To delight and instruct
Or else I would die!
Because I didn’t want a job
To make myself seem more interesting than I was
To attract the love of a beautiful woman
To rectify a miserable childhood
To serve art
To serve history
To make a name that would survive my death
To experiment
To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities
To give back

There’s plenty more. Later in chapter three, entitled “Dedication,” Atwood talks about the Lewis Hyde book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life and quotes Hyde to say, “any equation that tries to connect literary value and money is juggling apples and oranges.”

Atwood talks about economic exchange versus gift exchange. She says

“the part of any poem or novel that makes it a work of art doesn’t derive it’s value from the realm of market exchange. It comes from the realm of gift, which has altogether different modes of operating. A gift is not weighted and measured, nor can it be bought. It can’t be expected or demanded; rather it is granted, or else not. In theological terms, it is grace, proceeding from the fullness of being.”

She says, “There are four ways of arranging literary worth and money: good books that make money; good books that don’t make money; bad books that make money; bad books that don’t make money.”

So obvious it sounds ridiculous.

According to Hyde, the serious artist would be well advised to acquire an agent who can mediate between the realm of art and the realm of money….he may then remain modestly apart….Lacking such protection, he will have to maintain a very firm division in his own soul.”

Poets are obviously lacking such protection. If you’re a writer of privilege, as I am (I have a safety net or two), this is probably an easier “division of the soul.” Being a poet is a dangerous vocation, being an artist is a a risky vocation if you need that money.

Each of us in on a different path with different needs and opportunities.

Now all this is fully granting how awfully depressing it is when you speak through art and no one responds or responds in the right number of YouTube views or the response is confusing and ambiguous or your efforts don’t move the mountain of the muse itself. I know plenty of artists who tried for a while and then stopped.

And then some mediums of art cost more money than others. Films require big outlays, for example.

But then I think of a lifetime of effort I’ve spent writing many hundreds of poems, paying off a gigantic loan to have been able to go to Sarah Lawrence College (still not done yet).

I’ve never had a fortune in money, but I’ve spent the Imperial Palace in time. And how do you qualify that?

And it was my idea. Am I due a reward for it? Nobody came to me and asked me to do it.

“We really need this poem, Mary.”

I can’t get back this whole life. Nor would I want to. For me my art is like my love. Given freely or it has no value at all. No exchange required.

But then I think fundamentally I’m working under the paradigm of the gift exchange and not the market exchange. Of course I would like to be read, but on a much lesser scale of readership that those who are working under the market exchange.

It’s like throwing parties. My parties are very small. They’re like the parties in the Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Holiday (one of my favorite things ever). I feel like I’m essentially the Mrs. Potter character trying to find that very small party beyond the very big one, the more electric one on the third floor with all the eccentric and funny screwballs: Johnny, Linda, Professor Nick and Ned. Those people seeking “of esteem” over the blinding bling downstairs, the people who make due with imaginary butter on their enchanting parsnips.

Fictions

October 26, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 4 Comments

A few weeks ago I was so proud of myself. I wrote my first short story. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wrote two short stories in college and they were both terrible. One was a humorous ghost story I wrote at Sarah Lawrence and the other was an undergrad story so terrible it had no plot or subject that I can recall.

But anyway, this was a significant milestone in that I’ve been struggling with my fictions since childhood when my friend Krissy and I embarked on our first novels at age 8. Unfortunately, we had no life experiences to cull from and so our epics petered out pretty quick.

In fact, my problem writing fiction goes back to that very young me, back to when I started doing what I call “calibrating towards reality,” in other words obsessively worrying that I am thinking from an unrealistic perspective.

It all started with a tween diagnosis of anorexia, most likely tripped off from a condition called body dysmorphia (although I wouldn’t know what that term was for another decade): an inability to correctly see with my own eyes what was in the mirror in front of me.

And this dutifully led to a distrustful questioning of anything I saw or experienced, basically. Great.

My “calibrations” developed like an over-correction and led to an irritating habit of always asking surrounding people these things: “did that really happen?” or “are you seeing what I’m seeing” and basically disregarding, whole hog, experiences I have alone.

Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans just did a podcast this week about ghosts and I was thinking about whether or not I’ve had any ghostly experiences. And then I remembered I don’t believe the experiences I’ve had because there wasn’t any corroboration. There’s a mental bucket in my head for those experiences: questionable.

This calibrating is also a problem in some social situations. Like someone will be spouting off their fictions and I’ll say, “But that’s not how it happened” or “but that doesn’t make sense because…” or “but what about this other evidence that contradicts everything you’re saying?”

And then I think, “Oh crap, this person is just coping with their fictions right now or this person is just talking in marketing mode.” Leave them to their realities.

But then I think, “Wait a minute, we all have the same reality. There’s no point in the universe where their reality ends and mine begins.”

See? I can’t stop. It’s like a buffering wheel. It’s always going in my brain: “Is that right? What you’re saying?”

This is why I find deep fakes so terrifying. And why I’m hyper-sensitive to gaslighting. Stop trying to fuck up a very fucked-up experience I’m already having over here.

Anyway, here is where these calibrations have a detrimental effect on my attempts to write fiction:

Recently I was in Kansas City and I met up with my grade school friend Jayne from St. Louis. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Jayne since we started Junior High and went into separate social groups. So we had a lot of catching up to do over dinner. And at the end of the night, out in the parking lot as we were saying goodbye, she said something like, “What about that piano teacher we had, huh!” We then told our spouses the gory story and I told Jayne I was trying to write a short story about it but was struggling.

I had just recently come across a photo of this piano teacher and had looked up a newspaper article about the murder she was involved in. Because the story involved a real family, I didn’t want anything I wrote ever getting back to harm the survivors. So I decided to fictionalize everything. Easy enough. I made changes to some of the sexes of the characters, pumped up the sex drama (as you do), added some disguising plot points and boom, I was off to the races.

Except that after a little while I suddenly stopped and said to myself, “But that’s not how it happened.”

“Am I for real right now with this?” I thought. Of course that’s not how it happened. That’s the whole point of changing everything from how it happened, so that it wouldn’t be how it happened!

And so I’ve given up on that story for a while.

Telling stories doesn’t seem to be a problem for me if they’re based on reality and I’m depicting an ostensible reality, even if my memory fails me or I need to embellish for the sake of humor or someone’s privacy or, as my great-grandfather would say, to make it better than it was. Those kind of detours feel acceptable because I know the difference in my head. The core reality is clear and stories aren’t obligated.

I’ve also written two books of narrative poems and I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is there. Why was I able to do that? My Mars poems aren’t a fully realized narrative, but instead little narratives tossed in among personal lyric poems. I was still figuring out how to write narrative poems back then and could only carry a story for the length of a poem. That seemed do-able.

The next book of cowboy poems was actually a fully-drawn out, start-to-finish plotted story. It took forever but again, living in those stories was accomplished poem by poem. I always thought I could transfer that trick to short stories or a novel.

But it’s not the same. Like at all. Those genres demand you be more immersive in their fictions. And that is not a very comfortable place for me to be.

There’s a common prescription in fiction to base characters on people you know, à la Proust. As part of a fiction exercise in a fiction writing guide, I tried to make my novel characters an amalgamation of poets and people I knew. And the result was the same exact mess. My brain kept wanting to default to one real person or another. “But so-in-so wouldn’t do that.”

The new short story had the benefit of being the product of a funny dream. I was able to basically transcribe the dream, clean it up and embellish it where needed. It was subconsciously delivered almost intact and that make all the difference.

I’m thinking the problem comes with stories based on even a semblance of a true story but are not true stories, per se. And I’m leaning toward the idea that I’m to be a Donald Barthelme kind of fiction writer, veering heavily toward nonsense. Because I’m not haunted by the idea of discovering folderol, the uncanny or ghostly things.

I’m haunted by the specter of reality.

Happy Halloween!

And So the Summer Departs

September 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

To-do List Courtesy of Reddit

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here…well since our Essay Project came to a close in July. When I finish a big project I always feel suddenly a little untethered.

Alarmingly, this year has gone by faster than any year before (it would seem). Cruel summer and turned into cruel fall. Soon it will be Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The Halloween stores are already open and just a moment ago it was spring and I was finishing up migrating websites. The whole year was on the horizon and my day job was really feeling great. (They gave us ice cream!)

The year of 2023 has brought me….well, things. For one, the day job has turned into the gaslit labors of Sisyphus. And the somewhat dreadful news about Artificial Intelligence has taken a lot of wind from the sails of my proliferating digital poems.

I spent a few minutes yesterday with no small bit of ennui considering if I’ve actually accomplished anything this year.

But I have.

I’ve finished two multi-year online blogging projects on Cher Scholar and we’ve wrapped up the Essay Project here. I did create a few new browser-based poems and the The Electrical Dictionary of Melancholy Absolutes hit 100 definitions quite unbelievably this week.

And the in-progress stuff continues to march along. Although it’s been a slow slog, I’ve been working on a big course-like survey about the poems of American history. I stared about two years ago and I’m just now seeing the finish line. Monsieur Big Bang’s new Intro to Anthro podcast has me thinking about what format that survey course will take. Should it be a podcast or an online class? Should I use an educational platform for a fee or just host it myself for free (like a podcast)? I still don’t know. Podcasts have higher visibility but that format leaves out the possibility of fun PowerPoints and videos of petroglyph from my neighborhood. In any case, that’s a decision probably a year or two away.

The Katharine Hepburn poem is underway and slowing forming into itself. I’ve also started a new browser-based poem about my paternal grandfather based on some work my brother Randy finished a few years ago researching the history of our grandparents in Jicarilla, San Carlos, Hopi, Tohono Oʼodham, at the Indian School at Stewart, Nevada, and their final years in Roy, New Mexico.

I also need to dust off the Braille machine I purchased a few years ago and figure out how to write poems on that thing.

I have a little stack of experimental poetry books to review going back to last fall of 2022.

There are some fun trips ahead, too. Our group formerly known as the Sarah Lawrence writing group, now known as the Difficult Book Club, held a reunion dinner recently in New York City. It was so much fun, we’ve made plans to meet again in Winslow early next year.

And I have poems forthcoming in a spring 2024 anthology of Albuquerque poets coming out from University of New Mexico Press.

It’s a lot of work. I’ve made a big change in my day job hours that will go into effect at the first of the new year and hopefully that will give me more time finish all of this stuff. There’s that novel too.

So I guess that’s good, right? I feel like I’ve hit a plateau somehow. Oy. These are times for baby steps.

Anyway, in other news my friend Christopher gave me this book for my birthday, a coloring book created by Jane Heyes, peppered with Shakespearean, Romantic and 20th Century British poetry (except for one Walt Whitman poem floating in there, “A Glimpse“).

Maybe I should spend a few months just coloring around poems like I’m William Blake

Meditations on Milestones

June 26, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 1 Comment

Three stories:

One: a project that took so long, everything changed

I was very excited Sunday when I suddenly hit a major milestone with my Katharine Hepburn epic. I finished sorting through all my notes. Woohoo!

Okay, this may not seem like a big deal, but I took my first note while sitting on the floor of my living room in my Yonkers apartment 25 years ago.

It was a basement apartment steps away from a beautiful aqueduct trail running up the Hudson River near Odell and Warburton. I used to walk my dog there twice a day. The apartment was always freezing (and flooding) and everyone else was on rent strike…except me because nobody bothered to tell the new tenants about it.

I would gladly have joined the strike just to be able to phone my grandfather in Oregon to tell him I was finally on strike for something, at least something other than that time he talked me into going on strike in their Port Orford living room the day I was disgruntled about having to eat fish again for dinner. He even helped me make a picket sign and sent me pacing around the room with it.

Of course, he would have asked about the picket lines and I would have said, “There’s no line, Grandpa. I’m just not paying my rent! Kickin’ ass for the working class!”

Anyway, aside from reading the occasional new Katharine Hepburn biography, it wasn’t until this year that I made a concerted effort to compile all the notes from all the books, magazines and journals. And it kind of feels like 25 years, (on and off, but mostly off), digging into a basement and now I can start pouring the foundation and raising the walls.

But here’s the thing, a lot has changed for women in 25 years. And I am finding that assumptions I made about Katharine Hepburn back then, assumptions I was pretty sure most other women shared as well, they aren’t so certain anymore.

For example, Katharine Hepburn herself, both her parents and her Aunt Edith together worked for and symbolized sexual, economic and reproductive freedom for women. You don’t have to search very far on social media to find men (and women) fighting against those very ideals Hepburn stood for and defended. Conservatives are attacking reproductive freedom on many fronts, not just abortion. Contraception, control over one’s virginity or sexuality, and the entirety of women’s roles in the workplace are now contested spaces. I saw a tweet yesterday attacking a woman’s decision not to procreate at all, even through abstinence.

So I can no longer tell the story I was going to tell in the same way I was going to tell it, with the assumptions I was going to make about how women are allowed to be. The direct quotes I had been cataloging from Hepburn and her allies, quotes which still sound empowered and fearless aren’t going to land the same way for everyone. Even the assumption that an empowered woman is a positive thing is now up for debate again. I can’t even assume Katharine Hepburn can be understood as a great American hero in today’s political climate.

Two: hypertext heroics

I also finished a new browser piece, a more complicated piece using those iframes we once implemented back in the late 1990s with all those boxes and ugly scroll bars everywhere.

And usually, when I try to return to these older HTML design elements, I introduce a whole host of problems for myself and have to find work-arounds and make compromises. For example, in this piece I had wanted to use the new search technology Text Fragments. You’ve seen this in action if you’ve ever searched for something and were directed to a webpage with the exact search text highlighted. My grand vision was to show highlighted text from one frame link to another frame’s text. But Text Fragments won’t work at all with iframes so I had to scrap that architectural pipe dream.

I was telling a relative in Kansas City recently about writing browser poems and how I was going about them. And she said, “So you’re trying to make them hard to read?” And I said, “Yes.”

Because it’s hard to read on browsers. It’s frustrating on many levels. That’s what makes a book so pleasant…to this day. And pages and poems don’t get lost in a book. They don’t suddenly stop working. On the other hand, books are relatively passive. Links make you do something. Even something as microscopic as clicking a mouse button. Browsers and books, they each have their capabilities and failures.

Three, the notebook

A few weeks ago I started to use a handmade notebook I’ve been saving for a special purpose. I purchased it about 10 years ago but whenever I need a new notebook, I always go for the dollar-store ones first.

I finally decided on a use for this best notebook collecting favorite poem titles from poems I find on Twitter. And since I am reminded of the day I purchased the notebook each time I use it, I’ve been thinking about the people I met that day and looking up their names on Wikipedia. This weekend I discovered two of them have died. (Sigh.)

Nonetheless, this is an amusing story about meeting somewhat-famous people and how it doesn’t always go so well.

When we first moved to New Mexico in 2010 we lived in Santa Fe. I was working for ICANN in Los Angeles but working from home in Santa Fe. So I wasn’t meeting any new friends. This is partly because Santa Fe has become a wealthy and cliquish city. But also, I just wasn’t getting out. I met my friend Maryanne on a bus tour to see Greer Garson’s historic John Gaw Meem house on the Pecos River. For years, she was the only friend I had in Santa Fe.

I was even attempting to glom on to Monsieur Big Bang’s friends from Highlands University and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. Well, I only did this once but I befriended one of his anthropology professors, a woman from Israel living in New Mexico to study Navajo culture. She was a cancer survivor and involved in a Santa Fe charity whereby seriously rich people were raising money to help poor, rural New Mexico cancer patients afford the stupidly expensive Santa Fe motels when they came in town for treatments.

So I would invite the Professor to dinner and she would invite me to these charity art shows and events in Santa Fe, One day the two of us traveled to the small New-Mexican town of Galisteo for the town’s home studio art tour. Because it’s always fun to go house to house and see everybody’s studio set up, especially in rural towns with especially high concentrations of artists.

Galisteo is interesting in itself. All I ever knew about it was that Burl Ives lived there. If you drive through the town, it appears to be just another shady ancient and rundown New Mexican village. But shockingly those dilapidated-looking adobes are actually multi-million-dollar retirement homes. I remember the Professor telling me the CEO of Victoria’s Secret lived in one of them! How did those people even find out about Galisteo? And is it fair for a bunch of rich people to buy up a quaint little New Mexican village?

Anyway, so we went from swanky shack to swanky shack looking at everyone’s art spreads and we finished up at a house on a hill, my Professor’s friend from the cancer charity, a French woman named Evelyn Franceschi. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who had an attic full of delightfully charming French-looking things she had made by hand: books, dolls, pictures. She even made her own French chocolates. (I bought some.) She was also quirky and charming and I bought the aforementioned notebook from her and loved it so much I hated to use it for ten years.

While we were there, another friend rode up on a motorcycle. We all stood in the dark, adobe living room chatting. Evelyne found out from the Professor that Monsieur Big Bang was working on an anthropology degree and Evelyne told me we should come back sometime to see petroglyphs on a mesa bordering their property (we never did). When the Professor told Evelyne I was a writer, she told me her husband was a writer, too, and had just written a book of local Galisteo history. I was very interested in reading about Galisteo that she told me I should ask her husband about it when he came back. As if on cue, her husband arrived minutes later. I went up to him and said, “Evelyne tells me you’re a writer. What sort of things do you write?”

I was expecting him to show me his stack of book copies on Galisteo history. But with a stone face he said, “I write plays.”

And I said, “Oh.”

I remember the sound of disappointment in my voice and I could even feel my face crumple up a bit at this unfortunate news. I mean plays are nice but how often do you meet a Galisteo historian?

And so that was the conversation killer. He looked at me with the face of someone who is annoyed that you do not know who he is, but not annoyed enough for him to tell you. We each went our separate ways and I never did learn the history of Galisteo.

The Professor and I took our leave and as we were walking to her car, her motorcycle friend comes up behind us. As she’s putting on her helmet she says to me, “You know who that was, don’t you?”

And I hate it when people say that because they know very well you don’t know who that was. But anyway I said, “No. Who?”

“He wrote The Elephant Man.”

“Oh…wow,” I said. “That is impressive.”

She told us he moved to Galisteo in order to not be found. His name was Bernard Pomerance and he died in 2017 of cancer. Evelynn died in 2015, about two years after we all met in her house in Galisteo. All things considered, I’m very happy to have this souvenir of my social awkwardness, this lovely notebook handmade by the charming Evelyn Franceschi, wife of the playwright who wrote The Elephant Man and possibly other bits of Galisteo history.

The Essay Project: Silences

June 21, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In 1978 the writer Tillie Olsen published a book called Silences, “a landmark survey of disenfranchised literary voices and the forces that seek to silence them.” In 2003, the book was re-released.

This essay was photocopied from that book and appears to be its introduction.

Olsen wrote often about the political and social reasons why women have been prevented from writing. In our Sarah Lawrence College essay class back in the mid-1990s we usually passed around purely craft essays. But occasionally someone would pass around a political essay, which is kind of interesting since our professor, Susanne Gardinier, was a political poet. I’m actually surprised we didn’t cover more political pieces, just to, like, kiss-up to the teacher.

In the first part of this essay Olsen talks about creative silences in general, why artists may choose to go quiet.

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all….what are creation’s needs for full functioning?”

She talks about natural silences, those which represent a “necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation.”

But Olsen really wants to talk about unnatural silences, like for example Thomas Hardy ceasing to write novels and taking a religious vow that required he refrain from writing poetry. Or Arthur Rimbaud abandoning “the unendurable literary world.” Herman Melville’s needing to earn a living.

Akin to those silences are what Olsen calls “hidden silences: work aborted, deferred, denied,” censorship silences, self-censorship, “the knife of the perfectionist,” problems of focus or will-power, silences created by self abuse. Ernest Hemmingway is her example for this type. She borrows his own quote from “The Snows of Kilmanjaro”:

“He had destroyed his talent himself—by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.”

She then talks about silences caused by long foreground periods. Walt Whitman is a good example here and writers who didn’t even start up until their forties, fifties, sixties (Laura Ingalls Wilder). Some writers had so many life demands, they needed “the sudden lifting of responsibility” or the “immobilization of a long illness” to carve out the time to write.

Rainer Maria Rilke was so possessive of his time, his need for “a great isolation,” that he refused to help support his wife and daughter at all, let alone feed the dog. (He didn’t even attend his daughter’s wedding). I’ve heard Mary Oliver suggest as much in an essay, that’s all is fair in love and war and writing. Emily Dickinson, in her own way, withdrew from the world.

I’m just gonna say I can’t live like that. I mean, I can hermit up as much as the next monk and I feel no great rush to publish, but I can’t refuse time to people. And honestly, I don’t feel I have to. Maybe this is because I was an administrative assistant for over ten years. I learned how to multi-task. Maybe because I’m obsessed with the idea of lost time I’ve learned how to hoard it.

I’m actually multi-tasking the writing of this blog today as we speak.

I’m pretty good at “time management.” That said, I have failed to carve out the time to write the novel and the short stories. But I’ve always considered this more of a challenge of will power and work-life balance; but hey, that excuse could just as well be a rationalization.

I’m sure I could produce out more if I worked at it nine to five or even 9 to noon. But, like Joan Didion, I didn’t want to teach (or write screenplays or finagle inheritances). So then…life choices.

But I’m having the dog. Between the dog and the novel, the dogs gonna win that battle.

Olsen says, “Most writers must work regularly at something,” if not teaching than something out in the big world. But “substantial, creative word demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it.” And here she mentions Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, who produced quantity while holding down other jobs. She quotes from Franz Kafka’s diary to illustrate his struggles finding time to write.

From 1911, “I finish nothing.”

From 1917 “the strain of keeping down living forces.”

This is especially true, Olsen says, of women. Many women writers see decades between books, and not due to “lying fallow” in order to fertilize ideas. Olsen compiles a long list of the most successful women writers of the past century, (I’m assuming she means 1800s), who either had no children or had servants to help with the children. Then she lists accomplished 1900s women writers who also had “household help or other special circumstances.”

She then rightly poo-poos the belief some hold that women don’t need to create because they can “create babies.”

(For the love of..)

I need to stop now…and seethe.

AI Aiyee!

June 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve been telling people this week about what a dumpster fire my life is at the moment what with various things going awry, (job things, neighborhood things, sick friends, old dogs, and many, many more).

For example, I wanted long hair when I was young and my mother would not allow it, mostly based on her own aggravating childhood experiences of her mother brushing her long hair while she practiced piano but also because she said she knew me very well and I would never brush it. And if I didn’t brush it, spiders would nest in it. That’s what she said.

I thought, hmmm…not a deal breaker.

So what happens this morning? Ok, she was right. I don’t brush my hair very often, but seriously? I suppose you could say this is a dumpster fire of my own making but that’s not the point. The point is, that spider could have picked any other week to go for my long, unbrushed hair.

So anywho, I’ll be using a few dumpster fire pics to describe the new normal for poets and other writers in the shadow of Artificial Intelligence, another dumpster, another fire.

Everyone everywhere is talking about Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and the astounding (and creatively off-putting) gains it has made in the last few months with the release of ChatGPT.

When I was last in LA in April, my friends and I went to the Marina del Rey restaurant Dear Jane’s and our friendly waiter there, (who had just moved to LA from Atlanta), told us he was using ChatGPT to write a script for a sitcom about a restaurant where he was once employed. He said he just plugged in all the characters and some scenarios and bada-bing-bada-boom! The script was done.

Forget for a moment the cliché that every waiter in LA is writing a Hollywood script. We have more pressing problems.

I also have a friend from Sarah Lawrence who now works as an editor at a very prominent magazine in New York City. She told us the writers there are being told they have to use ChatGPT for first drafts (save us all time, you know). The writers there are very unhappy about it. Even the young digital natives are upset. Everyone can see the writing on the wall here.

For years, we’ve been letting AI learn from us everywhere from Grammerly to auto-correct to auto-suggest. And we’re so cheap and frugal. We’ll happily be lab rats as long as the App is free. As they once said in the documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” if you didn’t pay for the product, the product is you.

So here we are. Flood under the bridge.

I’ve been saying for years writers shouldn’t feel so threatened by AI since nobody wants to hear what machines have to say. We’re human beings wanting to connect with other human beings about the human being experience. I was even reminded of this while attending my niece’s graduation from Perdue in Indiana last month. We talked about AI there too. At dinner when someone suggested the commencement speeches might someday be written by AI, everyone noticeably cringed.

The table was full of engineers who had plenty to say about AI. First the engineers informed us it was really machine learning we’re talking about, not AI. (I still don’t know the difference.) My brother Andrew, his ex-wife Maureen and her best friend are all computer engineers and they had a mini-debate at the table about whether or not we could use tools to detect things created by AI.

That debate started because I lamented AI would probably affect all future literary submissions to magazines. Now this is one thing I hadn’t thought about before when I insisted people don’t want to hear poems, music and stories created by machines. We still don’t want to but what we want only matters if nobody ever lies.

And as we know, people love to lie.

So, for example, how will a literary magazine be able to tell, post ChatGPT, whether a submission has been written by a human being or a machine? We’re on the honor system now. And the problem is letting machines write your poems is easier than doing it yourself. And we all know people who care more about getting published than they do about authorship in the first place. Why wouldn’t they let a machine try to create something that would get their name in print and then just lie.

I didn’t think about the lies.

How do we even prove we’ve created something? I’m imagining a scenario like Melanie Griffith in the movie Working Girl where she’s explaining to Harrison Ford the long and winding way she came up with her business idea to prove her boss, the lying Sigourney Weaver, did not.

And what’s to stop a literary magazine from one day deciding to let a machine write the whole thing? It’s a lot easier than dealing with those pesky, needy writers. And who would even know? Who would even be able to tell? Do we even have the time to even try to figure it out?

My brother thinks we’ll soon have machine tools to be able to suss out tell-tale markers of creative AI content. My other brother Randy then said “But won’t AI then just get smarter to outsmart the tools?” To which Andrew replied that the tool will just get smarter then too.

Oy. Sounds like a lot of work.

And then having worked in the Internet business for a while myself, I can see how even AI might not be able to slog through the onslaught of information burying us these days, (AI could process it but could it find what’s meaningful for us?) or even more distressing, I can see how one bug in the program could cause a lot of damage. Happens every day. We’re not smart enough to make perfect AI. (Although some day AI could be conceivably smart enough.)

Some people are even worried AI could cause not only the loss of all our professions, but the demise of humanity itself! Some alarming scenarios are proposed in an article in this week’s The Week. I’ve been talking about some of these apocalyptic scenarios with my Dad (a former computer hardware mechanic and software programmer) for years. But he sides with the machines! “Good-bye to bad rubbish,” I think he said. No help or sympathy there.

I spoke to my cousin Mark about it last Saturday. He says what I hear most of my writer friends say, “I’m just glad I’m at the end of my career and/or life.” But if you believe at all in reincarnation, you’ll probably just get reborn decades down the line, right back into this flaming dumpster fire so that’s not a real hope of escape. Besides, I’ve got maybe 40 years left if my family genes hold up. I’m not planning on retiring from creating.

My cousin Mark also said he’s heard about people forming communities around the idea of only consuming creative material made before 2023. And honestly, if each of us just tried to consume the mountains of creative material at our disposal made before 2023, we’d never run out of music, poems, fiction, movies, or TV shows. We’ve surely got enough stuff.

But that’s still not very comforting.

Creators might have to live with creating on a much smaller scale, with just a small circle of readers. Because the joy of making art isn’t just in consuming it. Humans love to make it. Making it, in fact, might be the most pleasurable part. And at the very least, we know whether we made it or not.

It feels like a big dumpster fire in the making. Let’s just all stop brushing our hair in protest.