Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Poetry Technology (Page 7 of 8)

Movies with Poetry: Sylvia Plath (2003)

SylviaWhen I moved to Albuquerque, I discontinued my Netflix for a few months. Now they insist I buy the streaming before I can get my DVD plan back as well. All my Netflix streaming friends and relatives tell me I don’t need the DVD plan anymore because streaming is so great; but I do not find this to be the case. Of the 33 movies I have listed in my Netflix que for DVDs, only four are available on streaming. Four!! To get access to these movies I would have to pay over 15 dollars a month. So I cancelled my Netflix and signed on with a company called Green Cine. They have more of the older, independent movies and documentaries I want. They don’t have as many as the Netflix DVD library had but they have many more than streaming did and they charge me per movie or a monthly charge of less than $10 a month.

Sylvia (2003)

The first movie I rented was the BBC Film Sylvia (2003) with Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes.  

I’d recommend this movie for these reasons:

  • It seems to be a balanced account of their relationship. No black and white good/bad guy.
  • You see Paltrow handle the character arc of Plath, from manic and effervescent to morose and difficult. She’s shown as an imperfect character.
  • It’s amusing to see a muscle-set Craig play Ted Hughes. He’s actually very good and brings out the ambivalence of the character.  Hughes is in love alright but a rather pathetic and unhelpful partner, especially when the seas get rough.
  • Blythe Danner plays Sylvia Plath’s mom, (some fun meta-movie making as Danner is Paltrow’s actual mom).
  • The bad guy (Professor Moriarty) from the second 2011 Sherlock Holmes movie is in it: Jared Harris.
  • The movie shows Sylvia actually working and her labor in writing, reciting, teaching, grading, getting burned out. You see her typing up manuscripts. The movie covers the frustrations of not only her house-wife-ing but her writing. You see how competitive it was even then to get any sort of book review.
  • Lots of poetry gets recited. There are also lots of books in Plath’s house.
  • Plath and Hughes listen to vinyl recordings of another poet at a dinner party.
  • The movie is visually interesting, both drab and colorful in parts, depending on Plath’s mood. Plenty of good, detail-driven shots, haunting setups and interesting visual themes.

   

Finished My First MOOC

MoocFor that last 10 weeks I've been taking my first MOOC, massive open online course on Modern American Poetry taught through the University of Pennsylvania by Al Filreis. The course starts with Whitman and Dickinson and moves through modernists like Williams, Stein and Pound, Communists poets, Harlem Renaissance poets, anti-modernists, the Beats, the New York School, language poets and conceptual poetries.

There were a few amazing things about this class:

  • It was haaard: difficult, experimental poems, hours of lectures, four challenging essay assignments. I loved every minute of it but it was very time consuming.
  • It was huuuuge. Thirty-five to forty thousand people participated in the 2013 fall class including novices, masters students, and professors, people from all around the world.
  • The course utilized the online tools of coursera.org very effectively. In fact, the poetry MOOC is the most popular mooc of all the scholarly topics they surmise because it manages to energize students with/despite its online tools.
  • It was an ivy-league quality class offered for FREE!

I've been working this past year to get my head around more experimental and difficult poetries. Al Fin-ale-c06442-dFilreis took us through his version of the American poetry lineage and I actually really enjoyed almost everything we covered. Al is an open, friendly and challenging but cheerful teacher to take you through the world of mind-bending  conceptual and meta poetries. This is his bag for the most part. If this isn't your bag,  if you think poetry is the language of the Gods and the voice of humanity (which it can be but doesn't have to be all the time), please don't bother with this class. You'll only be a buzz-kill to about 34,900 people.

I didn't agree with everything he said, myself, and I hated the confusing way his online quizzes were worded, but his enthusiasm and help was invaluable and I came out of the class with poets to investigate further, including Whitman and Frank O'Hara who I've already read before and Susan Howe (I bought her My Emily Dickinson). The most mind-blowing piece we discussed was the final poem, Tracie Morris' performance piece Afrika(n) which was a mash-up commentary on pop culture, racial history and computer technology…all in one sentence!

Anyway, my take-aways from the class also included the following amazing things:

RrrOur last essay was about conceptual Mesostic poetries and we were tasked with doing our own. Here is where my Cher and poetry blogs converge. I did a Sonny & Cher mesostic with song lyrics.  Here's my post on Cher Scholar: I Found Some Blog about it: http://cherscholar.typepad.com/i_found_some_blog/2013/11/sonny-cher-mesostic.html.

  

Poetry Podcast Checkup

While I was driving out to Phoenix in August to meet the writing group, I listened to hours of interesting podcasts. I've been meaning to list them here (but the big-bad move got in the way).

PbsI started early in the morning with PBS News Hour poetry podcasts, both current episodes and ones from last year.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: A podcast on the book Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami by Gretel Ehrlich, a book about the Japanese tsunami survivors. She quotes William Stafford who said, a "poem is an emergency of the spirit." She talks about "beauty framed by impermanence" and how "you have to be alive to die."

– HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: A podcast with Eliza Griswold who visits Afghanistan to learn how an ancient Afghan oral folk poetry form has adapted to tell the story of the modern life for Afghani women.These anonymous poems are highly subversive and cover comments about penis size, sex and rage at the Taliban in a protected, collective poetry form without authorship. Afghani women are not allowed to write poems and could be put to death for attempting to. You can read more about Griswold's project at Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html.

As a contrast to all the poets I've been reading who deal with identity
and language struggles, these first two podcasts reminded me how meaningful and useful a
simple witness poem, all arguments aside, can be.

RECOMMENDED: A podcast interviewing Richard Blanco and some behind-the-scenes information about how an inaugural poem comes to be, about starting with a theme, trying to tap into a universal question, how an inauguration committee picks one poem from several that a poet submits. It's interesting to learn Blanco is a whiz at math, which is why he started out as an engineer.

RECOMMENDED: A podcast interviewing
editor Charles Henry Rowell about underappreciated African-American poets for a new anthology called "Angles of Ascent." Rowell quotes work I want to explore more, including Rita Dove (although I've been a fan of hers for years), Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey.

–A podcast interviewing David Ferry

–A podcast catching up with Gerald Stern. They discuss how he views his old poetry against his new poetry and how there was not a single book he can remember in his parents' house growing up, only  issues of  Look Magazine.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: A podcast covering the new anthology The Hungry Ear. Joy Harjo reads a poem called "Perhaps the World Ends Here" about life around the kitchen table. I crave this book! Just added it to my wish list.

SplThen I moved over to some Scottish Poetry Library podcasts. These are longer in form and never disappoint. As I started to listen to them I found myself lost in a shortcut I was taking through rual Arizona, between Holbrook and Phoenix. I almost had a panic attack but found these podcasts very calming. How bad can things be happening when you're listening to someone talk about poetry?

RECOMMENDED: A podcast about poet George Szirtes and his positive thoughts on modern technology like blogging and twitter ("energy makes energy; the more you do, the more you can do; things grow out of things; technology changes the terms; imagination flows into available spaces. Why not [try and] see what else you are?"). They also discuss 1960s pop music and his poems based on Alfred Hitchcock and the song "Mony Mony."

–A podcast with Polish poet Tadeusz DÄ…browski and his war against post-modernism and empty allusions. To him language is reality. Hey says poets don't admit it but they write to be liked and accepted. He feels poetry should not be only for specialists. Although he often forgoes adding titles to his poems because he feels titles can explain too much. 

RECOMMENDED: A podcast with Australian poet Kona MacPhee and all her various career experiences, her interest in science fiction, and how "poems rub up against biorphgaical symbols." Like Richard Blanco, MacPhee had an interest in math and music before poetry and is interested in how we can "pack info into a small space" like a poem or computer code and how she's interested in the intersection of disciplines.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Tracey S. Rosenberg runs a podcast round table on the art of dealing with rejection letters and why "nobody feels comfortable talking about it." This was a great little podcast on working through submissions as they have an affect on your self-esteem, time and energy levels.  Are you being rejected? Is your work being rejected? Or are you often just rejected by timing and all the factors over which you have no control. Also, they discuss how far you can edit yourself in service of finding acceptance in journals. "You can't edit what you don't know."

RECOMMENDED: The last podcast I listened to on this trip covered language identity with Singapore poet Alvin Pang. I didn't get to finish this one but I was intrigued by his discussion of how how alienated Mandarin, Malaysian and Tamil-speaking writers are from each other due to their language differences, even though they share such a small space geographically. Pang also talks about using whimsy in resistance poetry, saying sometimes the "fool is the only one who [is allowed] to laugh at the King and get away with it." Pang says to just be a poet today is political because you're not doing what society expects of you. He also talks about the influence nursery rhymes had on his poetry.

I had so many more podcasts dowloaded to enjoy on the way home to Santa Fe but I think I was a little burned out by writing-chat because I played my iPod all the way home.

 

Poets Starting Presses

PoemgiftsAn entrepreneurial poet from my alma matter, University of Missouri-St. Louis, has started a business printing off poems in a business-model similar to iTunes, selling them one poem at a time.

Jennifer Tappenden started Architrave Press which sells poems individually printed on cardstock or sold as part of a subscription.

I've been thinking about subscribing to this for a while. These poems would be great to frame and cover office walls with or as items to include in snail-mail letters.

Find more about the press at: http://www.architravepress.com/

Or visit her online store at: http://architravepress.storenvy.com/

I read about her in my alumni magazine. I love hearing about poets who are thinking outside the book…in truly productive and community-affirming ways.

Sometimes I get the feeling the state of poetry isn't so far from the state of the 2013 Video Music Awards, with Miley Cirus writhing around in a bra and panties, with her tongue hanging out, waving a big foam finger. Then some reporter on CBS interviews Cher (because her new album drops on Tuesday) and goads her into saying a bunch of negative things about how soulless and cynical and artless Miley's performance was. Then the next day Cher has bitch-slayers-regret and apologizes for allowing herself to be encouraged to be so harsh about a fellow female performer all for the  drama of some network ratings.

Meanwhile, nobody's reading poetry because, although it's full of all the same drama, bitchiness and narcisism, it doesn't involve wigs and near-nudity.

 

New Kickstarter Poetry Project

KickstarterLast week Kickstarter featured a new poetry project: Neutral Norway Collective's Second Book. They are only looking for 350 pounds and you can donate as little as one pound (about $1.50). They've already raised 312 pounds.

Think of your karma!

This is the second poetry project I've supported on Kickstarter. Last year I supported the independent filmmakers working on a documentary of New Mexico poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand.

Kickstarter is a great way to support and connect with poets from all over the world.

 

30 Poems in 30 Days – I Did It!

JoyOMG! I finished! I did 30 poems in 30 days. It was exhausting and I was so cocky when I started. I thought I could just do some exercises in stanzas every day, nothing too high stress.

But even a little poem took about a half hour a day and the longer ones hovered around an hour a day. Turns out I had no issues with putting up unfinished work. My problem was dredging up the energy to get it done every day.

Beyond the forms I used from a book I was reading (The Ode Less Traveled), I didn't use any subject prompts and never made a decision on what to write about until that day or the night before at the earliest.

It was haaaaaard y'all!

And I was pleasantly surprised using Hello Poetry. I respect it for its Google-like simplicity. Also, I was surprised that so many people were online reading these poems. I was surprised to see which poems "trended" (like items trending on Google, become popular fast). Trending was an interesting issue because the poems I thought people would not like they sometimes did and the poems I thought they would love they sometimes didn't. And trending isn't everything. Some poems didn't trend (get read by a lot of people over a short period of time) but they did find a large amount of readers over a long stretch of time. For instance, see below.

The Poem Statistics

I have 30 poems up on Hello Poetry with a bonus opening haiku. In total, they've been read 3,369 times. Yes…three THOUSAND. Unbelievable. I received 12 likes on individual poems and 8 fellow Hello Poetry writers started "following me" which basically seems to mean they've bookmarked my homepage to check out again later. That's what I've gathered from finding others to follow myself.

These were the five poems that trended (numbers as of this morning):

Tremor in the Bowl – 236 readers
Ode to a Free Girl Writing Free Verse – 217
Do the Dead Who Love Us Know – 230
 - How the Devil Plays Bach – 235
Sword of Words – 340

But over time, five other poems received as many if not more reads:

An Artifice that Time Forgot – 283 readers
Crossing the Mississippi – 109
American Ghost – 104
Things I Love About Rhoda (As Told by Mary Richards) – 376
Things Those Tests Do Not Test – 180

So as seen above, my most popular poem did not trend. My least popular poems were my most recent one and the one dedicated to the Boston bombing:

Sonnet to Spam – 18
Finish Lines – 19

I still can't believe I did it. It took a lot of physical energy and I was glad when the month was over just so I could rest today! This took some sweat.

To see all the poems, visit my Hello Poetry home page.

I'm going to be MIA from blogging for about two weeks. Monsieur Bang Bang is graduating with his Masters in Archaeology and the entire clan is coming for two shindigs at our house. Then we're going to plan a move. So happy post National Poetry Month everyone and I'll see you on the other side.

 

Movies With Poetry: Edgar Allan Poe, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Alice Duer Miller

As part of my multi-media explorations of the world of poetry, I've searched Netflix and sprinkled my movie que with movies about poets or poetry. I am old fashioned and still get DVDs mailed to me; haven't tried streaming yet . Here are my first three movie reviews of poetry-related movies:

The Raven (2012)

RavenMr. Big Bang and I actually saw The Raven, starring John Cusack, last year in the the-A-ter. Basically, this movie took some basic facts about Edgar Allan Poe's life and embellished them into a psychological-action thriller, ala the latest Sherlock Holmes fare.

I'm not against this sort of thing by definition (I kind of liked Gothic from 1986), but the results here were disappointing for these reasons:

  • John Cusak, although he "gains an inky black goatee and loses as much of his puckish ironic attitude as possible" (Entertainment Weekly, May 11 2012), is badly cast. He's still John Cusack and I never forget it.
  • To create the psychological thriller part of the movie, Poe is made to chase a murderer who is copycatting his short-story murder techniques. Saw-like gruesomeness ensues with scythe-pendulums, burials alive, and melodramatic poisonings. You've read it, they got it here. I can just imagine the snarky, angry review Edgar Allan Poe would give this movie for stealing all his maniacal devices.
  • It's got the gore but not the haunting skill. Entertainment Weekly said it best, "there are no unspoken shadows haunting his soul." He's just a messed-up drunk.
  • In trying to create early 1840s Baltimore, they filmed the movie in Belgrade and Budapest.  The results were off-kilter: for instance, the movie had no black actor extras (zero) and Baltimore was a slave state and the roads and buildings all looked too Central European. 

The pictures below say it all, over the top and heavy handed.

Raven2
Raven3 

 

 

 

 

Total Eclipse (1995)

TotalFirst of all this movie was hard to get a hold of. It was the first and only movie that sat languishing in my Netflix que waiting for all the girls and boys who are obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio to get their hands on it first in order to see all his naked scenes.

And there's plenty of nudity to go around between DiCaprio who plays Arthur Rimbaud and David Thewlis who plays Paul Verlaine. That's one perk of the movie but other than that you get DiCaprio playing his sullen, cocky and incorigable best (as seen in many other films of his early oeuvre) and Thewlis plays his pathetic, doormat of a mentor. Both are in this 1871 bisexual affair for their own poetic ambitions (only Thewlis falls for good).The movie is full of their gay, ugly tantrum fights.

I will say Thewlis has an extraordinary profile and I found his mugging more interesting than DiCaprio's mugging although both characters became very unappealing very fast. Rimbaud is an attention-whore with a juvenile urge to shock and Verlaine is a veritable pTotal2sychopath who sets his wife's hair on fire for no reason. Worse than that, he can't take a hint.

The movie, like many, glamorizes poetry. However, there are very few scenes of the poets actually talking about poetry (as you know they would be) or writing any of it. At one point Rimbaud has been trying to write (off camera I guess) and he cries out, "It's so difficult!" but then later states soberly, "The writing has changed me."

Verlaine dramatically calls absinthe "the poet's third eye." At one point Rimbuad laments, "The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable." What? Is that a logic puzzle? The movie was supposedly based upon the correspondence between the poets and like most biopics, the narrative is choppy and uneven.

But there were things I did like: the movie covers class issues among poets, something I feel is rarely discussed today. Rimbaud and Verlaine both struggle with money and time. There's a good exchange in this regard between Rimbaud and his mother:

Rimbaud's Mother: This work you do, is it the kind of work that would lead to anything?

Rimbaud (angrily): I don't know. Nevertheless it's the kind of work I do.

Who hasn't had that conversation with their mom? The movie is also about how some people literally consume their mentors and how dangerous that relationship can be.

Rimbaud, when asked to read some of his poems declares, "I never read out my poetry!" In the end, there is professional truth in his monologue about why he gives up writing poetry (he had been mostly full of hot air about it: "I decided to be a genius…I decided to originate the future!") and at the end, he dismisses his mentor as a "lyric poet" and goes off to Africa.

Roger Ebert had this to say, "The poems can be read. The film must stand on its own, apart from the
poems, and I'm afraid it doesn't. To write great poems is a gift. To be
interesting company is a different gift, which neither Verlaine or
Rimbaud exhibits in "Total Eclipse." One admires the energy and
inventiveness that Holland, Thewlis and DiCaprio put into the film, but
one would prefer to be admiring it from afar."

The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)

DoverGee, do I love it when my obsessions converge! On my other blog, I Found Some Blog…by Cher Scholar, I've been tracking Cher's month as co-host of Turner Classic Movies on Friday nights. Cher is a huge fan of classic movies and since 2011 has been dropping by to co-host movie nights on TCM. This month she's been doing a series called It's a Woman's World, powerful female-starring movies of the 30s and 40s. The first Friday was a set of four movies on Motherhood. Last Friday she did a set of war movies, one of which was the movie about an American (Irene Dunne) living in England during World War I and World War II called The White Cliffs of Dover, a movie I've only ever heard of because it was one of Elizabeth Taylor's first movie appearances.

But interesting to us on this blog, the entire film was based on a poem. Imagine that! It's a very long poem (a "verse novel" says Poem Hunter) by Alice Duer Miller called "The White Cliffs." A verse novel. Imagine that! The narration of the film starts out with Irene Dunne reciting the first
stanza of Miller's poem and then flips over to poetry written for the
film by Robert Nathan. Poetry written for a film! Imagine that! The Los Angeles Times did a story about Robert Nathan when he died in 1985. He had published 50 books of poetry and fiction.

Alice Duer Miller's original poem was influential in many ways. According to Poem Hunter:

The poem was spectacularly successful on both sides of the Atlantic,
selling eventually a million copies – an unheard of number
for a book of verse. It was broadcast and the story was made into the
1944 film The White Cliffs of Dover, starring Irene Dunne. Like her
earlier suffrage poems, it had a significant effect on American public
opinion and it was one of the influences leading the United States to
enter the War. Sir Walter Layton, who held positions in the Ministries
of Supply and Munitions during the Second World War, even brought it to
the attention of then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Alice Duer Miller was also influential as a suffragette:

She became known as a campaigner for women's suffrage and published a
brilliant series of satirical poems in the New York Tribune. These were
published subsequently as Are Women People?. These words became a
catchphrase of the suffrage movement. She followed this collection with
Women are People!
(1917)

The movie is your basic war-time romance/tearjerker about a woman who loses everyone she loves in two wars. I don't particularly like war movies and a weekend watching four of them ("Three Came Home" from 1950 was particulary harrowing) put me into quite a funk. People never learn. None of our laments about war are new, etc.    
Roddy

The New York Times recently called the movie "A Cinderalla story in sweet disguise" but I couldn't disagree more. Her life was full of tragedy and lonliness shortly after she married. Had she picked boyfriend number one, she might have had an entirely happier life in America.

At least the movie is good for the appearance of Roddy McDowall who plays the young, charming son.

 

New Video! Poet in Real Life: The Job Interview

Big Bang is proud to announce the premiere of our first video, Poets in Real Life: The Job Interview. One of my mentors in this whole process of publishing and blogging suggested I use the site Xtranormal to create it. So that we did. Tell us what you think.

 

The Making of Poet in Real Life: The Job Interview

Xtranormal was pretty cool in many ways. It was not free, althought it claims to offer a free basic plan. But many of the animation sets you will need to choose, anything more than two characters and special effects…many of these things cost "points" which you will need to buy. On the bright side, points are cheap. My 3 minute movie above cost 400 points. The cheapest point plan was 1200 points for $10 bucks. That breaks down to about 3 movies at this level for $10. I may not use Xtranormal beyond that. Not sure at this point. I had a hard time finding two voices that could pronounce all the words (like "profudity" for the girl and "quote cheese in their crackers" for the guy). Also many of my browsers struggled with the video files. I had to rotate between Firefox, Explorer and Chrome.

Poetry for Professionals

A good article in Harvard Business Review, "The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals" from 2012.

 

The Overwhelming World of Poetry Websites

PoetryGone is the world of ink and quill poetry. Well, actually there probably is a website out there dedicated to writing poems with ink and a quill pen; I just haven’t found it yet. But for the most part, poetry has entered the Internet age, like it or not.

And maybe this isn’t the end of the world. Ink writing, as can be seen in the graphic to the left, was a bit messy in its own way. When you start to dip into the world of poetry and literature websites, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and throw yourself into lamentations that there are too many poets, too many bloggers, too many people spouting their opinions.

You may say there are not enough readers (for your poetry, let’s be honest). But I’ve just spent hours and hours over the last few months visiting literally hundreds of writing, literature, academic and poetry blogs and websites and all of these folks are happily reading and reading ravenously. I don’t believe for one minute that it’s a shame so many people are blogging about literature and poetry. I think it means only that the Internet has felled the gates of the gatekeepers and the masses have risen to talk about their love of books.

Today we have to be our own gatekeepers. Which for those complainers, this might be a drag for you. It means more labor in the service of literature. (You don’t sit on your fat ass reading books for nothin!)

I have discovered, however, that most literature websites have very messy blog rolls (lists of their favorite websites). Believe me, I’ve dealt with these blog rolls quite intimately. You have no idea perusing them which blogs are good for news, which blogs are good for commentary, which are good for book reviews.

And this is what makes my blog roll superior, in my humble opinion. I’ve used the social bookmarking site StumbleUpon to house my blog roll and recently I’ve created handy lists to categorize all the many fine websites. My categories are based not on what a website or blog may have been created to provide, but what I personally find useful about the blog. For instance a blog may be a book-review blog but I find it more useful in keeping up with industry news and so I’ve categorized it as such.

Please feel encouraged to visit my blogroll and peruse or “follow” my lists or leave comments about the way they’re organized or what would be more helpful.

All 107+ of my favorite sites can be found randomly on my StumbleUpon Likes page.

You can view all 10+ lists on my StumbleUpon List page.

Here are the individual lists

  • Poems to Read – Sites that primarily exist to provide you with good poems to read.
      
  • Lit Chat – Braniacs working over all kinds of literature topics.
      
  • Ruminations on Poetry — like Lit Chat but all poetry braniacs.
      
  • Lit News – My most favorite type of literature site: gossip!
      
  • Life as a Poet – Blogs that talk about the day-to-day life of being a poet. Invaluable honesty.
      
  • Off-the-Beaten-Path Book Reviews – Quirky reading journeys.
       
  • Books as Objects – Sites that “cover” book design.
      
  • Specialty Poetry – Sites that deal with specific kinds of poetry, war poetry, avant garde poetry, Sci Fi, Mathematical, sacred poetry, translations.
     
  • Interaction – Sites that provide ways for you to interact with other poets, teachers or get involved in the world of poetry.
      
  • Good Literary Distraction – Sometimes you just get tired of heady literary bickering and you want a website with pictures of books that have fallen into the bathtub or posts from a bookstore owner or reviews of the covers of dime-store novels or posts that will talk you down from ever desiring an academic career.
        
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