Category: Poets in Action (Page 10 of 14)

The Los Angles Times Book Festival

May 11, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some notes form the fiction panels I aggended:

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

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

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

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

American Language, Ideas of Performance and Natalie Diaz

November 19, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The Poetry Foundations magazine, American Poets, included a great essay by Natalie Diaz in the most recent, Fall/Winter 2015, issue. Recently, they published this same essay in their online newsletter.

Ostensibly, the essay introduces some contemporary American Indian poets you may not know, including Ofelia Zepeda, Michael Wasson, Margaret Noodin, Joan Naviyuk Kane, and Sherwin Bitsui. In the online version, be sure to visit their poems below the essay and to use the right-side arrows to scroll through the subsequent poets.

But before introducing these poets, Diaz addresses two issues important to her, the first being the state of American Indian languages. Diaz has spoken on a few occasions regarding her efforts as a language learner in the Mojave Language Recovery Project.

Sherman Alexie, (a Spokane poet I recently discovered in the CNM traveling library and blogged about this year), also speaks out frequently on preservation of the many endangered American Indian languages.

I love that this issue is getting prominent attention in American Poets. All Americans should care about preserving the continent's languages as much as an Irishman would care about preserving Celtic. As a lover of words, I fantasize there will someday be an American Institute of Languages, a college dedicated to funding the preservation of all American languages.

In a Great Courses class I’m currently taking taught by Anne Curzan, (The Secret Life of Words, a class I would highly recommend for word nerds), I just learned that Anne Curzan, Sherman Alexie and Maxine Hong Kingston are all members of the American Heritage Dictionary word usage panel. And I love to imagine a multi-cultural, multi-lingual group of wordsmiths debating the evolution of English, which has now become the first truly global language but one historically full of borrowed words, including plenty of American Indian words.

And if I wish for something short of a severe French Academy, I believe we desperately need something more than dictionary panels. We need something putting power and money behind the study of the plethora of American languages and language hybrids.

My fantasy of such a college was ignited again in the summer of 2014 when I visited the somewhat abandoned-looking Stewart Indian School in Stewart, Nevada, where my grandfather was once superintendent in the late 1950s and where my father lived when he was in high school (he drove the school bus). This school, like many Indian boarding schools, has a controversial heritage.

As a side note, when I was the interim faculty secretary at the Institute for American Indian arts I read the novel by the fiction instructor there Evelina Lucero, Night Sky, Morning Star which took place at the Steweart Indian School. From talking to her about it, we discovered she grew up in the very same house my father had lived in, the same location where my parents were married.

I couldn’t help but believe that if this beautiful stone campus resided on the East Coast it would have a huge endowment and be named a historical location and be still operating. According to the school’s website, there are "earthquake safety issues with the masonry buildings." Could this be fixed? I don’t know. Admittedly, part of the reason this is my fantasy location for an American languages school is personal. But part of my dream is politi-practical: why won’t some nationalist, rich white billionaire invest in the preservation of American languages?

And if my fantasy finds another historic location and can continue, I see Anne, Maxine, Sherman and Natalie all there teaching, working and collaborating about preserving and observing the progress of American’s languages, particularly ones we are in danger of losing.

But then Diaz’s essay changes course and starts to discuss her connotation of the word "performance" and how it is used to describe poets giving readings, particularly American Indian poets giving readings and how prescribing performance to Indian American readings can be offensive. Here is where I find I can’t agree with her assumptions about the word.

Here’s what she says in particular:

“On many occasions, after readings at which I am the only native reader in the lineup, and especially if I am the only person of color in the lineup, the things said to me are different from those said to my nonnative colleagues. The most common response I hear directed toward my colleagues is, “Good reading,” whereas I am told, “That was a good performance.” Performance, of course, is a loaded word for many reasons, not the least of which is the association the word has with the red- and blackface depictions presented in our culture as recently as the new Adam Sandler movie, scheduled for release in December. It is as if, for certain audience members, my identity as a native person overpowers my identity as a writer. While my nonnative, white colleagues are heard and even critiqued as writers who employ skill to craft a poem and deliver it to an audience, it’s as if I am looked at as having relied on some innate part of my native identity. In certain eyes, I didn’t toil over my poem,
I simply performed my nativeness.

Native poets also encounter this perception when they incorporate native language into their poems. Rather than its presence being understood as a craft choice, a language choice, a verb choice—it is all of these things and so much more—it is perceived as something less than craft and expertise. Poems that employ native language are often viewed by the academy, or audience members educated by the academy, as something more along the lines of folk art, something that has arisen out of that still “wild,” “uneducated,” “naked” part of us that hasn’t fully assimilated.

We are often regarded as dead people frozen in museum time—our languages, too, are interpreted and misunderstood as something ancient and not alive, something primitive and therefore undeveloped, therefore lesser."

I have to say I have seen Natalie Diaz read and her book is one of my favorites of the last five years. I blogged about it in 2012. And I have to admit, after reading this essay I raced back to my review to see if I referred to her reading as a performance. Thank God I didn’t but I honestly might have.

I do agree with Diaz that American Indians are often regarded as nonexistent, not only themselves, but their culture and languages. They are regarded as living museum exhibits or like “people that time forgot” especially in locations where there are few to none among the population, such as in St. Louis, Missouri, where I grew up. Not to say I was an expert, but because were were from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and because my father grew up on reservations in Arizona, I knew more about the reality of American Indian history and current culture than my friends and teachers did.

However, I’m not Indian. I can't speak to how it feels to hear the word performance. But I can speak to why it is that Diaz gets invited to more cultural and anthropology classes than poetry classes. This is a symptom of one culture’s flawed attempt to fix its first problem, the base ignorance. It’s also a symptom of the poetry problem, the fact of poetry’s devalued status in anglo-American culture.

I would also argue that there is a bit of anthropology in all poetry, just as there is a bit of philosophy, science and spirituality. Eons from now, all poets of America will be mined for anthropological purposes. I support science's exploitation of poetry. It’s just awkward that American Indians are being treated as if they’re already left the building, treated like souls from a lost time. But the political reality is that in many areas of America, they are.

What to do about this? All ways forward seem wrong. Proceeding to educate Americans about the realities of American Indian experience will be frustrating.

I just don’t agree that much of this hinges on the word performance or that the use of the word is even subconsciously intended to be derogatory. And I think that here is where many misunderstandings occur around word connotations between cultures.

Some poets read, some poets perform. Joy Harjo read her poems in this video (and performs her saxophone); she performed her show at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light.

Poetry slam poets perform, even when they appear to be reading. Academic poets tend to read. I think Natalie Diaz performs; she takes it up a notch.

Part of my connotations of the words reading and performing have to do with my ideas of theatricality and my theatrical husband, Monsieur Big Bang's, critiques of poetry readings I’ve taken him to. He always notes the difference between a reader and a performer and this never maps to anything cultural, other that the poetry culture or theatrical culture. Sometimes people read when they should perform; somethings they perform when they need to read.

One of the best poet performers I’ve ever seen was at a poetry panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books back in 2006. I’ve tried to research online to figure out who that poet was. Back then I was sadly uneducated about my poets. I can tell you this: he was an old, white guy.

Here were the two poetry panels of that year (I remember hating their lame, ambiguous titles).

Poetry: Seasons in Verse
PANEL 2082
Moderator Mr. Douglas Messerli
Ms. Eloise Klein Healy
Ms. Alice Quinn
Ms. Kay Ryan
Mr. Timothy Steele

Distilling Reality: The Poet’s Craft
PANEL 1082
Moderator Ms. Dana Goodyear
Ms. Gail Mazur
Ms. Marilyn Nelson
Mr. Donald Revell
Ms. Amy Uyematsu

So there were only two white men on these panels (I'm sure it wasn’t the moderator): Timothy Steele and Donald Revell. Monsieur Big Bang thinks it was Donald Revell based on the sound of his voice. But that was almost 10 years ago; how could you remember that?

Here the thing: Jack Gilbert was at the festival too, winning an award. I think Jack made a surprise visit to one of these panels and he’s the unforgettable performer we witnessed. Why? Because I feel like I recognize his name and in online videos I see that he leans forward on his elbows when he reads and he looks like an old pirate. Monsieur Big Bang says the guy looked like an old pirate (see right).

He was the best poetry performer because he memorized his poems, he leaned forward with his elbows on the table stared right out at all of us in the audience as he recited from memory the entire poems. It was unforgettable, the true difference between a reading and a performance.

Memorization: it stinks but is effective.

If it was indeed Jack Gilbert, I should pinch myself that I was able to see even a mini-Jack-Gilbert performance. Such as LA Times Book Fest technology went, there’s probably only a cassette tape somewhere that documented the event and long boxed-away in an un-locatable archive. I didn’t even know who he was back then! Incredible! Now I can’t even afford his Collected Poems used on Amazon.

Here is Donald Revell (right) who does make some serious eye contact.

Here is Jack Gilbert in an interview and doing more of a reading than a performance.

Anyway, reading and performance—there is a difference. Diaz may get called a performer by some other Anglo by virtue of the fact she is labeled “Indian” but this Anglo insists on calling her a performer because she’s better than a reader, not less than one.

To further cause problems, I think a similar connotation problem is happening around the word costume. White culture consistently uses costume to describe traditional American Indian clothing, religious or not. And this consistently offends. Some of this may be willful ignorance, some may use the word dismissively; but often I find the user doesn’t have a good word to substitute for costume. Sure, on Project Runway costume designers (think Bob Mackie) are thought less of than the haute couture designers, but most Americans would are at a loss to name categorize various articles of clothing. I heard Anglos often refering to nun’s habits and the Pope’s robes as costumes too. I don't doubt that some of Diaz’s Anglo fans describe her reading style as drum-like or chant-like, but I see this as coming more from an inability to articulate how they are experiencing her reading in more productive ways. They might hear phantom hip-hop sounds from African American poets or misread British poets as being more refined than they actually are due to stereotypes about British accents. As Oprah says, "when you know better, you do better."

Language is notoriously imperfect when bridging the divide of cultures. I hope someday Natalie Diaz can be found teaching a class about it at The College of North American Languages.

Poetry in Unlikely Places

October 8, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I started taking the Emily Dickinson Harvard online course a few weeks ago. While flipping through my Dickinson anthology, Final Harvest (it wasn’t), I came across a poem I had marked in college as having been in the movie Sophie’s Choice. Remember the scene where Meryl Streep goes into the big, intimidating library looking for Dickinson’s poems and mispronounces her name and then faints?

At least that’s how I remember it from the time I rented the cassette from Movies To Go. Later, she quotes this poem:

“Ample make this Bed–
Make this Bed with Awe–
In it wait til Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.

Be it Mattress straight–
Be its Pillow round–
Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground—"

(1891)

Monsieur Big Bang and I joined our local food co/op this year. How happy was I to find a poem in the September newsletter? Very! It was a piece by a well-known ABQ poet, Hakim Bellamy. The newsletter is doing a series of his poems in partnership with the Santa Fe Art Institute around food justice, food security, food deserts (like local reservations and barrios). Find out more at: http://sfai.org/food-justice/ and http://sfai.org/residencies/food-justice-residents/.

Here are two excerpts:

“Back when medicine men
and medicine women
could not save someone’s life
without seeing how they live.”

and

“…there is no time for hunting and gathering
between Bob’s Burgers and bus tops."

You can read the full poem on page 4 of the newsletter’s online version: http://issuu.com/lamontanitacoop/docs/september_2015_cc

Television!

Sometimes it’s good to look at what your competition is doing. If you don’t think TV is really your competition, (you’re so over it), listen to what this literary-lover has to say about TV today in this article form The New York Times.

Some poets I know love to keep insisting TV is the eternal boob tube. And two minutes later they lament about poetry's low readership, never noticing how out of touch they come across. Television: has so much changed or have people finally figured it out? You’re not competing with BAD television, your competing with GOOD television!

Poetry in O, The Star, NPR

April 28, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

American Poets magazine has a Walt Whitman essay by Mark Doty and in their annual report, they discuss a poetry reading they hosted recently called Poetry and the Creative Mind which they say tracks the influence of poetry on readers from other disciplines. I hope we get a report on that someday. I think it melds well with the Poetry on Mars project here on BBP, to get poetry into the hands of researchers in order to provide practical subject-based backup, a kind of laser-like focus on a topic, or further testimonial evidence to a study.

I went to Red River a few weeks ago and left all my books at home. I was forced to visit the bookstore of a mega-chain in order to find some reading material for the weekend. If you’ve been in a Target you know that they have at least 2 aisles of books. Let me just say Walmart has a lousy book section. There was less than a quarter of an aisle of reading material in there! But then I guess plebs aren’t getting under paid to read.

The April issue of O Magazine features National Poetry Month. The article is called "Why Poetry Matters." Former us poet laureate Natasha Trethewey opens up the discussion with this content: “In an era of sensory overload, there is stillness and clarity to be found in verse.” She goes on to elaborate how in poetry she found a “place to place grief.” Poetry, she says, also provides us with community, it shows us to ourselves, it acts as refuge, and serves to continue a cultural legacy.

Laura Kasischke, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award says poetry can be “understood in parts of our brain that appreciate sounds, or smell.” This section also included prompts from The Poet Tarot Deck (from two sylvias press). What Oprah magazine article would be complete without product promo? I’m snide but you know I’m going to buy this as soon as I can scrape up fifty dollars.

There are also six short book reviews and reviews of two poet memoirs.

A friend of mine recently purchased for me a gift subscription to the tabloid magazine The Star. Inside there’s that good ole National Amateur Poetry Competition advertisement. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this sucker.

By the way, here is a handy list of writing contests to avoid: https://winningwriters.com/the-best-free-literary-contests/contests-to-avoid (their own site’s contests might be best avoided as well).

News and articles

From my colleges

Here is a CNM article on slam poet champion, writer, TEDx presenter, teacher, dedicated activist, mother, CNM tutor, and now Albuquerque’s newest poet laureate, Jessica Helen Lopez.

A University of Missouri-St. Louis blog post: Bilingual poet’s second collection shifts to second language

National Poetry Month

“Read This Poem” project to usher in National Poetry Month (SF Gate)

President Obama on why poetry matters (Yahoo!)

Poet booths in subways: Bespoke Poetry Hits The Subways With Peanuts-Inspired "The Poet Is In" (The Gothamist)

People

Gary Snyder (NPR)

James Merrill (Bend Bulletin)

Patti Smith Punk Poet Laureate (The Guardian)

Other

Video poetry: Red Riding Hood Revisisted: https://vimeo.com/3514904

Quote Deck, Good Finds

March 22, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Good Quote-age

I did enjoy my subscription to Poetry London over the last few years. I liked it for its many reviews placing large amounts of international poets—insiders and outsiders—on my radar. But it has been expensive getting the magazine stateside and so for now I’ve switched to a virginal subscription to Poetry Magazine and the tiny journal of short fiction called One Story. Tough times, tough choices.

My first issue of Poetry (February) included a pretty amazing experimental poem by Elizabeth Willis called “Steady Digression to a Fixed Point” with some skillful verbal weaving that actually takes us somewhere.

There’s also a snippet of the Amiri Baraka poem “Tender Arrival” that I wanted to share:

“What do you call that the anarchist of comfort asks,
Food, we say, making it up as we chew. Yesterday we explained
language.“

Lists of Poems

Over the last few weeks I’ve received two emails from Poets.org/The Academy of American Poets that were very interesting, one for St. Patrick’s Day and the the start of spring and another for Women’s History Month. The emails include a list of relevant poems along with links to audio poems and video.

The poetry list for spring and St. Patrick’s Day:

“Infinite and Plausible” by Tina Chang
“Spring is like a perhaps hand” by E. E. Cummings
“Luck is not chance (1350)” by Emily Dickinson
“In cold spring air” by Reginald Gibbons
“Anything Can Happen” by Seamus Heaney
“The Conditional” by Ada Limón
“Personal Poem” by Frank O’Hara
“Chance” by Molly Peacock
“The Chance” by Arthur Sze
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree ” (with audio) by W. B. Yeats

The list for Woman’s History Month:

“Blues” by Elizabeth Alexander
“Alone” by Maya Angelou
“Slight Tremor” by Linda Gregerson
“The Weighing” by Jane Hirshfield
“Where I Live” by Maxine Kumin
“The Words Under the Words” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“psalm” by Alicia Ostriker
“City Lights 1961” by Diane di Prima
“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely [On the bus two women argue]” by Claudia Rankine
“The Poem as Mask” by Muriel Rukeyser

Visit their links above to view the poems and sign up for their emails to get these email lists.

Lists of Review Outlets

Poets & Writers Magazine has a database of book review outlets: https://www.pw.org/review_outlets

News Links, March 22

What Happened When A White Male Poet Read Michael Brown’s Autopsy As Poetry (The Huffington Post)
A Poet In Every School – the Detroit iO Program (The Huffington Post)
Interview with poet Jane Hirshfield – Hirshfield has out a new book of essays about poetry (SFGate.com)

As a teen I was very inspired by Mark Twain’s home in Connecticut and his typewriter in Hannibal, Missouri. Since then I’ve always looked forward to visiting writer’s homes. Poet’s don’t get as many museums turned out of their homes, however. But now we have one more:

TS Eliot Foundation buys poet’s Gloucester summer home (WCVB Boston)
Quiz: Can You Match These Homes to the Poets that Lived in Them (The Guardian)

And because I’ve had family in Anchorage and Santa Fe…

A Long Way From Anchorage: Poet Joan Kane Gets a Boost in Santa Fe (Indian Country Today)

Poetry Apps

Last week I found an app called “The Waste Land” from Touch Press Limited costing a pricey $13.99. If you’re a big fan of this poem however I’d say the cost might be worth it. The app boasts having a performance of the poem by Fiona Shaw, audio readings by many people from Ted Hughes to Viggo Mortensen to Jeremy Irons and lots of references, allusions, and notes on structure. There are also 35 perspectives on the poem and the original manuscript with Ezra Pound’s editing. Find out more: http://thewasteland.touchpress.com/

More Craft March: Intellectualizing and Performing

March 14, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Mindful Intellectualizing

I’m in a mindfulness program at CNM for faculty and staff. This week, we received a Harvard Business Journal article called Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain by Christina Congleton, Britta K. Holzel and Sara W. Lazar.

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about how mindfulness can create changes in your brain in a very testable, physical way. This article goes further to make connections to how our brain behaves in states of stress or mindfulness, what kids of thinking these states effect.

I feel this information has direct implications not only as to the type of poetry we choose to write but regarding why we write that way and how we conceptualize and intellectualize poetry. For instance, current arguments on form and conceptual poetries revolve around our sense of self, degrees of perception, complex thinking and the role of emotion and introspection. Turns out these ways of thinking are not only altered by mindfulness (homeostasis) and stress, but the brain is physically altered by continued experiences in these states. Specifically the hippocampus is one of the brain areas affected. Those living with chronic stress show smaller hippocampuses. This alters their sense of self, perception, body awareness, emotion regulation, and abilities regarding introspection and complex thinking. Mindfulness and stress affect another area of the brain, the ACC area, which involves decision making and resisting distractions.

Honestly, as an artist you can make any degree of homeostasis or stress work for you. That’s not the issue. What this does say, however, is that our intellectual differences in poetic identities and theory could be more physiological than truly intellectual.

It puts these endless arrangements in perspective if our predilections turn out to be physiological. It's possible we're not even starting on the same page, biologically speaking.

That Thing You Cannot Explain

Similar to last week's post on cognitive bias and persuasion, I've been finding a lot of good food for art-thought from articles on user experience and design. Joel Marsh is a self-described Experience Architect and his blog has some fascinating finds. Here’s a quote he posted about art, science and “that thing you cannot explain”: http://thehipperelement.com/post/111467573348/art-is-made-to-disturb-science-reassures-there

Presentation

Mashable recently published a posted called "Why are poets' voices so insufferably annoying?", an essay on the annoyingly solemn voice poets use for public readings.

Without realizing it, I had been talking in "poet voice" — that affected, lofty, even robotic voice many poets use when reading their work out loud. It can range from slightly dramatic to insufferably performative. It's got so much forced inflection and unnecessary pausing that the musicality disappears into academic lilting. It's rampant in the poetry community, like a virus.

Some thought-leaders feel poets should affect this performative voice when we read in public. However, most of the public feel we sounds affected and silly. This is a usability issue!

Similar pleas to end "poet's voice":

City Arts: Stop Using 'Poet Voice'

Huffington Post: Poet Voice and Flock Mentality: Why Poets Need to Think for Themselves

News and Affirmations

February 7, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Poet News

Neruda is back in the news with investigations on his possible poisoning.

The Hindu does a short piece on protests poetry.

The Huffington Post has a story on Rupi Kaur, "The Poet Every Woman Needs to Read.

A tale of two Iranian poets: "Iran has long been one of the few countries where poetry enjoys mass popularity. So, it came as no surprise that the death earlier this week of the poet Moshfeq Kashani was treated as a major event with a special message from Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei paying tribute to the poet and miles of coverage in the official media. Kashani collapsed and died during a ceremony honoring another poet in Tehran…At the same time, however, the same authorities that heaped praise on the 89-year-old Kashani were determined to prevent any attempt at marking the first anniversary of the execution of another poet, the much younger Hashem Shaabani, who was sentenced to death by hanging on a charge of “waging war on God”.

The New York Times obituary of poet Rod McKuen.

In local news…

I've added new quotes on writing strategies and narcissism to my book page for Writing in the Age of Narcissism.

Poet Affirmations

We haven't done these in a while. These are all by poet Mark Nepo and these quotes can help guide us all through ways of seeing and intellectualizing what we write about:

"Live loud enough in your heart
and there is no need to speak."

"Birds don’t need ornithologists to fly."

"If you can’t see what you’re looking for, see what’s there."

"Before fixing what you’re looking at, check what you’re looking through."

"No amount of thinking can stop thinking."

Promoting Your Own Work with Video

January 12, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Promoting your own work – in this day of low publisher promotion, it's something poets must learn how to do. Ann Cefola figured out a way to put together a fun poetry video.

She tells me she recorded herself reading her poem "Velocity" from her new book Face Painting in the Dark. She then selected photos from the Internet and included a copy of "I'm Sittin' On Top of the World" by Les Paul and Mary Ford.

She says she wanted the song because the lyrics were "I'm sitting on top of the world, just rolling along, just rolling along" and "Like Humpty Dumpty, I'm about to fall." Cefola says, "Les Paul and Mary Ford had such energy together and their songs had a sparkly innocence–it seemed right for that moment in time."

She then sent the images to a film editor who used effects to create a sense of movement out of the individual photos. You could also try to create a slide show yourself in Windows Live Movie Maker or some similar software for Macs.

A Book About the Dark Side of the 1970s

December 11, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Over on my sister-site Cher Scholar, I've just published a recent interview with the author of a new novel, Sister Golden Hair, about a pre-teen girl named Jesse growing up in the early-to-mid 1970s. I talk to author Darcey Steinke, the daughter of a minister and a beauty queen, about how a celebrity-obsession with Cher works in the narrative and what Cher's "text" means vis-à-vis our struggles with ideals of beauty, role models and holiness. We also talk about the construction of her novel and depicting the trials of a teenager navigating issues of identity.

Interview with Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair

News! The Revolution, Creativity, Entomologist Poets, Stephen King, John Ashberry, and Festivals

September 22, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

It's amazing what you find when you search the Internet for poetry news, how many mainstream publications are indeed writing about poetry and the latest dramatic data on eBook and Indie publishing.

John Ashberry agrees to a collection of eBooks (New York Times)
Twenty Emerging UK/Ireland Poets (The Guardian)
Story about the Australian Poet Geoffrey Lehmann (Yahoo! Australia)
The American Entomologist Poet’s Guide to the Order of Insects (Entomology Today)
Stephen King talks about his Father’s poetry (The Daily Beast)
Wallace Steven’s Heartford Home Purchased for Residence–with Pics! (The Courant)
The homeless poet of Brentwood, California dies (West Side Today)
The Poetry longlist for the National Book Award (Washington Post)
Wisconsin Poetry Festival Oct 10-11
Where have all the poets gone? (NPR): you might worry this article is another clueless piece about the lack of good poets today, especially when it wonders where are all the protest poets these days. It actually does provide a list of the current protest poets and declares they should be on the front lines of culture instead of ghettoized as a subculture: "Did they stop speaking, or have we stopped listening?"
A Woman’s Epilepsy Medication Turned Her Into a Compulsive Poet (New York Magazine)
The 7K Report (AuthorEarnings.com): This is an amazing report from February 2014 which talks about the lack of data on eBook sales and indie publishing, why that data is missing and how one crafty author found a way to download the information from Amazon on author and publishing earnings, broken down by percentages. Although this particular study deals in more popular genres, there are important lessons here for poets. It's shocking not only to see how well indie books rank on Amazon sales lists but how poorly small presses are doing (from just about every angle). The study also tracks the success of a title based on the set price of a book and makes a good argument for more reasonably priced eBooks. The report surmises why the Big 5 publishers overprice their eBooks and how this hurts overall sales. Again, this has implications for poets and their eBooks.
10 Reasons Self Published Authors Will Capture 50 Percent of the Ebook Market by 2020 (The Huffington Post): The creator of Smashwords makes some Indie predictions as well in September 2014.
The July/August 2014 issue of The Atlantic has an interesting article on the secrets of the creative brain by Nancy C. Andreasen, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and student of literature. She quotes Shakespeare and John Dryden to illustrate her ideas. She explains the difference between convergent and divergent thinking. The study of creativity tests someone's ability to come up with many divergent responses to probes as opposed to one correct answer, which IQ tests measure. The study also measures the differences between high IQ scores and high creative scores and whether creativity is inherited or nurtured. Creativity tends to run in families and creative thinking might just be a skill one is born with. When studying brain scans, Andreasen found different brain centers lighting up for creative and less-creative people. This may just be the essential part of creative work many teachers declare "can't be taught."
More on the Poet’s Forum 2014 conference: Will include a series of short films on New Yorker’s love of their favorite poems, a project connected to Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem project. There will also be panels on publishing, promotion, endangered languages, revision, translation, prose, ekphrastic poetry, and a lecture by Richard Blandco.
Edward Hirsch's new book of poems, Gabriel, received a rare review in Entertainment Weekly. Unfortunately the eBook is overpriced at this time with $11.84.