Category: Think Outside the Lament (Page 2 of 7)

The Essay Project: War Writing (It’s Closer to Home Than You Think)

October 14, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The essay I dug up for this week is definitely from the Sarah Lawrence essay class because Lamont and Annie actually put their names on the first page, which is nice, because then I can remember them. They found a Jan/Feb 1996 article in The American Poetry Review by Christopher Merrill about poets and the war in Sarajevo, “Everybody Was Innocent: On Writing and War.”

Aside from this essay, we can all sense we’re living through unprecedented times right now, relatives against relatives, old friends against old friends, teams against teams. I watched The Social Dilemma last weekend on Netflix and fears are mounting regarding civil wars in most established democracies around the world right now. This is no longer a far-fetched idea. And it seems social media has done a lot of the work to create a monstrous dystopian reality for all of us.

As writers we all may soon be called upon to become war writers right inside of our own poems about place. This will become the same project.

When I read news reports of Sarajevo back in the 1990s, I remember feeling very moved and very removed. So reading this essay again gave me both a flashback on that feeling and an entirely new perspective.

In this article, Christopher Merrill visits Sarajevo and interviews an ‘embedded’ poet there. Which reminded me, I subscribed to APR for a few years and never read a single article like this in the journal, only academic reviews and landscapes. I wish APR had been as hard-hitting when I subscribed.

The article talks about the special issues around writing about war, such as:

“I want to explore some of the ways in which writers can approach a subject extensively covered by the media: when television cameras shape our perception of a tragedy like Bosnia, how can writers respond to it without, as Sarajevans say of some visitors to their city, ‘going on safari’ – shopping for material, that is, like tourists?”

We can easily replace the idea of television with cable news and social media.

1996 was a year of commemorations, Merrill stated: the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, V-J Day, the shootings at Kent State, the fall of Saigon…

"it is important to remember that more than fifty wars are now taking place around the world. The Cold War is over, and we are deep into the Cold Peace.”

Merrill talks about how in Sarajevo the war script was flipped, how in typical wars, the majority of the casualties were soldiers. But in Bosnia, the majority of deaths were civilian. He talks about the “sense of ambiguity integral to the talks of writing about war. Nothing is as it seems…despite what pundits and politicians would have us believe.”

He quotes Vietnam writer Tim O’Brien:

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of the truth itself, and therefor it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is every absolutely true.”

He talks about the “enormous power of television” and how “CNN has the power to shape events” and again for us it's the cripplingly awesome power of social media and the Internet.

The article quotes Greek poet, Odysseas Elytis, translated by Olga Broumas and T. Begley, who says that during World War II,

“An entire contemporary literature made the mistake of competing with events and succumbing to horror instead of balancing it, as it should have done”

in contrast with the example of Henri Matisse who:

'‘in the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz…painted the juiciest, rawist, most enchanting flowers and fruits every made, as if the miracle of life itself discovered it could compress itself inside them forever.”

This reminded me of the immense and moving humanity to be found in Georges Perec’s novel Life A Users Manual. Merrill says,

“This is, of course, no small task—even in peacetime. And those who rise to the occasion in war are truly heroes of the literary imagination.”

He considers Bosnian poet Goran Simic one such hero, “discovering meaning in this tragedy.” He also quotes Ferida Durakovic,

“Before the war I didn’t really like Goran’s poetry. It was too hermetic to me. But now it’s so clear and direct. Now he only writes about what’s important.”

Merrill says what interests him is how Simic “looks at the crevice between what the media finds and reality itself.” Merrill talks about Sarajevan humor “at its most biting with a profound moral vision….” and this most haunting warning by journalist Dizdarvic,

‘the victory of evil continues on unabated—the powerlessness of good, the triumph of chaos over order, the verification of defeat in the match between humanity and the bestial goes on…that Sarajevo’s story is not unique—many other towns like it lie along the road of the madmen who have ruined it. As a Sarajevan who has seen and lived through these events, I am compelled to broadcast a warning: there are sick people in the world who now understand that they are dealing with a public that, when it comes to international politics, is egotistical, incompetent, and unrealistic. We are witnessing a renascence of Nazism and Fascism, and now one is willing to call it to a halt. We are witnessing the abolition of all recognized human values.”

That was 1996.

“This insight,” Merrill says, “is one reason why the War Congress closed its session with Ferida Durakovic reading a declaration asserting that ‘the writer exists to face evil.’” Merrill says, “Televised images of war are revolting, but we grow used to them. The writer’s task is to change that.”

Merrill talks about Tobias Wolff’s memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War,

”Wolff went to see at eighteen dreaming of Melville, and it may be said that he went to war to act out something from Hemingway. A writer’s education depends upon the stripping away of illusions about the world—and the self. There is no better place to do that than in a war, where you quickly come up against your own cowardice.”

Merrill ends with a comparison of the witnesses versus the watchers:

“The difference between witnessing and watching is a function of the imagination. Witnessing comes from the Old English for to know; watching is related to waking as from sleep. First we watch and then, if our imaginations are sufficiently engaged, we witness. What I wish for is to make witnesses of us, not just watchers, because in the Age of Television [the Internet] no one is innocent.”

We are at the precipice, if not in the midst, of a civil war, a global civil war and also a very local civil war. It is here. How will we write about it?

The Essay Project: Grumpy Poets Telling Us What Poetry Should Be

July 29, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This week’s packet was a twofer, “On Being a Poet in America” and “To Make Words Disappear” by Louis Simpson. I have to say these are the first essays I didn’t like at all. I’ve noted that they were brought in by Greta and Andy, two poets at SLC who I DID like. The first essay can be found in the book Selected Prose and the second short essay from A Company of Poets, both books by Louis Simpson.

I’m quite immune to a kind of “grumpiness as display” from writers like Mark Twain. I’ve done it myself, learned from the somewhat stalwart grumpiness of my grandfather Stevens. But this grumpiness of Simpson's is far from charming. The last straw for me was reading in another book last week, essays by Maxine Kumin, that Simpson dismissively reviewed one of Anne Sexton’s books as “Menstruation at Forty.” On this side of #MeToo he comes off poorly. But here we go.

On Being a Poet in America

“On Being a Poet in America” starts with lofty goals with that title and he begins by telling us there is no shortage of poets short on talent, how talent cannot be “bought, borrowed, or stolen. Many pretend to have it…” I’m thinking here we’re dealing with fears of illegitimacy we all have as artists; but no, he’s got no soothing conclusion for fears of talent-less-ness.

He then talks about imaginary beginnings for good poets and how a poet should behave: “He will not serve other men. That is the occupation of a valet.” Seriously? That's dismissive to poets and valets.

The sections are basically small mini-rants with no real transitions or cohesion.

Then he talks about being seen as a writer: “The astonishment that anyone reads anything you write, and that anyone takes it seriously, as though it actually existed." This is good. This is a common feeling. But then he continues with "And then your resentment. What right do they have to read your mail?” Resentment? I think he’s revealing something of himself here, mistakenly attributing that feeling to all of us.

The next section is about how poets cannot have great audiences because, “The mark of a bad writer is that he is popular.” He outright dismisses popular culture and continues by saying “popularity…flatters the stupidity of the audience. But real poetry cannot be popular in its own time.” So much in here is messed up.

He goes on about the falseness of “artistic integrity” and how professors he has known who have bemoaned about it always end up as advertising executives. So…he's dismissive of both popularity AND artistic integrity. Pretty amazing.

The next short section declares this: “There is only one law for the poet—tell the truth!…tell the truth…if you are serious about it—and if you’re not, you aren’t a poet at all.” You know I hate this "poetry is" crap but especially today, in this world of propaganda and our polarizing struggles to define truth, this seems like such a quaint and naive idea. And his fury at the declaration marks hint the great struggle over truth might already be beginning.

But even when he’s full of himself and full of hot air, I still find something to like here, like these fiery sentences:

“I know too much about literary life. I know by what means, by what steady cultivation of his betters, by what obsequiousness in print and out of it, the mediocre writer gets himself a name…The need of fame has turned many a decent man into an envious, spiteful, vanity-ridden, self-deluding wretch. And what does he have to show for it? A handful of reviews.”

But then he's back to academic insults: “whether one writes ‘in form’ or ‘out of form,’ is not an essential question—it is a matter for simpletons to worry about" and “How easy it is to settle on a certain style, to write a certain poem over and over again! Most verse writers do just this. The publish a new book of the same poems every four years, and when they have repeated themselves often enough they win the Pulitzer.”

And then he has very lofty ideas about truth: "you find that you are wrestling with an angel….not witnessing but assisting at the birth of truth in beauty. Of course, to some people this is all nonsense. To a deaf man, music does not exist; to a blind man, there are no constellations in the sky.” There's no room for any kind of variation of experience or disagreement here. You are blind and deaf if you don’t agree with this.

The next section takes aim at critics: “Criticism in the last forty years has been largely an end in itself, a bastard kind of art, a kind of theatricals for shy literary men…when you examine the critic’s method, under the appearance of sweet reasonableness, there are only prejudices and taboos. The critic’s art depends on an exertion of his personality, an unstable quality.”

And here, even when you agree with him, you find yourself cringing at his own very "theatrical” vitriol. And then there’s the inconvenient fact here that a poets art also too often depends on the same kind of “exertion of his personality, an unstable quality.”

All this hints at sour grapes over being excluded in some kind of group. And hey, some of us out here should be able to relate to that. But he makes any kind of relatable connection impossible. I found this tone problem the very same that always crippled arguments between my grandfather and other people. His very valid truths would always get lost behind his presentation too. You see it all the time right now in political debates: smug republicans calling liberals smug. Smug liberals calling conservatives stupid. It just makes people entrench. But the hate is at such a high level, it cannot defuse itself and compromise collapses.

Simpson says, “the poem, the novel, the play. They deal in facts. But the critic deals in opinions.” This is simply not true. Art is full of opinions. And so it puts his whole idea of truths into question.

The last section talks about poets with “poetic intelligence” like Rilke, Yeats, Blake. “Poetic brains.” Frost drew “back from ultimate commitment” he says. "…a poet of original and purely poetic talent….would make up new ways of seeing things; he would push metaphor to the limit. And if such a poet were also interested in ordinary life, we would have great American poetry. Such a poet would not have to justify his existence in America; the rest of us would have to justify ourselves to him.”

You read that and wonder if that sounds like humility coming from Simpson or him suggesting that such a poet is himself.

To Make Words Disappear

“To Make Words Disappear” talks about “emotional intensity” being “what poetry consists of.” Here we go again. This is the issue with surrealism, Simpson says. Emotion needs “a narrative line” and poets “seem to think that it is enough to say that they are having a feeling.”

He also doesn’t like “poetry that preaches…a poet berating people for their shortcomings—for example, for not being as ‘politically aware’ as he is.”

“There is a lot of hard breathing going on…you may feel sympathetic, but it doesn’t do a thing for your life.”

If that’s not a narcissistic statement, I've never heard one. What can this poem do for me?

But then hilariously he adds, “It would be better if he were less self-absorbed and told you something that was interesting”

Something interesting according to you. It’s all about you. It's not always about you. I think that's the cautionary tale of these essays.

The Essay Project: Who Owns Art

May 21, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Some days in our Essay class, we'd get two essays in one packet. These two essays by Chinua Achebe come from his book Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. Both essays cover Western ideas about individuality, which track nicely to our current conversations and struggles in the Age of Narcissism.

Essay one: “The Writer and His Community”

Achebe says, “One of the most critical consequences of the transition from oral traditions to written forms of literature is the emergence of individual authorship.” He talks about the physical transformation as well: “…a story that is told has no physical form or solidity, a book has: it is a commodity and can be handled and moved about.”

Igbo artists “are always careful to disclaim all credit for making.” Achebe quotes Herbert Cole as saying, “A former onyemgbe fears that he might slip up and say, ‘Look, I did this figure.” If he [says] that, he has killed himself. The god that owns that work will kill him.”

John Plamenatz is quoted as saying, “The artist ploughs his own furrow, the scholar, even in the privacy of his study, cultivates a common filed.’" Achebe continues, "It has been said that the American Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first to use the word ‘individualism’ in the English language, rather approvingly, as a definition for the way of life which upholds the primacy of the individual.”

“Western man [has] made the foundation of his philosophical edifice, including the existence of God, contingent on his own first person singular!…Perhaps it is the triumphant, breathtaking egocentrism of that declaration that occasionally troubles the non-Western mind.”

The west “prompted the view the view of society and of culture as a prisonhouse from which the individual must escape in order to find space and fulfillment….when people speak glibly of fulfillment they often mean self-gratification, which is easy, short-livid and self-centered. Like drugs, it has to be experienced frequently, preferably in increasing doses.”

“Fulfillment is other-centered, a giving or subduing of the self, perhaps to somebody, perhaps to a cause; in any event to something external to it. Those who have experienced fulfillment all attest to the reality of this otherness.”

It’s interesting to contemplate what this means for our philosophy of living, but this essay is actually asking us to consider our ideas of the self when we write or create art pieces.

“…resulting art is important because it is at the centre of the life of the people and so can fulfill some of that need that first led man to make art: the need to afford himself through his imagination an alternative handle on reality.”

It's true, however, that the Igbo community supports its artists. They won't starve by creating art for the community for free. But I think Achebe is not necessarily talking about support as much as he is referencing the credit we seek or demand, the ego that wants to place yourself into the creation story.

Read the online version here.

Essay two: “The Igbo World and Its Art”
Igbo African art is “never tranquil, but mobile and active, even aggressive.” Apparently there are no private art collections among Igbo people. Art is always spiritual and public.

Poems in the World: Old and New

May 12, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Video Poem

You may have seen this video by Gary Turk about disengaging from technology. It was recommended, ironically, by someone high up in our IT department.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY

Which is amazing in and of itself. This is the same person who told us last year to stop emailing each other so much and pick up a phone. I think people (even in tech) are starting to see the damage that tech can do to social engagement and work processes.

Another amazing thing: I took me a minute and 40 seconds to realize the video was a poem!

There's some great shots in the video, especially the time progression of the poet standing looking at his phone while tons of life passes him by unseen.

I found a not-so-nasty but rebuttal of a parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jhd3HXcaEk

Although the parody is too dismissive of the problems in tech-dependency, it does make some good points. Like when your bike breaks, you can learn to fix it on YouTube. My family leaned on Zoom technology this weekend to enable more family to attend my aunt's funeral in the time of Covid-19. It's not all bad. It's just bad if you can't stop.

New/Old Publication News

Good albeit old news. I'm in the not-so-latest issue of Blue Unicorn, February & June 2009 issue!
(not the same cover, left)

Back in 2008 I lived in Venice, California, with Mr. Cher Scholar and had the poem "Bluestone" from Why Photographers Commit Suicide accepted by this journal. But then we moved to Redondo Beach in early 2009 and it's possible my contributors copies did not forward.

Anyway, I assumed the magazine folded or they changed their mind. But years later I found a spreadsheet of my acceptances and I was reminded about this one. So for ten years my to-do list has included the task of researching the missing contributors copies.

I tried to email the magazine years ago but the email bounced. I tried again last month and they responded. And sent me my belated copies! Whoo hoo!

Inside is one of my many name experiments: I'm listed as Mary Elizabeth Ladd.

Difficult Stuff: Diction, Elit & MOOCs

December 4, 2019 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Books

I finished a few other essay books this year….

The Language of the Poet, Verbal Artistry in Frost, Steven’s and Moore by Marie Borroff. Some people would, in fact, find Marie a real bore-off. Ha! This was a very difficult and dry book, literally it’s about classifying and counting words in the poems of its example poets, two notoriously difficult ones. But I actually loved this book (even though I had to read it very slowly) and came out with a deeper understanding about all of these three poets and about what the difference was between diction and syntax (which I’ve never been able to figure out before).

Diction is about word choice, the difference between the words lightness and buoyancy and what meaning changes happen as a result of those word choices or between concrete to abstract synonyms, synonyms that differ in terms of class differences and occasion.

Syntax is about sentence construction and how simple or complicated sentences can get. When someone says, “I couldn’t follow his syntax” (which I do all the time with Wallace Stevens poems), they usually mean the subordinate clause and verb layers are too complicated to make sense of. In writing class they would tell us to break those monster sentences up into shorter sentences for easier digestion. But for some poets, the fun of the thing is trying to push a sentence to its limits. And that’s okay.

Literature in the Digital Age by Adam Hammond

This is now my favorite book on the current affairs of digital literature. It’s so concise and yet the most expansive book on the subject. And it’s so friendly and reasonable!

Hammond starts with a historical review of the criticisms and rebuttals of electronic literature (very fairly handled), then moves onto issues of digitizing existing literature (including history around Virginia Woolf’s interest in that area) and issues around accessibility, then moving over into talking about quantitative studies in literature. He ends talking with “born digital” pieces and alterations in our ideas about authorship.

If you hate this subject (kids today!) but what to be literate about it, this is the book for you. If you don’t know anything about it and are elit-curious, this is the book for you. It’s a must have for anybody studying the most contemporary literatures, including narrative video games.

Game Stories

Not video games! I know what you’re thinking. Hammond provided two excellent examples of literary video games, which you can view online as walkthroughs:

The Stanley Parable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgmIk_aOCRs

I loved this branching story, a very literate take on the absurdity of video games!

Going Home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXwuqG3FVNs

The walkthroughs are a big speedy which made me a bit
dizzy so I haven’t finished it but the game is full of things to read and reading is a big part of the game. It’s a story about a missing family in a big shadowy house.

I also read the mass of materials known as Building Stories by artist Chris Ware. It comes in a board-game box full of graphic stories of different shapes and sizes (see pic left, click to open in larger size). This is a story about a woman’s life trajectory and a sub-story about bees. The amazing thing is the reading order affects how you understand and "compile" the story in your head, how you decide to order and interact with all the materials, which include a game board artifact.

I decided to read them all from smallest to largest. My friend just randomly picked up booklets to read. I labeled the main character as the woman with one leg because I learned about her leg situation before I learned anything else and I learned about her accident which caused this situation at the very end of my readings. So that was the trajectory my brain designed for the story. My friend labeled the same character “the mother” because that’s what she learned first. The leg situation was never very important to her. Check out what the whole story looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwFGU3w8Hs

Whether or not you feel resistance to non-paper-based stories or computer experiments, the truth is that many of the experiments are often the same between language poets and computer poets: randomness, parataxis, and auto generation. We get it, people matrix! My favorite experiments, however, have moved beyond matrixing or assembling meaning from collage.

Words can come to life outside of paper. Why would a story told through a series of inter-linked blogs or in a game be much different than a paper version in terms of intensity or truth telling? There’s no reason.

MOOC Update: Are Good MOOCs a Thing of the Past

I’ve completed a few new free online classes (or MOOCS) this year: one on William Wordsworth, one on scientist/poet Humprhy Davy (both University of Lancaster classes hosted on FutureLearn) and a Harvard EdX course on Shakespeare.

They were all good in their own way, but I’ve noticed a trend in MOOCs, similar to the trend of tomato sauce cans getting perceptibly smaller year after year.

The original appeal for MOOCS was two things: they could be self-paced and they were free. Plus you get access to people and institutions all around the world. Colleges benefit from showing off their wares a bit and encouraging continuing, public, adult education (especially considering most MOOC offeringss are general education classes or liberal arts (and coding probably). But no one is offering a degree as a result of MOOCs or any kind of college credit for them. But they have the opportunity to collect a great deal of data on you and how you fared through the material, what tools worked and what kind of content was most effective. They study your learning in other words. Plus they gather information through polls, papers and discussion boards.

It seems that either the cost of creating these courses has become an issue or they're just are trying to squeeze more revenue out of a once-revenue-free stream. Lately there’s been a move to monetize these courses but still making they seem free. They first tried this by offering a certificate. But at $50 most students didn’t go for it. What could that certificate be used for? Nothing. It’s just a piece of paper.

Then they started restricting access to grading and discussions (no big deal if you’re taking the course archived anyway). Now the tactic is to put a timer on the days you have access to the class, thereby removing the self-paced feature. Some give you less than a month! And once the time runs out, you lose all access to the class and prior work, including your own comments.

I’ve responded to this by skipping all the interactive features of the classes. Who has time for that? And why give up any data when all the benefits are disappearing? In the Shakespeare class there was a participation check you could only access if you paid for the class, which was absurd because as users we don’t need to verify your own participation. That feature was created for their benefit. Why would we pay for that?

Here’s the thing. I think teachers should be paid. I believe the adjunct system is bankrupting higher education. It’s signaling to everyone that teachers don’t matter. And teachers are literally the product here so institutions devaluing them in salary and benefits in institutional insanity. It also hints at some real gangrene dysfunction in the whole system.

So I’m not opposed to paying something for each class. After all, it takes labor and time to make these things. But at $50 a class, I’m close to the price point for a real live community college class. Not as convenient, sure. But it has sociability benefits and relationship building opportunities MOOCs don't have. So I wouldn't say one is more valuable than the other.

And I’m completely not interested in a monthly or yearly subscription model. Whole years go by where I don’t see classes I want to take. So a subscription plan feels like a waste of money. I want to pay as I go and retain access to work I’ve already done. Since these classes are truly massively attended, Udemy is good platform to study what price-points users will bear. A small amount ($15-25) purchased massively should pay for the creation of the class. Add that to the benefits gained from all of our data and that should be more reasonable for all of us.

But then there’s the tomato can issue, classes are getting really slim: shorter required readings, shorter videos, shorter syllabi. It all makes me wonder if MOOCs have run their course. If they’re truly not providing both students and providers with dividends, what’s the point? I surely don’t want to feel I’m giving up a lot of effort and data. I'm all for data gathering and educational improvements. I just participated in a user study for one of the MOOC to provide feedback on a very cool new tool they had developed. But if there’s no common path for all of us, I’ll just go back to the library or my local college.

More Bad Reviews of Good Things: Walt Whitman

October 9, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Bill Henderson's book Rotten Reviews catalogs unfortunate reviews of Walt Whitman:

"Incapable of true poetical originality, Whitman had the cleverness to invent a literary trick, and the shrewdness to stick to it."
Peter Bayne, Contemporary Review, 1875

"No, no, this kind of thing won’t do…The good folks down below (I mean posterity) will have none of it."
James Russell Lowell, quoted in The Complete Works Vol 14, 1904

"Whitman is unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics."
The London Critic

"Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language."
William Allingham, letter to W.M. Rossetti, 1857

"Mr. Whitman’s attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste…Our hearts are often touched through a compromise with the artistic sense but never in direct violation of it."
Henry James, The Nation

"Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, souring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon."
Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies, 1882

"…his lack of a sense of poetic fitness, his failure to understand the business of a poet, is clearly astounding."
Francis Fisher Browne, The Dial, 1882

"He was a vagabond, a reprobate, and his poems contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature would hardly be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew him to the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime."
Max Nordau, 1895

Poetry’s Tough Love

November 29, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Even poets need tough love.

This is a great article for any struggling writer: "7 Things You must Give Up to Become a Successful Writer." I have friends who produce all the excuses listed in this article all the time. And I have my own personal theory that I've believed in for many years: if you don't do it, you don't want to do it. It's not a fail safe theory (in relationships, for example) but it's pretty accurate prediction around vocations and avocations. I actually learned it from the parents of my boyfriend in college. They were commenting about me. It wasn't pleasant but they were right. And it helped me give up something I wasn't all that interested in for something I was very interested in.

People who want to write, they write. People who don’t want to write make excuses.

There's one thing you can say about tough love…it's tough.

Similarly, here is a blog post from earlier this year about feel-good good habits that don't amount to much under the shadow of long, hard work.

A year or so ago we talked about how challenging it is to start and maintain a poetry (or any) podcast, many moons ago Robert sent me a more current guide for setting up a podcast. Just because it's tough doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

Smarting It Up

June 28, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Some people call it Hermioneitis (after Harry Potter), some call it Insufferable Syndrome or Smarty Pants Disease. My grandmother had a family friend from Arizona who came to visit her in St. Louis and her friend was very educated and published in southwestern American Indian culture. He was spouting off his knowledge in her living room and it was very impressive and we were all enraptured and his wife turned to my parents and said, “Isn’t he a smart son of a bitch?”

We love that story and whenever someone sits too high on a horse we say that, "Isn’t he a smart son of a bitch.” It’s very handy because pontificating on some subject or other is addictive. So you always need a wing man near by to disparagingly reprimand you when you’re sounding too much like a smart son of bitch.

I’m full of opinions that I can carry off with a tone of rightness, but honestly I’m wrong I’d estimate about half of the time and the phrase "Did I say that?" is a common pre-apology for thinking too much through my mouth. I take solace in the idea that nobody's reading this anyway, right?

Recently in the magazine The Baffler, Rick Perlstein took all the smarty-pantses to task in his article, "Outsmarted." Some excerpts:

"Even as we moderns spend enormous amounts of our conscious energy making evaluations about who is sophisticated and who is simple, who is well-bred and who is arriviste, and who is smart and who is dumb, these are entirely irrelevant to the only question that ends up mattering: who is decent and who is cruel."

"Whatever 'smart' actually is, it bears absolutely no necessary relation to fundamental decency. But that's a psychological, or even spiritual, lesson, not an intellectual one."

This is the cause for many moments of head-in-the-hands for fellow Hermiones. Many of whom are poets.

And so with that I'm going to complain about this recent online article called "Why All Poems Are Political" by Kathleen Ossip.

Calling the writing of poetry in any genre a political act sounds groovy at first but that's spreading the net a bit too wide, like saying playing video games instead of getting a job is a political act. It can be, but it isn't always. Not all poets write as a political act, not all poets care about political acts. And you could also say being a poet of any political bent or of no political bent is all still a political bent. You wouldn't be wrong there but you also wouldn't be saying anything. Political intention is important. What kind of political act is it? It's like saying writers have agendas. Writers want to persuade. Poetry can be awfully un-rebellious and supportive of the status quo. They can also be rebellious for no purpose.

I do agree with Ossip that the Poetry is Dead meme is dead itself at this point and out of step with the times. There are more writers if not readers of poetry these days, lots of poetry literacy online, and, as my survey of news stories last year indicated, plenty of news outlets are printing stories about poetry and poets beyond the Poetry is Dead story. Just do a Google search for "poet" every seven days. Society does not only turn to poetry in times of crisis, although in times of crisis it surely ramps up (see the protest poetry phenomenon happening now).

You could say people, for the most part, also only get politically active in times of crisis. So if you believe those two things are related, (poetry and political acts), it shouldn't be a surprise that political poetry gets attention in a crisis.

But I do get tired of the lament that wants to compare poetry to other media. Ossip asks why we don't wonder Does Television Matter or Does Football Matter or Do Restaurants Matter. Does Cable TV Matter is actually a conversation happening as we speak and many people have given up television altogether after asking this very question. Every football season I have the argument with Monsieur Big Bang: does football matter. I ask the questio, do games matter all the time, especially ones for which we willingly spend billions of dollars. We do have a plethora of TV shows that ask the question do restaurants matter, particular ones with Gordon Ramsey yelling inside them and in general now that we've endured a flood of restaurant and cooking shows and the world falling apart. Do foodies matter? Is there foie gras after fascism? (I just used that for the alliteration. Foie gras is terrible with or without fascism.)

In fewer words, yes these conversations are happening.

Ossip's article then lists a set of un-numbered questions attempting to challenge mainstream ideas about poetry. Ossip points out that poetry can be an antidote to toxic and numbing culture. But some of her questions play into the same assumptions that proponents of Poetry is Dead succumb to, perpetuate the same stereotype of the obscure poet, especially around the issue of difficulty. Difficulty is not a crime, but it is also not a necessary ingredient of poetry. Difficulty is useful for that particular class of difficult poetry. "Can something be pleasurable and difficult." Yes it can, but it can also be easy and pleasurable. Not all poets traffic in difficult poems. Not all poems are difficult. Not even half of all poems are difficult.

And I think, (because here I am over-thinking again), that this favored idea of poetic difficulty ties back to Perlstein's article and our need to come off as smart thinkers outweighs the benefits of our brilliant new ideas.

And yes, my head is in my hands right now. It's a tragic problem. Smart can be wonderful. Smart can be alienating. Smart can be deadly.

Am I being melodramatic? Can smart poems kill someone? In local news, police are making pleas to the zillionaire who has hid a fortune of coins in northern New Mexico and presented his clues in a too-cryptic poem. Two people have already died trying to find it.

The poem is too hard. The thirst to understand it is too great.

Quotes for the Summer of ’17

June 12, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Here is another slew of quotes to ponder, many from the Bob Sacks media newsletter.

Craft

"An artist’s limits are quite as important as his powers. They are definite assets, not a deficiency, and go to form his flavor and personality." Willa Cather

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." Robert Louis Stevenson

"To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Carl Sagan

"Act with the authority of your 16 billion years." Joanna Macy

"Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess." Edna Woolman Chase

Reading

"A book ought to be an ax to break the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka

"I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget." William Lyon Phelps

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." G. K. Chesterton

"We can spend our whole lives fishing only to discover in the end it wasn't fish we were after." Henry David Thoreau

Thinking Better

"I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Albert Einstein (attributed)

"How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality." Norman Douglas

"Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance." Plato

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." Paul Dirac

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated." Poul Anderson

Bearing the Business

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." Winston Churchill

"Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community." Simon Mainwaring

"An over-reliance on past successes is a sure blueprint for future failures." Henry Petroski

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

"There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny." Frederick William Robertson

Living a Life

"I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?" Ronnie Shakes

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." Groucho Marx

Narcissism Today

March 9, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Narcissism is in the news big time right now. It's as if the years of self-absorption have finally come home to roost. It seems like a good time to plug, Writing in the Age of Narcissism again. But first some recent articles on the topic:

Understanding Trump’s narcissism could be the key to opposing him (The Guardian)

Trump is an extreme narcissist, and it only gets worse from here (The Boston Globe)

Donald Trump’s Narcissism Got Him Elected. It Won’t Get Him Impeached. (Fortune)

Narcissists In The Workplace (Psych Central)

Me! Me! Me! Are we living through a narcissism epidemic? (The Guardian)

World events call for a change in attitude. If you're a former gunslinger looking to turn good, this is a place to start:

Writing in the Age of Narcissism

If you’re a poet or writer in any other form or genre, you’ve probably witnessed many modern, uncivilized behaviors from fellow students, writers and academic colleagues—their public relations gestures, their catty reviews and essays, and their often uncivil career moves. Like actors, visual artists and politicians, cut-throat pirate maneuverings have become the new normal. It’s what occurs whenever there are more people practicing an art than any particular economy can support.

The difference with writers is their ability to develop highly conceptualized, rationalizations in order to prove their worth and ideals. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it has reached a critical mass in meaningless attempts to pull focus in a society obsessed with the show-biz spotlight.

Writing in the Age of Narcissism (72 pages) traces how the narcissism epidemic affects writers, including our gestures of post-modernism and irony, and proposes an alternative way to be a more positive writer, critic and reader.

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