Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Think Outside the Lament (Page 4 of 7)

News & A Poet Who Conquered Twitter

EdPoetry News Coverage

6 Curious Things About Emily Dickinson, America's Favorite Recluse Poet (Huffinton Post)

How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield (Washington Post)

Roque Dalton: The Revolutionary Life of a Revolutionary Poet (Roque Dalton, born May 14, 1935, should be seen in the same ranks as Jose Carlos Mariategui and Che Guevara. Like them, Dalton was a seminal figure for Latin American revolutionaries whose life was tragically cut short.  (Telesur TV)

Poet Anastacia Tolbert: 'What To Tell My Sons After Trayvon Martin' (KUOW.org)

Poet Wo Chan uses words to fight oppression (PBS NewsHour)  
Wo’s work has recently explored what they describe as “rage” at the power imbalances that exist in the U.S. For Wo, the process of experimenting with language also challenges the systems that create those imbalances.

Acclaimed poet's dog rescued after plunging 300 feet down cliff east of Port Angeles (Peninsula Daily News-Washington State)

Neruda still not reburied (Star Tribune)

A Poet Conquers Twitter

The author was revealed this week (Rolling Stone) behind the very popular twitter phenom"So Sad Today." Some even speculated the author might be pop star Lana del Rey. It was, however, a poet named Melissa Broder who has published three books of poetry, most recently 2014's Scarecrone.

  

 

Frustrations of Genres / Poetry News

WhyThe Problem Children of Poetry

I'm in kind of void of postings because I'm on the cusp of a review of New Mexico poetry anthologies, a new new poll and a new list. None of those are ready yet so I suppose this is a good time to talk about the frustration of genres.

My first book of poems struggled for over 20 years to find publication. Although I would read the poems in workshops and at conferences and receive unbelievably positive feedback, something was wrong.

I say that because the level of positive response only confused me in light of the fact that I couldn't get this book any traction. A former editor of Graywolf Press even raved to my face about the poems at a Colrain conference eons ago. But contests and publishers were not interested. Twenty years of contest fees add up to that fact.

Was it the way I read them? I suck at readings so that definitely was not the case.

Meanwhile, a few years ago Graywolf itself published a book of science poems by Tracy K. Smith called Life on Mars, a book that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. My book was titled almost the same thing in one of its incarnations. In fact my 1997 thesis at Sarah Lawrence might be named something like that.

But my poems are different thank Smiths, our Mars subject aside. My poems are about the idea of U.S. manifest destiny as it pertains to our dream of colonizing Mars. Sounds like science fiction doesn't it and what literary publisher would like to publish anything slightly tainted with the stamp of SciFi. Answer: none.

Science fiction publishers didn’t appreciate the book either. Because it wasn't science fiction.

Thank God, technology in my lifetime has allowed me to pull my own project to fruition (self-publish) and move on with my life.

I'm only reminded of all this because last week USA Today published a story about how Elon Musk plans Seattle office for Mars colonization.  The poems in Why Photographer’s Commit  Suicide are based on Michael Collins’ book about similar plans to colonize Mars.

I now worry that my second book will suffer the same tragic fate. It’s another mashup book only this time its a mashup of Buddhism and cowboy stories.  Cowboy stories. Oh dear. Sounds like cowboy poetry. Another literary poetry problem child. Such a throwback. Although they're not cowboy poems!

WfPoetry in the News

Philip Levine who explored the working lives of American people. (The Independent)

Should the poet laureate have to write about the royal birth? (The Guardian)

William Faulkner Makes Us Wonder: What's So Great About Poetry, Anyhow? (NPR)

Palm Tree and the Poetry of M.S. Merwin (The New Yorker)

Yeats’ 150th Birthday Parties (The Guardian)

British punk poet Dr. John Cooper Clarke hits U.S. at last (SF Examiner)

Arthur Sze Finalist for Pulitzer Prize (Albuquerque Journal)

Documents confirm fascists murdered Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (World Socialist Web Site)

From the archive, 27 April 1915: Editorial: A Poet’s Death; The death of Rupert Brooke leaves us with a miserable sense of waste and futility, yet it is impossible to withhold even the most precious personalities (The Guardian)

Alissa Quart, The Money Poet (The New Yorker)

    

Poetry as Usability

Useful

For work I’ve been reading both marketing and usability studies and essays on user interface design. A common idea across all of these areas is the trend toward creating more scannable content. This is primarily because users come to software and Internet pages to accomplish tasks, not to be entertained or enlightened.

Speed readers grab what they need and go! Designers use bolding and other tricks to help people scan a page. I see myself doing it when I come across a list of marketing tips. I scan for the main points and read further where I need to.

I can feel the knuckles crunching on the hands of writing academics, their blood pressure rising to a steam. Is quality reading losing the battle? Reading poetry takes attention. It’s the antithesis of scanning. It’s slow reading.

Monsieur Big Bang and I are also listening to The History of the English Language podcast with Kevin Stroud.  In one episode he describes Old English Scops (or poets) who were once happily employed traveling to villages providing poem-casts of the latest news. Back then, poets were charged with keeping the news flowing in a time when nobody could read or write. Rhyming provided ways of understanding and memorizing that news. Truly, poets were the social media of their day. We’re fine with that right? Well then…check your self-serving diatribes about social media at the door.

Communication efficiency in the old days was good if it served poets. Is language efficiency bad now because poets are left out?  Culture changes and therefore communication changes.  Society is doing what it needs to do. This doesn’t mean that poetry should be eradiated from communication. It just means we won’t use it the way we previously did. Poems are not for distributing the news anymore. They’re for meditative moments, considered protests and language inquiry. Poems are not scannable; but wait, here comes the next experimental poem exploring scannability! Wait for it!

     

Hard Times for Poets: Quotes and Stories to Keep You Going

FauklknerSome quotes to keep you hanging in there as a writer when you feel like giving up!

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

“Fall down seven times, get up eight!” –  Japanese Proverb

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away many small stones.” –  Confucius again!

 

 

And some more ridiculous reviews:

 “The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.”

–  Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker on Absolom, Absolum! by William Faulkner, 1936

 “…a book of the season only…”

–  New York Herald Tribune  

“The Great Gatsby falls into the class of negligible novels”
–  Springfield Republican on The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

“Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.” 

– La Figaro on Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857

 

From Bill Henderson's Rotten Reviews

   

The Biology of Narcissism and Mindfulness and What It Means For Poets

Kristin-Neff1

Poetry writing is a field where everyone is on a mad mission to distinguish themselves from everybody else. The popular complaint among poets is that everybody writes but nobody reads. It’s true that reading someone else’s writing is a compassionate act and not too many writers are on a mission of compassion. They're on a mission of self-esteem. It's exhausting and Kristin Neff is a scientist who has given a Ted Talk on compassion versus self-esteem. She talks about how the self-esteem movement has contributed to the narcissism epidemic and how this contributes to bullying in various populations and the great American fear of being average.

You see the self-esteem drama everywhere: on TV advertising, interacting with drivers on the street, in awful news stories. I see it in MFA ads for poetry programs. In fact, there's a new game in town: tapping into a student's ego to lure them into the program. In Poets & Writers issue January/February 2015 there's an add full of published books with a blank space reading, “The Place for our Next Book is Here” (meaning you!) and in APR's last issue there is an ad stating “Before you write your success story, you have to find your voice.” It's all about your success story! Wow.

These are topics I cover in Writing in the Age of Narcissism. For years, advertising has been banking on our narcissistic tendencies, our self-obsession and our desire for fame and to consider ourselves above average. 

View the Ted Talk: The Space Between Self Esteem and Self Compassion: Kristin Neff at TEDx Centennial Park Women

More quotes on the topic:

And I'm not the only poet talking about this. Bianca Stone (daughter of Ruth Stone) says, “I’ve always been drawn to science, especially neuroscience. I feel that poets look at the world so differently because of something to do with the way their brains are wired." Bianca Stone, Poets & Writers, January/February 2015

In his essay "Casting Stones" on the Mary Kay Letourneau story called Charles D’Ambrosio talks about the “reflective rush to judge” and “threadbare or disingenuous language which failed to allow for the possibility that [the case] was both simpler and more complex than they were prepared to understand or admit…My felling was, first you sympathize, then you judge – that’s a complex human response. You sympathize first, and until that happens, you don’t understand anything.” Quoted in Poets & Writers, November/December 2014

Read more quotes about writing and narcissism here: http://www.marymccray.com/writing-in-the-age-of-narcissism.html#writers 

Inspired by this, I've decided to embrace my average-ness. I’m an average working writer. And that’s okay. In fact, that’s pretty respectable.

   

Berry Gordy Jr. and Poetry on TV

BerryYou always hear laments about how people don't respect poetry, how entertainers steal focus from literature, how poetry is meaningless in our society. This is why I love to see celebrities talking about poems on television.

Poets can be bitter butter balls. Their hearts can't see when their heart are closed. And this includes noticing all the good television programs out there.

For years I've been enjoying Oprah's Master Class series. I have about eleven of them banked up on my DVR. I finally watched the episode with Berry Gordy, Jr. I only know about Gordy Jr. from reading histories of Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Michael Jackson and I've always pictured him as a kind of stern record mogul who created the unlikely but inspiring success of Motown in Detroit. Hearing him talk about his own process was fascinating. He was much more charming and self-deprecating than I anticipated. He also attributes the success in his life to a poem, specifically the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Gordy Jr. said he was under great pressure, as his father's namesake, to learn how to be a man in a big, physical sense. He said this poem taught him that there were ways to be a man mentally and it changed his life.

 

My New eBook is Available

Cover-smallMy new eBook on Trementina Books is now available. Writing in the Age of Narcissism is available for Kindle, ePub, PDF, Sony readers.

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.

This essay 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.

Kindle $1.99  Buy
PDF, ePub, Sony $1.99  Buy

Or sign up for my quarterly newsletter and receive a free copy. Just provide a valid email when you sign up.

    

Ridiculous Reviews: T.S. Eliot

Ts The Waste Land, 1922

“Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior.”

New Statesman

“…it is the finest horses which have the most tender mouths and some unsympathetic tug has sent Mr. Eliot’s gift awry. When he recovers control we shall expect his poetry to have gained in variety and strength from this ambitious experiment.”

Times Literary Supplement

 

from Rotten Reviews compiled by Bill Henderson

   

Is Reading Dead? Does Poetry Matter? Should Life Be Art?

Art-project

In the June 2014 issue of The Atlantic, there's an article blurb by William Deresiewicz that reminds me of some of the poetry essays I've been reading lately: "There is an idea in there somewhere, but it can’t escape the prose—the Byzantine syntax and Latinate diction, the rhetorical falls and grammatical stumbles"… the difference between "text that urges us ever onward" and text that like "boulders, say stop, go back.”

I also enjoyed a recent sketch from the show Portlandia about art overstepping the life boundary and how every celebrity and artist now seems to want to force the rest of us into the inescapable project of their own performance-piece-life. Watch the sketch here.

In Hector Tobar's piece called "Reading is Dead" from the LA Times,  Tobar comments on famous celebrity editor Tina Brown's insistence that reading is dead (because she doesn't read or that as an editor she failed to sell magazines). Tobar quotes a website commentator's frustration with people who declare everything dead:

“This week, a reader at the American Conservative (which also reproduced [Tina] Brown’s words), took to his or her keyboard and responded on the website’s comments section with a summary of all the “death” talk he or she’s been reading about lately: 

“Death of the novel, death of lyric poetry, death of literature, death of cursive writing, death of writing itself,” wrote the commenter, a lawyer from Philadelphia. “Death of August holidays. Death of looking at the stars. Death of romance. Death of marriage. Death of church music, death of Western Christianity, death of liberal American Judaism, death of American Judaism generally, death of religion generally. Death of democracy in Europe. Death of the moral community. Death of Western civilization …. Death, death, death.

Declaring things dead is so dead. And Tina Brown is a classic narcissist.

My friend Mary Anne sent me this article from The New York Times: "Poetry: Who Needs It?" by William Logan. Which reminds me, a friend of mine once gave me a book of reviews by William Logan and I think I lost it.

Anyway, Logan doesn't see the fact that most people don't have a need for poetry as indicative of disaster. He says most people are also "unlikely to attend a ballet, or spend an evening with a chamber-music quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de La Tour."

Excerpts:

"A child taught to parse a sentence by Dickinson would have no trouble understanding Donald H. Rumsfeld’s known knowns and unknown unknowns.

[but]

You can life a full life without knowing a scrap of poetry, just as you can live a full life without ever seeing a Picasso…"

In other news, the Academy of American is running a Poets Forum Oct 16-18. Read more here.

 

Paul Strand on Artist Philosophies

Strand_stieglitz2Recently I found this quote in a book about the modern artists of New Mexico, Voices in New Mexico Art published by the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe. Famous photographer Paul Strand is quoted in a letter to Sam Kootz in 1931.

"Artists tend either to think out loud about their technical problems…or…frequently erect some romantic philosophy – some elaborate and misleading rationalization. Possibly one reason for this is that the creative process involves a balance between conscious and intuitive elements, and a critical analysis of the artist’s own spirit of himself upsets the balance."

 He also says,

"It seems to be the business of the critic, not of the artist, to get through…the artist’s essential attitude, not towards his medium but towards his world—life itself. When I look at a painting, a photograph, hear music, read a book, that is all that interests me—what living meant or means to the person who made the thing—not so much how, but why, they made it."

  

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