Category: Whole Life of the Poet (Page 13 of 18)

Poetry in College Courses; the Poetry of Mindfulness

March 1, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I love to see poem used to illustrate non-literary concepts in academic papers. I blogged about this in 2012, Using Poems for Research Projects.

So I'm thrilled to be in a CNM course on Mindfulness where our teacher, Beth Giebus-Chavez, opens each class with a poem that describes a concept where learning that week. It's awesome! The poems get at the topic from another angle, or a substrata that the academic papers, videos and mp3s, discussions and journalings can't reach. The poems are not only examples of mindfulness but they are the very practice of mindfulness.

Here are the poems we've covered so far:

In one of the live lectures on Mindfulness, we also covered this poem, "Autobiography in Five Short Chapters" By Portia Nelson.

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."

Writing in the Age of Narcissism

January 19, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The narcissism epidemic has spread around the world and has tainted the attitudes and impulses of writers and all artists. This situation affects our futures and our fortunes. In my new eBook, Writing in the Age of Narcissism, I talk about strategies of literary criticism as they enable narcissism, as well as possible solutions to counter-act destructive tactics in writing and reviewing.

I've just created a dedicated page for the eBook to showcase an ongoing list of quotes from other writers about the topics of writing strategies and narcissism.

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.

My New eBook is Available

January 17, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

My 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.

Self Publishing Report from Smashwords, Expensive MFAs, Word Crimes

January 12, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I've been following Mark Coker’s publishing predictions for a few years now. He's just come out with his 2015 points. I like that he studies his data for these things and that he updates his predictions as the data changes. He doesn't have an ideological agenda. Well, he might, but he's willing to adjust his assessments, for instance he predicts screen reading increases might slow down this year.

Last year he was still promoting the power of making books free to raise your profile. This year, with traditional publishers finally getting wise, the idea of free might lose some steam.

Check out all 12 predictions.

In 2008, College Crunch listed Poetry as the number one most expensive and useless degree in America.

And they provide a depressingly sad-sack example.

I found that link over the holiday break going through my email. I found a few old fad links I'd missed over the years, like this video from Weird Al. If you’re a word-nerd, his "Word Crimes" video is for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc

Article Watch: Tenses, Confessionals, Narcissisms, MFA-Alternatives

November 16, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The November 2014 issue of The Atlantic has a good article called "Passive Resistance" written by Steven Pinker about how "the active voice isn't always the best choice.

American Poetry Review Sept/Oct 2014 has an article by Jason Schneiderman on the friendship between Agha Shahid Ali and James Merrill and talks about Merill's ouija board book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover." This poem is not included in his collected works, by the way. In the same issue there's an essay about the grotesque in poetry by Anna Journey. There's also a special suppplement of poems and commenorations on Stephen Berg, one by David Rivard and one by Edward Hirsch.

And finally the issue has a good overview of the most famous confessional poems and how their writers use pronouns and a retrospective of Pete Seeger.

Poets & Writers Sept/Oct 2014 Issue

This issue has interviews with both Edward Hirsch and Louise Glück. Hirsch says:

"I think to have poetry, you need to have all kinds of different poets. We need poets to write playful, funny poems, poets who write light verse; I don't think we should neglect that. But should that be the defining feature of your poetry? Is that how you want your poetry to be remembered? I guess that's up to people in the culture. But it's also true that we live in a very superficial culture. We live in a culture that's driven by entertainment, by celebrities, so there's plenty in the culture to distract us and lighten us up. People who turn to poetry, I don't think y're looking for something gloomy, but I do think they're looking for something deeper than the superficial exxperiences you get in the culture every day."

Also, three poets discuss keeping a journal. There's a great essay on narcissism and entitlement by Steve Almond and an article on the Savvy Self-Publisher and another one on MFA alternatives that talks about classes in urban areas outside of the college system:

The combination of innovative pedagogy, lower costs, and a focus on the craft of writing can make private writing workshops an attractive alternative to traditional MFA programs.

Just as happened with iTunes, Air B&B and Uber, the high cost and low-return (and greed of executives at the top) of bloated organizations will be driving customers to startup alternatives.

You can check your local library for older issues of these magazines.

Galway Kinnel Dies, Poetry Brothel, Sandburg, Dylan Thomas and Lorca

November 3, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Galway Kinnell has died. His obituaries:

– The Burlington Free Press

– The New York Times

– The Huffington Post

Last summer, for my family reunion in Bandon, Oregon, I took this poem, "On the Oregon Coast," to read during talent show night. I didn't end up reading it as the poem was too long, the crowd was too restless, and the text was slightly political. (Our reunion banned anything political.) I did however give the poem to my mother before the reuinion was over.

The first book of poetry I ever read was Powers of Congress by Alice Fulton but I didn't get that book so it doesn't count. I'm planning to re-read it since I recently enjoyed Palladium so much. In any case, I consider the first book of poetry I ever read to be the first one I ever fully understood. That book was Galway Kinnel's The Book of Nightmares.

In other news…

BBC America has a new movie about the last days of Dylan Thomas.

Archaeologists are now searching for Federico García Lorca lost grave.

Bordello-style poetry readings at the Poetry Brothel

I 've been reading the collected poems of Carl Sandburg (the book has 800 freaking pages!) looking for New Mexico poems for a project I'm doing. I found this poem in his book Slabs of the Sunburnt West, "Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry." It's a list of metaphors for what poetry is. I like some of them like “Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language" and "Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes."

Others are redundant and some make me scratch my head like "Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes" and "Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts."

I went to see a lecture last month give by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum called "Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line." The talk dealt with his connection to the Alfred Stiglitz circle, how he learned through the making and drawing of maps, about his friendships with Duchamp, Diego Rivera and Andre Breton. The talk defended caricature as abstraction.

Covarrubias did a series for Vanity Fair Magazine called Impossible Interviews. Here's one with Freud and Jean Harlow and another with Sally Rand and Martha Graham.

I just found new versions of Impossible Interviews by David Kamp with ones like Russel Brand and Vladamir Putin and Kim Jong-Un with Anthony Bourdain.

Interesting idea for a series of poems.

Art Projects that Inspire

September 10, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Recently my friend Christopher sent me a March LA Times article from March called "Yarn Bombing L.A. challenges ideas of street art".

Although Los Angeles has always had an intellectual and artistic inferiority complex in comparison to New York City, having lived in both placed I find Los Angeles a highly competent art and book town, maybe even slightly smarter, truth be told.

Years ago, at an LA Times Book Festival symposium on something or other, I witnessed a New Yorker who stood up to tell us what a refreshing experience the LA book festival panels were and how in NYC intellectuals would be falling over each other posturing and posing. He felt LA intellectuals were more honest, open and for real. I agree. It's as if their inferiority complex makes them more honest.

LA has a vibrant art scene and this is why I love getting articles confirming my understanding of its vibrant culture, like the one about yarn bombing.

Artist from all over the world crafted kitted squares to bomb the LA Craft & Folk Art museum, which sits in the shadow of LACMA and the Page Museum in Los Angeles. The act of public art was designed to challenge street art as a masculine space and explore the idea of“who gets to belong in a public space.”

I also love the Riot Grrrl, Third Wave Feminism aspect of the bombing, girls taking back knitting: “By putting craft our in the public, we’re challenging the history of craft as well as the culture of street art that has a lot of embedded sexism.”

There is a “wealth of public art and performance collectives, such as Fallen Fruit and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers” and what Carol Zou describes as “grassroots arts projects happening …There’s a culture in L.A. of artists getting together and forming their own organizations from the ground up.”

Los Angeles is known for pop culture production but few give the city credit for its art and intellectual production.

I also received a brochure from The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Buckneell is doing something called The Poetry Path, its first public art project consisting of a walking tour of historic downtown area. The locations are marked with poems and recordings by poets at ten markers that feature a poem chosen for its thematic and cultural resonance to the site.

All towns should be doing this!

Take a virtual tour: http://bucknell.edu/PoetryPath

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

August 30, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

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.

Walking with Poetry

August 30, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The Georgia O’Keeffee Museum hosted a educational program in June called "Walks in the American West: The White Place and Echo Canyon" and it was a trip led by poet Lauren Camp.

There we are at left, walking through an area Georgia O'Keeffe painted and once called The White Place for it's rock formations made of limestone.

While I was getting ready for the trip, I went through my closet looking for a notebook to take. I have a feeling all poets have a box of those fancy, unused notebooks our friends give us as gifts because we're poets and they imagine us writing in fancy notebooks instead of on the backs of cards and scraps of paper.

I had one such friend named Michele who gave me a fancy hard-cover notebook as a goodbye gift in 2002 when I was fired from my job where we worked in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was a dramatic firing and she had been my confidant through the hard-times I suffered there. She was that kind of a friend to many of us. Looking for any notebooks to take on the trip, I unknowingly and randomly picked up hers. I liked the size of the lines on the paper.

When I arrived in Santa Fe to start our journey up the Chama river valley, I discovered Michele's lovely message to me inside, written 12 years ago, encouraging my creative endeavors and ending with, “I will miss our heartfelt talks and good laughs.” She had told me once you have three kinds of friends: friends for life, friends for the ephemeral moment, and friends who are there to help you through crucial times. She was the later. And she was speaking to me from the grave because she had passed away from brain cancer two years ago.

This sobering accident affected my thoughts all through my trip. Lauren Camp had us try out the Japanese form of poetry called the haibun, a combination of prose and haiku. We read "Lepidopterists" by Diana Webb and a haibun by Basho.

I walked out alone among the white place river bank and wrote a haibun for Michele:

Where I was sitting with my book-bag.

Letter to Michele

Chica Micha, you are here in the White Place. Today, your own ink is here. Your fingertips have reached the White Place. Your small printed letters, your porous hardship, your palm is in the White Place touching hardened sand. Your soles are sinking in the river bed. Your breath is trailing me here, telling me, “Some friends stay forever; some friends come and go; and some friends are there only when you most need them.”

The vulnerable brain’s
Oceanic erosions—
Your majestic early precipice

Chica Micha, you are floating above the white space. Today, slowly sliding over me in a mass of shape-shifting. You are buzzing today, urgent. And then your quiet is here. You are monumental. Your wrinkles in the stone, your shards of stone, your cup of sand in the linestone. Your towering portrait of ornamental caprock. This of you is here.

The lawn of the river bed
A slow race of tumblers
Hard souls swimming to the next

Chica Micha, your ocean is here. Many shadows of the wave and white caps holding their foam-rock faces to the sun. The party is here, standing in a half-moon circle, grass in our toes, hard smooth backs. Weathered, we are here. Enveloped in your seldom shadows. You are in the White Place. You have traveled to the White Place. Your print is now here in the Place.

Our red hot faces
Finding the small cactus—finally
Foot after rock foot

Later we traveled to Echo Canyon where we ate lunch and worked on epistrophs, forms where the end of each line repeats. I wrote an epistroph about breathing. I think subliminally I was thinking about both Michele and the trip I made to Echo Canyon years earlier with my mother. She had a hard time walking up the path and she was out-of-breath with COPD. I thought she could probably make the trip today after she recently lost 30 pounds.

Ten Lines of Breathing

Finding the path to the bowl and I breathe.
Tangling over my roots and I breathe.
The rock that warms me and I breathe.
Stumbling and I breathe.
Knotting and I breathe.
Bathing in the amphitheater empty and I breathe.
Smelling the fly-sweat and I breathe.
The sound draining with the light and I breathe.
Tipping calls over the rail and I breathe.
Avalanche and I breathe.

We all received a Georgia O'Keeffe pen and tote bag and a generic composition notebook. You know I love me some tote!

Poet Lauren Camp was a great guide through these places and forms. You can find out more about her at http://www.laurencamp.com/. She also runs a blog and hosts workshops, such as Reading to an Audience, which I totally need and would take if I lived closer to Santa Fe.

View all my pictures from the trip.

Michele Sawdey (1960-2012)