Category: Whole Life of the Poet (Page 14 of 18)

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)

Paul Strand on Artist Philosophies

June 8, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Recently 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."

Bob’s Burgers and Bad Poetry

May 5, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Episode 4/27/14 – The Kids Run Away (watch it on Hulu)

Louise (in rabbit ears, left) runs away from the dentist office and seeks refuge at Aunt Gall (played by Megan Mullally). Her mother hopes Aunt Gall will drive them nuts (and thus home) with her invented board games and poetry readings.

The nerdy aunt wears a fanny pack all day among other idiosyncrasies and her boobs hang down to her waist (see below).

On the show she reads the following poems:

Happy Things We Should Send Into Space

A jar of mayo
magazine clippings of Scott Baio
that song that starts with Day-O

And another poem goes like this:

Little cat, you’re just like me
you go outside and squat to pee

SQUAT! SQUAT! SQUAT! SQUAT! SQUAT!

I’m not done.

SQUAT! SQUAT! SQUAT!

The end.

Louise then asks to read the rest of her poems in private so she won't disturb any one when she says,

“mmmmm”

“uh-huh!”

“well put”

“Devastating!”

They're making fun of poetry readings. And it was a great episode.

My Porn Following and Sexy Poems

April 29, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Last year in my Big Bang Poetry newsletter, I sent out an article about how Tumblr was the up-and-coming social media player for young people. Facebook and Twitter are skewing more for old folks.

Because I care about reaching people younger than myself, I dutifully set up a Tumblr page. My page was pretty static with only basic information about how to link to my blogs and other web sites.

I was surprised a few months ago when I started getting a steady stream of new followers. Not just a few but like 40 followers in two months. I was confused about the activity but decided to create a new section of the Tumblr page for updates. I figured if people wanted to connect with me on Tumblr, I should update it more often.

However, something seemed a little off. The icons (pictures) of the new followers…well they didn’t look right. Let’s just say they looked more like someone you’d come across at a club on the Sunset Strip than someone you would run into at a poetry reading (or a Cher fan for that matter).

It all became clear to me one day when I received a new follower with a quite provocative icon image. Totally porno! Suddenly I had a theory about this. I wondered if I was being confused with a porn star. Could it be?

Monsieur Big Bang and I then ran a search for a porn star with the name of Mary McCray. Lo and behold, there is not only a porn actress named Marie McCray but she's alternatively known as Mary McCray. She has a Tumblr page and capitalizes on misspellings of her name.

All these new followers were following me mistakenly thinking they were following Marie McCray the porn star!

Imagine their dismay at all my poetry posts and Cher updates!

Monsieur Big Bang thinks I'm on to something. He thinks all poets should incorporate the name of a porn star into their own name to catch porn hits, names like Ron Jeremy Padgett or Nina Hartley Crane.

You can’t unfriend followers in Tumblr like you can in Facebook and I’m not sure I would want to. Maybe I can get one or two porn fans to consider the salacious potential of John Donne and H.D.

Read 10 sexy poems compiled by Flavorwire

My Poet Ancestor’s Miracle Poem

April 29, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In 2012 I wrote about my only ancestor (my great-grandmother's niece) who was a poet, Marylu Terral Jeans and her book Statue in the Stone. Last month I received a fascinating email about one of her poems from a man named Patrick in Pittsburgh.

Here's is the story he told:

My mother, Mary, was a Peace Corps volunteer in its early days, right after President Kennedy's assassination. She was so inspired by Kennedy that she joined the Peace Corps as a 24 year-old woman and taught English in the Philippines from 1964 through 1966. She mother was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer about five years ago and died at age 67.

While I was going through some of her old Peace Corps souvenirs, I found a small poem which looked like it had been torn out of a magazine by hand. It was the poem "Love-Armored" by Marylu Terral Jeans. I found the poem very moving, and obviously my mother did too, as she had kept it with her while thousands of miles away from home in the Philippines for 2 years (long before email, cell phones or other technology made the world seem much smaller). I kept the poem in a ziplock bag along with some prayer cards left over from her funeral. I put the plastic bag in a wooden box with a Bible in it. The Bible had been given to me at her funeral. The box then went into an old oak dresser which came with me through several moves in the last few years.

This past December I bought my first home, a small brick ranch house on a mountaintop piece of land in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania (50 miles East of Pittsburgh). I had a woodburner stove installed into a basement fireplace, and the installer's must have made a mistake when putting in the new chimney liner. At 3:00 AM on December 12th, I woke up in the middle of the night because I wasn't breathing right and a smell of smoke was all through my house. I went down and checked the fireplace, and the fire in the woodburner was out. I figured the new stove just wasn't venting properly and went back to bed. At 7:00 AM I awoke again because I was breathing smoke and this time noticed a haze of smoke all through the house. (I wasn't supposed to get up until 10AM, because I had worked late the night before). I walked all through the house trying to figure out where the smoke was coming from but couldn't find any source. I opened windows to try to air my house at this point.

Little did I know, the underside of the hardwood floors in my home had been smoldering with fire all night waiting for oxygen. I then noticed smoke billowing up from behind the piece of furniture (an old family heirloom that had belonged to my mother's family) which held the Bible box. I ran downstairs and pulled the tiles of the drop ceiling and the entire underside of my floors were on fire. I dumped an entire fire extinguisher into the ceiling before having to flee my house due to smoke overtaking me. I made it out with just my clothes and wallet in my pocket.

Within a half hour, my entire house had burned and the first floor of the house had collapsed into the basement. It was a total loss fire. The fire had burned so intense inside the brick house that I never even found a trace of my mountain bike (all metal) and other large objects that were completely melted. But while the entire first floor had collapsed and incinerated in the fire, the old oak dresser with the Bible in it had slid down on a piece of broken floor into the basement…and it didn't burn. The area of the basement where it slid into was the vortex of the fire. It was within 8 feet of where my mountain bike and a couch had melted completely with no trace. The oak dresser was charred, but survived. The Bible in the wooden box had remained completely untouched during the fire. It had literally been in the hottest part of the fire where nothing else survived.

Last week I began looking for the plastic bag containing the old poem which i knew had also been in the Bible box. It was nowhere to be found. I began searching Google for lines of the poem which I remembered, but there were no Google hits for a poem titled "Love Armored". I couldn't remember the name of the author. Very sad over the loss of this old poem which meant so much to me, I went back to what remained of my old house last week, took the boards off the windows and tramped around looking through the sludge and debris. Over a foot of water had been dumped into the basement of the house by the fire department during the fire, and it was a mess. No luck finding anything. A friend of mine had removed the old dresser the day after the fire to dry it out in his garage, and I called him just to see if maybe the bag was still inside.

He called me back and said "This is really spooky. I have the bag, it had been lying near the dresser after the fire. The plastic bag isn't even sealed, and there are ashes in the bag, so it was open during the fire. But for some reason, none of the papers inside the bag are burnt, and there isn't even any water damage to anything in the bag". Just to clarify, a plastic ziplock bag containing paper items was lying unharmed within 8 feet of where a mountain bike and everything else in sight had completely melted in the fire. He sent pictures of the bag and the contents. A few people had been telling me since the fire that my mother had been watching over me and had awakened me before the carbon monoxide or fire could get to me. When I read the FIRST and LAST lines of the poem, it gave me chills. See the attached photos of the actual bag and poem.

Love Armored

My love surrounds the house in which you dwell,
The place you work, the streets your feet have known,
With more of tenderness than I can tell,
And prayers I have said for you alone.
If you are lonely, know that I am near;
If you are sad, my faith will comfort you,
The things you value I shall hold most dear;
Your happiness will make me happy, too.

If you are heavy-laden, be at rest…
He who is loved need never walk alone.
He has a cloak, a sword to meet the test,
A shield, a talisman that is his own.
Be sure of this: Though you may travel far,
My love will guard you anywhere you are.

More Poet Affirmations

February 13, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

More affirmations culled from The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo:

Our strength will continue if we allow ourselves the courage to feel scared, weak, and vulnerable.
–Melody Beattie

This reminds me of a story I have about Melody Beattie's wonderful book, Co-Dependent No More, How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Taking Care of Yourself. Many years ago a therapist of mine recommended the book and it really helped me. Two years ago, I met a woman in Santa Fe who was struggling with the issue of trying to fix her alcoholic boyfriend. I loaned her the book and a week later she told me a story about how the boyfriend went into a tirade when he saw it, ripped it up and then threatened her physically. She kicked him out and then promised to buy me a new copy, one she said was already re-ordered and in the mail. Weeks later a co-worker was helping her after another drama with her estranged boyfriend and when she mentioned the word 'co-dependency' our co-worker, a horribly dysfunctional and co-dependent woman herself, told us she defiantly didn’t believe in co-dependency. The concept was a bunch of malarkey. Needless to say, I never saw a replacement of the book and I miss all my marginalia from the allegedly destroyed copy. I guess I should stop being so co-dependent on my book.

To let knowledge produce troubles, and then use knowledge to prepare against them, is like stirring water in hopes of making it clear.
–Lao-Tzu

Mark Nepo goes on to say "the mind is a spider that, if allowed, will tangle everything and then blame the things it clings to for the web it wants to be free of."

How can you follow the course of your life if you don not let it flow?
–Lao-Tzu

To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.
Mark Nepo

Movies with Poetry: John Keats & Marlon Riggs (2009/1989)

January 28, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Bright Star (2009) is another BBC Films movie focusing on the 1818 love story between John Keats, (played like a heartthrob by Ben Whishaw), and Fannie Brawne, (played by Abbie Cornish), with screenplay and direction by Jane Campion.

This was another winner with great depictions of the following:

– the pompous, insufferable poet who has no sense of humor about himself or anything else, played by Paul Schneider as Keats’ friend Mr. Brown

– sequestering yourself to get writing done

– poor reviews and poor sales

– choosing a life of poetry even though this entails poverty

– really good friends who are actually not very good friends whenever they provide blind, tragic generosity.

Just as she did in The Piano, director Campion makes another unhurried, particular movie. She is a master of shooting the outdoors, the outside lawns and forests of Hampstead Village, full of butterflies and the sounds of the woods. Campion is also good at including adorable little girls in her pictures, girls who run around the heath and steal the movie.

Here, Campion sets up a parallel of craft between Brawne’s labors over stitching and sewing her fashions and the labor of Keats' writing. There is a scene midway that is a remarkable bit of visual poetry itself: Brawne laying in her bed in the first thoes of love as her window curtain floats across the room toward her.

Campion also does a few studies in the ruffles of “almost-silence” (with interesting foley sound effects) and visually in a look at love’s madness (with a succession of butterfly scenes that begin with beauty and end in depression—hey, we’ve all been there).

Brawne suffers trying to relate to Keats, declaring, “poems are a strain to work out” before she asks Keats to teach her how to read a poem. Keats describes reading poetry to her as similar to swimming in a lake. The point is not to rush over to the other side but to enjoy floating in the middle of it.

Many of Keats' most famous poems are recited. You also get to feel the exhilarating joy and tactility of receiving hand-written letters.

But warning: this movie is not for those with a “delicate constitution” as the film requires a steady crying jag that lasts practically the full final half.

Tongues Untied is one of the documentaries listed in the documentary about 50 documentaries you should see before you die. The movie is both a collage of experiment and a personal statement by Marlon Riggs about his experiences as a black gay man. Between narratives, the movie weaves in spoken-word poetry, popular music and dance.

At the time of its release, the movie was labeled pornographic and used as an example in the attack against national funding for the arts. Looking back, that response looks shamefully puritan.

Beautiful performance poetry on issues of race and sexuality. Not for those who are squeamish about frank discussions and depictions of race and sexuality. Highly recommended otherwise.

Tourist Poem Written After an Execution

January 28, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

First of all, it's amazing where you come across poetry in your travels. Second, it's always moving to find a poem serving as an appeal to the afterlife.

On our way home from Pennsylvania after Christmas, Monsieur Big Bang wanted to stop in Fort Smith in order to do some research on Belle and Pearl Starr for his consulting project with the show Quick Draw.

At the Fort Smith historic site, I came across this poem called "My Dream" written by Rufus Buck on the backside of a photograph of his mother. It was found in his cell after his execution for rape on July 1, 1896.

I've cleaned it up…there's a piece of punctuation after practically every word…blame his fragile state of mind…and I've fixed the spelling.

The poem reads,

I dreamt I was in heavenamong the angels fair;
I'd ne'er seen none so handsome
that, twine in golden hair.
They looked so neat and sang so sweet
and played the golden harp.
I was about to pick an angel out
and take her to my heart
but the moment I began to plea
I thought of you, my love.
There was none I'd seen so beautiful
on earth or heaven above.

Goodbye my dear wife and mother,
also my sisters.
Rufus Buck,
Yours truly.

1 Day of July
in the year of
1896

Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Virtue, Resurrection
Remember me Rock of Ages

Pop Culture, Art Culture, Value & Camille Paglia

January 20, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Because last year Cher was mired in an interview scandal over comments she made about Miley Cyrus' controversial performance on the Video Music Awards, my friend Christopher, fellow-poet and pop-culture aficionado, sent me an editorial on the topic by controversial critic and pop-culture academic, Camille Paglia. I blogged about it yesterday on I Found Some Blog. I don't always agree with Paglia (politically) but I felt her comments hit a target about Miley Cyrus and the vapid sexuality of pop performances today, not to mention the corresponding vapid rebelliousness of the avant garde's stunt art…

"…the real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus' performance was in artistic terms. She was clumsy, flat-footed, and cringingly unsexy, and effect heightened by her manic grin.

How could American pop have gotten this bad? Sex has been a crucial component of the entertainment industry since the seductive vamps of silent film and the bawdy big mamas of roadhouse blues. Elvis Presley, James Brown and Mick Jagger brought sizzling heat to rock, soul and funk music, which in turn spawned the controversial raw explicitness of urban hip-hop.

The Cyrus fiasco, however, is symptomatic of the still heavy influence of Madonna, who sprang to world fame in the 1980s with sophisticated videos that were suffused with a daring European art-film eroticism and that were arguably among the best artworks of the decade. Madonna’s provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl’s keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.

…

But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality — above all, Marlene Dietrich’s glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse’s stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today’s aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove.

Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

…

Pop is an artistic tradition that deserves as much respect as any other. Its lineage stretches back to 17th century Appalachian folk songs and African-American blues, all of which can still be heard vibrating in the lyrics and chord structure of contemporary music. But our most visible young performers, consumed with packaging and attitude, seem to have little sense of that thrilling continuity and therefore no confidence in how it can define and sustain their artistic identities over the course of a career.

What was perhaps most embarrassing about Miley Cyrus’ dismal gig was its cutesy toys — a giant teddy bear from which she popped to cavort with a dance troupe in fuzzy bear drag. Intended to satirize her Disney past, it signaled instead the childishness of Cyrus’ notion of sexuality, which has become simply a cartoonish gimmick to disguise a lack of professional focus. Sex isn’t just exposed flesh and crude gestures. The greatest performers, like Madonna in a canonical video such as “Vogue,” know how to use suggestion and mystery to project the magic of sexual allure. Miley, go back to school!

Read the full piece: http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/27/pops-drop-from-madonna-to-miley/

After taking my MOOC class on contemporary poetry last year (which I loved, by the way), I think there is room to pause at this statement, "avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against." After all, even Madonna needed a church to subvert against. Avant guarde artists have run the irritant gamut. And I think this is why it feels like rebelling when we take up kitsch and bad art, hence the popularity of MOBA, the Museum of Bad Art in Boston.

Don't get me wrong, I love MOBA on many levels: ironically (the whole museum is ironic) and literally (I have a soft spot for participatory attempts beyond one's skill). More on this later, but I do believe we can actually conflate gestures of loving something both ironically and literally. One level I don't love MOBA on is the level of the rebellious, avant-garde. To me that reads like a cynical, take-over gesture by artists who have run out of any other ideas. It's like robbing the innocents of their playroom in order to fashion your own school of thought. This wouldn't necessarily include language poets, Dada poets, John Cage-inspired poetics or found poetics (which are healthy experiments, I think), but might include any overt celebration of the bad as a suspicously rebellious way to question value-systems. It's not fair to those who spend hours crafting and its not fair to those who are beginners. It's bad karma and it's a dead end.