Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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

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

GalwayGalway 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…

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

 

 

LorcaArchaeologists are now searching for Federico García Lorca lost grave.

 

 

Poetry-brothelBordello-style poetry readings at the Poetry Brothel

 

   

 

SandburgI '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.

Freudharlow Randmartha 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

ImagesSI7TMUEQRecently 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.

PathI 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?

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.

 

Walking with Poetry

PoetsThe 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:

WhiteWhere 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

 

EchoLater 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.

 

  MichelleMichele Sawdey (1960-2012)

  

 

 

 

 

  

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."

  

Bob’s Burgers and Bad Poetry

Bobsb 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” Auntg

“uh-huh!”

“well put”

“Devastating!”

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

   

My Porn Following and Sexy Poems

TumblrLast 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!

Mary-mccray-pornstar-short

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

BagIn 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.   Poem 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

HappyMore 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)

BsBright 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.

TuTongues 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.

  

   

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