Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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Ask a Poet: Hope is a Muscle

Awhile back I had a string of questions to Big Bang Poetry. And I can’t find them now. But here’s a new interesting one that just came in.

Hi, as a class, we just finished reading In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle [by Madeleine Blais, 1995]. My teacher said that the title was based on an Emily Dickenson poem. I have looked high and low, and I haven’t found it. Since you’re an expert, I was wondering if you knew where it came from. Let me know.

This was an interesting question. Emily Dickinson thought a lot about hope but not so much about muscles. I did a google search for “Emily Dickinson” and “muscles” as a cursory check. Nothin.

She has a famous “hope” poem though which I figured was the most likely culprit but with a twist for the basketball team and the Amherst connection in the Blais book. Then I found an article where the author confirmed as much herself: https://www.thepostscript.org/p/madeleine-blais-heart-is-an-instrument

“The title In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle was also inspired by a writer, Emily Dickinson, the poet who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, the setting of the high school basketball team whose championship season I covered. Her famous poem claims “hope is the thing with feathers,” though Woody Allen has a joke about that thing with feathers is his nephew in Zurich who thinks he is a bird. I, obviously, had my own definition.”

According to Google’s Ngram viewer, Blais’ book is probably the first use of the phrase in 1995.

There is also an oft-revested quote by Krista Tippett: “Hope is a muscle, a practice, a choice that actually propels new realities into being. And it’s a muscle we can strengthen.” But from all I can see online, this seems to be a more recent quote.

There’s also a Bjork song using “hope is a muscle” from her 2022 Fossora album that is a very good read (https://genius.com/Bjork-atopos-lyrics) but a pretty typical Bjork experience to watch.

Literary Recipes

I’ve been meaning to do this post for many months now but was unable to carve out the time. Recently, there was an Intro to Anthro With 2 Humans podcast about Roman food (“Pour Some Garum on Me“) and just like the Egyptian sex poems book, I was able to find literary crossover as a stream of books come through the house.

As I flipped through one book called Gastronomical Time Travel, I also happened to be reading The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook and I realized some of these recipes were related to famous literary works.

So I thought I would list some of them out.

Absinthe

I visited an Absinthe bar in Paris in 2008 and since then I’ve been noticing references to absinthe in paintings, novels and biographies. Painters and writers include Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Paul Verlaine, Picasso Vincent van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant and Oscar Wilde.

Absinthe recipe

The Mint Julep

The Mint Julep was made famous in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Here’s a Medium article on “The mint julep’s jaunt through literature.”

Mint Julep recipe

The Madeleine

The Madeleine is probably the most famous depiction of food’s impact on memory and the sublime, from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way.

Madeleine recipe

New England Clam Chowder

New England Clam Chowder as depicted in Moby DickI’m going to Boston in early August and hope to have some thick, creamy New England clam chowder!

New England clam chowder recipe

Fried Chicken, Cold

Cold Fried Chicken appears in many novels from Pride and Prejudice to A Moveable Feast.

Make the fried chicken recipe, then refrigerate.

Haggis

From the Robert Burns poem, “Address to a Haggis.”

Poets love to write about food. Here are 10 anthologies of poetry about food:”10 tasty food poetry anthologies for hungry readers.” I have The Hungry Ear which has anthologized food poems by contemporary poets.

Haggis recipe

Oysters Rockefeller

In The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Toklas talks about Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s return to America from France in 1934-5 and their discovering the new foods Americans were eating. One of the dishes was Oysters Rockefeller and Toklas captured a recipe for it. Mark Twain was also extremely fond of oysters in any dish, including the Oysters Rockefeller.

The Decades-Long Comeback of Mark Twain’s Favorite Food

Oysters Rockefeller recipe

More Lists of Literary Foods

Learning New Things

I am still making my way through a year’s subscription of New Yorker from 2021 but I only have a few issues left. I came across a good article last week called “Starting Fresh” by Margaret Talbot and it’s about learning new things as an older person and how this is good for preventing cognitive decline. This article interested me for a few reasons:

One, the women in my family have always been keen on preventing cognitive declines. My grandmother Ladd did this by religiously doing crossword puzzles and keeping track of storyline plots of soap operas. My mother does it with online games like Words With Friends, and cooking when she is able to still do that.

Secondly, I had a brain explosion many, many years ago when I took a ceramics class and got over the daunting idea that I would never be good at it. (See raspberry mask above.) We live in a society that instills in us a terror of attempting anything we might fail. So most of us like to stay in our comfort zones.

But as a writer working my way through my later years, I feel the need to keep exploring, as best I can anyway. This article talks about the benefits of learning new things later in life beyond the spiritual resetting of embracing a beginner’s mind. And also of the dangers of perfectionism earlier in your life.

“Maybe it could be an antidote to the self-reported perfectionism that has grown steadily more prevalent among college students in the past three decades. Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, the authors of a 2019 study on perfectionism among American, British, and Canadian college students, have written that “increasingly, young people hold irrational ideals for themselves, ideals that manifest in unrealistic expectations for academic and professional achievement, how they should look, and what they should own,” and are worried that others will judge them harshly for their perceived failings. This is not, the researchers point out, good for mental health. In the U.S., we’ll be living, for the foreseeable future, in a competitive, individualistic, allegedly meritocratic society, where we can inspect and troll and post humiliating videos of one another all the live-long day. Being willing to involve yourself in something you’re mediocre at but intrinsically enjoy, to give yourself over to the imperfect pursuit of something you’d like to know how to do for no particular reason, seems like a small form of resistance.”

Yes it does.

Talbot talks about what kinds of cognitive abilities decline with age and which ones improve with age. There’s no perfect age, as it turns out, for the best cognitive ability in all areas. “Fluid indigence, which encompasses the capacity to suss out novel challenges and think on one’s feet, favors the young. But crystallized intelligence–the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise and Fingerspitzengefühl—is often enriched by advancing age. And there’s more to it than that: particular cognitive skills rise and fall at different rates across the life span…”

The article states that your overall cognitive function will also improve if you try to learn a few new things at once. You don’t even have to be good at it. Just the attempt to do it. And researchers think this is because the act of learning multiple things at once replicates how children learn.

I’m fascinated watching how children learn things cognitively and socially. Following early child development educator Dan Wuori on Twitter is just as interesting as watching people try to solve mysteries or design things on TV. It’s watching the wheels spin. You can see it on countless reels of little kids. The first Dan Wuori video that hooked me was a little kid learning how to sort bags of different kinds of snack chips and it was compelling. The face of someone thinking is a wonderous thing.

Which is all to say I’ve started learning how to type on a braille typewriter I bought a few years ago. Back then I invited a friend over who works at a local school in Albuquerque where kids have some disabilities. So she has to take a braille test every year. It was a daunting lesson. First we had to figure out why the machine wasn’t working. Then she had to show me how hard it was to use!

I did a series of typewriter poems a few years ago and it took me like 60 pieces of paper to type out 6 poems. But I’m a comparatively good typist so that was easy compared to working with braille. There’s the same high expectation that there be no errors, (no white out sheets for my typewriter poems!), but you have to learn to type very slowly with multiple fingers engaged for every single word.

It took me quite a while to write a poem I thought worthy of the thing. Years. Then I used an online text to braille translator to map out the poem this week. Now it’s just days and weeks ahead of making many mistakes.

Wheeee!

Poems in Pop Culture: Ghost (UK)

I’m pleased to report another poem in pop culture today. My last reported poem in pop culture was the poem in the Al Pacino movie Sea of Love which I rewatched during Covid in 2020. And the most popular Big Bang Poetry post of all time is probably the hilariously bad poem from Bob’s Burgers.

So now we have another one. For Ghost show fans, you probably already know there is the British TV show Ghost and the U.S. version of Ghost. I watch them both. The U.S. version has a lot of heart and can be very sweet; but the UK Ghost is indisputably funnier, which is not surprising. The cast is also mostly carried over from the skit comedy Horrible Histories, a show Monsieur Big Bang is a big fan of so I’ve seen many of those episodes and you can see how the UK cast coheres better for being an existing and robust comedic troupe.

Recently we’ve started watching the final season of the UK show on Amazon. And last night’s “Home” episode (#2 of season 5) centers around the writing of a poem. This is not surprising either because the UK show has a poet.

The U.S. show’s ghost-types include the mansion matriarch, the 60s hippie, a Revolutionary War captain (and his British counterpart boyfriend), the Native American, the jazz singer, the scout leader, the playboy stockbroker, the occasional visit from the plague victim and Thorfinn, a visiting Viking,

The UK version has the Romantic-era poet (played by the funny and handsome Mathew Baynton), a caveman, a WWII captain, a Conservative MP (the trouser-less counterpart to the playboy stockbroker), a Georgian noblewoman, a scoutmaster, a peasant woman (gone from season 5) and the mansion matriarch. Besides the poet, my second favorite character (played by the talented Martha Howe-Douglas) is Fanny the matriarch because she makes hilariously interesting faces.

Anyway, in the “Home” episode, the poet Thomas tries to ruthlessly finagle a poem from the matriarch so he can earn a publication in a modern-day poetry contest. This is the poem Fanny writes thinking she is just explaining to Thomas her love for her historic estate, a parcel of which is about to be sold.

Home
By Stephanie (Fanny) Button,
transcribed by Thomas Thorne

Have you never stood to regard our home
from its farthest corner,
the long grass shimmering in the sunlight
as the wind combs through the field
like gentle waves in a great calm sea of green?

Flowers die. The trees fail.
The house can change brick by brick
until nothing of the original remains.
Everything changes.

So home is not the walls or the gardens.
Home is the souls within those walls.
Home is the memories made on the spot.
Home is not a place. Home is a feeling.

The Essay Project: Concepts vs. Identities

I hear there’s a saying in recovery therapy that says, “don’t should on me.”

And I think about this phrase a lot when I’m reading and hearing how poems should be this way or that way, how people should be this way or that way, or how the problem with X,Y or Z is that it should be. Men should be. Women should be. The Other Side should be.

I’m slowly reading a book called Advanced Poetry, a sort of poetry course put together by Kathryn Nuernberger and Maya Jewell Zeller.

Each chapter has writing exercises and extra readings online and so reading it is taking me time. In fact, I’m only up to the chapter about a poet’s “voice” where they spend time discussing the New York School poets, specifically Frank O’Hara and all the experimental alternatives to writing confessional poetry. The chapter explores the tensions between the two exercises, writing confessional/identity poetry and writing experimental/modernist poetry, illustrated most clearly in two essays the author’s have included online.

Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” by Cathy Park Hong  was a somewhat ground-breaking article that calls out conceptual or experimentalist poets for being clueless, and alternatively insensitive or rude, on the issue of identity politics, for not producing pure-language experiments, as they do, or for writing, as Stephen Colbert’s character would say on his old Comedy Central show, from the vantage point where “I don’t even see race.”

However you feel about the term “identity politics,” marginalized groups sharply feel their status in the world. For example, I can’t forget at any time that I am a woman. Honestly, I’ve led a pretty easy and privileged life. But I can still face obstacles as a woman. What if I get pregnant? What if I apply for a manly job, like kicker on a football team? What if I piss-off either other women or men but saying something perceived to be wrong for my gender? My womanness is very much a part of my idea of myself.

And my ideas of myself are always tricky. I get tangled up in them when I try to seek out a religious or cultural identity for myself because my father grew up on Indian reservations (as a white boy) and passed a lot of cultural artifacts down from the Hopi and Tohono Oʼodham (which is the childhood and young adulthood he experienced). That was passed down with our New Mexico heritage which is very hybrid as well. However, genetically I am not Hispanic or Native American. So what am I, culturally speaking? You can’t escape focus on your identity when it is blurred or marginalized or hated. You don’t have the luxury to not think about it. The world forces your identity upon you. And then you can criticized for talking about it.

From the point of view of modernists and experimentalists, we should be able to shred our identities and write in an authorless, language-based way. Hong calls this out as clueless. It is possible we will never get to a place of social equity ever and pretending this can be so (through art manifestos) doesn’t ever make it so.

The other essay is “Delusions of Progress” by Daniel Borzutsky which really takes some time to unpack Hong’s statements.

The experimentalists (or conceptualists) are pretty cliquey. That’s another issue. They can be pretty dismissive of other poetries. On the other had, political writers operate with such urgency, they often feel the same way. And their point can be well taken. For example, if we don’t solve the environment crisis and we all die off, there will be no humans to make the poetry experiments. So there.

This is not a new problem. I’m also reading about the beginnings of modernism. Modernist poets like T.S. Eliot wanted to push back against “sentimental poets,” women poets of the time. Poetry should be to escape the personal, he believed. Confessional poetry sprouted up to push back against that. Also, there were some women and minority poets during the time of Eliot who were using non-experimental or traditional forms and structures to talk about their lives in political ways.

It has always seemed to me more a matter of privilege than overt racism, although you could draw political lines between the two groups. The modernists were ironically very politically conservative. Eliot and Pound were famously antisemitic during WW2. They latter-day New Critics not only believed a poem should stand as an artifact free of biography, but as a critical force they shut down the poetry of the political left which disappeared from the canon and the academy for almost 100 years, along with popular poets of the day, whatever their politics were, poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan…etc. More recent modernists evaluations and anthologies in both America and England are just beginning to bring those poets back into our critical awareness.

This is not to say some experimentalists are not racist. But many of them just have the privilege of their race or sex not being a barrier or under threat. They can’t or don’t want to write about their whiteness. So they tool around with words instead. I just want to say that their doing this isn’t the problem. Their experiments in and of themselves are not clueless or wrong. It is all their critical judgements, their exclusive shoulding, their grand ideas about their own place in the poetry canon that is clueless.

I do get energized, myself, from procedural and language experiments but I have always sympathized with poets who want or need to write poems of witness and social concern. And now that I feel my own future jeopardized as a person in the new era of aggressive incels, I understand this much more viscerally.

Borzurtsky’s article is a good discussion on these struggles and he comes to conclude that maybe this isn’t a discussion about poetry at all, but how you “position yourself in the world, about how you want to live your life.”  He says, “the politics of form is really a discussion about the politics of content.”

To dismiss identity poetry is tragic, he feels, because he has seen “poetry have a transformative effect on individuals because of a poet’s willingness to speak, directly and honestly and vulnerability, about ‘identity,’ about political and social experience, about what it means to survive in a world that wants to kill you.” (or enslave you, or make rape legal…)

And we have to remember, in some countries you were (and still are) killed or jailed for writing witness  or political poetry. To say this kind of poetry isn’t “serious” enough is just absurd. No government is going to kill you for writing a procedural poem.

Borzurtsky goes on to say “I think about how small and incremental it feels to write poetry in our over-saturated, a-political landscape.”

Which reminds me of the joke, “Why are poets so cutthroat? Because the stakes are so small.” Poets are already marginalized. This becomes a nonsensical skirmish at some point. Because I would never want to see the poetries of witness vs. experiment made into opposing camps. Not only are there excellent and important poets who traffic in both exercises, we desperately need them both to exist.

I’ll say that again: we desperately need them all to exit.

We absolutely need a poetry of witness, identity, and social concern. But we also need the laboratory poets, the scientists’ scientist, the poets’ poets like Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein (who ironically supported some antisemetic bad actors herself because she was so vehemently anti-left). Many Harlem Renaissance writers and women writers at the onset of modernism used traditional poetry forms to protest the idea that they were not smart or genius enough to write in forms (Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay). We need all the things.

Forms (like music genres) have no politics. It’s the judgement about them that has politics.

By the way, Advanced Poetry as a text-book is happily inclusive of British and American poets of all kinds. It really puts the “trans” in trans-Atlantic.

Short Story Challenge No.2

So it took quite quite a bit longer than two months as predicted in Short Story Challenge No.1.  Oy. Other things happened this spring. A lot of depressing things, one of them being the writer with which I had originally arranged to do these challenges announced at a retreat of writers that she was going to quit writing. Sigh. This person was a big influence on me at Sarah Lawrence so this was more sad news.

But finish the first short story challenge I did, for the most part, over the last few months. The cards were a God-send. I was amazed how much easier it was to write toward unexpected plot points, to get into that kind of creative flow. Much different from writing the poems. And yet looking back, I can see how I was still stringing retooled random life experiences into the story.

I did about three or four passes of “The Ceasefire,” a story about a young pre-teen named Gerald who begins his coming-of-age story in the principal’s office complaining about his French teacher. He falls is love with the new girl who arrives at his bus stop and yada yada yada….complications happen with that (as set forth by the cards we drew in January). I made a change from my original plan to set the story in the 1990s instead of the 1980s (in order to hit a certain plot detail that only occurred in the 90s). I was happy with the way it turned out.

A few weeks ago, I showed this story (and the dream-based first story I did earlier) to Monsieur Big Bang. He seemed to like the story’s characters and humor a lot but deemed the story not really ready for prime time, yet. Horsefeathers! But he gave me some good notes for a few tweaks (which are still left to do) and helped me through a sticky plot point. After a while, I’ll go back to those fixes.

But that story spawned some other in-progress ideas and I figured it was time to keep going with a new challenge. I hope anyone who followed the first challenge had good luck with it, fruitful practice and possibly a viable story.

So anyway, here we go. I’ve added a few other cards from the Ouisi deck my friend Natalie gave me for Christmas for those of us who are visually minded.

To the left are the cards I drew for Challenge No.2.

As you may recall, step 1 is to draw cards from the Synapsis box: 1 spark card, 1 connect card and 2 riff cards.

We then start with the Spark card. Although we’re not writing a novel, our theme and tone is “Romance.” Oh la la. This is a love story (what story isn’t?) and, with that in mind, step 2 is to write our opening sentence using words from the top riff, the second connect and the third riff cards below.

I actually came up with two sentences. I’m not sure if I will choose one of them or use both.

Skin remembers hand.

While skinny-dipping, Wilma remembered Eleanor’s hand-me-downs.

In Step 3 we pull again from the Synapsis deck. We then sketch some quick answers to these questions.

For these questions, I thought about possible really bad love advice Wilma could have gotten in her life. This is an interesting angle to start a character with. The answer to the second question has a big effect on the whole story. My symbol is a lake (probably inspired by the skinny-dipping). And so the third answer was reflected by the lake and the skinny-dipping in a small list of picnic edibles. So we now have some props.

Step 4 is to give you story a title. Mine wasn’t that hard: Memory Lake.

For Step 5, we pull some cards from the other deck, The Storyteller deck. These are character wants (gold) and obstacles (copper).

So our character wants “royalty” and to never be in charge. Figures. Good luck with that, Wilma.

Her obstacles are the unexpected package and the smell that brings it all back. Okay then.

And we have a new step this round. Step 6 is to somehow incorporate these four images into the story:

I would say get something done in the next two months but…all things considered, do the best you can. Good luck.

In other news, I’ve created a poets of New Mexico page! Check it out for a survey of books that cover poems of place, in this case one of my places.

The End of NaPoWriMo

A little bit of catchup to do. I was in Cleveland for a month dealing with some family stuff. And then my dog. And then my computer. And then my sanity.

New Mexico Poetry

When I arrived home from Ohio, sitting on the doorstep, (literally), was the Albuquerque anthology of poetry, Open-Hearted Horizon, from the University of New Mexico Press. This was the first piece of good news I had had after many, many days of increasingly bad news.

I knew the book was coming out sometime this spring but I hadn’t heard an update since the fall of 2023, including any news of the book launch party which happened in March while I was gone.

Sigh. My streak of being unable to network with local poets continues.

But two of my poems made it into the anthology, including one from each of my books, Why Photographers Commit Suicide and Cowboy Meditation Primer. I’m very excited about reading this collection, which includes some famous local poets and Joy Harjo. To be in an anthology with her is pretty awesome.

This book will also be included in an upcoming page I’m working on that will be an ongoing roster of poetry anthologies and poets who write about New Mexico. I have a shelf of these books! It’s the kind of page I wish I had found when I moved back here in 2010 and was looking for examples of how poets write about the place to understand how I might do it.

You can buy Open-Hearted Horizon from the University of New Mexico Press page or from Amazon.

NaPoWriMo 2024

This was my last year doing the challenge as I’ve hit the goal of over 300 poems (311 to be exact). Quite frankly, I’m shocked I was able to get this year’s challenge completed, almost without a hitch.  I say almost because on the last day,  (April 30), I accidentally copied over the poem prompt from the day before, (for April 29), with no backup available locally or online. I hadn’t yet printed off the set and had kept no offline copy. Why I forgot to do this? I have no idea but it’s a great example of  the precariousness of NaPoWriMo challenges because almost every poem starts that morning without much pre-writing. So I literally had to re-invent that entire prompt from scratch.

I guess it’s surprising this had never happened to me before in all the 11 years of NaPoWriMos. It was an almost miraculous bit of luck that I was able to slowly remember most of the poem. Unfortunately, it’s not an exact copy. I know a few lines here and there are missing from the summary and the poem. It was an interesting mental experience to crawl back into the flow and see what memories came back in what order, the most recent memory being a missing piece that woke me up very early this morning  and I kept mulling over whether the line was “instead of someone to  spend all this time with” or “instead of someone with which to help spend all this time” or finally “instead of someone to help spend all this time” and then I fell asleep and forgot it all over again and had to start all over when I woke up again, the second time finally scribbling it down on a piece of paper in the dark and then going back to sleep again.

This last challenge is interactive with 30 multimedia prompts covering food, handwritten postcards, music, maps and scavenger hunts so you can write along. I had really no idea how each poem would go each morning, with the exception of the Winslow weekend posts which I had to preplan.

Here is a summary of the last 11 years of NaPoWriMos:

2013-2017 and 2019 can be found (somewhat degraded over the years) on Hello Poetry.

If you’re interested in interactive poetry projects, you can also try the 52 Haiku prompts.

The NaPoWriMo poems will stay up for a little while until I find the time to edit them better and compile them into a book. The nature of this challenge is that poems are quickly scrawled off and edited only within the span of a day. So they will be improved before their final resting place.

Winslow Writer’s Trip

One of the things I’m grateful for right now is being able to have taken a writing trip to Winslow, Arizona, a week or so ago. I so needed it. The trip was to meet up with the Sarah Lawrence College off-campus writing group that started in the early 1990s at the house where Murph and Denise’s were living in Bronxville.

Over the years we have stayed in touch and a few years ago we started a reading group to tackle Infinite Jest. We kept going after that. Last August, when I visited New York City, we met for dinner and agreed to meet again in Winslow in 2024.

We caught up on life stuff, writing projects and generally became a closer, fiercer gang of writers. It was perfect, aside from the fact that three of us miscalculated the time-zone change driving back east to Albuquerque and I had to floor it to get them to the airport to catch flights back to Philadelphia and New York. Good times.

 

To be honest, I almost decided not to finish the NaPoWriMo at all. This spring was so rough I was very much feeling like “what am I doing all this for?” But then I decided I would get to the 300 poems done if killed me. It did not kill me. But I have some quiet reflection to do right now.

NaPoWriMo Starts Soon

Ok…so my life is a series of slow-burning calamities at the moment.  I just lost my favorite fella last Wednesday and my mother has been in and out of the hospital for the last two months, with that situation ongoing,

I had to bail suddenly on a dying computer last Tuesday and set up a new one quickly in case I will need to return suddenly to Ohio. And plenty of other dramas are going on concurrently. In fact, this year is proving to be the worst one yet. I have been wallowing in funny animal and baby reels via Facebook and I’m not sorry at all about that.

The world needs more funny baby and animal videos right now. It’s something we can all get behind, no matter what our ideologies. My favorites have been the voice-over antics of Rxckstxr and following the adventures of Branston Pickle and Gizmo or any reels of Dads doing silly things for their little kids.

But I do not want to postpone my final NaPoWriMo another year. Absolutely not. So God help me I will begin the final set of poems starting Monday, April first.

I may not finish them by the end of the month. I may not finish them by the end of next month either. It may take me until July to get them all up, but finish this we will.

Check here periodically for postings of the as-yet-untitled set of poems: https://marymccray.com/napowrimo-2024-by-mary-mccray/.

People, Place or Thing: NaPoWriMo 2024 Is Coming

This will be my last National Poetry Writing Month Challenge year. I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo for over 10 years now and I said I would stop at 300 poems, which I will hit this year. I wanted the last set to be something more interactive, like an asynchronous group activity. So I’ve come up with a theme  on looking back on childhood and putting the past in a very tiny book.

Although I’ll be posting things every day in April related to the theme, I’m not seeing it as a project that has to be finished in a NaPoWriMo amount of time or even in 30 days. The point is to just get through the 30 little challenges. I’m starting to create a calendar to get it all organized.

Materials you will need to complete the challenges:

  • an iphone camera (if you want to memorialize your little scavenger hunt assemblages ((spoiler alert: there will be scavenger hunt assemblages)),
  • recipes (see below),
  • 5 books from childhood that you loved, (access to childhood stuff),
  • 5 postcards,
  • a tiny little notebook. I purchased my tiny little notebook (pictured above) a few years ago at the gift shop of El Rancho de Las Golondrinas, the Hispanic living history museum near Santa Fe. I was just waiting for something to do with it all this time.
  • Optional: A youtube or streaming music account

Example topics will look something like this:

Childhood Foods

  1. A childhood comfort food
  2. A recipe from childhood you still make
  3. A recipe that breaks your heart
  4. A recipe you associate with your mother, an aunt or mother-figure
  5. A recipe you associate with your father, uncle or father-figure

I’ll document my progress as we go and anyone who follows along (and wants to share) can send pics to and progress to mary@bigbangpoetry.com.

Speaking of NaPoWriMo, on the plane to Cleveland, The Birds and the Bee version of this song below came up on my phone’s music app shuffle.  (And I really do love these hipster versions of this song, truth be told.) I remembered driving home from work at AECOM in downtown Los Angeles years ago and Steve Jones on his radio show extolling the virtues of the song’s structure.

I also remembered it was the last outtake of NaPoWriMo 2022 and it got displaced for April 13, 2022, for a Genesis song. Here it is.

Fathoms Deep
(“How Deep Is Your Love,” Bee Gees from the movie Saturday Night Fever)

It’s tempting to pick the proliferating
hipster versions instead of this vulnerable
little embryo of a song
by the original vibrato brothers,
its morass of whispering
away from disco foolhardiness.

Regardless, I feel we must ask
the key, foremost question
posed here in a love trill,
addressed here in plain,
manifest English.

Because I really do need to learn
where this knowledge lives,
where it is, for what it longs.
And this is an inquiry to the heads
of the realms where we are both from.
A question to the pilot, the head honcho,
the chairman of the board, the grand poobah.

How many fathoms deep is it?
And can we believe in it?

Board Game for Poets

This amazing world, huh?

In August my friend Ann told me about a poetry board game called Dead Poets Rise, a game that was not yet for sale. I sat across from Ann practically losing my shit. A board game for poets? I’m a poet! I love board games!

I tried and failed to get in on the funding by sending a message to the game Facebook page. Possibly I was too late, but I did get added to the mailing list. The game went on sale  last fall for $100. This seems like a steep price when you consider games going for $20-40 on Amazon and Target. But I’ve noticed really popular and well-designed games are going for $100 on eBay, games like The Gallerist (about planning art exhibitions at your gallery and rumored to be the hardest strategy game out there, a factoid told to me by one of the clerks at my local board game hangout) and Shakespeare (where similarly you plan out a theatrical show).

This is a very nice game and I can see why it’s listed at that price point. I got a copy as a Christmas gift. Thanks Mom!

The Stuff

It’s a beautiful game in an awesome hexagonal-shaped box. The only flaw is that the box doesn’t close properly and needs a paper strap that’s hard to get on and off to keep it closed so that the contents don’t all spill out when you try to stash it in your closet. The paper is already tearing and will give up the ghost before long and I’ll have to be careful with storage. Right now the game is not being stored with my other board games but with my conspicuous poetry consumption objects.

The cover also acts as a hexagonal board with quotes printed along the edges. There are also juicy elements like a die, three decks of cards, tons of marbles! And a board that looks like Chinese checkers. Also included are mechanical pencils (with little eraser hats and a box of replacement graphite), pads of paper and a sticky notepad for all your writing prompts.

You also need a phone to look up texts and videos as part of the writing prompts.

The instructions

The instructions attempt to explain in words how to set up the board but we had no idea what we should end up with. The instructions need a picture of the board at the start of play. The main issue was that there were too many marbles for the available marble holes and we needed to have a combination of black and green marbles. But how many black marbles did we need? The instructions didn’t say. And should there be more black marbles in games with more players? There were black and green marbles and big shooting marbles (to represent the players). Shooting marbles went into easily marked holes around the edges of the board. We just had to guess.

Instructions should be specific about how many black marbles to “roll out” per number of players and then instruct the players to fill in the rest of the holes with green marbles. Why were there so many bags of marbles in the first place? There was a nice tan bag full of big beautiful shooter marbles, a beautiful black bag with the game logo full of green marbles. Then there was an extra plastic bag of 12 black marbles and another extra plastic bag containing 4 green and 2 black marbles. We never did figure out what all the different bags meant.

The black and green marbles were referred to as common and uncommon marbles which seemed unnecessary. In fact the game had too much new terminology that was maybe intended to create ambience in the game but it ended up just being confusing.

Instead of getting a specially made single die with low numbers, the instructions had a die translator. This annoyed me more than it did Monsieur Big Bang who was playing the game with me.

A word about Monsieur Big Bang, he hates board games. He grew up with bar games like pool and foosball, not that he’s crazy about those games now either (maybe with the exception of pinball). During Covid I got into board games somewhat excitedly. I focused on finding 1) games I felt deprived of as a child like Mystery Date or Go To the Head of the Class, two games my girlfriends had, 2) detective games with map boards and 3) games with pictures of famous art or art-related games (which is a crossover of #1 and the fact that my eldest brother had the game Masterpiece and refused to play it with me for mysterious reasons so I’ve been obsessing about that game ever since.

A word about me: I am notoriously bad at board games. I just like the doo-dads, setting them up, sorting it all out, losing the game and then putting everything back in the box. Just typing all that out makes me want to do it right now. My eldest brother did play games with me from time to time, but only war games like Risk or Battleship, during which he famously won by lying for the whole game and I guessed every single space until it was impossible not to have hit one of his ships by then. I lost by gullibility but then he was 7 years older than me so…I don’t feel too bad about that.

Getting Monsieur Big Bang to play board games is always a struggle, especially these days because he is very busy. And my local friends have their own games they want to play, so I’m collecting quite a stack of unplayed board games. I even bought one called Plunder with a pirate raiding theme (and little tiny ships with attachable masts and cannons) thinking it would entice Monsieur Big Bang (who also used to like Risk) but that was a no go. One of the last games I made him play was the aforementioned Mystery Date. I had a few friends who had this game but they never wanted to play it (also mysteriously). It has such an awesome opening door feature and I was always wanting to play it.

It turns out my girlfriends didn’t want to play this game because it is mind-bogglingly boring and takes too much time around the board before you can ever get a chance to actually open the technological marvel of that door to reveal your date for the night. I recently snared a copy and talked Monsieur Big Bang into playing it and (can you believe it?) I kept losing this game too! He kept getting the ball-room prince and the ski hunk and I kept getting the ‘dud,’ by which the game just means disheveled guy.

Oh yeah, so another annoying thing about Mystery Date is that is was created in the late 1950s and has seriously outdated ideas as to what makes an attractive date for the typical 1970s little girl. Twenty years later and that ‘dud’ looks pretty much like the most attractive guy in the deck and the others look like the duds.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not very good at board game strategy. And this game would prove no exception, professional-poet expertise aside.

Dead Poets Rise has two stacks of Creation and Chaos cards. You use them to write a poem while your working to collect marbles on the board.

Creation cards give you prompts for lines of your poem. Chaos cards sabotage the directions you were headed with those lines.

Examples of Creation cards: use the words always, never, sometimes in your next line, use alliteration with pr, pl, gr, gl sounds, search Google with provided prompts for words, write about a smell in the room, write about two disparate objects in the room, fill in this sentence when I hear ambulances I want to ….

Monsieur Big Bang said at this point the game felt like a Mad Lib.

Examples of sabotage cards: change one of your words to the opposite, change your verb tense, change the past to the future.


Unfortunately, there were quite a few duplicate cards and some triplicate cards. Coming from a family of poker players who can do fancy acrobatic playing-card shuffling, I can tell you I also suck at card shuffling. So I have to shuffle like ten times and still we couldn’t get them shuffled enough to reduce the duplicates  We also caught a typo in the word ‘corresponds’ in one of the cards.

Hopefully these things will get rectified. All the prompts should be original.

We played the short game for two people. The object is to roll the die and move across the board collecting a certain amount of black and green marbles. Once you have all your marbles you can move into the center area of play called The Sphynx Challenge.

Each turn also draws Creation and Chaos cards that help each player create a poem in the style of one of the “dead poets,” obscure poets that comprise another, most interesting deck.

You actually start things off with this dead poet deck, which includes separate little packs containing a handful of cards each for one obscure poet. At the beginning of the game, you all agree on the poet and everyone pulls a poet card with some biography and samples of poems. The players also choose a random theme from a list in the instructions. You use the theme and the poetry samples to write “in the style” of the poet you are attempting to “resurrect.”

It sounds more complicated than it is.

The back of the dead poet packs have biographical information and each player gets one of cards with snippets of their poems on it. These are the cards we drew:

 

By the time of The Sphynx Challenge at the end, you have pretty much a completed poem and the challenge is to read one line of your “fake” poem lines and two lines of the real poet’s poem and others have to guess which line is yours.

We each guessed each other’s fake lines.

In fact, Monsieur Big Bang won on the technicality that he was the first to make it to the Sphynx area with is big marble. And our decision to have him guess my fake line was just courtesy play.

The punishment for losing the Sphynx challenge seemed too much for the short version of the game (three green marbles) but then again your marbles don’t win you the game so who cares.

The Sphynx challenge introduced the elements of points which seemed sudden and out of place and the game provided no material to track these sudden points (grab a piece of paper). It felt like an after-thought, an additional confusion. And yet those points would determine the winner as people won or lost the challenge. Then again, it was also possible we weren’t playing it right. The whole points layer was confusing.

At the end of the game, we felt like the game was missing something and I couldn’t articulate it. The box had all the do-dads, after all.

Monsieur Big Bang had some ideas though. He said you could almost dispense with the board play and use the card prompts for writing exercises, like for students, friends or just playing alone. He said it was lacking a sense of a game’s highs and lows. There was no real feel of competition. And so we discussed board games that lacked this competition element and yet were still fun, like the Encanto movie board game. In that game you work together against a clock to save the house. It’s still fun but not cut-throat.

My friend Julie recently gave me a very Dungeon and Dragons like haunted house game, Betrayal at House on the Hill, (which I haven’t found anyone to play with yet), and the first half of that game is cooperative to set up the board pieces and the second half of the game, once the monsters get tripped off, is competing against a common monster and against each other.

Dead Poets Rise did feel like a writing exercise more than a game. I also didn’t understand the rationale for collecting the marbles except to extend our writing time with the prompt cards. The game does seem to needs more conflict, if not against each other than with some external element.

Monsieur Big Bang also felt the game didn’t have enough person-to-person contact. And you didn’t feel invested because there wasn’t enough drama, which prompted a retelling of the the joke I learned at Sarah Lawrence, “why are poets (and thus poetry board games) so cut throat? Because the stakes are so low.”

The stakes felt very low for this game. And maybe that’s where game drama lives.

The final imposter challenge did seem most satisfying at the end and maybe that could be worked into  regular game play. Considering it was one of the most fun aspects of the game, it was disappointing that the first person to enter the final Sphynx challenge area quickly won the game before anybody else could experience the fun of being an impostor.

I also really liked discovering, if not feeling like I fully “resurrected,” the dead poet. Our poet was Celia Dropkin and our theme was “the war within.” I had never heard of this Russian-born Yiddish poet who immigrated to New York City at the turn of the century (and passed away in the 1950s) so that was great fun for me (more so than for the non-poet-player).

Although there are some fixes needed, I do want to emphasize it’s a fun box of beautiful things and I will be playing it again and showing it to other poets.

My resulting poem turned out like this:

Untitled (the task of adding a title could be added to the play somehow)

Maybe my mother’s yearning
is never in me like conception (Not a bad start)
and the silence of the Gods gone quiet
like all the fires of the world going out,
grounded, groused and groveling for air. (What a mess of a run-on!)
And to survive I strive to organize. (True, dat)
When I hear ambulance I want to
melt into the water like ground (Good prompt to switch those words)
where the italicized roots of Latin are buried. (I had to change roots to monks. Boo.)
And the world revolves on the sight of glass
and dollars and dead poets. (I like the end)

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