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What is Poetry: Where Is the Poem?

August 28, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We are continuing through Elisa New’s queries on what poetry is, questions she posed in the Harvard Emily Dickinson MOOC. This week I’m actually going to combine eight of her questions into one, because they’re all related.

1) Is a poem still a poem if one only entertains one’s self with it internally?

This reminded me of Emily Dickinson. Does the poem exist in her chest (as in her bosom, as in a poem only internal to her) or in her chest (as in a very physical hope chest or chest of drawers where she hid 1800 or so of her poems during her lifetime)?

In the first scenario, the poem has not been physically written down yet, like possibly millions of other poems she never officially wrote out on paper. In the second scenario, she is still the only one (in her lifetime) entertained by them. Scenario #2 is still barely removed from “internally” and yet significantly different from “internally” because it is the only place that those poems have potentiality, the potential to be read in the future by another reader.

Once a poem moves from your brain to an external media, it assumes a future audience, even if you hide it somewhere. I feel the same way about journals, they assume an audience even if they are “private.” Only thoughts inside your head are truly private.

2) Where is the poem?

This question feels like a Zen Koan to me. I don’t even think we need to answer this one; we can just soak it in. But this question implies a poem taking up space in the world: where is it? A poem has a physical location. If a poem is only read aloud, does it have a physical location? Does a poem have to happen on paper to have a physical location?

3) Where does the poem really happen?

In my interpretation, this question implies a poem happening in time: a happening. “When” does it happen would be more accurate. A poem comes to be in a moment of time or a span of time. Is the time from thought to composition to appreciation all the time?

4) Where does a work of art really live?

This broadens the question out to all the arts and specifies its existence beyond being born in space and time. Where does it live out its life? In the collective mind? In our individual imaginations? Somewhere else? Some objective space (can it exist without other readers/listeners)? If a poem has been recited in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it…

5) Does it live in intention?

Here Elisia New starts to move through the stages of creation. The artist has intentions. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a great example of this. Twain specifically states that he does not have certain intentions for the novel:

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR”

All the readers disagreed. There was a moral. There was symbolism in the Mississippi River which he also did not want attributed to his work. Georgia O’Keeffe consistently claimed her flowers were not vaginas and penises. Viewers don’t agree. They have agency to interpret what they see.

So you could argue that author intention is practically never the place where a piece of art lives. Artists give it their best shot and then release it into misinterpretations and multiple-meanings. I think this is why artists associate their work with the idea of having children: birthed by them but ultimately beyond their control.

Besides, intentions often exist before any work has been committed to any media. Million of ideas never come to life. Intentions are just part of the morass of our minds.

6) Does it live in the throes of production or composition?

This is the most fascinating stage for me, drafts, editing, iterations. In some cases, new drafts even occur post-publication, like W. H. Auden’s later-day revisions and Marianne Moore’s undoing of her poem “Poetry.”

Sally Bushnell’s book Text as Process explores the meanings of drafts and versions and it’s fascinating. She goes through different kinds of draft versions and levels and theories of composition. And the book made me think immediately about the singer Cher’s demos and remixes. Cher’s demo for the song “After All,” although it was technically a draft, became the final, “canonical” version of the song (with Peter Cetera’s vocal added later).

Similarly, there are album versions of particular songs and then often a fleet of remixes for songs delegated as “singles” or potential “hits.” And sometimes these “versions’ get confused. For example, maybe it’s the dance remix of a song (“When the Money’s Gone”) that is the one to chart as the hit, not the supposedly “canonical” album version of the song. Other times, later remakes of an artists song can take on another life. Cher’s song “Bang Bang” has not only been covered many times by other artists but by Sonny and Cher themselves who created later-day versions on live and studio albums, sometimes with altered lyrics. Where do those songs live in this sense? Which song is the version?

Maybe songs and poems exist in a separate space above and beyond all their variations.

7) Does it live as it’s appreciated by a social body?

This is where art moves beyond the artist and into society. The social body could be as small as one person (for example, love poems exchanged between two people) to small aficionado groups (at some point Cher’s fans were a large group, then a small group, then a large group again), or a small workshop group to a huge group of social media fans or best selling and anthologized poems. The size doesn’t matter.

To me the debate is between question 6 or 7. Are drafts considered poems proper? In some cases, definitely yes. Some drafts (things considered unfinished) become famous products. Especially drafts left incomplete when the artist dies. Maybe not all drafts are “canonical” but some can be promoted to canonical pieces.

Drafts that are never seen by readers ever, neither by researchers documenting famous creators in process or drafts published in published anthologies, are those drafts not still poems? Like some kind of twin to their more famous later-day finished draft?

8) Does it live when it’s canonized and is cherished through the ages?

This is an easy no, for me. Fame and success widely wax and wane. This rubric would exclude many, many artists who were discovered sometimes long after their deaths, from Emily Dickinson (who took decades to gain respect) to colonial poet Edward Taylor (who had to wait 200 years upon discover) and this illustrious list of major writers. The canon is fickle…thankfully. Generations disagree on who the “important poets” are.

Alternatively, poets like Katharine Hepburn’s poet, Phelps Putnam, was one of the most popular poet’s of his day. Now he’s considered Katharine Hepburn’s poet, although she was not even famous yet when he wrote about her.

Canonization and being cherished by hordes is irrelevant to the existence of a piece of art. If one single other person read or hears the poem, it exists.

I find it interesting how instinctually most artists yearn to impress their elders, their mentors. Audrey Hepburn for Cher is a good example of this but every artist has their people. But consistently artists always impress their youngers instead, the fans who come up behind them. This is often because mentors are part of the past. And this can feel frustrating. Thwarted intent again.

It speaks to the timing of your influence. You want to be anthologized, awarded and feted in your lifetime, benefits that are typically bestowed by elders and mentors in positions of power over the canon. But the most famous of artists and the artists with the great longevity are always fetted by their fans and this often happens long after their own deaths. Fans are crucial to post-mortem reputations. Fans have kept Shakespeare in business forever.

And post-death, does the artist possibly even care? In that sense, poems are more permanent than their poets. And so maybe we should move on to the question: where does the poet live?

What is Poetry: Should Poetry Be Heard or Read

August 21, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re making our way through Elisa New’s queries on what poetry is, questions she posed in the Harvard’s Emily Dickinson MOOC. Here’s the next question in the list: is poetry language other human beings necessarily hear or read?

It’s interesting that New specifies “human beings” because obviously animals overhear poetry spoken by humans, like a racoon stuck in an attic overhearing a poetry reading downstairs. It must sound like pure music for them, like listening to any unfamiliar language. But it’s humans who need to experience their language as poetry or want to. And there are humans who are satisfied to experience poetry simply as nonverbal music. Fans of Gertrude Stein, for example.

New also specifies the word “necessarily” as if this is the way we have to experience poetry, as a necessity, and the other way is possibly superfluous.

It’s probably not necessary to overthink New’s casual questions here but the fact is the hoomans have never been able to agree on an answer.

Some of us believe poetry is best experienced as spoken word. Poetry is primarily aural in this case. Some of us believe the page is where the poem is set in stone and formalized. And the page itself, the white space, the visual is crucial to its meaning.

And they both have a point here. Much depends upon what properties of a poem the author was working with, sound or visual tricks. It’s hard to bring visual chicanery to life in a spoken performance. On the other hand, you can get a slight idea of the sound effects when reading a poem silently, but you get a better understanding of them when you read a poem out loud.

Poetry predates printing and so spoken word and memorization is at the heart of its history. Musical elements made it easier to perform and pass along poems. Often, it’s the musical elements that set poetry apart from prose.

But then the printing press happened. Poems could come alive in the minds of readers and not just in the ears of listeners. Now we have even newer publishing platforms like web browsers and interactive applications.

In one MOOC I attended on Electronic Literature, the teacher talked about “affordances” which were like beneficial properties of any one platform. For example, you can take a book to the beach, get it wet and it won’t conk out on you. It’s still a very usable media platform even when damp.

On the other hand, a book in an e-reader might short-circuit when wet, but is weightless and doesn’t take up room in your house if you decide to keep it. You can also search it for content very effortlessly and quickly.

Likewise, our mouth is a platform with some very beneficial affordances.

Everyone has a greater need toward one or another affordance. I personally like the look of books in my rooms. I like the feel of books and paper.

Interestingly, I was going to search images for this post, one for “poetry reading” (as in the live event) and “reading poetry” (as in the book). But the search engine, of course, didn’t know the difference. So putting the words “poetry” and “reading” in the search field brought back everything and that is kind of metaphorically nice.

These are pretty stereotypical images of both options. The dark room with a spotlight and a dramatic performer gesturing with their hands. Contrast this with the manicured reader, enjoying nature no less with a latte with some artfully applied whipped cream.

So every one will have their own personal answer to this question; and how could it be otherwise? We all have different aesthetic needs.

For me, music itself satisfies my need for music. And the music of poetry often overwhelms me during poetry reading performances. The rhythms send me drifting off into my imagination and I come back a minute or two later having missed whole sections of the poems. There’s also the poetry reading grunt that I find pretty grating.

But then again I love to attend public discussions of poetry and literature, like the sessions of The Los Angeles Festival of Books and I like Ted Talks and stand-up comedy. So I do like the physical human presence of communication. It’s a fine line between that and other forms of spoken word.

I’m much more interested in poetry as a visual artifact. So for me, the page trumps the performance. Whereas for the live performance of a conversation, lectures or the performance of music itself, this is not the case.

Music has such a strong nonverbal element, regardless of its lyrics, a strong energy of spirit (in all its variation). Poetry, albeit with its own kind of spiritual effect less powerful, is more verbal and idea-based, despite experiments exploring the boundaries of that with either nonsensical or mostly musical writing.

For me, music does music so well. And reading platforms give poetry more opportunities to do what it does so well.

What is Poetry: Deliberate Craft Controlled by the Maker

August 14, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re working through Elisa New’s very interesting questions about poetry from the Emily Dickinson Harvard MOOC. The next question is a big boy: “Is poetry a deliberate craft controlled by a maker?”

And here I think Elisa New is asking about how much control we have over our creations, how much of the poem comes from inside us versus how much comes from something outside of us. And this is really a spiritual (and biological) question about where our consciousness begins and ends.

You might believe you are a singular entity, biologically and mentally speaking, or you might believe you are part of a larger system of energy or thought.

I personally am agnostic in pretty much every spiritual sense: not ruling anything out but not fully accepting of any belief system. I’m spirit-curious, as it were. Non-committal. I have commitment issues, religiously speaking. I was raised by one stalwart atheist and one reluctant atheist.

I believe it was the writer Will Storr who said it takes just as much faith to believe in ghosts as it does to not believe in them. And you could pretty much take that perspective to any kind of spiritual dilema.

Anyway, as it pertains to writing and creative thinking, I have had three kinds of experiences around this.

1) Writing with the conscious mind: this includes a conscious effort to brainstorm, organize, draft and edit work.

2) Subconscious accidents and architectures: these are unplanned things that happen but that are traceable back to training, experience, expertise and other subconscious activities happening in your own brain. Sometimes natural, serendipitous connections and subconscious decisions are made with details and architectures.

3) Outside contributions: here is where it gets a bit spiritual. Some writers believe in a real external muse, a mystery or a loved one or maybe input from God or ghost writing. Poet James Merrill believed his content was being provided by a Ouija board in his book The Changing Light at Sandover and poet Jack Spicer was another major poet who believed language was “dictated” to him and he was not “an agent of self-expression.”

This question has prompted me to go back through my own experiences in writing poems (from high school to now) and make a survey of my various “phases.”

High School Phase in St. Louis: this was my first, exploratory, practice of poetry (reams of it!) handwritten in notebooks, a lot of high-school love stuff and play with free association. It’s marked by a lack of training and very little reading of other poetry. And not a lot of thinking about how creativity works.

Undergraduate College Phase in St. Louis: these were my first advanced classes in the explication of literature, my first poetry-writing workshops, the happy discovery of writing mentors/teachers (the first encouragements I received to continue on). I started to meet other poets (amateur and professional), started to read poems (contemporary and the canon). This period was marked by my revolt against the idea of a poems written in a series (no idea why; it seemed pretentious) and embracing metaphorical writing, especially the extended metaphor poem. My word choices became more conscious as I had discovered the magical uses of a thesaurus. All this was firming the muscle of my conscious writing skills.

Graduate School in Yonkers: I was getting continued encouragement and realizing I was wrong about the series-based poem thing. I actually loved doing series work and would continue to do basically that going forward. I was also learning to write narrative poems (the Mars poems) and telling small stories. I was doing more conscious-writing skill-budling.

Post-Grad School in Los Angeles: here I started a deep dive into Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and was developing an interest in telling my family history on my father’s side, having an epiphany of confluence for those two interests while reading Zen and the Art of Falling in Love by Brenda Shoshanna, which eventually resulted in the cowboy book. The family history got dropped and I was practicing more long-form narrative poetry instead. This to me was some unconscious work starting to happen, some happy accidents, integrations and conflux of various separate interests and ideas.

Writing in New Mexico: this period is marked by starting on the NaPoWriMo challenges while I was temping at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. These were yearly explorations in form prompts and series poems on speed. After moving to Albuquerque, I started to take MOOC surveys on the history of American poetry, the final phase being “Electronic Poetry” or digital poetry after which I began exploring browser-based poems.

Now, from the beginning to this point I had never experienced anything like writer’s block on any writing projects except maybe day-job assignments in marketing (which were miserable experiences). For good or bad, I’ve always had plenty to say, a lot of obnoxious opinions. Maybe once in a while I’ve had a problem with a plot point or a spot of rhythm or word choice, usually needing help ordering a series or a book. For spelling and punctuation, I will always need another set of eyes (if I can find them).

But here is where it starts to get weird. For all the NaPoWriMo projects from 2013-2021 and including 2024, the writing was mostly directed by me. I had complete authority over those poems (in my mind at least). There were some subconscious happy accidents, some parallelism I didn’t consciously intend or a clever plot point that designed itself.

In 2021 I started what turned out to be a two-year project of dictionary poems. This was a project inspired by Lohren Green’s Poetical Dictionary (2003) and I had assumed I’d have complete authority over not only the the containing poems but the words themselves.

I soon found out that I was unable to insist upon any of my own words. If I picked out a word I wanted to use, I would always get writer’s block. This was the first time in my life experiencing a block over anything. What the hell! I could pick as many words as I wanted but poems went nowhere over and over again. There was no rational argument I could make to the mysterious muse.

And it’s not like words just came to me from the outside. That didn’t happen either. I would come up with a few words every few days and a voice (that didn’t seem to be me) would almost nudge me with an encouraging voice telling me that “maybe you should explore that word.” And I would have to wait for that nudge or I couldn’t proceed. So f**king weird. And I had no control over how often words would be sort of “approved” by this voice. How frequently they would come or not come.

At the same time I was working on another series, NaPoWriMo 2022. I was pretty busy doing that and hoping to put the dictionary poems on hiatus. But that month a large bunch of dictionary words came in a fury and I found myself often posting two poems a day, one NaPoWriMo poem and one (or more) dictionary poem. It was crazy-going until I finally appealed to the voice (or whatever it was) to stop sending me dictionary words.

Almost in a huff, the words stopped and they stopped for what seemed like months. Was this myself in a huff with myself?

I can’t characterize much about the voice but it almost seemed to have a gender and an age. But hey, let’s not go there.

For that NaPoWriMo year in 2022, I had a similar but not identical experience with “the voice.” These poems were based on pop and rock songs and I did determine (for the most part) which songs I was going to write about. I also felt I had authority over the hook for each poem and their narrative direction.

The voice (and it did seem like the same voice) appeared only to help me with particular problems. For example, I had a big problem with the poem for the song “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” That poem was a hot mess involving literally a shipwreck. Figuratively, the poem was a wreck itself. I opened up my mind to suggestions from outside of myself and I received back the idea to use Theodor W. Adorno’s famous quote about “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” as a alternative guiding principle for the poem. Big help. Thank you very much.

Similarly, I became stuck with the poem for the song “Could It Be Magic.” I couldn’t get a direction or any traction with it. All I knew was that the poem was half-written and I got very angry every time I worked on it. Why was I getting so angry? Then one day while I was in Cleveland, Ohio, visiting my parents an answer popped into my head like a gift.

It was the song making me feel angry. Incredibly, the response I needed was not only the answer to my question, but it was the answer to the poem and the whole set of poems. It was amazing!

In another section of the set, the muse was completely unhelpful. I had a placeholder song for a poem (and a placeholder story to go with it) that I did not want to use. I wanted to use another song by that artist but I couldn’t yet find it. Also, the story was too enigmatic. It didn’t fit with the other more direct poems in the set. I was blocked again.

I opened up again for help. The voice returned but this time with an adamant no in response. The voice said unequivocally, “this is the song and this is the story you get.”

Well, I couldn’t believe this was true. Surely, open-mindedness would prevail and another song by that artist would come with and new idea, just like it did for those other problematic poems. This artist had many songs, after all, and I had months to prepare. As the day of publication kept getting closer, I felt nervous but never resigned. I kept checking in; the voice kept saying no. This is the song; this is the story. So aggravating! Up until the day of publication, I kept hoping for a new idea and that voice never waivered. To this day, I see that poem like the flaw in the Navajo blanket, the open door that defines the whole set.

I have not experienced either of these experiences since those projects of 2021 to 2023.

And I can’t honestly tell you I even believe in this voice or the idea of an external muse. It’s not very rational and human perspective is so limiting and easily misled. Maybe I just have a very active imagination. Maybe I have a deep, subconscious creativity.

Maybe the longer you practice writing, the more deeply you go into your thinking mechanisms and the weirder that might seem. On the other hand, maybe the longer you practice writing the more you are able to tap into intelligences beyond yourself.

So in answer to this question of whether poetry is a deliberate craft controlled by its maker, I really couldn’t say.

What is Poetry: Language or Music

August 8, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re working through Elisa New’s very interesting questions about poetry from the Emily Dickinson Harvard MOOC. The second question is really two of her questions: “Is poetry native language at all? Is poetry a kind of music?”

We’ve argued about this previously, most notably when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Price in Literature in 2017. Well, I guess it was just me arguing with the points made by New York Times poetry critic David Orr. I can’t paraphrase it all here. Suffice it to say I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks poetry is not music and language both.

The use of “Native” is interesting in the first question. Does this mean pre-language versus learned language, like toddler-speak? Or does it mean pre-history language like petroglyphs? Or some kind of under-language that is always with us, some emotional language?

Poetry for me has a pretty big umbrella and it involves an implication of permanence. I mean every writer intends a kind of permanence for their work, (a possible stay against death), but poetry tends to have a greater shot at a longer shelf life. Poetry is not inherently disposable like, say, political opinion or podcast reviews. The topics are more universal, the tone meant to strike more deeply into the psyche.

I am always considering the place of petroglyphs as poetry, too, and our hesitancy to label American Indian verbal rituals as poetry. Unlike verbal ceremonials, someone took the time to write out concepts in petroglyphs. I have some petroglyphs on the hill behind my cul de sac. And as far as “native” language goes, (in all senses described above), they “feel” like poetry to me. They explore something intellectually serious and they strive to be permanent.

Often they intend to commemorate a special occasion or idea. As does music.

Poetry has always challenged the boundaries even poets have tried to attach to “poetry.” Poetry should this and poetry should that. Always they are trying to contain the idea of poetry around themselves, their work or their taste. Musicians do this, too. Maybe so did the petroglyph writers. Humans love to tell each other what to do.

Is poetry simplified language? Except that it can be delightfully complex and convoluted. Is it a simplifying of our experiences? Except that it can illustrate the complexity of our experiences. Is it elevated language? Except that it can be coarsened language. Is it a narrative? Except that it can be non-narrative. Is it form? Except that it can challenge the idea of form.

It uses words. Except sometimes it tries to loosen words from their moorings. And it can be gibberish. It can be written in any language system (petroglyphs). It can be pictorial sometimes or can employ the same intention with symbols (petroglyphs).

It is not music. Except that it often is imbued with music. It’s almost impossible to separate poetry from any trace of music, any occurrence of rhythm and rhyme.

It may even be a third thing, a hybrid teetering in-between and pulling from native pre-language, sophisticated layers of modern languages and also ice-skating with tropes of music. If not an in-between thing, it is maybe an ever-morphing thing that grabs from all of its neighboring communication systems. It is possibly undefinable.

We could let it go, this attempt to nail it down. But tell me what’s the fun in that?

What is Poetry: What is it Made Of

July 29, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

(Atom sculpture)

Years ago I took some Harvard MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) with Elisa New. And during the class on Emily Dickinson she went through a list of very interesting questions about poetry.

She noted that certain Dickinson poems theorize about “what poetry is, what poetry is made of.” And then New goes on to ask multiple questions around the substance and boundaries of what poems are, what poetry is.

I’ve collected these questions and we’ll be exploring them for the rest of the year, starting with the opening inquiry: what is poetry made of…

….which you can’t very well answer, by the way, without speaking figuratively.

I would answer this by saying poems are made of heart and brain matter, the substance of yearning, suffering and joy, the desire to nail down the salty, sugary in-betweens-ness of our lives.

It is made of nothing from the periodic table of elements, not even the breath or paper it finds itself delivered upon. It is both a voice and not a voice in every sense of the word. It has no DNA or nucleus.

It has a big charge without any atoms.

It has no matter and yet it does.

Poetry is one of the only human things on Earth not made of carbon.

And this reminds me of a love poem from my first book, Why Photographers Commit Suicide, “Monogamous Carbon: A Classified Ad” written back in the early 1990s when I lived in Yonkers, NY, and was writing science poems for my MFA at Sarah Lawrence.

Ask a Poet: Hope is a Muscle

July 11, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

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

June 23, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

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 Dick. I’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

June 15, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

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)

June 7, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

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

June 1, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

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.

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