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Poetry on the Street

November 29, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

My boss at CNM went to Washington state this summer and came back with some great poetry stories. She met two street vendor poets with portable typewriters. You paid them what you wanted to. Then you gave them a subject prompt. You could wait or come back in ten minutes and you would get a one-of-a-kind new poem along with a dramatic reading. She picked the subject of “native plants.” This was the poem she received:

My boss also happened upon a flower sculpture in Spokane that you can interact with and receive a poem from a database. It was called the Hello Flower Project.

In Albuquerque and Santa Fe, old cigarette machines have been converted into five-dollar art machines. My desk is full of these $5 art objects. Below is a picture of my favorite two pieces together:

But I also found evidence of poetry vending machines made from old cigarette machines! Has anyone seen one of these in Vancouver or Philadelphia or in your town? If so, please send me a vending poem! I will return the favor with something versical and lamented!

In other interesting poetry news…

– A writer is creating found poems from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I hope this isn’t Plan B for when actually reading the book seems too hard.

– The Mall of America in Minnesota has a poet in residence named Brian Sonia-Wallace.

– Lisa Ann Markuson is writing haikus for all the U.S. Senators (#PoemsForSenators). To read them visit Twitter.

– And My Poetic Side has produced "Behind Bars: 61 Poets Who Went To Jail."

Happy Halloween: Poetry Card Final Week 17 (US, UK)

October 30, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while
I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious
volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door.

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

I did not plan this card to fall in the last set for a Halloween post. I swear. These cards were picked completely randomly. I even purchased a dollar store tombstone for my office this month that says "never more."

Poetry: it's just magic.

Edgar Allan Poe had a rough life. He was “orphaned and destitute” in childhood and taken in by the Allan family of Richmond VA. From them he received a good education but he had health problems and came across as dark and destructive. With his “macabre tales" he "pioneered the modern detective story.” He is widely known for “The Raven” but this composition was the beginning of an unstable end.

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day…”

The last card of 48, “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell.

When you look up the poem, the second paragraph goes on to say…

"But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity."

And this reminds me of a category of pop songs I dub the "Go All The Way" songs (after the Raspberries) that have been produced ever since.

Marvell was apolitical and pastoral while he was tutor to a lord’s daughter. Later, he became a "vicious political satirist and defender of John Milton and Oliver Cromwell" and an influential member of [British] Parliament.

Final stats:

Not a lot of diversity here but this is an older deck. I have a feeling a 2017 deck would rob less from the canon and more from women and people of color. Measly lack of women, especially British women from what I'm still convinced is a British deck, but many American women (almost half). The majority of poems are from the last two centuries which is understandable considering most people claim to be allergic to moldy old poems.

1 black American female
3 black American males
8 white American females
10 white American males
21 American poets (4 Americans of color, 9 women)

1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male

13 white English males
2 white English females
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male
17 British poets (all white, 2 women)

2 white French males
1 white Greek male
1 white Irish male
1 white Italian male
1 Japanese male

1 500s BC poet
2 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
3 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
15 1800s poets
25 1900s poets

Poetry Card Week 16 (UK, US)

October 12, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

“Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed ever veyne in swich licour
Or which vertu engendred is the flour…”

Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Boy, spell check hated that verse. Literally, these are the lines that began English literature. I took a class in this book in college. It was required. But I have to say, the class was not as torturous as you might imagine. This is a story about a holy pilgrimage from London to Canterbury by 29 people who each get to spin a yarn along the way. It was funny and bawdy as I remember. Our teacher, on the other hand, was a stern old humorless bore. My Shakespeare teacher was a character herself. She was a veritable Shakespeare groupie who made her own pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon and enthusiastically showed us her grainy snapshots.

“There was an older person of Dover,
Who rushed through a field of blue Clover;
But some very large bees stung his nose and his knees,
So he very soon went back to Dover.”

“Limericks” by Edward Lear

According to the card, Lear “made the world safe for the limerick.” These are just nonsensical party games that were written to the grand-kids of his patron. They even came with comic graphics.

“And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”

“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes

According to the card, one of the “masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance” in the 1920s. Hughes spent his career perusing an authentic African American voice," one infused with the syncopation and stylings of black music; jazz, gospel, and blues." I've been collecting poems about dictators on my website and on Facebook. By far the biggest response I've received has been for excerpts of Hughes' poem "Let America Be America Again."

Current stats:

1 black American female
3 black American males
8 white American females
9 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
12 white English males
2 white English females
2 white French males
1 white Greek male
1 white Irish male
1 white Italian male
1 Japanese male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 500s BC poet
2 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
2 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
14 1800s poets
25 1900s poets

Sometimes It’s Poetry, Sometimes It’s Not

October 12, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

And then it sort of is.

Many, many years ago my parents gave me a notebook that had been my grandfather’s. It was full of pages of handwritten verses. My parents assumed these were poems and since I liked poetry, (and my brothers got the horse saddles and cowboy hats), they gave me the notebook. The notebook sat in a box for a decade or so before I decided to transcribe the verses. As I was typing them out, it occurred to me they might not be poems, or original poems anyway. My grandfather started his career as a forest ranger at Jicarilla, an Apache Indian reservation in northern New Mexico. He spent a lot of time on a horse out in the middle of nowhere. He had left his girlfriend, my grandmother, back in Roy, New Mexico. He had no cellphone, transistor radio or 78-record turntable to pass the time. I figured he was probably kind of stir crazy and writing down some poems or songs he liked to pass the time.

This was 1926.

So I Googled a line or two. And bingo: they were all old songs (and a few odd pages from a Spanish class). I was able to purchase all the recordings from iTunes, all but one song which apparently hasn’t been recorded often, if at all. I picked either artists my grandfather might have known or, failing to find that, versions I liked. When I couldn’t decide, I added both versions. Then I sorted them into a mix I called the Burt Ladd Mix 1926 (or BLadd Mix) and gave it to my father for Father’s Day present in 2015.

I thought it would make a good playlist on YouTube and I’ve finally put it up. Some of the mariachi songs aren't the same versions I found on iTunes. Some of these old cowboy and mariachi songs are pretty famous, others more obscure. He probably became familiar with them from local traveling bands (Bob Wills started out in Roy, New Mexico) and from local parties and dances.

The play list.

Other poetry projects and experiments on my YT channel.

Electronic Poetry, Haikus, Travel & Humor

September 27, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Electronic Poetry

I’ve been investigating electronic poetry and I’ve started tracking my favorite pieces on this list. I’ve broken up them down into auto-generated, visual poems, video things, apps, and interactive.

This summer, a story about auto-generation came out that might disturb some of us. There’s this thing called a Bot Dylan, inspired by you-know-who, that creates machine-generated melodies. Scary thought. And I know auto-generation makes everyone (but auto-generation artists) a little anxious.

But I wonder if it’s really that much of a threat. My Dad and I have this ongoing argument about it. He worked with computers vocationally, (both fixing IBM machines and programming them) and he often thinks about them often conceptually, especially the new artificial intelligence developments with smart phones and Siri. Does he think auto-generated art will ever replace human art?

I, myself, don’t think it will, (even if it turns out to be well made and aesthetically interesting), just for the fact that we go to human-generated art for the main purpose of connecting with other humans, to hear what other humans have to say about the experiences of being human. If we wanted to know what it felt like to be a machine, we'd ask a machine. It doesn’t matter what the machine is saying. We want a human to be saying it. This is why we feel anxiety around it.

However, my Dad is not so sure and he’s a pretty smart guy so we should probably keep tabs on the situation.

The Bot Dylan

“We didn’t expect any of the machine-generated melodies to be very good,” Dr. Oded Ben-Tal, a music technology expert at Kingston University in London, told The Daily Mail. “But we, and several other musicians we worked with, were really surprised at the quality of the music the system created.”

Of course, electronic literature is technology dependent. Which is a real bummer sometimes. My Kindle keeps freezing on me at lunch and I can’t even read when my Kindle's batteries are dead. I was reading one book the other day and the Kindle crashed and I lost all my underlining. Which was copious! That shit doesn’t happen with paper books. They’re always charged and you never lose your marginalia unless it catches on fire or you accidentally throw it in a river.

eLit is also often very complex, cerebral and meta. I actually like that about it. But a lot of effort goes into making eLit pieces: coming up with a new ideas, programming the thing, distributing it, keeping it from becoming technologically outdated. They are very labor intensive projects.

Haiku

In contrast, you have the haiku. It’s tech free and very simple to write and comprehend. You only need a piece of paper and not all that much ink. Haiku is also something you can tie to your meditative practice. Haiku can be healing and calming. You can spend all your time creating haiku on a train, in a park or on top of a mountain. In contrast, eLit requires some kind of computer and the whole thing might give you carpel tunnel.

I spent the summer with these haiku books:

One Hundred Frogs by Hiroaki Sato (1983)

I bought this book used at the 2016 Los Angeles Festival of Books. It’s a collection of translations and re-tellings of the famous Basho haiku about a frog jumping in the water. The book is also a flip-book of sketches of a frog jumping into a pond. I enjoyed the marginalia from the prior reader and tended to like the same meta poems that this person put smiley faces next to.

And it was very meditative to read the same poem written a hundred different ways, as well as a good lesson in various writing styles: couplets, sonnet, limericks, concrete versions, word-for-word translations, transliterations and trans visions (still learning what those are). Basho did his own elongated version, Allen Ginsberg uses the great word “Kerplunk!," one version explicates the poem in terms of samsara, satipatthana and nirvana, one is a pre-modernist variation of formal poetry, one is done in overwritten prose.

Haiku, the sacred art, A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines by Margaret D. McGee (2009)

I also found this on sale at the 2016 book festival. I was reading it with my friend Natalie as part of a healing haiku project we were doing. I finished it recently as part of ArtBrawl political haiku project we started and never finished. The book is a real fusion between Zen, Christianity and a writing guide.

I was at first put off by the biblical passages, feeling it didn’t jive fully with the Buddhist lines. But I started to appreciate McGee’s intention and her wide knowledge of haiku and its connection to Zen Buddhism, and also her willingness to incorporate them into another paradigm, Christianity. She writes from a place of openness and her church seems very inclusive. It’s a short book with haiku exercises and it often explores the spiritual and healing aspects of haiku. She provides both self and group exercises.

The World, the World by John Brandi (2013)

I got this book in Santa Fe and it has a good collection of haibun poems. Haibun, a cousin of haiku, are comprised one block of prose followed by one haiku. I did a bunch of them once on a Georgia O’Keefe Museum writing retreat near Abiquiu, New Mexico, and they were fun to do.

Brandi is a local author and his book includes poems about hiking in Northern New Mexico. He also writes poems about Zen. One poem plays with the idea of hiking as opposed to spending time on LinkedIn. Brandi is also a painter and there are some poems about painting and art culture.

Travel Poems

The second half of the book is where Brandi visits Tibet and India and…they become travel poems. Travel poems are always problematic. They’re a drag to read (unless you’ve been to the location yourself) and I think this is because travel poems are essentially not about the place at all but about the experience of traveling. And almost always these poems are devoid of any self-deprecating humor. They’re overly serious and posturing, even when the poet tries really hard not to be. Somehow they’re like 1950s slideshows that put your parents' friends and relatives to sleep. Poets make great pains to try to avoid this, especially if the trip sounded expensive. They try not to sound like they’re bragging subconsciously about their amazing time and transformative journey. (I attempted a satire of this type of poem in Why Photographer’s Commit Suicide.) Poets are usually self-conscious around issues of privilege and so they try to spin their travel poems in ways to make them sound more like pilgrimages, like there is some kind of universal spiritual experience to justify the poem’s existence. But it never comes across. It always feels contrived.

Humor in Poetry

A good anecdote to this situation would be…a sense of humor, maybe even a self-deprecating one. Humor would make an emotional connection with the reader that would offset the travel-bragging thing. But unfortunately there are some poets, particularly travel poem writers, who are loathe to add any humor into their poems because of a highbrow belief that humor is a cheap strategy or a lesser form of language.

Which has always mystified me because I was raised to believe humor was a higher level of thinking, elevated conceptually and more difficult to devise. It was right up there with logic puzzles and math for my peeps. So to go out into the world and find out “comedy” was a "lesser than" art – this was a shocking eye-opener for me and I have tended to gravitate toward funny writers. I've been lucky because there are plenty of GenerationX writers who specialize in melding highbrow fiction with funny.

In my experience it takes a sophisticated and agile intelligence to be funny. It takes an ability to see the world from other level in the matrix and then to skillfully perform language in a timely way that invokes laughter. It’s hard to do, and I think this is why many writers disparage it. Humor can also disguise great hatreds and aggressions. It can be pretty violent. And likewise, it takes a certain smartness to perceive when that aggression is actually occurring. We don’t say jokes are “over someone's head” for no reason.

So I’m always on the lookout for what academic poets have to say about the craft of funny. I recently read Louise Glück’s new book American Originality: Essays on Poetry. (I’ll do another review of it separately because I have so much to say about it). But in one of her essays, she marks similar anecdotes for the narcissism of confessional poems: modesty, detachment and humor. She singles out Mark Strand as an example of humor, but she makes sure to note: “not to say he has turned himself into a comedian.” Because that would be bad. A "comedian" is lesser than a serious poet.

Completely mystifying.

And another strange thing about comedy, there are quite a few comedians who hate to explicate the language of comedy. They’re not that dissimilar from poets who hate to explicate poetry (Albert Goldbarth). However, language nuts do like to do this because we like to dissemble sentences to see how language works. So I’m also fascinated by scholars of the funny. We’ve studied our anger, we’ve studied our guilt. Humor is so much more mysterious. Philosophers have studied humor, including Plato and Aristotle. There was a superiority theory, Freud’s relief theory, the incongruity theory (the unexpected funny). Some reading I was doing for work led me to this very interesting Slate essay on theories of funny including the benign violation theory which addresses angles of comedy that even baffled Aristotle. The essay includes this funny video example to prove one of their theory.

I found another very great intersection of poetry and comedy while watching the TV special Woody Allen Looks at 1967. You can see the full show here.

Fast forward to minute mark 41:50 where there’s a very funny Bonnie and Clyde satire with Woody Allen, John Byner and Liza Minnelli. There’s a short exchange about poetry between Liza Minnelli and John Byner at mark 47:45. It’s not all that long but it explores our ideas of poetry, class consciousness concerning the lowbrow and the highbrow and it does this all within a joke that last less than a minute. Pretty smart.

Slow Learners and The New Yorker Magazine

September 27, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve always been a very slow learner. It took me a long time to learn to tie my shoes, use a zipper, tell time on anything non-digital, read, figure out what boys wanted, crack the mysteries of office politics. Really painfully slow.

But, and this is a big but, when I figure things out sudden enlightenment comes like a big aha and I go from the bottom of the hill to the peak instantaneously. I’m in remedial reading one day and not improving and then I’m in National Honors Society the following Tuesday and all my brainiac friends are like “WTF are you doing here?”

Okay, so tying my shoes is a bad example. I still can’t really do that very well. But in general I spend a lot of my time confused and in the dark and then…bingo….I get it.

And The New Yorker Magazine is another example of this. When I was at Sarah Lawrence all my writer friends seemed to be reading The New Yorker. I tried it then but there weren’t enough pictures. The text was oppressively text-y. The poems seemed obtuse. I even tried multiple times over the years since then. If some pretentious person had the magazine displayed prominently on their coffee table or if my writer friends still were subscribing, although always with the comment, “I love this magazine but I never have time to read it.” And then recently at CNM even my coworkers were talking about it and sharing links to it. Huh. What is wrong with me? You can’t force these things.

But suddenly in 2016 I was offered a deeply discounted short subscription to the magazine through the college and I’ve been glued to it ever since. All the other magazines coming into the house, (I’m being gifted quite a few right now), are being literally ignored, except for the celebrity rag I’m reading in the bathtub because I don’t care if it gets wet. I even stopped my subscription after 6 months because I was feeling anxious that it would take me two years to get through just 2016 issues and I didn't want to miss anything. So I cancelled it because I liked it.

My favorite articles are pieces about visual artists and writers. There have been three good articles on poets and writers so far.

Insurance Man: The life and art of Wallace Stevens

Like The New Yorker, I’ve often tried to like Wallace Stevens. People I know who love Wallace Stevens love him very passionately. They work hard to understand the poems and they feel like extra time is worth it. Two classes I've recently taken in Modernism helped me find a few poems to get into, my favorite is probably "The Man on the Dump." But I’m not rushing out to find any Wallace Stevens books. This book review didn’t really change that feeling but it was very interesting for two reasons:

For uncovering his political beliefs:

“Stevens made haplessly clumsy allusions to social and political tensions of the time, though he was “a Hoover Republican,” Mariani writes, and also an admirer of Mussolini for rather longer than is comfortably excused as a common myopia of the time. He was no better than most white men of his class in point of casual racism and anti-Semitism, though fewer such toxins leak into his poetry than into that of Eliot or Pound. In verse, Stevens transcended anything mean or petty in himself, but for art’s sake; he wasn’t much given to moral scruple."

And his office personality:

“Stevens continued to go to work each day into his seventies, even after surgery for a stomach obstruction revealed a metastasizing cancer. He was too august at the firm to be let go, but he was never popular there. His boss remarked, “Unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart.”

Ouch.

Design for Living: What’s Great About Goethe?

This was another good piece of biography which also covered the reasons why Goethe isn’t so popular now with English-speaking readers, possibly due to his obsession for leading a mentally healthy life. That sort of impulse is not very en vogue with us this century after we re-imagined our judgements about mental illness. In our time, artistic madness is appreciated, the whole “living on the edge” thing. The author compares the sentiment around madness before and after Beethoven, a contemporary of Goethe, came on the scene. Fascinating.

Another good one in these times of political anxiety: Adrienne Rich’s Poetic Transformations.

Like Wallace Stevens, I’ve also struggled to connect with Adrienne Rich, although I appreciate writers' appreciation of her. I had a book signed by her once at The Dodge Poetry Festival back in the 1990s and she seemed a bit stern and cold while signing books. But coming across Rich in continuing education courses keeps me trying.

Someday I’ll get it.

Political Poems Keep on Happening

September 14, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Poems About Dictators

So you may know I’ve been reading anthologies of political, protest and resistance poetry, both new and old. As I’ve done this, I’ve been sharing excerpts of particularly prescient or arresting lines to my friends on Facebook. So that got me beginning my own catalog of poems about dictatorships and lawless regimes. As I continue, I'll keep updating it. Check out Poems About Dictators.

It includes excerpts from poems like this amazing one by Czeslaw Milosz: “Child of Europe.”

Orthodoxy

I also read a good piece on Leftist Orthodoxy and Social Justice from Medium by an activist named Heartscape and it contained a rewrite of a poem called "If I can't dance, It's not my revolution" by Emma Goldman. It's an extension of the article which is about inclusiveness, creativity and intolerance within a political movement, not a heavily figurative poem but the kind of poem that clearly communicates frustration within a group of opinionated activists.

If I can’t fuck up and learn from my mistakes, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t disagree with you, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t ask questions, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t decide for myself what tactics I will use, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t be femme, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t choose my own friends, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t bring my family, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t bring my culture, then it’s not my revolution.
If I can’t bring my ancestors, then it’s not my revolution.
And if it’s not our revolution, then let’s build a new one.

The Lazarus

Poet Amy King also recently helped organize a project of poets writing poems inspired by the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus' poem. This became a controversy recently when the White House senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, disparaged the poem as not containing foundational ideas about America.

Read the resulting poems collected by The Guardian.

More Political Poetry News

Why All Poems Are Political (Electric Literature)

Poet for the Age of Brexit, Revisiting the work of A. E. Housman (The Atlantic)
Today, in the age of Brexit and the renewed movement for Scottish independence, the question of what Englishness means is once again up for debate.

Punk Poet Eileen Myles on Combating Trump, Capitalism With Art (Rolling Stone)
With a new generation of fans from Twitter and 'Transparent,' the legendary artist is basking in latest literary renaissance

Celebrities Reveal Their Immigrant Stories In 6 Powerful Words (Huffington Post)

The Way We Protest as Poets’: Gynecologist Monument Sparks Anger, Art (Free times)

And this is not sstrictly political but something cool to check out: y cousin sent me this link for African American poets from the Appalachian area: http://www.theaffrilachianpoets.com/

Also big in poetry news, (although not a protest poet), poet John Ashbery has died. Read his obit in The New York Times.

Poetry Card Week 15 (Japan, US, France, UK, Greece)

September 12, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I took the summer off (my parents visited for five weeks) but I kept going through the poetry cards so we can finish the last few posts this year.

"Not knowing
The name of the tree,
I stood in the flood
Of its sweet smell.”

Matsuo Basho from “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”

Known to be the greatest of the Japanese haiku poets, Basho was influenced by Zen Buddhism and wanted miniature perfection in a poem. This required only seventeen syllables broken into sections of 5-7-5. In later years, he journeyed through Japan doing travel sketches tied together with his haiku. When translated, the poems lose their original syllable configuration.

“A poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war…”

“A Poem is a City” by Charles Bukowski

I love how these poems bump up against each other. Two travelers, two poems. The card talks about Bukowski's “pure, undiluted voice from the street, attached to no school, tradition, or ideology save that of day-to-day survival.” The “unflinching honesty” of his poems dealt with bus terminals, boarding houses and racetracks. The movie Barfly was based on his writings. There's also a very cool database of his work.

"Like a clamorous flock of birds in alarm
All my memories descend and take form,
Descend through the yellow foliage of my heart
That watches its trunk of alder twist apart,
To the violet foil of the water of remorse
Which nearby runs its melancholy course…"

Paul Verlaine’s “The Nightingale” (a video and alternate translation)

The card says his credo was “music before all things” and he spent a life of rages, romantic obsessions, alienation, and prison time for shooting Arthur Rimbaud (see the movie Total Eclipse or Big Bang Poetry's review) because he was full of “inner turmoil.”

“He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The memory sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a cold dark day.”

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by W. H. Auden

Auden emigrated to America, the card said. This was my first clue (aside from the stats below) that this is an English deck. Auden's famous saying, “poetry makes nothing happen” was misunderstood and what Auden meant was "that poetry had no hand in the evil events taking place in Europe at the time—the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany and the impending war." He meant instead that poetry was “a way of happening, a mouth.” If you understand that, let me know. I'm still having trouble with it.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

“The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats

Ireland’s greatest literary figure, says the card. Yeats was a collector of folktales and legends, a senator and a self-styled oracle. This poem was his reaction to the Black and Tan War in Ireland where British troops came to quell an uprising.

“If I meet you suddenly, I can’t
speak—my tongue is broken;
a think flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,
hearing only my ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body
and I turn paler than
dry grass…”

Fragment 2 of Sappho

Sappho was from the Greek island of Lesbos and was the aristocratic head of a poetry school. She was once as famous as Homer. She was allegedly bisexual and her love poems were “meant to be sung in the Mixolydian mode she invented.”

“Call the roller of big cigars
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.”

From “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens

This was a jarring paring against Sappho! Stevens was an American modernist and insurance executive. “Stevens chose to lead a life of quiet middle-class conform in order to make room for his real vocation, poetry.” His first book was published when he was 43. He wrote that this poem had “something of the essential gaudiness of poetry…obviously not about ice cream.”

Week stats:

1 black American female
2 black American males
8 white American females
9 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
10 white English males
2 white English female
2 white French males
1 white Greek male
1 white Irish male
1 white Italian male
1 Japanese male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 500s BC poet
1 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
2 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
13 1800s poets
24 1900s poets

Poetry Card Week 14 (US)

June 28, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

“What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?”

“Heritage” by Countee Cullen

Cullen was a Harlem Renaissance poet (1920s) and the most traditional of the Harlem Renaissance poets. He was an admirer of Keats, Housman and St. Vincent Millay. He was conflicted about being a spokesperson for the black community but he was never ambivalent about his message.

“Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!”

Claude McKay’s “America”

Two Harlem Renaissance poets together! Maybe I didn't shuffle these cards. We actually studied both of these poets in Harvard's EdX online Modernism course. Jamaica-born, McKay was involved in politics and felt anger at the oppresive systems of America, the subject of this sonnet.

“The grass is walking in the ground.
Soon it will rise and blow in waves—
How can it have the heart to sway
Over the graves,
New graves?”

“Spring in War-Time” by Sara Teasdale.

Teasdale is from St. Louis but I had never heard of her until many years after I moved away. “Known primarily for her forlorn poems of love, (ex: “My soul is a dark ploughed field in the cold rain”–yikes!), and “tempestuous epistolary affair" with Vachel Lindsay, a poet I’ve come across a few times in the roster of New Mexico poets in the 1930s and also as an early poet of the Chicago circle who contributed to early issues of Poetry magazine. Everyone seems to have had an opinion of Lindsay and you either loved or hated him. Teasdale apparently loved him if not his poetry. They both committed suicide. I did not know that. Now my interest is piqued and I will look into this dramatic story. This excerpt, according to the card, is one of her most famous poems, not about love but about World War I and was “widely distributed among the soldiers on the front lines.”

“This is the soldier home from the war.
These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is round or flat.
This is the Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances carefully down the ward,
walking the plank of a coffin board…”

“Visits to St. Elizabeths” by Elizabeth Bishop

I just saw the film Reaching for the Moon. This poem is about her visits to see Ezra Pound while he was in the hospital for psychiatric treatment. The poem was modeled after Ravel’s Bolero and “The House That Jack Built.” Not much biographical info is on the card which simply lists her places of residence. Interesting.

Week stats:

1 black American female
2 black American males
8 white American females
7 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
9 white English males
2 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
12 1800s poets
20 1900s poets

Smarting It Up

June 28, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Some people call it Hermioneitis (after Harry Potter), some call it Insufferable Syndrome or Smarty Pants Disease. My grandmother had a family friend from Arizona who came to visit her in St. Louis and her friend was very educated and published in southwestern American Indian culture. He was spouting off his knowledge in her living room and it was very impressive and we were all enraptured and his wife turned to my parents and said, “Isn’t he a smart son of a bitch?”

We love that story and whenever someone sits too high on a horse we say that, "Isn’t he a smart son of a bitch.” It’s very handy because pontificating on some subject or other is addictive. So you always need a wing man near by to disparagingly reprimand you when you’re sounding too much like a smart son of bitch.

I’m full of opinions that I can carry off with a tone of rightness, but honestly I’m wrong I’d estimate about half of the time and the phrase "Did I say that?" is a common pre-apology for thinking too much through my mouth. I take solace in the idea that nobody's reading this anyway, right?

Recently in the magazine The Baffler, Rick Perlstein took all the smarty-pantses to task in his article, "Outsmarted." Some excerpts:

"Even as we moderns spend enormous amounts of our conscious energy making evaluations about who is sophisticated and who is simple, who is well-bred and who is arriviste, and who is smart and who is dumb, these are entirely irrelevant to the only question that ends up mattering: who is decent and who is cruel."

"Whatever 'smart' actually is, it bears absolutely no necessary relation to fundamental decency. But that's a psychological, or even spiritual, lesson, not an intellectual one."

This is the cause for many moments of head-in-the-hands for fellow Hermiones. Many of whom are poets.

And so with that I'm going to complain about this recent online article called "Why All Poems Are Political" by Kathleen Ossip.

Calling the writing of poetry in any genre a political act sounds groovy at first but that's spreading the net a bit too wide, like saying playing video games instead of getting a job is a political act. It can be, but it isn't always. Not all poets write as a political act, not all poets care about political acts. And you could also say being a poet of any political bent or of no political bent is all still a political bent. You wouldn't be wrong there but you also wouldn't be saying anything. Political intention is important. What kind of political act is it? It's like saying writers have agendas. Writers want to persuade. Poetry can be awfully un-rebellious and supportive of the status quo. They can also be rebellious for no purpose.

I do agree with Ossip that the Poetry is Dead meme is dead itself at this point and out of step with the times. There are more writers if not readers of poetry these days, lots of poetry literacy online, and, as my survey of news stories last year indicated, plenty of news outlets are printing stories about poetry and poets beyond the Poetry is Dead story. Just do a Google search for "poet" every seven days. Society does not only turn to poetry in times of crisis, although in times of crisis it surely ramps up (see the protest poetry phenomenon happening now).

You could say people, for the most part, also only get politically active in times of crisis. So if you believe those two things are related, (poetry and political acts), it shouldn't be a surprise that political poetry gets attention in a crisis.

But I do get tired of the lament that wants to compare poetry to other media. Ossip asks why we don't wonder Does Television Matter or Does Football Matter or Do Restaurants Matter. Does Cable TV Matter is actually a conversation happening as we speak and many people have given up television altogether after asking this very question. Every football season I have the argument with Monsieur Big Bang: does football matter. I ask the questio, do games matter all the time, especially ones for which we willingly spend billions of dollars. We do have a plethora of TV shows that ask the question do restaurants matter, particular ones with Gordon Ramsey yelling inside them and in general now that we've endured a flood of restaurant and cooking shows and the world falling apart. Do foodies matter? Is there foie gras after fascism? (I just used that for the alliteration. Foie gras is terrible with or without fascism.)

In fewer words, yes these conversations are happening.

Ossip's article then lists a set of un-numbered questions attempting to challenge mainstream ideas about poetry. Ossip points out that poetry can be an antidote to toxic and numbing culture. But some of her questions play into the same assumptions that proponents of Poetry is Dead succumb to, perpetuate the same stereotype of the obscure poet, especially around the issue of difficulty. Difficulty is not a crime, but it is also not a necessary ingredient of poetry. Difficulty is useful for that particular class of difficult poetry. "Can something be pleasurable and difficult." Yes it can, but it can also be easy and pleasurable. Not all poets traffic in difficult poems. Not all poems are difficult. Not even half of all poems are difficult.

And I think, (because here I am over-thinking again), that this favored idea of poetic difficulty ties back to Perlstein's article and our need to come off as smart thinkers outweighs the benefits of our brilliant new ideas.

And yes, my head is in my hands right now. It's a tragic problem. Smart can be wonderful. Smart can be alienating. Smart can be deadly.

Am I being melodramatic? Can smart poems kill someone? In local news, police are making pleas to the zillionaire who has hid a fortune of coins in northern New Mexico and presented his clues in a too-cryptic poem. Two people have already died trying to find it.

The poem is too hard. The thirst to understand it is too great.

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