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Why Do I Write?

January 27, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Sometimes when I need to find a page quickly on my website and I don’t know where it is I’ll just google it. Like “Mary McCray NaPoWriMo.” It’s faster than browsing around for things. I learned this trick at ICANN because the site has tens of thousands of pages (full transparency, you know).

If I search my name on Bing, that search engine asks me very politely “are you sure you don’t mean porn star Marie McCray?”

If I search my name on Yahoo!, that engine just gives me results for porn star Marie McCray. (“Surely that’s what you want, right?”)

If I search my name on Google (and this is why Google is king, I guess), I get a handy information card to the right that actually returns Me. But Google has decided for some reason that I’m a Journalist. Which is very funny because I’ve never written a piece of professional journalism in my life, unless you count those old reviews on Ape Culture (which had the grand distinction of not being very good).

I can see now that I need to get new pictures. One of the things I dread doing (more on that below).

I have some good friends on the East Coast who I saw last August. They’re a couple: one is a writer/poet and the other is a musician. I’ve known them since back in the Sarah Lawrence days. We’ve had some great conversations over the years about being artists and I remember touring the lair of the musician last summer and the two of us got to musing about why we keep working even though we haven’t “succeeded” and how we would still keep doing it whether we were successful or not. Because we love the doing part and we probably couldn’t stop even if we tried.

I figure feeling this way helps us forego the constant assessments of our value. It’s more about what we value. But this doesn’t make it easy.

It’s tough out there. I know three graphic designers (web and print) who struggle to find work because the Internet has decimated their opportunities, just as it has for writers.

But often I have to remind myself that for poets, it’s been this way for about 100 years already. We were once on top of this culture heap, but then dime-store novels sent us packing; and then motion pictures arrived to soak up everyone’s leisure time. And then TV came. And then the computer games. And then the Internet.

And motion pictures were far from the first disruption to human kind. The printing press put those monks out of business, which was a shame because apparently they were drawing little hidden penises in everything).

Media change is relentless. And we find ourselves in the middle of yet another disruption because annoying human beings keep inventing things like stone tools.

But considering there are still thousands of poets writing and reading poetry even though it’s been 100 years of deeper and deeper losses, we must be working with a different rubric of success. But if you want to join the Irrelevant-Media club, you know where we are. We keep on like dysfunctional little windups.

Alternatively, I know two writers, (one of them lives in my house), who, if there’s no money or promise of money down the line, they do not write. Period.

Another close friend I spoke to recently works in a medium that I would consider mostly a labor of love. And for years they’ve been doing it just because they love doing it, they said. Recently, this changed to working for “something big,” a term that is a vestige of this person’s former life in Show Business.

It’s such a commonly ringing bell lately, I can’t help but think that, despite what anybody says, fame and money are what everybody wants.

Sometimes I even doubt myself. I mean even those monks wanted to be remembered by someone, otherwise they wouldn’t have been drawing all those funny little penises in all those old books.

I’ve been reading an essay about Robert Frost over the last few days, “Robert Frost and Tradition” by Siobhan Phillips.” Phillips says “Frost courted fame on the widest scale and became by some measures the most well-known English-language poet of the twentieth century.”

Frost said, “there is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips.”

And esteem buys you no butter, that’s for sure. You can’t argue with that.

I have another visual artist friend I’ve know a very long time, a very talented artist, but this person has what I would call a problem of self-motivation and over the decades hasn’t produced very much. Recently I had dinner with this person and they said apropos of nothing, “I really thought I would be famous by now.” I had some very unfriendly thoughts at that point and then when I got my sea legs again I said, “So how is Becky?”

I mean I have problems of my own but I have some self-awareness about it. For example, I also another friend who gives good advise about networking: go out and hob-knob with other poets (oy!), join poetry groups (no), give readings (good lord!), network through teaching (I’ve seen that and I consider it a Faustian bargain). I didn’t want to do any of that. And that’s on me. I like to think of it as a handshake with mediocrity.

I’m also been reading a poetry anthology sprinkled with rediscovered poets going back to the Colonial era, poets who never published in their lifetimes but are being uncovered even now like hidden treasures. And I think how nice that sounds to me sometimes. You get the fame if not the money and you don’t have to deal with any of the bullshit, like poetry grunts at public poetry readings. (Thank you to Ann who reminded me I sent her that poem many years ago and completely forgot about it.)

But I’ve been thinking more deeply right now about where this ambivalence around success comes from. And like most things, it probably resides in my early childhood experiences, particularly with bullies. I grew up in a place where you would be a target if you won or if you lost. So the safe spot was right in the middle. When I learned what grey rocking was I was like Yes! I am a master of grey rocking. I imagine a little black belt around my little inner grey rock. Literary grey rocking. It’s perfect.

Robert Frost also wrote a great deal about futility, from the futility of building a fence to the futility of conceiving a child (he lost three, arguably four). However, he saw no futility in poetry. He famously said, “every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” And how does one monetize that?

I was writing something the other day and I referenced the game Mousetrap. I played this game with my friends Diana and Lillian when we were kids. We didn’t even bother playing the game. We just set up the mousetrap and set it in motion to see all the ways it wouldn’t work. Due to small manufacturing mistakes, the contraption rarely did work. In fact, it was an exciting miracle if it ever did.

I started writing for reasons that are not all that flattering to me. It was over a boy, of course.

You know that thing you do when you find out somebody you like enjoys some activity or experience and so you try to get into that thing so that you can build a kind of bridge with that person?

I have a bad history of these bad ideas around boys. But in this particular case, through a series of happy and sad Mousetrap-like events, I started writing poems which randomly sent in play a boot kicking a yellow bucket, knocking out a silver rolling ball down a green staircase and through the red slide, knocking the green man off the blue diving board and into the yellow tub which shakes down the red mousetrap. And here I find myself 39 years later having written many hundreds of miraculous poems.

When I first started writing, I firmly believed you had to be a dead poet to be famous poet. (I didn’t know any but dead ones.) And misguided by that belief, I did not stop writing. I just lowered by expectations.

Real, real low.

Of course, there are many very well-known poets, but nobody in my immediate family would be able to tell you the name of a single one.

It’s all relative.

Romanticism idealized both eschewing fame and expecting it. And many of us are stuck there in that perplexing purgatory.

In the forward to Margaret Atwood’s book Negotiating with the Dead, a Writer on Writing she lists two full pages of reasons why writers write including some really funny examples:

To show those bastards
To delight and instruct
Or else I would die!
Because I didn’t want a job
To make myself seem more interesting than I was
To attract the love of a beautiful woman
To rectify a miserable childhood
To serve art
To serve history
To make a name that would survive my death
To experiment
To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities
To give back

There’s plenty more. Later in chapter three, entitled “Dedication,” Atwood talks about the Lewis Hyde book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life and quotes Hyde to say, “any equation that tries to connect literary value and money is juggling apples and oranges.”

Atwood talks about economic exchange versus gift exchange. She says

“the part of any poem or novel that makes it a work of art doesn’t derive it’s value from the realm of market exchange. It comes from the realm of gift, which has altogether different modes of operating. A gift is not weighted and measured, nor can it be bought. It can’t be expected or demanded; rather it is granted, or else not. In theological terms, it is grace, proceeding from the fullness of being.”

She says, “There are four ways of arranging literary worth and money: good books that make money; good books that don’t make money; bad books that make money; bad books that don’t make money.”

So obvious it sounds ridiculous.

According to Hyde, the serious artist would be well advised to acquire an agent who can mediate between the realm of art and the realm of money….he may then remain modestly apart….Lacking such protection, he will have to maintain a very firm division in his own soul.”

Poets are obviously lacking such protection. If you’re a writer of privilege, as I am (I have a safety net or two), this is probably an easier “division of the soul.” Being a poet is a dangerous vocation, being an artist is a a risky vocation if you need that money.

Each of us in on a different path with different needs and opportunities.

Now all this is fully granting how awfully depressing it is when you speak through art and no one responds or responds in the right number of YouTube views or the response is confusing and ambiguous or your efforts don’t move the mountain of the muse itself. I know plenty of artists who tried for a while and then stopped.

And then some mediums of art cost more money than others. Films require big outlays, for example.

But then I think of a lifetime of effort I’ve spent writing many hundreds of poems, paying off a gigantic loan to have been able to go to Sarah Lawrence College (still not done yet).

I’ve never had a fortune in money, but I’ve spent the Imperial Palace in time. And how do you qualify that?

And it was my idea. Am I due a reward for it? Nobody came to me and asked me to do it.

“We really need this poem, Mary.”

I can’t get back this whole life. Nor would I want to. For me my art is like my love. Given freely or it has no value at all. No exchange required.

But then I think fundamentally I’m working under the paradigm of the gift exchange and not the market exchange. Of course I would like to be read, but on a much lesser scale of readership that those who are working under the market exchange.

It’s like throwing parties. My parties are very small. They’re like the parties in the Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Holiday (one of my favorite things ever). I feel like I’m essentially the Mrs. Potter character trying to find that very small party beyond the very big one, the more electric one on the third floor with all the eccentric and funny screwballs: Johnny, Linda, Professor Nick and Ned. Those people seeking “of esteem” over the blinding bling downstairs, the people who make due with imaginary butter on their enchanting parsnips.

New Learning Opportunities in 2024

January 9, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about this for months. But I wanted to finish the PBS series Poetry in America first so I could give a complete review of it. But my library copy of Season 1 stopped working halfway through. Then I purchased a DVD from Amazon and that DVD stopped working half way through, too, and so I returned it for a replacement. And it happened again!

All the Poetry in America DVDs for season 1 seem to be defective and they’re still selling them! So I went over to the PBS app and signed up for the $5-a-month-member to see the rest of Season 1 and found out there was a Season 3! Sweet!

Anyway, all this took time to work through.

Every since I’ve run out of poetry MOOCs (those free Massive Open Online Classes) and burned through a year’s worth of literary celebrities on MasterClass, I’ve been searching for online literary education again. Happily, last year I found it in two places.

The Smithsonian Associates Online Courses

I think I purchased Christmas cards from MOMA one year and then started getting a stream of museum catalogues (not an unpleasant thing) and one of them was just for online, live courses offered from the Smithsonian.

These are great courses offered in all subjects and taught by some pretty respectable teachers. I haven’t had a bad experience yet…except negotiating their website which is hard to log on to, hard to change the password for, and there’s no literature or book category per se. But you can search “literature” and this bring up all the upcoming lit courses.

I also appreciate that the courses are priced well for the time provided, about 25-35 dollars per 1.5-2 hours. This is much more amenable than $50 to $100 for a single course or a yearly subscription contract. Price point has been an ongoing issue for me. It’s just a shame you can’t go back and stream older courses. What an easy money maker for the Smithsonian that would be.

The first class I took was on Moby Dick (a book I still haven’t read and just unsuccessful pitched to my Difficult Reading Book group), a course taught by Samuel Otter, a professor out of U. of California Berkeley. He had helpful suggestions like reading the chapters out of order. He also put the book in the context of Herman Melville’s life to illustrate how unsuccessful the book was at the time. He discussed the Melville conference in Japan and how influential the book’s heroic monster has been to monster movies like Godzilla. He talked about the idea of “the world in the whale” and how a novel can “swallow everything.” In the Q&A they addressed how the book fit in with his other works, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s influence on the book. Interesting quotes from the class: “This book seems to know how you feel when you read it.”

I also took “Thoreau on Work” because I didn’t know much about Henry David Thoreau either. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, two philosophers who wrote a book on Thoreau’s attitudes currently resonating with the culture of quiet quitting, co-ran the session. They also recommended the Jennifer O’Dell Book, “How to Do Nothing” and talked about fulfilling work and privilege (interestingly Thoreau didn’t have much of that and did manual labor most of his life) and Thoreau’s idea of having “work that keeps your mind free” which resonated with me and how I’ve chosen my day jobs in this life.

I really enjoyed the discussion about plants and bloom times versus living a life beholden to mechanical clocks and what time has come to mean for us, doing work that you can take pride in (at least some of the time) and how some work leads men to “live lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau’s words). They also lightly covered the idea of Original Affluence and we see a lot of young people doing this, scaling down their needs so they can keep work to 40 hours or less.

There was a three part series called Art and Literature and I missed the first one. The second one was on William Blake, given by Jack Dee, an art historian, who explained the time and work of William Blake and how his illustrations intersected with the poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience. We studied these poems in many physical classes throughout high school and college and no teacher (that I can remember) spent time going through the illustration for each one and how it communicated back to the language of the poem. Dee also talked about how Blake’s wife was his collaborator and what she contributed.

The other session I caught was called Picasso and Stein, given by David Garriff. This was also a facinating dive into Gertrude Stein and her relationship with Pablo Picasso. The course suggested a long New Yorker article on the politics of Stein that got me reading Lifting Belly and The Alice B. Tolklas Cook Book.

These classes above were about an hour and a half and cost about $35 for non-members and $30 for members. The more expensive classes either went for an hour and a half over multiple days or were classes that lasted 3-5 hours.

Reading Faulkner: Chronicler of the Deep South, taught by Michael Gorra of Smith College, was a dream come true. Ever since hearing about the Faulkner class at Notre Dame I’ve been thinking about trying to finagle my way into such a thing. This was a class with three sessions (each on a book) over three months, one book a month (so you could read along). First book was The Sound and the Fury (a book I once read with zero understanding of what I was reading). After this session, I went back and reread it with much more understanding and appreciation for not only the novel’s stylistic experiments and narrative experiments but for telling a story about a woman through the voices of her brothers. Like for Moby Dick, none of Faulkner’s novels were successful (as we think of them today). Unlike Melville, Faulkner was unconcerned about this.

The next Faulker book we read was Light in August, one of my favorite books period. My best college paper, in fact, was on Light in August. I loved the novel even more after taking this class (even got a poem out of it). The last novel we read was Absalom, Absalom! which I haven’t yet read, but it’s a book that was also referenced in the Poetry in America, season 3 as an important part of an amazing Evie Shockley poem so I’m looking forward to starting on it.

I also attended a half-day Saturday class on The Russian Novel: Anna Karenina (which I’ve read) and The Brothers Karamazov (which I haven’t) given by Joseph Luzzi from Bard College. I accidentally slept through the first hour of the class. But luckily you get 48 hours to rewatch any recorded sessions. This was the professor who tipped me off to the Cambridge Companion books for authors and art forms.

I took another Luzzi class, one of his high school revisited series, for The Great Gatsby, which prompted me to read a few other F. Scott Fitzgerald novels (now sitting in a stack by my bed, including The Beautiful and Dammed which I’m reading as we speak).

Another interesting thing about this class was the handsome professor. During one of his Q&As at the end of the classes, one devotee suggested (with fluttering eyes you could entirely imagine) that Luzzi should start a podcast. In mild frustration he insisted that he was too busy with writing books, running his online book club, teaching and “I have a family!”

The most recent course I took was on Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Loss and Invention, taught by writer Robert Morgan, a class that worked well to overturn the myths of this most famously mythologized writer. This was less of a lecture than Morgan reading from a paper. So that felt kind of stilted, but he knew what he was talking about so that mitigated the annoyance.

Coming up I’m taking the class Cinderella: Beyond Bippidy Boppidy Boo (tonight, actually) and Wuthering Heights and Invisible Man, again with the handsome Joseph Luzzi as part of his High School Revisited series.

Poetry in America

This PBS show is another, little-known but excellent source for literary continuing ed that I loooved.

The half-hour series was hosted by Elisa New of the aforementioned Harvard poetry MOOCs. In fact, I vaguely remember her talking about filming such a new show poems exploring aspects of America back when I was watching one of those final Harvard MOOCs.

The production values, the ingenuity in illustrating the poems, the wonderful animations, the travels to the places of the poems, the pathos of the shows, and the stellar guest rosters of not only literary but subject-matter experts, just really, really superb and well worth the price of the one or two months of membership to PBS it might cost you to watch all three seasons.

Here are the poems and poet episodes listed below. I have to say, the episodes I was least interested in watching at first were probably the ones I enjoyed the most.

Season 1:

“I Cannot Dance Upon My Toes” by Emily Dickinson exploring the idea of fame.
“Fast Break” by Edward Hirsh about American sports and male bonding (I loved this one and I don’t really like sports).
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden talking about “the black sonnet,” the blues sonnet.
“Hymn” and “Hum Bom!” by Allen Ginsberg about God and The Bomb.
“Skyscraper” by Carl Sandberg about capitalism and the idea of the city.
“Harlem” by Langston Hughes about ruined dreams.
“Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden about suffering and war.
“Shirt” by Robert Pinsky about factory labor, particularly New York City garment labor.
“To Prisoners” by Gwendolyn Brooks about prison (this one was very moving, too).
“The Grey Heron” by Galway Kinnell about nature.
“New York State of Mind” by Nas about Rap music as poetry (a must see episode).
“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus about the immigrant experience (which included a guest singer I really like, Russian immigrant Regina Spektor).

These are available on DVD but good luck finding a playable copy of episodes 7-12.

Season 2:

“Urban Love Poem” by Marilyn Chen about the immigrant experience.
“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop” about grief.
“The Fish” by Marianne Moore about close observation.
“This Your Home Now” by Mark Doty about male barbershops and AIDS (I looooved this one).
“Finishing the Hat” by Stephen Sondheim from the musical Sunday in the Park with George about French painter Georges Seurat and the creative process. (I also love how this show incorporates music into its definition of poetry. See #11 above.)
“You and I Are Disappearing” by Yusef Komunyakaa about the Vietnam War. (Another one of my unexpected favorites on how to write about war).
“This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams about marriage.
“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman about the ideals and multiplicity of America.

These are available on DVD and I had no issues with Season 2.

Season 3:

“Sonnet IV” by Edna St. Vincent Millay about turning upside down the classic love sonnet.
Two southwest poems, “Bear Fat” by Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan and “Rabbits and Fire” by Mexican-American poet Alberto Rios — both about storytelling and tragedy in the southwest.
Motherhood poems by Sharon Olds (“The Language of the Brag”) and Bernadette Mayer (“The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters”) – another amazing episode, “The Language of the Brag” ended up being one of my favorite new finds.
“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost about when walls work and when they don’t work.
“you can say that again, billie” by Evie Shockley about blues, humor, racism in the American South, (another one of my favorite episodes).
“Cascadella Falls” by A.R. Ammons (also showcasing his paintings) about geologic time.
“Looking for the Gulf Motel” by Richard Blanco about the nostalgia of a lost youth, especially with immigrants for their homeland as places left behind.
“The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman about the Civil War.

I have loved every minute of these classes and TV shows. To find out more information about them, visit:

Short Story Challenge No.1

January 4, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So I haven’t been posting on Big Bang Poetry for a while. My other blog kind of blew up and took over the end of last year.

But I’ve been saving up some posts for this blog. This year I have cut back my day-job hours in order to have more time for writing projects. I also embarked on a challenge with a friend of mine who hasn’t been writing as much as she’d like. I thought if we could gamify the writing of a short story, it would help encourage writing time on her side and help me get out of my truth/fiction dichotomy over on my side.

So I located two sets of storytelling game cards last year, The Storymatic and Synapsis (both from Storymatic Studios).

(For Christmas my friend Natalie also gave me Ouisi cards which have a storytelling component to them and I’m using those separately this year).

Anyway, I composed some new game rules to bring the two games together (The Storymatic and Synapsis) but my friend unfortunately had a personal issue come up this month and she won’t be able to join in with the first story.

I decided to continue on and thought it would be interesting to mark out the process and progress here. Feel free to join in with the challenge if you feel so compelled.

The main point of the cards is to not overthink your ideas, to instead just blurt it out. You can overthink it plenty later.

Step one was to pull one pink card to get our story theme (or milieux it seems more like) and three gray and blue cards to assemble an opening sentence.

So our pink card sets us up in a young adult novel. Since this is a short story, that just means our main character should be a young-adult character. Mine is named Gerald and he’s 13.

We use the cards on the right to string together a first sentence. Mine turns out to be: “As a whistleblower, Gerald looked more like a ceasefire.” (Gives Gerald a little bit of character there,)

Then we pulled some “Ask” cards to help further define our story:

What happens in the scene of your first sentence: Gerald is trying to report some offenses of the French teacher to the school principal and he backs down and ends up defending him instead.
When/where does the story take place: 1980s suburbs in the general U.S.
What does the main character want more than anything: the love and respect of all the girls, or a girl (whichever comes first).

Then we pull four more cards: two gold cards are to further define the character’s wants or desires, the other two copper cards give us the obstacles our character must face in the story as he works toward getting what he wants.

So besides girls, Gerald also wants to become a future president as well as a person who says yes to everything. (Pretty good goals as they go but I can already tell Gerald is the kind of person who rarely says yes to anything).

A fever and a frozen slice of his Uncle’s wedding cake will have to thwart him on his journey to happiness.

We get two months to write a short story with these guideposts.

Here we go…

Fictions

October 26, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 4 Comments

A few weeks ago I was so proud of myself. I wrote my first short story. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wrote two short stories in college and they were both terrible. One was a humorous ghost story I wrote at Sarah Lawrence and the other was an undergrad story so terrible it had no plot or subject that I can recall.

But anyway, this was a significant milestone in that I’ve been struggling with my fictions since childhood when my friend Krissy and I embarked on our first novels at age 8. Unfortunately, we had no life experiences to cull from and so our epics petered out pretty quick.

In fact, my problem writing fiction goes back to that very young me, back to when I started doing what I call “calibrating towards reality,” in other words obsessively worrying that I am thinking from an unrealistic perspective.

It all started with a tween diagnosis of anorexia, most likely tripped off from a condition called body dysmorphia (although I wouldn’t know what that term was for another decade): an inability to correctly see with my own eyes what was in the mirror in front of me.

And this dutifully led to a distrustful questioning of anything I saw or experienced, basically. Great.

My “calibrations” developed like an over-correction and led to an irritating habit of always asking surrounding people these things: “did that really happen?” or “are you seeing what I’m seeing” and basically disregarding, whole hog, experiences I have alone.

Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans just did a podcast this week about ghosts and I was thinking about whether or not I’ve had any ghostly experiences. And then I remembered I don’t believe the experiences I’ve had because there wasn’t any corroboration. There’s a mental bucket in my head for those experiences: questionable.

This calibrating is also a problem in some social situations. Like someone will be spouting off their fictions and I’ll say, “But that’s not how it happened” or “but that doesn’t make sense because…” or “but what about this other evidence that contradicts everything you’re saying?”

And then I think, “Oh crap, this person is just coping with their fictions right now or this person is just talking in marketing mode.” Leave them to their realities.

But then I think, “Wait a minute, we all have the same reality. There’s no point in the universe where their reality ends and mine begins.”

See? I can’t stop. It’s like a buffering wheel. It’s always going in my brain: “Is that right? What you’re saying?”

This is why I find deep fakes so terrifying. And why I’m hyper-sensitive to gaslighting. Stop trying to fuck up a very fucked-up experience I’m already having over here.

Anyway, here is where these calibrations have a detrimental effect on my attempts to write fiction:

Recently I was in Kansas City and I met up with my grade school friend Jayne from St. Louis. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Jayne since we started Junior High and went into separate social groups. So we had a lot of catching up to do over dinner. And at the end of the night, out in the parking lot as we were saying goodbye, she said something like, “What about that piano teacher we had, huh!” We then told our spouses the gory story and I told Jayne I was trying to write a short story about it but was struggling.

I had just recently come across a photo of this piano teacher and had looked up a newspaper article about the murder she was involved in. Because the story involved a real family, I didn’t want anything I wrote ever getting back to harm the survivors. So I decided to fictionalize everything. Easy enough. I made changes to some of the sexes of the characters, pumped up the sex drama (as you do), added some disguising plot points and boom, I was off to the races.

Except that after a little while I suddenly stopped and said to myself, “But that’s not how it happened.”

“Am I for real right now with this?” I thought. Of course that’s not how it happened. That’s the whole point of changing everything from how it happened, so that it wouldn’t be how it happened!

And so I’ve given up on that story for a while.

Telling stories doesn’t seem to be a problem for me if they’re based on reality and I’m depicting an ostensible reality, even if my memory fails me or I need to embellish for the sake of humor or someone’s privacy or, as my great-grandfather would say, to make it better than it was. Those kind of detours feel acceptable because I know the difference in my head. The core reality is clear and stories aren’t obligated.

I’ve also written two books of narrative poems and I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is there. Why was I able to do that? My Mars poems aren’t a fully realized narrative, but instead little narratives tossed in among personal lyric poems. I was still figuring out how to write narrative poems back then and could only carry a story for the length of a poem. That seemed do-able.

The next book of cowboy poems was actually a fully-drawn out, start-to-finish plotted story. It took forever but again, living in those stories was accomplished poem by poem. I always thought I could transfer that trick to short stories or a novel.

But it’s not the same. Like at all. Those genres demand you be more immersive in their fictions. And that is not a very comfortable place for me to be.

There’s a common prescription in fiction to base characters on people you know, à la Proust. As part of a fiction exercise in a fiction writing guide, I tried to make my novel characters an amalgamation of poets and people I knew. And the result was the same exact mess. My brain kept wanting to default to one real person or another. “But so-in-so wouldn’t do that.”

The new short story had the benefit of being the product of a funny dream. I was able to basically transcribe the dream, clean it up and embellish it where needed. It was subconsciously delivered almost intact and that make all the difference.

I’m thinking the problem comes with stories based on even a semblance of a true story but are not true stories, per se. And I’m leaning toward the idea that I’m to be a Donald Barthelme kind of fiction writer, veering heavily toward nonsense. Because I’m not haunted by the idea of discovering folderol, the uncanny or ghostly things.

I’m haunted by the specter of reality.

Happy Halloween!

Experimental Poetry

October 9, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’ve still some things to catch up on since I had to divert my attention to moving all my websites earlier this year. I kept on reading and now I have a big stack of books to review, so big that I had to divey them up into a traditional poetry stack and an experimental stack.

I’ll start with the experimental ones, because even that stack had sub-stacks: the ones I liked and the ones I didn’t. Sometimes I think I have a love-hate relationship with experimental poetry. If the experiment seems generous and comprehensible, I tend to really love it and it inspires me to try similar things: like strike-out experiments, experiments with bilingualism, footnote experiments, poems working side-by-side itself on the page.

However, if the experiments seem solipsistic or just an extension of the meaning-making experiments of parataxis or repeats of 100-year-old strategies modernism, I get annoyed.

Meaning-making is clugey, we get it. It’s hardly following Ezra Pound’s adage to “make it new.” Not that we have to keep up that death-march anyway.

But in any case, this all seems very subjective. Experiments I like fall flat with others.

Yield Architecture by Jake Syersak falls into the later category for me. The book itself is beautiful, which is why I picked it up at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books earlier this year. But I didn’t even finish it. And there are only a handful of poetry books I can say that about. I can usually stick it out (or skim it out).

This book is described as “an unyielding investigation of how linguistic and material structures intersect to shape one’s perception of reality” which sounds like part of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. experiments again. There are four sections with names like “Skins, Skeins, History, Hysteria & Dust” that seems mostly juxtipositional sound experiments, like one called “Soldered Opposite of Weather Was Yourself” which contains this untitled snippet:

architecture
              dear architecture,

to begin, I’ve written two-words side-by-side on yellow-lined
              notebook paper:

violet: violence

as a way of testing the bruises a colloseum’s pillars bury into a
              hillside, how the grass gathers around it

(what anchors me in all this?—alarms of nausea, nausea the likes of
              which can only be described as: nausea describes

For example: I wonder, how calmly your waters hold a swan’s gristle

And there’s much more like this going on for 81 pages but we’re done.

Watch Me Trick Ghosts by Robert Krut was also beautifully printed and does follow a thin kind of sensical narrative but the poems still didn’t quite connect for me.

From “Pedagogy” first stanzas:

He wants to be a teacher, but what
to teach when the world is a tiger,

when even walking out to sneak a smoke
is met by a town where someone

behind a mailbox whips batteries
or unsuspecting afternoon walkers,

The poem “Ghost Does”

Sky ghost prepares lightning.
Electricity ghost is acid on steel.
Thunder ghost speaks to tree ghost.
Tree ghost is you.
Foundation ghost stretches, contracts.
Wind ghost inhales.
Blanket ghost is bandaging.
Slate ghost marks in chalk.
Bone ghost is an echo.
Moon ghost is moon.
Sun ghost is moon ghost.
I am moon ghost.
Branch ghost is arm as body.
Rain ghost is a footprint on cement.
Leaf ghost lifts eyeline.
Tree ghost is waiting.
Tree ghost awaits.
Tree ghost is you.
I am tree ghost.
Tree ghost is moon ghost.
We hide, appear.

More excerpts: https://www.hypertextmag.com/excerpt-robert-kruts-watch-me-trick-ghosts/

Some people still really enjoy these things of almost-meanings. I remember my friend Laura and I used to write these almost-sensical poems in the third grade when we were trying to feel our way into language and didn’t have any real meanings to work with yet. They weren’t quite poems, but wordiness we would put in clouds, like thought clouds but they were really like simulacrums of what we imagined sounding deep and thoughtful writings would be (without any actual deep thoughts because we were eight).

But, at the end of the day, I do support any kind of poet lab/pure experiments no matter whether I can find a practical use for their ideas or not. Everyone is on their own path.

Janet Kaplan’s Ecotones (given to me as a gift in NYC this year for my birthday), is about half-and-half successful for me. There are three sections called Plasma, Chronicles and Technopastoral. Plasma used collages with quotes to make very faint points. Her concern with the vocabulary and typography of technology inspired me to think more about technology poems, especially the connective tissue of communicating in code. I really liked the Chronicles section where there seemed to be more of a person writing there. Technopastoral contained various spatial experiments.

And I think this book helped to clarify for me what it is I’m looking for in experiments, not too much abstraction and intellectualism at the expense of finding a breathing, feeling person somewhere in there living a life. This kind of personhood has been so lacking in experimental poetries (especially but not exclusively the digital ones).

I did love the word pictures in You Would Say That by Robin Tomens, which I received for entering a contest last year. These are completely typographical experiments, literally using words as a visual medium, (which I would usually just classify as visual art), but Tomens does something extra to give a snippet here or there meaning, and so we felt a person was coming through. Some poems were commentary on the process of thinking but not so much that they didn’t strike me as still touching, maybe due to the way they were drawn into the typographical art.

Samples of the text from the pieces:

POETIC GLAMOUR IS NO LONGER WHAT COUNTS MOST
BUT THE INTRINSIC INTERST IN THE THOUGHT

~~~

A KNOWS HE IS NOT READING, AND HAS A
SENSE OF JUST THIS WHILE PRETENDING
TO READ

~~~

IF SOMEONE COULD SEE THE MENTAL PROCESS OF
EXPECTATION

~~~

HOLD THAT THOUGHT

Some images from the book:

James Thomas Stevens’ The Golden Book was a take on the intersection of grammar and love poems, an experiment I was doing myself last year. Stevens’ poems seemed to be so personal, however, as to be almost cryptic.

Based on David Lambuth’s The Golden Book on Writing, a writing guide from 1923, these poems shared titles like The Paragraph, The Sentence, Words, Punctuation.

The opening poem called “A Warning”

Isn’t every
encounter a cross
to bear,
a cultural one?

The small battles.
The volleys.
The flag raisings.

They poems are pretty far removed from their source material, which seems more like a jumping-off point than any attempt to address the rules of writing directly. One I really liked was called “Set Up Sign-Posts” which is an adage of writing any kind of persuasive thesis paper.

Point to your beloved.
Remind him of his progress.
At the end tell him that
you have arrived – and see
that he understand it.

Don’t have him turning over the sheets and
saying with a start: “Oh, that’s all there was to it.

From “Know Where You Are Going”

Know which He you are writing of:

He, the pianist carpenter, or
He, the poet violinist.

In like lions, out like lambs.

I also liked a poem called “Simple Words for Big Ideas” which it hard to even summarize but a poem that covers sex, language and colonization.

Personal story, I worked with Stevens when I was a faculty secretary at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) in Santa Fe back in 2013-14. There was tension there between the dean and both the art and writing faculty around who got access to the copier (and me), all which made some of the teachers a bit grouchy. Stevens was initially very grouchy about this and I remember some chastising he gave me for taking over the copier for one of the Dean’s projects. Stevens had an exceptionally messy office. I told him his office was itself a Language poem. But I really liked his poems and he became less grouchy (as did the other faculty) as the semester went on (and I learned to make copies after the faculty left for the day).

More excerpts from the book: https://courtgreen.net/issue-14/james-thomas-stevens

A few weeks ago I picked up the $30 Anne Carson book Float from the local library. It comes in a plastic box and has about 27 loose booklets and front matter pieces inside. They were all disorganized and in disarray.

It was very satisfying to my Skittles-organizing mind to sort all the front matter out. The little booklets could be read in any order although there was a Table of Contents. “Reading can be freefall” the title page claims.

I used the same reading strategy as when our book blub read The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson, which was to read the smallest booklets first, working up to the longest ones. It’s the low-hanging-fruit of reading strategies. The book was like the detritus of Anne Carson’s writing drawer, stuff too small to put anywhere else, culled together to Float in one package. It was only loosely cohesive and again connections depended upon the principle of parataxis, random connections of proximity.

There were ordered lists, long poems, poem sets, theatrical scripts and essays. The booklets kept slipping out of the plastic container all over the floor.

Understandably the book had less cohesion than other Anne Carson collections and I can’t say this was my favorite “book” of hers but it did inspire me to try a few things. I loved “Maintenance,” “Eras of Yves Klein” and “Merce Sonnet,” “Reticent Sonnet” and “Sonnet of the English-Made Cabinet with Drawers (In Prose)” from the booklet called “Possessive Used as Drink (Me), A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets.” A few of the essay pieces even inspired me to create an Essay poem and there will be a Cheras poem one day, no doubt.

My favorite experimental book this year was from Unincorporated Territory [guma] by Craig Santos Perez. I picked up this book at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), the museum extension of IAIA, along with the Stevens book.

This is a book about the status of Guam as part of and not part of the United States and how its citizens can feel diaspora even while living in their own place, beyond what even some post-colonized aboriginal groups might feel due to continued militarization. It’s colonization in real time and the book explores what it means to “be home” when the definition of your country is changing. Perez weaves in document-speak and impact statements into a kind of meaning collage. The poems are too difficult to type out so here are some images of my favorite pieces:

The first poem, from the legends of juan malo [a malologue]:

ginen ta(la)ya:

ginen fatal impact statements

And here’s a poem on spam: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57827/ginen-the-legends-of-juan-malo-a-malologue

The Labor Poets

September 15, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

After my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, my grandfather came to live with us for a while in St. Louis. And when my grandfather found out I was writing poems, (I was in college at the time), he told me to read the labor poets.

I had no idea who these labor poets were. They certainly weren’t in the Norton Anthology I had from school.

My grandfather said I should look them up at the Public Library. He told me to go to the reference desk and say, “Show me the labor poets!”

I wasn’t about to do this for two reasons: for one I was too shy to demand anything from reference librarians, (ok, not entirely true if it was an old Cher magazine I wanted from an archive), but also I wasn’t reading any other poets at the time. I was just a newb writing to find my own voice.

I should take a moment here to elaborate about my grandfather. I usually talk about my grandparents on my father’s side because their history is very mythological and romantic. But my grandparents on my mother’s side are none the less interesting (or mythological for that matter).

Some would call my grandfather an anglophile.

Now I live with a Francophile. So I know what this is. Monsieur Big Bang’s high-school friends still lament about trying to have a conversation with him back in the 1980s. Listening to him was like, “France, France, France, Proust. France, France, France, Proust.”

Monsieur Big Bang himself will tell you he was very much like the Italian-obsessed kid in the movie Breaking Away, a working-class kid enamored with another romantic culture. And just like that kid in the movie who had his own reality-check during the bike-race scene when the Italians cruelly sabotaged his bike, Monsieur Big Bang spent a good deal of time in France finding out the French are assholes too, just like everybody else.

But I don’t feel anglophile is quite the right word for what my grandfather was. Somehow the word anglophile suggests a range in an obsession. And as I’ve mentioned in my other blog, my grandfather had only a small set of topics he would discuss at any time:

What English people ate or did not eat. This suspiciously coincided exactly with what my grandfather ate and did not eat, like tomatoes. He said an Englishman would never eat a tomato. (We’ll come back to that.)
The superiority of British shipping history. I spent many, many hours with this man and I only had to hear the words “Sir Frances” or “Sir Walter” and I would gently float off to my happy place, which in college was thinking all the time about boys.
America was a completely corrupt country and soon our hard-fought-for unions would be weakened and demolished. This was in the 1980s during Reaganomics. Looking back today, I can see he was right about this, but at the time it really rankled me and my mother to hear it.
The last thing was The Ludlow Massacre. I heard about this tragedy all the time. “Remember The Ludlow Massacre.” It was his Alamo. When I happened to come upon a highway sign for the massacre site in Southern Colorado about ten years ago, I turned off immediately to visit the place (every American should). I had heard about it so many times in my childhood, the actual location always seemed more fantastical to me than real. It was like coming upon the exit sign to Narnia.

These topics all come together for my grandfather in his family’s Colorado pioneer history. Although my grandfather spent only a total of two weeks in the country of England during his entire lifetime (see below), his adored parents were both from Cornwall, both from coal mining families who immigrated separately to America, and both his mother and father were heavily invested in the American labor movement as it was happening at turn-of-the-century coal sites in Colorado.

My grandfather could determine a stranger’s political party in five minutes. And he could be incredibly difficult if he didn’t like you (say you belonged to the wrong one). He could also exhaust people with his small list of discussion topics.

In fact, my grandfather talked about England so much that when my grandmother, (a Germanic woman from a big family farm in Iowa), was offered a two-week trip to England during the family’s roots tour of 1977, she declined. She opted instead to “take care of Dave and the kids in Missouri.”

She chose Missouri over England! (I can’t even.)

She said she felt like she had already been there.

After my mother, Aunt Merle and grandfather returned from that same trip, my mother told me, “Mary I saw tomatoes everywhere.” I was like how would we know? How would we even know?

My grandfather talked about England so much that I benefited in being the remaining person he took to dinner every Thursday night for years when everyone else in his life had dropped out. (Dropped out of the restaurant dinners, anyway. My mother still cooked him a big dinner every Sunday.) He insisted on eating at more expensive establishments after working until he was 80 as a machinist and a mechanic. He had a good social security check and had been frugal most of his life and he wanted to eat well. He usually wanted to visit the same fine establishments over and over, too, which also tired everyone out. I was the last man standing and his driver except for those times he wanted us to splurge with a cab.

I once took him to The St. Louis Bread Company, (a direct relative of Panera), so I could show him this fabulous new thing called a bread bowl. He was offended that I had to “truck our own food” to the table and refused to be impressed.

“But soup! In a bowl of bread!”

So we were back to the fancy Bristols and Spiros soon enough. I missed most of the Seinfeld, Mad About You and Cosby Show episodes during those Thursday-night years. It’s a gapping hole in my cultural literacy.

Anyway, all these years later I have discovered Cary Nelson who has recently created a critical space in the American poetry canon to rediscover these labor poets my grandfather was telling me about. Revolutionary Memory is a book about how these poets were lost from anthologies in the first place. Next Nelson edited two major anthologies which reinstated these lost poets, Anthology of Modern American Poetry and Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

As I’m finding these labor poets in those anthologies, I’m deciding I really like them and I’ve been tracking down books of their collected works (if available; they’re still pretty obscure). These poets are all very funny and they don’t write about politics or labor issues all the time. But when they do, it’s poignant and crafted. Some of my favorite poets so far:

Kenneth Fairing, who also wrote a respectable crime noir book called The Big Clock
Thomas McGrath
Stanley Burnshaw

What you tend to want from your dead relatives is context. And back when my grandfather was alive I was too young and badly-read to even know what questions to ask him. Did he read these poets himself? Where did he come upon them? Did he ever subscribe to the socialist periodical New Masses or The Masses where many of these poets were published? (My mother tells me just now that he did take a Labor newspaper). Did these poets come up in conversation at union halls or in machine shops? I have my grandfather’s scrapbook of union and political clippings and there’s not a single poem in it as I can recall. Did he collect any of these poems somewhere else?

One final story. I was living in Yonkers and my grandfather would very kindly send me fresh canned tuna from Winchester Bay in Oregon in cases of 24. About every six months when I ran out, he would send me more. I’ve never tasted a better canned tuna than the fresh tuna from Winchester Bay, Oregon. My grandfather and I weren’t able to dine out together anymore because I was at Sarah Lawrence in New York by then and he had moved back to the coast of Oregon.

We still kept our standing date every Thursday night, if just on the phone. One time it took over two weeks for his box of tuna cans to arrive and he was really angry at the Post Office. During one of our Thursday night calls he said, “the Pony Express could have delivered it faster!” I took his point but truthfully, the Pony Express would have taken months and probably Indians would have been enjoying the cans of tuna instead of me. He then said very seriously, “You know in England they send all their mail through pneumatic tubes.”

I thought this was just about the silliest thing he had ever said. And in the years following I told this story of the tuna to many, many people as an example of the kinds of unbelievable things my grandfather would say about England.

Fast forward years later I’m in Paris with Monsieur Big Bang and we’re visiting some museum there, (the sewers? the catacombs? the city museum?), and they start talking about how Paris was once fitted with pneumatic tubes everywhere for quickly sending around mail throughout the city. I turned to M.B.B and said, “Oh shit. He was right about pneumatic tubes in England!”

Goodwill

September 11, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Goodwill. I’m not talking about a thrift score here.

I’m talking about the person-to-person kind. You know, bonhomie.

I’ve been around tribes of writers for many, many years now and other artists for a time too. I’ve always dreamed of finding my tribe, my school, my group of likeminded thinkers…and mostly for the social aspect if I’m being honest about the fantasy. When I read stories about professors holding court at restaurants or drinking establishments surrounded by their students talking shop, talking about quality writers and writing, I always think mmm….that sounds so nice.

I do have friends that I collaborate with and friends who are writers, but I’ve never found that sympatico group of people who are working on the same things I’m working on. And as for the work itself, some writers enjoy the process (I know I do) and some writers find it difficult and painful. But aside from any enjoyment you might get just by doing it (brainstorming, assembling, editing, polishing), I contend writing isn’t really about the written result per se. It’s about communicating to other people, which is more social than solitary.

And the harder the thing is to communicate, the more words become a problem. Words and sentences don’t always convey. They manipulate everyone all the time. Words say things you don’t intend. They stick your foot in it.

But you keep going, because what else is there but speaking and writing?

Once you’re dead, the written words will be left behind like an empty vessel. Others might enjoy them but that’s none of your concern anymore. The writing may live or not live. You most definitely will not live.

So if you were the last man on earth, would you bother? Once the people you’re communicating with are gone, would you bother? No, I don’t think it’s the writing itself, deep down, that fulfills what we desire.

As Al Pacino says in Author! Author!, “We’re people, Gloria! We’re people!” People who need people.

One of my biggest pet peeves lately is the envy writers and artists feel toward one another, especially friend-to-friend envy.

This is exhibited in many ways: friends consistently not reading or attending to their friends artworks, friends not providing words of encouragement when milestones are reached (like publications or good reviews), friends being inexplicably suddenly attentive when bad milestones are hit (failures, bad reviews). “Sorry to hear about your bad review. You must feel terrible.” It’s easy to say a real friend wouldn’t do that, but sometimes otherwise-very-good friends do things like this.

And full disclosure I used to be one of those people. Not the schadenfreude kind, but I did find it hard to drum up genuine enthusiasm for a friend or acquaintance’s success. And I think it’s a naturally competitive emotional response to be envious.

I think it serves you not a whit, but it’s a natural, normal response.

When I started this blog, I made a conscious effort to approach other people’s poetry pieces with an open and impartial mind. My friend Christopher was a good mentor in this. No matter how he may have historically and dramatically disliked something, (recently he declared to me on the phone, “no woman can pull of bangs!”), he will approach a new thing with an open mind, lacking any of his prior prejudices. He will say things like “I usually don’t like this but you have to give so-and-so credit. That was amazing. They really did that well.” It’s always a generous, fair-minded response.

It was in that spirit that I tried to dump my own prejudices and walk forward in literature without the baggage of envy. And this was initially a challenge when reading the work of someone I knew. In the back of my chest there was that pang of envy every time. Why didn’t I do this? I could do this. My friend is moving forward and I’m falling behind. The crazy thing is I didn’t usually care about falling behind. I’ve been behind from the get-go; I’m usually the dumbest person in the room and I’m comfortable with this.

But envy is a feeling your ego creates, something deep-seated. And your ego has its own agenda.

The thing is there is a trick to escaping this. I actually learned it from a therapist I had many years ago, the same one I quit over the Linda Ronstadt song. Although she gave me the terrible advise to consider ‘no good’ any boy who was disinterested in me (which was certainly not healthy or logical), she also gave me a piece of very good advice that changed my then-young life.

I was a senior in high school at the time and she told me to keep a daily list of everything good that happened to me and another list of everything bad that happened. She insisted that over time the bad list would become shorter and the good list would become longer, like magic.

And it worked. (In reality, it was a trick of attention and where you put it.)

Turns out, in the the case of envy, the fake-it-til-you-make-it method does, in fact, work. First you drum up some half-baked enthusiasm for your successful friend and it’s like endorphins kick in or something. It feels good to be happy for someone. Before you know it, you’re feeling real genuine enthusiasm for them and their projects. Magic!

You’ll soon notice envy fading away completely and you’re a much happier creative person in the world.

This is different than toxic positivity. Negative emotions are normal. And there’s plenty time to still feel shitty about strangers and their successes. Just don’t let yourself feel envy over your friends.

But then sometimes I wonder if maybe all friends aren’t created equal. Maybe good artist friends aren’t good generic friends. Cézanne was frustrated with Zola and Zola was frustrated with Cézanne. Maybe the friend who would bail you out of jail isn’t the same kind of friend who will happily deconstruct your latest opus.

I have to say, my best readers have been complete strangers. Hell, I think my only readers have been complete strangers, aside from my mother. (Thanks Mom!)

But the thing is some of those stranger readers have gone on to become very good friends. And we talk about more than writing or Cher. We talk about our struggles in life as well.

So I don’t know the answer to this yet but I think the world has become so hyper-competitive and self-serving and hyper-sensitive as to our own standing, we’ve lost too much goodwill. And trust me, goodwill feels so much more pleasant than envy.

🤗

And So the Summer Departs

September 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

To-do List Courtesy of Reddit

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here…well since our Essay Project came to a close in July. When I finish a big project I always feel suddenly a little untethered.

Alarmingly, this year has gone by faster than any year before (it would seem). Cruel summer and turned into cruel fall. Soon it will be Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The Halloween stores are already open and just a moment ago it was spring and I was finishing up migrating websites. The whole year was on the horizon and my day job was really feeling great. (They gave us ice cream!)

The year of 2023 has brought me….well, things. For one, the day job has turned into the gaslit labors of Sisyphus. And the somewhat dreadful news about Artificial Intelligence has taken a lot of wind from the sails of my proliferating digital poems.

I spent a few minutes yesterday with no small bit of ennui considering if I’ve actually accomplished anything this year.

But I have.

I’ve finished two multi-year online blogging projects on Cher Scholar and we’ve wrapped up the Essay Project here. I did create a few new browser-based poems and the The Electrical Dictionary of Melancholy Absolutes hit 100 definitions quite unbelievably this week.

And the in-progress stuff continues to march along. Although it’s been a slow slog, I’ve been working on a big course-like survey about the poems of American history. I stared about two years ago and I’m just now seeing the finish line. Monsieur Big Bang’s new Intro to Anthro podcast has me thinking about what format that survey course will take. Should it be a podcast or an online class? Should I use an educational platform for a fee or just host it myself for free (like a podcast)? I still don’t know. Podcasts have higher visibility but that format leaves out the possibility of fun PowerPoints and videos of petroglyph from my neighborhood. In any case, that’s a decision probably a year or two away.

The Katharine Hepburn poem is underway and slowing forming into itself. I’ve also started a new browser-based poem about my paternal grandfather based on some work my brother Randy finished a few years ago researching the history of our grandparents in Jicarilla, San Carlos, Hopi, Tohono Oʼodham, at the Indian School at Stewart, Nevada, and their final years in Roy, New Mexico.

I also need to dust off the Braille machine I purchased a few years ago and figure out how to write poems on that thing.

I have a little stack of experimental poetry books to review going back to last fall of 2022.

There are some fun trips ahead, too. Our group formerly known as the Sarah Lawrence writing group, now known as the Difficult Book Club, held a reunion dinner recently in New York City. It was so much fun, we’ve made plans to meet again in Winslow early next year.

And I have poems forthcoming in a spring 2024 anthology of Albuquerque poets coming out from University of New Mexico Press.

It’s a lot of work. I’ve made a big change in my day job hours that will go into effect at the first of the new year and hopefully that will give me more time finish all of this stuff. There’s that novel too.

So I guess that’s good, right? I feel like I’ve hit a plateau somehow. Oy. These are times for baby steps.

Anyway, in other news my friend Christopher gave me this book for my birthday, a coloring book created by Jane Heyes, peppered with Shakespearean, Romantic and 20th Century British poetry (except for one Walt Whitman poem floating in there, “A Glimpse“).

Maybe I should spend a few months just coloring around poems like I’m William Blake

The Essay Project: Last Call

July 19, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We find ourselves at the last essay project essay. The rest of the stack is pretty much just dregs, articles I don’t really want to read again let alone discuss.

Somewhat unrelated, I spent about four hours last week working on a Big Bang essay about a Lunch & Learn on Artificial Intelligence I attended. I was writing about AI as it intersects with anorexia, intuition and calibrating toward reality.

But I soon decided not to post it because it felt too revealing. Something significant also happened at work that week to made posting the piece ill-advised. But I was triggered very personally by the discussion about AI in ways I didn’t expect.

I do want to make a final comment about Suzanne Gardiner’s Sarah Lawrence College essay class and my need to constantly calibrate toward reality.

I was pretty quiet in this class, mostly because it huge, like 35-40 people if I remember correctly. Everyone wanted to take it. We all sat in concentric circles around a big table upstairs in Slonim House. I was also a first-year in the Graduate Writing Program and there were many second-years students in the class more than willing to pontificate. There were so many smart people in that class.

I involved myself in only two debates (as I recall), first to make a glib joke about T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” poem, (“a poem with more footnotes than lines has a big problem with flow!”), and second to argue with Suzanne Gardinier about the nature of reality. Gardinier was then kind of known as an activist poet and her poems were, of course, concerned in reality.

As I was even then obsessively calibrating toward reality, (which the anorexia AI piece was ultimately about), we got into an impassioned discussion about a chair being a chair. So clearly was it a solid chair we would sit on it, she said. We can all agree on the reality of a chair. And I said something about how a chair is not in fact a solid but an appearance of a solid, in fact an unsolid of moving atoms (or whatever silliness I said). The point was a chair was an idea of solid, a human compromise in believing a reality that didn’t really exist but that was useful to our need to sit somewhere. And then I think we agreed to disagree or we saw each other’s point of view or something friendly at the end. What a great class that was.

Writing is just as much about how we negotiate our reality. And this brings us to our last piece, a compilation of short chapters from Natalie Goldberg from her very spiritual writing guide, Writing Down the Bones, which seems like a very moving and warm place to finish.

(Somehow, I managed to end my essay project the same week I completed documentation of the variety shows of Sonny & Cher. Which is weird.)

But anyway…I’ve taken many one-day workshops over the years and in at least two of them, sections of Goldberg’s very popular book were distributed, probably because Goldberg combines writing with a kind of religious practice. She quotes gurus of Buddhism and talks about Zen meditation and going deep into writing,

“This book is about writing…it is also about using writing…as a way to help you penetrate your life.”

We start with her Introduction which has lots of good tidbits:

“In college I was in love with literature. I mean wild about it. I typed poems by Gerald Manley Hopkins over and over again so I could memorize them…it never occurred to me to write, though I secretly wanted to marry a poet.

After I graduated college and discovered that no one was going to hire me to read novels and swoon over poetry, three friends and I started a co-op restaurant and cooked and served natural food lunches in the basement of the Newman Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This was the early seventies and one year before the opening of the restaurant I had tasted my first avocado. The restaurant was called Naked Lunch, after the novel by William Burroughs—“a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

See? Right there Goldberg masterfully talks about writing while talking about life as well.

She talks about “learning to trust my own mind” and how she happened upon Erica Jong’s poetry, Fruits and Vegetables, which illustrated for her how to write about her own subjects.

“A friend once told me ‘Trust in love and it will take you where you want to go.’ I want to add, ‘Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go’.”

Learning, she says, “is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life…to say deep down what you need to say.”

Beginner’s Mind

“Each time is a journey with no maps.” She doesn’t spend much time talking about how to attain beginners mind before each poem. Instead, she recommends some practical matters: a fast-moving pen to keep up with your thoughts, a cheap notebook so you won’t feel afraid to write crappy drafts.

“This is your equipment, like hammer and nails. Feel fortunate—for very little money you are in business!”

She even likes spiral notebooks with “Garfield, the Muppets, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars” covers. She uses them as pneumonic devices to remember which notes and and drafts are in which notebooks. She also says, “I can’t take myself too seriously when I open up a Peanuts notebook.”

She talks about how many writers work off scraps of paper. My father wrote his lists of to-dos on discarded 1960s-era computer cards. Goldberg talks about William Carlos Williams using prescription pads.

She talks about how physical writing is and how it matters what process you use, composing on typewriters or writing by hand. Computers weren’t around, apparently, but she does mention a Macintosh computer and writing into a tape recorder. She says she uses different tools for different projects.

First Thoughts

Goldberg talks about freewriting in timed exercises to explore first thoughts, and she includes the usual tips: keep your hand moving; don’t cross stuff out; ignore spelling, punctuation and grammar; lose control; don’t get logical; “go for the jugular;” if your writing gets “scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.”

The point is to burn through your energy, she says, “unobstructed” by your “internal censor.” Get to the feels, the “oddities of your mind.” This is all about exploration. The ego “tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is permanent and solid, enduring and logical.”

She then goes back to Zen meditation, how sitting is a discipline. “You must be a great warrior when you contact first thoughts and write from them…you may feel great emotions and energy that will sweep you away.” She talks about how her beginning students often break down and cry. You must not be thrown off, she says. “This is the discipline…inspiration means ‘breathing in,’ breathing in God. You actually become larger than yourself.”

Writing as Practice

Writing is like running, she says. You practice whether you want to or not or you will atrophy. “One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters.” She quotes Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist master to say, “We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.”

Composting

Goldberg is the writer who originated this idea of mental composting, the process that happens with all those inspired notes we take and never use, all our experience just “sifting through our consciousness.” She reminds us that Hemmingway wrote about Michigan in Paris (and then about Paris from somewhere else.)

“From our decomposition of the thrown-out egg shells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.”

When you take stabs at something but it doesn’t quite work, this means the compost isn’t ready. It isn’t entirely about your free will.

She quotes Katagiri Roshi to say, “Your little will can’t do anything. It takes Great Determination. Great Determination doesn’t mean just you making an effort. It means the whole universe is behind you and with you—the birds, trees, sky, moon, and ten directions.”

Goldberg adds, “Suddenly, after much composting, you are in alignment with the stars or the moment or the dining-room chandelier above your head, and your body opens and speaks.”

Wow.

“We aren’t running everything,” she says.

No, ma’am.

Artistic Stability

Goldberg talks a lot about her life in New Mexico, teaching and practicing, about a friend out near Taos building Earth Ships with old tires and how she allowed this friend to see her bad writing and how moving the experience was.

“We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.”

Original Detail

Goldberg talks about how original detail in your pieces leads to groundedness. You don’t have to be rigid with it. “The imagination is capable of detail transplants, but using the details you actually know and have seen will give your writing believability and truthfulness. It creates a good solid foundation from which you can build.”

But you have to relax, she says. “Don’t be self-conscious.”

The Power of Detail

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical….recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter…Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the real truth of who we are…we must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.”

I mean!

(But then how do we decide which real things really exist? Ok, there I go.)

This is a fine place to leave it.

The Essay Project: The Lead and The Ending

July 5, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

When I was an undergrad at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (or UMSL), I took a class in magazine feature writing because that seemed like a feasible career (instead of teaching). You could just pick a random topic, research it and write about it. Kind of like what Monsieur Big Bang does now on his new anthropology podcast. In my romantic mythical imaginings one could make their own hours and never get bored.

Problem was I was too shy to actually go out there and interview strangers. And at the time I had a huge phone phobia. This was before I became a Kelly Girl and they sent me out on all these nightmare receptionist temp jobs ((all those phone calls!!)); but then I had a total Schitt’s Creek driving test moment and realized “nobody cares.”

But that epiphany came much later. Back at UMSL I stewed in anxiety for a few weeks and then ended up just interviewing my own grandmother about her life on Indian reservations, which was a complete cop-out but the result completely enthralled the teacher and I ended up getting an A. Plus I then had three cassette tapes of my grandmother doing her great storytelling thing (and my funny Aunt Edna for a bit, too). Having run out of interesting family members, I then had to turn to my dog Helga’s veterinarian, interviewing him about ways to rescue your pets during house fires, floods and tornados. I’ve never had a cat so learning about scooping one out of their hiding places with a fishing net was very informative.

Anyway, in this feature writing class we also read William Zinsser’s guide On Writing Well, particularly the chapters on “The Lead” and “The Ending.” Back at Parkway North High School, we had already learned about the juicy non-sequitur lead paragraph. I used it when I wrote my first high school comp paper on the untold logistical and political food-delivery problems behind the efforts of Band Aid and U.S.A. for Africa. In that paper I somehow miraculously managed a lead involving Sonny & Cher. Don’t ask me how. But I got some margin-scribbled praise for that feat of lead-footwork

So I was informed about the magic of the lead, which according to Zinsser is “the most important sentence in any article…[because] if it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it is equally dead.”

But you can’t be deader than dead, sentence #2.

And although these chapters are about features and prose writing, this is similarly true for poems, maybe even more so because readers tend to skim and skip around a set of poems more than they do for prose and abandon rates for poems are arguably higher.

Zinsser does acknowledge that in literary pieces, you can delay your point a bit longer than in mainstream feature writing. I abuse this allowance all the time. But Zinsser warns, “I urge you not to count on the reader to stick around. He is a fidgety fellow who wants to know–very soon–what’s in it for him.”

Sheesh. Aint it the truth though.

Zinsser has some ideas to help us with the lead. He literally says to “Cajole him with:”

freshness
novelty
parody
humor
surprise
an unusual idea, an interesting fact
a question

“Anything will do as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve….but never patronizing him…”

Sounds uncomfortably like flirting to me. Or the perils of Scheherazade.

“Next the lead must do some real work,” Zinsser says. Like a date, I guess. Get to your proposition statement, Zinsser says, “but don’t dwell…coax the reader a little more…continue to build…adding solid detail.”

Don’t be a tease. Nobody likes a tease. Even the reader. Don’t frustrate the reader by not going anywhere. Ok, there are some readers who enjoy going nowhere sort of experimentally, but finding those readers can be tricky and most likely other less-accommodating readers will find you first.

Zinsser has some good advice here about your first whole paragraph: “Take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph–it is the crucial springboard to the next paragraph.” First and last sentences. Very important. Give them “an extra twist of humor or surprise,” a little snap and pizazz. Or find funny quotations for those spots.

Zinsser also believes in substance over style. He says “salvation often lies not in the writer’s style but in some odd fact that he was able to unearth.” This is true for feature writers 100% more than for poets. Poets can be all style and little substance. But some substance is good. Have a little bit of a point. Unless your point is pointlessness. But hasn’t that been done to death already?

He advises us to “always collect more material than you will eventually use.” Good advice for all writers.

“An even more important moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people.” He says to read your telephone bill fillers, read the back of menus and catalogues and through junk mail. He says this, and it’s invaluably true, “you can tell the temper of a society by what patio accessories it wants. Our daily landscape is thick with absurd messages and portents.”

(I see from my marginalia in the late 1980s I had to look up the meaning of the word ‘portent.’)

Zinsser excerpts his favorite leads from Joan Didion (“7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” her essay on Howard Hughes from Slouching Toward Bethlehem), Garry Wills (from his book Nixon Agonistes) and actor Richard Burton’s essay on rugby.

So quickly, what does Zinsser have to say about an ending? He says few writers know how to stop well, but that “you should give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did to your first. Well, almost as much.”

“A good last sentence–or paragraph–is a joy in itself. It has its own virtues which give the reader a lift and which linger when the article is over.” This is even more important to the poem, which often demands to resonate, more than prose. “The perfect ending should take the reader slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right to him.”

He elaborates:

“It is like a curtain line in a theatrical comedy. We are in the middle of a scene (we think) when suddenly one of the actors says something funny, or outrageous, or epigrammatic, and the lights go out. We are momentarily startled to find the scene is over, and then delighted by the aptness of how it ended. what delights us, subconsciously, is the playwright’s perfect control.”

“For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point that you want to make, look for the nearest exit.”

I find this maybe is too pat. Knowing went to end is something that takes practice. It’s a feeling. It’s understanding the flow you’re in, the current that’s taking you along. When to leave is an art, not a science. It’s refined calibration and a fine-tune. The way to get good at it is to keep working at it (and to keep reading delightfully crafty endings).

When in doubt, Zinsser always comes back to that funny quotation, to end with “some remark which has a sense of finality” or “adds an unexpected last detail.”

So when you don’t know how to end it, let someone else do it. (I’m here to tell you this article is breaking up with you.) This scheme not only provides a get-away vehicle but emotional distance. Sometimes what you don’t say at the end is just as important as what you do say. (Joan Didion was a master of this.) Likewise, Monsieur Big Bang’s favorite song (and he quotes it all the time) is by singer-songwriter Mike Stenson who elaborates about the end of flirting itself when he tells the story of inviting a girl to see The Rolling Stones. She never called him back. He surmises maybe she didn’t get the message but he never followed up. Instead, he wrote a song where he says, “I got your message when I never got your call.”

~~~

So, does that quote work as an ending? Yeah, I don’t think it does. Because Mike Stinson-fan Monsieur Big Bang did actually end up calling me twice in the beginning and I honestly didn’t get the first message. So the moral of the story here is that sometimes you can end a thing too soon.

Big Bang Poetry