Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Page 38 of 68

Recipes for More Thinking in Writing

CriticalthinkingIt sounds obvious and I’m always saying this but, nevertheless, writing is thinking and we have, over the years, managed to separate the craft of writing, (the lightly intellectual tinkering with words), from the art of keeping our critical thinking skills refined.

I was reminded of this reading The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking by Richard Paul and Linda Elder who are from The Foundation for Critical Thinking. I received my copy of this booklet from the faculty admin trashcan at IAIA where it was addressed to a teacher long since gone.

Yes, sometimes my reading comes from trash cans.

The book covers elements of thought, levels of thought, intellectual traits and types of questions. It has a reasoning checklist, a template for analyzing your own logic and has a template for problem solving and assessing research.

Even if your poetry challenges some of the structures and assumptions of reasoning and logic, to write poems with no understanding of more sophisticated systems of thinking is to limit yourself, your poetry and your message. As they say, to break it well you gotta know how well it breaks.

But what interests me more, of course, is the narcissism of thinking you know it all already. In fact, that’s the big narcissistic mind-fuck of our modern age: we think we’re all pretty sharp scissors but such is part and parcel of our many self-delusions. Poets go even further with this affectation of their own brilliance. I’ve met quite a few who like to assume that because they write poems, they’re a type of instant intellectual.

Which is why my favorite part of the book deals with “Intellectual Standards and Traits” which, as the booklet says, form part of your inner voice. They break down Intellectual Standards into:

Clarity: Is the writer clear on the issue being addressed? Does the piece lack elaboration? Remember the goal of this kind of writing isn’t language theory, it’s strictly, (relatively), successful communication.

Accuracy: Does the writer speak in true statements? Their example is “Most dogs weigh more than 300 pounds.” Some facts are indisputably false. Which is not to say there aren’t good poems out there full of 300 pound dogs.

Precision: Does the piece provide detail and specificity or does it deal in vague generalities?

Relevance: How do the examples bear on the issue? Is the point irrelevant?

Depth: Is the piece dealing with the most significant factors? Their example is the superficial response of the Reagan administration to drugs with the “Just Say No” campaign which failed to deal with complexities of the issue.

Breadth:  Does the piece address other points of view?

Logic: Do the arguments follow each other logically?

Fairness:  Is the piece written in good faith? Are Facts distorted, biased, tainted by vested interests?  “We naturally think from our own perspective, from a point of view which tends to privilege our position.  Fairness implies treating all relevant viewpoints alike…[this is] especially important when the situation may call us to see things we don’t want to see, or to give something up that we want to hold onto.”

Then the book delves into the Intellectual Traits. These, I find, are what many poets, (most artists actually), are lacking in socially if not artistically:

Intellectual Humility (versus Intellectual Arrogance)
“A consciousness of the limits of one’s knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one’s native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively…recognizing that one should not claim more than one actually knows. [This is] not spinelessness or submissiveness…[but a] lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations of one’s beliefs.”

Intellectual Courage (versus Intellectual Cowardice)
“Consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs or viewpoints toward which we have strong, negative emotions and to which we have not given a serious hearing…recognition that ideas considered dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified (in whole or in part) and that conclusions and beliefs inculcated in us are sometimes false or misleading …We need courage to be true to our own thinking in such circumstances. The penalties for nonconformity can be severe.”

[I’d like to add an addendum to my comments last week about Mark Twain. Sometimes the penalties of nonconformity can be ostracization from both sides of the issue, those whom you are defending and those whom you are fighting against!]

Intellectual Empathy (versus Intellectual Narrow-mindedness)
To imaginatively put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them…to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. Correlates with the willingness to remember occasions when we were wrong in the past despite an intense conviction that we were right, and with the ability to imagine our being similarly deceived in a case-at-hand.”

Intellectual Automony (versus Intellectual Conformity)
“Rational control of one’s beliefs, values and inferences…one’s thought processes. Commitment to analyzing and evaluation beliefs on the basis of reason and evidence, to question when it is rational to question, to believe when it is rational to believe and to conform when it is rational to conform.”

Intellectual Integrity (versus Intellectual Hypocrisy)
“[To be] consistent…[to] hold one’s self to he same rigorous standards of evidence and proof to which one holds one’s antagonists, to practice what one advocates for others, and to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one’s own thought and action.”

[Were we ever rigorous thinkers, we Americans? If so, we’ve become fat and lazy thinkers, which brings me to…]

Intellectual Perseverance (versus Intellectual Laziness)
“In spite of difficulties, obstacles, frustrations…[and] the irrational opposition of others, to struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended period of time to achieve deeper understanding or insight.”

Confidence in Reason (versus distrust in reason and evidence)
“…despite the deep-seated obstacles in the native character of the human mind and in society as we know it.”

Fair-mindedness (versus Unfairness)
“Treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one’s own feelings or vested interest or the feelings or vested interests of one’s friends, community or nation.”

The booklet also elaborates on the problem of Egocentric Thinking: “Humans do not naturally consider the right and needs of others…[do] not naturally appreciate the point of view of others nor the limitations in our own point of view. We become explicitly aware…only if trained to do so.” Otherwise, we’re left with “our own egocentric assumptions, the egocentric way we use information…interpret data…the implications of our egocentric thought. We do not naturally recognize our self-service perspective…As humans we live with the unrealistic but confident sense that we have fundamentally figured out the way things actually are and that we have done this objectively. We naturally believe in our intuitive perceptions—however inaccurate.”

There’s also a list of self-centered psychological standards from wish fulfillment to group think to innate selfishness. These self-centered standards are kissing cousins to the list of mental biases and 30 Poems About Suffering.

There’s also a brief section on Sociocentric Thinking: “Most people do not understand the degree to which they have uncritically internalized the dominant prejudices of their society or culture. This phenomenon includes the “tendency to blindly conform to group restrictions, (many of which are arbitrary or coercive),” and the failure to “distinguish universal ethics from relativistic cultural requirements and taboos.” It also includes the “failure to realize that mass media in every culture shapes the news from the point of view of that culture.”

These are mental processes which, if ignored, will affect the types of poems you choose to write and read and the quality of every piece you write. You can be a technically savvy formalist or labratory-poet, but if your thinking is lazy, we all suffer for it.

  

Twain and Place Endure Black Eyes While Confronting Issues About Race in America

TwainFisticuffs: Mark Twain and Vanessa Place Endure Black Eyes While Confronting (Sometimes Their Own) Issues About Race in America

Sometimes the literary community is so up its own derriere that it makes it hard to sort out what's what.  Vanessa place, described in articles as an academic, white woman, has been doing a performative literary project around the text of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, specifically the racist parts (although she’s slowly tweeting the whole damn thing), to question whether the heirs of Margaret Mitchell should be making money off of a work that has come to be seen as very racist.  A backlash occurred from allegedly from both black and white communities and Place was let go from a judging position with AWP.

Aaminah Shakur from Hyper Allergic tries to explain, "why a white poet should not be attempting to reclaim the 'N-word'"  claiming that Place is “someone engaging in offensive racism and Blackface.”

First off, I'm confused. Why do we accuse Place of perpetuating racism for a performance piece trying to alert us to the continued profits derived from racism?  Is Shakur misreading the piece? Or refusing to read it on its figurative levels.

Let’s start with the piece. Place is tweeting the entire novel to try to get the Margaret Mitchell heirs to make attempts to stop her in the name of copyright infringement. This will force them to admit they’re making money off the racist novel. Honestly, all this is small fish when you consider the money being made for Hollywood studios from all those classic movies made in the era of bold-faced racism. We live in a capitalist society. Nothing gets aired without someone making a buck. Sure, we can stop watching them. After all, those films get more and more disturbing each year. I went to college in St. Louis and for our first class in film studies, the teacher played us D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation without any context. Cut to class two and we were all pretty offended by the racist parts. And this was in St. Louis, Missouri! In 1990! For those of you who don’t know, Ferguson is basically a suburb of the St. Louis metro area. So that was saying something.

But maybe we should be made to revisit sexist, racist, abusive history to remind ourselves that such things as bad human behavior are always on the verge of existence. Try to erase your past and you will be doomed to repeat it, don't they say? There’s a caveat that what we do when we revisit these racist spaces is to have a discussion about them in order to understand the insidious, sometimes hidden aspects of racism and how it works. Hopefully, this knowledge will helps us stop being racist. Many are accusing Place of not providing this context. However, she’s engaging in a somewhat stark performance piece. She’s not running a college forum.

The Daily Beast says that AWP’s particular issue was “unmediated quotes of Margaret Mitchell’s novel.” So okay, context would be better…well, I guess that depends on your performance piece. What I don’t understand is the accusation that Place can’t perform issues of race because she is part of academia (privileged) and a white person. The Daily Beast broke that issue down, saying “If Place lost one of her privilege badges—if she wasn’t white and an 'in academia'—would her attack on racism have more credibility?”

Do you see what’s happened there? Are you looking closely? Performing the piece has become itself a performance piece!

The Daily Beast quotes “professional provocateur” Place as saying,

“I’ve been thinking about the ways this concept works for six years, so it shouldn’t surprise me that people who have thought about it for six days, or six minutes, have a different view of it,” Place said of her detractors, noting that her Gone With the Wind Twitter feed only had 1,200 followers and the petition had 2,200 signatures. At least half of those who signed it may not have even seen her project. “That said, the literary world does seem to take things pretty literally,” she added.

This literal/figurative disconnect must sound familiar to all Mark Twain scholars. We hear the same controversy and charge of racist leveled at Mark Twain for his depiction of Jim in parts of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and for the heavy use of the N-word (which also matches the issue with Mitchell’s tome). Most Twain scholars will tell you, (and if you read the figurative level of the novel you can see), that Twain’s project for the novel was to challenge racist ideas. These included slave-holding attitudes, Jim Crow attitudes and, in hindsight we know, some of Twain's own racism. Which is to say he was trying hard NOT to be racist but ended up being racist in parts of the book anyway. 

Is that the worst thing that can happen? It seems to me the larger project for Twain and for all of us was the bare fact that he was trying to write through the process of becoming an anti-racist. In fact, much of his work supports anti-rasicm. The problem is he does this so imperfectly. Although his essay writing and political commentary was clearly anti-racist, his novels are too obscure. They’re not ever explicit enough in their racial messaging. At times he panders to racists. At other times, he confronts them with their inhumanity. He writes through it in the same way he writes through American Imperialism in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

The truth is Twain was born into a community whose cultural biases were racist and it took him time and effort to evolve his thinking away from those beliefs. He did what few of us have the balls to do, he worked through all this publicly. He was a once-poor, ultimately-successful white man imperfectly writing to address racism in America. The fact that his work opens up conversations about race every day, (which we say we need), seems lost on everybody.

Listen, people will always criticize controversial things they’ve never read, viewed or investigated, (heck, I do that with the Bible all the time), but that’s why I’m so thankful there are black scholars of Mark Twain who have read the books. Watch the Ken Burns documentary to see for yourself. Some people will also refuse to see the figurative level. Biological studies in mindfulness and meditation tell us know that some people have a physiologically harder time even seeing figurative levels. They consistently resist seeing metaphors, symbols and ironies working in any art piece. This is the same phenomenon I see happening with Vanessa Place's piece.

Black academics, black political leaders, social workers, presidents (!) have all been calling for national conversations about race and the response needs to come from everybody: black people who continue to experience racism on the street and white people who need to work through it within their possibly mixed and often racially one-sided communities. Yes, white academics should be the forefront in talking about race…even imperfectly. Maybe especially imperfectly. As if black discussions are race are perfect. They’re not. They’re full of personal bias and emotion, just like everyone else’s.

Our freakout over this piece just shows what mixed messages we continue to send. We complain about the dearth of white people writing about race. We say that white writers were stuck in an ignorant bliss of white privilege. White writers complain that they're too scared to dare to write about race for fear of being criticized and ostracized.  And apparently this is not an irrational fear.

I don’t think we’ve proven by any stretch that Place is a racist artist. But it’s a good question because it begs the next question: if you’re trying to expose racism, so what if you’re a racist. In fact, even better if you’re a racist. Because we can't have it both ways. We can't keep calling out the problem like a pack of victims and then villainize anyone who steps out to poke the monster with a small stick.

My husband in another life was involved with Chicago theater. He said a good performance piece is the one that makes people mad and gets a conversation going. You might say Place has succeeded. You might say AWP is a big performance piece of itself, all of us actors in the big piece called Wrangling Racism.  

According to The Daily Beast, the AWP says, “The group’s work must focus on the adjudication of the 1,800 proposals, not upon the management of a controversy that has stirred strong objections and much ill-will toward AWP and the subcommittee.” Which is another issue in itself.

Can you even imagine an established literary group with some stones?

PlaceI don’t know Place personally or her work well enough to say what kind of character she is. I can say my interpretation of the work is anti-racist and I will support any white artist taking on issues of race. I don’t support  the clusterfuck of criticism we seem to be indulging in.

Ironically, this news story coincides with a Supreme court decision on a Faceook murder-threat trial and the difference between perception and intent and what necessary for a jury instruction in a criminal case. There's a difference between perceived threat and intent. What's more important? Which gets priority? It’s probably one of the more crucial legal issues of our time, what with scary Stand Your Ground laws and online bullying. Weighing these two points of view has real implications on our lives and for our work.

So you should take some time to really think about it.

 

More Stories:

Hyper Allergic against Place: http://hyperallergic.com/208995/why-a-white-poet-should-not-be-attempting-to-reclaim-the-n-word/

In support: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/28/does-tweeting-gone-with-the-wind-make-this-poet-racist.html

Arguments about arguments, if you care to go there: http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/05/26/22275249/a-poet-defending-vanessa-place-equates-signers-of-the-petition-against-her-with-the-cop-who-killed-mike-brown (The Stranger)

   

Early June News Roundup

Brodksy-catSimon Armitage, Making poetry pay:  In a culture that has consigned poetry to the margins, Armitage has become something very rare: a genuinely popular British poet. Aida Edemariam hits the road with the busiest man in verse.  (The Guardian)

Welcome to This House,’ the Private Life of a Poet: Barbara Hammer’s impressionistic yet informative portrait of the poet Elizabeth Bishop.  (The New York Times)

Poet Jessica Jacobs talks Georgia O’Keeffe and her debut collection  (Mountain Xpress)

Russians Honor Deceased Poet Brodsky on His 75th Birthday (The Moscow Times)

Caution: World-Changing Poetry at Work, In essays as forceful as they are graceful, the poet Jane Hirshfield argues that poetry possesses the ability to transform the way its readers perceive the world.  (The Daily Beast)

Poetry Kept My Patient Alive (Opinionator)

Egyptian Court Acquits 17 in Case Arising From Poet’s Death at March  (The New York Times)

Poet Aja Monet Confronts Police Brutality Against Black Women With #SayHerName
(Huffington Post)

Also, if you join the Academy of American Poet's email newsletter, there were good links in the last few weeks to LGBT Pride Poems and Mother’s Day poems.

 

iPhone (and Other Devices) Apps for Poetry

AppI checked in with some new poetry apps a few weeks ago.

Daily Haiku
True, you get a daily haiku in the app but no information on who wrote it or how old it is. And with the cheap version, you can’t scroll backwards to see other haiku. Sure, you can upgrade but users online don’t recommend it. They say it’s just as disappointing on the other side.

Poetry Daily
This website has been publishing daily poetry since as long as I can remember being on the Interwebs, like from 1998? I remember reading their poems while I was still at Sarah Lawrence in New York. The good thing about this app is that Poetry Daily has worked to expand the daily post into actually selling the books the poems are in. They’re now a bookstore or they at least they link to the publisher sites in many instances. They also provide photos and bios when possible. But most annoyingly, I can’t resize the poems on my iPhone. They all appear like unattractive blocks that I have to scroll sideways to read. Turning my phone horizontally only helps the shorter-lined poems. Also, in the mobile version, the title of the poet disappears between <null> tags. But the app does let you scroll back through prior days and even run the “random” button for receiving random gifts of poetry. Recommended.

Poetry Foundation
I think I’ve covered this one before. You spin a dial for a poem or choose a category like Boredom, Pessimism, Aging, Family. You can even combine categories. It’s fun to spin the button and get random combinations of subjects. You can also browse by mood, subject or poet and you can access audio poems, too.  This app grows on you. Recommended.

Poem Flow
This app displays a poem like a textual movie of animation. An interesting format to help think about how reading this way affects your understanding of the poem. You can slow or quicken the pace. I’m not sure how long before the thrill of reading poems this way might wear off but it feels like an interesting art project, some beneficial way to experience words… at least once. Something to talk a friend into downloading so you can experience without it cluttering up your apps space.

Poetry Everywhere with Garrison Keillor
This app provides little videos about poets. For example, you can see a Coleman Barks reading of his Rumi translations from the Dodge Poetry Festival (the Ozzfest of Poetry). With this, you get two or so minutes of bite-sized education. I love hearing Barks' southern drawl reading Rumi.  This app provides a variety of sound for spoken word events and there’s a good amount of content here although the app hasn’t been updated in ages. Recommended.

  

You Are Biased (and more heavily than you know)

1276_colours_in_culture

For the last three years I have been doing the NaPoWriMo challenge. In this challenge, you write a poem a day for the full month of April. For the first year, I was all free form, meaning only that I was free to explore any form I wanted to experiment with. The second year I did a project called “30 Poems About Language” inspired by a modern poetry MOOC and the modernist and language poems I was reading in that online class.

This year, in response to readings I’ve been doing for my web content strategy and/ social media marketing job tasks and a pilot class on mindfulness I had attended at Central New Mexico Community College, I decided to do a set of cognitive bias poems called “30 Poems About Suffering.” I would pick a cognitive bias from the Wikipedia list and address that bias with mindfulness techniques (and also something from the news of the day to try to prove I wasn’t writing ahead). Incorporating the news turned out to be the hardest part. There were other technical challenges, one poem itself explaining why there are only 29 poems.

Turns out cognitive biases so crucial to understanding why we don’t agree with other writers (or humans) about politics, art and and day-to-day life. The site The Hipper Element posted a great video this week explaining the power of our mental biases:

“Watch a smart, adult man UNLEARN his intuition about how to ride a bike. Then RELEARN it. Then watch his 6-year-old son do it in a fraction of the time. This video is so relevant to UX [and political strategists and artists and writers], it’s hard to know where to start. As UX designers our job is to unlearn our own intuition, so we can design for people who think differently. But it takes a lot of effort, and it’s hard to undo.” Watch the video.

Here are my 2015 NaPoWriMo "30 Poems About Suffering:"

  1. The Confirmation Bias
  2. The False Consensus Bias
  3. The False Memory Effect
  4. The Curse of Knowledge and The Curse of Knowledge
  5. The Dunning-Kruger Effect
  6. The Next-in-Line Effect
  7. Functional Fixedness
  8. Illusory Superiority
  9. The Google Effect
  10. The Endowment Effect
  11. The Flaw Line
  12. Just-World Hypothesis
  13. Leveling and Sharpening Error
  14. Exaggerated Expectation
  15. Hot-Hand Fallacy
  16. Pareidolia
  17. Rhyme as Reason
  18. Hindsight Bias
  19. Barnum Effect
  20. The Bizarreness Effect & The Serial Position Effect
  21. Tip of the Tongue & Zeigarnik Effect
  22. The Empathy Gap
  23. The IKEA Effect
  24. Omission Bias & Post-Purchase Rationalization
  25. The Unit Bias
  26. Social Desirability Bias
  27. Reactance & Reactive Devaluation
  28. Irrational Escalation
  29. Bias Blind Spot

And yet there' smore information about biases! Culturally, we’re very biased about color.As a poet, this is good to know:

“This graph from Information is beautiful shows what color most commonly represents what emotion across cultures. Look at number 84: Wisdom. In Japanese and Hindu cultures wisdom is purple, while it is brown in Native American and blue in Eastern European. Or Love, which is Red in the Western world yet green in Hindu, yellow in Native American, and blue in African cultures.”

From the blog post on Pickcrew. Click on the color wheel at the top of this post to view the full spectrum of cultural biases on color.

  

If You’re Looking for Balance in Your Poems…

Compart…which I recognize not everybody is, it never hurts to understand the foundations of balance in other disciplines–whether you want to achieve it or wreck it!

When I was working as the Interim Faculty Admin at the Institute of American Indian Arts a few years ago, one of the instructors there was teaching from the book Composition in Art by Henry Rankin Poore. I was able to read a bit of it while I was there. The section on entrances and exits in pictures seemed particularly useful to a the composition of a poem as well:

“While mystery, subtlety and evasive charm all have their place in a work of art, they should not stand in the way of one necessary quality—immediate attraction. The picture should be like an open door to the view without anything blocking the threshold.”

“There must be one spot or area to which the other parts are subordinate and to which the eye is immediately attracted…[it] must be simple and uncluttered and have the essential ingredient of leading the eye on further into the picture. Any one element that stops the eye so powerfully that it simply cannot go on is destructive to the composition.”

“Getting out of the picture successfully is every bit as important as getting into it. This does not mean, however, backing out…The exit should be so carefully guarded that after the viewer’s eye has roamed about and seen everything, it comes upon the exit naturally. Providing two or more exits is a common error of bad composition.”

A little snack of food-thought.

  

The Student Art and Poets of CNM

StatuePolice Brutality Art

I have not connected yet to my local poetry scene in the ABQ. Being slightly hermitish, I need a somewhat more outgoing friend to assist in my branch out. In Santa Fe I did attend two or three readings given by a local poetry society but it was always a trial to drag along Monsieur Big Bang and I never felt comfortable going alone. It's not like poets are overly friendly at such things. Mr. BB did attend a recent Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) author’s event with me to see guest reader Arthur Sze. 

CNM is not an art or liberal arts school. The school started as a technical college and has retained its core identity as a trade school. However, the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the resulting riots against police violence did manage to inspire an art piece here that captured the attention on local news. To repeat, the controversial art piece came not  from the Art Institute of Santa Fe, or the Institute of American Indian Arts  or from the big boy, UNM. No, the controversial piece came from CNM. Joshua Gonzales was one of the artists who made the piece out of plastic and tape. View the news piece

BackgropCyber Nimbus Melodies

Meanwhile, I’ve been working with a CNM English professor on a large web-content project and recently came across some recent video work he’s been involved in with his poetry students. Patrick Houlihan hosted a well-made video poetry reading called Cyber Nimbus Melodies.

Seven or so students read about five poems a piece in our production studio. Some awesome green screen backgrounds were used (explosive lightning, fire explosions, a pastoral kitchen scene). The sound quality and lighting gave these readings some pop. The fact is I would have loved the opportunity to practice reading during my undergraduate OR graduate school years. But YouTube wasn’t even a gleam in the Internet’s eye back then. Forget about having a full production studio we could have access to. Imagine this being a class requirement! 

Backgrop2There are also some interesting poems here. Donald Seals’ piece “The Voice of Slavery” has a surprise ending. Elements of mindfulness and lives transforming populate his pieces. Dennis Noel had a great reading delivery and I loved his poem about pride and false self-esteem called “A Deadly Sin.” He also invoked Edward Munch, fractals and Zoloft. Fabulous!

Some of the poets became emotional while reading, including Tanya  Gonzales (who quotes Marcel Proust about suffering in a poem that ended strong called “Good Grief”) and Reynaldo Garcia. I liked his poem “I Am Learning.” Claire Rutland had a strong one called “Buried Alive” and a untitled poem about issues of communication. Will Vega did a poem in Spanish and talked about willpower. And Josiah Ruanhorse was full of piss and vinegar in long pieces about ancestry and sobriety. Of all the poets, I probably disagreed the most with the content of his pieces (being a working woman and all), but I’d like to check back with him in 20 years and see where he's at then with his political views.

Many of the poets covered themes appropriate to young college students: pressing on, perseverance, failed love relationships, loss and students composed plenty of formal pieces for those naysayers who believe that kids today aren’t learning their forms.

As a poetry reader or writer, it’s important to hear the sounds of different voices, literally. This is the most powerful aspect of an open reading for me. In this "me-me-me" culture—we should always try to practice the art of seeing another person and listening to their physical voice.

The Literary Magazine Reading

CNM’s production studio also posted a video recording of the literary magazine launch.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in New Mexico, poet's here love marathon readings. Each one I’ve ever attended has stretched to at least 2 hours. But this video gives you a good sense of what college poetry readings are all about. A prominent ABQ slam poet named Don McIver begins the reading after Patrick Houlihan does an initial introduction. Houlihan speaks of poems as “brain prints on paper,” as unique as fingerprints. He also talks a bit about the project of putting the magazine together.

I guess I'm beginning to recognize poet faces. I’d just seen McIver a month ago doing a reading at a local showing of the 1980s William Burroughs biopic.

As far as readings go, I like to see what people wear. I saw everything from a Scorpions band t-shirt to sparkly party tops. I don’t know if it’s the Spanish influence here in New Mexico but a lot of the kids invoke the element of blood in their poems. This reminds me of the Spanish poets I like who tend to be more fully connected with ideas of the body and mortality.

While I was at IAIA, there were no student readings that I can remember. This might be because the student literary magazine had to be recalled the year I was there due to egregious layout issues. I managed to keep my copy and blogged about it. I haven’t read the CNM magazine yet but will post more about that soon.

   

News & A Poet Who Conquered Twitter

EdPoetry News Coverage

6 Curious Things About Emily Dickinson, America's Favorite Recluse Poet (Huffinton Post)

How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield (Washington Post)

Roque Dalton: The Revolutionary Life of a Revolutionary Poet (Roque Dalton, born May 14, 1935, should be seen in the same ranks as Jose Carlos Mariategui and Che Guevara. Like them, Dalton was a seminal figure for Latin American revolutionaries whose life was tragically cut short.  (Telesur TV)

Poet Anastacia Tolbert: 'What To Tell My Sons After Trayvon Martin' (KUOW.org)

Poet Wo Chan uses words to fight oppression (PBS NewsHour)  
Wo’s work has recently explored what they describe as “rage” at the power imbalances that exist in the U.S. For Wo, the process of experimenting with language also challenges the systems that create those imbalances.

Acclaimed poet's dog rescued after plunging 300 feet down cliff east of Port Angeles (Peninsula Daily News-Washington State)

Neruda still not reburied (Star Tribune)

A Poet Conquers Twitter

The author was revealed this week (Rolling Stone) behind the very popular twitter phenom"So Sad Today." Some even speculated the author might be pop star Lana del Rey. It was, however, a poet named Melissa Broder who has published three books of poetry, most recently 2014's Scarecrone.

  

 

Frustrations of Genres / Poetry News

WhyThe Problem Children of Poetry

I'm in kind of void of postings because I'm on the cusp of a review of New Mexico poetry anthologies, a new new poll and a new list. None of those are ready yet so I suppose this is a good time to talk about the frustration of genres.

My first book of poems struggled for over 20 years to find publication. Although I would read the poems in workshops and at conferences and receive unbelievably positive feedback, something was wrong.

I say that because the level of positive response only confused me in light of the fact that I couldn't get this book any traction. A former editor of Graywolf Press even raved to my face about the poems at a Colrain conference eons ago. But contests and publishers were not interested. Twenty years of contest fees add up to that fact.

Was it the way I read them? I suck at readings so that definitely was not the case.

Meanwhile, a few years ago Graywolf itself published a book of science poems by Tracy K. Smith called Life on Mars, a book that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. My book was titled almost the same thing in one of its incarnations. In fact my 1997 thesis at Sarah Lawrence might be named something like that.

But my poems are different thank Smiths, our Mars subject aside. My poems are about the idea of U.S. manifest destiny as it pertains to our dream of colonizing Mars. Sounds like science fiction doesn't it and what literary publisher would like to publish anything slightly tainted with the stamp of SciFi. Answer: none.

Science fiction publishers didn’t appreciate the book either. Because it wasn't science fiction.

Thank God, technology in my lifetime has allowed me to pull my own project to fruition (self-publish) and move on with my life.

I'm only reminded of all this because last week USA Today published a story about how Elon Musk plans Seattle office for Mars colonization.  The poems in Why Photographer’s Commit  Suicide are based on Michael Collins’ book about similar plans to colonize Mars.

I now worry that my second book will suffer the same tragic fate. It’s another mashup book only this time its a mashup of Buddhism and cowboy stories.  Cowboy stories. Oh dear. Sounds like cowboy poetry. Another literary poetry problem child. Such a throwback. Although they're not cowboy poems!

WfPoetry in the News

Philip Levine who explored the working lives of American people. (The Independent)

Should the poet laureate have to write about the royal birth? (The Guardian)

William Faulkner Makes Us Wonder: What's So Great About Poetry, Anyhow? (NPR)

Palm Tree and the Poetry of M.S. Merwin (The New Yorker)

Yeats’ 150th Birthday Parties (The Guardian)

British punk poet Dr. John Cooper Clarke hits U.S. at last (SF Examiner)

Arthur Sze Finalist for Pulitzer Prize (Albuquerque Journal)

Documents confirm fascists murdered Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (World Socialist Web Site)

From the archive, 27 April 1915: Editorial: A Poet’s Death; The death of Rupert Brooke leaves us with a miserable sense of waste and futility, yet it is impossible to withhold even the most precious personalities (The Guardian)

Alissa Quart, The Money Poet (The New Yorker)

    

Poetry in O, The Star, NPR

OAmerican Poets magazine has a Walt Whitman essay by Mark Doty and in their annual report, they discuss a poetry reading they hosted recently called Poetry and the Creative Mind which they say tracks the influence of poetry on readers from other disciplines. I hope we get a report on that someday. I think it melds well with the Poetry on Mars project here on BBP, to get poetry into the hands of researchers in order to provide practical subject-based backup, a kind of laser-like focus on a topic, or further testimonial evidence to a study.

I went to Red River a few weeks ago and left all my books at home. I was forced to visit the bookstore of a mega-chain in order to find some reading material for the weekend. If you’ve been in a Target you know that they have at least 2 aisles of books. Let me just say Walmart has a lousy book section. There was less than a quarter of an aisle of reading material in there! But then I guess plebs aren’t getting under paid to read.

The April issue of O Magazine features National Poetry Month. The article is called "Why Poetry Matters." Former us poet laureate Natasha Trethewey opens up the discussion with this content: “In an era of sensory overload, there is stillness and clarity to be found in verse.” She goes on to elaborate how in poetry she found a “place to place grief.” Poetry, she says, also provides us with community, it shows us to ourselves, it acts as refuge, and serves to continue a cultural legacy.

Laura Kasischke, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award says poetry can be “understood in parts of our brain that appreciate sounds, or smell.” This section also included prompts from The Poet Tarot Deck (from two sylvias press).  What Oprah magazine article would be complete without product promo? I’m snide but you know I’m going to buy this as soon as I can scrape up fifty dollars.

There are also six short book reviews and reviews of two poet memoirs.

A friend of mine recently purchased for me a gift subscription to the tabloid magazine The Star. Inside there’s that good ole National Amateur Poetry Competition advertisement. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this sucker.

By the way, here is a handy list of writing contests to avoid: https://winningwriters.com/the-best-free-literary-contests/contests-to-avoid (their own site’s contests might be best avoided as well).

News and articles

From my colleges

Here is a CNM article on slam poet champion, writer, TEDx presenter, teacher, dedicated activist, mother, CNM tutor, and now Albuquerque’s newest poet laureate, Jessica Helen Lopez.

A University of Missouri-St. Louis blog post: Bilingual poet’s second collection shifts to second language

National Poetry Month

“Read This Poem” project to usher in National Poetry Month  (SF Gate)

President Obama on why poetry matters (Yahoo!)

Poet booths in subways: Bespoke Poetry Hits The Subways With Peanuts-Inspired "The Poet Is In" (The Gothamist)

People

Gary Snyder (NPR)

James Merrill (Bend Bulletin)

Patti Smith Punk Poet Laureate (The Guardian)

Other

Video poetry: Red Riding Hood Revisisted: https://vimeo.com/3514904

     

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