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Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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Meet Poet Sherman Alexie

April 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

AlexieI haven’t made a post recently on poetry I've been reading. This is because I’ve been mired in New Mexico poetry anthologies. Report coming soon!  

I visited the local CNM library in search of New Mexico poets. Didn’t find any. But I did find many Sherman Alexie works. Alexie is not a New Mexican poet but he is an American Indian poet from the Spokane tribe located in Washington state. Although Spokane is very different from the tribes of southwestern New Mexico, he does provide both profound and humorous insight into the American Indian Experience. I started with the oft recommended children’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. As described, it was excellent and a perfect place to start with Alexie if you’re a confused gringo. Truly, if you’re looking for Indian perspectives you have millions of alternatives. Natalie Diaz is a very hot Mohave poet right now. Joy Harjo is a perennial favorite of mine. But just check out this Wikipedia list.

I’m becoming really attached to Alexie in fact and the well-rounded way he talks about race reminds me of Richard Wright (just perused Richard Wright’s collection of haiku at the library). Like Wright, Alexie knows how to balance the complexities of race by using both good and bad characters from all sides. Good white people and bully white people. Good Indians and bully Indians.  And the badness that ensues when trying and failing to be good.

Similar Alexie stories occur in poems, short stories and the novels, like Grandma’s stolen powwow regalia which shows up in An Absolutely True Diary and in short stories from the collection Ten Little Indians. An Indian mother singing Donna Fargo’s "Happiest Girl in the USA" is another story that shows up in different fiction and poems.

The poems in One Stick Song (2000) are also a good introduction to Alexie with poems like "Unauthorized Biography of Me," "An Incomplete List of People I Wish Were Indian," "The Mice War," "Sex in Motel Rooms," "Powwow Love Songs." In his stories and poems, Alexie can describe both Rez life and city life. What I like about his poems, they’re all different in tone and format.  

The Business of Fancydancing,  (1992), contains poems that are a little rougher. But worth reading are "War All the Time," " Misdemeanors," "Missing," "The Reservation Cab Driver," and "Giving Blood." Alexi is good at setting the scene and giving you a tight kick in the pants.

Diary Ten One

   

Poetry as Usability

April 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Useful

For work I’ve been reading both marketing and usability studies and essays on user interface design. A common idea across all of these areas is the trend toward creating more scannable content. This is primarily because users come to software and Internet pages to accomplish tasks, not to be entertained or enlightened.

Speed readers grab what they need and go! Designers use bolding and other tricks to help people scan a page. I see myself doing it when I come across a list of marketing tips. I scan for the main points and read further where I need to.

I can feel the knuckles crunching on the hands of writing academics, their blood pressure rising to a steam. Is quality reading losing the battle? Reading poetry takes attention. It’s the antithesis of scanning. It’s slow reading.

Monsieur Big Bang and I are also listening to The History of the English Language podcast with Kevin Stroud.  In one episode he describes Old English Scops (or poets) who were once happily employed traveling to villages providing poem-casts of the latest news. Back then, poets were charged with keeping the news flowing in a time when nobody could read or write. Rhyming provided ways of understanding and memorizing that news. Truly, poets were the social media of their day. We’re fine with that right? Well then…check your self-serving diatribes about social media at the door.

Communication efficiency in the old days was good if it served poets. Is language efficiency bad now because poets are left out?  Culture changes and therefore communication changes.  Society is doing what it needs to do. This doesn’t mean that poetry should be eradiated from communication. It just means we won’t use it the way we previously did. Poems are not for distributing the news anymore. They’re for meditative moments, considered protests and language inquiry. Poems are not scannable; but wait, here comes the next experimental poem exploring scannability! Wait for it!

     

Hard Times for Poets: Quotes and Stories to Keep You Going

April 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

FauklknerSome quotes to keep you hanging in there as a writer when you feel like giving up!

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

“Fall down seven times, get up eight!” –  Japanese Proverb

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away many small stones.” –  Confucius again!

 

 

And some more ridiculous reviews:

 “The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.”

–  Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker on Absolom, Absolum! by William Faulkner, 1936

 “…a book of the season only…”

–  New York Herald Tribune  

“The Great Gatsby falls into the class of negligible novels”
–  Springfield Republican on The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

“Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.” 

– La Figaro on Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857

 

From Bill Henderson's Rotten Reviews

   

Poetry Magazine, Poetry in Mainstream News (April)

April 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

4-2015-cover-360

I've been subscribing to Poetry magazine this year. I can't say I'm completely enjoying my first few issues but April 2015 has much to recommend in it. The issue is dedicated to hip hop poetry and I enjoyed almost every poem.  Nate Marshall lists a 7-point blueprint for BreakBeat writing and Kenneth Goldsmith's conceptual manifesto ends the issue. Good fodder for discussion on what poetry is supposed to do. There are some truths in there, some narcissisms and quite a few contradictions.

I'm busy working on my NaPoWriMo pieces. Met a few new poets over there. Hello Poetry has gotten into NaPoWriMo in 2015.

 

 

Poetry In Mainstream News

Cat Poetry

Charles Bukowski’s Unpublished Cat Literature Can Be Yours In October (Flavorwire)

People

“I Am Not a Nature Poet”: Why Robert Frost Is So Misunderstood (Flavorwire)

2I love it when my blog obsessions overlap. In 1975 Brit Pop Star David Essex appeared on Cher's solo TV show (YouTube). Now he's released a book of poetry, Travelling Tinker Man & Other Rhymes. (The Independent)'

Charles Simic Displays a Poet’s Voice and His Passions (The New York Times review)

Tomas Tranströmer died last month at the age of 83

Poetry Drama

Stepson of poet Anne Cluysenaar receives life sentence for her murder (The Guardian)

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti laments changing San Francisco (PBS NewsHour)

The new Maya Angelou stamp quotes Joan Walsh Anglund by mistake (People Magazine)

Making Poetry Vibrant (and Not Complaining)

Miami poet R.M. Drake reinvigorates enthusiasm for poetry through Instagram (Miami Herald)

No One Cares About Poetry? Right. Check Out China's Vibrant Scene (1,200 years later, is Chinese poetry entering a new golden age?) (PRI)

'Sidewalk Poetry' Project To Take Literature To Cambridge Streets—Literally (The Artery)

Gentleman Poet’s Hunt & Light Kickstarts New Poetry Book (Dan's Papers)

Remembering Peggy Freydberg, a 107-Year-Old Poet Whose Career Was Just Getting Started (Vanity Fair)

Take a Poet to Lunch in April (My San Antonio)

     

The Biology of Narcissism and Mindfulness and What It Means For Poets

March 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Kristin-Neff1

Poetry writing is a field where everyone is on a mad mission to distinguish themselves from everybody else. The popular complaint among poets is that everybody writes but nobody reads. It’s true that reading someone else’s writing is a compassionate act and not too many writers are on a mission of compassion. They're on a mission of self-esteem. It's exhausting and Kristin Neff is a scientist who has given a Ted Talk on compassion versus self-esteem. She talks about how the self-esteem movement has contributed to the narcissism epidemic and how this contributes to bullying in various populations and the great American fear of being average.

You see the self-esteem drama everywhere: on TV advertising, interacting with drivers on the street, in awful news stories. I see it in MFA ads for poetry programs. In fact, there's a new game in town: tapping into a student's ego to lure them into the program. In Poets & Writers issue January/February 2015 there's an add full of published books with a blank space reading, “The Place for our Next Book is Here” (meaning you!) and in APR's last issue there is an ad stating “Before you write your success story, you have to find your voice.” It's all about your success story! Wow.

These are topics I cover in Writing in the Age of Narcissism. For years, advertising has been banking on our narcissistic tendencies, our self-obsession and our desire for fame and to consider ourselves above average. 

View the Ted Talk: The Space Between Self Esteem and Self Compassion: Kristin Neff at TEDx Centennial Park Women

More quotes on the topic:

And I'm not the only poet talking about this. Bianca Stone (daughter of Ruth Stone) says, “I’ve always been drawn to science, especially neuroscience. I feel that poets look at the world so differently because of something to do with the way their brains are wired." Bianca Stone, Poets & Writers, January/February 2015

In his essay "Casting Stones" on the Mary Kay Letourneau story called Charles D’Ambrosio talks about the “reflective rush to judge” and “threadbare or disingenuous language which failed to allow for the possibility that [the case] was both simpler and more complex than they were prepared to understand or admit…My felling was, first you sympathize, then you judge – that’s a complex human response. You sympathize first, and until that happens, you don’t understand anything.” Quoted in Poets & Writers, November/December 2014

Read more quotes about writing and narcissism here: http://www.marymccray.com/writing-in-the-age-of-narcissism.html#writers 

Inspired by this, I've decided to embrace my average-ness. I’m an average working writer. And that’s okay. In fact, that’s pretty respectable.

   

It’s That Time of Year: World Poetry Day, National Poetry Month

March 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Napowrimo

It's spring and poems are in the air!

The Poetry Month poster for 2015 is out from the Academy of American Poets. I've already hung mine (which I received as a member but you can request a free one here) on my office wall and have already received comments about it from artists in the office who walk by and recognize the work of Roz Chast. She illustrated a Mark Strand poem. 

Which reminds me that April is also the month for the NaPoWriMo 30 poems in 30 days challenge. This will be my third year participating in this very exhausting gauntlet of poetry writing.

Every year I say I'm going to use the site's prompts and every year I'm itching to work on some other idea. I was going to try to do 30 "addresses" inspired by Kenneth Koch's book New Addresses which I read last year on my eReader.

But since I've been working at CNM and studying both user architecture and design and mindfulness and its cognitive science, I've decided on doing a project that melds both the Wikipedia list of cognitive biases and mindfulness practices. The project is called "31 Poems of Suffering."

Poems will be posted, as usual, daily on Hello Poetry. You can view poems from past year's challenges here, too: http://hellopoetry.com/mary-mccray/

 

News about World Poetry Day: http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/21/living/feat-world-poetry-day/ (CNN)

   

Quote Deck, Good Finds

March 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

EliotGood Quote-age

I did enjoy my subscription to Poetry London over the last few years. I liked it for its many reviews placing large amounts of international poets—insiders and outsiders—on my radar. But it has been expensive getting the magazine stateside and so for now I’ve switched to a virginal subscription to Poetry Magazine and the tiny journal of short fiction called One Story. Tough times, tough choices.

My first issue of Poetry (February) included a pretty amazing experimental poem by Elizabeth Willis called “Steady Digression to a Fixed Point” with some skillful verbal weaving that actually takes us somewhere.

There’s also a snippet of the Amiri Baraka poem “Tender Arrival” that I wanted to share:

“What do you call that the anarchist of comfort asks,
Food, we say, making it up as we chew. Yesterday we explained
language.“

Lists of Poems

Over the last few weeks I’ve received two emails from Poets.org/The Academy of American Poets that were very interesting, one for St. Patrick’s Day and the the start of spring and another for Women’s History Month. The emails include a list of relevant poems along with links to audio poems and video.

The poetry list for spring and St. Patrick’s Day:

The list for Woman’s History Month:

Visit their links above to view the poems and sign up for their emails to get these email lists.

Lists of Review Outlets

Poets & Writers Magazine has a database of book review outlets: https://www.pw.org/review_outlets

News Links, March 22

As a teen I was very inspired by Mark Twain’s home in Connecticut and his typewriter in Hannibal, Missouri. Since then I’ve always looked forward to visiting writer’s homes. Poet’s don’t get as many museums turned out of their homes, however. But now we have one more:

And because I’ve had family in Anchorage and Santa Fe…

Poetry Apps

Last week I found an app called “The Waste Land” from Touch Press Limited costing a pricey $13.99. If you’re a big fan of this poem however I’d say the cost might be worth it. The app boasts having a performance of the poem by Fiona Shaw, audio readings by many people from Ted Hughes to Viggo Mortensen to Jeremy Irons and lots of references, allusions, and notes on structure. There are also 35 perspectives on the poem and the original manuscript with Ezra Pound’s editing. Find out more: http://thewasteland.touchpress.com/

  

Poetry News – 14 March 2015

March 14, 2015 / / 0 Comments

More Craft March: Intellectualizing and Performing

March 14, 2015 / / 0 Comments

MindfulMindful Intellectualizing

I’m in a mindfulness program at CNM for faculty and staff. This week, we received a Harvard Business Journal article called Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain by Christina Congleton, Britta K. Holzel and Sara W. Lazar.

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about how mindfulness can create changes in your brain in a very testable, physical way. This article goes further to make connections to how our brain behaves in states of  stress or mindfulness, what kids of thinking these states effect.

I feel this information has direct implications not only as to the type of poetry we choose to write but regarding why we write that way and how we conceptualize and intellectualize poetry. For instance, current arguments on form and conceptual poetries revolve around our sense of self, degrees of perception, complex thinking and the role of emotion and introspection. Turns out these ways of thinking are not only altered by mindfulness (homeostasis) and stress, but the brain is physically altered by continued experiences in these states. Specifically the hippocampus is one of the brain areas affected. Those living with chronic stress show smaller hippocampuses. This alters their sense of self, perception, body awareness, emotion regulation, and abilities regarding introspection and complex thinking. Mindfulness and stress affect another area of the brain, the ACC area, which involves decision making and resisting distractions.

Honestly, as an artist you can make any degree of homeostasis or stress work for you. That’s not the issue. What this does say, however, is that our intellectual differences in poetic identities and theory could be more physiological than truly intellectual.

It puts these endless arrangements in perspective if our predilections turn out to be physiological. It's possible we're not even starting on the same page, biologically speaking.

That Thing You Cannot Explain

Similar to last week's post on cognitive bias and persuasion, I've been finding a lot of good food for art-thought from articles on user experience and design. Joel Marsh is a self-described Experience Architect and his blog has some fascinating finds.  Here’s a quote he posted about art, science and “that thing you cannot explain”: http://thehipperelement.com/post/111467573348/art-is-made-to-disturb-science-reassures-there

ReadingPresentation

Mashable recently published a posted called "Why are poets' voices so insufferably annoying?", an essay on the annoyingly solemn voice poets use for public readings.

Without realizing it, I had been talking in "poet voice" — that affected, lofty, even robotic voice many poets use when reading their work out loud. It can range from slightly dramatic to insufferably performative. It's got so much forced inflection and unnecessary pausing that the musicality disappears into academic lilting. It's rampant in the poetry community, like a virus.

Some thought-leaders feel poets should affect this performative voice when we read in public.  However, most of the public feel we sounds affected and silly. This is a usability issue!

Similar pleas to end "poet's voice":

City Arts: Stop Using 'Poet Voice'

Huffington Post: Poet Voice and Flock Mentality: Why Poets Need to Think for Themselves

 

Crafty March: Persuasion, Cognitive Biases and Technology

March 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

UserdesignA Poem's User Experience

My day job is posting and editing web content so I'm always interested in user experience design and testing. I've read a few books on the topic, like Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, The Art and Science of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen and Information Architecture by Morville & Rosenfeld. But to brush up for my new job I've been taking an online class on user testing and reading The Hipper Element's UX Crash Course in 31 days.

What is most fascinating to me is that user experience can be applied to anything, especially writing poems.

The Hipper Elements article #26 on persuasion is particularly interesting for those of us interested in how to speak with authority through a poem.

This list of cognitive biases is also something every poet should read. We all write with these biases and read with them.

Everything involves user experience…even a poem. Think about a poem’s user experience.

Thinking Back to the Book

For my job, I also read the latest edition (with illustration by Maria Kalman) of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I thought I had read it before but turns out I get this book confused with On Writing Well by William Zinsser which we read in college composition class.  Both of these are great book to re-read and yet Strunk and White's aim toward brevity leaves my Proustian sensibility feeling somewhat chilly. Absolute clarity is sometimes a route devoid of any atmosphere. Colloquialisms have power. And some superfluous words work to add emphasis and personality which a flat Stunk and White sentence lacks.

I took exception with the books distaste for the word offputting as in "That gesture is offputting. I am put off by it." I can visualize it. Personally is another emphatic word I would make an argument for, as in "Personally, I liked it." Yes, it's redundant but it lets the stress sit on the speaker when over-emphasizing the word I sounds silly.

In news related to words and the Internet, father of the Internet Vint Cerf says we may be entering a digital dark age. Read the full BBC News article.

Think about all your poems lost on floppy discs and you will understand his point. At some point in the future we will have devices that can't read our poems in outdated Microsoft Word files from 2007. Aren't you already annoyed by .docx files you can't open from your older computers?

While Cerf and others are working on very smart solutions to keep the world's content (including poetry) accessible, consider this when saving and publishing electronically.

On some level, I feel we might be over thinking a problem we created ourselves. After all, aren't books so far the most sturdy, eternal and accessible technology? Sure, they're burnable in libraries. But it would be pretty hard to destroy every copy of a popular book like the Bible or Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities which is still doing pretty good on the list of best-selling books. 

Books consume trees, but technology creates the physical trash of discarded plastic phones, computers and eReaders.

One drawback of the emerging technologies is their very asset: they continually improve. Our current content technologies are never static. Web browsers, software and hardware become outdated and unusable. eReaders will probably suffer the same fate. And the corporations pushing them are always itching to make prior evolutions archaic in order to force consumers to make a repurchase every few years.

Books, being pretty simple, seem to be immune from this dastardly cycle of expiration. It may get smelly, but I can still pick up a book from a hundred years ago and access its content.

 

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