Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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Philip Levine, Louis Jourdan, Leonard Nimoy, the Creator of Nutella RIP

March 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

LevineI was very sad last week to read about the passing of one of my favorite poets, Philip Levine.

Read his New York Times obit.

The first full length poetry collection I ever read in my twenties was They Feed the Lion. Levine was also the first living poet I ever read. He was living proof to me you didn't have to be dead to be a poet. He even wrote about living, modernity and about work.

He was the second poet I saw read live, the first was Tom Lux in St. Louis. The only other writer I ever saw read in St. Louis was Stephen King.

Levine was the first poet to visit Sarah Lawrence College while I was a  graduate student there. That night, as he walked through the dark entryway of Slonim house and passed me on his way to the living room and I felt like a celebrity had just walked by! Imagine that? A poet celebrity! I was starstruck. I have always mythologized him and I probably always will.

JourdanWe've also lost Louis Jordan. I honored him a few weeks ago by watching Gigi again.  Gigi is full of great stuff. It’s slightly Proustean in its exuberance, full of Paris location shots, Louis Jordan as fluid as a dancer, Maurice Chevalier, (who is just as charming as Louis Jordan with his amazing smile), and there’s an adorable performance by Leslie Caron. And Eva Gabor is very good in her small part, too. Vincente Minnelli directed it. It’s based on a Colette novel. The score is by Andre Previn. I’ve heard the movie get a lot of flack for winning 1958s best picture and other Oscars but it’s one of my favorite movies. Full of some stunning poetic movie lines like where Aunt Alicia says, "Marriage is not forbidden to us, but instead of getting married at once, it sometimes happens we get married at last."

My favorite scene is when Louis Jordan is in a fluff over Gigi and pacing around a restaurant table where his uncle, Maurice Chevalier, is sitting.  Maurice tries to calm him down with the serious suggestion to:

 “Have some cheese!”

 I use this suggestion all the time as a calm-down phrase to Monsieur Big Bang–spoken very Frenchly:

 “Have a piece of cheese!”

Pain-au-chocolatSpeaking of great things to eat in France, the creator of Nutella has also died.

My first taste of Nutella was where some was stuffed in a pain au chocolat outside of Notre Dame in Paris.

It was pretty mind blowing.  

I haven't honored him yet but I plan to this weekend.

 

 

Leonard_NimoyA few days ago we also lost Leonard Nimoy. Although not very respected for his poetry in established circles, he did publish quite a bit of it.

To view a sample: http://leonardnimoypoetry.com/

His poetry book covers look a bit like the "Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts" from SNL, but here they are on Amazon.

 

If this makes you miss Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts, here is the site for you: http://www.deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com/

  

Poetry in College Courses; the Poetry of Mindfulness

March 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

MindfullI love to see poem used to illustrate non-literary concepts in academic papers. I blogged about this in 2012, Using Poems for Research Projects.

So I'm thrilled to be in a CNM course on Mindfulness where our teacher, Beth Giebus-Chavez, opens each class with a poem that describes a concept where learning that week. It's awesome! The poems get at the topic from another angle, or a substrata  that the academic papers, videos and mp3s, discussions and journalings can't reach. The poems are not only examples of mindfulness but they are the very practice of mindfulness.

Here are the poems we've covered so far:

In one of the live lectures on Mindfulness, we also covered this poem, "Autobiography in Five Short Chapters" By Portia Nelson.

More on the Mindfulness program at CNM.

Berry Gordy Jr. and Poetry on TV

March 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

BerryYou always hear laments about how people don't respect poetry, how entertainers steal focus from literature, how poetry is meaningless in our society. This is why I love to see celebrities talking about poems on television.

Poets can be bitter butter balls. Their hearts can't see when their heart are closed. And this includes noticing all the good television programs out there.

For years I've been enjoying Oprah's Master Class series. I have about eleven of them banked up on my DVR. I finally watched the episode with Berry Gordy, Jr. I only know about Gordy Jr. from reading histories of Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Michael Jackson and I've always pictured him as a kind of stern record mogul who created the unlikely but inspiring success of Motown in Detroit. Hearing him talk about his own process was fascinating. He was much more charming and self-deprecating than I anticipated. He also attributes the success in his life to a poem, specifically the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Gordy Jr. said he was under great pressure, as his father's namesake, to learn how to be a man in a big, physical sense. He said this poem taught him that there were ways to be a man mentally and it changed his life.

 

Interactive Poetry Games

February 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

WackSometimes poetry can be a very head-to-paper activity. Sometimes it good to inject something tactile in between.

I've had these games for year and sometimes I take them to small, informal writing groups.

Roger von Oech’s "Creative Wack Pack" are great cards to stimulate creative thinking.  There are blue Exporer cards (a man with binoculars) that cover aspects of how we go looking for inspiration. The orange Artist cards (a head with its hair exploding) cover idea generation. The green Judge cards (an old man with a gavel) deal with evaluating our ideas. And finally, the red warrior cards (a warrior helmet) give tips for inventive ways to implement ideas. 

Included is a book of ideas on how to use the cards, either as individual exercises, in group workshops, or as an oracle.

 Each card tells a story with a final lesson learned.

Here’s a sample of one from each group:

Explorer card, Get out of Your Box: the story is about cutting across disciplinary boundaries and borrowing for ideas.

Artist card, Reverse: reverse how you look at something to dislodge assumptions, the example being when everyone else looks one way at a sunset, look behind you into the darkness. How can you reverse the way you look at an idea?

Judge card, Conform: the story is about St. Augustine being told "When in Rome…," the question being to what standards should you be conforming?

Warrior card, Do the Unexpected: the story is from 1334. Hochosterwitz castle was being besieged and a commander did the opposite of what was expected by the enemy, the lesson being use a  surprising tactic to reach your objective.

StonesI also have a game called Stones from the Muse, Runes for the Creative Journey. There are 10 double-sided rune stones in a bag and a book. You can draw one stone a day. Yesterday, I drew the Tool rune (a crude pick axe) which is about taking action. Or you can draw three or four stone configurations. I drew two more to do a reading called "immediate picture, big picture, action required." My second rune looked like a tadpole (the transformation rune) and the third looked like a swirl (the seed rune) which dealt with idea composting and fertility. The booklet has long descriptions of each rune and ideas for action steps.  

 

 

 

PastlifeThe first creative oracle I purchased in college were these phoenix cards. The idea behind them is that you will draw the card that most represents your past life culture and its influences on your current life. For years, I have always been drawn immediately to the Zen Buddhist card. For years I researched Zen to figure out what that meant.

The cards each have radically different cultural aesthetics and most people only gravitate toward one or two of them. Strangely, when I used the cards to read everyone in my Bronxville, NY writing group years ago, the writers did claim the readings were pretty good. One friend said her reading was more like her than any of us could ever know.

I’ve ever only gravitated to the Zen card. Eliminating that card today, I picked  the Medieval Illumination. And I have to say, its description of me wasn’t too far off either.

Anyway, fun games for creative types.

eBook Formatting and Frank O’Hara

February 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

EbookformattingI'm a big believer that you don't need to fork over money to an eBook designer to create an eBook version of your poems. That is, beyond what you will spend to design your physical book. There are many poets out there insisting poetry can't be designed for electronic book reading. But I've been reading books of poems on my Kindle for years now. And if they're priced right, I buy books of poems on my Kindle I normally wouldn't buy in print. This usually happens when I want to test out a new poet or when I want to read a book but not necessarily "collect" it on my bookshelf.

There are special formatting issues for poems on eBook. Some special indenting creates problems, but over the last few years these issues have been overcome by some lit-minded, html-savy people who are generous enough to share their tricks with us.

Your Poetry eBook, Quick and Easy Formatting for Kindle by D.L. Lang is a great start for newbies. It's cheap and quick and informative for any poet who wants to stay up-to-date on how their books are made. 

Looking to Read

Publishing by Gail Godwin was recently reviewed in Entertainment Weekly, whose review tells us the book “explores the writer’s shifting place in the publishing industry’s disheartening transformation—from a place where tweedy editors spent years nurturing gifted young writers to a marketing machine where authors must now come with ready-made personal brands.”

The Frank O’Hara Project

City poetI just finished my first big experiment in reading someone’s collected works at the same time I read the biography. This idea started when I finished Edna St. Vincent Millay’s biography and then started her selected poems having forgot all the anecdotal stories from the biography.

I decided to slowly go through Donald Allen’s collected tome of O’Hara while reading City Poet by Brad Gooch, or as Monsieur Big Bang like to call it, that big book by The Gooch.

I started at the end of 2013 and finished just before Christmas in 2014! It took a year of bedtime reading!

I loved the biography and how its stories and poets overlapped with my studies on local Santa Fe poets over the same time-period. For instance, one line of the biography declares how O’Hara despised Vachel Lindsay.

The collected poems were a bit of a slog, containing over 400 pages of small printed verse. Many of his experiments were interesting at first but tedious after many incarnations; but I felt by the end of it I had my own personal little selected list of gems.

In any case, his famous poems are famous for a reason.

  

News and Affirmations

February 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

AffirmPoet News

Neruda is back in the news with investigations on his possible poisoning.

The Hindu does a short piece on protests poetry.

The Huffington Post has a story on Rupi Kaur, "The Poet Every Woman Needs to Read. 

A tale of two Iranian poets: "Iran has long been one of the few countries where poetry enjoys mass popularity. So, it came as no surprise that the death earlier this week of the poet Moshfeq Kashani was treated as a major event with a special message from Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei paying tribute to the poet and miles of coverage in the official media. Kashani collapsed and died during a ceremony honoring another poet in Tehran…At the same time, however, the same authorities that heaped praise on the 89-year-old Kashani were determined to prevent any attempt at marking the first anniversary of the execution of another poet, the much younger Hashem Shaabani, who was sentenced to death by hanging on a charge of “waging war on God”.

The New York Times obituary of poet Rod McKuen.

In local news…

I've added new quotes on writing strategies and narcissism to my book page for Writing in the Age of Narcissism.

Poet Affirmations

We haven't done these in a while. These are all by poet Mark Nepo and these quotes can help guide us all through ways of seeing and intellectualizing what we write about:

"Live loud enough in your heart
and there is no need to speak."

 "Birds don’t need ornithologists to fly."

"If you can’t see what you’re looking for, see what’s there."

"Before fixing what you’re looking at, check what you’re looking through."

"No amount of thinking can stop thinking."

   

Crafty-Links: The Art of Daring, T.S. Eliot and Online Poetry Classes

January 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

DaringFor all the talk of poetry being invisible in big media stories, I am continually finding really good features and news stories on poetry  and poets in the major American (and UK) newspapers. 

 

The Art of Daring

"In August of last year Graywolf Press released the tenth volume in their acclaimed "Art of" series, this time authored by poet and four-time National Book Award finalist Carl Phillips." (The Huffington Post)

 

“The Triumph of Bullshit" by T.S. Eliot

"TS Eliot, once a subversive outsider, became the most celebrated poet of the 20th century – a world poet, who changed the way we think. Yet, fifty years after his death, we are still making new discoveries about him." (The Guardian)

…

"Fifty years later, “difficult” remains the word most people attach to his verse. Yet we quote him: “Not with a bang but a whimper”, the last line of Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” is among the best-known lines of modern poetry. “April is the cruellest month” begins The Waste Land with unsettling memorability; no reader forgets the strangeness of the “patient etherised upon a table” at the start of “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”."

…

"Through allusion, quotation, echo and resonance, modern life is presented as a repeated ritual, one we can hear more deeply than we see it. To a greater or lesser degree, this is still how poetry works. It’s not so much that knottily difficult poets including Geoffrey Hill and Jorie Graham embed one resonance within another as they write, as that even poets very different from Eliot inherit an acute self-consciousness in their language. Poetry manifests an awareness that language – in its play of sound as much as in its denotation, its meaning – spools and unspools the self."

 

The Web Poet's Society: Can an online course revive interest in the classics?

This is an article on the University of Pennsylvannia Modern Poetry MOOC course (The Atlantic)

"Skeptics of online education still question if academic subjects, let alone poetry, can be taught on the web. They stress that true scholarship takes patience and time—values that aren’t inherent to online education. Even though many MOOCs offer certificates of completion, only 5 percent of of those who enroll actually stick to it. And, despite their popularity, both UPenn and Harvard’s poetry classes have experienced high dropout rates as well.

But Filreis suggests that the courses’ objectives are more important than their measurable outcomes. ModPo, he said, isn’t about the number of people who complete it—and it certainly isn’t designed to replace a traditional college seminar. After all, data indicates that most of the students who sign up already have some formal higher education under their belt. Rather, ModPo—and Poetry in America—are about reaching more minds and opening more people to the possibilities of language. They're about finding Whitman not only under boot soles but on smartphones, too."

   

Poet Miller Williams Dies

January 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Miller-lucindaArkansas poet and father of singer Lucinda Williams, Miller Williams died on New Year's Day this year at the age of 84. Longtime fan of Lucinda Williams, I was lucky to see them perform together in song and poetry at Royce Hall at UCLA years ago.

I think I picked up his book, Making a Poem: Some Thoughts About Poetry And the People Who Write It, at that show.

Here are some prominent obituaries. As you may recall, Miller Williams read the inaugural poem for second term of President Bill Clinton.

 

Writing in the Age of Narcissism

January 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Cover-smallThe narcissism epidemic has spread around the world and has tainted the attitudes and impulses of writers and all artists. This situation affects our futures and our fortunes. In my new eBook, Writing in the Age of Narcissism, I talk about strategies of literary criticism as they enable narcissism, as well as possible solutions to counter-act destructive tactics in writing and reviewing.

I've just created a dedicated page for the eBook to showcase an ongoing list of quotes from other writers about the topics of writing strategies and narcissism.

 

Kindle $1.99  Buy
PDF, ePub, Sony $1.99  Buy

Or sign up for my quarterly newsletter and receive a free copy. Just provide a valid email when you sign up.

    

My New eBook is Available

January 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Cover-smallMy new eBook on Trementina Books is now available. Writing in the Age of Narcissism is available for Kindle, ePub, PDF, Sony readers.

If you’re a poet or writer in any other form or genre, you’ve probably witnessed many modern, uncivilized behaviors from fellow students, writers and academic colleagues—their public relations gestures, their catty reviews and essays, and their often uncivil career moves. Like actors, visual artists and politicians, cut-throat pirate maneuverings have become the new normal. It’s what occurs whenever there are more people practicing an art than any particular economy can support.

The difference with writers is their ability to develop highly conceptualized, rationalizations in order to prove their worth and ideals. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it has reached a critical mass in meaningless attempts to pull focus in a society obsessed with the show-biz spotlight.

This essay traces how the narcissism epidemic affects writers, including our gestures of post-modernism and irony, and proposes an alternative way to be a more positive writer, critic and reader.

Kindle $1.99  Buy
PDF, ePub, Sony $1.99  Buy

Or sign up for my quarterly newsletter and receive a free copy. Just provide a valid email when you sign up.

    

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