Tuesday, February 9, 2010

"I thought I could understand / what they were protesting about"



"You were nothing before you met me. You were a Girl Scout cookie."


I catch a lot of guff for teaching Tony Hoagland's poems in my English composition classes and poetry writing workshops, but I've never really been able to understand what people object to. It seems like it comes down to popularity, as if those folks who are repelled by Hoagland's work and lash out do so from the same emotional space out of which Christian Slater and Wynona Ryder resent or mock or abhor The Heathers. Hoagland is no Heather, and though he's got some sex in his poems, I think he'd be the last person to flaunt it or use it to intimidate.

And, yes, I see that this comparison is replete with logical fallacies, and I don't really mean to equate Hoagland with a Heather or the haters with murderers, but at least you got to watch the trailer to a cult classic. Bet you didn't think you'd see that today.

As with any poet's work, some poems are better than others. As with any poet's work, some of Hoagland's poems are over-the-top better than others he's written. But it's not a good argument to pick out the crummier ones and use them as reason to push the entire cake off the table. Most folks who dismiss Hoagland, I've found, have hardly tasted his work.

Well, Hoagland has a new book out. It is titled Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, and other than John Gallaher's Map of the Folded World, it has been a while since I've seen a more appealing book cover.

I haven't read the new book yet, but I have read his recent Hollyridge Press chapbook, Hard Rain. From what I've gleaned from available info online, it sounds like poems from this chapbook have made it into the larger new collection.

Last year I wrote a review of Hard Rain (and then never did anything with it). Here's one point I tried to make:
There are moments in these poems where the diction seems off, just not quite right, and then again, that’s Hoagland’s whole schtick. He wants to make you look crook-eyed at what he’s telling you. Before you swallow it down you are given the chance to push it away. 
I don’t find the poems glib. More like fatty. Not healthy, per-se, but you do carry them around with you. Hoagland makes you feel comfortable with these poems' body type. Any moments of weakness, a tone that's saccharine or empty-calorie diction, end up contributing to the poem as counterpoints to what the trained reader expects to taste after having spent too much time eating at the same restaurants.
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Here are a couple recent New York Times reviews of Hoagland's new collection. I'm guessing there will be more as the book makes its way around.

Here's an excerpt which pretty much summarizes Joel Brouwer's review "Truth or Dare":
Where Hoagland succeeds, sometimes brilliantly, is in those poems in which he neither rails against the food court with formulaic sarcasm nor forces forest epiphanies, but instead abides wherever he’s found himself, reflects rather than reacts and struggles to meet what he’s seeing with a sensibility stripped of any traces of cant....At his best, Hoagland rejects both the cynic’s lie that everything superficially beautiful must be rotten underneath, and the romantic’s lie that everything apparently ugly must possess some essential nobility.
And a similar sentiment from Dwight Garner's so-so review "The Free Verse Is in Aisle 3":
Not all of the poems in Mr. Hoagland’s new book work. On occasion he can’t skirt glibness. (“Now he was standing on the Continental Divide,/i.e., whether to remain continent or not.”) A poem called “Poor Britney Spears” is a misfire, making you prize once again the lightly pressed genius of Frank O’Hara — a poet Mr. Hoagland occasionally resembles — in a work like “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!).”

A few other poems are limp and tired. At his frequent best, though, Mr. Hoagland is demonically in touch with the American demotic.
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Hoagland gave a reading along with Lucia Perillo at the Library of Congress in November of last year. The LoC website has a RealAudio cybercast of the event, which you can watch by clicking here. Hoagland opens with "Food Court" which appears in Hard Rain. His reading begins about 48 minutes in.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Verse Daily!


Woah! I just saw my poem "Praise Nothing" is up at Verse Daily today! And they included links to this blog and a few other poems of mine available online. (They didn't get the indentations of the lines correct in the formatting, but I'm NOT complaining.) Thanks to Hunter Hamilton and Campbell Russo for noticing my work!

Last week I got a letter informing me of my Pushcart nomination and I received word that my poem "Aubade with Red Kimono" has been accepted for publication after many years of persistent submission.

My goal of increasing my web presence is already showing some results. 2010 is off to a blessed (and fortunate) start!

The Monday Tape

Top Five Books I'm Looking Forward to Reading After My Next Prelim

5. Joan Didion - The White Album

I'm about forty or so pages from the end, though I'd like to be through with it already. I will finish it out. If I don't finish a book, there's a unique guilt that arrives, and The White Album is not one I'd like to add to my "shelf of shame."

It's not that I haven't enjoyed The White Album. I have. The book, frankly, hasn't lived up to my high expectations. I haven't learned from it what I thought I would. The essays haven't struck me as particularly unique or instructive in either writing or looking. All of this is to say, that my expectations of the book are not entirely fair.

I originally picked it up last December at a Seattle airport bookstore. My non-fiction leisure read at the time was Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey, and I'd become a bit bored with it, though wanted to continue with my reading in the vein of art/writing and observation as a political act. So when I saw The White Album faced out on the shelf, I took it as a sign: Purchase this book.

I've never read any Joan Didion. I know, I know. But there is a time and place for everything. I'd originally heard of the book in Randy Marshall's essay "Suite: Larry Levis," read it a few years ago in the Buckley anthology of writings on Levis, The Condition of the Spirit, and it's Marshall's essay that so amped up my expectations. Here's how Marshall describes how he first read The White Album:
One of the first classes Larry Levis taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, back in the spring of 1993, was a creative nonfiction workshop in which I was fortunate enough to be enrolled. Among the first reading assignments Larry gave us was Joan Didion's The White Album. I had never read any of Didion's work, so the experience of encountering her for the first time will always be intertwined in my memory with my earliest impressions of Larry. Over the course of those gradually warming Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I began to appreciate each of their perspectives on California, and recent history, and the way writing, any kind of creative, meaningful writing, gets done. Larry had a great deal to say about Didion's journalistic preeminence, about how he respected her eye for the telling detail, and about how he enjoyed her quirky, moody delivery. And he was quick to opine that it was a certain discernible inflection of the Self in Didion's work, a willingness on the part of the author to be implicated in her subject matter that rescued her essays from the banality of mere reportage. I listened and read carefully. Something in Joan Didion's (and Larry's) hip, sardonic tone appealed to me. I was learning.
In a sick way, I guess I expected my reading of The White Album to be similar to Marshall's, or that in reading it I could begin to understand what learning from Larry Levis would have been like. Sad to say, that hasn't been my experience. And this is not fair to Didion. The bar is way to high. If I want to learn from Levis, I can from reading his work, from rereading The Gazer Within, from reading what he read. But to think that I could learn from a dead man by channelling an eduction through someone else's work....not so much.

As I said, I'll finish the book out. After: it may be time to mine The Gazer Within for the hundredth time.


4. James Agee - A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text (Edited by Michael Lofaro)

I first read A Death in the Family in the spring of 2008, just after I'd received word that I'd be working with the editor of this volume as a result of receiving a fellowship to assist him in editing Agee's collected poems. When I applied for the fellowship, I didn't know Agee's work all that well; mostly all I new about Agee could be summed up in the little Agee lore I'd heard from local writers and that every day I walked down James Agee Street from the bus stop to the Special Collections library or to campus to teach. Regretfully, I read the novel much too quickly.

In the fall, I participated in an event as part of the James Agee Centennial Celebration. I think there were six of us: local writers asked to select a passage or two from Agee's work, and read it for an audience. What was great about this reading was that we were asked to make no introductions or set up our readings in any way, to just read the poem or passage. It was a beautiful time.

R.B. Morris read the opening of A Death in the Family, a passage called "Knoxville: Summer 1915." I was stunned by it, and if you haven't read it, I urge you to do so. The newly restored edition, though, drastically alters the sentiment of novel. The figures established are so different and dark that the novel, in its restored edition, becomes, I'm told, a great "experimental novel."

In the press release for the new edition, Michael Lofaro describes the restored "Knoxville: Summer 1915" this way:
My problems with the narrative...were the result of the radical posthumous revision of Agee’s text by his editors to increase the book’s salability in 1957. Agee’s original version of ‘A Death’ begins with a nightmare in the narrator’s adult present and presents the ensuing story as a unified and chronological series of memories that range from his first recollection to the aftermath of his father’s funeral. For me, it represents Agee’s highest artistic achievement.

I clearly prefer Agee’s version, but for 50 years the older work has been a part of the fabric of American literature. While I may become known either as the person who resurrected Agee’s masterpiece or the one who called a classic into question, for the first time readers now have in their hands a way to make their own judgments.

3. Peter Kropotkin - Memoirs of a Revolutionist

I admit that I know next to nothing about Kropotkin or this book. I want to read this because a friend of mine, a fine poet, has recommended this book after finding it very influential to his poetics, and he and I generally see eye to eye on these sort of things, though they do manifest themselves differently in our respective poetry.


2. Theodore Adorno - Problems of Moral Philosophy

Adorno's Metaphysics: Concept and Problems is one of those books. You know the kind. A book that finds its way into your possession almost by chance, and then proceeds to invade every channel and nook of your conscious thought until you find yourself asking, "Where has this book been all my life?"

The way I found Metaphysics reminds me of Stanley Kunitz talking about how poetry and Gerard Manley Hopkins found him. I wasn't in a library as Kunitz was, but this book did literally fall off the bookshelf in the store where I was working and into my hands. I was alphabetizing the philosophy section when WHAM -- there it was. Ever since then, Adorno has played a feature role in my poetry, the criticism I write, my study of rhetoric, and my teaching philosophy.

As soon as this prelim is over, I am quite excited to pick up more of his work, particularly the lecture series published by Stanford University Press. Here's the description of Problems of Moral Philosophy:
This book consists of a course of seventeen lectures given in May-July 1963. Captured by tape recorder (which Adorno called “the fingerprint of the living mind."...The lectures focus largely on Kant, “a thinker in whose work the question of morality is most sharply contrasted with other spheres of existence.” After discussing a number of the Kantian categories of moral philosophy, Adorno considers other, seemingly more immediate general problems, such as the nature of moral norms, the good life, and the relation of relativism and nihilism.

In the course of the lectures, Adorno addresses a wide range of topics, including: theory and practice, ethics as bad conscience, the repressive character, the problem of freedom, dialectics in Kant and Hegel, the nature of reason, the moral law as a given, psychoanalysis, the element of the Absurd, freedom and law, the Protestant tradition of morality, Hamlet, self-determination, phenomenology, the concept of the will, the idea of humanity, The Wild Duck, and Nietzsche’s critique of morality.


1. Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

Yesterday afternoon I was thinking about today's Monday Tape and trying to come up with a "desert island" kind of list, which then turned in to an examination of works I'd read at certain moments in my life, times in my life that would have been drastically different had I not been reading whatever it was I was reading at the time.

Sartre is one of those authors. And Milton. And Sharon Olds. Adrienne Rich. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charles Wright. Larry Levis. Beckett is also one of those authors, though he's not one I immediately go to.

What I remembered, though, in thinking about the play Waiting for Godot yesterday afternoon was the exchange in the very end of Act II where Vladimir and Estragon are talking about what they should do while they wait.
ESTRAGON: Why don't we hang ourselves?
VLADIMIR: With what?
ESTRAGON: You haven't got a bit of rope?
VLADIMIR: No.
They talk about using Estragon's belt, which is actually a short piece of rope, but figure that the logistics won't work. The rope is too small to hang them both, and the tree might break under their weight. They agree that when they come back to wait for Godot the next day they'll bring some rope.

And then this exchange:
ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That's what you think.
I'll refrain from any further exegesis of this passage, and I'll let you chew on Vladimir's response. Thinking about "Waiting" yesterday has me considering Beckett's mix of stern stoicism and determination to survive, even if it means waiting out time, as very much influential to my own poetics. I do not at all mean to compare myself or my life to Beckett's, but there's a similar philosophy here as it relates to freedom, God, time. My hope is that rereading this play will put me on a path to figuring out that relationship.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Ramke

Found this poem in Craig Morgan Teicher's review of Bin Ramke's latest, Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems 1978-2008. The review is available in its entirety at Boston Review online, the January/February 2010 issue.



Westminster Chimes


We are moved to memory: it is
after all, spring. After white days,
not of, in this southern state, snow,
but of frost internalized,
of cold incipience.

I lean into the white waltz
of birds across the evening sky,
I remember a child I was,
and see him at a window
listening to the whippoorwills
call across a dreary field
which glistens in the last light,
orange. He lived there
and loved the world.
I hear a chime from town
strike the hour—after all,
it’s spring and all the windows
open—a beat behind the clock
in the living room. Nine,
my old bed time.

Suddenly nothing
can keep me from sleep.


Bin Ramke
from White Monkeys

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Mercy

As I mentioned yesterday, I can't really make a whole lot of time this week or next for any significant blogging. During the last few weeks, I've seen a dramatic uptick in the average number of visits to Little Epic Against Oblivion, as well as people finding this blog as a result of googling my name, so it's a bit of a bummer that the content here may diminish slightly because I'm in the last push of studying for my rhetoric prelim. Big meeting with my exam committee chair tomorrow afternoon, and then it'll be one week more before I have to sit down and write for three days.
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Something is rotten on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Oregon.

Perhaps Eugene is not the Marxist bastion you have come to expect as prompted by the media lore. I can tell you from experience, and people don't really express this because it's not something often said or thought about deep down in those places we don't talk about a parties, that outside of the I-5 corridor, Oregon is not so much the vegan, Birkenstock-wearing, hybrid-driving, LGBT-friendly, hippie burnout refuge, that folks think it is.

Courtesy of C. Dale Young's blog:
Police investigate swastika vandalism at University of Oregon in Eugene

No one yet knows who did it or when but they know this: It was ugly.

A four-foot square swastika was found emblazoned in black spray paint on a carpet in an office at the University of Oregon early this morning.

Black paint was also sprayed all over the flat-screen Dell monitor and computer in the office.

Located in the basement of the student union, the Erb Memorial Union, the office is home to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans Queer Alliance.
... ... ...

[Alex Esparza, co-director of the alliance,] said there was speculation that the vandalism might be linked to a recent discussion about the meaning of the swastika held by the Pacifica Forum, an outside group that meets regularly on the campus.

Classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Pacifica Forum has met on campus since 1994 under the affiliation of a retired professor. [Julie Brown, spokeswoman for the university,] said it is long-standing policy for the university to allow groups associated with tenured professors to meet on campus.

"We support free speech," she said, adding that there is no evidence pointing a finger at the group.

The university is reconsidering its policy of allowing outside groups to meet on campus, she said.

If the university does reevaluate this policy, I wonder if they'll also reevaluate allowing the extremist anti-choice, anti-abortionists to come on campus, or at least make them keep their horrible signs off university grounds.

If you've been on a university campus in the last ten years or more, you've seen them. These are the propaganda signs emblazoned with graphic, hi-resolution photos of fetuses captioned with language like, "American Holocaust."

These folks often materialize on our campus in Knoxville, and wherever one is on the abortion issue, after seeing their appeals in action, it's hard to see how their rhetoric persuades anyone, that it's mostly gasoline on the flames.
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Hard to figure how to transition out of that discussion, but this may work somewhat.

The computer game designer and manufacturer EA has released a game based on The Inferno -- actually, that's the title: Dante's Inferno.

Here's the Guardian.co.uk description of the game's basics:
The Dante here is no poet but a crusader, who has fought Death himself, won (of course) and now comes riding home with the grim reaper's scythe thrown over his shoulder. Sadly, the villa in Tuscany has been trashed and Beatrice, his giant-breasted (of course) wife, lies dead in the garden. Her ghost tells Dante he must rescue her from Hell.

In the original, it is "girl saves boy" – Beatrice, dead at an early age, looks down from heaven, sees Dante's soul in danger, and sends help. Here, however, Dante fights the nasties to save the girl. The lower he descends, the more haunting and powerful the graphics become, but it's a much duller story than the book. Kill one monster, kill another.
Sounds good to me, though I'm sure I'd prefer reading the actual poem. Why not a game that is more closely modeled after the poem? It could still have all the fighting....

I wonder what other poems could become computer games? I've wondered this about film before (here and here and here) but never games.

What comes to mind right away is some kind of Orpheus/Eurydice game, but are there others?
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"When, as a writer, you move from 'perspective' to 'answers,' you move from discovery to ruin. Don't do it." 
Charles Wright -- from "Halflife: A Commonplace Notebook"

After mentioning Dante, best to post some Father Wright. Here's one that ends with a strikingly direct claim. About as political as the man gets.


The Monastery at Vršac


We’ve walked the ground,
inspected the vaults and the old church,
Looked at the icons and carved stalls,

And followed the path to the bishop’s grave.

Now we sit in the brandy-colored light of late afternoon
Under the locust trees,
attended and small
From the monastery. Two nuns hop back and forth like grackles
Along the path. The light drips from the leaves.

Little signals of dust rise uninterpreted from the road.
The grass drones in its puddle of solitude.

The stillness is awful, as though from the inside of a root...

--Time’s sluice and the summer rains erode our hearts
and carry our lives away.
We hold what we can in our two hands,
Sinking, each year, another inch in the earth...

Mercy upon us,
we who have learned to preach but not to pray.


Charles Wright
from The World of the Ten Thousand Things

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

February?

Uhm, what happened to January? It was a good month: a couple new poems drafted, sent off to a couple more contests, submitted some poems, got a poem accepted, started with a new class of writing students (who are brilliant, by the way). With my rhetoric prelim coming up in just eleven days, I could use a bit more January to gear up for it.
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A Flickr page I found interesting: Passport Photos - Famous Artists:
Passport photos gleaned from passport applications files of writers actors, poets, artists, photographers, etc. The quality is pretty gritty, but I find them interesting, not the least because they are glimpses of these people without their artistic personas showing. Just another traveler submitting to the demands of the state.
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You can feel free to buy me this:

Statement by Amy Casey:
"Over the past few years I have been working on paintings influenced by my immediate surroundings in Cleveland and my general feeling of helplessness while keeping up with local and world events, both great and (mostly) terrible. Feeling a small, useless painter, I created an alternate world that I can menace with difficulties while simultaneously trying my best to stick it back together and rebuild communities and connections.
In my work, I am interested in storytelling, cause and effect, mistake making, finding solutions, what ifs and the everyday. I am fascinated by the resilience of life. Every disaster is followed by rebirth, where we try to cobble together a Plan B out of what remains. My paintings celebrate this fascination and my love of the urban landscape and its creatures."
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Dorianne Laux has a new chapbook called Dark Charms forthcoming from Red Dragonfly Press. It should release soon.

In 2008, she published another chapbook with Red Dragonfly Press called Superman: The Chapbook, and it is fantastic.

Chances are you won't be able to track down a copy of either chapbook through the normal outlets. Superman is out-of-print, as far as I know. But the new book is best found directly through Red Dragonfly Press.
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A colleague recently asked for a copy of my poem "A Soul Petitions Entry" a.k.a. my Buddy Holly poem a.k.a. my Big Bopper poem to use in his class on music writing. This is a poem I read last year and really let the reading fly. Performed it as an AM radio preacher around here might. Stomping my feet, slapping my leg, generally carrying on.

The poem mentions "Holly's Beechcraft Bonanza," which, if you didn't already know, is a kind of plane. It looks like this:

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The new issue of Still was just released online. You should read it and submit your work there.

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And, finally, here's a poem by Margaret Atwood from one of the first poetry books I ever purchased, Morning in the Burned House. I bought it my freshman year of college because, of course, a girl told me she liked it. Why else get into poetry but for love?

I haven't picked it up for years, maybe since college, and I'd forgotten how important this book was to me, because apparently I took the time to mark it all up with pencil. Maybe to try and figure out how the poems worked, but more likely this was done to try and impress the girl.

Here's a poem for this month:



February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Margaret Atwood
from Morning in the Burned House

Monday, February 1, 2010

The Monday Tape

This week I'm starting a new weekly series called "The Monday Tape."

It won't be anything fancy, but each Monday I'm going to post a list related to poems. Sometimes it might be a list of favorite X Poets, or "Ten Poems for X," that kind of thing. "Ten great moments of sound in "This Lime-Tree Bower" -- you get the idea.

My hope is that this Monday series can be, as Barry says about his mixtape, "A fucking conversation stimulator, man."

Whatever the series ends up becoming, I hope it can be something along the lines of this scene from one of my favorite all-time movies, High Fidelity, except with actual idea exchange instead of rage and insults and accusations of facism.


As part of their "Craft Notes" section, HTMLGIANT recently posted an interesting list of popular poetry moves. They describe the list the following way:
So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of “contemporary poetry,” the nebulousness of calling something a “move,” the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on, but hey: dancing is fraught with peril too, and no one’s managed to stop me from doing that. So here we go. 41 moves.
I spent a half an hour this morning rereading the list and then a good while going through my manuscript and thinking about it in the context of these rules. On the list below, I've marked off the places where I'm "GUILTY" (sometimes with caveats), and I'm pleased to say that I've come away from this exercise having been found guilty on only twelve counts. (Hm. That seems like a lot now that I type that out.)

I don't think, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that I have identifiable "moves" in my poems, but that I have my own unique voice and idiosyncratic tics. Going through this, though, makes me want to get a tally of how often I do some of these "moves."

I like this, and I think a list of this kind is all-to-quickly dismissed as having an agenda (as if there's something wrong with that!), or for being too narrow, etc. I get the sense that this list is meant to be fun, and fairly light, and a conversation starter, rather than an attempt at dogma. So, I hope you'll take it for what it is. It would be relatively easy to criticize this list, and even dismiss it, but I prefer to find a practical application. I wish this list had been around last semester for my poetry students.


41 Moves in Contemporary Poetry

1) Exposed revision
1b) Variation: Revision by way of “I mean”
2) Starting a line with the final clause from a previous line’s sentence and finishing it with a single short and often fragmentary sentence.
3) Abstract epistolary: Using “Dear [abstraction or common object]” in the title or first line.
4) The “blank of blank” construction - GUILTY
5) Use of “etc.”
6) Verbing a noun or other nonverb - GUILTY
7) Ending a question with a period
8) Ending a non-rhyming poem on a rhyme - GUILTY
9) The reversal of size, expectation, etc
10) Description or declaration by way of posing a question and then answering it
11) The “the new X” construction
12) Comparing something to itself - GUILTY, but not like the example
13) Extreme (ironic) egotism
14) Explicit references to poems, especially the poem in question
15) Mention of a forest animal - GUILTY if birds are lumped in with "forest animal"
16) Use of casual hedges like “sort of” and “kind of/kinda” - GUILTY
17) Humorous use of ecstatic “O” - GUILTY of this while drafting, but I always revise it out
18) The very long title - GUILTY of this while drafting, but I always revise it out after a reader asks, in effect, "Why the hell is this title so long? Who do you think you are? James Wright?"
19) Poetic allusion as joke
20) Surprise re-framing of an utterance - Not guilty, but I like this if you can do it without being cute, do it for a purpose.
21) Verbs as reasons for linebreaks
22) Fake proper names - GUILTY on one account, but it was worth it: "another / tally slash in the column Unsuccessful / Ciphers of the Outer World" (from "Wash n' Shop")
23) Moving the poem forward by associating one word with an unrelated word that sounds similar
24) An often campy obsession with science/sci-fi terminology
25) Self-aware naivete of tone and diction
26) The act of identification as an opportunity for humor
27) The throwaway pun
28) “Scare” quotes
29) Stacking up of ten-dollar words
30) Breaking a line so as to stack a repeated word on top of itself
31) Ending a poem with a question - GUILTY of this while drafting. The questions usually come out, but if they stay, they're moved up into the poem
32) Embedding a fragment of a quote - GUILTY of quoting lines and pieces of lines from hymns - Can that be so bad?
33) Including a brand name in a list
34) Clipping or altering a cliche
35) Correcting a cliche
36) Definition or description by negation - GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY - this negation is a part of my poetics
37) Compound nonce words
38) Polysemy: Language deliberately meaning multiple things at once
39) Parataxis: Pairing nebulously related things/utterances
40) Illogical causation
41) Ending with an end (e.g., fade to black, death, credits, Fin“)

Friday, January 29, 2010

From endings to beginnings

Last week, I posted some thoughts and examples from my own work in response to Joy Katz's Best American Poetry Blog entry about the use of repetition in the endings of contemporary poems. I summarized her entry this way:
Katz suggests two reasons for why there is so much repetition.

First, this repetition is a product of poets doing what they see everyone else doing it. In part, this may be out of some anxiety of expectation we feel while we write for readers (other poets) who are looking for repetition in endings. Katz explains, "So we're used to seeing it, and we've got those kick-kicks in our minds — our poems are Rockettes, or maybe they're blowing kisses, or landing a couple of punches — as we read each others' work. We do it because we do it."

Second, we repeat because it is a variation of free verse form, and repetition has a long tradition that informs our contemporary moment. Katz cites lines from Plath, Bishop, Yeats, Sidney, and Shakespeare, as examples.
While there wasn't anything particularly revolutionary in her post, and while I'm still waiting on the follow-up posts, her thoughts were productive in the sense that she compelled me to go back and look for consistency, patterns, variations, idiosyncrasies, recurring moves, in the ways I end the poems in my manuscript. As a result, I've been able to go back through the manuscript and reorganize a bit, try some things, and locate a couple of places that need shoring up, probably with a few more "linkage" poems, or a longer piece.

Continuing along the same lines (ha!), Joan Houlihan has a review at Contemporary Poetry Review of four recent books. The review is worth reading for many reasons, but primarily because it focuses on opening lines and how readers use an individual poem's opening lines to make snap-judgements about whether the poem (and book?) is worth reading.

Anyone who has ever worked for or edited a literary journal knows this is often the case. One gets an initial feeling about the poem right off the bat. Knowing whether a submission is going to move on to the next round can happen just as quickly. For a journal, this is why it is important to have a number of readers and assistant editors, and that all the readers treat the slush pile work just as they'd like their own poems to be treated. Call it "The Golden Rule of Slush" if that helps. More on this and other matters related to slush piles and editing soon. I've got something percolating...

In her review, Houlihan compares the rhetorical function of a poem's opening lines to a movie's trailer, the idea being that readers determine whether or not to continue on into the body of poem in the same way they determine if they are going see a certain movie, that their decisions are based on initial impressions. One primary reason readers decide on their own and quickly is the disappearance of poetry gate-keepers due to a kind of the-world-is-flattening phenomenon in poetry publishing (internet, .pdf, POD, online pubs, etc.). Consequently, as Houlihan states, "the evaluation of what’s worth reading is falling more and more to the reader/buyer." (Um, shouldn't it be this way?)

I can say this is the case for how I choose to see a movie, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to suss out what looks good to me from the stinkers, and to do so quickly. And rarely do I read reviews in order to find out what's worth seeing. But is it the same for me in how I read poetry? This is something worth serious consideration and time.

Questions to be considered: Do I read more widely or deeply? And if more widely, how do I determine what's worth my precious time? How am I reading? Are I reading for craft? Reading for pleasure? Reading for entertainment? Am I looking to be delighted? Or for instruction? To understand myself more? The world more?

As an example of one answer to the reading for entertainment question, a colleague told me that reading Larry Levis is, for him, "like watching TV." I guess I was supposed to interpret this as a statement about value and the uses of Levis's work, or about the depth of his poems, and, as you might expect, I whole-heartedly and vocally disagreed with the characterization, or at least I disagreed with my what I inferred from his simile. But, it raised an interesting question about reading poetry as if it's entertainment coefficient were the same as an episode of House or The O.C.

Is this an okay thing to do? Are some ways of reading better than others?

As an aside, thinking about TV/Poetry reminds me of this exchange with Bob Hicok at the How a Poem Happens blog:
HAPH: Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem ["The Active Reader"]? Any influences you’d care to disclose?
Hicok: Of course you mean poets. Poets always mean poets when they ask that question. I don’t recall who I was reading at the time, or if I was reading. I like reading TV, to be honest. It turns the pages for you.
[h/t to Matthew Nienow for jogging my memory about this interview last night on Facebook.]
In her review, Houlihan looks at the opening lines of poems in recent books by Charlie Smith, Lawrence Raab, Bruce Bond, and Liz Waldner, and summarizes her methodology thusly:
I think most readers of poetry can tell from the opening lines of a book if it’s a book they want to read more of, just as most of us make a decision about seeing a movie from its trailer. As with a movie trailer, a lot can be seen in a small space. To test my theory, I’ll use the opening lines of four books, all written from the same aesthetic (an I-based narrative) so as not to confuse ideas about an aesthetic with those of writing ability. Imagine that you must decide whether or not the whole book is worth reading based on their opening lines.
Again, you should read the review for yourself, but here's how I inventory her primary points regarding craft and appealing to readers:
  1. Opening lines that begin with or revolve around an "I" often precede poems that are flat and unsurprising.
  2. Poems that open with an omniscient, third-person POV often leads to "mildly interesting anecdotes" if not didacticism.
  3. Poems that use clever enjambment to interrupt the reader's expectations of syntax are more likely to persuade a reader to continue.
  4. Positioning yourself on the outskirts of tradition's boundaries, but not pushing past them, will give you a "dangerous allure" that will delight readers and make them stay with you.
  5. Poets today all write about the same subjects because they are all influenced by the same teachers at the same MFA programs, and if you're going to distinguish yourself, you'd better find ways to be both emotionally moving and unique.
Some of these points are directed more specifically at opening lines, and some of them seem more about poems on the whole. While I might not be on the same page as Houlihan in terms of her analysis of the specific poems in the review, overall, the reminders regarding craft and the poet's relationship to their audience are right on the money. In short, you've only got seconds to convince a reader to keep on reading, so you'd better figure out a way to make yourself stand out.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, last week I posted the endings of five of my poems as a kind of evaluation exercise in order to see if my poems use repetition in the ways discussed by Joy Katz. I'm going to do the same thing with the beginnings of those five poems.

Although she does include titles, something that Houlihan doesn't discuss is in her review is the title's relationship to the opening lines, and I think that's something worth thinking about. I'm going to include titles as well, though I'm going to hold off on my reasons until a later entry. I would be interested in reading about how all of you use titles, your strategies, etc.

So, here are the titles and opening lines of the five poems I mentioned last week. Applying Houlihan's points to my lines will hopefully help me to notice some new angles of approach to the manuscript, and I'd love to hear what you all think.

Looking at my poems, I'm feeling a bit like Charles Wright who, in a poem somewhere, wonders, "What do I d with all of this?" How do my poems' openings stack up against Houlihan's criteria?
_______


Cold sweeps east across the asphalt predestined
for the warehouses of the snow, the darkening
suburbs.

          ("Not Pregnant: A Theodicy")


Stuck good and bleeding out,
its horns torqued to gore, Di Modica’s
Wall Street Bull charges headlong
toward the abyss.

          ("Of Falling")


Crossed-out and re-circled,
the Want Ads’ daily litany
of numbers and names lies crumpled
on the bar where loose change

for the busted jukebox stacks up,
mini nickel-plated silos
looming lusterless over dusty
mahogany laminate plains.

          ("Field Rows")


Maybe it was enough to believe
the Zodiac’s blazing entirety
would be cast from the sky,
an effortless handful of salt

scattered to the Kansas plains’
red wheat.

          ("Heaven as Nothing but Distance")


April’s cold snap
fools next door’s
lilac buds, glistens

a white valediction on
last night’s roadkill mange.

          ("Praise Nothing")

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Usher review to read

Barbara Berman, author of chapbook The Generosity of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2008), has a review of one of my favorite poet's newest books posted at The Rumpus.
It's a review of B.H. Fairchild's Usher, and it opens curiously this way:
I hungrily dove in to Usher, his latest collection, and soon encountered a profusion of pointless epigraphs, including three on one page. Feeling like the crabby critic who encountered crippling emendations in an edition of Frost, I found twenty-four epigraphs, usually unnecessary, in one hundred and seventeen pages.
I say "curiously" because I've savored reading through Usher twice now (it takes a while to give it a full read--like months), and I was never bothered by, nor did I really notice, how many epigraphs there are.

I think my not noticing is less evidence of my poor reading as it is a testament to the ease and comfortability of Farichild's poems, even as they are ornate and cooly crystalline in their construction. I didn't feel, to use a famous workshop buzzword, "distracted" by the epigraphs. If anything, they seemed, well, right, and useful. Establish context, tone, etc.

There's certainly a backlash against epigraphs in some poetry communities, especially those communities with ivory or glass walls. The attention of comments gets paid to little, bitchy stuff, than to how the poems are made, the larger craft elements, the poetics.

Or, so I say from my position firmly ensconced behind ivory and glass....

I'm certainly not including Barbara Berman in the Picky-Picky. We're in agreement over quite a lot concerning Usher, particularly this statement:

Usher should solidify B. H. Fairchild’s reputation as an essential force in contemporary letters. The praise he receives typically includes “American,” suggesting a smaller audience than he deserves. He merits acclaim beyond the academy, beyond our shores.
Anyway, you should read the review of Usher. You can also read my previous posts on B.H. Fairchild by clicking on the following links:



Blue Spark


In an effort to get more of my work online, here's a poem published in the current issue of Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall/Winter 2009.

The picture on the left is a photo I took a couple years ago of the bar in Spokane, Washington, that initially served as a vehicle for the poem.

"Blue Spark" is one of those poems that's been around for a long time. Actually it's one of the first poems I wrote after moving to Oregon for my MFA, and written shortly after I'd just begun studying under Garrett Hongo whose instruction in poetry and so many other things dramatically influenced and focused so much in my life.

The first drafts of "Blue Spark" go back to 2001, but the poem has been relatively the same since about 2002, only tinkering with little edits here and there, chiseling out unnecessary articles, syllables, etc. It's one of those poems that I was tempted to give up on, but never did. I believed in it, and knew that one day it'd find a home. And now it finally has, and a wonderful home at that.








95 Cent Skool -- Wow. Just. Wow.


Who wants to go?

More brilliance from Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr:

The 95 Cent Skool is a 6 day long experimental seminar that will be offered in Oakland, California, July 26-31, 2010. It is convened by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr. It will explore the possibilities of poetry writing as part of a larger social practice, at a distance from the economic and professional expectations of institutions. We believe a dozen people sitting around a table can’t ruin poetry, but that costs, professional context, mythologies of individual genius, and client/service-based models can — and in our own experiences teaching in pay-to-play writing programs, often do.

Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. “Social poetics” is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.

The 6 days will feature:
• Morning discussion groups lead by Juliana and Joshua
• Two guest speakers: one on the political economy and one on ecology
• Afternoon group and/or collaborative writing sessions
• Dinners and drinks at a nearby bar

The 6 days will not feature:
• Workshops led by a “master poet”
• Agents or editors who will advise your work into publication
• A Richard Wilbur Celebration Night
• Instruction in reciting poetry to bring out the emotional content of the poem

The final program will be available later in the Spring.

Each participant will be asked to contribute up to 1% of annual gross income as their 95 cents exclusively towards operating expenses. The workshop leaders and as many other organizers as possible will donate their time. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Email us if you’ve got questions about how much you can pay. We will also help in finding free housing for any participants in need.

The program is open to any interested participant with any level of prior engagement with poetry. This program is not affiliated with any institution of higher education and no transferrable institutional credit will be offered. There is no application fee, but space is limited. Please send a note indicating interest and experience to 95centskool@gmail.com

Please feel encouraged to re/post this listing to your blog or otherwise redistribute. If you would like to receive further information about the 95 Cent Skool, please email the address above, or join the 95 Cent Skool facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=300963159304&ref=mf
The 95 Cent Skool will happen with the support of Small Press Traffic and 'A 'A Arts.

Thank you very much,

the 95¢ Skoolers —

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The horse and rider fell into the sea


Wave Books State of the Union Discount


Wave Books State of the Union Discount:

ONE DAY ONLY: In conjunction with Obama's State of the Union Address tonight (9 pm EST), Wave Books is offering a supreme discount on the REAL address: STATE OF THE UNION: 50 POLITICAL POEMS, featuring poems by 50 contemporary poets. $5 for a softcover edition, available only through the Wave website here: http://www.wavepoetry.com/catalog/66

BIR-duh



So, yeah, birds often appear in my poems, which is understandable, I think, because my project for this manuscript is investigating suburbia and its vehicles. "Vehicles" as in "large automobiles" (James Tate reference -- bonus points if you can name the poem), cars up on blocks, semis, etc., and also "vehicle" in the I.A. Richards sense, obviously, which is where the birds come in. Scrub jays, doves, cardinals, robins, unidentifiable gray birds, finches, juncos, and so forth.

And birds come up so frequently in my poems that not too long ago, and I think I may have mentioned this here before, E. suggested I change my manuscript title from Suburban Hymnal, to Birds and Shit that They Do.

I don't know. There is a certain ring to it, the latter I mean. Don't you think? And, yeah, I've been thinking I need to explore new title options anyway, so....

_______



A book I've meant to recommend: Whirl Is King: Poems from a Life List by Brendan Galvin (LSU Press, 2008). Here's the LSU Press description:

For nearly five decades, award-winning poet Brendan Galvin has written about the birds of the tidal flats, woods, and marshes around his Cape Cod home and on islands in the North Atlantic. He knows their field marks, habits, and songs, and his work demonstrates an obvious fascination with them. Whirl Is King gathers forty-three of his bird poems about herons, owls, shorebirds, warblers, raptors, wrens, and other exotic visitors blown in by wind and storm.
Seen from various angles and stratagems, Galvin's migrants and locals are always in motion, acting and acted upon, sometimes predatory, sometimes possessing mythic qualities. In tones ranging from the elegiac to the hilarious, these poems inhabit the overlapping borders of human and avian life: "not to salute such / charity of song / though it be plain as / thumbsqueaks on clear windowpanes, / not to say their names, / and the shadow of death passes / across our tongues." Whirl Is King features Galvin's hallmark descriptive powers and verbal music on full display and demonstrates his talent as a contemporary poet.

I don't have the book in front of me because I had to return it to the library, and I'm going to defer commenting on it because I plan on writing a review of it as soon as my rhetoric prelim is finished. That's a pretty weak recommendation, I know, but I think his poems are recommendation enough.

Here's an example:



Hummer

A few feet away in fuchsia,
wings are inferred.
She signs the air with herself
so fast the whole benediction
is visible, then gone,

& when I look around she sits
resting on the line among plastic
clothes-pin—synecdoche,
metaphor, or just a sense of humor?

Air's ampersands, seahorses
of the aether, Thomas Morton believed
they live on bees, & Loranzo Newcomb,
thinking to taste their nurture, went about
inhaling the essence of trumpetvines.

This one's an ounce emphasizing
the grossness of chickadees,
hinting at the design of the Concorde
that used to boom out over the Atlantic
each morning around 8:30,

& so quick she has few
effective enemies. If extremes
truly contain their opposites,
she & I have at least
that in common, along with
a life among the trees.



Brendan Galvin
from Habitat





Also of interest to you may be this recent anthology edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee: The Poetry of Birds.

The Guardian online has a quick review.

I haven't seen a copy myself, but just put in a request to the university library. Will let you know....

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

You should submit to this

From Stacey Lynn Brown's blog "Ten Fingers Typing":
The editors, Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz, are pleased to announce a call for submissions for A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry.
We are seeking poems that work within the literary tradition of persona poetry: poems written as dramatic monologues, whose speakers employ masks, or whose character and voice are different from the poet's own.
Please submit up to 5 unpublished poems. We will also consider poems whose rights have reverted back to the author.
All submissions will be accepted electronically. Please send an email to the editors at facesanthology@gmail.com with the poet's name and 'Submission for Persona Anthology' as the subject line, with the poems as an attachment.
The submission deadline has been extended to February 15th.
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