Cosmic Liverwurst

From Poetry and Thanksgiving at Where Poetry Intersects

2011-11-25T09:31:00.001-05:00

Today I am grateful for the life of a man I barely knew.

Fausto, a member of my parish, passed away this week at the age of 82. I knew him a little, which is to say I knew him at 9:00 mass, where he was an usher, and I am a lector. When my family first began attending this mass, I formed an instant opinion of him as a gentle but disagreeable sort - a curmudgeon in the most commonly-held sense of the word. He moved slowly, rarely smiled, and gave the smallest nods in response to greetings.

As most people do, we always sit in or near the same place at our regular mass, and as I got to know the people around us - long-time parishioners all, many older than us - in the same demographic as Fausto - I began to notice the greetings, silent and subtle, that passed among them as he would pass at the end of the communion line. I don't know if i ever saw him smile, but I surely saw my fellow parishioners smile as he passed and nodded, passed and whispered.

See the rest at http://wherepoetryintersects.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetry-and-thanksgiving.html

Poetry and Purpose (new at Where Poetry Intersects)

2011-10-21T06:06:00.001-04:00

http://wherepoetryintersects.blogspot.com/2011/10/and-purpose.html

Poetry and Remembering (At Where Poetry Intersects...)

2011-09-11T18:30:00.002-04:00

http://wherepoetryintersects.blogspot.com/2011/09/and-remembering.html

... and Teaching (over at Where Poetry Intersects)

2011-09-04T16:02:00.001-04:00

http://wherepoetryintersects.blogspot.com/2011/09/poetry-and-teaching.html

Furnishing the New Place

2011-08-27T23:31:00.000-04:00

Loyal readers, I'm migrating the content of this site to a new locale: wherepoetryintersects.blogspot.com. Today's entry is (naturally) about the storm it its uniquely inspiring way. Do drop by!

In which stuff I've been contemplating on long car rides comes bubbling out becuase it's been so frapping long since I logged in

2011-08-13T09:16:00.002-04:00

{begin Mike Greenberg voice} and we're back and better than ever! {end Mike Greenberg voice}

A busy, good, frustrating, scary, wonderful month since last I checked in here. This is not a place where I discuss the business world, but no one associated with an American corporation can look at the events of the past month and not wonder a bit about the future. It is in times like this that we typically turn to our art for solace and encouragement, for a place to voice what we need to voice and hear what we need to hear. Which makes me a bit of a banana for having been separated from the art for a while.

Well, not really "separated". I haven't been separated from preparing on the new season of the Spoken Word Series in our new location. We've moved from Symposia Bookstore (where we spend 8 terrific years growing and thriving under the stewardship of the amazing folks there) to The Theater Company. We're giving up a location in which words literally surround you, and moving to one where performers can dial up the volume a bit. I've tried to reflect that a little in the choice of artists for the coming year, and as usual have tried to blend voices new to Hoboken with word artists who have visited us in the past. The first event will be Sunday October 2, and the whole season will be announced here and at The Theater Company in the coming weeks.

And not separated from my writing projects, per se, but rather in a different mode - a "research" mode, if you will. I've got two projects in the cooker right now - each focusing on heroes of mine in one way or another, and since I'm producing poems that actually are grounded in reality (in principle, anyway), I feel a responsibility to be aware of the truth. Note that I say "be aware of the truth", not "depict the truth faithfully"; I don't want to get caught in that same old trap of something needing to be true to matter to the reader, but neither do I care present a complete guess at the truth when written history is available to guide me.

And not separated from the muse, but rather giving her a chance to recharge. I've challenged her to keep up earlier in the summer, to sit with me while I experimented with solos on my accordion, or tried to prepare energizing and meaningful education experiences (not "training materials"), or to do the little writing I'd been doing. She needed a break. I spent almost an entire day last week just playing with my kids in the pool and eating my father-in-law's ridiculously good cooking. Those who do not consider this an essential part of the creative process can just kiss my beefsteak.

And not separated from poetry. From the recent arrival of Jeannine Gailey's terrific new book, to finally getting to Horoscopes from the Dead, to coming late to Elizabeth Bishop, I've been populating the mental database with new words. Ray Bradbury (and many others, I know) said many times that if you want to write you must read. Bradbury, though, was one of the few I recall saying you should read everything (poems, plays, novels, nonfiction...) to uncover metaphors outside your experience that can inform your own writing. I'm especially open to this idea, I guess, since my poems are informed so much by a primary source unexpected (in many opinions) to show up on poems.

But still, in a world preoccupied with output and emotion (heavy on the latter, if the NYSE and Iowa are any indication), I haven't produced a lot lately. Of either, I suppose. But we have those stages.

I just wonder in which order I'll start producing them again....

Poems and Projects and Pop/Folk, oh my!

2011-07-17T09:52:00.003-04:00

While I'd be pleased to propose the paucity of publications since my previous post was atypical, I shan't purport that preposterous prevarication upon you, my people.

(I need to purge my alliterator from time to time, else it spills forth into the poems. Thanks for your patience.)

****

It's been a busy summer at Vincenti Central. I'll tell you about the poetry stuff at the bottom of this post, but I think I'll deliver the rest to you in rough reverse chronological order....

I suppose my May appearance with Alex and Janel must have gone OK, because they were nice enough to invite me to appear with them again, this time at Rockwood Music Hall. I realize what most people think when they see the accordion appear (at least those who recognize the instrument - it's not a frequent sight at most Manhattan clubs), and it's a joy to be able to join in with great artists like these to bust up a few misconceptions. I think there are likely to be more such opportunities; if you'd like a chance to open your mind to a new free-reed experience, go "like" my FB page, or drop a note to the davidvincenti.com list email address and we'll keep you in the loop.

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The reason I was available to join Alex and Janel was that I was not able to join my Staten Island Music School bandmates at the 2011 American Accordionists Association National Festival in Charleston. I have it on good authority that the Busso Accordion Orchestra rocked the ballroom with our southern medley; you can check out one of our warm-up sessions here (audio only).

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I am now officially a Project Management Professional; last weekend I passed the PMP exam! All PMPs are honor-bound not to divulge any bit of the content of the exam, but this much I can tell you: Don't take it lightly when the prep materials tell you that you're at a real disadvantage if you haven't managed a large (seriously, LARGE) project previously in your career.

This was the first significant educational challenge I'd set for myself in quite a long time, and I'm a little surprised at how I settled into a study routine. Granted, it was a routine heavily tailored to my schedule (audio books for commuting time, microexercises for those moments before meetings start, etc.), and my family was gracious enough to give me the 4 Saturday mornings leading up the exam for uninterrupted study time. Sitting in a library studying... THAT brings a person back...

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Finally, the Voices From History tour is taking shape. S. Thomas Summers and I trialed the event, in which we present stories from the lives of Galileo Galilei and a confederate soldier, at The Theater Company during Monroe Arts Center's May Open Studio day. We're pretty pleased with the way it comes across. So far we've got presentations planned in Campbell Hall, New York and Fanwood, NJ, and we're expecting to present more in the months to come. The best way to keep track of that is through FB, but don't worry, we'll find a way to get you the news.

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We wish watermelons for you to welcome the warm weather as we wander away....

Rats. Fire up the alliteratinator!

Let's Be Fathers Today....

2011-06-18T22:45:00.004-04:00

I presume everyone has heard about Adam Mansbach's new book, Go the Bleep to Sleep, by now. There's an audiobook version out with the Samuel L. Jackson at the microphone; he's great in just about everything, and I'm sure he's great in this.

Now, I'm sure I'll read, maybe even own a copy at some point, Walter the Farting Dog won me over, after all, but I'm really looking for something else in these books. Not that the book isn't funny, or isn't well-written, but I'd also like to have a Father's Day in which fathers are not absent, or caricature, or sitcomically self-absorbed. Where are the books that celebrate the spectacular mundanity of fatherhood?

In my experience, books intended for or about fathers revel in their ignorance of pregnancy, birth and rearing, start and end with religious intent, or are specific to a small segment of fathers. A few (the Armin Brott series, most notably). Fathers' Day "poems" are gooey verses that also celebrate our shortcomings more than anything that might be called a strength.

Is it possible I'm the only one interested in writing this space? Or reading about it? I hope not. So let me exhort my peer group this way: Fellow fathers, take this pledge with me today: Let's stay on the road to being the fathers we've never stopped hoping we'd be, and let's talk about the trip.

Happy Father's Day to all who celebrate. May you have moments your children will talk until net Father's Day.

Fellow fathers, take this pledge with me today: Let's be the fathers we've never stopped hoping we'd be.

Bits for Early June

2011-06-11T17:47:00.002-04:00

My kids keep a list of "Things you would never expect to hear in conversation". On that note, I find myself asking "Is it possible to be friends with something other than a human being?" Facebook forces me to conclude that no, it's not possible (certain large domestic animals excepted). That's probably a bit self-defeating, I know.....

***

In the middle of "The Reading Promise" by Alice Ozma. Subject hits close to my heart. Best line so far: "It takes a certain type of child to develop a crippling, life-changing fear of the corpse of John F. Kennedy."....

***

The Mets are kind of an analog for my artistic year to date: Not great, moments of wonder, better than reasonably hoped for, but not exceptional. Worth contining to root for, though....

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Just finished celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday with bowling and chinese food. Another reason I can't join in the traditional badmouthing of the mothers-in-law during office small talk....

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Studying for the PMP exam at present. First really major educational challenge I've set for myself in a long time (other than the pathological need to learn something new - even something useless - every day). Will be back to collect your wishes, vibes and mojo as the event presents itself more imminently.

***

As Father's Day approaches, I ask myself what kind of father I have been so far. Well, when I remarked earlier today about the weather that "It's cold and it's damp", my kids replied in song. In unison.

I'm good with that.

A busy collection of bits

2011-05-21T11:02:00.005-04:00

Two things I should have mentioned weeks ago:

The Spoken Word Series' new sponsor, The Theater Company, his hosting an afternoon of planned and open-mic performance as part of Monroe Arts Center's May Open Studio Day Sunday. Siobhan Barry and Scott Summers will join me in presenting the literary side of the arts spectrum, and we'll be joined on the schedule by some of the great musical talent that works the Hudson County area (and beyond!). Scott and I will be unveiling a new project called Voices from History where we showcase voices from times in history that you don't find in contemporary poetry all that often. We think it's worth a visit; check out the TTC website for the schedule, or just arrive at 1 and spend the day with us.

I have a poem in the last issue of Redheaded Stepchild - one I'm particularly proud of because it's quite a departure for me. It derives from a scene from Fred McBagonluri's Dusk Recitals; writing about an image that originated in someone else's mind and is completely outside my experience is quite atypical for me. I'm quite proud of the poem when you're there, make sure you read the rest of the issue, especially A True Princess Bruises; it's always gratifying for me to appear alongside poets whose work and counsel has guided me, and Jeannine Gailey's poems take you to a place you think you know but still surprise you.

And here's one thing I don't know that I'm supposed to mention, but I'm too jazzed not to: there's a rumor going around that Alex and Janel have invited some special guests to sit in with them during the release show for their new collection "You Won't Be Alone", and that one of these guests may be packing an accordion. You should go even if there's no accordion. But there may be one. Maybe.

A Few Words From My Mother

2011-05-08T01:39:00.003-04:00

Traditional Mother's Day poems, like most poems written for Hallmarkian holidays, tend toward sweetness, and since I don't (think I) do that very well, I'll not contribute to the buffet here (for some occasion poems, check out the last week at yourdailypoem.com or David Young's "Mother's Day" at poets.org). A rare alignment of circumstances gave me a couple uninterrupted hours with my mother this weekend, which we spent mostly by talking about events from long ago - some well known and raised for reliving, some that I knew less well. It's interesting to revisit events for which I have some memory of as an 8- or 12- or 17-year old through the filter of being a father now, and to hear my mother describe these events to me as a peer, without the softening or misdirection that sometimes infiltrates the parent-child relationship.

Some of the events we relived made their way into poems 20 years ago, some more recently; I've mentioned in this space that the older I get the righter my father becomes, and gaining a little context makes me want to return to that material and treat it a bit differently. And of course, there are the poems about my father as young man, whose subjects I know only from what my mother has told me. Lord knows he wasn't about to talk about them.

So though I've written more about my father than my mother - because ours was the more complicated relationship, and because I tried to write my way through the months after his death. But I suppose in a way those poems about Dad were almost as much about the shared experience with my mother as they were about my memory of my father.

Which reminds me of a quote; I don't know where exactly I first heard this, but Google turns it up intact and similarly attributed in enough places that I think it must be accurate. And after watching my daughter compose a poem for my wife, I'm convinced that whether it's accurate or not, it's true:

"My mother is a poem I'll never be able to write, though everything I write is a poem to my mother." Sharon Doubiago

Happy Mother's Day.

On Easter Sunday, a poem might also be....

2011-04-24T00:05:00.001-04:00

This is a story about a poem.

For the past few years, I have taught 7th grade CCD (religious education) in my church. I began teaching it for the reason I think many intellectual smorgasbordists* would: I wanted to get to know my own faith and beliefs better. Part of that is self-interest, being at the time in my life when one tends to do a lot of recursive examination; part is practical, as my kids are approaching the ages when their questioning (well, more their insistence upon answers) will begin to strip my ability to answer unless I maintain myself better than I'd been.

With a very few exceptions, I've found my students' questions to be relentless, unembarrassedly personal, and ruthlessly fair and honest. One of the more common questions I get from the kids is whether or not I believe the particular miracle we just discussed actually happened (surrounded by 3 minutes of what they would do if confronted by such unbelieveability). The subject of miracles is a tough one to broach with a 12/13-year old - their world is complicated and indefinable enough without the burden of believing in an otherworldly power. But -- unlike the persona I adopt in my poems -- I always tell them the truth. Which starts with my grandmother.

What faith have comes, ultimately, from my grandmother. In the whole of my life, hers was the strongest faith I have ever encountered. Not the loudest, not the most obvious, but the strongest. I was well into my 20s before I started to learn about the hardships Nana had faced in her life, hardships which might have caused another person to adjust their disposition toward the cynical. But Nana's was definitely an Easter faith; she believed that no one would ever be burdened with more than they could handle, and that renewal and restoration was waiting for you if you could manage your burden just a little longer.

Which is why Nana continues to show up in my poems, and why I feel pretty strongly about those poems. I'm not objective about them and I don't pretend to be. But there was one particular disappointing episode in her life that I've always felt was perfect for a recollective poem, one that ought to be presented in sepia tones, it's so much a peek at the past. I've been writing and rewriting it for years, never quite sure what to do next with it, or whether to call it done. But I've thought for a while I had handled it well enough to let my peers have a look.

A short while ago, I learned of John Newmark's online journal Generations of Poetry, a new (this year) literary effort in support of the geneablogging (online genealogy) community. It seemed a logical place for this poem I've wanted so much to take out of the folio and expose to the light. It takes place (mostly) in 1937, and it has a lot to do with the records we keep about our families. I won't tell you more; you can read it for yourself.

Today. Easter Sunday.

Now I don't know if that means anything. It's presumptuous to think that the cascade of coincidences that led to the appearance of Grand Canyon, 1937 on Easter is anything more than just that. And don't mistake me for anything other than a (slightly sentimental) realist. I know enough about statistics to know that if you flip a coin 50 times every day, one day you'll get TAILS 50 flips in a row. I know enough about people and their faith to know that a divine hand is frequently and perhaps foolishly seen in things those people are desperate to make sense of.

But.

I will have a new group of 7th graders in September. And sometime before Halloween they will ask me if I believe in miracles. As I do every year, I'll tell them I don't know. Then maybe I'll tell them this story and ask what they believe.

If you are celebrating it today, I wish you a joyful Easter.

* relentlessly curious on a surprisingly far-flung set of areas of interest.

Truth Is Not the Caramel Center

2011-04-10T02:03:00.003-04:00

Pulled again this week into the old conversation: Truth in poetry. Answering the question "Wow, did that really happen?" Whether to show my mother what I write*.

It's that same question again and again: whether it's reasonable to expect a person reading a poem not to place the poet into the person of the speaker, or just to assume it's all true. I haven't found a way to convince people that it's really not, and I'm not just talking about novices or non-poets, but also about people who have a reasonable claim at being writing hobbyists.

I usually try to bring the visual arts into this discussion, ask whether people look at paintings and ask if the scene really happened. It usually doesn't work, but I think I finally hit on the way to connect this comparison. I think it's probably true that visual artists prepare a sketch or use (pencil/light) guidelines when producing a piece of art suitable for hanging; these are the equivalent of truth to the poet. They may get you into the piece, but they're not there when you're done, though their shape may be visible.

The problem, I think, is the old opinion of poetry as therapy, not as craft. I'm not saying there isn't therapeutic or cathartic poetry, or music, or painting, but that it's silly to think it all is catharsis. Even established writers talk to me about poems "needing to be written". Do we think of screenplays in that light? Novels? Some, to be sure, but we don't start with their truthfulness as the assumption. I don't think we do, anyway.

And that, I'm afraid, goes back to how poetry is taught. It's either dry and dead or first-person pathos. That's one reason I like to follow the Poetry Out Loud competition; giving voice to other's work breaks wide open the idea that the poem must be a confessional or observational moment.

Truth is not the element that makes the poem essential or beautiful; it is not the reward. It's not even essential to the poem. It's just another way into the moment. No, I don't think the conversation's over, or that I'm winning many people over, but I intend to keep trying.

* - Not all of it. Sorry, Mom.

A night out with words

2011-04-07T21:41:00.005-04:00

Had an unexpected opportunity to catch Lyn Lifshin (prolific poet and teacher) and Michael Mirolla (writer and editor of Guernica Editions) at the Montclair Public Library tonight - a delightful reading. Michael opened and read poems from several books, then closed with a story that was twice a gift. The first gift was his discovery that he'd brought the piece at all. It turns out he was unable to bring his books with him for reasons I'll leave him to work out with the folks responsible, and he happened to have a hardcopy of the story from his files. The second manifestation of gift happened when I approached him after the reading and mentioned I'd enjoyed the story and thought I could find an eager audience for it at home, and he opened his briefcase and handed me the story - proving to me again that the rule is true talent generally shows true generosity.

I hadn't seen Lifshin read in about 15 years and she was exactly the same as I remember her. Picked up her new book, All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, which she read a bit from. It's a fun collection in which she addresses her relationships with many other poets and she insists that some of it is true! As is the rule (at least with me; don't know about you), I tried out something new in the open, which forced me to put the pen to paper. My iGoogle counter has been yelling at me again - 89 days since I completed a poem - and it was great to finally click the reset button. \

And.... just heard tonight that Generations of Poetry, an online journal with a genealogy focus, has accepted a poem; more on that when it appears.

Hope your tax season is going well!

.... And, We're Back.

2011-03-29T19:34:00.004-04:00

What's the expression? March comes in like a lion, tears into all your stuff like it's been dipped in zebra gravy then poops all over the debris? Well, it's something like that.

Wild, wild month. Not the least contribution to the craziness came from preparing for and delivering a talk this month title "Poetry in Praise: Tools for Praying" to a (predominantly) non-writing audience. This was part of an adult education program my church (along with 3 others) presents during Lent, and I'd received a clue from some of the planned participants that expecting participation in a writing exercise would be akin to calling for wax fruit to be juicy when bitten. Nonetheless I relied heavily on an introduction to poetry lesson that I've used in grammar school workshops before. It's an orientation that borrow shamelessly from material and advice from Elizabeth Lund and BJ Ward, and it went pretty well with this mature audience. I was determined to provide an element of discussion of craft even if I didn't expect much of the crowd to apply it in the room.

The highest praise came from someone who commented that they had signed up for the session of loyalty (to support me), but - and this is a direct quote - "actually enjoyed (her)self". I like to think that's part how I organized the lecture, part my entertaining style of presentation, and part the anthology of poems I present which, though all on Christian themes (obviously), ranged from Greeks writers circa 150AD to post-WWII Japanese writers, from the cloistered life of Thomas Merton to the busy life of the modern secular American.

And yes, I foisted a little of my own work upon them; you don't need to yank my guild card, fellow shameless self-promoters. I'll type up the anthology over the rest of this weekend.

Happy PoMo, BTW.

Overanalysis of a Marge Piercy Quote

2011-03-05T07:44:00.004-05:00

Today's Literary Quote of the Day (courtesy dailyliteraryquote.com): The real writer is the one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. - Marge Piercy.

This is a terribly rich quote. Let's take it a bit at at time.

The real writer is the one who really writes. - This seems obvious to most creative writers but let's parse if both ways and see what it means. Forwards: To be a real writer, one must really write. True; if you're more interested in the trappings of "being a writer" than in acquiring craft and producing quality output, I don't think you can claim to be a real writer. Backwards: If you really write, you are a real writer". This is a bit less obvious to me. If one defines "really writing" as "writing containing a progressive and expanding sense of craft and desire", I'm down with the definition. I suspect a prolific and widely-reaching writer like Piercy probably meant it that way, or something like it. I do not, however, accept the position that all creative writing hobbyists are "really writing"; many are occupying time with literary sameness.

Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. - A brilliant line, but I don't buy it. Perhaps this is the geek in me poking out, but consider the origin of the phlogiston: Before the isolation and discovery of oxygen, there was for a short time a theory that all flammable materials contained a substance - phlogiston - could be liberated by fire. Clearly, the theory was wrong; flammability is raw material, plus oxygen, plus ignition. Now, I believe completely that combustion is a great analog for writing. One must have fuel (interesting content), oxygen (your personal contribution of style, form, genre, etc.) and....

Work is its own cure. -- this is the real ignition. While I believe in inspiration, work is the real spark. It's what takes the fuel and the necessary environment and makes it come to life with meaningful heat.

So back to the phlogiston, I'd say the need for something to burn is a necessary input in writing, but that's not "talent". Talent is the combination of fuel and spark. However, I do believe that good writing is not understood by those who do not study it well; perhaps there's the implication of that belief in Piercy's use of an unlikely and incorrect theory in comparison.

You have to like it better than being loved. -- What's the old saw? "If you can imagine yourself being anything else, go be that, because you're not a writer." A poetic overstatement by Ms. Piercy, but true enough.

Interesting challenge, trying to define the "real writer" and "real writing". In a poetry spectrum that ranges from Silliman to Collins (and beyond them on both sides, to be sure), I don't think it's really possible to define "writer" to the complete satisfaction of the trade. But I think the analogy of the solitary builder of a nourishing fire (using the correct modern definition, that it is) is good place to start.

Discomfort=Success. Pluto=John Gould Fletcher

2011-02-19T12:39:00.005-05:00

Wonderful post from Wil Wheaton yesterday. He recently shared a story which, if comments can be trusted, was replete with evil and short on happy endings. A reader sent in a note requesting that future stories not be so dark. The author loved the feedback, posting

HUNTER is just 2700 words, but it affected this reader so much, he/she/it wrote me this e-mail, and I've been walking on air all day because of it. HUNTER is set in a dark and desperate world, where good and evil is really a matter of perspective, and if readers left that world feeling really good, I either didn't hit the target I was aiming for, or I'm going to keep my distance from that reader if it's at all possible.

That's the perfect reaction. Clearly, Wheaton is not evil (The Big Bang Theory notwithstanding), but his piece was designed to contain and portray evil. Obviously, it was successful, and he revels in this evidence of his success. Wheaton maximizes his online presence and is quite innovative in distributing his work (Hunter is a pay-what-you-like downloadable story), which makes the feedback channel direct and immediate. Of course, Wheaton, being a Trek icon and Prime Minister of his corner of The Internet, has a constituency disposed to use the direct and immediate route, which helps, but how great to get a response and be able to see how it proves that your experiment worked. Congrats to him.

Wheaton is also an excellent source and model for us as poets because he deliberately and routinely challenges his limits as an artist, both as actor and writer. And he lets us tag along on the ride.

***

It was 81 years ago this week that Pluto was discovered and labelled a planet. Of course, after having a Disney dog named for him and providing the punctuating object in a classic grammar school mnemonic*, Pluto has since been repurposed as a big ice cube, but I don't know that ever knew the exact reason, which emanated from new rules that said planets must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit." Since Pluto's oblong orbit overlaps that of Neptune, it was disqualified. Despite having such an impact on science and culture for his period, it's likely that Pluto will have little or no such impact on future generations.

Which brings me to John Gould Fletcher. Now, I'm sure there are regular visitors to this space who are quite familiar with Fletcher's literary legacy, but here's what I knew about him before some very recent research: He's not in my (c)1976 New Oxford Book of American Verse. The Poetry Foundation website associates him with Amy Lowell, but includes no links to any of his poems. Lowell's page links to 29 of her poems and a number of other writings. Fletcher's page has no links.

I first encountered Fletcher when I found in a second-hand bookstore a 1960 anthology called American Poetry, edited by Karl Shapiro. There's one Fletcher poem in there: "Elegy on an Empty Skyscraper". I enjoyed the poem and it got me started wondering about Fletcher. This one poem was all of his legacy that Shapiro, an important opinion at the time (?), felt worthy of sharing. This despite his inclusion of three Oliver Wendell Holmes poems - all inferior (IMHO) to "Elegy..." - in the same edition.

Who will be the arbiters of poetry's future solar systems? Who decides if Williams and Pound remain planets or become asteroids in the belt? For that matter, who decides who decides? Shapiro was Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry (forerunner to the US Poet Laureate) and a fairly prolific writer and educator, but when the poets I follow today discuss their influences and loves, the name "Shapiro" doesn't encroach on the conversation.

And don't tell me that distance in time is the reason. Dickinson, Freneau, Whitman, and others from their eras I see and hear about with some regularity, and they all predate Shapiro. And Fletcher. Is this my ignorance talking? Perhaps. I'm pretty well-read in American poetry, but I'm not a scholar. And much of my reading comes at the recommendation of contemporary poets whose work I love, so my biases, in effect, define the sphere of my readings. Believe me, I'm aware of that.

I don't know that I really have an answer or even a meaningful question here. But with appreciation for Pluto's teaching us that more than just art is fleeting, maybe I'll make a little more time for reading the great words of the past that are no less great for having been eclipsed by later learnings.

Just 'cause he's not a planet anymore doesn't mean he's not still in the sky.

*My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas =
Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto

Bits and Bits...

2011-02-12T21:06:00.002-05:00

Average submissions pending per day so far this year 0.9. Target: 2.0. My iGoogle DaysSince gadget is merciless in pointing out the distance to my goal.

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I don't know if I'm leveraging Facebook the way I should, and I still maintain an author page separate from my personal page (I don't "friend", I ask people to "like" me...), but it did permit an out-of-state poet whose work I have liked for many years to locate me to tell me about her new book. I'll mention the book here when I've had a chance to take it in.

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Adele Kenny has created a nice list of love poems, from the traditional to the modern, and challenged us to write a love poem that is not sentimental, maudlin, or mushy. She suggests a funny love limerick (among other forms). Maybe.

AAP has a list, too.

****

Working on my poetry and praise workshop for next month. I don't want to give anything away until I share it in its final form, but it's been interesting putting together a program specifically anticipating an audience with limited (or at least untapped) interest in poetry. Emphasis on presentation and meaning, though form is the point of the talk. To a point, that is.

****

I don't post a great deal of personal stuff here, but I did a long time ago explain our tradition of midFebruary KFC, an ongoing reminder of the night I learned that "impressiveness isn't what shows love - the making do is where the heart shows itself off." I still believe it.

Enjoy the day.

Death of an email

2011-02-10T18:01:00.002-05:00

After months with neither solution nor response, I have to conclude I've lost my access to my email accounts. I'll correct the information at the website at some point, but for now I'm unable to receive mail at my davidvincenti.com addresses. The best way to reach me for the foreseeable future is to message me through my Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/David-Vincenti/88501363411). With the grace of a kind muse and a benevolent ISP, I'll get the Mailing List running again soon.

If you've emailed me since November 15, please accept my apologies and try me again with a Facebook message. I'm not ignoring you, honest.

Thanks for your patience, and as always, thank you for your support.

In which the author shifts his impudence to the world of horror prose...

2011-02-05T13:53:00.005-05:00

Famous Author's Comment (courtesy Google's Daily Literary Quote): Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. - Stephen King

David's Response: Phhbbbbbththth.

Among the many and useful exceptions:

When, in prose, you are filling the mouth of a character with a dialect, style, or vocabulary other than your own; it is frequently a good idea to know the point you'd like to make, make it in your voice, then use your BBOW* to explore ways to revoice it.
When you are jumpstarting a particular idea in verse and you are experimenting with the musicality of the line. Illuminate offers different possibilities than does Light.
When you are working with a young writer in any form, and you have a teaching opportunity to open novice eyes to the idea that there are many ways to make the same point, each of them correct.

There's an episode of Family Guy** based on some King stories. In one scene, King himself appears, gets hit by a car, decides it's a great story starter, and completes the story in the time it takes him to come to rest after the collision. Funny and satirical. And quite complementary to his quote.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy King (Thinner is my favorite), but I much, much prefer his short stories to the novels, and language is one of the keys why - the books take on a sameness of language, apparently quite purposefully, which drives me into page-flipping mode. I also find the most interest in King's characters. They're excellently drawn, but once I feel I've come to understand the character, I'm waiting for something interesting - language, a character flaw I missed, a plot twist not deployed in three other books - to lead me eagerly through the rest of the book. I don't get that from King's novels.

I feel like I need to apologize for taking a stance opposite a respected writer. But then, I'm a poet. Which means never having to say you're sorry. Or something like that.

* - Big Book O' Words

** slightly toward the brilliant side of the brilliant-offensive continuum.

In Which the Author Takes Presumptuous Umbrage with Galway Kinnell

2011-01-26T19:21:00.005-05:00

Just when I resolve to be comfortable calling myself a poet, along comes the estimable Galway Kinnell with this little bit of rebuke in American Poetry Review:

A poet should not call himself a "poet." Being a poet is so marvelous an accomplishment that it would be boasting to say it of oneself. I thought this well before I read that Robert Frost took the same view.

At the risk of impudence, I think Mr. K. is completely wrong.

Being a "poet" just means you've written a poem, know it's a poem, and know what you did to write it. Being an accomplished poet is a different thing entirely, but to be aware enough to know what goes into creating poems and then skilled enough to create those poems is not something we should be reluctant to name in ourselves.

Look at it this way: I'm an engineer. I don't need anyone to tell me that I have the credentials for that title. I have the knowledge requirements (through education). I have the behavioral tendencies (a relentless quest to fill my head with details on how things work*). And I have the tangible output, among which is an issued patent, publication in conference proceedings, products launched, etc., all of which are work products deemed acceptable by technologists other than me. I am an engineer.

Am I a good engineer? Well, 20+ years of continuous employment in the field suggest that I probably am, and when I look over my career portfolio, I admit that I think I'm pretty good. In the end, of course, the quantitation** of that goodness something others will do. It's for my boss and his peers to evaluate at my job. It's for my peers to consider when they choose to come to me (or not come to me) for counsel. It's for young professionals to ponder when they decide if mine is a career path they would emulate. But I'm an engineer. This is not debatable.

Likewise, I'm a poet. I have sufficient knowledge in the art to define it and to distinguish it from "greeting card verse". I have the behaviors that cause me to mull over word choice like Snoopy on a dark and stormy night and to find the occasional line so compelling in my ear that I repeat it until my tongue aches. I have the tangible output in journals managed by poets whose talents are not debated.

Am I a good poet? Well, I have some ground cleared for a career there - albeit a smaller foundation than the one I've built in engineering. And I would argue that just I am aware of at least some level of proficiency in my engineering, I am aware of some level of proficiency in my poetry. I recognize elegance in analysis and I recognize the witness markings of poetic craft. Yes, I believe I'm a good poet; if I didn't, I'd not be here. But irrespective of my opinion of myself, I am a poet.

This is not debatable.

* - for example, I probably know more about the design of beverage bottle closures than all but the people who work with them daily. I certainly know more about them than most people care to know. Not because I work in the field, but because I think it's neat to know.

** - Yes, it's a word.

In Which The Author Does Not Blame Weather, Jury Duty, Or Illness

2011-01-22T20:26:00.002-05:00

... but oy, what a month.

***

I keep a card with me most of the time with "my numbers" on it. These are mathematical reminders of my personal goals - weight, hours spent with my kids, etc. One of those numbers is 2; this is the number of journal submissions I want to have pending at any time. I've failed to meet that at any time in 2010. I'll attribute that to a single-minded focus on publishing my chapbook, but that's (of course) not the whole story. The big reason is that I permitted myself to be overwhelmed. I'm targeting a particular caliber of magazine, I decided a couple years ago to aim outside my own backyard (read: not to bombard editors with whom I have a relationship), and my acceptance ratio went into the abyss. And of course, about the same time, my cumulative contest fees reached the level at which I had decided to consider self-publishing. You'd think, having been at this for a decade, I'd not crumble in the face of rejection. Heck, I'm a accordion-playing poet who roots for the Mets. Still, sometimes you sit down and wonder.

But 22 days into 2011, I'm feeling like I'm over it, finally. I'm meeting the number (even challenged by the courtesy of a quick reply from one zine). I've migrated my ISO-registrable submission tracking system online and am leveraging electronic submissions exclusively at this point; but in doing so, I've learned that tracking and printing and signing and mailing were maybe 10% of the time involved in preparing a submission for me. I have learned, to my horror, that I like to tinker. I would rarely spend minutes worrying about word choice once I'd printed a poem for submission. Now that I'm just formatting for upload, I cold lose a whole afternoon reworking a single line. That's a whole different risk of being overwhelmed.

So what? So this just comes back to my single, simple resolution for the year - just to be confident, unembarrassed, and persistent in being a poet. Simple, right?

Not that I lack good projects to rally myself to: My lunchtime writer's group in my office will be elevating the energy level this year, taking on some larger projects and scheduling more time for critique and revision. I'm designing this month a program on poetry and prayer for an adult-education series a group of churches in my area present every year. And I have a box of chapbooks that ask me every time I walk past them when I'll be showing them a little daylight.

More on each as progress warrants. I'm resolved.

Leaving the Blanket Behind

2011-01-08T23:16:00.004-05:00

That's literally (a nice warm quilt) and figuratively (my nice, secure silence). After two days where a nasty chest cold had me horizontal for the vast majority of its contained hours, I got out into the world again today for a wonderful event hosted by Jim Gwyn - "EXPRESSING ELVIS", poems and music in honor of the king on his 76th birthday. I used the event to introduce an aunt to the world of poetry; she has a shelf full of Elvis books, busts, and brickabrack in her den, and I thought this was as close as her orbit would ever be to the art. It was a great deal of fun, and included a local chef presenting a sampling of Elvis-endorsed (horribly-bad-for-you) foods, including catfish po-boys, fried PB&Bs, and sweet potato pies. Just delightful.

And yes my aunt, who's never been to a poetry reading before, ran into someone who knew her. You just get used to it after a while.

Also got to see two of the grand ladies of NJ poetry, Maria Gillan and Laura Boss, to sing a little bit (quite and down an octave because of the darned cold), and to read a new work of my own. That little 90 seconds of my own reading let me live up to my 2011 resolution. I hadn't planned to read, but when asked to by the organizers, I "penned up" and said yes. I hadn't planned to sell books, but when Jim encouraged the audience to visit the poets' book table, I put a few books up and moved a couple. Poet. Don't use the term unless you mean it.

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Confidential to the green and white: Breathe while the air is good, fellow fans. And recall that we know the next beast well and have slain him before.

J-E-T-S-JETS!-JETS!-JETS!

Resolution: Be a poet.

2010-12-31T19:21:00.007-05:00

Before the sadly-no-longer-ageless Dick Clark takes custody of my television and I set my alarm for 11:40 so I can be awake for the annual commemoration, it seems appropriate to take a minute to think upon the year ending this evening.

In terms of my own writing, this was the year I finally pulled the trigger on my chapbook. Is there anything to add to that? The first time I submitted it was a little over 6 years before it finally saw the printer. It was a full-length manuscript then; it contained 55 poems of which about 18 survived the revision and resubmission process into the final cut. Into the mix were folded silent rejections, quiet encouragement, generous advice, familial patience, and finally, sufficient prodding. With a little help from a great designer, the thing in my head finally became a thing in my hand.

The first public viewing of the final product was in July. There, and in the couple of times since that I've taken it to the podium, I've been a little surprised at the positive reception; don't know why, except that having labored on it for so long, I'm fearful about the value of that labor.

And then earlier this month I receive an email from a poet of some renown, all of whose books are on my shelf, someone I've spent more than a little effort emulating, saying he wanted to get a copy of the book. I read the email to my wife. Twice.

And then, a poem from the book appeared at Your Daily Poem, and comments about the poem showed up in my box and on the poems' YDP page. A request to reprint. Invitation to promote the book. Hmm.

I've always felt blessed that so many terrific poets have let me run in their company over the years, and yet always been a little (OK, more than a little) self-conscious to have them introduce me as "also a poet" to their friends. I'm an engineer. A father. An educator. Sure, I write, but that's not what I really am, is it?

Kelli Agodon reprinted this week a list of common traits of successful artists. Her post is worth reading, and the primary trait was that art is the core of their lives. I have never really accepted that about myself. But as Kelli says, "you want to be known as a writer, not someone people run away from because they see your book peeking out of your shirt pocket."

Whatever else I might think, I realize that statement is true for me.

So here's my resolution for the year. I'm going to stop avoiding the word "poet" when I'm chatting with people, especially ones I'm just getting to know. I'm going to talk about the book like I'm proud of it, which I am. I'm going to be a poet when I'm working, when I'm bowling, and when I'm picking up the groceries. With my kids and with my mother. Watching football. And when I'm writing. Which I will do - because that's what I do.

Yeah, I'll waive my hands at losing weight and organizing my closets and not procrastinating, but this is my for-real and for-true resolution: I will be a poet.

Shouldn't be so hard, should it?

Happy New Year. See you back here in January.

The Christmas Poem, 2010

2010-12-23T22:11:00.004-05:00

If it is true that we write to find out what is on our minds, it's pretty clear where my head has been at this month.

Of Readings and Readings

2010-12-09T01:49:00.002-05:00

What makes a good poetry reading? I heard two rules suggested in my visit to the Wednesday Night Poetry Series last week: A crowd that listens and asks good questions, and an open in which everyone participates. I'll add a qualifer to the second: an open in which everyone who participates does so without self-promotion. I don't think it's necessary everyone in attendance read (in fact, I frequently repeat the line that great writing requires great audiences, too, not just other poets waiting for their turn at the microphone). But the WNPS crowd is genuinely a great audience - in the open presenting their own work, readings of classic poems, discoveries from newly uncovered books, etc. and paying such close attention to my invited reading that they were able to teach me something about my own presentation, noticing the musical modes I prefer and making observations about my delivery that surprised me. A great time.

And Sunday in Hoboken, my small but dedicated band of regulars gave a DeBaun and Symposia welcome to Joe Traum, who gave us the gift of some insight into his writing and editing process, as well as some entertaining excerpts from Waking Up. We don't turn out people by the dozen, but our audience contains some great listeners and the ends of our features almost always turn into Q&A.

Which, by the way, is a planned and eagerly anticipated part of the WNPS series, as well. There's something to this.....

Joe Traum in Hoboken

2010-12-05T10:50:00.002-05:00

It's a nice windy day in Hoboken, perfect for stopping in out of the Washington Street wind tunnel to hear Novelist Joe Traum read from his new book "Waking Up". We'll see you there!

Beginning to look a little like Christmas

2010-11-28T22:02:00.001-05:00

With Thanksgiving officially past (as measured in leftovers processed), thoughts turn to holiday tasks. These include mining of family conversations for gift ideas, mulling the possibility of holiday cookies before settling on pfefferneuse and whatever the kids want me to help with (and staying out of the way of the real bakers who us my kitchen as Bake Station Zebra), and the sifting of notes for the annual Christmas poem.

Christmas poses a particular challenge for me. I choose to recognize the holiday with a poem each year, but I don't want to simply contribute to the relentless dreck that passes for art and entertainment every December. As much as I love A Christmas Carol, and for every gem of an interpretation (Alistair Sim, Albert Finney, Kermit the Frog), there are a hundred craptacular ones in sitcom episodes and TV movies. And don't even try to count the Wonderful Life knockoffs.

What pains me is that the horrid imitations have turned people off the originals. So I am further pained if my effort doesn't add something to the literature of the season. While I'm not always successful, the goal has be that it must work as a poem first, not just be "Christmassy".

With one exception, I find that my success is inversely proportional to the length of the final poem. I need to learn to recognize that signal; if I'm having trouble telling the story or getting to the point, there's probably something flawed in the concept. That's true even when it's not Christmas, of course.

It's against policy to talk about a poem in progress - a policy I think most poets stick to - but I can say I'm weaving together present and past, as the holidays lead us to do. Don't know if this will be the last idea I work up (I usually complete 2-3 unrelated drafts before selecting one to refine), bit it seems to have a bit of life to it.

We'll see. Until then --

Thankfulosity

2010-11-25T10:15:00.002-05:00

I'm thankful for my family in all our loud, busy, need-to-clean-the-living-room-again cacophony. Despite the appalling lack of testosterone.

I'm thankful for the great poets in my life, for their eagerness to teach, and their willingness to welcome.

I'm thankful for being looked on as the kind of man people can approach in moments of need and say "I could really use your help".

I'm thankful for having a good job doing work I love for a company whose products help people lead healthy lives.

I'm thankful for a Jets season that seems to be leading to a productive end, though I haven't started planning the playoff watching party just yet.

I'm thankful for the time I'll spend with Albert Finney, Jimmy Stewart, Burl Ives, Joel Grey, and Peter Ustinov in December.

And I'm thankful for you, my six loyal readers, for letting me spend a little time with you during the past year.

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Rediscovering My Moss-Covered Three-Handled Family Gredunza

2010-11-20T11:52:00.003-05:00

There are many great things about being a parent: the opportunity to teach, seeing your children gain knowledge and confidence and independence, boarding the plane first. Among my favorite is the rediscovery of things I loved as a kid. Today's rediscovery was The Cat in the Hat.

I think many people recall Dr. Seuss fondly, no? And I'm not aware of a person who doesn't get the reference when I say "I do not like that, Sam I Am" (usually right before I try something and discover I like it). But this morning I had the chance to listen to the cat voiced by someone who isn't familiar with the story, who doesn't hear the voice of Allen Sherman in his head while reading, who isn't contaminated by an image of Mike Meyers. And let me tell you, it was remarkable to hear someone discover the story, to encounter the words fresh and repeat and repeat and repeat them just to hear them again.

This is a reminder for me of the casual disdain some artists have for the work that's preceded them. Well, maybe disdain is a harsh word; call it a lack of respect. I think poets are more guilty of this than practitioners of other art forms because technique is - to some - less obvious in poetry than in visual or performance arts. The old-fashioned Broadway musical is sometimes mentioned in the discussion of current shows, or at least the great performers they showcased. Most people can appreciate paintings because they're aware they can't produce similar results with their own brushes and bottles.

But for some reason, it seems hard for some people to pull down their Nortons and reinhabit the old works without mild derision; indifference at best. I haven't recently come across a person (teachers excepted) who thinks of EA Robinson the same way I do. I know the works well, I'm not surprised by the twists, but I read and reread the works to appreciate and relearn the art of the set up, the musicality of his language, the way the rhythms set up the pause before the punch. There's brilliance there, even if the poems belong to the past.

Have you read The Cat in the Hat lately? This is a book that works on at least 4 levels. The language is musical and repetitive and great for an early reader. The story is colorful and loud and funny for a young reader not struggling with words to enjoy reading many times. The artwork complements the story marvelously, and is itself a multilayered experience. And for seasoned readers - and hammy performance parents such as I am - the joy of reading the book aloud to an appreciative audience is almost unmatched.

I think there's something to be learned from that. Something we can think about in our poems. The great works work on the page, in the hear, and in the mouth. They look different from different perspectives, mean different things at each reading and for each reader. Which teaches us: Consider musicality. Consider meaning. Permit ambiguity. Let there be fun.

Let the cat in when your mother is out.

An Arty Weekend in Hoboken

2010-11-06T09:03:00.002-04:00

If you're loitering between the tunnels this weekend, please stop into the Monroe Arts Center on Saturday for an all-afternoon coffeehouse with short features throughout the day by Siobhan Barry, Wafa Al-Rimawi, Joel Allegretti, Sharon Lynn Griffiths, and Mark Brunetti; there will be some terrific musical performances also. This is all part of the Hoboken Artists' Studio Tour weekend, and highlights the new home of The Theater Company at Monroe Arts Center. First performance is at noon, and the day runs until 5PM.

Come back tomorrow to Symposia Bookstore to hear David Messineo and Tony Gruenewald in the November installment of the Spoken Word Series at 3PM. Tony is appearing with us for the first time, and series veteran David will be presenting something series fans haven't seen from him in past appearances, tailored to go with the tone of his latest book, Formal.

Monroe Center is at 720 Monroe Street, Symposia is at 510 Washington Street, and I hope to see you there!

Things Good Poker Players Know That Many Poets Ought to Learn

2010-10-30T13:44:00.006-04:00

I enjoy the game of poker. I enjoy the math, the interplay among the participants, the drama of watching a good game from the sidelines. It occurs to me that much of what attracts me to the game is similar - if not spot-on - to what attracts me to poetry. See if you agree with these principles and how they apply to both poetry and poker. You may need to interchange the word "hand" with the word "poem" once in a while....

With very, very rare exceptions, every hand/poem is improvable. You may be holding a great poem in your hands. You may consider it done and it may be excellent, publishable, and memorable. It may be "the nuts". But there may be something else you find, learn or discover later that would improve it. You may not ever find that something, and you may not need it to be successful, but be open to it if it comes along.
If you want people around you to take action based on what you hold, it's important what they think of you. It's of course possible to construct a great hand with limited input from other players/poets and limited history of poker/poetry. However, your decisions and your ability to influence people into action are drastically improved if you understand how things work and some of your shared history. At minimum, you need to understand the rules. Bluff all you want, but there are rules.
While people may make their decisions based on their opinions of you, there will be times when your only and best influence is to show your cards. Therefore, no matter how effective you are at the rest of the game ("being a poet"), you simply must have the ability to know when you've built a good hand (written a good poem).
It is possible - and probably necessary for most people - to combine competitiveness and social behavior. There are certainly Hellmuthian examples of poets being jerks and still being respected for their objectively and genuinely great poems, but you're more likely to get help on the way to Ledererian greatness - purposefully in the form of teaching and subtly in the form of noticing other people's habits - if your default mode is participating, learning, and listening. NOTE: Hellmuth doesn't seem to really be a jerk. Does that matter?
Playing with the cover of anonymity (online) can help you hone skills, develop a sense of what's important to you in the game, and learn some of the rules. However, a skilled player/poet with live experience of actual poker/poetry events will detect in seconds if that (individual effort) is your only experience. And if your goal in that meeting is to impress that skilled player/poet and impose your will in some way (win money, gain respect, acquire feedback), it will not end well for you. You must understand the universe to chart your way to the stars.
In any large gathering/tournament, there will be participants who will not pay much attention to anything but their own business, who will neither learn nor teach, and who are likely to leave early without having much impact on the rest of the people gathered, though they may have fun, contribute, and enjoy themselves. There is nothing harsh or disrespectful about saying this. It is helpful to recognize the ones who respect the game/art, for those are the ones from whom you can learn.

Think I'm way off? Go try the Poker Professor's "Poker and Zen" first; this little list may seem like the nuts (instead of being "just plain nuts") after that.

Another Obseration from the Second String

2010-10-22T20:14:00.006-04:00

In my last entry, I articulated something I hope is not heresy: we're not all great poets, and it's hard to agree what "great" is. Just last month, in a poetry forum I follow, a couple of the poets were wondering what people found so great about Robert Frost. Personally, I think that's a silly question (there are those who think Frost wasn't a great poet? Really?), but I'll entertain the argument. There are, however, poets who can claim to be competent, good even, without a compelling argument available to promote them as great.

Like me, for example.

Now be advised this is not a hook dropped into the community pool in search of praise. But there are a few things I think are necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) conditions for greatness; let me present them along with why I say, with comfort and self-respect, that I don't meet them.
Great artists expand the art. The great poets add new things to their form or bring their form to new applications. They integrate other fields and disciplines and create links among their art and other areas of knowledge not obviously connected. This can be in an individual poem or artwork, a particular body of work, or a career of artistic reaching. Frost added conversational language; Williams added minimalist jazz; etc.

Great poets push an envelope. There's great safety in operating where other artists operate and where opinion of one's work is fairly well assured. Most sitcoms come to the air because of this principle. However, the most interesting and memorable work is that which surprises us, which takes us away from the safe and the known and still entertains us. Of course, there is risk there, because sometimes you stray so far from the known that you lose the audience you are trying to bring. And to know where you start to lose people, to know where that limit is you have to accept that you will breach that line sometimes. My favorite examples here are Family Guy and Pearls Before Swine. Both show great awareness of their forms and history and challenge that form and history all the time. They both are occasionally offensive and frequently brilliant.

Great poets create audiences. I expect some challenge on this one, but I'm not necessarily talking about popularity here. Many artists believe that they create for creation's sake, and are not concerned with reaching an audience. I think that's bunk. While an artist may not be concerned about the quantity of fellow appreciators of that art, they surely believe that fellow appreciators exist and that their artistic wants are not met through conventional artistry. When Pound integrated Chinese characters into the cantos, it wasn't to convince people to study Chinese, or as some sort of barrier to force the casual reader away, it was with the expectation that some readers would want to and be able to "get it", either through prior knowledge or understanding from within the poem, and would appreciate the poems more for it. While this work may not satisfy the conventional fan, these artists make fans of people who weren't fans before - fans of work that may not have existed before. The avant (post-avant?) of any art form operates with the confidence that there is an avant audience waiting for their output.

I think one needs to meet at least two of these criteria to even be considered for greatness. As for my small contributions to the universe of poetry? Well, I dabble in expanding the art sometimes through incorporation of concepts and language from the world of science and engineering. Maybe one day one or two of my poems in that vein will be thought of as great. But I don't live in that space, nor do I seek to bring people into it with me. As for the other two? Not really. My internal editor is set in a very consciously limiting way; there are boundaries I do not care to flirt with except in my journal and writing exercises. More on the what and why of my self-limitation another time.

Again - you don't need to be great to be good, to have an audience, to contribute to the art. We on the B-list can actually better appreciate who we are and what we offer by understanding the A-list and what the members of that list do that we don't. This helps us stay centered on what we can do well without deluding ourselves about things we can't. It helps us focus on connecting with our audience without the false impression that we're blazing new trails for them. I think this is a good thing.

Are we all striving for greatness? Maybe. But being a serious student of the art requires one to know where greatness begins, and where you're standing at the moment.

A Writing Lesson from Rusty Staub

2010-10-09T12:19:00.003-04:00

"He was never a great player, but hit for a good average and good power, and had a strong arm from right field."

Rusty Staub has been my favorite baseball player for as long as I can remember. He played for my father's team and was a dynamic player for them at two formative moments in my life: When I was becoming old enough and aware enough of the team to root for real and not just because rooting earned me a cookie, and again when I began accumulating my own money to spend on tickets. The line above is from his official website, so it must be description of himself that approves of.

I've met Rusty twice, and you wouldn't think from the way people treat him that he "was never... great". He surely made the most of "very good"; he played for 23 years, and was good in every role he had, at first, in right, DHing, or coming off the bench late in the game. He hit .279 for his career (which you may remember was approaching its peak around the same time as the "Year of the Pitcher"), and belted 292 career home runs. I suppose those aren't great numbers. But they were number I could root for. Numbers suggesting accomplishments that were important to me individually, and over a career.

Put your seat belt on; here comes the turn toward poetry.

I'm missing Dodge this year (first time since 1998), in part because of a confluence of busyness at work and home, and in part because of a nasty cold that's just kicking my tuchus mercilessly, so all I've seen is the Thursday night simulcast, where the 24 "featured" poets (though they don't call them anything like that anymore) each read for 4-5 minutes (or in Rita Dove's case, 9). As they paraded by in these short stints, I was wondering which of them I'd call "great", if any. It's not terribly relevant which ones I think compete for the title; the point is simply that (no offense to anyone....), it's probably not all of them.

Forgive me, oh gods of parity and you literarical correctness wonks, but that's the truth. Not everyone who speaks a line of verse during the 2010 Dodge Festival is a great poet. And if I were to name one or two that I think are truly great, I could find 10 people outside the NJPAC right now to disagree. And that's OK.

We don't all need to be great to contribute something to the art. But to contribute, we need to be aware that we are not all great. That the last poem I wrote is probably not "The Man With The Blue Guitar" that the last book I read is probably not Paterson. But there may be some artistic merit in them if we permit them to fill their role - in our own portfolios first, then in our writing communities, then amid the clutter and cacophony that is contemporary poetry.

Heresy? I don't know. Cop-out? Hardly. I listen to Amiri Baraka and read the analyses of Ron Silliman and know immediately where my part-time hobbyism leaves me in the pantheon. But I don't stop writing. I have an audience in mind, an emergence of a style, and an approach I don't see many other poets using. There's something there to contribute. Someone to contribute it to.

My poems, maybe, are the literary equivalent of a good right-handed stick off the bench. Rusty batted lefty; there's room for me on the team.

Know me, know The Mets

2010-10-02T19:49:00.004-04:00

I am a fan of the New York Mets. Even now, with respectability the only goal remaining for the year, I continue to root. I received the requisite training for this during my formative years of fandom. Playing in the street all those summers ago, I modeled my windup after Craig Swan, my right handed stance after Steve Henderson, from the left after Rusty Staub.

As it says somewhere on this page, I also root for the Yankees. You don't need to believe this, but it's the truth. It was much easier to hold this position before interleague play, but even nowadays, I support the pinstripes 156 games a year. When the chips are down, though, such as during the 2000 World Series, or back when I traded my Reggie for a Nino and a Mike and future considerations, the Metsies are my men.

That doesn't mean that I disrespect the Yankees even when I'm turning them off to watch the orange and blue. It would be ignorant of a baseball fan not to recognize the gifts the players on the Yankees have. I learned this attitude from my father.

Not the trading away of the Hall of Famer for two cards and a stick of stale gum. That he'd have though was ridiculous. And not just because of the legacy of the Seaver trade.

Anyway, here at the end of the season, I still want to know how the Metropolitans did, and I'm interested in seeing the young kids get their ABs because I'll be back next year to watch them again, because my father came back every year for them, too.

What does this have to do with poetry? Not a lot, I suppose, except for those poems where the Mets and baseball feature prominently. Or maybe in more places than that. Being a fan, coming back when you think there's more to see or to learn or to accomplish, the wanting others to succeed, these are attitudes that tend to pervade one's approach to life and writing.

I learned that from my father, too.

Back to poetry after the end of the season.

In which the author refuses to let the Blogger monthly counter indicate a completely delinquent September

2010-09-30T22:54:00.002-04:00

Confluence: Start of the school year, end of the fiscal year, start of some new teaching projects, ramp up of the drive to book reading events in the coming year, start of the DeBaun calendar (including rework of the schedule because we completely goofed on October).....

.... and one very nice, interesting thing. Started up a lunchtime writer's group in my office. Shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose, to find 15 energetic writers on a corporate campus, but I admit I didn't expect to find quite so much enthusiasm. Not just poets in the group, so I suggested a prompt I thought would be adaptable to any style: Start a poem or a paragraph with "Now that I can....". It would (IMHO) go against spirit of a new group to tell you much more, but I'll say that it worked pretty darned well.

For our next meeting, we've taken prompts in advance, giving ourselves a month to work on them. I'll be curious to see how well the variety works among forms in that case; I suspect that time favors the prosers. What do you think?

***

I'll be using the Facebook page to keep track of reading dates in the coming months, and all the DeBaun date are up to date there, so please head over there and "Like" my author page if you're interested.

And with any luck, I'll not be absent from here for the next month in the process.....

Delete Your Darlings

2010-08-28T14:11:00.003-04:00

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. - Samuel Johnson
(courtesy iGoogle Quotes of the Day)
****

Best. Advice. Ever.

This was the hardest thing for me to accept as I entered the home stretch with "To The Ones...". On an intellectual level, I realized that I wasn't objective about some parts of the manuscript. A lot of that's because there are scenes in there derived from real-life experiences with my kids, and it's hard to separate neutral-to-negative comments about the associated writings from neutral-to-negative comments about the events and kids themselves. Of course, that's complete nonsense, which I know - on one level.

I had some great and generously honest feedback on my manuscript that left me with two choice: reject the consistent feedback of poets I admire and defend my personal position on poems I'd been close to for years, or accept that maybe - just maybe - I might not be seeing those poems clearly.

You'll have to read the book for yourself and tell me whether I was successful in processing the feedback, but my clear intent was to listen.

I've also passed Johnson's advice along to other writers; usually I add "because those are the parts you're not objective about". Aside from "Read, read, read", I think it's the best guidance a writer can take to heart.

What's your favorite bit of advice?

Appearing in the Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow 3....

2010-08-25T23:58:00.003-04:00

Very pleased to announce I'll have two poems in THE RUTHERFORD RED WHEELBARROW 3. Take a look at the company I'm keeping in this issue. My thanks to the editors for permitting me entry to this prestigious club!

*****************

The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow No. 3
ISBN 978-0-557-58376-8
Paperback: 232, Price: $15
Red Wheelbarrow Poets, August 2010
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-rutherford-red-wheelbarrow-no-3/12206587

Masthead:
Editor: Jim Klein
Managing Editor: Mark Fogarty
Managing Editor: Sondra Singer Beaulieu
Designer: Claudia Serea
Editor Advisor: John Barrale
Editor Advisor: Céline Beaulieu
Editor Advisor: George DeGregorio

Contributors (in alphabetical order):
John Barrale
Céline Beaulieu
Sondra Singer Beaulieu
Marian Calabro
Teresa Carson
George DeGregorio
Gil Fagiani
Jane Fisher
Mark Fogarty
Elissa Gordon
Max Greenberg
Roxanne Hoffman
Pamela Hughes
Josh Humphrey
Gail King
Jim Klein
Melanie Klein
Janet Kolstein
Joel Lewis
Maria Lisella
Pete Loria
Zorida Mohammed
Michael O'Brien
Moira O'Brien
Tony Puma
Gabriella Radujko
Susan Rappaport
Susanna Rich
Dan Saxon
Claudia Serea
Ed Smith
Rosemarie S. Sprouls
Anna Toher
John J. Trause
Miyuki Tsurumaki
David Vincenti
B.J. Ward
Dorinda Wegener
Don Zirilli
Sander Zulauf

Procurement details to follow....

2010-08-22T20:01:00.000-04:00

Saturday Rounds

2010-08-21T10:43:00.006-04:00

Finally, an appropriate piece about the death of publishing, by The Morning News's Non-Expert.

******

Via Diane Lockward, a new online anthology, with the pleasant surprise of work from old favorite Joseph Bruchac and the promise of more from other terrific poets soon.

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Fascinating debate raging on the New-Poetry mailing list about Robert Frost, the gyst of which seems to be that he wasn't genuine in the character his poems suggested. Or that his poems are too cliche or out of touch to be meaningful today. I think there have been so many Frost imitators that we lose sight of what Frost was when his work was new, and I still think he's among the best ways to introduce poetry to kids. A short side thread wanted to compare Frost to Williams and to Stevens, which is - in my opinion - like comparing (in no particular order) spaghetti with sushi with hot dogs. Sure, they're all food, but what does the comparison get you?

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Note to Monopoly fans: If you fancy yourself a serious player (which I do) and you allow yourself to join a game using a Disney(tm) Princess Junior game set (which I did), you should expect to lose to the youngest player by 4x the starting bankroll (which.... no comment).

Hey, buddy, can you spare a workshop idea?

2010-08-10T21:49:00.004-04:00

I have an ongoing relationship with dandelions. The first poem I ever had accepted for print by someone who wasn't also grading my term papers was called "Dandelion". It was a lovely bit of syrup and I remember fondly the poem and the time in my evolution as a writer it represents (my "early Crayola" period). When I first started shopping around to lead poetry workshops with kids, that poem was one I turned to as an example - it was simple, suitable for audiences as young as 3rd grade, not entirely awful, and contained a few teachable elements - but I never thought of it having much use for workshops with adults, or even older kids.

This month (well, next month, actually), I'll be looking for ideas to jump start a new writers' group, and I like the idea of starting with a workshop based on dandelion poems. It's subject matter everyone can attach to, both visually and metaphorically, yet have a range of reactions to on either axis. That's key for me, because this group will contain writers at levels ranging from accomplished to novice.

The old blogroll will serve me well in this case; starting right at the top with Adele Kenny, there are a dozen good ideas easily accessible (in the IT sense, not the New Formalist or any other "school" sense). But I'm open to suggestions, too.

Do you have any workshop ideas that you've seen work with a widely divergent audience?

Don't even think of talking here

2010-08-05T05:18:00.005-04:00

Ron Silliman has turned off the comments stream for his blog because he chooses to no longer moderate the vitriol. Somehow, some people have interpreted this as an offense against readers who do not favor L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. I'm not sure how anyone can reach this conclusion.

A number of people calling into sports shows I follow have lamented that "because of steroids", Alex Rodriguez' 600th home run is meaningless. Really? While I understand people's disappointment in tarnished heroes, I don't know how, at least if you're not a Yankee-hater, you dismiss the accomplishment.

Wil Wheaton is attending a gaming convention this weekend and has decided to execute a Howiemandelic maneuver and not shake hands with people during the covention as a way to avoid illness. This has some people offended, and they've made that known in his comments stream.

Common thread here seems to be to find a way to subtract from the importance you assign to persons of accomplishment who do somehow not permit us to apply our values to their work. Or maybe that without the direct link we want to a person with talents we recognize, we choose instead to have no links at all. I don't get this at all.

It's not that we can't feel loss, even deprivation at something taken away. But how does it subtract from the pleasure of experiencing the artistic product to have diminished respect for the artist? I'd have to delete half my playlist if perfect respect for the performer were a requirement for enjoying the music. The message is "I am not interested in your talent of you don't deliver it to me in the way I choose."

In the specifics of Silliman's comment stream, my question is: if you have something to say in response to one of his posts, why is the only place you can say it on his website? If you object to the elimination of his comment thread, isn't that the same thing as resenting losing a forum for your own words? Does he have an obligation to provide not only his time and energy, but also an audience for his readers?

That's the question. What's the answer?

Ta daa!

2010-07-20T21:45:00.002-04:00

Well, I suppose it's official now. I've sold copies of my chapook, and not to people with whom I share a maternal grandparent. It was a quite an odd experience in the end - trusting the nice manager at Borders, seeing the books with the Borders price tags on them (I saved one!). But it was a terrific night - first time I've heard a full set from Barbara Crooker, who was just tremendous, and her incredible energy and broad artistry were an interesting balance for my pensive positions, or so we heard from a number of audience members.

The audience included some students of a Stevens classmate; she's left engineering behind and now leverages her technical skills as a high school science teacher, and she introduced some of her former students to the poetry scene with our little event. It's always nice to be able to show people that you can be a good scientist or engineer and still take an interest in the arts. And a great gift to spend a few minutes with someone who knew you when, and has the time and inclination to give you a few minutes today.

The DVP audience is quite a friendly crowd, some poets I know well, some less well, and it was a joy to be able to offer To the Ones there for the first time.

Extending the good feeling and the reach of our corner of the PoBiz, Barbara's "Patty's Charcoal Drive-In" was featured on YDP this week, as were poems by Diane Lockward and Scott Summers.

Up next, taking the book where the book wants to go.....

As long as I'm not watching the fireworks....

2010-07-04T22:01:00.002-04:00

(Aside: blah, blah blah, long time, busy busy, blah blah blah.)

I just clicked "Send" on a submission for the first time in (according to my iGoogle clock) 148 days. Partly, I admit, to celebrate completing a poem for the first time in about 50 days. It's a good feeling. And I don't think it's unrelated to finally pulling the trigger on the chapbook.

Yes, boys and girls, I have left the dithering at the dock and committed the chapbook to print. A short debate with Scott Summers over the value of self-publishing recently gave me a chance to confirm to myself that self-publishing is OK with me for this project. I've articulated the reasons before. And yes, I do still think there's a publisher out there who would be interested in the collection, but I also believe that the probability of aligning the manuscript with that publisher at the confluence of their resources (time, money, and submission period) is low, and I want, for a number of reasons, not to roll the dice to discover that alignment any longer.

It's true that you can get backed up artistically, I think. That it gets hard to bite off something new while you're chewing over and over on something you'd like to be done with. I'm not exactly done with the old, here, as I'll be taking it on the road and hopefully moving a few in the months to come, but moving the project out of composition and into presentation makes it a different animal. One that takes energy, yes, but which also creates it in a real way. I don't think I'm alone in thinking this.

So let's see. If I'm right, I'll be bringing that energy to a venue near you soon.

A Father's Fathers' Day

2010-06-20T12:36:00.004-04:00

"...We’ve thrown in rain,
we’ve thrown in darkness, once in March we
put on gloves under our gloves and threw in snow
and always to the soundtrack of our conversation,
a father and son’s seeds for a garden of love
I pray will bloom all seasons. ..."

From Ed Romond's Bald Spots, up today at YDP.

The thing that strikes me most today is how different my relationship with my kids is than the one I had with my father. That's partly a function of our respective generations, of course, but also a function of those unexplainable differences that make us all different. My father and I played a lot of baseball together when I was younger - a lot of golf when I was older - and it's not like I played those games reluctantly. But I was always aware that I was not driven the same way he was. I was always a little more joyful in the doing, a little less interested in the level of the achievement (after a point, that is - like him, I've always had the desire to do well anything I cared enough about to do at all).

Looking back at the defining moment in our relationship - the day I brought back to my parents' house a new car I had selected and paid for without their help - and how different our times together were after that, I begin to realize he was always pushing me to be "good enough". We may have had different definitions of that, but I see now that once he was convinced I would neither starve to death nor go bankrupt outside his care, all the (occasional) tension between us fell pretty much away.

Now, I know it's not that simple. Nothing is ever that simple, and the frosted lens of memory covers over many details that would complicate my conclusion. But the thought reminds me today of the father I want to be - the kind whose children are happy in the doing, who are able to do what they choose to do as well as they choose to do it, who are safe and know how to stay so, and who are able to find joy in their decisions. Baseball's not part of our repertoire; we're more likely to sit down at the piano together than go outside to play ball, but it's not really all that different than the way Ed sees things when he's with his son. It's just that our misunderstood imperfections are broken keys - "no music" spots, maybe - instead of the patches in Ed's lawn.

****

Here, by the way, are three things I think all fathers should share with their kids on Father's Day:

An activity they can do while laughing
A meal they can eat with their hands
A nap.

And so I'm off.

A Happy Fathers' Day to my many role models in the job.

Kibble (the stuff that's not quite up to "Bits" standards)

2010-06-19T10:53:00.003-04:00

Wouldn't it make more sense for Mothers' Day to be coincident with the end of the (grammar) school year? As much as I think of myself as an involved and enlightened father, it seems sensible to celebrate mothers at the same time the day-to-day schlepping of the a school year hits a little bit of a lull.

Of course, "camp" starts soon enough...

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At YDP, Jayne Jaudon Ferrer has been celebrating fathers this week. As always, her selections span from contemporary to classic, and the idea that we have been exploring our relationships with our fathers for hundreds of years is somehow comforting to me.

Jayne posted this week one of my favorite father-themed poems by I writer I am getting to know better this year. Go read Gregory Orr's "Father's Song" and, if you've been around these parts for long, you'll quickly see that it's the kind of poem I frequently aspire to write.

Today's poem, by the way, is by Jerseyan and literarymama columnist Ona Gritz; her work is always worth a visit.

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I hereby concede to the spammenters. Comment moderation is now turned on here. I get so few comments, it's not a big deal, but it is ridiculous.

And yes, I will continue to prevent anything I find offensive from appearing in the comments section (though now proactively instead of through deletion. My mother visits here, after all.

****

Ron Silliman was in Poetry in June. He was last in that august periodical in 1969. I think that says something, but I'm not sure exactly what.

The issue in which he appears has letters on both sides of a "controversy" regarding the value, or maybe the appropriateness, of having poets explain their work. This may be particularly meaningful in an issue in which Silliman appears, given his ongoing position that most poets put so little effort into the craft that there is no "other layer" to the work - that most things people call "poems" today are at best interrupted prose in consideration of sitcom-quality topics (all of that is in my words, by the way, not his...). And I know that even I, whose work is not nearly as many-layered or allusive as that of the great poets I follow, grow weary of people stopping in the middle of a poem to ask "what does it mean?" However, I find the vehemency of some poets' opposition to explanation just as wearying. If we want to grow poetry's audience, we need to provide some opportunity for people to latch onto it. And once latched on, the explanations are irrelevant. Explanations are like the instructions to a great board game like History of the World. We cling to the directions when we're learning, but once we are proficient we leave them in the box and just play.

Why is this such a problem for some poets?

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Quote today on iGoogle: "Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people." (it's attributed to Doris Egan, but I don't know if it's her or one of her characters speaking). Now, as a daily practitioner both of my Roman Catholic faith and my technology career, I think this is selling people of faith a bit short, but that's for another forum. What's interesting to me is that you could substitute just about any subject about which people feel passionately for the religious connotation in this statement. For example, could you imagine hearing "Rational arguments about poetry don't usually work on poets. Otherwise, there wouldn't be poets."? Or soccer fans? Are annoyed with sportscasters feeling obliged to tell us how they don't like soccer everyday during the World Cup? I don't care if you like soccer (I'm not a fan, really, either), but don't disparage people who do. Likewise poetry.

BTW, doesn't this link clearly to the explanation argument? If the fervent are dismissive of the explanations, and the uninitiated are dismissive of the explanations, is there anywhere for the two to connect?

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Today is one of six days every year (well, 11 days back in 2000). I root against the Yankees. Forgive me, please!

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And in case I don't get back to you, Happy Father's Day!

Draft: One For My Father

2010-06-04T21:13:00.004-04:00

Discussing the object of our respective writings, a poet friend recently asked me if I'd written much about my own father, wondering if exploring that relationship was somehow evolving parallel with my exploration of the relationships I'm seeking with my own children. I realized, and said in response, that I'd done quite a bit of writing when he died - going on 10 years ago, now - but much recently. Not long after, I had a nice long car ride in which to think about that. And this is the season for me to think about time: his birthday (he'd have been 69 this month) and Father's Day are close enough together to concentrate my energy on on his memory for a while, and it's about this time every year that I realize that I am more like him than I am like any other person - and I understand him a little better each time I reach that realization.

Of course, he'd slap me senseless for going on like this. He believed firmly that thinking of those who have gone ahead was akin to shouting down a well - might get some words out of your system, but you're not doing anyone else any good.

I disagree. But I'm also OK with that if it's true. Here's one for my dad.

Long Weekend Bits

2010-05-30T07:32:00.002-04:00

Is it just me or do long weekends have a way of becoming fuller than shorter ones?

***

Been a busier May than I'd have designed, though I finally (this morning) clicked off my iGoogle Days Since I Completed A Poem reminder. 103 days is a long time. A number of drafts accumulated since then, but with the focus on the chapbook, I haven't been transcribing much. Getting to a couple readings this month has certainly helped, as has having a couple of long solitary car rides in which to aerate the idea factory.

***

The chapbook, you ask? Well, TTOWMBL v2.0 (the Beta) has seen daylight. I've even allowed left it out on a table for passersby to pick up and flip through. Of course, even in a poet's home, the probability that a book of poems will be noticed and read isn't exactly a given. But I'm trusting it. I don't know that it's done, but I have a few weeks before my self-imposed deadline of Father's Day to get comfortable with it. I've got one more small change in the contemplation stage; decision soon.

***

May ends for me with the start of the Memorial-Day-to-Father's-Day run, which includes my father's birthday; Dad's been gone for the better part of a decade now. The balance for me is to stay in the moment as a father without sacrificing moments of reflection. That may contribute to how long this weekend feels for me each year.

***

A completed draft tomorrow, maybe....

In which the author intends to skip the excuses and get directly to the business of blurbing about where we've been for two weeks. But fails.

2010-05-21T23:10:00.006-04:00

I gauge my efficiency by the status of my inbox. At work, if I go two successive weeks without reducing the length of un-responded to emails my inbox to less than 1 screen (about 40 messages), then I know I'm slipping. I'm a little less compulsive at home, there it's "no more than one new page" (about 50 messages).

After an hour this morning I've cut the home account back to 200 unprocessed emails. Ugh. Faring much better at work, because the hierarchy is always 1/2 Family, 2/1 Work, 3 Health, 4 Community, 5 Art. But the problems not (usually) that I don't read these emails, it's that I keep thinking I'm going to do something with them.

Are we all like that? I receive 3 poems in my inbox every day: YDP, AAP (until they go exclusively to the iPhone, anyway) and TWA. I've long ago stopped being able to visit PD every morning - it's more of a monthly catch up with me now. But with many of the poems, I find that there's something keeping me from dispositioning it. Something I want to share, or imitate, or research, or - Forgive me, Lord - try to do better than it was done in the poem I just read.

I think this has been exacerbated for me this year with the focus on the chapbook, rather than on new writing: two rounds of reordering an rewriting, doing some local readings from the book to get the feel of how it hang together, etc. Heck, just deciding to and weeding through options to self publish was a lost month.

And could someone have warned me the urge to rewrite poems once you see the book laid out as as an actual book would be overwhelming? Anyway....

Now that I'm coming out the end of the book process (my goal was available by Father's Day - it'll be close....), the new poems are coming again, and the urge to keep piles of papers all around me (virtually and physically) seems to be going away. Which is nice.

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Recent goodnesses: Attended Diane Lockward's annual festival at the West Caldwell Public Library; couldn't stay for it all, but what I saw was great as always - picked up a couple new books (Weil, Gwyn) and current journal issues.

Visited Connecticut for the first public airing of the poems from the anthology Crush (about romantic crushes in all their forms...) upcoming from Hanover Press. The official launch is in June, but I wanted to become acquainted with the work in whose company I find myself. I think this will be a terrific book, and I'm very pleased to be included.

More soon.

At least that's the plan.

Thanks

2010-05-09T06:45:00.003-04:00

AAP (poets.org) is suggesting an untinterrupted hour of reading or writing time.

Restaurant.com is suggesting gift certificates to some pretty good restaurants and offering some deep discounts as encouragement.

The Metsies are having an honorary bat girl today as part of the Going to Bat Against Breast Cancer initiative.

Everyone who writes has written about their mothers (one great example is BJ Ward's "Upon Being Asked Why I Dedicated My First Book To My Mother When There's Not A Single Poem In There About Her" from Gravedigger's Birthday)

However you note it, use Mother's Day to acknowledge the small moments that otherwise go unacknowledged. A little thanks is worth more than a bunch of brunch.

Or so I've heard.

Happy Mother's Day.

Cruising down the 405....

2010-05-06T21:00:00.003-04:00

Post 405, that is - the 405th entry into this little corner of The Internets. Another busy week, so some bits and pieces as we pass through the neighborhood of the FOD:

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Deborah Ager is running an online poetry workshop, part of the proceeds of which go to support 32 Poems magazine.

***

Elizabeth Lund has a new short review of two recent New and Selecteds, from Robert Hass and Kay Ryan.

***

Many of our friends will be appearing in one way or another at this year's Celebration of New Jersey Journals, hosted by Diane Lockward and featuring a seventh annual collection of readers selected from the pages of local magazines.

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More general busyness likely the next few days, though I do hope to get to my notes from the great JNJP reading last week while the experience still echoes for me. Like I hope Jason Bay finds his lucky batting gloves soon.

Soon!

This Day in May

2010-05-01T10:29:00.002-04:00

April
by James Schuyler

The morning sky is clouding up
and what is that tree,
dressed up in white? The fruit
tree, French pear. Sulphur-
yellow bees stud the forsythia
canes leaning down into the transfer
across the park. And trees in
skimpy flower bud suggest
the uses of paint thinner, so
fine the net they cast upon
the wind. Cross-pollination
is the order of the fragrant day.
That was yesterday: today is May,
not April and the magnolias
open their goblets up and
an unseen precipitation
fills them. A gray day in May

(courtesy AAP Poem-a-Day)

***

NatPoMo is over. Did you hear the gong at midnight? How did you do versus your goals? I did OK: touched a book of poems every day, attended at least one poetry event, completed at least one draft. Setting the minimum goal I did (put one book a day away) had made it easy to do. I could either do something with the book or not, but I had to touch it. Once it's in your hand, why not open it?

***

One third of the way through the year, I've accumulated 23 posts. That's a bit off the pace I wanted to hold, which was 2 per week (100 for the year). I can blame Blogger for eating two I tried to make this week, but I'd still be about 10 off where I wanted to be. I've said before, it's not the posting pace I care about per se, it's being immersed enough in poetry to have something interesting enough to say twice a week. But the truth is that poetry comes third for me, after the family and the job - that's not a complaint, it's a scaling of expectations - which makes the application of minimums important. And utilization - making the most of the moments in which I can choose to immerse.

***

Actually, poetry's fourth when the Mets are in first. Hah!

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One thing I did make time for was the JNJP reading last week, which you know of you're following me on Facebook. Sandy Zulauf always presents a great show at County College of Morris and this was not an exception. Two hours of poems and music (and great cheeses!), about which more later.

Returning after a few days, the author's head is filled with miscellany and thoughts of Fudge Stripe Cookies...

2010-04-25T21:41:00.004-04:00

You go away for a couple days, things happen in your absence. You actually take a day or two to clear your head, and you start to hear the muse again. You pay attention to the muse, and observations come your way again. A few such...

***
Observation from poetry world: Adele Kenny has joined to the universe of online commentators at http://adelekenny.blogspot.com/, providing material from and suitable for her workshops. One of her first entries is on poetry presentation, including this note on reading speed: "Sometimes the proper pace seems ridiculously slow, but it’s really not." I usually put it this way: If you feel like your reading a little too slowly, you're reading almost slowly enough.

***

Observation from the getaway: If you don't like to get wet, don't go to a water park.

***

Observation from the poetry world: Having given Copper Canyon's anthology "The Poet's Child" another chance during vacation (I'd put it aside after the second poem that seemed to reject the whole idea of having children), I of course found some great stuff in it. I need in particular to learn more about the work of Gregory Orr; every time I come across his work I feel a keen connection.

But I still think poets about not liking children are out of place in such a book.

***

Observation from the getaway: The only itinerary acceptable to the under-12 set is the one in which every possible dessert gets sampled. This is not possible. Plan your life lessons in advance of the trip, not in line at the buffet.

***

Observation from the getaway: The books are right; your attitude changes immensely with just a short battery recharge. Monday morning looms, and you still have too much to do, and it's not possible to do it all (see: buffet, above), but somehow the same activity list seems less impossible.

Of course, summer camp season is a whole different story.

***

Observation from baseball: The Mets' solution to dealing with a struggling player back from a year away with injury is to put him in a higher-pressure position he knows less about? I don't have to wait for summer camp to know how I feel about that one.

***

Meter reads full. Off to the routine...

Comedic Kinship

2010-04-19T21:18:00.002-04:00

"So part of me wants to let them see my weird side. And part of me wants them to see the serious craft it takes to dig this stuff out and turn it into art. And there's some need for me to connect with them. This whole thing is probably about connecting. Standing up in front of people is saying 'Hey, folks, look at me, ain't I great? Please induct me into your imaginary club of people you like. I want to be in that.' And there's the need to find things out about them. To make kinships. 'I feel this way about ... Volvos and farts.' 'Yeah! Me too!' 'You too? OKAY?'"

As usual, George Carlin says it best. And if this little rant, ostensibly about stand-up comedy, doesn't also apply to poetry, then I don't know what poetry is.

About Last Words, I'll say that that it's a bit disturbing to find out as much about Carlin as he admits in the book (though not really all that surprising). But over the course of Carlin's telling of his own life story, there was demonstrated time and again the same evolution in his comedy that is typical of the evolution of a writer - we start out as mimics, grow a little into learning an audience and giving them what they want, get lost for a while in a recursive loop of imitiating our early successes, then emerge into a discovery of voice that dominates the rest of our careers.

Or is that just me?

PS: Read the book!

MidPoMo Muttermutter

2010-04-14T20:30:00.002-04:00

The heck with lilacs and dead land, tax season for Met fans is the very definition of cruelness. But more to the point, a little unexpected business and the pace of posting grinds to a halt. Not exactly cruel, but definitely disheartening when you feel like you've found a rhythm (7 posts in 11 days - unheard of in this little corner of the internets). Anyway....

***

Attended Diane Lockward's reading last weekend, the second annual event where she works with students in a local college's Poetry class. The students learn her work, design a reading for her to deliver, then host her in it. It's interesting to see what people who (1) have little emotional attachment to the work and (2) aren't in PoBiz look for in a reading. The students selected more of Diane's darker work (not that her books don't contain darkness, but her readings don't usually feature it); I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, should it?

***

Maureen Berzok continues her tour of NJ Poets, landing on Peter Murphy, Amiri Baraka and BJ Ward, Charles Johnson, and Frank Finale in the past week. Wow.

NJ always amazes me with its diverse and active community of poetry voices, so I was a little surprised this evening to find that a celebration / open-mic at my local library had been cancelled due to lack of interest. We seem to think that a National Whatever Month will bring the Whatever to people not already members of the Whatever community, but I don't think that's how it works. It seems to be a reminder to those who already hold the interest to make some time to celebrate. Not that that is a bad idea, but I don't know that it's the intent.

There are exceptions, of course. Diane Lockward leads a poetry reading in honor of Women's History month - a nice juxtaposition of interests - that attracts a large (and not exclusively female) crowd. I'm thinking the point for us as poets and lovers of poetry should be to use the art to connect outside the indoctrinated, or to bring something new to an event where poetry isn't an obvious direction.

Like Father's Day, maybe?

***

The cancelled poetry event at my library wasn't a total loss. I signed up for a "Blind Date With A Book", an event where you get a book for free with the request to read it. That's all. If you write a short review, you can be eligible for an iPod Nano. Sounds like a good deal to me. Tell you more about the book when I get into it.

I also borrowed George Carlin's last book and Steve Allen's How To Be Funny. I've always felt a kindred spirit between comics and poets - particularly comic strip writers and poets. File these under the heading of "continuous personal development". And "Good bedtime beading".

***

Rather long an interesting debate going on in the New Poetry discussion group about "taking a break from" "difficulty poetry", which has evolved into definitions of a scale of accessibility and what it says about the writer and the reader. I don't think it'd be in the spirit of the group to reproduce it all here (and it would be a colossal chore to cut an paste it all), but you can imagine some of the vectors the discussion has followed. As usual, there are those who consider "accessible" a synonym for "simplistic". Surely that's not always the case.

I think the whole argument misses the point. For me, there are only two questions that matter: "Is this a poem?" and "What can I get out of it?" The former specifically asks for awareness and evidence of craft. The second is can be answered in infinite ways, from providing a good story, to being a great example of form, to teaching me mythology, to anything else.

When we look at a piece of visual art, do we consider "accessibility"? No, we classify it and determine if we like it. That's it. Same should apply here.

***

Tomorrow is Tax Day, MidPoint of NatPoMo, and a day off for all the 3B on my fantasy baseball team. There's a certain combination of peace and pain in each of those, don't you think?

Tom Plante in Hoboken This Sunday

2010-04-10T10:00:00.000-04:00

Tom Plante
April’s Spoken Word Artist

Performance Date: April 11, 2010, at 3 p.m., with open microphone following
Location: Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ (Accessible by PATH & Light Rail), www.symposia.us
Admission: FREE, with $3 suggested donation
Information: www.DeBaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html or 201-216-8933

Hoboken, NJ: For the final installment of the 2009–2010 Spoken Word Series, DeBaun Center for Performing Arts and curator David Vincenti have chosen a well-published artist to be featured on Sunday, April 11, 2010, at 3 p.m.—Tom Plante. The Spoken Word Series, co-hosted by Siobhan Barry-Bratcher and David Vincenti, is presented monthly at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ.

Tom Plante grew up on Long Island in East Rockaway, NY. After a couple false starts at college, Tom traveled to the West Coast, where he earned a B.A. in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley. Tom published a literary magazine, Berkeley Works, and labored in the wholesale book business before moving to New Jersey in 1986. He continued his journalistic work with the Irish Echo in New York City, the Scotch Plains-Fanwood Times, and the Courier News in Bridgewater, NJ. In 1996, he was awarded a first prize for editorial writing by the New Jersey Press Association. Since 1988, Tom has edited EXIT 13 Magazine, an annual journal of poetry that he publishes in Fanwood, New Jersey. As an editor, he has participated in a variety of festivals and workshops, including the Union County Teen Arts Festival, the Long Branch Poetry Festival, the Walt Whitman Poetry Festival in Ocean Grove, and the annual Celebration of New Jersey’s Literary Journals held in West Caldwell. Tom is a co-director of the Fanwood Arts Council. The most recent collection of his poetry is My Back Yardstick (CC Marimbo Communications, Berkeley, 1998).

Tom will read from his works and then the microphone will be open to the public to share their work. Although it is not necessary to pre-register to attend the event, those interested in sharing their work during the open mic are asked to sign up at 2:45 p.m. Open mic participants are asked to limit their work to five minutes per person.

The Spoken Word Series takes place at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ. Symposia is the only used bookstore in Hoboken and has great prices for used books, wireless Internet access and many events every week. This is the sixth year DeBaun Center for the Performing Arts and Symposia Bookstore have teamed up to co-produce the Series. With each reading, more and more people are introduced to this wonderful bookshop and the work of many superb artists.

For more information, please visit www.DeBaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html, email Center@DeBaun.org or call 201-216-8933

The 2010–2011 Spoken Word Series will begin on September 12, 2010.

Put Another Nickel In...

2010-04-10T01:14:00.003-04:00

Been thinking about music today. Facebookies who follow me there got a link to Ed Romond's "It Must Have Been The Snow", which I thought of after Maureen Berzok's posting of some lyrics by Jersey natives as part of her JerPoMo observations. Some song lyrics can stand on their own as poems (Yes, Mr. Conley, I remember the mimeographs of Billy Joel lyrics), and I'm wondering if poets have a natural inclination, or an "in" if we want one, to songwriting. In the end, I think it's not as natural as one would think.

Some differences in the approach a songwriter might take to writing are:

Priority of structure and rhyme - if your objective is a song, you're more likely to contain your lines and force rhymes into these lines. True, many poets do this in poems as well, but your choice of rhythms is somewhat limited by what is "singable".
Necessity of a refrain - Folks songs excepted, most songs have a repeated section, introduced thematically early in the piece and permitted to return - this limits the length of content that can be presented. Mandates a stanza length, if you will.
Constraint on length - a song, to function as a song, has a meaningful lower length limit and (great writers and bands excepted) a practical upper limit.
More subtly, melody influences word choice, because some phrases become impossible (or unattractive) with some choices in musical phrasing. Of course, this works in reverse as well.

I've written three songs in my life that I'd be comfortable dusting off for performance, and none of their lyrics work as poems for me. Actually, one derives from a poem written by a friend in college, and in turning it into a song, I gave up quite a bit of his structure, to the point where he didn't like what I'd done with it because the structure loss dragged some meaning with it. Not good or bad, but not the same.

This is an interesting observation for me. I've been a musical performer (singer and instrumentalist) for over 30 years, a practicing poet for much less than that), which I think is why I naturally impose rhythm and sound (though not rhyme) at the expense of word choice sometimes. I guess I never really thought that through before. My friend, though also a talented performer, is by profession a teaching scientist -a purveyor of natural truth through precise language - and therefore less likely, I believe, to trust the music over the words.

This trade-off I see between music and meaning makes Ed Romond's accomplishment so much more impressive for me - the lyric functions as a poem and doesn't (appear to) sacrifice much in word choice for the sake of the song, but the song has a great rhythm and a memorable, hummable melody. And Ed can play guitar.

Where, oh Where, has my Underdog Gone?

2010-04-09T02:19:00.003-04:00

Many people followed the Butler Bulldogs up to the near-miracle near-basket that would have beaten Duke in the NCAA Men's Basketball tourney, but there was an even better (if colder) story brewing in the Men's Hockey over the past week where the RIT Tigers knocked off two schools with long-established Division I programs (RIT's is only 5 years old) to reach the Frozen Four. Their push came to an end on Thursday as Wisconsin knocked them off, 8-1. A great run for an unlikely team. What a great winter season for college sports.

So, uh, where are the underdogs to root for in the coming seasons?

****

While we're considering underdogs, unlikely candidates for our energy and affection, may I make a pitch for all of us, during NatPoMo, to find a poet from a non-Borders bookshelf and give them a chance to win us over? I've discovered a number of poets that way - some of whom I've later discovered were quite well-known, just not to me. I think that's a great feeling, to grow to love the art before you know you're "supposed" to.

I've gotten to know a number of poets that way, and had the good fortune to meet some of the them afterwards, and without exception they've been pleased (and surprised) when they discover you knew their work before you happened upon them in person. So it's a gift for the poet, as well as to yourself.

As Gregory Orr said, "Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced , or felt something like what I have felt."

****

Another underpoet sentiment might be a request to folks organizing festivals and events this year to consider some new voices in their programming. I promise to do the same in Hoboken!

****

If you really need a sports underdog to root for this year and you don't live in Kansas City, let me know and I'll send you a link so you can follow my fantasy baseball team. Season's 5 days old and already I'm two weeks behind. It's 'cause I'm reading poems, not baseball stat books.

Yeah. That's why.

NatPoMore Observations....

2010-04-07T02:33:00.006-04:00

One thing I occasionally grow weary of is the mistaken idea that poems whose origins are personal experience must be factual and cathartic. While this can be true, it is also true that poems that cling to this rule are frequently interesting as experiences, but weak as art. Or to be a bit less gentle about it, they're stories, not poems. In a newly-posted episode of Poetic Lines, Elizabeth Lund leads Ellen Steinbaum through explaining (among other things) the difference between writing as therapy and poetry as craft - concepts which can overlap at some point in the process, but which are not nearly the same thing. Recommended.

****

I'm seeing less National Poetry Month in the non-poetry media this year. I'm wondering if that's economy on the literary side (fewer $$ in promotion to gain the notice), or economy on the mainstream side (less space = less non-mainstream material). I don't think for a minute it's lack of energy in the poetry community. My inboxes are bursting.

****

Confidential to the NCAA: a longer tournament increases the premium on athleticism, thereby reducing the probability of the interesting upset. As long as that's what you want, go ahead and go to 96.

But thanks for a great tourney this year. The performance if my personal bracket notwithstanding.

****

Chapbook 2.2 is off for the final proof; my goal of availability by Father's Day (it is a book of poems in the voice of a father, after all) remains a strong chance. April, with its NatPoMomentum is a great energy source for striving to complete this project - finally. Also, it was in April that my own father died, and it's impossible not to reinhabit my relationship with him when that anniversary rolls around. Another, different, energy source.

****

Let's Go Mets! (and Yankees until the subway series starts!)

A Basket of Miscellany for Easter

2010-04-04T14:23:00.002-04:00

A strange combination of busy and lazy is Easter in my house. Usually have house guests. Always have a few time-dependent things to do at church. Generally fighting off the first allergies of spring. And by early afternoon, having had a busy morning and a big brunch, we're scattered around the house napping. So yes, we're having a typical Easter. And a lovely thing that is.

***

I've met my minimums so far this NatPoMo. Yesterday the book I happened upon in my slow-motion cleanup was The Poet's Child, a Copper Canyon anthology that "explores the intricacies between parent and child". It covers that relationship at all stages from the birth of the child to the death of the parent, and many milestones in between. I've always found the inclusion of two poems whose titles reject the idea of writing about children a little off-putting (one is irony, two is making a point), but it's a good read, and a useful one if you're planning to explore that space yourself.

Having touched that theme, I dug through the pile for my favorite book in the semi-exclusive club of poet parents, Beth Ann Fennelly's Tender Hooks, which is a great and truthful account of what bubbles through the mind of a first-time parent.

***

A little exchange today in the New Poetry discussion group pitted a poem by Robert Frost against a similarly-themed one by Ted Kooser, and concluded (without my vote, I should disclaim) that the Kooser effort was superior. This is to me concrete proof that in human contest, on any given day, anyone can win. Once.

***

Which brings me to my Mets. (you like that transition, Mom?). Baseball season begins this evening with the Yankees and the Red Sox. Whatever. 180 wins minimum between them and they'll both be in the playoffs. A real fan places their rooting energy with a team that needs it, with a group of players that could be the best if they get some breaks and play a little over their heads.....

Or not. Some of us are just continuing to invest in our team in honor of having traded away a Reggie Jackson for a Nino Espinosa in 1978. But root we must.

***

NatPoMo continues. Here are a few events in the area I think you may want to have on your radar:

Diane Lockward will execute a reading of her work designed for her by Caldwell College students at the West Caldwell Public library on April 10.

Unfortunately opposite this, is the Book Launch reading for "The American Voice in Poetry" at Passaic County Community College in Paterson.

Of course, I know you're already planning to visit Hoboken on April 11 for Tom Plante in the Spoken Word Series at Symposia Bookstore.

And I'm planning to visit the County College of Morris on April 28 for the Journal of NJ Poets 2010 reading. One of my (and many others) favorite journals.

There are dozens of other events within reach this month. If you've not been in a while set a minimum to put one on the calender. Just write it down. See what it does for you.

***

Actually, I think I may have thrown an Ed Figueroa in with that Reggie Jackson card.

***

Happy Easter to my six loyal readers. And everyone else.

***

(links to follow)

Now I'm Looking For a Bowler...

2010-04-02T23:48:00.004-04:00

Tonight I'm returning Valzhyna Mort's Factory of Tears to the shelf. I feel a certain obligation to disclose that I purchased Ms. Mort's book entirely because I saw her on the cover of P&W with her accordion. Turns out it was a good buy, but it may be the first time that the presence of a free reed instrument secured a poet a sale.

From Factory of Tears, here is "On a Steamer":

at night from far away
the city looks like
a huge overturned christmas tree
decorated for a holiday
then thrown away
now
it's lying
with its branches scattered
and its lamps
still glittering
in the dark

Natural Pottery Mints

2010-04-01T20:21:00.002-04:00

NatPoMo snuck up on me this year, and it's just as well. I had no time to cajole myself into promising that I'll make time to write a poem a day and two sestinas on Sundays. No time to cultivate the urge to reorganize the manic mess that is my bookcase and lie about how I'll reread a book therefrom every 30 minutes until May. No time to shop for discount hardback notebooks in a new color scheme to celebrate the start of new projects that will run out of gas 4 pages hence in the middle of June.

I've been working some of the tips from Marty and Joshua Seldman's sneakily impactful Executive Stamina into my routine; one of the really useful tips in that book is the practice of "minimums", setting simple and small goals for yourself in an effort to get you to change habits and gain momentum in areas in which you're eager to improve. It's been working for me in other areas, so for NatPoMo this year, I'm going to apply some minimums to my writing habit. Here is my minimum for this April:

I will put away one book a day. This will require me to put my hands on one book of poems. Just one. And if I flip through it for a minute, maybe something will catch my attention. Maybe I'll go write it down and play with a response, or email it to someone, or mention it here, call a writer friend to chat about it. But if I don't, that's OK. I will put one book a day away. I commit that to myself.

Now, if you are more into the immerse and overwhelm strategy, you can go for NaPoWriMo, or Robert Lee Brewer's Poem-a-Day challenge, you can sign up for the year-round The Writer's Almanac and Your Daily Poem (which you should already be signed up for anyway) and the seasonal Poets.org daily list, or the weekly Poetry Daily list (to get its poets-selecting-poems emails; always a treat!).

But me? I'm just going to put one book away. One book like Coleman Barks' Tentmaking. The book with the poem "Seagull at the Newark Airport" in it:

Going low less than a foot off the asphalt, then up over
a tanker and around
the freestanding staircase, a poem with its

two black beads watches how government manages to fly.

What book will I pick up tomorrow?

Dodgy about Dodge

2010-03-27T10:36:00.005-04:00

The first flyer for the 2010 Dodge Festival reached the house this week. On the website, there's a photo of the NJPAC with a great and colorful crowd in and around it. The site talks at some length about how the new location (used to be in Waterloo Village, and one unfortunate year at Duke Farms) will be co-located with the vibrant Newark arts scene and "greener" because it will enable attendance by public transportation. This is all true, I suppose, but I can't help but feel this will be a very, very, different experience than prior festivals, and it will be missing some of what, for me, were the best experiences of the festival.

At Waterloo, there were occasionally long walks between selected venues - I guess for many people, these were an inconvenience, but for me, they were a chance to digest whatever event I had just been in, breath for a minute, and get ready to give myself over to the next experience. Can you imagine, for example, going from Anne Waldman to Coleman Barks without a sorbet-like stroll separating?

The spread-out nature of the festival permitted spontaneous gatherings; you'd sometimes see a group of (ahem) younger aspiring poets gathered in circle talking, or even having an impromptu critique group meeting. It also permitted the strolling musicians - like Yarina, who are featured prominently on the website - to really stroll. I'm hopeful the planners are considering this, though I'm not sure how it's going to happen.

The particular venues of the Waterloo layout also contributed to some events - storytelling in the barn, spiritual poems in the old church, the crazy joy of the high school kids' reading from the gazebo. I can't see how those venues can be recreated around NJPAC - different ones, maybe, but newer, pre-fab ones.

Probably what I'll miss most are those moments where I wander away to the side of the Morris Canal and just unplug from the intellectual energy of the event. Looking back over past festivals, those times are what I seem to remember most clearly. Walking along that quiet path down by the canal, toward those two buildings that always seemed somehow forgotten, to that tent across the canal that always seemed to collect all the water from all the other tents, thinking about the 6,000 stories in Dovie Thomason's repertoire, about meeting poets like Beth Ann Fennelly whose work I knew for 6 years before I met her, about Taha Mohammad Ali's experiences and Mark Doty's great joy for whatever he was doing (reading, chatting, greeting people on the walk. We'll see if those experiences can be recreated in Newark. Maybe they'll open the ball park for us.

I'll accept the "greener" label and its good intentions for now, though that's a very hard thing to prove. Most "greener" claims simply displace waste to a different location or trade waste for energy (like how hand dryers eliminate a bit of waste at the expense of bit of increased electricity consumption), but it's probably true that some people will take advantage of the public transportation, which would have been running anyway.

In any event, I just need to adjust my expectations for a different kind of Dodge. Even if it's not what I'm used to and some of the things I personally looked forward to each time, it's still a terrific gathering of premier poets, and worth the effort to get used to something new.

A Few Tips From Brother Joseph and Sister Michael

2010-03-20T20:54:00.006-04:00

Via Steven Schroeder, today I read this post by Chris O. Cook, in which he calls out the 600-pound gorilla by saying "Poetry readings are boring." While I don't share his vehemence, I think he makes some excellent points that my high school forensics coach and first director* would share.

Chris makes some excellent points, but it really all boils down to a lack of awareness of what engages the audience and a lack of effort (sometimes deriving from a lack of comfort) to be entertaining.

Here are a few things many poets can do a better job of:

Plan to engage the audience. Bad coaches tell you to open with a joke, good ones tell you you need a hook to catch them and make them listen. Either way, you have a responsibiltiy to push the START button on the reading somehow.
Understand but don't partition your audience. As you're starting and during the "casual" dialog, you should be aware of the demographics of your listeners (usually obtainable from a quick look around the room as you settle in at the microphone). It's good to speak to them once in a while, but try not to exclude anyone in the crowd when you do so (I've been inadvertently excluded based on gender, age, education, favorite poets, and politics).
Drop the mousy humility. If you're really uncomfortable reading, don't read. If you're going to read, doing act like you hate it. It sounds almost too silly to point out, but remember that your discomfort will make the audience uncomfortable.
Be aware of presentation technology. Spend a minute to understand your microphone before you read. Get there early enough to experience the venue, the lights, the layout of the space.
Cast off the monotony. Basic public speaking tip: Vary volume and speed. Your poems and your banter with the audience will have different mood and tone and meaning at diffreent points in your reading; why would you suppress your natrual voice at those moments to make them sound the same?

Truthfully, I've not had a reader in my series in 9 years who was genuinely difficult to enjoy because of weak presentation, but I make a serious point to understand the probability of a weak presentation when I sign someone up. In most cases I've seen them before or have a first-hand recommendation; in a rare case, I'll trust a large personality offstage to carry over onto the stage.

Give Chris's post a read - he's more eloquent than I on this issue, and I'm curious what points strike you as on the mark, and if you think he's missig anything. Let me know; we haven't even touched on how basic dance chorus training can be useful for your readings!

* - names altered, but they know who they are....

In Which We Turn Around And Realize A Month Has Passed...

2010-03-19T02:10:00.004-04:00

Hoo boy. Things do happen, don't they? Let's have a quick catch-up post so we can move on to better things in the days to come, shall we?

****

Had a great visit from Joan Cusack Handler to the Spoken Word Series this month. I know my six loyal readers are tired of hearing this, but the generosity of the NJ poetry community continues to refresh and amaze me. Joan is the Publisher at CavanKerry Press, which produces some of the most physically and poetically beautiful books around, and a terrific poet besides. Not only was her reading great (which I expected), but she handled the typically interactive enthusiasm of our little crowd with great humor, and gave several of us some specific and helpful publishing guidance besides. Isn't it true that those with the most confidence in themselves tend to be the most generous with their coaching?

BTW, if you enjoy poetry presented live, you need to go here. It doesn't get much better.

****

Word is starting to leak out about the upcoming Hanover Press anthology Crush, to which I contributed a favorite poem that had yet to find a home in print. Editor Faith Vicinanza has this to say about the book:

"Most poets are intrigued, if not enthralled, with the notion of love. And it doesn’t require a belief in love as a viable construct nor as a human emotion that is, by its nature, unavoidable, to find the subject worthy of contemplation and a poem or two.

Still, poets know there isn’t a hewing cry for more unrequited love poems. I prefer to call these almost love poems, or better, versified flirtations.

This collection is meant to delight in the familiar, to share knowingly in the humor underlying the obsessive, and at times, to tease, perhaps even seduce."

This book should be a lot of fun.

As an aside, the truism that a poem is never really done (that most poems can always be revised and improved) applies to me in spades in this case. I presented the earliest version of the poem Faith includes in the book at an open 2004. The final product is a recognizable cousin - related, but different in many good ways. And yes, I mean that as a compliment to my cousins.

****

Finally noticed a press reference to the fun event at Gary's Wine and Marketplace last month, which featured Laura Boss, Maria Gillan, and a Who's-Who in New Jersey at the open mic. The article reflects a bit of distance from the poetry community (some of the references are pure textbook stuff), but it's still worth a read. And a nice DeBaun Series event reference on page 2 (for which THANKS!)

And yes, that's me in the second row.

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My first chapbook, which I've made several oblique references to in past weeks, will be out in time for Father's Day this year. It was a long process to complete the commitment to self-publishing it and validating that opinion with poets and publishers I respect. I've been reading from the prototype in public recently. I feel about self-publishing like Wil Wheaton did about making an infomercial: It will send clear signals to some and create a perception that I'm an artist on a certain level of talent. Nevertheless, it's clearly the right decision for me in this case and I'm comfortable understanding what some people will think of me. "Some people" aren't the audience for this book. Thanks to those who helped me get home on this issue; you know who you are.

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The waters are starting to recede in New Jersey, but we are reminded that we are part of the fragile world after all. The tree that was leaning over my house for the past week has been tended to, and in its leaving has taken with it all the metaphors it introduced into my little universe. I'm thankful, and looking forward to a great and renewing Spring.

Stick around for it, won't you?

Curling: The Official Winter Olympic Sport of Poets

2010-02-23T19:47:00.005-05:00

If you're a fan at my Facebook page, you probably thought I was nuts this morning when you saw:

David Vincenti Analogy for the day: Curling is to The Olympics as Poetry is to Barnes and Noble. Discuss.

Jayne Jaudon Ferrer of Your Daily Poem was first to fire a salvo back, repeated here in its entirety: "I think not! Poetry is vibrant, exciting, funny, heartbreaking, provocative, whimsical, keep inserting other descriptive terms. Curling is BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORING.."

Well, friend Jayne, I couldn't have asked you to set me up any better. (I'd insert the obvious volleyball reference here, but that would be mixing metaphports).

My proposal is that poets adopt curling as our official winter Olympic sport, and see in that fine old game a series of similarities to our selected art that might just teach us a thing or three.

First: Curling has historical roots that most people who dismiss the sport don't know. While these don't necessarily make the modern version of the game easier to understand, they do provide some context, not to mention some interesting stories that might help you connect to the game as you play it or watch it. Poetry, similarly has history that most people who dismiss it put out of their heads the day after they learned them in high school. While this history doesn't necessarily make contemporary, modern or post-avant poetry easier to understand, it certainly contains interesting characters and many ways connect to poetry as you read it, write it or listen to it.

Second: Curling, while it looks easy to do (at least to those who don't participate in game) and is tempting to treat lightly because of that, does have some subtlety to it, some rules which - if you exploit them well - make the difference between being a champion and missing the medal round. Face it: Even if you don't see it, there's got to be some skill involved, or teams which are consistently good wouldn't beat up so regularly on the teams that are consistently bad. In the same way, poetry seems easy to do (at least to those who don't participate in the art). And while many people could talk about rhyme and tap some iambs out on the table, few outside "the game" could speak usefully about assonance, enjambment, allusion.... which will lead us, inevitably, to lash out at those who dismiss us with a similar challenge: they might not see it, but there is clearly a practitioner's skill involved, else those who publish and present and are read more widely wouldn't consistently outpublish (etc.) the others.

Third (Sorry, Jayne, this one's right back at you!): Curling is Boring. Ask anyone in your office about poetry. I disagree on both fronts, but don't for a minute tell me that a significant fraction of your coworkers would say poetry was exciting.

Now how about this one: Curling unfolds slowly, tactically but its the rapid twists at the end that provide the hook, the reason to keep watching. Poetry, similarly, unfolds according to its own tactics, but frequently brings a surprise at the end that makes the unfolding all the more interesting in review.

Or this: the basics of curling, the steps in execution, are learned fairly easily. Their mastery, which is much more mental than physical, comes only with practice and wisdom, explaining why curlers are typically older when they reach their peak than are other athletes. Isn't that really true of poets as well? I mean, in what other arenas does "Younger" mean "Under 35?"

In case you hadn't guessed, I've been watching a bit of curling and yes, as I get to understand it a bit better, I'm really finding it interesting. Not for everyone maybe; I think my wife is convinced I've gone a bit loopy to be so fascinated by it. As to whether that is another way curling is like poetry, I'll have to withhold comment.

OK, I get it. I know that, truth be told, most people don't care about curling and won't care about anything I've said here. But it is also truth that most people don't care about poetry either, and probably would dismiss it with all the same prejudices they do curling. We take it personally when they dismiss our art and take steps to educate them otherwise, no? Let's show a little empathy and extend the same courtesy to our new official sport.

Rock on, stone throwers.

Tomorrow in Rutherford!

2010-02-16T20:35:00.006-05:00

Come join us if you can!

Happy Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T02:22:00.004-05:00

If you are one of my six loyal followers, or for that matter anyone who's wandered into earshot during the first half of February over the past few years, you've heard of how the tradition in our house is KFC on Valentine's Day (the full story is in the archive). Here's a little update of that story, in honor of the day, and of my kids, who to my great joy, have begun to revel in the quirkiness of our celebrations as much as I.

May you spend the day with ones who bring you as much joy.

{sorry, this poem has been deleted}

Heartmonizing for Mr. Clinton

2010-02-13T00:40:00.004-05:00

I don't know if he agrees with his politics, but my Uncle Bill and his quartet stopped by to offer former President Bill Clinton a song and some advice upon his release from the hospital:

{this obsolete link has been deleted}

A Roux, A Reduction, The Essence (if you will)

2010-02-12T23:09:00.002-05:00

A great event last night at Gary's Wine & Marketplace in Wayne. Maria Gillan and Laura Boss were featured, introduced by Jim Gwyn in an event organized partly by Jim and Emily Rose of Lips Magazine. Maria and Laura are simply great, entertaining poets who radiate joy for the art, and they attracted a great crowd of poets and fans of poetry. Oh, and the four wines Gary's staff were pouring next to the yard-wide cheese plate didn't chase anyone away, either.

The open was a good ride. A long list of good local writers presented (Jim Gwyn, Jessica DeKoninck, Betty Marchitti, Norma Bernstock, Catherine Magia, and I'm sure I'm forgetting several) along with at least one first-time-ever reader, a member of the store staff with a great set of pipes who I hope enjoyed his experience enough to try his chances again at the next poetry event at Gary's (hint, hint).

After the event, Tony Puma of the WCWilliams Poetry Cooperative (which has graciously rescheduled my snowed-out reading with Diane Lockward for next Wednesday...) commented on the short poem I presented that it was "tight", that it seemed to contain what it needed to and no more. High praise, indeed; I don't know what I could have heard that I'd have taken as a better compliment. That got me thinking about how I sorted out my portfolio last year, removing a substantial fraction of works I thought qualified as "done", but that were somehow not up to the level of my other work. While it breaks down fairly chronologically (the older work is the weaker work - not unexpected), the real difference is the "tightness", the absence of unnecessary words. When I've received the gift of feedback on my work in the past year, that's one of the themes that's been consistent in that feedback, and that's what drove me to sort and select the poems that I'll be including in the chapbook.

And there's another element to what got included which actually cause me to sort out at least one piece that I think is stronger than most of the poems I left in. Which links me to this week's other learning.

But I'll save that for next time....

2010-02-06T10:34:00.001-05:00

Farrah Field
February’s Spoken Word Artist

Performance Date: February 7, 2010, at 3 p.m., with open microphone following
Location: Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ (Accessible by PATH & Light Rail), www.symposia.us
Admission: FREE, with $3 suggested donation
Information: www.debaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html or 201-216-8933

Hoboken, NJ: For the fifth installment of the 2009–2010 Spoken Word Series, DeBaun Center for Performing Arts and curator David Vincenti have chosen a well-published artist to be featured on Sunday, February 7, 2010, at 3 p.m.—Farrah Field. The Spoken Word Series, co-hosted by Siobhan Barry-Bratcher and David Vincenti, is presented monthly at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ.

Farrah Field’s poems have appeared numerous publications, including Pebble Lake Review, Mississippi Review, Margie, Chelsea, The Massachusetts Review, Harpur Palate, and Pool, and are forthcoming in Sojourn and Another Chicago Magazine. Her first book of poems “Rising” won the 2007 Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books. She teaches high school in New York City. www.cortlandreview.com/issue/37/field.html

Farrah will read from her works and then the microphone will be open to the public to share their work. Although it is not necessary to pre-register to attend the event, those interested in sharing their work during the open mic are asked to sign up at 2:45 p.m. Open mic participants are asked to limit their work to five minutes per person.

The Spoken Word Series takes place at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ. Symposia is the only used bookstore in Hoboken and has great prices for used books, wireless Internet access and many events every week. This is the sixth year DeBaun Center for the Performing Arts and Symposia Bookstore have teamed up to co-produce the Series. With each reading, more and more people are introduced to this wonderful bookshop and the work of many superb artists.

For more information, please visit www.debaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html, email Center@debaun.org or call 201-216-8933.

The next Spoken Word event will be on March 7, 2010, at 3 p.m. with Joan Cusack Handler.

OK, What is he saying now?

2010-01-28T20:54:00.003-05:00

I am fascinated with translation tonight. I've borrowed from the library two books of poems in translation -- same author, different translators, 10 years apart. There are about a dozen poems in common between the books and the differences between them are remarkable. There are some word choice differences, but there are two key differences between the works:

In one, there seems to have been a conscious choice to simplify, opting for simpler words in most cases, maintaining a shorter line, leaving out images that appear in the other. Not coincidentally, these translators also decided to employ a regular line rhythm, and an English rhyme.

Now, I do occasionally sacrifice a word for an aural effect in my writing, but when I hold up a translation that exhibits an end-rhyme in the target language, I admit I'm suspect of it. I'm not multilingual by any means, but across the Spanish and few bits of German in my head alongside my native American English, I'm not aware of any word pairs that rhyme in all three tongues.

Of further interest, I've been experimenting this year with the paraphrase, taking well-known bits of English literature and restating them in my own language. Translating them, if you will, from their original form into the language I speak, whatever you might call that. Not only a writing exercise, this is also a reminder that there are multiple ways to say everything, that every communication choice we make is a reflection of our own style. And every communication choice is a chance to lay our own style on top of whatever bit of information we transmit.

So thinking back to that author who I've been reading in translation (and no, I'm not going to say who it is for a while - part of a future project), I wonder what style decisions he made in his own words and which translator is truer to it. And which is imposing his own style on someone else's words.

Reflections on Tasty Coco!

2010-01-23T09:28:00.008-05:00

Tuesday night I was invited by Rick Mullin to perform a bit of my poetry at Tasty Coco in Caldwell, NJ. Been a long time since I prepared a 20-minute set (last time was April, 2009, and the time before that was in 2008) and I had a different kind of challenge than I was used to in preparing for such things. In the past, I was comfortable with a basic "extended open" approach to preparing the set: identify 6-7 poems I liked and wanted to present, pick a few others to create some decent transitions, knead until blended. And since I was never seriously close to committing the chapbook to print, I never really considered that I might be "featuring" its contents for consumption in pursuit of sales interest.

Now, I had the the book beginning to feel real (I even had a prototype to hold up if I wanted to), but I also had 2 other projects that were interesting enough to me that I was considering doing something with them (one's a persona package approaching chapbook length, one is a fun sequence that may or may not be able to sustain itself for 24 pages.). On top of that, I've been writing "in response" a lot in the past year, and I've always found that poems that link to other art or to events that the audience has a little collective recollection of make for great moments in a reading; at least from the audience, which is where I'd always experienced them before.

Another factor was my co-feature, Quincy R. Lehr, whose style on the page was much truer to form and at the microphone much truer to performance art than mine. There wasn't much chance of similarity in either content or presentation from us, but I didn't want to even flirt with it.

There was also the format of the series, which I knew from prior attendance was highly interactive and informal, and included a "lightning round", or a once-around-the-room after the open and the features, in which every poet in the room gave one more poem. So I'd have to save something back, a cognac-like aftermoment which would be my last impression on the crowd.

And finally, there was the crowd, which I knew was going to include at least a few folks who know me primarily as a technologist or a project manager, who in fact are career technologists themselves, who may have seen my poems on paper before but would never have seen me as a performer (except in training sessions, which actually is a good way to show off your skills - but that's another post). So not only did I want to make a good impression, but a particular impression, and one which wouldn't present itself back to me too embarrassingly in line in the cafeteria.

Oh, and it was Poe's 201st birthday, so I wanted to mark that, somehow, as well.

All of these things are "good problems", of course. I take away that I've got a little more to offer as an artist than I used to, that I'm reaching that "wider audience" I've always coveted (not that my Mother's opinion isn't always very encouraging), and that I haven't lost my skills for anticipating the crowd (which, if you have been hanging around here long enough, you know I had far earlier in my life than my serious interest in poetry). But it also signals to me that I've arrived at that necessary transition point, that I'm no longer interested in having a few minutes of microphone time. And that my ambition for creating has grown to the point where it requires conscious cultivation, that I can't take a month off from writing and expect to pick it up a the same place it was, that the project is now at least as important as the individual poem.

So what does this mean? I don't know. Kind of a wake up call for the year, really. Maybe not a make-or-break year, but certainly one in which my expectations for myself are changing. Need to set some larger goals for 2010, of course, and start thinking in terms of that 2-year cycle that seems necessary for the completion of a book/project. And about carving out the writing time instead of taking it where it comes (with a focus on revising and assembling, which is not something I can do easily orally, as I tend to compose).

Thanks then, to Poetry at Tasty Coco and Rick for giving me this opportunity not only to drag a few of my engineering mates into the poetry scene, but also to have this moment of reflection. I feel like the bell has been rung, and it's up to me to answer it now.

Speaking of "bells", the homage I paid to Poe was to read the opening section of "The Bells" before reading my own stuff. Rick was nice enough to capture the moment and post it to his channel. Take a look and let me know what you think.

And stay tuned. This could be a good year.

In which we take a few minutes on a Sunday evening to repurpose some adrenaline left over from the Jets victory

2010-01-17T21:20:00.002-05:00

"Greetings from DavidVincenti.com! This is your 'Jets 16, Chargers 14' Update.

We know you're busy thinking through how you'll celebrate the Jets' victory* on Sunday, but we don't want you to forget about the days following that momentous event, either: planning your evening menus, organizing your receipts to start on your taxes, and coming to see David Vincenti read with Quincy Lehr this Tuesday at Tasty Coco in Caldwell, New Jersey....

* - Yes, we believe. We always believe."

I sent it to my mailing list yesterday. I swear!

=============================

Since I brought it up, shall I mention a bit more about this Tuesday? Tasty Coco features a nice bistro menu, heavy on good desserts and coffee drinks, and a rather large fraction of their energy goes into presenting local artists. This week, those artists are Quincy Lehr and yours truly. Rick Mullin is the host.

I've been going through new and old poems for the last week or so thinking through my material; Rick serves up an interesting format, one that is extremely entertaining in how it circles through the voices it presents. The open starts, then the features go on for a while, then the rest of the open, then a "victory lap" where every poet present (including the features, of course) does one more short poem. It's worth coming out to see.

=============================

Busy couple of months coming up here. Two scheduled readings in the next month, one already booked for July (and keep contact with the Facebook page for two more in the works!), forcing me to update the portfolio, which I've been horribly neglecting. Having been focused so much on polishing and repolishing the chapbook manuscript (and being busy with family and work - the clear priorities, in the end), I'm sure I've been losing good ideas. The current notebook has lasted me a year; even with relaxing my rule against composing in MS Word (I use a pencil or a tape recorder), that's not good enough. But this reading's given me the kick in the seat I needed to dust off the newer projects. Sometimes you need that.

=============================

Did I say chapbook? Yes, I did. More on that next month.

=============================

I've been flipping around in Ray Gonzalez' Consideration of the Guitar (New and Selected Poems); I'll take it from the beginning soon, but this is how like to work my way into an author whose work is new to me: a random sampling of the buffet so I can decide where to dive in first.

I get to it all, don't worry.

Interesting, though - Gonzalez is one of those poets whose work is very different to me aurally - I have the same trouble hearing Gonzalez that I do hearing Coleman Barks. They're not similar poets at all, but they do share a low-key, inmitable presence at the microphone which I can't replicate in my head. That won't stop me from consuming the work, of course, but I do need to get past it before I can really enjoy the work. Is that crazy?

============================

See you Tuesday?

Starting the New Year Right

2010-01-01T21:19:00.004-05:00

A few posts ago I mentioned how a recent workshop I attended made the link between gratitude and diffusing stress; it also went on to connect diffusing stress with increasing energy and increasing energy with operating efficiently (seems obvious to type it, but think through everything it implies for how you make and act on your daily decisions!). So in an effort to hit the new year in stride, here are a few coins for the gratitude meter as it applies to the little writing hobby that carved out this little corner of the Internet.

I am first and always most grateful for my family, who find enthusiasm for not only the time I spend on my writing, but for the writings themselves (even when they don't "get it"), and for the geeky quote collection I've accumulated in my head from projects over the years. They remind me the truest meaning of support: That something is important to me is reason enough for it to be important to them, and I can tap into that trust as the reason to write.
From the unknown conference attendee who participated in my May presentation on project management, and took the time after to complete an audience evaluation form, on which was contained the single word "Useless", I am grateful for this important lesson: Nothing I write will be meaningful to everyone, but that should not stop me from writing; those who find value there will do so irrespective of other opinions.
For the poets, the band of linguophiles, editors, and teachers who permit me to sometimes run in their company and never, never, use the word "idiot", I am grateful for the generous examples they provide in person and in poems. From them two goals for the year: to live up to their generous adjectives and their specificity guidance.
To the teams and athletes I root for (that's the Mets, Jets, Yankees*, Norm Duke and Parker Bohn, among other lesser followings), I remain as grateful as I was when I was 10 for the recurring chance to cheer, thrill, groan, and completely lose myself in the pursuit of something with great passion with no consequence more severe than a Sunday afternoon. The residue of passion is momentum. Better if the Jets win, of course, but the adrenaline persists no matter the outcome.

The learning from my workshop was that gratitude = energy, eventually, and I do believe that. But it seems all the more important in the pursuit of a writing hobby, where the feedback cycle is measured in seasons, if not years, to have one's energy be generated from within.

Let that be this year's resolution.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T00:01:00.000-05:00

Now, the tree is decorated with bright merriment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness. And they are welcome. Innocent, and welcome be they ever held, beneath the branches of the Christmas Tree, which casts no gloomy shadow! But, as it sinks into the ground, I hear a whisper going through the leaves. "This in commemoration of the law of love and kindness, mercy and compassion. This, in remembrance of Me!"

Charles Dickens
"A Christmas Tree"

A joyful Christmas to us all.

A Daily Dose of David

2009-12-23T02:02:00.001-05:00

Well, for one day, anyway. Please click over to Your Daily Poem and see more!

Do Not Open Until Christmas

2009-12-20T00:01:00.000-05:00

Sound the Jingle Bells!

2009-12-17T06:55:00.004-05:00

The Christmas shopping (pending the arrival of a few Amazon boxes) is complete! This is a momentous occasion, coming as it does more than a full week before the Day itself. This permits a number of good things, including the avoidance of the mall exit of the highway until the 28th and focusing on the parish events (and there are several!) in the coming week. Good for us.

***

I was able to participate in a great class yesterday at work. I probably shouldn't report a great deal of it here (wouldn't be fair to the content owner), I did volunteer a lesson I've learned from my blogroll and you, my six loyal readers, so I should say at least that much: There is clear evidence that a sense of gratitude, in general and specific, is a contributor to managing you stress and to permitting you to operate at peak efficiency; if you click through the links at right, you've known that poets - for whom the distance between work product and feedback may be the longest of any profession - have known for a while. Thanks for that teaching, Kelli.

***

Three days to the Christmas poem's arrival here. And to the end of the Jets' playoff hopes. Which I look at as a gift, as it will save me a lot of anxiety the next few Sundays....

Speaking of Occasion Poems....

2009-12-13T13:03:00.002-05:00

Well, as Jayne Jaudon Ferrer notes in today's installment of Your Daily Poem:

So what do you do when you want a poem for a specific occasion and can't find one? You write it yourself. I find it hard to believe that no Scandinavian poet ever felt the urge to write about the lovely Lucy, but I sure haven't been able to come up with anything. So here you have it: one of my own, hot off the press. One does what one must...

The occasion in question here is Saint Lucy's (or Lucia's) feast day, which is today. Such occasions - ones steeped in history but less commonly known and certainly less commercialized - are where poetry can serve us well. Overuse, secularism, and cynicism are less likely to have turned your readers away before they read your opening line.

You can read Ms. Ferrer's poem here. While you're there, be sure to subscribe.

The countdown-to-Christmas-poem continues...

Musing about The Holiday Poem Process

2009-12-12T08:28:00.007-05:00

Well, the Christmas poem is complete. While it's something I enjoy and feel very good about doing (for myself and for the two or three of you, my six loyal fans, who engage the Holiday the way we do in my house), it's become (or I have made it) a bit more challenging in recent years.

First, there's the act of crafting. With all due respect to the 83 emails I've received since Thanksgiving containing 30-couplet rhymes restating "I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day*" presented in curlicue reds and greens, they're really, really bad poems. Forgive me, Lord, for passing judgment during the season, but it's the truth. To receive decent marks as a poem, a work must have an awareness of its structure and deploy some element of craft. Rhyme is one, of course. But rhyme with haphazard meter, without awareness of other elements of sound, with no sense of pattern... is distracting and lazy. Or, more likely, it's an attempt at a poem by someone who's never read a poem. I don't enjoy this. I don't choose to create anything like it.

Next there's the selection of subject. While subject is (truly) infinite, it's hard to imagine connecting potholes, or the Yankees, or health care reform to the Christmas season (though some have tried on that last point, to poor effect). Frequent offenders are shopping, decorating, and travel; the Gospels make their appearance in there, of course. In my own Christmas poem history, I've taken as my source material shopping (badly), events/scenes at my church (mixed effect), my children (OK), and Bible verse (better). There's a balance between personal investment and objectivity that you need to find in a poem that tends toward the sentimental.

Then there's theme. I accept that poems in general need not have themes (and certainly not "messages"), but it seems to me that an occasional poem is the exception, that a poem attached to an event needs somehow to be part of the purpose or presentation of that event. The most frequent themes I've seen in the couplet parade are "slow down at Christmas" and paraphrasings of the Ghost of Christmas Present introducing the children beneath his robe**. It's easy, too, to turn to a child's experience of Christmas and apply it to the adult world. I've been writing these poems for a number of years. I want to find something fresh to say.

A branch of theme argument is tone - I do not choose to be a Scrooge, and it is my choice to stay close to the religious spirit of the holiday. This excludes some themes, I know, but it's consistent with my approach to the Holiday, and it's how I want to approach the work.

Finally, and this is a limitation I choose to impose, there's accessibility. This annual is a work I compose specifically to reach the broadest audience, which includes reaching friends who don't read poetry. These are folks I don't expect to take an interest in my work as a rule, who are on my email distribution list only because they want to encourage me, or are friends of my mother, or some such. I value the energy these people lend my artistic effort, and I want them to experience the Christmas poem in a way they might enjoy. Am I a sell-out? I dunno. But you wouldn't write a love poem to someone in a language they don't speak and still expect them to fall into your arms, would you?

In a nutshell, I'm trying to write something that maintains sufficient poetic craft to satisfy myself but offers enough dangling threads to engage a wide audience spanning secular and religious, artists and skeptics, young and old, deeply loved family and the friends-of-friends-of-friends.

It'll be here in a few days. Please drop by so you can tell me how I did. In the meantime, the American Academy of Poets can keep your sleigh's engine idling.

* - which, by the way, was a Longfellow poem before it was a carol. In case you were interested.
** - if you didn't get this reference, which many of the emailers wouldn't have either, go read "A Christmas Carol" - the original - immediately. Watching the Alistair Sim movie version will do in a pinch.

Testing the Facebook Connection

2009-12-11T22:48:00.000-05:00

Have you checked out my Facebook Fan Page? The link is at the top right. I'm trying to connect all my outlets into one stream, but my IT expertise peaked with DEC Pro-BASIC some years ago. Wish me luck!

We regret to inform you....

2009-12-05T22:03:00.002-05:00

... Linda Radice will not be able to participate in the Spoken Word Series this weekend due to injury. We look forward to having her as part of next season's program. Meanwhile, be sure and stop by for Hudson County's friendliest open mic event!

Linda Radice this Sunday in Hoboken

2009-12-03T23:04:00.000-05:00

Linda Radice
December’s Spoken Word Artist
For Immediate Release: November 17, 2009

Performance Date: December 6, 2009, at 3 p.m., with open microphone following
Location: Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ (Accessible by PATH & Light Rail), www.symposia.us
Admission: FREE, with $3 suggested donation
Information: www.debaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html or 201-216-8933

Hoboken, NJ: For the fourth installment of the 2009–2010 Spoken Word Series, DeBaun Center for Performing Arts and curator David Vincenti have chosen a well-published artist to be featured on Sunday, December 6, 2009, at 3 p.m.—Linda Radice. The Spoken Word Series, co-hosted by Siobhan Barry-Bratcher and David Vincenti, is presented monthly at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ.

Linda Radice is a poet and essayist, and has had her work published numerous journals and anthologies. She is the second place recipient of the 2007 Allen Ginsberg Award, and Honorable Mention in 2008. She is a member of the Fanwood Arts Council, and assistant director of the Baron Arts Center Poets Wednesday reading series. She works by day to keep the lights on, and is a furious scribner by night in the home she shares with her husband Sam and a cat named Shakespeare. She owes her writer/poet friends and mentors her undying gratitude, and never forgets how blessed she is to have them in her life. lindaradice.blogspot.com

Linda will read from her works and then the microphone will be open to the public to share their work. Although it is not necessary to pre-register to attend the event, those interested in sharing their work during the open mic are asked to sign up at 2:45 p.m. Open mic participants are asked to limit their work to five minutes per person.

The Spoken Word Series takes place at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ. Symposia is the only used bookstore in Hoboken and has great prices for used books, wireless Internet access and many events every week. This is the sixth year DeBaun Center for the Performing Arts and Symposia Bookstore have teamed up to co-produce the Series. With each reading, more and more people are introduced to this wonderful bookshop and the work of many superb artists.

For more information, please visit www.debaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html, email Center@debaun.org or call 201-216-8933.

The next Spoken Word event will be on February 7, 2010, at 3 p.m. with Farrah Field.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T12:20:00.003-05:00

Kelli tagged the blogosphere on this one:

"A few questions to share my Thanksgiving day with you..."

1. Which do you like better: hosting Thanksgiving at your home, or going elsewhere?
Someday, we'll host. Until then, I'll bring the turnips. And sometimes Brussels sprouts.

2. Do you buy a fresh or frozen turkey? Organic? Free-range? Tofurkey?
In college, my friend Nick used Tofurkey as an escalated swear word (Tofu --> Tofutti--> Tofurkey). I agree.

3. Do you make stuffing or dressing? What kind?
My MIL makes the sausage stuffing, one wet one dry. I eat it. Good deal for me.

4. Sweet potato pie or Pumpkin pie?
Can't get sweet potato often enough to prefer it, but it's good when I get it.

5. Are leftovers a blessing or a curse?
This isn't even a real question. They're a delight of the first order.

6. What side dishes are a must-have in your family?
Mashed turnip, stuffed mushrooms, 3+ others. I make the turnip for me. That my wife eats some is the truest evidence of her love for me.

7. What do you wish you had that might make Thanksgiving easier?
A La-Z-Boy to facilitate footballnapping.

8. If/when you go to someone else’s house for the holiday, do you usually bring a dish? If so, what is it?
The above-mentioned turnip. If it's really only for me, I should prepare it, no?

9. What is your favorite after-Thanksgiving activity?
Board games until at least one of us erodes into irrepressible giggling. Doesn't usually take long.

10. Share one Thanksgiving tradition.
My daughter preparing a blessing.

11. Share one Thanksgiving memory.
During after-dinner gaming one year, playing Uno Attack ("Uno Spitto" to her friends), my Mother managed to cause a playing card to helicopter the length of the table and land in her coffee. Nothing but net. Took ten minutes and 14 tissues for us to recover from that gigglefit.

12. Name five things you’re thankful for.

1. My delightful loving supportive family -- every circle of it, every day.
2. A job that lets me have a small hand in improving people's lives.
3. The geographic accident that placed me in the NJ Poetry Community; living at a time when my poetry community includes friends in 10 states, some of whom I've only "met" through the window of this little spot on the WWWeb.
4. Good health in those nearest me who have it, good care for those nearest me that need it.
5. Having great people in my life - at work, at home, in art, and at the bowling alley - who have the skill to teach me, the will to teach me, and the time to teach me.

Learn something every day: That's the way I practice my gratitude.

Thanks for the impetus, Kelli, and Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Where the month has gone (a play in 3 excuses)

2009-11-18T21:13:00.003-05:00

Wow. You blink and it's two weeks later. How does THAT happen? Anyway, here's what's been going on.

Well, work's been busy, but I know that none of you, my six loyal readers, are here to read about that.

* * *

Last week I presented a lunchtime poetry seminar to the Seniors group at my church. I had read about LifeVerse and proposed a talk to the group a few months ago, but right up to the night before, I wasn't entirely sure I was going to do. I learned that the idea of a writing workshop wasn't going to be appealing the group, so I set out to assemble a short program on the theme of "What Poetry Can Deliver": an assortment of unusual metaphors, a love poem someone who doesn't live with poetry might be surprised to by, and since it was a church group, at least one prayer poem. Aside from a few of my own poems, here's what I wound up presenting:

"November", Billy Collins (timely)
"Not Rose Petals", BJ Ward (a love poem with an unusual metaphor)
"Nonsense Song", W.H. Auden (a little fun in the form of a love poem)
"Fork", Charles Simic (poems can be about anything)
"Prayer", Joe Weil (prayer poem)
"Joy is the Grace we Say to God", Ray Bradbury (prayer poem)

I did go in expecting that there wouldn't be many poetry fans in the audience, and I debated presenting more classic work, but opted in the end to present work I loved and trust that my enthusiasm and the quality of the work would carry the day. Turned out to be a good call.

Should I have been surprised at the reaction? At one lady approaching me at the end for a copy of Joe Weil's poem? Or someone asking for copies of my own work? Or someone asking where she could find more of BJ Ward's work? I suppose not. And yet I was.

* * *

This week, despite a case of pink eye that's been wandering my house trying to catch me, I was able to slip out to attend a professional society meeting (always refreshing) and to sit in on a great reading by John Trause, part of a new series hosted by Rick Mullin at Tasty Coco in Caldwell. John is equal parts poet, entertainer, and historian (or is that redundant?), and you can get a good feel for the event over at Rick's place.

Would have been enough just to hear John, but it was also a terrific open, my own effort a kindergarten contribution to a grad school seminar. Great stuff.

* * *

So that's the last couple. Next up is finding a new recipe for Brussels sprouts for Thanksgiving and getting ready to mash the annual turnip.

And other things, maybe.

Debrief on de Koninck

2009-11-03T23:15:00.002-05:00

We had a nice crowd at Sunday's Spoken Word Series event - 15 people counting the late arrivals and early departures, about half invited directly by featured reader Jessica de Koninck. Jessica read mostly new poems, commenting early on that many people find her work unhappy; that's certainly true of her firs book Repairs, which is advertised as a meditation on loss (I find it more a coupling of the ordinary details of keeping on with the extraordinary feelings of absence and familiarity that accompany the passing (or leaving) of someone close.

The poems that Jessica read - about her children, about cooking her Grandmother's traditional dishes - were exactly what I find most compelling in the poems I like: The discovery of something extraordinary in an otherwise ordinary observation. Jessica's are poems written from a grounding tradition without being "traditional" poems - they don't celebrate tradition explicitly so much as they find the pointer in the tradition that directs us back to ourselves.

Jessica does less embellishing between poems than many readers, but still was comfortable when one of our regular called out for an encore (fairly common in our events...). All in all, whether the poems had a bit of darkness in them or not, it was an entertaining afternoon. Jessica's been busy with appearances around NJ lately; catch her when she visits your area!

Jack Wiler 1951-2009

2009-11-01T21:22:00.002-05:00

Looking for God in Downtown Jersey City

The soul tonight is a shopping bag
Plastic
Floating lightly above a rusted gate.
I found it on my kitchen counter weighted down with
mustard and toilet paper.
I emptied out the garbage and when my back was turned
the soul fled
lifted up on the wind and out over fourth street
through the streets of Jersey City
people look up cross themselves
their eyes bright for an instant
The soul reflecting back pure white.
Dogs and children see it and laugh for a moment
we are all of us full and clean and
pure in the reflected glory of the plastic soul
we have glimpsed for just a moment.
Then it's gone.
A child steps back for a chance at a second look
At something else
white and plastic and high above us
that we can admire as not of our bodies.
(from I Have No Clue, Long Shot Productions, 1996)

Got the news today of Jack Wiler's passing last month. Jack read for us in Hoboken in 2004. Jessica de Koninck, our featured reader today, paid tribute to Jack by reading his excellent "Belief Systems" at Symposia bookstore, in the same room he'd presented it five years ago. It's a poem that has inspired with grateful attribution several other poems -- at least one of which has also been heard in Hoboken.

I didn't know Jack all that well, other than through his work and the praise that it and he received whenever his name came up among NJ poets.

Jack's book Fun Being Me ends with these words:

But it's God's world and it's His noise and it never stops.
It would be sweet if all of God's names were names we know.
It would be sweet.

Jessica de Koninck this Sunday in Hoboken!

2009-10-27T06:17:00.001-04:00

Jessica G. de Koninck
October’s Spoken Word Artist
For Immediate Release: October 20, 2009

Performance Date: November 1, 2009, at 3 p.m., with open microphone following
Location: Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ (Accessible by PATH & Light Rail), www.symposia.us
Admission: FREE, with $3 suggested donation
Information: www.debaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html or 201-216-8933

Hoboken, NJ: For the third installment of the 2009–2010 Spoken Word Series, DeBaun Center for Performing Arts and curator David Vincenti have chosen a well-published artist to be featured on Sunday, November 1, 2009, at 3 p.m.—Jessica G. de Koninck. The Spoken Word Series, co-hosted by Siobhan Barry-Bratcher and David Vincenti, is presented monthly at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ.

Jessica G. de Koninck’s first collection Repairs, a series of poems about loss, was published by Finishling Line Press. Among numerous journals and anthologies, her poems appear in print in The Ledge, Bridges, the Paterson Literary Review, the Edison Literary Review and US 1 Worksheets and on-line in The Valparaiso Poetry Review and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A former Councilwoman and resident of Montclair, New Jersey, she is pursuing an MFA at Stonecoast. Also an attorney, Jessica is counsel to the South Orange and Maplewood Public Schools.

Jessica will read from her works and then the microphone will be open to the public to share their work. Although it is not necessary to pre-register to attend the event, those interested in sharing their work during the open mic are asked to sign up at 2:45 p.m. Open mic participants are asked to limit their work to five minutes per person.

The Spoken Word Series takes place at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ. Symposia is the only used bookstore in Hoboken and has great prices for used books, wireless Internet access and many events every week. This is the sixth year DeBaun Center for the Performing Arts and Symposia Bookstore have teamed up to co-produce the Series. With each reading, more and more people are introduced to this wonderful bookshop and the work of many superb artists.

For more information, please visit www.debaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html, email Center@debaun.org or call 201-216-8933.

The next Spoken Word event will be on December 6, 2009, at 3 p.m. with Linda Radice.

The Dragon and the Bomb

2009-10-24T09:27:00.004-04:00

Today's Literary Quote the Day at iGoogle is from W. H. Auden: "A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb."

Boy, I hate to disagree with a genius, but......

Seems to me that a more accurate (though admittedly less pithy) thought would be "It's easier for a poet to write a good poem about a man slaying a dragon than a good poem about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb." And stated this way, the justification is simple: distance.

It's easier (for most) to attain emotional distance from the romantic medieval fiction than from the difficult modern fact. And because of that, the bomber poems can fall much more easily into triteness or worse: political prose attempting to hide in a poem. For many of us who call ourselves "poets", attention to craft does down when we have "something important" to say. Billy Collins once noted that his poetry improved when he "realized he had nothing to say", his point being that many grand subjects had been written about before, often by the literary giants who preceded us, and to write something meaningful on those subjects meant to exceed their greatness.

Of course, the problem with many of us who all ourselves "poets" is a deplorable interest in our own history, a lack of awareness of those greats and an accompanying inflated sense of our own efforts. But that's another post.

What this means to me is that if you can find a way into the bombardier's seat that isn't a simplistic description of the ensuing horror or the pat discussion of conflict in his year, you can write that poem about the man dropping a bomb. If you can take what's going on in that instant and apply the filter of form or language to open it up to different interpretations, that subject should be wide open to you. It's just much harder to do it well.

It's this kind of logic that causes me to gravitate to my pet subjects, areas which for one reason or another are less crowded or lend themselves to reinterpretation or repurposing in verse.

Of course, this doesn't even begin to address the subject of the respective target audiences in Auden's original quote and the implications understanding them might have for the poem. Who do you think would be more open, less critical: dragonstory fans or devotees of the military and political?

A Few, Little, Tired Bits

2009-10-23T23:18:00.005-04:00

Oh, my. You know the place writing has in your life when the hobbies hits the fan, so to speak. Let me set the tap to "drip, drip, drivel" and see if I have anything interesting to say.

***

It's been a phenomenal month on the New Jersey poetry scene. If you're already in Peter Murphy's PoetryNJ Yahoo Group, or a regular visitor to Anthony Buccino's NJ Poets and Poetry, or a subscriber to the Delaware Valley Poets list, or connected to one of the other terrific sources of information in our wonderful Garden State poetry community, you should get there.

How good is this month? Check out these events scheduled opposite each other next week:

ERIC HOFFMAN, BURT KIMMELMAN & MADELINE TIGER in Monclair
Thursday, October 29, 7:30 PM Watchung Booksellers http://www.watchungbooksellers.com/

DIANE LOCKWARD & DAVID TUCKER in Middletown
Thursday, October 29 @ 7:00 PM Middletown Public Library.

Also, I'm really late to add congrats, but Diane Lockward and Kelli Agodon recently announced upcoming books. And Meg Kearney's new book (announced some time ago) is now available at Amazon.

***

After 30+ years in musical theater (give or take a month), I performed my first solo in front of an audience tonight. Don't get me wrong, I've been singing in public forever, but no one has ever mistaken my very blendworthy bass for a less-powerful version Howard Keel. I kinda liked it.

Better, though, was getting a chance for my whole family to be part of the finale in our musical revue. All of us were in front of or around the footlights. I liked that a lot.

Incidentally, you have one more chance to see us.

***

I had forgotten, by the way, how all-consuming the final weeks of staging a production could be. It's not even that our individual bits require all that energy (though anyone who tells you maintaining your character, even for just a song or two, 4 or 5 nights in a row isn't work has never trod the boards) - it's just as much the active listening when you're not in character, the being present during other scenes to know how yours contributes to the whole...

And I'd forgotten how much fun it could be, too.

***

I'd like to thank the New Jersey Jets (you heard me) for not dragging things out until week 15 this year. That makes Sundays a bit easier. Frees me up to watch the bowling with a clear conscience.

***

I've just about got the hang of that Facebook thingy. My Artist's Page is slowly becoming both informational and entertaining. If you're looking for status updates, I'm not your man, but if you're looking for reminders of selected Jersey events, links to interesting arts articles or (perish the thought!) the chance to see me perform live, I think it's serving its purpose there. Easier to update than this (though that's a personal bias - if I'm in this space, I take a bit more care in the writing. Not always in the spelling, but in the writing).

***

Only 60 shopping days until Christmas. Feels like I'm behind already. Thinking about my annual Christmas poem. I'm leaning in a Peanutsy direction, if I can pull it off. Hard to tap the energy of the masterpiece. 'course I haven't made much time for the pencil.

Which means maybe I should end this post and grab my notebook. You think?

Monday Musings on Poetry Friday

2009-10-05T22:59:00.004-04:00

I'm so far behind in the poetry orbit that I'm in danger of being lapped by Pluto, but I did happen to catch Khalil Murrell's Poetry Friday entry over at the Dodge Blog. I've enjoyed what the Dodge folks have done with that space, and Murrell's essay is interesting and well written, but there are couple of inconsistencies I'm struggling with.

When he says early on that "completing your MFA is like finishing med school or an MBA (except with less money-making potential, but similar debt).", I'm OK with it, though the difference between medical school and an MBA is huge -in both effort and application. In the sense that each area of expertise has a logical education terminus, I agree.

Next, in considering what to do with the thesis inside that terminal degree, Murrell asserts that "Naturally, capitalism offers an easy answer to these questions: morph it into manuscript, shop it around and publish! publish! publish!". Starting to lose me here. Having already asserted that there's no money in poetry and kept the work "professional" in quotes, it's misleading to call the drive to publish a capitalistic exercise, no matter what that implies.

"But in many ways life as a writer becomes more complicated once you drop the pen and certainly as you mature as an artist.". Hmm. Certainly no one can argue that maturation implies an acceptance of complexity, bit I don't understand how seeking publication equates to "drop(ping) the pen". This seems dramatic, and inappropriately so for someone familiar with the process. Going on to add "And believe it or not, I even miss the time when I foolishly wrote bad love poems (but good to me at the time) before the word “workshop” ever invaded my vocabulary." again speaks to nostalgia for a less complex, more youthful time, but doesn't speak to an older self who isn't writing.

Again speaking of publishing exclusive of or in preference to writing, Murrell notes that his writing buddies "are very disciplined about getting their work out there. In fact, one friend created an Excel document to track her submissions. Another keeps some type of document on his iPhone." This moves from nostalgia into naivete. Is it really such a surprise to track submissions? to navigate a spreadsheet program? To have such information handy?

Closing up his approach to completing his degree, Murrell notes "I’m satisfied with making sure I leave my program with an authentic—rather than workshop—voice, with trying to create something beautiful out of bewilderment or sadness." I've written about and empathize very much with pursuit of genuine voice. But the naivete is even louder here. Unless the point here is advocacy of college for college's sake - a strange sentiment for graduate school in this century - this implies that there is no connection between the conscious decision to pursue advanced education the desire to advance in one's field. Now, I don't think that Murrell's really saying this; I think he's just frustrated with the priority that publication has in some people's minds. However, when he adds that "I realize this may sound overly romantic if not inauthentic .... (b)ut a little romanticism has done very little to hurt the masses.", think frustration really clouds his position. I suspect many poets with a certain level of talent and accomplishment find the "romantic" opinion of the amateur - the "Hey, I've written a poem! Everyone needs to read it!" - more frustrating than the publish or perish attitude of the jaded professional.

Perhaps I'm picking nits here. And (Disclaimer Alert!) I'm not an MFA candidate and not likely to become one anytime soon. But I think most professionals like me, who went to graduate school specifically to learn and apply particular skills for the purpose of being and being recognized as someone more accomplished in a given field, I think Murrell's argument is (admittedly) romantic, but also deliberately incomplete.

Which may actually specifically make it poetic, now that I think a little. Maybe I'm way off after all.

Fred McBagonluri at DeBaun

2009-09-26T12:08:00.004-04:00

Here's this week's press release from the Spoken Word Series. Beats me why it never occurred to me to post there here before.

===========================================================

Fred McBagonluri
October’s Spoken Word Artist
For Immediate Release

Performance Date: October 4, 2009, at 3 p.m., with open microphone following
Location: Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ (Accessible by PATH & Light Rail), www.symposia.us
Admission: FREE, with $3 suggested donation
Information: www.debaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html or 201-216-8933

Hoboken, NJ: For the second installment of the 2009–2010 Spoken Word Series, DeBaun Center for Performing Arts and curator David Vincenti have chosen a wonderful artist to be featured on Sunday, October 4, 2009, at 3 p.m.—Fred McBagonluri. The Spoken Word Series, co-hosted by Siobhan Barry-Bratcher and David Vincenti, is presented monthly at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ.

Fred McBagonluri is a Director of R&D at BD Medical. Fred graduated from Central State University, Wilberforce, OH with a BS in Manufacturing Engineering (summa cum laude) in 1996. He holds MS and PhD from Virginia Tech (1998) and University of Dayton (2005), respectively. He has published extensively in technical journals, conference proceedings and book chapters and has over 26 US and European patent applications in the areas of advanced imaging technologies and hearing instruments design. Fred is the 2008 recipient of the Black Engineer of the Year: Most Promising Scientist, 2008 NJBiz Healthcare Innovator Hero Awards and 2009 Astronaut Candidate Finalist. He is the author of three novels: (A) Woman to Marry, Dusk Recitals and When Tears Stand Still. He is married to Diana McBagonluri, also an author and they have two daughters, Putiaha and Puyen.

Fred will read from his works and then the microphone will be open to the public to share their work. Although it is not necessary to pre-register to attend the event, those interested in sharing their work during the open mic are asked to sign up at 2:45 p.m. Open mic participants are asked to limit their work to five minutes per person.

The Spoken Word Series takes place at Symposia Bookstore, 510 Washington St., Hoboken, NJ. Symposia is the only used bookstore in Hoboken and has great prices for used books, wireless Internet access and many events every week. This is the sixth year DeBaun Center for the Performing Arts and Symposia Bookstore have teamed up to co-produce the Series. With each reading, more and more people are introduced to this wonderful bookshop and the work of many superb artists.

For more information, please visit www.debaun.org/SpokenWordSeries.html, email Center@debaun.org or call 201-216-8933.

The next Spoken Word event will be on November 1, 2009, at 3 p.m. with Jessica de Koninck.

One Poem, My Beamish Boy!

2009-09-17T21:28:00.003-04:00

The Poetry Out Loud blog posts the following question: If you could choose only ONE poem to teach to your students, what would it be, and why? POL is about high school, which is a venue I've only dipped a toe into, but I can answer without hesitation for the age groups I've worked with (3rd-8th).

Jabberwocky.

Think about it. It's a classic but it's fun. It permits the teaching of rhyme and meter. It permits both performance and interperations. It many elements of sound and how it affects tone (hard sounds are darker...), etc.

And here's one more huge thing for me: it teaches not to be hung up on the words as individuals when the idea is to experience the poem. There will be time to worry about the words and their placement, and all that; a first experience with poetry is not that time).

One of the biggest hurdles I find in getting kids to write poems is to permit their imagination to come with them into a poem. To let their natural desire to tell great stories, unencumbered by truth, control the pen. What better vehicle to get past that than a great action story in which you provide the meaning for every single noun.

And as kids get older, you can add to the lesson that the poem is capable of taking on a life of its own irrespective of what was in the poet's head when he or she wrote it - another reason to trade meaning for momentum in the poem. Almost always the right thing to do.

What poems were meaningful to you as kids? What was it about them that stayed with you:?

What is this man trying to say?

2009-09-17T00:52:00.002-04:00

Actually, I'm teaching some project managers some simple tools to better understand scope management. Wasn't that obvious?

Notes: Photo was borrowed from here. Visit the Symposium Page for more on my talk.

Poetry Weekends in New Jersey!

2009-09-15T21:51:00.003-04:00

Oh, to be in New Jersey, now that verse is here....

***

If you weren't in Hoboken last weekend, you missed Deborah Ager's visit, and hearing her read from Midnight Voices. Deborah and her family braved both sides of the Hudson and got to spend some quality time at the Hoboken Italian Festival (zeppoles in lieu of payment? I'll bite).

Thanks, Deborah for the visit! I hope the southbound traffic treated you well on the way home (but I know it probably didn't...)

***

My oh my, if you have already made plans for this Sunday, you need to cancel them now and get your DVR ready to save the end of the Jets' 23-13 victory for you. That's right. I said it.

Here are three events that should ought to give the NFL a run for its TV money. Unfortunately, they're all happening at the same time!

First, in Red Bank, you have Peter Murphy and Chris McIntyre reading at Dublin House.

If that's too far south for you, stop in to see Nancy Scott and BJ Ward at Poets in the Garden in Morristown.

And finally, if you have an aversion to BOTH the Parkway and 287, join Diane Lockward for a Poetry Party on the theme "When Arts Collide" at the Huddle Inn.

***

And NEXT weekend, we have the Warren County Poetry Festival! More on that as it approaches. I need to focus on Sunday!

Another few reasons you should come to Hoboken tomorrow...

2009-09-12T13:45:00.003-04:00

From my perch, I regard your room
as insipid. I receive your whispers
daily. You, in return, push all
my buttons.
...

from "Lament of the Telephone", by Deborah Ager, from Midnight Voices.

It promises to be a mostly sunny day in The Boken, and you may even be able to grab a few zeppoles on the way in or out of the reading. The Jets are starting a rookie and won't be watchable until week 5, the Giants don't kick off until 4:15. There are no excuses not to be in your seat at Symposia Bookstore (510 Washington Street) by 3PM.

None.

Zero.

See you there.

Remember. Read. Renew.

2009-09-11T19:50:00.003-04:00

Home By Now
by Meg Kearney

New Hampshire air curls my hair like a child's
hand curls around a finger. "Children?" No,
we tell the realtor, but maybe a dog or two.
They'll bark at the mail car (Margaret's
Chevy Supreme) and chase the occasional
moose here in this place where doors are left
unlocked and it's Code Green from sun-up,
meaning go ahead and feel relieved—
the terrorists are back where you left them
on East 20th Street and Avenue C. In New York
we stocked our emergency packs with whistles
and duct tape. In New England, precautions take
a milder hue: don't say "pig" on a lobster boat
or paint the hull blue. Your friends in the city
say they'll miss you but don't blame you—they
still cringe each time a plane's overhead,
one ear cocked for the other shoe.

==================

Meg read for DeBaun Series in January, 2002. Although we'd "started" the series a few months earlier, I consider Meg's reading our first real event for a number of reasons, but mostly because the cumulative audience for the preceding 4 "events" was "zero". When she read for DeBaun, she started by reciting the poem of a teenage boy, which I unfortunately don't remember, which basically said if the two sides in a war could see each other clearly, as if through a window, they'd just stop fighting. I think Meg recited that poem to open all her readings in 2002, as a small gesture toward restored sanity in the world.

==================

Well, we've been trying to live up to the spirit Meg's reading baptized us with, and you'll see that spirit in action this weekend if you can stop by Symposia Bookstore at 3PM Sunday, when poet and editor Deborah Ager will join us. Read her poems, then make your plans to join us. You TiVo the games.

Deborah Ager at DeBaun

2009-09-07T11:29:00.002-04:00

Even now I dream of this -- ice-glossed asphalt,
the car in circiles, then at rest in the median.

For miles, nothing but snow coating Osceola,
Iowa like a curse, winter crimping the final berries.

(from "Black Ice", Midnight Voices, Cherry Grove Collections)

Deborah Ager will be the featured reader at the initial event of the Spoken Word Series this coming Sunday; all the usual details apply.

Hope to see you there!

SePOETember

2009-09-06T14:33:00.002-04:00

You could get whiplash entering the New Jersey Poetry Scene in September, I'm thinking. Our season starts up in 7 days (more on that tomorrow), but here's an event you might want to be making time that might not show up on your usual poetry calendars:

Premiere Stages mounts a production of "Any Other Name", George Brant's play inspired by the experiences of poet John Clare, through September 20. Read more about it, and if you're ordering tickets, use the discount code "ROSE" when you call the box office (908-737-SHOW) to announce your love of poetry and save 5 bucks in the process.