Festival! Festival!

The annual Poetry Festival organized by Diane Lockward happened Sunday in West Caldwell, and if you weren't there, I feel sorry for you. The energy level was so great, the poetry was top-drawer with a great mix of new (to the area) talent and respected favorites.

• Among the poets that registered with me for the first time today (I'm never sure anymore that I haven't heard a poet before and just failed to internalize their names) was Teresa Leo. Her reading was brilliant, and I can't wait to digest her book. She also very generously took a minute while inscribing her book for me to offer (what really seemed to be) genuine support for my own effort to make my book a reality. (Bottom line: took her 10 years; I've only been at it for three; keep going!)
• Edison Literary Review Gina Larkin has joined the blogosphere; her fledgling effort is indexed at right.
• Got the skinny on Sandy Zulauf's upcoming book, Where Time Goes, from Dryad.
• Learned how to pronounce "Schuylkill". Hey: If Worcester can be Wooster, Schuylkill can be "Skookle".
• Picked up Joe Weil's new book. What Remains. There's some jumpy video of the book launch reading over at YouTube. (NOTE: I don't know if this is authorized; if someone in the know can clarify for me, I'd appreciate it and I'll react accordingly). The video has piano, chant, and harmonica, but not "What I'm Waiting For", with which Joe had the crowd absolutely rolling.
• Got to see the wittiest man in Po Biz, Hal Sirowitz. Hal is one of the most widely respected an enjoyed poets I've ever heard read. When I first started going to readings, his book Mother Said had just come out, and I followed him around to all the readings I could get to for that book.

And here's the best bit of recognition I've ever had for this page: "David! Thanks for what you wrote on your site. The Bologna Blog, is it?" "Cosmic Liverwurst, actually" "That's right. I knew it was lunch meat".

FYI, I've reluctantly dropped Kate Greenstreet's hiatused blog from the list; be sure, however, to be alert for her next book, due in October from Lame House Press.

After 15 years, I'm still impressed, though no longer surprised, at the great generosity of the NJ (and neighboring!) poetry community.

Some April Bits

Those darned primary responsibilities keep encroaching on my blogging time. A few bits, just to remind myself how to post:

• Diane was recently asked why she writes about fruits and vegetables. A fascinating question, what we write about. Early in my "career", I tended to rely on water as the central image in just about anything of value I put to paper. When the barriers between my selves began to drop, I started to make better use of the engineer side of me and bring concepts from science, particularly physics, into the work. I'm torn, though: is the vocabulary off-putting to the dominant interests of poetry readers?
• We spend a ton of time in our local library. A TON. But the fine poet and educator BJ Ward has an essay up at the American Library Association site that makes me feel like a sporadic squatter in that world.
• The Mets just make my teeth hurt, you know that?
• Working on a new chapbook project, doing more organized research than my usual casual "Oh, that's neat, what can I do with that" approach to turning reading into writing. It's interesting. I've actually got a story to write to, which both burdens and liberates the process. It's really fascinating me. The risk for me (again, re: engineer) is to stop the research at some point and start the writing.
• In addition to the targeted readings, I've been back into the parenting books recently. I'm still in the same place -- Most aren't useful for fathers, many aren't useful in the least to anyone with sense -- but sometimes reacting to bad ideas can create good ones. That, too, falls under "research".

Maybe if I research the Mets next....

Happy Spring!

Changed Your Mind?

John Horgan this week posted his answer to Edge.org's The Question for 2008: "WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?"

Interestingly, The Question is prefaced with:

"When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science."

I don't 100% agree with this - there are facts outside the realm of science, after all - but it's close enough for the set up of an interesting question.

Like most dabblers*, I change my mind a lot as I acquire more information about an area of interest. Over the years, some of my more surprising evidence-based mind changes have involved men's gymnastics, the musical Cabaret, Bill Clinton, and the color yellow. As far as the literary arts go, here's one I've been changing my mind on, with some decisions made this year:

In the debate on "Spoken Word" versus "poetry", Diane Lockward recently commented (essentially) that works which entertain the ear but don't work on the page are missing an element necessary to define them as poetry. She's right, and here's the learning I've acquired this year. There are three buckets in this debate: Poems which are successful on the page and to the year, poems which are less successful in one or the other of page and ear but which essential contain the craft elements of both, and entertainments which are called poems but are more performance arts that lack elements of poetic craft.

Bucket 3's pretty easy to define: Think Def Poetry Jam, which is 75% entertainments. The other buckets are subjective, but I bet you can name a few poets for each one right off the top of your head. You can read the list of performers at the 2006 Dodge Festival and populate all three buckets quite easily.

Where I've changed my mind is in the acceptance of bucket 3. It's fine for me to internally note that what I'm hearing or reading is not poetry, but it's not necessary for me to set up flares around it and discredit it for anyone else. In fact, if I can use an entertainment to lure someone a step closer to the recognition of poetic craft, then it's served a purpose valuable to poetry, for which God bless it. It's like using the singsongy verse of early childhood to learn a vocabulary and appreciation for poems. Or like using the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to get a child to ask "Who was the real Donatello?" Maybe that last bit's a stretch.

Anyway, take a look at the (more meaningful) answers at Edge. It's dominated by science-related posts (which is very interesting for me, of course), but I trust there's something for everyone there. I'm disturbed at the infuriating misquote of Emerson a little way down the page, which was used by the Toronto Star to discuss The Question, but I suppose that's a personal problem.

Quick aside: Five days and 12 signatures into the new year, and I haven't written "'07" yet! Go, me! And Happy New Year again!

* - a dabbler in this sense is someone who discovers a topic and becomes progressively more immersed until his or her opinions become better informed, but who doesn't hold back those opinions in the interim. Think of an amateur Asimov.