A Highest Point. A Culmination.

(Note: The title for this entry is a lesser-known definition of the word "solstice". You'll see why in a minute).

If you are looking for a conference experience to accelerate your writing this summer, I recommend you consider the Solstice Summer Writer's Conference of Pine Manor College. Directed by the estimable Meg Kearney, this conference invites you to pursue poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction with an accomplished faculty, including a poetry workshop lead in part by the editor of my favorite and most-often-reached-for anthology (Verse and Universe): Kurt Brown. Check out the conference site and you'll see how aptly named it is. But hurry: applications must be postmarked by May 28, and "the earlier you apply, the greater your chances of earning a place in the workshop you most want to attend".

A note on the director: Meg is a talented (and generous) poet and editor. If you can't get to Massachusetts for Solstice, try to make it to National Arts Club next month. Meg recently helped helm the collection Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews, which she, her coeditors and selected contributors will read from on June 2 at 8 PM. Go!

Not Necessary Useful

The History Channel's This Day in History feature informs us that today is the birthday of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. About Rossetti, it says:

"Dante Rossetti, put off by his father's passionate politics, came to believe that art and literature should pursue beauty for beauty's sake and not try to be moral, instructive, or politically useful."

Hmm.

The Rossetti Archive has a ton of interesting stuff on him. If you haven't studied him, which I haven't, it's all recommended reading.

Did you know Muses made bracelets, too?

Confidential to the Muse of the Northway: Happy Birthday!

For you ladies with wee lasses: Check out My Tiny Baubles, an online jewelry source for those of you who find your genteel little ones bedecked in the finest from the House of Gymboree. Also offers nice custom pieces to celebrate your child's princessitude and your own proud parenthood.

What The Book (Draft) Tells You

Things putting an actual manuscript together taught me:

• There are some words I use a lot. Surprisingly, orbit seems to be one of them. When you're submitting poems 3 or 4 at a time to magazines, that's easier to miss. When you line all your poems up, those words line up with them. I rewrote some poems just to not beat those words and images to death.
• Poems can look different in different light. At least 2 poems I liked as individuals couldn't find a home anywhere in the collection. But at least 2 poems I've never really cared for (and never thought of as "done") fit for some reason. I think it has something to do with pacing. Are there such things as "pacer poems"?
• Mercy does not make the final edit. I felt more desire to trim the final product further than to put my darlings back in. I wonder if this is typical - to readjust your bar significantly higher when it comes time to risk an actual book.
• Yes, Virginia, I do have a "voice". People have said this to me for some time, but I do start to see what makes one of my poems particular to me. I can't say "unique" - there are a lot of poems I haven't read yet - but I can for the first time detect the rhythms and sound patterns and basic vocabulary choices that are common throughout my work. And it makes it all the more pleasing when I surprise myself - hopefully that surprise reaches the reader in the collection, too.

As I said in an earlier post, this is my first contest submission, and my expectations are (I think) appropriate to my level of experience. But these new ideas (and the dozen other learnings I don't yet see clearly) were worth the hours of preparation and the $3 postage. Easily.

"Sorry this is so long...

"... but I lacked the time to make it shorter." (apologies to Blaise Pascal)

Thanks to all who sent good wishes on my manuscript submission. I'll talk more about that process and what it made me confront about my writing as soon as I start to feel objectivity returning. In the meantime, lots of good stuff worth calling attention to:

If you like assignments or writing prompts, Maureen Berzok is someone you should know. Today's is one I found very interesting: "Pick a month and personify it in a poem. other months broken up with May because it is unwilling to commit? Is October fun on a date or just a little bit scary?" It goes on from there, check out NJ Writers for more.

In case you haven't already heard this elsewhere, Poetry now has online features. The first of these, by Daisy Fried, is about... poetry online. It covers resources, online journals, blogs (including part of a rant by C. Dale Young), and poetry forums (with a disassembling of the commentary at Slate's poetry Fray that would make an 11th grade English teacher proud).

Peter Pereira and Kelli Agodon (and, I'm sure by now, others) have dusted off their first published poems for the world to see. I thought hard about joining them, because I started off so far behind them on the poetry learning curve (go read their first poems and you'll see what I mean), but I ultimately decided that if I'm comfortable where I am today as writer, then there's no harm in admitting that this is where I started:

Dandelion

A light rain falls
refreshing the daffodils
feeding the dandelions.
The garden has its weeds
and the day its clouds
but the children still smile
at the pretty colors
and I am amazed
by the pretty colors.

The mist kisses my face
and I am a dandelion
growing yellow and straight
in a garden of my own.

I couldn't stand to post this without updating the punctuation and eliminating the initial caps, so if you happen to be one of the twelve people who saw this in the little upstate NY newspaper in which it first appeared, please accept my apologies. Actually, this poem's proven quite useful in my 4th-6th grade workshops, both on its own and in comparison to other dandelion poems.

For the first of my published works that doesn't make me itch to apply the red pen even more vigorously, go here and read "History".

Done and Done

Well, I did it. I dropped in the mail yesterday a manuscript and a publisher's address. I hope I put the correct one on the outside of the envelope.

This my first time for this scale of composition, and my expectations are scaled accordingly, but the learnings have been huge. I'll start writing about them when I stop recalling flaws in the submission package..

Practice Poetry Prevention!

A friend forwards this from The Onion:

National Poetry Month Raises Awareness Of Poetry Prevention
NEW YORK—This month marks the 10th National Poetry Month, a campaign created in 1996 to raise public awareness of the growing problem of poetry. "We must stop this scourge before more lives are exposed to poetry," said Dr. John Nieman of the American Poetry Prevention Society at a Monday fundraising luncheon. "It doesn't just affect women. Young people, particularly morose high-school and college students, are very susceptible to this terrible affliction. It is imperative that we eradicate poetry now, before more rainy afternoons are lost to it." Nieman said some early signs of poetry infection include increased self-absorption and tea consumption.

And you thought Slate's observation of NatPoMo was harsh. Well, actually, Slate atones today with a summary of things they've said recently about poets and poems, and a list of every poem they've published. Guilt is such a difficult thing to manage.

Encouragement from WNYC

New York's Public Radio Station had a couple things of interest to poetry writers today:

In an interview with Renee Montagne, Bruce Springsteen said "You're always writing about yourself... you hide it in a variety of ways, and you meld your voice with other lives." This is a message I've been preaching recently, especially to the kids in my workshops - you start with your own voice, but you don't have to stick to the truth or to your own experince in your poems. I'm not a huge Boss fan, and I think a lot of his newer stuff is message-focused to the exclusion of subtlety, but I do think his music exhibits this blending of voice pretty well.

Brian Lehrer is having a giveaway: call in with a poem, he'll send you a T-shirt. I didn't hear about this year's show live (a friend pointed it out to me), but I've heard some of it in the past. A question for practicing poets: Would you (a) call in with a poem of your own, taking the opportunity to publicize yourself to a broadcast audience, (b) call in with a good poem by another poet, taking the opportunity to publicize them to a broadcast audience, (c) call in with a humorous, light, or "made-for-the-general-public" poem, because that's really the audience for this kind of event, or (d) not call in, because events like this do little for poetry other than save $11 on some poet's wardrobe expenses?

I mulled it over all night and decided on (e): don't call during work hours. But that's hiding from the real question, isn't it?

Bits and Pieces

From all over the map:

If the letters by Franz Wright in the new Poetry are not a joke, they comprise a sad commentary on the meritocracy. Yes, I said "comprise".

Flipping channels this weekend, I stopped watching Star Wars (Episode 4) during the commercial breaks in the games I was following because I was in the middle of rooting for the Mets and the Nets. If my luck spilled out from those games to the movie, Luke would've been toast. (By the way, did Leia really call Han "laser brain"? I must have heard that wrong. "Laser brain"?)

The Spring/Summer 32 Poems is available. I think you should go order one right now, but go read Geoffrey Brock's sonnet and decide for yourself. Deborah and the 32 Poems team were nice enough to credit me in the Research and Development group along with Jeffery Bahr and Jeannine Hall Gailey (both of whom have fine poems in the issue as well). I hope to do more in service for that honor soon.

Slate ran an article by Billy Collins on e. e. cummings, asking "Is That A Poem?" I'm of two minds about Cummings. Some of his poems have been important to me forever, but I don't feel much need to reread them, the way I feel the need to reread, for example, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird every so often. Sounds like Steven Schroeder is of like mind on that point - we agree there's something in Cummings worth not forgetting. Thanks to Jilly Dybka at Poetry Hut for highlighting this (and a hundred other things I'd otherwise have missed).

Wil Wheaton is out of the tournament, but I expect a good story when he gets his hands on a computer that works.

Over in The Poetic Life, a reader posits the ultimate unspoken sentiment: "Perhaps writer's block is simply a state where one has nothing to say. In which case, silence is the most useful thing. Elizabeth Lund evokes a preening peacock in reply.

If you get the impression I'm all over the place today, it's because I am. I've taken on a task that elevates my seriousness about this writing business. It's occupying the vast majority of the operational fraction of my brain, and no, I'm not ready to tell you about it.

So there.

Aren't You The One?

Lileks today notes he received a nice unexpected compliment from a someone he'd never met but who'd read and appreciated a recent column. It got him thinking:

Ninety-nine percent of the people who do actual work and make actual contributions to the world never get that out-of-the-blue atta-boy.

So I should give back: excuse me, aren’t you that firefighter? That emergency room nurse or admitting clerk? That policeman, that Reservist, that underpaid librarian, that park worker who picks up the stuff people throw in the creek, the guy who wipes the tables clean in the food court so I don’t have to put my elbows in someone else’s ketchup? Aren’t you that systems tech who makes sure my favorite website comes up every day when I want, the UPS driver who gets my stuff to my door and rings the bell, the gaffer who plugged in the cords so they could shoot that scene in the movie I want to see, the board operator at the radio station who sent the signal to the bird, the fellow behind the console in the theater who brought the spotlight up with practiced ease so the audience knew the show was starting? Excuse me, aren’t you that person who delivers the paper every morning?

Not a bad idea. Yesterday, after my final scheduled grade-school poetry workshop for the month, a number of students asked me for my autograph, though I'm clearly not someone they know or follow or read about in the papers. Which leads me to think the failure to appreciate thanksworthy tasks is a learned behavior.

Hmm. I just felt a crack form in my April writer's block.

Sweet Mytrle, I'm Tired

NatPoMo workshop day 2 is done. I did 5 40-minute workshops with sixth-graders today. Have I mentioned lately what an awesome job public school teachers do?

I had the most completely enjoyable and uplifting experience with these kids today. Sixth and surrounding grades are a great target because students are old enough to have some great creative moments, but haven't yet "learned" to hate poetry. If I can make it fun for them before it somehow becomes a chore, we may be on our way to expanding the future audience of poetry.

My goal whenever I do a class is to reach one student and leave them interested in writing and reading poetry after I leave. Imagine my glee when, as I was packing up, the principal stopped by and mentioned to me that a few students were actually discussing poetry at lunch. I could not possibly have asked for better.

But my goodness I'm pooped.

Here are some of the other poems I used in the workshop (other than the Malam poem I referenced below). I'm curious what other teaching poets think of these choices for this age group.

"How To Eat A Poem", Eve Merriam
"Steam Shovel", by Charles Malam
"The Garden Hose", by Beatrice Janosco (couldn't find a link that was true to the page)
"A Long Day of Rhyming", by Dean Koontz
"The First Dandelion", by Walt Whitman

I've used them several times now with some success, but I'm always open for ideas.

No Room For Gloom; Poetry in Bloom

Well, Dana Gioia's predicting the end of civilized thought again (Thanks Poetry Daily for that little ray of sunstroke). Or still. But his idea that reading being in decline is the reason people are less informed on history and less able to write (among other failures) really misses the point for me (which I think lies somewhere in education: a need to better teach the process of critical analysis). But I'm not going to get into that now.

And the Book of the Month club is celebrating National Poetry Month by promoting its special edition of Leaves of Grass. I love Whitman as much as most people, but to me, this completely misses the boat on celebrating all the exciting things going on in poetry TODAY (like the NEW books that BOMC professes to want to sell you). But that's not for today either.

I had my first workshopping experience of the season yesterday and it was refreshing and recharging in that way that only working with children can be. There are too many high points to hit them all, but here are a few:

• I do an exercise where I hand out flashcards with objects on them and have the students write about the thing on the card but never mention its name (I use the Charles Malam poem here, and others, as examples first). Then when volunteers read their poems aloud, we all guess at the thing they're writing about. When the exercise goes well, the guesses are all over the place, meaning the poem has left lots of room to create an appropriate image. We routinely had guesses that included the animate and inanimate, people and clothing, and of course, desserts.
• To start the kids thinking, I like to get them to tell me what makes a poem. Usually I get "rhyme" and "rhythm" and lots of answers that point toward form. This discussion in this group of grammar schoolers actually led to the question: "Does a poem need to have words in it?" I don't care what your opinion of Vizpo (visual poetry - poetry specifically without words other than a title) is, that's a great, creative question.
• In writing a comparison poem, the students found all sorts of interesting things to define themselves (and their friends, and their cars, and me...). I don't know if they all know what "metaphor" means, but they can sure all deliver one.

So much more, but I'm already late for doing other things, and I need to get to my own pen and capture the energy this class was so generous to give to me. Two more workshops coming up next week; more then.

Well, I Asked For It

Celebrating National Poetry Month by teaching workshops at three local grammar schools over the next 2 weeks. This is exactly what I wanted. Trouble is, I wanted it so I'd have the impetus I needed to complete the DESIGN of these workshops. So I've been focused on other things the last week, and am likely to be so for the next. I hope the school visits go well enough that I'm inspired to post snippets here; if you don't here from me for a while, I'm probably under a pile of erasers and Social Studies textbooks somewhere in New Jersey.

They do still use erasers, don't they?

Poetry By The Numbers

I'm continuing to detail my Poetry and Science workshop, which is targeted at grammar school kids. The plan:

1. Introduce the premise with Goldbarth's "The Sciences Sing a Lullaby"
2. Group warmup exercise: have the kids suggest interesting science facts and I'll suggest a "poetic line" about each. After 4-5 lines, have the students suggest lines based on each other's facts.
3. Read "Earthling" by Billy Collins. "Amazing Fact" excercise: Write their own poems based on science facts that are interesting to them individually. If they get stuck, I have a formula (5 questions to answer which define the lines of the poem) that I can give them. Or maybe I should give them the formula with the assignment. Not sure. Volunteers then read.
4. Read "Numbers" by Lisel Mueller. Have the students write a similar poem, using the numbers 1 through 5. Emphasize unusual use of the numbers, and forbid mention of the numbers in the poems. Volunteers then read.
5. Close by reading a poem of mine called "Science Fair", inspired by my visit to a grammar school fair this year.

Does that sound like 50 minutes? I'm still developing my feel for how much to push writers at that age without making the task distasteful for them. And I haven't decided whether to use teachers as helpers or have them write and read poems, too. I think it would be encouraging for the students to hear their teachers' efforts. I think.

And I wonder if this will come across as geeky and cool or, well, geeky and uncool. Given the reputations of science and poetry at this age, I fear I know which is more likely.

Live On The Edge, Looking

"There's something Pound says somewhere, which argues that the experience of beauty comes from one's recognition of a thing's perfections, how it is what it is, not necessarily why. Why peculiarly invites a judgment which has most to do with one's own terms of understanding. In the poem, however, that place we are finally safe in, understanding is not a requirement. You don't have to know why. Being there is the one requirement."
- From the introduction to The Best American Poetry 2002

Here

What
has happened
makes

the world.
Live
on the edge,

looking.

- Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Errata and Manahatta

(Updated 3-31-05; I think I was confusing AAP with Poetry Daily)

Shame on me. A couple days ago I mentioned AAP's Poem-A-Day, but I hadn't taken the time understand the details of this year's program. I think it's a great gift that AAP will be exposing us to new poems this year. Maybe the poems selected will be from this list.

While I was verifying my mistake, I spent a few minutes on the AAP site to see what else I'd missed, and sure enough, found something worth calling your attention to: the DC Celebrates Walt Whitman exhibit. The events (especially the Leaves of Grass Marathon Reading) look to be terrific, and the Links page, filled with excellent Whitman references and other events celebrating the 15th anniversary of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, is another gift worth checking out.

Many thanks to Robin from AAP who took the time to find my mistake and correct it. Oh, and Robin, if you get a chance, please tell Accounts Receivable my annual dues are in the mail....

The Ethics of Memory

There's a very interesting piece by Susan Schultz up on Silliman's Blog today. It's extremely rare that I find poems written in response to the events of September 11, 2001 to be interesting anymore - forgive me for that, and remember I'm talking about the writing, not the emotion or the person behind the writing, and remember we've all read hundreds of poems on that subject by now. But The Untraumatized Man, from Portraits:Parables (TinFish Press) puts a fascinating character and a compelling prose poem style together for something that really struck me. I'll leave it to you to go get the whole poem, but the lines that stay in my head are:

If the newspaper is his daily prayer, he has failed to utter it. If there is an ethics of memory, his is incomplete.

Newspaper as prayer: Is news the way we pay homage to things larger than us? Ethics of memory: Is there an expectation that a society has a collective memory, at least of altering events?

Thoughtful stuff, written well.

In Like Ilini, Out With Iambs

If you're a basketball fan, you just might be in the middle of the best month of your life. If you're a poetry fan, next month won't be so bad for you either. In addition to the National Poetry Month activities that you are personally planning (and you know who you are), be sure and sign up for the Academy of American Poets daily newsletter, which throughout April will include some old (read: public domain) poems introduced and appreciated by contemporary poets. It always interests me to find out what interests other poets. Any why. Always why.

As in: Why did Illinois put me through all that?

But Are They My Favorites?

So I'm getting ready for my annual pretense toward being a teacher, and I'm reminded of the one basic question asked by a student last year that I was embarrassingly and completely unprepared for: "What's your favorite poem?". It's an obvious question, and I couldn't think of one good response. I had made bookmarks with a short Robert Bly effort as a giveaway, and I made a lame effort along the lines of "there are so many great poems, I can't name just one, but here's a good one", but even as I said it, I knew the Bly piece wasn't my in my Letterman list.

There are poems that were important to me in the formative (pre-college) years of my interest in poetry; "Jabberwocky" and "Kubla Khan" come to mind (clearly, music was most important to me here). Through college, which included my first serious classes in poetry, I collected some favorites which were more emotionally impactful, but no less musical ("Richard Cory", "Birches", "A High Toned Old Christian Woman"). Only after college did I really get to know the work of anyone writing after 1960. Harder to capture a short list of contemporary writers because the list is frustratingly eclectic and I always feel like some part of me (not to mention some poet I love) is underrepresented. Today I could easily include B. J. Ward's "Upon Learning That Hearts Can Become Stones" , Meg Kearney's "Creed", Lucille Clifton's "Adam Thinking" and "Eve Thinking" (which have to be taken together), Mark Doty's "Messiah (Christmas Portions)"... Tomorrow the list might be very different. I've got Pax Atomica, American Smooth, and Breath on my nightstand right now; who knows what I'll find there? And now I look back over this paragraph and I don't see Coleman Barks or Kim Addonizio or Maria Gillan... you see? I can't do it. But I can tell the kids the common things about all these poems that make them peers in my affection.

As soon as I figure out what those things are. I'm going to have to think about this some more.

Pax Abecedaria

I'm in the middle of my second reading of Campbell McGrath's Pax Atomica, which I'm enjoying greatly. The book is densely populated with cultural references, and these create an intriguing atmosphere; I feel like I'm at a late night poetry reading staged in front of a giant television laying a soft soundtrack of static and the voice of Ron Popeil. I think the shorter poems in the collection work better, but then I usually think shorter poems work better; it's a bias I admit to.

But I'm fascinated with the four (yes, FOUR) abecedarians in this collection of 22 poems. McGrath turns a simple (and too often simplistic) form on its head by presenting it 4 ways: backwards, interrupted (all the letters in order but in discrete irregular stanzas), eventual (lingering for several lines on certain letters) , and traditional (and a love song to Xena: Warrior Princess, besides). To me these alphabets, along with the repeated terza rima efforts, are like a sturdy fence on which the observational snapshots of F-Troop and Led Zeppelin and Clint Eastwood and Payless Shoes are hung - it's the care and respect for language that makes the content more meaningful. Very refreshing, since my most frequent argument of late is about writers "not burdened by" (read: not caring enough to apply) form and careful word choice.

The collection as a whole is discussed in a great short review (where I relearned the term "terza rima") by Gianmarc Manzione over at MiPOesias. There's also a nice interview with McGrath (from the great Poets Q&A series) at Smartish Pace.

Callin' on Me Irish

I never know what's appropriate, poetry-wise, to recognize a holiday. Especially one more associate in my neighborhood with cabbage and beer than the saint it's named after. But I'll resist the urge to rhyme "Killarney" again, put off until tonight the traditional viewing and instead direct you here:

Salmon Poetry, located in County Clare, is a fine publisher with a great website. Their catalog have many writers we know well on this side of the pond (Adrienne Rich, R. T. Smith, Jean Valentine...), as well as some writers I only know through Salmon. I'm particularly fond of Salmon for bringing me the latest collection of Ray Bradbury's poems; it sounds odd to say of someone so accomplished, but I think Bradbury's poems, like his short stories, are underappreciated because his novels are so great. What a great problem to have.

Float Like a Rebounder, Rhyme like Ali

It's hard not to be encouraged by something like this: The Washington Wizards basketball team is sponsoring an afternoon of poetry and basketball. For $45, you get a 1-hour poetry workshop, tickets to the basketball game a reading by player & poet Etan Thomas, a copy of Thomas's book More Than An Athlete from Moore Black Press and a chance to meet Thomas and have him sign the book.

Thomas has been fitting a book tour into his NBA schedule for the last two months, and read some of his poetry on a kids' show called NBA Jam (NBC). You can like or dislike the work itself (I think he's got some talent, but check out the scrolling text and audio tracks of his stuff at the links above and decide for yourself), but I don't think you can't deny the value of having him present himself as a poet, and introduce names like Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez and Edward Hirsch through his bio to a young audience that might never have heard those names before.

Apple + Gravity = Poetry?

As National Poetry Month (and Young People's Poetry Week therein) are just around the bend, I've been soliciting for opportunities to reach out to local grammar schools and help keep poetry fun. Last year, with a great deal of help from some very generous artists, I did a basic 1-hour Introduction to Poetry for 3rd through 5th and 6th through 8th graders. It was extraordinary fun, one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, and I'll be using that same workshop this year at (at least) one other school. But... that intro isn't me.

Well, maybe it's me, but it's also a dozen or a hundred other people, most with more teaching experience or more literature experience or both. I admit it: I'm more than a little self-conscious about representing myself as a poet and teacher when there are so many good poets and teachers around; I am primarily a technical professional, an engineer - at my center, that's what I do, and that's what I'm good at. What teaching experience I have is for the most part with high school and college students considering careers in science and engineering.

So I don't know why I didn't see this before: Poetry By The Numbers; poems in response to science. Think: Science fairs are among the biggest events in grammar schoolers' lives. What are the things that younger kids are most impressed by? Simple experiments: vinegar and baking soda, putting out a candle with carbon dioxide. And math tricks: seeing how to tell a number is divisible by 9, learning the secret of the count-the-squares puzzle. And the length of Venus's year, and the magic of chlorophyll, and how a spider eats, and the cork-and-needle compass, and what makes a volcano and on and on and on. What better inspiration than these?

And, more's the joy, maybe I can connect poetry to something else in their lives, something they treasure and remember, so that when later they are forced to recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in front of their snickering classmates, maybe they'll remember poetry is more than "the valley of death".

I'll talk more about class soon, as I finish writing up the outline. Sneak preview: It relies on a terrific anthology.

Donate your book, increase your audience

A pretty neat idea from Jeff Winke at Upper Iowa University. Courtesy of Spiral Bridge. Contact Jeff directly for more information.

Seeking poets who might have an extra copy of their chapbook or book they'd be willing to donate to a lucky student. Each week, during my 8-week undergraduate poetry class, there will be a drawing to see who wins the book a poet has been generous enough to donate. The winner will be responsible for reading your book and selecting a favorite poem to read to the class the following week. If you like, contact information and book price should be included so that others in the class can buy your book. Students will be STRONGLY encouraged to buy the books of poets who, after all, were kind enough to contribute a book to their education. If you're willing, please send your book (autographed would be nice) and contact and price details to

Jeff Winke
Upper Iowa University - Milwaukee Center
6610 W. Greenfield Ave.
West Allis, WI 53214

Thanks,
Jeff Winke
jeff@jeffwinke.com
414-699-3244

Rock & roll, pure and simple

I always have music running through my head -- always. It begins with blues and it finds a groove and locks in tight, rock steady, chorus upon chorus of the blues . . . always the guitar. Sometimes drums kick in, and bass, and I'm walking along, and rock & roll is the whole reason I'm alive. Maybe the guitar gets moody with reverb, a little overdrive, not too much -- just enough to give it an edge. -- The Del Ray Method, Chapter 1

If you're around Hoboken NJ on Sunday at 3, please stop into Symposia Bookstore to hear Mike Fleming read from his rock & roll novel, The Del Ray Method. This Spoken Word Series event is sponsored by The Center for the Performing Arts at DeBaun Auditorium.

Pobots

This one's for the geek half of my audience (he said with overestimative confidence).

Two poetry links of interest to people who do lateral thinking puzzles for fun on Sunday mornings (and you know who you are):

Underway for some time now, the Darwinian Poetry experiment continues to use "natural selection" to systematically assemble new poems from the best liked parts of older poems. The study is 22 generations old and has accumulated nearly 200,000 votes as the input for its selection process; poems which get many votes live on and spawn, poems which get fewer votes die off. Now when I say "poem", I mean this:

where fall beautiful
beating beyond the
loneliness till love the doubted pressed in
mouth doesn't comes foreign
a love strangely motionlessness
(poem #17071)

I don't know if it's poetry (though it's better than some stuff I've read from real live people), but it's interesting, and it certainly is fuel for the creative engine. I'm afraid the experiment has lost some of its momentum (I first wrote about it in June, 2003), but it's still worth a look.

Substituting web trawling for personal opinion, Finnish poet Leevi Lehto has created a Google Poem Generator. Your search string and selections on a few variable are pressed through the Google index and made into poems. These can be fascinating - don't be surprised to get some real found poems - and also great fuel. While you're on The Google Poem site, be sure to check out everything on Lehto's menu. Thanks to Ron Silliman for this link.

Fifty Words

From today's The Writer's Almanac:

(Dr. Seuss) went on to publish a series of fairly successful books for older children and then, in 1955, an educational specialist asked him if he would write a book to help children learn how to read. Seuss was given a list of 300 words that most first graders know, and he had to write the book using only those words. Seuss wasn't sure he could do it, but as he looked over the list, two words jumped out at him: "cat" and "hat."

Seuss spent the next nine months writing what would become The Cat in the Hat (1957). That book is 1,702 words long, but it uses only 220 different words. Parents and teachers immediately began using it to teach children to read, and within the first year of its publication it was selling 12,000 copies a month.

A few years later, Seuss's publisher bet him $50 that he could not write a book using only 50 different words. Seuss won the bet with his book Green Eggs and Ham (1960), which uses exactly 50 different words, and only one of those words has more than one syllable: the word "anywhere." It became the forth best-selling children's hardcover book of all time.

Wow. I write about my kids a lot, and I write poems addressed to them, but I've not done a lot where I seriously consider children my audience and select my words accordingly. When I did my first workshop in a school last year, I had something of a hard time selecting some of my own work to include. I blamed it on language (I have a tendency toward the Latinate), but later thought I feared the brutal honesty of the third grade shooting my work down. I think I'll visit the Young People's Poetry Week poetry starters and see if I can compose one from their prompt words; that might help me figure it out. I wonder if I could use the fifty words in Green Eggs and Ham and make something interesting out of them. I think I'll try that, too.

And it's not even National Poetry Month

My local paper actually ran a story on a local poet recently. A happy surprise to be sure - New Jersey is home to a large number of well-known poets (too many to mention, but start with Williams, Pinsky and Muldoon), but they usually are marginalized in the "mainstream press" to a few profiles during NatPoMo every year. While Rachel Hadas doesn't reside in the Garden State, she does teach at our state university; that's good enough for me. Newark Star-Ledger columnist Bob Braun profiled her recently; you can also find her in the current issue of Poetry.

By the way: If you've trolled through my links at right, you've already been to the NJ.com website to read Maureen Berzok's NJ Writers blog. If you've not visited yet, you should do so soon - she presents a tasting menu of Jersey writers past and present that covers more elements of the literary arts than you're likely to see collected anywhere else. And I'm not just saying that because she said something nice about me.

Please, Hate It.

I stuck my nose into an interesting discussion in Kelli Agodon's journal, concerning Ted Kooser's advice to keep your audience in mind (from The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice For Beginning Poets). I do subscribe to this notion, as I think expecting people to take an interest in something you wrote purely for yourself is narcissism of the highest order. But I also agree with this great (possibly paraphrased) quote, attributed to Marvin Bell: "There should be at least one person in the room who hates/dislikes your poem. If it has a little sugar, it needs a little salt." I don't find these thoughts mutually exclusive.

Poetry is never going to be universal. Done properly (and this includes all forms and schools and clans and workgroups and whatevers), poetry is language distilled into art - concentrated, impactful, sometimes warming, sometimes disturbing. It's like a very strong cocktail; these have their fans, but they have their haters as well. But this does not mean you can throw any three liquors together, give it a name, and expect anyone to want to sample it.

My poems reflect the things I find powerful. It so happens that my artistic mission is to find extraordinary moments lying about among ordinary things. Because of this, I think many people can find something to latch onto in my work. But many of my poems have met wrinkled noses and been greeted with questions, and this is fine. I should be concerned when the noses stop wrinkling, as I'll know then that I've stopped stretching, that I've stopped challenging myself to find something better, more meaningful, more memorable to say.

Confidential to Frank Chase

FC: After you work your way out of this mess, be sure and wish an HBB to the man who doomed you in the eyes of Murphy. -- dv

Riff, Resolve, Repeat

Had the great fortune to see the Lincoln Center Jazz Band (with Wynton Marsalis) last night, and I'm reminded all over again of the essential links between poetry and jazz. Like many people, I've always felt the connection between William Carlos Williams and Thelonious Monk (the spareness, the simple structures, the use of silence/rests), but I see very clearly and for the first time a direct parallel between the poem (or better, a series of poems) and the jazz performance. Follow:

- There's a structure. A melody. A theme, if you will, whose job it is to hold the mood together while providing space for the riffs - either the soloists or the departures in the poem, the things that deliver the unexpected and dynamic.
- In those riffs, there's an feel which has strong roots in the improvisational. It always has a feel of newness, and, done right, never takes you in the direction you expected.
- While the riff is the vehicle for delivering the energy, the surprise, it isn't the place the work leaves you. It delivers you through the highs and lows to someplace beyond. Forget the meadow beyond the woods analogy and think about the music you love. Am I right?
- Jazz comes in many styles: bebop and blues, fusion and classic, etc. But they all are true to the basics of the form: setup, riff, resolve.

OK, poetry isn't necessarily religiously improvisational, though I would argue poems with roots in improv (or that ride inspiration equally with craft) tend to be the better works. And I know many poets resist "resolution" in a neat sense, but we always find ways to end poems that feel satisfying to us, and these are usually different than the middles of our poems, no?

See if any or all of your poems fit. And next time you're stuck, feel free to call on Dizzy to seduce the muse.

They Really Show Me Something

I really enjoy The Missouri Review's website. It's a very good journal, but for my money TMR's web presence is just the perfect face of a literary magazine. In addition to periodically excerpting past issues and posting the work online, and maintaining a discussion group in which they actually and actively dialog with people over issues relevant to the magazine (including following up on submissions!) the editorial team posts commentaries frequently and maintains a pretty fair blog (self-advertising, no doubt, but which of us with this hobby isn't engaging in a little shameless self-promotion?).

I haven't visited in a while (busyness and forgetfulness), so I don't know when they were posted, but there are two terrific poems by Gabriel Welsch at the top of the poetry archive, imagining telemarketers talking in one case to Albert Goldbarth, in another to Billy Collins. I think I have my writing prompt for tonight, should the poem I started this morning about roadkill skunks as a sign of Spring not go anywhere for me.

Oh, and there are more telemarketer poems online, too,

Common Knowledge

According to The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Italian astronomer Galileo (Galilei), born in Pisa (1564). He devised a simple open-air thermometer (1607), but his greatest breakthrough was to build an improved refracting telescope (1609), with which he clearly confirmed the view of Copernicus, who insisted Aristotle was wrong, the Earth was not the center of things; the Sun was. Galileo's books were banned; he was summoned to Rome, to be tried for heresy. In 1633 he was convicted, sentenced to house arrest for life, and his books were ordered burned. He was forced either to renounce all his Copernican beliefs or be tortured on the rack. While signing his declaration that the earth was stationary, he muttered, "And yet... it moves." Confined to his home, he continued to study physics and astronomy, until, in his seventies, he grew completely blind.

Galileo is a hero of mine, because he saw no contradiction between scientific advance and faith in God, and because he is one of the fathers of empirical physics. Of equal importance to us as writers is the way he published his arguments in favor of the Copernican view of the solar system, which were radical for his time in two ways: First, they were written in Italian, not Latin, which made them accessible to many more people (not just scholars). Second, they were written as dialogues, in which the competing worldview was presented respectfully (though clearly discredited). I wish there were more people today willing to package their learnings this carefully for consumption.

My Love is Like That Red, Pete Rose

OK, she's not, except in the sense that she's been out of baseball for a while, too; though she is, of course, a bonnie lass. But when you get a good title in your head, you trust it, you know? (Apologies to Robert Burns).

Anyway, a little Valentine's Day reading:

The inimitable James Lileks writes on the day's effects at various stages in one's life over at the BackFence.

The Academy of American Poets has selections on Love, Lust and Loss. Make sure you know which category you're in before reading one across the candlelight tonight.

Robert Pinsky presents a miniantholovey at Slate.

As for me? Well, it's KFC tonight as always. And that's a good thing.

Poets' This, Poets' That

My college poetry professor, Ed Foster, was interviewed recently over at Here Comes Everybody. I remember loving his classes not only for the poems we studied and the poets that came to campus (Pinsky, C.K. Williams, McClure), but for the arguments we had in class. Even as an engineering school, we had enough students in the room for (occasional) quality disagreement. And it's testimony to his ability to teach that despite how different his interests and likes were from ours with our limited worldviews and math-and-science brains, he was able to direct us to appreciate the art we were studying.

What I find interesting today is the bang-on similarity of two of his answers at HCE to the way I would have answered: (7) Have young children write poems rather than try to define them and (8) The poet's role is to write poems - not more and not less.

My poetics could not be more different from Ed's. I write a narrative, character-and-scene driven, punny sort of a poem; you could call me "mainstream" and not offend me. I don't know how to characterize Ed's without oversimplifying so I'll send you here and here and ask you to judge for yourself. And yet we have the same opinion on two issues which are fairly fundamental to how poets interact with the world. Hmm.

Has anyone else noticed that when we permit ourselves to step back from our differences (such as that recent string of thoughts separating "My Kind" of poetry from "That Kind"), our similarities are usually more striking?

There's Always Time to Change

Any of you who have been thinking to yourselves that you're too whatever to change, that you're too set in your literary habits and reputations and should resign yourselves to your niche should take note of this: Wil Wheaton, once the overstated and hated wünderensign Wesley Crusher on Star Trek TNG, fresh off the publication of his second book Just a Geek (about which more another day), will be playing a psychopathic homeless murder suspect on an upcoming episode of CSI.

And you think you've got a reputation too hard to shake? Please.

Pre-Game Poetry

In honor of Le Bowl Superb this weekend, some football poem excerpts:

First this from Louis Jenkins' "Football" (which I first discovered at the Poetry 180 project site):

".... I've got a receiver open downfield..
What the hell is this? This isn't a football, it's a shoe, a man's
brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same
skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air."

Here's a bit of verse from Flak Magazine's Joshua Adams - a 13-part poem composed in real time in commentary on Super Bowl 38. It starts out as a theft of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", but it ambitiously steals lines from many more good works than just that:

"I was of three minds, like a field goal -- missed!
The South Dakotan kicker owns the day
no longer? How could you, Adam? Wide right?
Vrabel, verily, sacks the city Delhomme.
Would that Hugh Jackman shelve the Van Helsing
and punt for the Pats. ..."

Do you know these lines from James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"?

"...
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies."

Finally, did you now that a Google search for "football poem" yields almost 600,000 hits (most, it seems, for the game we on this continent call soccer)

Give yourself a challenge this year: Find something about the Super Bowl - the GAME, not the commercials or the hype or the halftime extrashaganza - to write about. Capture bodies in motion, human struggle, your uncle's tirade at Terrell Owens. See what you come up with.

By the way: Patriots 23, Philadelphia 13.

Performance versus Paper

Among the outstanding series of Debates, Manifestos and Criticisms over at The Academy of American Poets is one by David Groff on the dangers of poetry readings. He discusses the arguments over whether the popularity of readings is good or bad for poetry, the crux of which is experiencing a poem in performance is so vastly different from experiencing a poem by reading it in private that the success of one has little to do with the success of the other. He has a point; there are poets I enjoy greatly in one form that I struggle to appreciate in the other (Amiri Baraka comes to mind).

Now, since my primary contribution to the arts in my community is the reading series I host, it would be greatly inconsistent with my mission to think that The Spoken Word, as we title our series, does not contribute to the world of "The Written Word". However, I think Groff makes an excellent point when he says "...most harmfully, a public poetry performance usually cannot convey a poem’s form. In a world where the very notion of "poetry" contains multitudes of meanings, only one element separates poetry from other verbal arts: the line. A poem is essentially a collection of words in which the margins matter—yet this basic element is the one thing a poet can seldom convey in a public reading. Listening to a poem, haven’t you longed for the poet to hold it aloft so that you could see its shape on the page?"

He's right on here. Poetry is about form, whether conscious alignment with existing form, bold creation of new form, artistic use of visual form, purposeful avoidance of all form (which is the hardest of all to do well). Hearing a poem aloud should drive you to the page to see what it looks like. More importantly, it should drive you to the page so you can inhabit that poem again yourself through reading, and get the next level of understanding or enjoyment from it.

Then there's the Pinsky mandate to "read it aloud". I do this often. There's a practical piece, of course: selecting writers for the series, I need to have a sense for how the material works aloud. But for me, poetry - on the page or in the ear - must have some kind of music in it. I first concluded this when studying Wallace Stevens for the first time, I've incorporated it into my own work - even though I write mostly narrative, character-driven poems - and I feel more strongly about it then ever, having seen too many poems lately that are so impressed (or preoccupied) with their subject or their style that they ignore the textures of the words they use. The biggest sin here is the acceptance of an OK word when a better one is available (for precision in definition, for alliteration, for dramatic impact, etc.).

I seem to be all over the place on this one. But even though I am a fan and practitioner of writing for the ear, I guess I agree that poems must be successful on the page to be truly successful. I think I'd trade off greatness aloud for greatness on the page.

Love Me, Love My Accordion

Oh I know you're cheap and vulgar, you're an instrumental crime
In drawing-rooms you haven't got a show
You're a musical abortion, you're the voice of grit and grime
You're the spokesman of the lowly and the low
You're a democratic devil, you're the darling of the mob
You're a wheezy, breezy blasted bit of glee
You're the headache of the high-bow, you're the horror of the snob
But you're worth your weight in ruddy gold to me.

(from "Accordion", by Robert Service)

There are many good poems about baseball. Now all I need is a good poem about bowling and I'll have all my hobbies covered.

What's in a Name?

How important is the title of a collection of poems? Have you ever had to have a book just for its title? I admit I mostly purchase on the bases of author's names and recommendations from poets I respect. But I just checked the New Arrivals list at Poetry Daily. Here are the first 5 books on the list:

Birds And Bison, Claire Malroux, tr. Marilyn Hacker (Sheep Meadow Press)
Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (new in paperback), Marilyn Hacker (W. W. Norton & Company)
A Sail To Great Island, Alan Feldman (University of Wisconsin Press)
Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt, Charles Simic, Illus. Howie Michels (Tin House/Bloomsbury)
Green Rice, Lam Thi My Da, tr. Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh (Curbstone Press)

Does one jump out at you? My collection doesn't include much erotica (and even the one book I have has marriage as its central theme), but I'm considering Simic's book on the title alone. It doesn't hurt that Simic is a tremendous poetic presence, of course.

Goodnight, Johnny

A: Never again.
Q: When will there be another presence like Johnny Carson?
And if you disagree with me, may the sweat of a dozen pregnant camels accumulate in your oatmeal.

As he makes his way to that great Slosson cutoff in the sky, let's take a minute think about the impact Johnny Carson had on his art form, and let's think about our own impact.

- Johnny inherited a simple format. He personalized it, expanded it, and stamped it in a way that spanned 40 years (example: Steve Allen's Question Man predated Carnac, but who did you think of at the start of this entry?) If you are a writer, what contributions to your form are you making that are unique? Memorable? Different?

- Editors and reading series hosts, this one's for you: Johnny had everyone from zookeepers to actors to writers to that lady who found a potato chip that looked just like Bob Hope, and he gave them all respectful time and made them all better for being with him. Don Rickles, in an interview on NBC tonight, said his appearances on The Tonight Show were on a different level from much of his work because of Johnny. What do you do in your collections and with your features to make them better? Isn't that your job?

- He booked a wide variety but he knew his audience, or else how could he have lasted so long and left on his own terms? What's your audience? What are you doing to serve them with your art? Yeah, yeah, "art for art's sake" and all that, but who are you hoping is going to see your work and what are you delivering to them to earn that privilege?

- With many "hosts", it's about the host bringing the funny or looking clever. If it was about that with Johnny, he was the greatest actor who ever lived. Ask yourself seriously: Do you want to create art or do you want to be "an artist"? It's not always the same thing.

Late night television hasn't been the same since Carson. What are you changing? And how are you changing it?

Applying the Shovel

I enjoy shoveling snow. I'm not just saying that because right now it would be impractical not to, but because it occurred to me this evening that shoveling snow is a lot like writing.

No, really.

Shoveling snow is a job without a starting point. You drive the shovel in anywhere, then you keep going. If you're good, you can find something important along the way, but the point is to make your way from here to there, disrupting your beautiful surroundings as little as possible along the way. It's easy to be sucked into making one sidewalk square or one corner of the driveway perfect - you scrape and scrape and scrape the edge of your shovel until the rest of the project goes to hell or you ruin your shovel and your attitude over something small. In the end, it's not about being perfect, it's about being done. And even with stray streaks and occasional lumps of snow, you can take pride in what you've completed, because it often is beautiful and valuable and appreciated.

Substitute pen for shovel, word for sidewalk square, line for corner, etc. See? I was going to suggest occasional cliché for occasional for lumps of snow, but that may be going a bit far.

There are a lot of places I think poets can take a tip from the physical world. It's not that hard to get started. It's not hard to make progress. It is hard to step back from what you're doing once your back is into it. Poets have the harder time here; at least God gave us exhaustion to force us to take a break from shoveling.

Everything Old Is New Again

I'm putting together a couple of poetry class ideas - one for grownups who probably don't know much poetry (or much about poetry), one for grammar school kids who we're trying to get not to hate poetry. To love it, even. Maybe. Hopefully. So I've been combing through poets as far ago as Wordsworth, and as recently as the copy of Smartish Pace that arrived yesterday, looking for ideas that suit my themes.

What's been striking me is how many similarities I'm finding in poems across the last several centuries. Oh, sure, Wordsworth wrote with a style that today we consider stilted (or worse), but if you can accept that the tendency toward sonnet was as much a part of his generation of artists as the avoidance of form is for (most of) mine, he might not be that different from us - from me, at least. He advocated "common speech", he didn't care for the epic, he wrote about people and things he saw as he walked and death and all the things that show up in so much contemporary poetry today.

Rediscovering Wordsworth like this has been fascinating for me. It has made me recall all the wonderful poems I studied in high school that instilled my love of poetry. All of a sudden, I'm looking forward to Poetry Daily's annual NatPoMo exercise where they call attention to poems in the public domain (read: old) that contemporary poets have selected for their meaning and value to them as artists. Until then, I'll try to treat my sense of wonder the way Wordsworth did his:


My Heart Leaps Up (by William Wordsworth)

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Exciting, not Great

First, of all, I'd like to thank my New York Jets for giving us a nice ride this season. The year lasted longer than we in the land of Gang Green thought it would, and it was fun while it lasted. But (and here's where I make like Justin McCareins and stretch)...

The Jets demonstrated in their last game this year that they're not (yet) a great football team. In 5 quarters of playoff football, they scored 3 points on offense. For those of you on whom this reference is lost, let me clarify: That's not very good. But the game was exciting. Sometimes badly executed, showcasing some obvious mistakes, highlighted characters doing dumb deeds; you see where I'm going yet?

I think there are some parallels to writing here. Writing can be exciting without being great. There are poems and stories and books that catch your interest without being top-shelf writing. I've often heard Stephen King placed in this category. I happen to be very fond of Mr. King's short stories, but I've only walked away from one novel thinking "Wow" (Thinner). Finished all the ones I started, though. I don't think his books are bad, but in my narrow view, they're not great.

It's easier for me to define what appeals to me in prose, because it's narrower than what appeals to me in poetry. I suppose it's all the things they teach in ficton classes; I look for well-drawn characters with motivations that lead them to decisions that will change them forever. I prefer not to hear the character's thought in my omnisicient earpiece ("Show, don't tell"), I'm partial to the speculative (my favorite prose producers tend to be from SF, and just to bring this back to football, I don't mean the 49ers).

Ah, the things that go through your head when you have a long ride home after watching a tough loss.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

The great Harlan Ellison once responded to this least favorite of all questions by saying he sends money to a PO Box in Schenectady NY and gets ideas by mail in return. That glibness actually titled Barry Longyear’s excellent collection of short stories.

Poets don’t get asked this question as much as do writers of speculative fiction but since poetry is “the supreme fiction”, it does come up from time to time. In very broad strokes, here’s a short summary of my own sources, or at least the routes by which they access me.

First are the classic “Inspired” poems, the kind where you stop what you’re doing, grab a pen, and commit excellence to paper. This doesn’t happen to me much. Generally, I dictate ideas into a recorder as they come to me and transcribe them later. Sometimes there are poems in the transcription, but more often there is input material for…

“Self-driven” poems: I comb my old material (sometimes as far back as 10 years) for ideas. Most of the time, these are poems I never finished that I take a new shot at. I don’t consider these inspired, because the inspiration is usually long dead. The character that resembles me in these poems is the me of 2005, not the me of whenever the idea struck me. I call these self-driven because they are derived all from my own thought (self), and are the result of conscious work (drive). Which distinguished them from…

“Event-driven” poems. You know the drill. Something happens in the world, and the writer sits down to write about it. Most of the time, this doesn’t work for me either. I’ve very rarely been able to react viscerally to a current event, and allow the event to pull the words from me. I blame this on (1) being a technologist, and as such feeling the need to see all side of every issue before responding and (2), being a storyteller (or narrative versifier, if you prefer) – I generally write from the eyes of a character. There are some events I have trouble allowing my mind’s eye to embody.

The final category is Prompted poems (any writing in response to a contrived or artificial prompt). I’m more adept at this than I feel I should be, and I think it’s primarily because of that “handicap” of being a storyteller, and the amount of reading I’ve done (and continue to do). It’s frequently easy for me to picture a scene around the most ridiculous things. And I see prompted poems sort of as logic puzzles or mysteries: Here’s what’s left in the room; what just happened?

I could write for days about the kinds of things I find when I sit down for some self-driving, and that would more appropriately answer that terrible, uninformed, wondrously naïve and star-struck question above, but I’ll save that for another time.

Reinhabiting a Poem

If you are a poet who is not familiar with the practice of reading, or are curious how an incredibly accomplished poet approaches the prospect of a live audience, check out Ron Silliman's blog today. Without meaning to place my own work in his class, I agree completely when he talks about memory of his own work, and about the theatrical practice of preparaing to read. I had assumed that it was my background, both as an engineer and CTCR veteran (Community Theater Comedy Relief) that led me to need a quiet practice space.

Guess not.