This Is NOT Why We Do This

Courtesy of Mr. Keillor:

"It was on this day in 1857 that Charles Dickens gave his first public reading. He liked to perform in public, he could make good money at it, and it got him away from home and from his wife. His first reading was of A Christmas Carol."

There are Dickens references turned up by a casual search. This chronology is part of one that has some good information capsules.

Hmm. Now that I read it again, Dickens; readings were the polar opposite of modern poetry readings, no?

TTFN

The original voices of Tigger and Piglet died this week. Both men were underappreciated, I think - Paul Winchell was an inventor and comic innovator, John Fiedler was a talented multidimensional actor.

I do feel a sense of loss today, for my childhood and for two talented performers. And I think this is a brilliant sendoff that Winchell would have appreciated:


Well done, Matt. (Go view the original. And read the "Poetic License to Kill" story from the archives while you're there!)

Is it "Self-" if they pay for it?

The Document Company is holding a book contest. Hurry, submissions are due Friday.

Birthday Banter

Mr. Keillor informs us that today marks the birth of both Frank O'Hara and Lucille Clifton. I think tonight I'll take one of his books and one of her books down off my shelf and alternate - one poem from each - for an hour or so.

Then I'll take two aspirin.

Words and Pictures?

Have you taken a look at the American Film Institute's long-awaited Top 100 Film Quotes yet? It's an interesting read. Everything you'd expect is there, I think, as well as homage to some great movies that had no really seminal single lines. The excellent film critic Stephen Whitty had a great column just before the thing was release, talking about filmmakers' decreasing respect for dialog. That may be true, but I'm more perturbed today about the AFI's complete lack of sense for climactic language. The list captures good lines from critical movie moments, but it frequently misses the peak, the poetic moment, if you will of these dialogues. Some examples:

• At #91, from the Abbott and Costello movie The Naughty Nineties, AFI selected "Who's on first." If you're familiar with the routine, one of the great comedy bits ever, would you say this line captures the spirit of that scene? Or would you immediately bark out "I don't know. THIRD BASE!"
• A couple notches up, we have a short Katherine Hepburn speech from "On Golden Pond". It's a lovely scene. It was a lovely moment. The lines are memorable only because they were Kate and Hank; otherwise, they're pretty ordinary. This was a very good movie. I've never, ever, heard it quoted.
• Up at #82, from all the marvelous lines in National Lampoon's Animal House, AFI selected "Toga! Toga!". Uh huh. If you want to quote that scene, it's "There's only one thing to do. Toga Party." Maybe the dialog that follows it. Or give me something Bluto said. Or better still, list "Thank you sir, may I have another," which I've heard uttered at least once a week for 20 years.

Peruse the list yourself. Some I like ("Don't call me Shirley", "Here's Johnny", "There's no crying in baseball"), and you can't really argue with most of the top 20, but for the most part, I think the list just misses the climaxes of the scenes it quotes.

Which has me thinking: it's part of the poet's approach to always know where that climatic second is, no? Because we write (for the most part) in distilled language, and (for the most part) in snapshots and images and fragments, we can't afford to be just off, can we? If we are, the poem simply doesn't work. Unfortunately, with our own words, it's not always obvious to us that this is the root of a failed or stalled poem. Movies have a luxury we don't.

As do top-100 lists.

Voice, Definition 2: Voice as Instrument

Poetry Daily informs us that Billy Collins has a new CD out. I like Billy Collins. I have some of his books, and I enjoy and still find useful his Poetry 180 project (I don't really undersand the purpose or connecting thread in 180 More, but there are many fine poems there). He's an entertaining speaker when he discusses writing process, or how to craft a collection, or when answering questions from an attentive audience. But his poems? Hearing him give them voice doesn't do much for me.

This brings me to the line between "poetry" and "performance art". In my Poetry Hosts group, we've been having a pretty active discussion about what "defines" poetry, and whether we as hosts should attempt to teach this to our audiences at all. In my series, I've heard entertaining performances of material I'd not call poetry, as well as poor readings of really excellents poems. So this leads me to ask: What's more important to me?

Bottom line for me: the poem exists on the page. Oral presentation of that poem may improve understanding or enjoyment of it, but if it doesn't work on the page with some attempt to apply some of the tools that separate poetry from prose, then we don't have a poem. I think I feel this so strongly because I believe poetry must be inhabitable, that I must be able to step inside a poem and hear it in my head, in my voice, for it to be successful.

This doesn't mean that a poet presenting a poem in his or her own voice shouldn't be a delightful thing. But the director in me wants that presentation to be more than, and different than, someone else's. Some examples that come to mind:

Lucille Clifton works on the page (I especially like the Clark Kent poems), but when she breathes into her own work it takes on a personality that suits the poem. It's her, mostly, but it's a dramatic embodiment of the work, more. I find the same in Coleman Barks. And while his own work and his presentation of Rumi share a slowness on the page and in his reading, it's a different slowness - his own work is sarcastic and nostalgiac, Rumi is neither of these things.

I can't go on about slams much, as I've never been to a real one, though I've featured good slammers in my series. Good poets who are good slammers follow the rule. You can feel on the page some of the energy that would exist in presentation. Different in your mind than in your ears, but there.

Back to Billy Collins: I never hear anyone but him when he reads. He doens't present his own work in a way that makes it different than what's on the page. I do enjoy his work, but I don't think I'll be buying this CD; I'd rather have the book.

A quick postscript: If you've belonged to AAP ever, you may have purchased or received a collection of reading excerpts. Dig it out and see if you don't find some great, great poets whose readings just don't improve their work.

Happy Father's Day

With Love
by Ray Bradbury

for Leonard Bradbury

My father ties, I do not tie, my tie.
On some night long ago, in June
I tried to try
My first tie snarled upon my vest
My hands all thumbs
And presto-chango
Something Awful This Way Comes.
My father quietly came by
And studied me and stood behind.
"Be blind", he said.
"Stay off of mirrors.
Let your fingers
Learn to do."
His lesson lingers. What he said was true.
Eyes shut,
With him to help me over up, around and under-out
Somehow a knot miraculous came about.
"There's nothing to it," said my Dad.
"Now, son, you do it. No, eyes shut."
And with one last dear blind perceiving
He taught my crippled fingers
Arts of weaving. Then, turned away.
Well, to this day, how dare I boast,
I cannot do it.
I call that long-gone sweet tobacco-smelling ghost
To help me through it.
He helps me yet;
Upon my neck, his breath, the scent of his last cigarette.
There is no death, for yestereve
His phantom fingers came and helped me tuck and weave.
If this is true (it is!) he'll never die.
My father ties, I do not tie, my tie.

from I Live By The Invisible (Salmon Poetry)

The Poet in Orion's Belt

When you spend your formative years among geeks, and then attend a geeky college twice to major first in geekdom, then in geekdom management, you occasionally get to reap benefits such as the following sentence: I'd like to wish my friend the astronomer a happy birthday.

It's actually a happy belated birthday, since I missed the actual event, but I figure when you make a living looking at things that actually happened (or rather: were emitted) tens of thousands of years ago, what's a week here or there?

And let me take a moment here to point out once again the confluence of science and poetry: This career scientist not only was with me on the staff of our college literary magazine, but was an extremely talented stage performer as well. He was always the leading man, I was always the comedy relief (see #5 below), but that never bothered me. Really.

Anyway, as Jennifer will attest to, the sky is a beautiful and inspiring place for a poet. And in their truest sense, the scientific and artistic impulses are not that dissimilar. As Livinia Greenlaw said during her tenure as Poet In Residence at the Science Museum in London: "...science stems from human enquiry and our experience of the world. And in that sense it is as subjective as poetry."

Things You Didn't Know About Me

NOTE: I'm only doing this because I want in on the Deb/Dale Bowling Challenge.

1. As a former head kegler for his college team, David can out-bowl Deborah, C. Dale, and most anyone else who stops by here today. But not his mother. (Note: Trash talking between two people 3,000 miles apart is best done if you are not located on the straight line path between them.)
2. This is a guarantee: if you have been to a doctor in the United States in the last 15 years, you have seen or had used on you a medical device that David had a hand in developing.
3. He won the New York State Accordion Association championship for pop music performance by a 12 year old with a performance of the theme from Star Wars (near-disco version).
4. Unaware of how it would brand him for life, David founded the Chess Club at his high school.
5. David holds the modern record for times pantsed on stage at Stevens Institute of Technology.
6. He can operate a slide rule.
7. He has never lived more than 15 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
8. Three-word sequences in normal conversation often prompt David to break into song. Especially into showtunes.
9. He has no fewer than 10 relatives who have performed music (solo or in a group) for audiences of 500 or more people.
10. David once captained a softball team called The Slugs.

Intro to Poetry: The Mix Tape

Steve set it up this way:

You've just met someone you think is special. They're smart, but they don't really read poetry. However, because you're who you are, they want to learn more about poetry. To get them started, you must create a "poetry mix tape" of 10 poems as a starting point for their reading.

I tried not to think too much about rules, to select 10 poems and see what rules seemed to have emerged. Here are 10 poems I would hand to someone interested in learning about poetry:

untitled ("won't you celebrate with me"), Lucille Clifton (scroll to the end)
"God Gives Faith to Baseball Fans", Edwin Romond
"After I Read Sandy Zulauf's Across the Bar, Victoria Takes Me Skiing", BJ Ward
“Across the Bar”, Sander Zulauf
"Bachelor Song", Douglas Goetsch
"My Daughter at 14: Christmas Dance, 1981", Maria Mazziotti Gillan
"The Word Kite", Tina Kelley
"For May is the Month of Our Mother", Cat Doty
"Messiah, Christmas Portions", Mark Doty
"Club", Coleman Barks

Interestingly, this didn't turn out to be a list of "poems I wish I'd written". I started to list out what I thought were my biases and intents, but the bottom line is these are contemporary poems that strike empathy with the reader, take great playful joy with language (even, some of them, to express despair), and can be talked about on several levels: for their story, for their individual poetic craft, and as gateways to greater body of work of the authors. One bias I should make clear: I only considered poems by poets whose work I felt I knew fairly well, well enough to intelligently introduce a new reader to.

Paying Attention to Your Voice (Part 3)

Getting back to voice, the most important thing I noticed in completing my first manuscript was that subtle variations in voice can be greatly magnified in certain context. Now, mine is a narrowly focused example, because of the gimmick of the collection (poems addressed to small daughters), so perhaps I'm more paying more attention to this than is usual. But here's an example:

A draft of a poem contained this sequence:

.............................We all check one box:
clowns, bats, death, lonelieness - we all have
one thing besides sex we can’t discuss with
our mothers, or else that brainbound rush
of red will make us five again.

In a sequence addressed to a child, with a father as the narrator, the appearence of the word "sex" is a distraction. It's out of character; I know because I've successfully avoided that word for the better part of decade - except in this poem. The rewritten section is a little different:

.............................We all check one box:
clowns, bats, death, lonelieness - we all have
one thing we can’t discuss, especially with
our mothers, or else that brainbound rush
of red will make us five again.

Weaker, frankly, but more supportive of the work as a whole. Another discovery, similar to the point Jeannine made a few days ago, was that the poems written earlier in this process (when my children were younger) don't feel the same as the ones written more recently. I've gotten better at getting past the sentiment to the interesting and ironic just beyond, but more importantly, my line has shrunk.

Aside: Does this happen to other poets? The basic construct of all your poems suddenly feels wrong and you are moved to create with different music? In my case, it seems I don't think in pentameter anymore. I've looked back to see the fuzzy period where I forced my line breaks and made some bad word choices to maintain the rhythm I used to want. But in the context of the larger work, those forces jumped out at me. Some got rewritten, some extracted.

Finally, I killed off at least one poem that I like that didn't fit with the essentially light tone of the collection, or with the subset of me that the narrating father represents. To simplify, several of the poems in the manuscript refer to Christmas, all in a neutral-to-positive way, religiously. One of the later poems I'd written for this project has at its center doubt about a particular element of my Roman Catholic faith. While it may be true to me personally, it may be interesting to read, and it may be a good poem, it just isn't necessary to the exploration of emerging fatherhood or to dialog with small children. It seemed a conversation with myself instead of with them. Maybe when I write for them as teenagers, that one will have a home.

So adhering to voice as it applies to a single collection of poems boils down to this: one book is by one person. Be complicated, be surprising, but be one person. The corollary is: if you are presenting a theme, stay on that theme; sacrifice length for coherence and sacrifice your favorite poems if they call so much attention to themselves that the reader loses his or her place in the larger work.

Ah. I feel better now. All this from a prawn tweaking a tin thing's pecs. I really gotta get out more.

A Brief Interruption

At the risk of disrupting my train of thought, there are few bits of SSP (Shameless Self-Promotion) to get out of the way:

• The Edison Literary Review has accepted my poem "The Good Thing About Rain" for the 2005 issue.
• Last Friday night I received the Robert Reed Service Award from The Center for the Performing Arts at DeBaun Auditorium. It recognizes significant volunteer efforts for bringing arts to the communities around Hoboken and Stevens Insititute of Technology.
• This quiz, which I found first at C. Dale's place, seems to think I'm John Ashbery ("People love your work but have no idea why, really. You are respected by all kinds of scholars and poets. Even artists like you."). That's an interesting fit; I'd have thought I was more Wallace Stevens. Or I would have if I thought I deserved to be mentioned in the same paragraph as either of them, that is.
• We announced the 2005-2006 season of The Spoken Word Series last week. Quality poets of several styles, some personal essay; local editors, local newspaper columnist. Watch the site for names and bios appearing over the summer.

We will shortly return you to your regularly scheduled series of blatherings about voice.

Paying Attention to Your Voice (Part 2)

Gonzo's nipples (prior entry) a little too tough a reference for you? OK. I understand. But the point is this: if you've created a universe that has certain rules, don't change the rules on me just to make a point or a joke, or - worst of all - to advance the plot. Fans of science fiction and fantasy take things like this quite seriously. {aginggeekreference} For example: In the Star Trek universe, "beaming" is possible. In the Star Wars universe, The Force runs through all things. If after two seasons Spock suddenly began deflecting phaser fire with a glowing stick, if after 90 minutes Obi Wan had suddenly materialized at the tractor beam's power source, would you stop thinking about the plot? Would you find yourself distracted by the one scene and lose sight of the larger work? {/aginggeekreference}.

Similarly with characters, if you've imbued them with certain characteristics, don't drop those characteristics suddenly to make a point or a joke, or - worst of all - to advance the plot. My point about Gonzo's comment was that it wasn't part of the action (the scene essentially stops so that Pepe can prompt the line), it was inconsistent with its context (Disney? Nipples?), and it was inconsistent with what we know about the character who spoke it (anyone who knows Gonzo as well as I do will agree).

So what does this have to do with poems? And my poems in particular? A friend once gave me a book of poems that an acquaintance of his had self-published. They were pretty standard fare - unrhymed, little regard for meter, no regard for form, preoccupied with death and badly-ended affairs. Except for one poem in the final third of the book: 3 rhymed stanzas about getting sprayed while changing his grandson. The last lines were "when changing a baby / better cover his spout". It's not really relevant whether or not this was a good poem. It came from such a completely different voice as the rest of the poems in the book that I lost sight of the collection as a collection. It wasn't a cohesive work by an author anymore. It was just some poems bound together. The collection had established the dark voice of an unhappy former cop and then sprung James Garner reading Hallmark cards on me. Boo.

The manuscript I just completed and submitted is a collection of poems all written as if I were speaking to my daughters. Not that the language is juvenile, but the topics are ones that derive from the experience of a man coming to understand how to deal with two small female presences in his life. The character I create as narrator is that man (NOTE: Yes, he's close to me. But since poetry is fiction, he can't really be me. Got that, Mom?), and his tone is consistent with that. Some of the poems are sarcastic, some are angry, some are frightened, but they're all consistent with that character. When I lined up the 70 or so poems I'd written (so far) for the project, which I'd never done before, I noticed that the tone varied in some of them. Less gentle, more adult subject matter, etc. It's not really relevant whether or not they were good poems. They distracted from the work as a whole and therefore had no place in the larger work.

I therefore rewrote a couple (probably weakening them as individuals), and decided a few of my favorites needed to be left orphaned. A tough process. Coming Friday: some examples.

Paying Attention to Your Voice (Part 1)

Do you write in character much? Do you take measures to ensure that your characters are internally consistent - that is, that they do and say and like and buy and discard things in a way that you find believable? That is consistent with the person your reader imagines them to be?

This is not to say your characters can't surprise us. But they need to surprise us in a believable way, one that is consistent with what you know about them. Cinderella can't turn to Drizella at the end and say "Take that, you uppity bitch." There's not much that will make me put a book down and walk away, but having characters utter inconsistent dialogue is one of them. Much of what I read for pleasure is science fiction and fantasy, so I do a lot of suspending disbelief - but if I have to suspend it a half-dozen different ways, I get tired, and I move on.

Did you see The Muppet Wizard of Oz? I was looking forward to it. I admit it. I'm a Muppet fan. I had a Dr. Teeth poster on my wall until college. I can quote the original Muppet Movie and name most of the cameos. In order. I rank Muppet Christmas Carol in my top 25 favorite movies of all time. But this movie lost me ten minutes into Oz. (Disclaimer: I'm about to discuss the believability of characters made of felt. So noted.) First, the witches portrayed by embodiments of Miss Piggy just made no sense. Were they good? Bad? Each sentence spoken by the Glinda-like character could have been attributed to a different member of the scene. But the worst offense came later when we met the Tin Thing.

OK. Gonzo as Tin Thing was cute. The set up was believable - he's fused into a lot of gadgets. Then Toto (Pepe the Prawn, about whom don't get me started) touches one of Gonzo's handles and asks what it does, and Gonzo replies "Nothing. Those are my nipples."

Forgive me, but that line is a disbelief-burster. I suspend so that my film universe includes the Muppets as real characters, then one of them speaks a line completely inconsistent with who I've believed "him" to be. The nipple line is for the writer, not the audience. Trust is broken. Channel changed. Opinion is divided on this issue, but I think it's fair to say that those with more investment in and attachment to the characters probably had the hardest time with it. Please don't confuse this with nostalgia or resistance to change. This is about a character losing believability as a character. It could be Wonder Woman praying to be rescued, Chandler Bing starting an episode by writing out a career plan. You lose trust, and therefore interest, in the character before you.

NOTE: I haven't seen Muppet/Oz past FozzieLion's appearance. I have the whole thing on tape, and I have no desire to pop it in the VCR.

What does any of this have to do with my writing? Well, recall when I said I'd learned the difference between a manuscript and a series of poems? I'll put these two thoughts together next.

Happy Oriole Day...

... from my daughter to you.

Coming next: Recognizing character voice, or Why no muppet should ever say "nipples".

"Well, he IS the Imperial Dark Lord..."

In 1978, the second-graders at Maplewood Heights Elementary School had a complex system for determining one’s place in the social hierarchy, an algorithm that took into account height, athletic prowess, popularity, sense of humor, intelligence, affluence, and a myriad of additional variables.

A year later, though, all of that had changed. By the time we entered third grade, social standing was solely determined by one factor: the level of one’s devotion to Star Wars.

From "Darth Vader Made Me Cry", by Matthew Baldwin. Curently darkening the doorway of the archives at The Morning News. While you're there, check out the archives of The Non-Expert, the column with the best motto ever: "Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. "

A New World Of Geeky Goodness

Ubergeek, underappreciated actor, and excellent writer Wil Wheaton celebrates the end of production on the Star-* (Star Wars, Star Trek) franchises as the beginning of a new era in intelligent geekdom. You should go read it - I can't do it justice - but I have to quote this line:

"If you've never tasted the sting of a dodgeball on your face, you're not a geek."

Oh, man. It's so true, it hurts anew.

Until we do so every day....

In the weeks leading up to and since NatPoMo, I've seen or heard a number of comments that the idea of a national poetry month is actually contrary to the idea of celebrating poetry. That it somehow makes poetry less necessary the rest of the year. Diann Blakely made this comment recently:

"Just as our celebration of women and black history shouldn't be confined to a single month of the year, we shouldn't ghettoize poetry to a 30-day block on the calendar"

Well, now. I do respect the sentiment that poetry shouldn't be confined or debased (the implication in the word ghetto), but I think it's terribly misguided. I think it's useful and natural to have celebrations from time to time. Birthdays. Holidays. Days of recognition. Anniversaries. Sure, I agree that you'll be the same age for the 364 days following your birthday as you are on the date itself. But the commemoration gives your friends - who won't love you any less on those 364 other days - a good reason to stop what they're doing, and take special note of you on that date.

Same with poetry. While it touches me every day, in April I made stopped my normal routine and took special note of poetry in my life. And to pass that note along to other people - notably, grammar school children for whom I crafted a series of workshops. Certainly, I could have made these school visits on October 9 or January 15. But I don't see the harm - the "ghettoizing" - in setting aside a few days each year in which we can plan for such events.

Like birthdays: until we learn to celebrate each other every day, let's celebrate on birthdays. Until we celebrate poetry every day, let's celebrate in April. It can only help.

A Gift of Red

The first blossom is on our rhododendron. There's a new cardinal nest at the foot of my driveway. The main thoroughfare through our county is about a nine iron away. Somehow, this puts me in a haiku mood.

Spring motion sensor:
cardinal nest at head height
in the forsythia

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.