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.