The Problem with Chunky Monkey

When Marjie Lambert penned her article "An American Odyssey", I don't think she was thinking of poetry. Nor was I - the first thing that popped into my head was that this article, subtitled "Rating the best and worst after traveling to all 50 states" was something I should send to my continentally-explorative sister-in-law. (Hi there, Sis!). And while it's generally a pretty good article, it contained a sentence that hit close to home, and made me think about one of the issues facing poetry.

Lambert talks about how the global availability of products and information has cost some of the rustic corners of the country their charm, and uses the following example:

"I didn't see much point in going that far to visit L.L. Bean's flagship store in Freeport, Maine, when I knew it so well from its catalogs, or to eat at the original Ben and Jerry's in Waterbury, Vt., when I'm already way too familiar with their ice cream."

Can't speak for the flannel purveyor, but in not stopping by the factory, Lambert missed out on a lot more than just a cup of Cherry Garcia. She missed the chance to see the ingenious layout of the factory (designed with the tourist in mind!); to see how the family-farm and environmentally-conscious mindset of the company extends not only to the product, but to the pallets, the cleaning solutions, the store itself; to hear how the first argument between the founders was about how thorough the mixing tank should be - with one saying "no spoonful should be devoid of chunks and "one saying it's OK as long as the next one has two." Is this terribly important stuff? I don't know. But it was interesting as hell to me, and it put the founders, the products, and company in a wholly different context than I had from just chowing down on the Chubby Hubby.

I'm getting to the point.

I think one reason poetry has an audience that is mostly poets is that most people have the same attitude about poetry that Ms. Lambert has about her ice cream. It's not an incorrect attitude, it's not even a negative one. It's ignorant, but in the most innocuous sense of the word: If you're not aware of the complexity and the context of something, it's often impossible to appreciate it. In a society where the omnipresence of information about a product leads people to conclude that awareness of a subject is binary - to know any is to know all - it behooves producers to make consumers aware of a little of its history, its making, its heritage.

Does this matter if the ice cream stinks? Not at all. But it can create a deeper appreciation for the ice cream if it is deserved.

Poets? While you should let people come to and sample your product willingly, don't just sit back in your Waterburys, letting people think they understand everything about it. First, make sure you know your product is worth consuming. Second, put it out there to be consumed. Third: Put it in some context; give it some values (artistic or social) and make people want to learn more about it, and therefore to learn more of it. Fourth: Repeat and raise it a level. The Ben and Jerry model actually applies quite directly here.

OK. I'm putting my biodegradable, recycled-parts-and-materials soapbox away now and gettin' me some Coffee Heath Bar Crunch.

A whole bunch of Ben and Jerry's trademarks are used quite liberally above. Please visit http://www.benjerry.com/ for more information on those trademarks, and to become a ChunkSpelunker.

Apostrophe Catastrophe?

"Do you adore clean, correct sentences? Do ungrammatical advertisements make you cringe?

We understand completely, and this is why the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar and Encarta have designated March 4, 2008 as National Grammar Day.

We owe much to our mother tongue. It is through speech and writing that we understand each other and can attend to our needs and differences. If we don't respect and honor the rules of English, we lose our ability to communicate clearly and well with each other. In short, we invite mayhem, misery, madness, and inevitably even more bad things that start with letters other than M."

(via Martha Brockenbrough, a Queen (Martha)Bee at both SPOGG and Encarta)

And now, since I've endorsed this event, I suppose I really ought to write the Silk Road webmaster and ask for an apostrophrectomy.

On that note: Confusing "its" and "it's" I understand. Insisting on using an instrument to adjoin an "s" to a proper noun ("Shall we visit the Vincenti's?") when you don't use it to pluralize a common noun ("Only if they're serving those wrap's!"), I understand less, but OK. But a sign in a bakery like "Come try our bun's" give me an itch I can 't stratch. I just don't want to be imagining the things that their buns might be in possession of.

Places and Labels (Pieces and Bits)

Just noticed that the good folks at Silk Road are using my poem to represent Issue One online. I thank them for the honor!

Contributed to a discussion over at Jeanine's place about the use of labels to classify poets. The gist of it was discomfort (ranging as high as offense) with Ron Silliman's use of the phrase "School of Quietude" to lump a lot of "us" together as artists failing to push the boundaries of poetry. You can read the discussion in its original form, but it reminded me of a time I described myself to a more experimental artist as a "mainstream poet", my point being that I tended to write accessibly and narratively. She barked at me: "What the hell is a mainstream poet? If it's poetry, it's not mainstream." That, to me, should be the point: even if we don't like a poem or poetics, if we recognize the craft, we should speak of it with some amount of respect. Using descriptors within the discussion of differences in style for our own purposes should be OK with us.

UOP (Unintended Offense to Poets) #1: Please don't stop at the end of the first line and ask me what it means. I don't stop in the foyer of your home and ask you to explain the coat hooks, do I?

Middle of a tiring week; more to come. But I'm not giving up this posting momentum!

Ought Eight, Part Six

Is it a truism that the busier you get, the more time you seem to have? I know for me, when I'm forced to flex my organizational skills the most, I tend to be apply them most effectively. So here I am, averaging a post every 3 days - by far my most communicative since launching this enterprise so long ago - at the same time as I'm ramping up at a satisfying rate on the day job, managing a more complex home schedule than is typical for me, actually reading some of the books in my queue, and even spent an hour (pun alert) fiddling around with songwriting, which I haven't touched in years.

If I can bowl a deuce and the Giants win Sunday, it just might be a perfect month.

The problem with all this efficiency, of course, is that it breeds opportunity, which brings with it more work. So when I was approached earlier this month about doing some grammar school poetry workshops, I couldn't resist the urge to revisit my prepackaged programs, refresh the anthologies I like to use, polish the writing exercises a little, etc. So instead of kicking back with a Blue Moon and some Numb3rs tonight, I'll be cleaning up the Burgess-Meredith-worthy piles of poetry and teaching books around the couch so my family can get near the TV tomorrow. I should know better.

But all the fiddling reminded me of the best advice I got as I was starting out with poetry workshops, which (oversimplified) is "Don't work so hard. Get the kids writing". For me, this simplifies the lesson plan: (1) Create energy. (2) Promote interest in poetry. (3) Get out of the way. Fortunately, the teachers I've worked with in the past (and present) have the same basic idea - and are sensitive to beating interest in poetry out of their students with curricula too focused on the "right answer".

That doesn't mean that this next book doesn't have a better example of rhythm and assonance, though....

Changes & Miscellany

For those keeping track on your Detective Note Sheets, there are a few recent changes to the column that disappears off the page to your right. I deleted few links to blogs of folks taking permanent or externally imposed hiatuses, and included some more compatriot art links in the Useful Sites section. Which reminds me, I just got an update from my ENIAC administrator that my main site is in need of update. Need a new cursor for my slide rule, too.

I need to apologize the good folks who have added me as friends in Goodreads. I just haven't thought to post reviews there, and I admit to having the "if you can't say anything nice" switch toggled on in my internal editor at the moment. But I'm centrally located between started and done on a variety of Christmas presents at the moment, and promise a writeup on at least one of them this month.

I'm thinking if the Giants and the Bolts can get that far, maybe I can win that contest I entered.

Saw several "seven things" lists on other bloggers' sites recently, and I started two of my own: "Seven things you should never say first after finishing a friend's new poem", and "Seven reasons engineers should make good poets". One list I'm having trouble pruning to seven, one list I'm stuck at two. You decide which is which. And come back later this week to see one of them posted.

Eighteen

Randomness at the end of a long week. Click away now if you're looking for something profound.

For the first time in 18 years, I woke up this morning NOT owning a car made by The Ford Motor Company. For all of you who are thinking Fix Or Repair Daily otherwise Found On Road Dead, let me state clearly: I know you have ample data to support your sneers, but my two Fords served me well for a total of 215,000 miles. Actually, my Tempo was much more reliable than my Focus, but both were more than adequate for me.

Got to thinking what else was different about me 18 years ago. Wasn't married yet, so it's hard to even consider that person I was back then me. I hadn't yet submitted anything for publication other than to my college litmag. As I look back at what I was writing then, there's generally about 2 lines in each "poem" that's still interesting to me. A couple of pieces still work as a whole, but what characterizes my work today is not evident in those poems. Indeed, the ones that work are the farthest departures from my style then and my style now - experiments that found something that worked.

That year did plant the seeds for work that is just sprouting recently, though. My relationship with my father changed - for a significant number of reasons - that year. Since his death a few years agoI've started to realize all the whens and whys of those changes. Some of these have work their way into some poems. Forgetting some of the subject matter was even more fictional then than it is in the poem, I could never have written this in 1990.

It would be interesting to have someone who doesn't know me well compare this to my early dreck and tell me what's changed, and if it's as much for the better as I think. But I'm not ready to share all the dreck yet. Maybe in 18 years.

{Sorry, this poem has been deleted}

Changed Your Mind?

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

Interestingly, The Question is prefaced with:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ms. Gillan's Grandmother

Delighted to find a poem by Maria Gillan on today's Writer's Almanac. She reads this one frequently (or at least, I've heard her read it a few times here in The Jersey) . Nice to have the King of Ordinary recognize.

A bit from the middle, formatted improperly, as always:

.....Was her heart a bitter
raisin, her anger so deep
it could have cut a road through the mountain? I touch the
tablecloth she made,

the delicate scrollwork, try to reach back to Donna Laura, feel
her life shaping itself into laced patterns
and scalloped edges from all those years between her young
womanhood and old age.

Resolutions, Part 1

Happy new year!

I hope all six of my loyal readers have had a great holiday season and are poised for a great 2008.

I'll be back soon to begin acting out my NYR's, which include:

Reposting on the relationship between writing and playing chess. It's really simpler than I made it.

Finishing any one of the drafts I started sitting in the airport when my mother's plane was delayed before Christmas. Maybe even posting one here.

Sending out overdue submissions.

Ceasing to worry if my chapbook contest submission actually arrived in December. I mean, it had to. Surely, right?

Christmas Dance

Panic in your face, you write questions
to ask him. When he arrives,
you are serene, your fear
unbetrayed. How unlike me you are.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, the great talent who has given me (and many others here in NJ) much to learn from as both artist and host is represented by her poem "My Daughter at 14: Christmas Dance" this week at The Writer's Almanac (first stanza above).

Reminds me: Time to get cracking on that old yuletide versification. Check back near Chrismas and see if I found something to write about.

Science = Metaphor?

Via Ron Silliman, I just finished reading an interview with Rae Armantrout wherein she says

I find that thinking about contemporary science takes us to the border of what we imagine we know—which is a good place for poetry to be. Science generally ignores poetry, of course. But science, like all human communication, depends on metaphors. I sometimes think scientists would do well to study poetry to become more conscious of the way metaphors work.

My first instinct was to say "umm, no." Science, in the sense of discovering the laws of nature, is the opposite of metaphor. It's the paring down of all interactions until unalterable truths are stated a minimum of ambiguity. But articulating that thought made me realize that this is not necessarily the opposite of metaphor. In fact, the demonstration of scientific findings to nonexperts through models and simulation does seem to be to contain some of the stuff of metaphor. And in that sense, Ms. Armanttrout is right: scientists could benefit from a fluency in meatphor to express their concepts better outside the fraternity of technogists.

I have drafted a Grade 6-8 program called "Poetry and Science" in which I use science concepts as poem starters and exercises. This simple statement has me thinking I could also go the other way: Start with language that captures a nugget of a scientific concept and have students expand on it, seeing if they get close to the law described or not, and discussing what the process teaches about separating "fact" from "idea" in the poem.

Interesting....

Salmon Revives the Poem of the Week

Jessie Lendennie's mailing list came back to life this week with a sample from the newly released Salmon: A Journey in Poery 1981 - 2007. I discovered Salmon searching for the poems of Ray Bradbury a while back and am glad the Salmon Poem of the Week is active again.

Salmon Poetry (not to be confuse with salmony poetry) is primarily a publisher of contemporary Irish Poetry, though as the Bradbury book confirms, they are open to other authors writing in English, and they have an Advice for Writers page that's pretty good as a refernce for beginners.

This week's poem, celebrating the new anthology is "The Day The Horizon Disappeared", by Nadya Aisenberg:

Cast out, flung to the furthest rim of neediness,
then caught there in the branches of the danger tree,
where meaning dwells, out of reach, attached
on its green stem at the very edge of dreaming,
a sign repeating itself through branches
surging in air. Wind surrounds and blows through us.
And whose hand is tearing strips from the sky,
And whose hand will seed wild grasses
on the worn nap of the threadbare world?

Thoughts on the way back from the Post Office

Why are they removing the stamp machine?

Do people really buy their envelopes standing in line to send their mail?

Did I spell the editor's name right?

Wow, the Christmas stamps are of questionable artistic merit this year.

Did that guy really expect his Hummer to fit in that spot?

Wait a minute -- I just entered a chapbook contest! What did I do?!?!

Hey, look - a Twix bar!

What I keep forgetting

"A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it."(E. B. White)

This was a recent Poetry Calendar page, and it comes at a good time, reminding me of an important variable to consider in the final selection of poems for the chapbook contest (deadline Saturday!) that I've finally decided to enter. Fewer qualms about this submission than past ones, as it's a contest that gives me a better "in" than most contests, but I've set expectations to - 0 - as usual.

This is an interesting challenge for the writer who has technical writing among their other disciplines (eg: as their day job) - to be able to move seamlessly from the necessarily complete to the delibertely incomplete. Jeff and Jeannine have credentials that suggest it is possible, so I have hope.

Anyway, check back in Monday and see if I made it to the post office!

Twas Brillig... Good Grief!

How have I never noticed Lewis Carroll and Charles Schulz share a birthday? Surely this means something. I have always loved and recited Jabberwocky, and I've quoted Peanuts almost constantly since grade school (don't tell anyone, though, lest my apparent wisdom be diminished).

Nah, you're right probably means nothing at all.

In Which I Admit I'm a Turkey But Move On Past Thanksgiving Regardless...

Geez, another month off for me. I sense a new year's resolution coming on. Anyway. Things of note?

My kids have been getting a long introduction to the fine art of storytelling listening to two of the best: Joseph Bruchac and Dovie Thomason. I've heard both at the Dodge and find them to be outstanding at their craft. It's really quite remarkable to see the impact good storytelling can have with a creative child.

The kids have also been working on what may be the best project ever at school. Every two months, they (essentially) have to "scrapbook" two pages of poetry. It can be original or researched, and the only rule is it can't all come from "The Internet". The one rule is, I guess, encouragement not be lazy in research; there wasn't any risk of that in this house. We're having a great time with it. I'm late in joining in, but I think starting in December, I'll join them and use this space as my scrapbook.

Me, well, busy with new stuff on the day job and recently completed a couple of family projects of some importance, so the usual comment of "many good excuses" applies. However, I've also found time to weed the manuscript down for chapbook contest submission with a December 1 deadline in mind. It's in the "settling stage", where I leave it in the briefcase for a couple days undisturbed and hope it still feels done when I look at it again Sunday. I'll let you know then.

Oh, and you should definitely read Matthew Baldwon's consiedarion of the point of giving thanks.

Condifential to the radical left: Permit yourself to remember the joys while others ritualize the sorrows. This is the gift you are best poised to bring.

Gastroanomintime for Christmas!

Hurray! James Lileks' new book, Gastroanomalies, is being released in time for Christmas, and can be preordered now for early December deliveries. If you haven't read The Gallery of Regrettable Food, Interior Desecrations, or Mommy Knows Worst, you are the poorer for it. There are some online samples of those first two books - revivals of bad 50's cookbooks and the best (by which I mean the worst) of 70's living rooms - on Lileks' website - go read them, then go order the books!

Not convinced? Here's the intro from Interior Desecrations' online adjunct ("Horrible Homes from the Brass Age of American Design")

Sweet smokin’ Judas, what were they thinking? Welcome back to Interior Desecrations, a brutal examination of the unlovely, unattractive, unlivable and unforgivable homes of the 1970s. All eras have some bad taste, of course – but it took the 70s to make bad taste triumphant and universal. It took the 70s to convince everyone to stick foil wallpaper on the wall, paint the bathtub purple, smother the floors in shag so deep it tickled the tops of your ankles, and hang art that managed to clash with everything, including itself. I mean, look at this picture – what is that? A dissected Rubiks’s Cube attempts to threaten a potted plant and his child, I guess. Love the rug, too. They didn’t even make AMC cars in those color combinations. They didn’t dare.

Don't tell me you don't want to see the photo that inspired this. You know you do.

Where Does The Time Go When It's Not Around Here?

(apologies to the great Barenaked Ladies for appropriating one of their myriad brilliant lines)

Oh, good gracious, My posting habits have led me deep into Jets Country now: well beyond the point of excuses. What's been going on:

The Spoken Word Series continues. If you're near Hoboken this Sunday, please join me at Symposia Bookstore at 3PM to hear from the prolific and talented Kate Greenstreet. This will be my first live hosting appearance of the season; my gracious co-host Siobhan Barry-Bratcher has handled the first two installments. The February reading will mark year seven for us. I hear that's an accomplishment; regardless of others' opinions, I know I'm proud to have gotten this far.

Would love to say I've been voraciously reading and spewing poems by the ream, but that would be complete salmon. I have been working on a project that combines several sides of my pu-pu-platter of a personality, but I shan't discuss that here yet for fear of releasing its energy.

And finally, I happened across an online copy of one of my favorite poems, Meg Kearney's "Creed". This poem, which according to Meg was inspired by a similar idea from Jack Wiler, was one of the key bits of kindling in the ultimate revival of my college writing hobby. Read this poem and then spend a few quite minutes letting it settle over you. I hope it does for you what it did for me, and does again every time I read it.

The Sonnet of the Strong Safety

"Sport is not considered art. Instead, it is invariably dismissed as something lesser — even something rather more vulgar — than the more traditional performance activities."

Really exceptional piece by the great Frank Deford today asking why sport isn't considered an art, or at least a field of study for students who wish to become expert. I'm still processing my opinion, but I think it's a great question. Especially when you think of how cerebral some sports have become, the way that understanding of probability and of prowess have become inextricably linked - especially when you think of the volume of study that goes into understanding of techniques and methods for both coaching and training, I think there's a valid question here. No, I'm not saying every student athlete should be permitted to take courses like "Linebacking 101", but that there may be a field of study behind all the sweat.

Having had success as an instructor and coach in both technological and artistic endeavor, and understanding first hand the disdain instructors on each side have had for the "softness" of the curriculum on the other, I'm open to the idea that there's a football curriculum waiting to be designed.

Maybe it will even explain how coaches who haven't seen a sonnet since tenth grade can use phrases like "poetry in motion" to explain the grace of a wide receiver at the apex of his leap, mean it as the highest of compliments, then tell their students poetry is for dweebs...

A little good press...

... about the Spoken Word Series, courtesy of The Current.