I've been reading Little Ease by Aaron McCollough, so I blog-stalked him and found this, an article about the connection between cognition and body movin', which reminded me of recent conversations I've had with Tom Lisk (a teacher Aaron and I both had), and Matt Yeager. Both were loosely based on the idea of drafting poems by hand vs. drafting them electronically...the first specifically about how the act of writing by hand stimulates the imagination. I used to do that...more out of a sense of the Romantic writerly-ness of being a poet than anything else I would guess. But, and I think it is due to how linebreaks drive my drafting, I can't imagine writing that way anymore (my handwriting is really bad and skews the proportion of the lines). But, my sense is that motion does play a big roll in people's writing processes.
So, how do people write...physically. Do you pace your apartment? Do you talk to yourself? Do you eat/drink as part of the process? Are you alone? Where do you write? When? Is it quiet? Is the tv on? Music? Do you check email/surf the web regularly during the process? Do you read beforehand? Describe your habits. What sort of physical rituals prime your imagination?
February 29, 2008
The Verb "to write"
February 27, 2008
Titular
Don’t you sometimes wish you could just write titles? Like being one of those people who get to coin color names or company names. Now, in conjunction with the Bulwer-Lytton Award for the worst fiction, we also have The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. Here’s the shortlist:
I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
How to Write a How to Write Book
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
Cheese Problems Solved
If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs
People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood
My personal favorite is Cheese Problems Solved. It just suggests an urgency that you normally don’t find around enzymes and whey. Trying to come up with poem titles usually seems like the last thing one does, like assigning names in fiction (for important but frustrating characters previously referred to in muttered undertones as “Sir Badinage,” or “Bastard #5”). You’d think with the potential abundance of... er... virtual rewards of the internet that there would be more fringe-y contests.
February 24, 2008
A classic never goes out of style
It's almost five years old, but Jonathan Mayhew's BAP face-off (available in his Sept. 2003 archives) is still a total hoot. (Octopus reprinted it as a "review" in their second issue.) He set the rules up here: "Poem by poem comparison of BAP 2002 (Creeley) and BAP 2003 (Komunyakaa). Rules: First poem in Creelely versus first poem in Kumunyakaa, etc... until the end of the shorter of the two volumes. I am the infallible judge. You are free to disagree with me, of course; just remember that I KNOW MORE THAN YOU DO." And so unfolds the boxing match as review.
SPOILER ALERT***: Bob stomps Yusef.
If you missed this brilliant bit of bloggery the first time around (when the age of poetry blogging had only just begun) I urge you to visit it now. An excerpt after the jump --
Round 26
Yusef: "Rhythmic Arrangements (on Prosody)" by Michael S. Harper
Bob: "Reunion" by Louise Glück
This round features two of the four poets who appear in both volumes (the others are Bidart and Warsh.) I got mixed up for a second about which poem was chosen by which editor. Harper's poem starts off:
I was forced to memorize and recite
in front of an atonal white hostess
made to do it again
in Iowa tests of critical argot complicit
with theatrical endrhymes . . .
The "atonal white hostess" might very well be Louise, whose tone-deafness here is astounding:
It is a pleasure, now, to speak of the ways in which
their lives have developed, alike in some ways, in others
profoundly different...
or
... Time has been good to them, and now
they can discuss it together from within, so to speak,
which, before, they could not.
Harper's deft metaprosodic poem wins the round for Yusef. The thought crossed my mind that Glück was parodying the empty, banal way we think about our lives. I kind of doubt it.
February 21, 2008
No one would steal from a literary magazine.....right?
Not so, the Oxford American recently discovered. Their former operations manager is looking at jail time after allegedly embezzling at least $30,000 from the journal. According to an article in Folio, Renae Maxwell issued company checks to herself by forging the name of a former employee. “This is a hurtful kick we sustained,” founder and editor Marc Smirnoff said to Folio. “We’re a poor non-profit. Losing $5 hurts. She essentially emptied our bank account, so we have to rebuild from scratch.”
Oxford American has folded and come back a few times already, so I’m sorry to hear about a good magazine facing rough seas again. Remembering that karma smiles upon those who are kind to literary journals, consider visiting Oxford American’s website to buy an issue or even make a donation.
February 19, 2008
Don’t tell me words don’t matter.
I was flying back from Texas yesterday afternoon, and all the airport TVs were tuned, as they always are, to CNN which was reporting the latest in presidential primary news: the Clinton campaign accused Barack Obama of plagiarizing Massachusetts’ own Deval Patrick in a speech the Senator delivered over the long weekend in Milwaukee.
According to the New York Times, he was responding to Hillary’s assertion that “he might deliver smooth speeches, but that she was better prepared to solve problems,” and in doing so, he said: “Don’t tell me words don’t matter. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ Just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words? Just speeches?” This passage, evidently, was almost identical to one “used by Mr. Patrick in response to similar criticism.”
Obama and his campaign are denying any wrongdoing, calling Clinton’s assertions “absurd and desperate”, and saying Deval Patrick and he share ideas like this all the time. Clinton’s campaign is saying this proves Barack to be a cheater and a liar. As a voter who admires Obama particularly for his way with words and ideas, and as a professor who has caught and punished more than one student plagiarizer, I’m not quite sure how to feel about this. Are the standards for identifying plagiarism different in the academy than they are in real life? What are the consequences for each? What should they be?
February 15, 2008
My Post-Post-Post-Avant Post
Ahhh...it's February, and definition is in the air (there should be an emoticon for such things). It kinda makes me wish I were still teaching freshman comp.
Anyway, over at the Poetry Foundation, Reginald Shepherd, Ange Mlinko, & Co. are sorting out the definition of Post-Avant, a phrase that gets bandied about quite a bit without being discussed itself. Here's a snipit from Shepherd:
Post-avant writers tend to eschew the standard and standardized autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical anecdote which predominates in what’s called (usually pejoratively) “mainstream” poetry. Indeed, they frequently problematize and question the notions of self and of personal experience. But they don't just discard the self as an ideological illusion. As well, they tend to avoid or at least seriously complicate narrative of any variety. They incorporate fracture and disjunction without enthroning it as a ruling principle. They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the pleasures, challenges, and resources of the traditional lyric.
One of my favorite things to watch is how folks, during these kinds of discussions, scramble to prove they were the first to coin such phrases (remember the flarf wars and when the Dan Hoy essay dropped? I friggin' loved it). Joan Houlihan and Ron Silliman engage in such a sub-convo (and Kent Johnson points out this forum). But I digress.
Mlinko responds with her own, more politically rooted, definition:
There is no "third way." A third way supposes a compromise of lyric and anti-lyric, but the New Americans largely weren't interested in style: they were committed to visionary politics and noncomformism. Their poetics was an outgrowth of that. There is no comparable movement now, but that doesn't mean we can paper over the differences between poets who were genuinely negative -- who knew the value of negativity -- and poets with great c.v.'s who organize themselves around Mommy anthologies and niche readings at professional conferences. There is no point of overlap whatsoever.
Dans les Cahiers, Joshua Corey sides with Mlinko:
I agree with Ange when she argues that to be avant-garde is a political position before it is an aesthetic one: that it assumes a negative, outsider's stance toward aesthetic establishments and institutions. If, as she goes on to claim, there is no longer any meaningful "outside" in American poetry, the avant-garde is emptied of its content and becomes a style at best and a pose at worst: one more chip to be played in the increasingly disorganized game of Texas hold 'em that is our boundaryless poetry present.
Corey discusses the fact that there might not be an inside vs. outside dichotomy in poetry anymore, that academia (a haven for many post-avants) no longer carries the cultural insider cred it used to:
Yet from my perspective, the crisis we're a part of now has less to do with the disappearance of the outside than it does with the disappearance of the inside. That is, literary culture (not just poetry!) no longer has a meaningful relation with our culture-in-general, which in itself no longer seems to serve the function of legitimizing political power that it used to do (but it may still have a role in legitimizing markets). Put another way and more locally, many poets associated with the "post-avant" now have tenure track academic jobs; but I would argue such positions no longer constitute a meaningful "inside" because neither American culture nor American poetry center on academia any more, and haven't for quite some time.
While all of this is very interesting and important...I mean, if we are going to use abstractions to define aesthetics, we should discuss on what, if any, common ground we stand...what I find most interesting about all this is the discussion of the lyric, particularly "Steve"'s comment (Stephen Burt?):
But there are plenty of people (Ange, you're one of them!) trying to figure out how to incorporate both lyric and non- (if not anti-) lyric impulses, and trying (not coincidentally) to put modernist fragmentation together with Romantic expectations about voice and form.
To me this is kind of a brilliant definition of a lot of the poetics we've been talking about recently (The New Sincerity, The New Childishness, etc.), and actually was quite revelatory for me as a poet. While most of the time I find it refreshing that my friends don't discuss their poetry in terms of a poetics, lately I've been lamenting that fact. What kind of poets are we?!?! What *kind* of poet am I? In a general sense, the kind of poetry I like to read and the kind of poetry I try to write does in fact attempt to combine the lyric and anti-lyric (which in my mind is not necessarily narrative), the modernist and the Romantic.
But this, I recently realized, is in and of itself a dangerously vague definition. And here's why. Last weekend, at a bar called Bukowski's of all things, a group of friends and I were discussing the lyric's very definition. I was shocked by how different the four of us took the lyric to be. I remember an article...maybe it was in The American Poet...maybe it was Zapruder and Harvey...doing a similar thing. If someboday has that issue lying around, throw a synopsis into the mix. Anyway, I thought I'd broaden the discussion. What is the lyric? What contemporaries exemplify your definition of the lyric? What would anti-lyric be? Who would you consider an anti-lyrical contemporary poet?
February 11, 2008
If you don’t secure your own mask first, you’ll just sit there stroking the child’s hair.
Stellar poet Ana Bozicevic-Bowling has been blogtificating recently about something she dubs "The New Childishness" -- a "cultivated artful artlessness" in tone employed by artists like Tao Lin, Joanna Newsom and Dorothea Lasky. She writes that this childish tone can be employed to great dramatic effect -- creating "insta-intensity" -- and that it tends to inspire love-it-or-hate-it reactions in people.
I'm very interested in this phenomenon too ... to what degree is it an artistic technique/persona and to what degree is it a greater cultural movement? A backlash against irony? I've sung the praises of Lin and Lasky here before, so I definitely don't fall in the "hate it" camp. But I also think there's something preemptively defensive about this Innocent mode -- as though by announcing upfront one's vulnerability, one could become invulnerable. As in, Don't hurt me, I'm just a kid. How conscious are these artists of this effect?
February 7, 2008
The Way We Never Were
An interesting article from The Independent: authors talking about the books they were never able to write successfully. Why some ideas take off and others don't can be a pretty mysterious thing—the way wonderful premises can fail miserably, and ideas that sound dumb or impossible or insane can end up being great books. What’s the poem/story/novel/etc that you kept trying to write, but will likely end up forever collecting dust in your desk drawer?
February 4, 2008
AWP afterparty at our house!
In a matter of weeks, 2008 AWP Conference Attendees, you will be receiving a survey from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs asking what you thought of the event. You will not remember to submit it. Knowing this about ourselves, let's hash it out right here and now.
Our very own Rob Arnold pointed out, for instance, that "All weekend, I kept wanting to post something about ridiculous panel descriptions. Especially ones framed like questions where the answer is obviously just 'yes.'" (see illustration)
So tell us, Attendees--what about this year's conference turned your crank/got your goat ("Cliches & Stock Phrases: a Meaningful Distinction?")? For me, the best part (after the snail joke told at a panel called, as luck would have it, "Do You Have to be Mean to be Funny?"), was the new journals and presses at the Bookfair, with meatpaper and Knockout and Buckbee being particular standouts.
See you next year in Chicago!
