Is there such a thing as bad poetry?

Yes. I say yes. Oh, oui, si, ano.

Bad poetry happens accidentally--usually it is the result of being both overly earnest and overly poetic, along with being really melodramatic. This site does a lighthearted parody of this sort of writing (which there is scads of everywhere--if you are writing about your own broken heart or careworn soul, beware)--and reminds writers not-so-subtly that yes indeed, it is quite possible to go over the top and write something astonishingly bad.

I give you Bob's poetic surgery shack:

http://www.jsheard.co.uk/theshack/

enjoy!

Dani

Reading Outloud

Always read your own poetry, and all poetry you read, outloud. This is something I sometimes forget to do, but it is so important--meanings, rhythms, stumbling blocks, etc all emerge through readings. This allows you to hear if there are lots of angry sounds in a poem, or soft sounds; it allows you to hear if there are some bits that simply do not 'sound right.'

I actually advocate reading all forms of writing aloud, but it is especially important in poetry. Poetry is meant to be read aloud, whether or not it is rhymed or metrical. Poetry should not simply exist on the page. A powerful poetry reading will stick with you--and this is usually the result of an author who has paid attention to the sonics of their work, and how sound can complement meaning.

Here are some examples of poets that are quite enjoyable to read aloud:

from Muse & Drudge~Harryette Mullen
http://www.temple.edu/chain/2_mullen.htm

when memory is unforgiving
mute eloquence
of taciturn ghosts
wreaks havoc on the living

intimidates intimates
polishing naked cactus
down below a bitter buffer
inferno never froze over

to deaden the shock
of enthusiastic knowledge
a soft body when struck
pale light or moderate

smooth as if by rubbing
thick downward curving
bare skin imitative
military coat made of this

______

tabloid depravity
dirty snowball
held together
with weak gravity

“fool wee, tumble your
head off—that dern wind
can move you, but
it can’t budge me”

he couldn’t help himself
he couldn’t help it
he couldn’t stop himself
nobody stopped him

blessed are stunned cattle
spavined horses bent under their saddles
blessed is the goat as its throat is cut
and the trout when it’s gutted

______

bring money bring love
lucky floorwash seven
powers of africa la man
poderosa ayudame numeros sueños

restore lost nature
with hoodoo paraphernalia
get cured in cuban by a charming
shaman in an urban turban

forgotten formula cures
endemic mnemonic plague
statisticians were sure
the figures were vague

sister mystery listens
helps souls in misery
get to the square root
of evil and render it moot

______

spaginzy spagrades
splibby spabibs
choice voice noise
gets dress and breath

slave-made artifact
your salt-glazed poetry
mammy manufacture
jig-rig topsy-turvy face

dance synched up so
coal burning tongues
united surviving ruin
last chance apocalypso

broke body, stammering spirit
been worked so hard
if I heard a dream
I couldn’t tell it

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=05/08/13/2356246
Song~Lisa Jarnot

words
toward the boat
that is love
who wears the blue
of night
who is a prince
in the sky
which is bright
as the moon
which is bright
as the green
as the thick
of the trees
of the crisp
of the song of
the whippoorwills
song,
willingly,
in May,
I'd say
unaltered
and reaping.



Invective

May an
ancient
Egyptian
sea monster
swallow you up
since you are not
the great god Ra,
and may your
shiny hair
fall out and
may you never
own an island
of your own,
or cats as good
as mine,
and may the
field mice dance
on your head
while you are
sleeping in a
coat made of
bad dreams,
simpering one,
you cloud
without a home.

In the Greenhouse~Eugenio Montale
(Translated from Italian by Charles Wright)
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17016

The lemon bushes overflowed
with the patter of mole paws,
the scythe shined
in its rosary of cautious water drops.

A dot, a ladybug,
ignited above the quince berries
as the snort of a rearing pony broke through,
bored with his rub-down—then the dream took over.

Kidnapped, and weightless, I was drenched
with you, your outline
was my hidden breath, your face
merged with my face, and the dark

idea of God descended
upon the living few, amid heavenly
sounds, amid childish drums,
amid suspended globes of lightning

upon me, upon you, and over the lemons...

Your assignment: Read some poems (yours or others) aloud, 2-3x, focusing on poems you have never heard aloud. Do an online search and turn up recordings of poets reading their work aloud (poets.org has a number of recordings). What catches your ear? What sounds very right? What sounds very wrong? The more you train your ear, the more able you will be to work sound effectively into your own work.

Happy listening!

Dani

Shopping for Poetry

Since I really started to read poetry in earnest back in 2003, my concept of the discipline has changed drastically. Along with all of this reading has come a sense of who I am as a writer--where I fit in, what I see that has not been done, and what niche I might fill. For me, that's the power of reading loads--much of writing that claims to be original has very little 'original' stuff in it, and this is an accidental disease I wish to avoid.

I was at Third Place Books in Ravenna the other day, perusing their poetry offerings (which are decent). They have a good selection of used poetry books (as do a number of Seattle bookstores, which is quite fun to sift through). I ended up with four books--the new Keillor "Good Poems" collection, a Liz Waldner, a martha ronk, and Irving Feldman. I chose these books using this science: The Keillor because I know many will buy and talk about it, and I want in on the conversation, and the rest because they had titles that intrigued me, and because a cursory flip-through revealed something I had not seen before. Yes, I thin-sliced the books; there were many I put back down through this process as well. Of the three books I purchased by this method, two are award-winners and two are by University professors. None I had heard of before.

Liz Waldner~ Self and Simulacra (the book I bought)
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/351

A Calculus of Readiness

I, too, come from the city of dolls.
A small palm is my umbrella.
This takes care of above
but below, the blind river of sadness rolls
on and in it, a hand is always reaching up
to pick fish from the night-time sky.

The lines on the palm of the hand lure a trout
with a strand of hair from the head of a doll.
The bait is the hope for a hand on your brow.
Shadows play on the wall. Or the face of a doll.
The plants eyeing each other
is all.

I would not call the stars generous.
They don't cry enough for dolls to play Drink Me.
They don't cast a covenant's fishy rainbow
yet leaf faces watch the open window
where they hang far and hard.
The rein of starlight a second hand

with which to play Go Fish.
Now Give me a hand, plants. Now give me
good-night, stars.


martha ronk~ why/why not (the book I bought)
http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16582

Why knowing is (& Matisse's Woman with a Hat)

Why knowing is a quality out of fashion and no one can decide to
but slips into it or ends up with a painting one has never
seen that quality of light before even before having seen it
in between pages of another book and not remembering who knows
or recognizing the questionable quality of light on her face
as she sits for a portrait and isn't allowed to move an inch
you recognize the red silk flower on her hat
and can almost place where you have seen that gray descending
through the light reversing foreground and background
as the directions escape one as the way you have to
live with anyone as she gets up finally from her chair
having written the whole of it in her head as the question
ignored for the hundredth time as a quality of knowing is
oddly resuscitated from a decade prior to this.

Irving Feldman~ beautiful false things (the book I bought)
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/683

Episode

Their quarrel sent them reeling from the house.
Anything, just get on the road and get away.
Driven out, they drove. . . miles into countryside,
confined and bickering, then cold, polite;
she read a book, or looked out at hillside pastures;
once, faraway life came close, and they stopped
in mist for muddy, slow cows at a crossing,
then, tilted, shuddering, a tractor came across;
coldly silent other hours of trees after trees
interspersed with straggling villages--then hot;
her voice pulsing, tempestuous, against the dash,
buffeted, blew up; the slammed her hand down, hard.
"You let it happen--you know you did.
And you make me the bad one--all the time!
I won't stand for it another second." And then,
irrationally, "Look at me, I'm talking to you!"
What half-faced her was mulish, scolded sullenness
--who gripped the wheel and to scare her drove faster,
scaring himself; he felt out of control, dangerous.
Downhill, the road darkened, dropped out of sight.
At the bottom, racing toward them, three lights,
and trees. . . . Remember this, remember this,
she thought, the last thing I will ever see.
Diner, tavern, café, whatever it was.
The car spun suddenly into the parking lot.
She grabbed at the key, threw it out. Shaken, they sat
--while their momentum went on raging down the road.
They knew they might have been killed--by each other,
had someone been up to just one more dare.


...so, I feel like I did pretty good! This is the same process I used while in London--I bought so many books in London, I had to buy a third bag--but their bookstore poetry sections are joyously large. I found both Stephen Dobyns and Les Murray this way.

Your assignment: Find a store with a good poetry selection--not a big box bookstore that only has Bukowski (ack!) and Plath, but a place that has names you're unfamiliar with--and go fishing. Here are some used bookstores in Seattle: http://recollectionbooks.com/seattle.html (Recollection on Roosevelt has poetry scattered all over the store), Third Place Books is good, the University Bookstore has a good selection upstairs, and of course, Open Books (http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/), which also has nice, cozy readings. The idea is to find poets that make you go "I didn't know you could do that!" Or, "I'd like to be able to do something like that!" Anthologies and collections are okay, but buying the slender volumes produced by just one author in one time period have a certain richness to them.

Happy Reading!

Dani

Abstractions

Let's get Gluck in here, too (in the spirit of past Laureates)--can't find the umlaut, sorry--

The Wild Iris~Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

The Untrustworthy Speaker~Louise Glück

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted-

I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That's why I can't account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We're the cripples, the liars:
We're the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When I living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.


One of the pieces of advice poets are often given is "avoid abstractions" and "avoid cliche." While the latter category is harder to resurrect with success, using abstractions well is quite do-able; I abide more by Pound's "Go in fear of abstractions." One or two, used well, can invoke universal themes and ideas; a whole load of them can make a poem completely ungraspable and probably overwhelming to boot. I've seen very short poems contain Desire, Love, Hope, Fear, Death, God, Life, Time, etc etc--all of these grand themes crammed into just a few lines is pretty much a guarantee that the author has said a whole lotta nuthin'.

Hence, the Louise Gluck--she uses abstractions well, and is a good case study for any budding poet hell-bent on *saying* love, or heart, or anger, right in the text of the poem (after all, these can all be invoked without actually stating them explicitly, and often are in the best of poems). There is a power in being able to use abstractions well--I just recommend keeping Pound's adage in mind. The reason we should "go in fear" of abstractions is because they can mean so many different things to so many different people, the author runs the risk of not communicating much of anything new, novel, remarkable, memorable--what have you. The universality of the term ruins the specificity of the message.

For another abstraction master, enjoy the below, lesser-known offering of Frost:

Directive~Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

...look at how well Frost weaves his chosen abstractions into this little tale--they're almost invisible.

Your assignment: Choose just one or two abstractions, and try not to allow yourself any more. Build a poem around them. Here are some others to consider: Home, life, soul, spirit, joy, sadness, weakness, quietness, body, belief.
(You know you have an abstraction when you can ask this question: "What kind?" As in, "What kind of sadness? What kind of joy?" Or--"what do you mean?" as in, "When you say soul, what do you mean?" "Soul" is probably the most difficult of the bunch, actually.)

Happy abstracting!

Dani

Three sites for you

http://www.poetrymagic.co.uk/

The above website is a sort of "teaching" website--it has filters which you can use to become better at both poetry critique and poetry writing (which go hand-in-hand). It has beginner-level stuff all the way to more advanced tools. It's a fluffy-looking site and has the world's dorkiest name, but the info is sound.

http://everylitmag.tripod.com/Biglist.html

This is a list that some kind fellow has created that has just about every lit mag known to man on it--getting close to 2000! I've been saying to people on one of my online workshops that it is necessary to read a lot to see what is out there--if they claim they don't like "modern poetry," they simply haven't read enough, because there really is a load of stuff out there. This list is comprehensive, and includes specialty sites just for gore, or sex, or death, or love, avant-garde sites, post-avant sites, standard modern lyrical sites, as well as some 'fluffy' sites that don't seem overly rigorous. I post this list so you can read more--if you feel inspired to submit work to any of these sites, make sure that they're legit, and beware of any entry fees--entry fees are okay if there is a legit contest attached with an expert reader you can Google and check in on, but otherwise, submitting work should be free-of-charge. And, ask about any sites "reading" policies--readings should be "blind."

A sick amount of E-zines, not all poetry related:
http://www.e-zine-list.com/titles_by_first_letter/A/page1.shtml

Happy reading!

Dani

Swapping Realities

One of the things that fetters writers is their own heads--the vocabulary we're most likely to call to mind to say something, the ways in which we think of things, and the ways we would consider stating an idea--can all be expanded by just borrowing a like-minded friend for a few hours.

My friend Matt and I did this at a cafe one day, to interesting effect: We sat for 15-20 minutes, just writing down random words that came to mind. We got very expansive, and really aimed to locate unusual nouns and verbs (and a handful of modifiers) in the recesses of our minds. Then, we swapped lists, and started crafting poems using some of the words from the other person's list. There was no requirement to the process, except that a few (or many) of the words be used, esp. those surprising and somewhat outside of our own immediate realities. The result? Unexpected poems, and unexpected avenues of thought.

Your assignment: Grab a few friends and try the above experiment--it's good at a cafe, or after a bottle of wine, when the mind is well-lubricated and willing to stretch a bit more. Or, if you're looking for a list right now, I'll give you a little bit of my reality right here:

beacon
buoy (noun or verb)
bog (again, noun or verb--many of these will be interchangable)
neatness
bankroll
cleric
incorrigible
tender (noun or adjective)
bracket
sunder
cricket
dilly-dally
shuck
pulse
rev
symmetry
cluster
indoor
shrivel
chaff
rigged
boil
boss
spared
pedal
parcel
fanned
flotsam
creep (noun or verb--heh)

that should be plenty for now. Use as many or as few as you like; start yourself off with one or two words you would ordinarily never use. If you have to look any up, I highly recommend Dictionary.com & its sister site Thesaurus.com; the latter, in particular, turns up loads of words from which to be surprised and delighted.

Dani

Kooser Time

Selecting A Reader ~Ted Kooser

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

A Birthday Poem ~Ted Kooser

Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.


Our current US Poet Laureate, folks. Note the simple beauties here; Kooser's poems tend to be tight and compact, and as focused as a snapshot. Every poem is a litte shot of joy. On my online workshop we had a bit of a debate between Billy Collins (a preceeding Laureate) and Kooser--here's my take on that:

Billy Collins is arguably the most popular poet since Frost--his books climb onto best seller lists, and his Poetry 180 project took off. His poems are very clever, a little snarky, and somewhat self-involved. It's these qualities that make him beloved as well as questioned--it would take a certain amount of hubris to write a poem about undressing Emily Dickinson, after all.

Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes~Billy Collins

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer's dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

...and yet, he's inspired, and evolves his poems into surprises by the end (so often, he's been accused of being formulaic). I like Billy Collins, and I can see why he's popular--he's the product of his times, really--we live in skeptical times, when everyone is battling it out to see who can be clever, or funny, or do the best job of being snarkily cynical. When I read through student literary magazines, I see the same voice, the same tone--and , I'm also starting to see a movement away from this sort of thing. Efforts to be clever are slowly being taken over by efforts to be more sincere, I'd argue, which is why Ted Kooser is worth noting--he is much more sincere, in tone and approach. His poems never provoke me to roll my eyes, or snicker derisively.

Using poet laureates as symbolic of cultural paradigm shifts might be a little sweeping, but I like the idea, dangnabbit. Plus, I'm done with cleverness, really. Cleverness, especially when overused, seems to me to feed into the idea that to get people's attention, they must be entertained, and entertained in the way that flashy 30-second commercials, Maxim Magazine, and Reality TV entertains. Screw that.

Your assignment: Go over some of your recent writings. Are there any common themes/tones? Do you find yourself being clever, even if unintended? Look at your tone/voice, and maybe get someone else to give you some broad impressions as well. Do they say your work seems, dark, pretty, simple, happy, silly, what? What do you think your word choices and metaphors evoke? Then, ask yourself why. And ask yourself again. This sort of questioning allowed me to start to see how/why I portray women as I do in my writings, and it caused some revelations. That's what you're aiming for--the unexpected revelation about what it is that you've created.

Borrowed from Ron Silliman

This is one of my fave Silliman entries (from May 2005)--I enjoyed this poet quite a bit:

I had this sensation again the other day, opening up Yesterday’s News by Taylor Brady. News could be called a book of poems – at 260 pages it certainly is that – but it could also be called (more properly, I think) a single work, composed of many parts during the year 2003. It’s not a diary exactly – most of the poems have titles, tho Brady hasn’t been consistent with the graphics of his titling, a strategy that is not, I think, accidental. The first poem I actually read all the way through lay deep in the book, on a page whose header contains the date October 21-22:

THE DUST CLUSTERS

Look, here’s a face, if

you lean in close you
can see congealed labor, plasma

knitting brows in concentration

that has decayed to fourteen hours’ sleep.
In the folds and flaps it smells
like peanut oil inside the head this

is the image of an elbow joint
blocked by hair.

Not so much the getting wasted
as the waste you get. Being ill-disposed

to buildup’s full, like time.

One could argue that this has all the elements of a traditional lyric – it’s constructed around a relatively coherent – if decidedly off-kilter – image – yet it really is the gyroscope of that frame that is the point here. Not only does the reader “see” the image first from the outside, then from the perspective of the figure in the poem, but it moves then not to resolution or synthesis, but rather spins off away from that – the last line’s “referents” (to call them that) is primarily to the vowel-consonant combinations of the last-half line of the previous stanza. Which is to say that it mimics in prosody what the previous lines have offered as scene. All of which in turn echoes the difficulty one has in focusing with, say, a hangover. The poem starts with a disjunct command – Look – and ends with an equally disjunct analogy, something that cannot be, of itself, seen: time.

That’s a lot to accomplish in just one dozen lines, on top of which it has a post-grunge surface texture that is quite unlike anything I can now think of being written. Five or six pages this good per year and you get to be famous, at least as far as poetry fame goes – but 260?

Let’s, just for the sake of the test, try another Brady poem at random. The hand stops flipping at page 97, which the header indicates represents May 4 – 5:

At Your Desk, a Highly Leveraged Zero

Every day is ground hog day
in the Cargill pork-processing unit.

An elite team of registration pros
can stretch your penumbra with size, snow cut
with small islands, marsh, ophitic structure
coiled about the flesh-stamps. No sweat, just twitch.

It’s written that the knife-hand often slips,

close to $50 idle protein all the long way up
to your command of standard stencils

in spilled blood and vermiform manure
over cereal monoculture in the new periphery,
to write in tiny burps and gags. Looks
as if the enemy of coordination looks like
futures, more bright winter glare on ink.

A sonnet about globalization with a slaughterhouse feel? On one level, this poem is not so radically different in approach from the close-up of the wasted person in “THE DUST CLUSTERS” – both use recognizable verse form strategies to present imagery that is completely – completely! – from outside of the received domain of literary imagery. But there the similarity stops. The rapid shifts in perspective of the first, which is all angles & fragments, is here a distant, cool objectivism, the one real bit of collage the comparison of cut flesh to mineral form. If the first poem feels like the cover image to a Kurt Cobain homage CD, this echoes the kind of literary ultra-leftism one might associate with Brian Fawcett or Kevin Magee.

Let’s try this test again, just flipping to the next page, the bottom half of which contains an untitled piece:

I’m probably more like a sand flea.

Without prehensile toes

the mathematical sublime
subtends whatever patch of skin
your post-whatever-else erosive

crabbed praxis of the gouged-out
decorative gesture on
the body of a spun

commodity can’t scratch.
Party over here, party over

there, nowhere the question
of the party. In bleached leisure
I’m all up in your skin, pus in pleasure,
salt in waistband. In English that
might rhyme. Here it’s rash, and flares.

Not, to my ear, as successful as the first two, but still superb – that long second sentence’s ever delayed pay-off has been done before, but the kick at the end still applies. If I have a hesitation, it’s that the disparate elements of this collage seem unmotivated – they don’t pull against one another strong enough. Still, the two meanings of the word party in that one incomplete sentence is something I’ll remember for a long time, that someone even wants to jar that particular set of possibilities strikes me as inherently exciting.

I can tell already that this is one of those books that I’m going to have to read slowly – it will almost inevitably take me longer to read than it did Brady to write. But that’s okay. Just as it’s okay if his sense of the line’s complexity isn’t the equal say, of Eleni Sikelianos, or the jarred juxtapositions aren’t as sharp as Graham Foust. What I see in Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News is a comprehensive intellectual ambition on a scale that I virtually haven’t seen on the part of younger poets in ages. It is completely awesome.

Your assignment: Like NaNoWriPo, a process I started back in April, try writing a poem everyday for a week, or for up to a month. You'll churn out a lot of stuff, only 10% worth keeping, maybe, but something *will* be worth exploring. This is a big challenge--it's best to do it in groups & with support, otherwise you fall off the wagon pretty quickly. Give it a try for at least a week--commit an hour everyday, and see what transpires.

Happy Writing!

Dani

And now, for something completely different

http://duplications.blogspot.com/

...this is a poetry blog that encourages submissions; the poems herein are from a different poetic school than what I've been harping on. Punctuation and immediate sense are not the objectives here.

...I rather enjoy reading poetry like this now and again--these poems tend to have more emergent properties, in that there isn't really a feeling that there's one key that unlocks just one lock.

I worry sometimes that poetry of this sort encourages writers to write down--well--anything, string it out a few words per line, and say "new poem!" I don't really want to get into the whole "what is poetry" debate, but I will say that what is clear to me about language poetry and other more avant-garde avenues is that these poems often say new and bizarre and lovely things--so, stringing out a boring old sentence may "look" like a language poem on the surface, but will probably suffer from lack of depth, curiousity, wit, newness, and cleverness. Language poems keep language alive by poking and prodding and slamming odds and ends together, and by stretching in a way that a poem with a narrative or plot to stick to cannot. If this is your poetic avenue, enjoy the above site!

Dani

For New Orleans

An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow

The word goes round Repins, the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,
At Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
The Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
And men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him.

The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
And drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
And more crowds come hurrying. Many run into the back streets
Which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There's a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.

The man we surround, the man no one approaches
Simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
Not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
And does not declaim it, not beat his breast, not even
Sob very loudly --- yet the dignity of his weeping

Holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
In the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
And uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
Stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
Longing for tears as children for a rainbow.

Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
Or force stood around him. There was no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
But they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
The toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us

Trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
Judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
Who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
And such as look out of Paradise come near him
And sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.

Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
His mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit ---
And I see a woman, shining, stretch out her hand
And shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
As many as follow her also receive it.

And many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
Refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
But the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
The man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
Of his writhen face and ordinary body

Not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow
Hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea ---
And when he stops, he simply walks between us
Mopping his face with the dignity of one
Man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.

Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.

-- Les Murray