Bothell Poets et al.

two new words

2006-02-22T10:07:00.000-08:00

gewgaw & flarf. Both borrowed from Ron Silliman's blog. Look 'em up--they're good 'uns

I got a kick out of this

2006-02-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

...and so, re-posted from C Dale Young's blog:

A POEM BY DEAN YOUNG

Don't think for one fucking instant
that I don't have a broken heart.
The man in briefs in an infinite sea
believes there is no subconscious
nor is he aware tempora exists.
Don't think I have not eaten
in the most beautiful Chinese restaurant
in the world. Don't think I have not written
on the walls of my bathtub.
Don't think I have not poisoned a snail.
Don't think I haven't ignited
the sulfur of the fortune teller.
Of course I have written a poem by Dean Young!
More than once I have written a poem by Dean Young.
More than once I have left them by your gate.
More than once I have stuffed the eucalyptus leaves
in your mouth. More than once I have lived,
more than once I have died because of it.
I love you. This remarkable statement
has appeared on earth to substantiate the clams.
Perhaps now we can reach an agreement in the Himalayas,
returning shortly thereafter as gods, the kind kind
largely ignored by larger and more sensitive organisms.
Don't think I wasn't shocked when
you were a traffic signal
and I a woodpecker.

--Mary Ruefle

(a poem titled "A Poem by Mary Ruefle" appears among Ruefle's work but was written by Dean Young)

Talking science with your pets

2006-02-08T17:57:00.000-08:00

Explaining Relativity to the Cat

Imagine, if you will, three mice.
Contrary to what you have
heard, they are not blind
but are in a spaceship
traveling near the speed of light.
This makes them unavailable
for your supper, yes.

So these mice, traveling near
the speed of light, appear
quite fat, though there is
no cheese aboard. This is
simply a distortion of mass,
because the mass of a mouse
is nothing more than a bundle
of light, and vice versa. I see
how this might imply mice
are in the light fixtures,
undoubtedly a problem, so let me try again.
If two people attempted
to feed you simultaneously,
no doubt a good situation,
but you were on a train
traveling near the speed
of light, the food would
appear unappetizing, falling
to the plate in slow motion,
an extended glob of protein
that never smelled good,
if you ask me, train or no.
The affinity of the food
for the plate, what we call
gravity, is really just
a stretch in the fabric
of a space-time continuum,
what happens when you
have sat in a seat too long,
perhaps on this very train.

Oh kitty, I know how you hate
to travel and the journey must
have made you tired. Come now,
lick your coat one more time
and let us make haste
from this strange city
of light and fantastic dream.

--Jennifer Gresham from
Diary of a Cell. ©Steel Toe Books.

(the class presentation we did on this was the best. presentation. ever.)

Two Ploughshares Poems

2006-02-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.pshares.org/pastIssues.cfm

Canister and Turkey Vulture
by Nicole Walker

You don’t bug the cops
but you fly like a feather-minded bullet,
fasten the updraft, pivot the jet.
You are the in between
the so far as
the as to.
You note every missing shingle
every drop of vapor
everything that stands between the oh so obvious
and the almost can’t imagine.

Peck the eyes out of the sun.
Cannot see you.
Throw away air,
pound the dust with your demanding wings,
promise that water and seed and enough claw and straw
will mark your rolling
will scrape the sky
keep it from falling.

Promises Promises
Who knew the sky so heavy?
Who knew speed
could catch light’s comeuppance?
Who knew together they would sag,
ruffle, catch, and molt?

Hippocampus
by Larissa Szporluk

A bell is gonged,
the body of a girl
curled up inside it,

a town grown wild,
dogs sniffing skyward—
gong, gong.

They listen all night
for the girl to fall,
her stomach to growl,

or is it a foot
in a mindless gallop,
snorts of delight

as the gods take up
the virgin-offer,
or is it a weird

and beautiful gargle,
the lovemaking sound
of a deep-sea diver?

Elliot Bay Readings

2005-12-28T01:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.elliottbaybook.com/events/next/index.jsp;jsessionid=FA6627D86A6E5C968A8411E11A583BA6

So much poetry! The Writers in the Schools reading will undoubtedly be killer.

CATHERINE WING
January 10 at 7:30 p.m.

Catherine Wing reads here this evening from her new poetry collection, Enter Invisible (Sarabande), the second title in the Woodford Reserve Series in Kentucky Literature. Now based in Seattle, she grew up in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and, along the way, has also had work appear in The Chicago Review, Field, and Poetry. "Every publisher announces a debut collection by claiming that the poet's voice is fresh, groundbreaking, surprising. Wing's actually is all of that...she creates dazzling, surreal vignettes populated by strange characters who seem both recognizable and dreamlike...Wing is an impressive talent, well worth watching." - Booklist.
________
CHRISTINE DEAVEL & KARY BARRETT WAYSON
Thursday, January 12 at 7:30 p.m.

This evening brings two fine Seattle poets together to read from new chapbooks that have been published by Seattle’s LitRag Press. Christine Deavel, also known for her vital part in poetry matters here as co-proprietor, with John W. Marshall, of the wonderful Open Books: A Poetry Emporium, is here with Box of Little Spruce. Some of the poems have appeared, along the way, in Fence, Iowa Review, and LitRag. Kary Barrett Wayson, a 2004 The Nation/Discovery Award-winner, reads from Dog & Me. Some of this work has appeared in Field, Mass Ave., Seattle Review, Poetry Northwest, LitRag, and a few of the Pontoon anthologies. Also expected to be on hand tonight are some past and present issues of LitRag, the literary journal (see www.litrag.com).

________
BRIAN TURNER & ANDREW HIMES
Sunday, January 15 at 2 p.m.

Co-presented with VOICES IN WARTIME. The poetry of Brian Turner, who served in both the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict and the Iraq War, has been compared to the wartime poetry of Komunyakaa, Sassoon, and Anderson, among others. His powerful collection, Here, Bullet (Alice James), has received positive attention in Military Review, Library Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He and his work were prominently featured in the acclaimed documentary film, Voices in Wartime. "Turner has sent a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon—the war in Iraq—and deserves our thanks." - The New Yorker. "Readers take note: 21st-century poetry, as such, may well begin here." - T.R. Hummer. Joining Brian Turner here today is peace and social justice organizer Andrew Himes, editor of the anthology, Voices in Wartime: A Collection of Narratives and Poems (Whit Press) and executive producer of the film, Voices in Wartime.
_________

WRITERS IN THE SCHOOLS Faculty Group Reading
Saturday, January 21 at 2 p.m.

Presented by SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES. Eight local writers-in-residence from Writers in the Schools, a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures that serves over 7,000 students in nineteen regional public schools, share the stage here today to present new work. EMILY BEDARD, poet, screenwriter, and editor of Crab Creek Review; ROSALIND BELL, novelist and screenwriter; LYN COFFIN, writer and actor; SIBYL JAMES, author of six books, including the Vietnam travel memoir Ho Chi Minh's Motorbike; poet SIERRA NELSON of The Typing Explosion and currently the Vis-à-Vis Society; poet REBECCA HOOGS, author of Grenade; and poet CODY WALKER are all expected to be here. Please join us. Read more about Writers in the Schools at www.lectures.org.

Poetry Northwest-Seattle Event

2005-12-22T15:31:00.000-08:00

Here's the reason why this is exciting, from C. Dale Young's blog: "I just received a Press Release. Apparently, Poetry Northwest has been resurrected. David Biespiel has been named their new Editor. It will be twice yearly, instead of quarterly. Not sure what role the University of Washington will play in the magazine in the future, but apparently the magazine is back. It was one of our oldest poetry magazines before it lost its funding at UW and died."

They're based out of Oregon now. http://www.poetrynw.org/

You're invited...January 20, 2006
Join the editors of Poetry Northwest at the Elysian
Each month we get together for a cocktail, & this month we're having our drink in...Seattle!
Please join us.
_______________________________________________________________

Dig out those nickels & IMBIBE at your leisure
MEET the editors
SUBSCRIBE to the magazine (if you haven't already!)
& go home HAPPY
_______________________________________________________________

the facts:
cocktail hour, friday, january 20, 2006, 5:30 pm till whenever
at the elysian brewing company, 1221 e. pike street

All are welcome. Spread the news.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg

2005-12-18T16:29:00.000-08:00

Love Letter

Dear love, though I am a hopeless correspondent,
I found your letter habits lacking too
Till I received your card from H.-lulu.
It made me more-than-slightly-less despondent
To see how you transformed your ocean swim
Among dumb bubble-blowers into meters
And daffy rhymes about exotic tweeters
Beyond your balcony at 2 a.m.

I went to bed when you went to Hawaii,
And shut my eyes so tightly I saw stars,
And clenched my sheets like wadded-up memoirs
And made some noise like wah-wah-wah, i.e.,
I find your absence grimly problematic.
The days stack up like empty cardboard boxes
In ever-higher towers of cardboard
Swaying in senseless-lost-time's spooky attic.
I'll give the -atic rhyme another try.
To misconstrue the point-of-view Socratic,
Life is a painful stammered-out emphatic
Pronunciation of the word Goodbye.

Or, as it came out on the telephone,
Sooner-the-better is the way I see it:
Just say, "I guess not"; I'll reply, "So be it."
Beloved, if you throw this dog a bone,
TO readopt the stray-dog metaphor,
I'll keep my vigil till the cows come home.
You'll hear me howling over there in Rome.
I have no explanations, furthermore--
But let me say I've had it up to here
With scrutinizing the inscrutable;
The whys and how-comes of immutable
Unhesitating passion are unclear--

I don't love you because you're good at rhymes,
And not because I think you're not-so-dumb,
I don't love you because you make me come
And come and come innumerable times,
And not for your romantic overcoats,
And not because our friends all say I should,
And not because we wouldn't or we would
Be or not be at one another's throats,
And not because your accent thrills my ear--
Last night you said not "sever" but "severe,"
But then "severe" describes the act "to sever"--
I love you for no reason whatsoever.

And that's the worst, as William S. the Bard
Wrote out in black-and-white while cold-and-hot:
Reasons can be removed, but love cannot.
The comic view insists: Don't take it hard,
But every day I'm pacing up and down
The hallway till I drive my neighbors mad,
And evenings come with what-cannot-be-had
As lights blink on around this boring town,
Whence I unplug the phone and draw the shade
And drink myself half-blind and fantasize
That we're between the sheets, your brilliant eyes
Open me and, bang, we have it make--
When in reality I sit alone
And, staring at my hands, I think "I think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink"
While hating everything I've always known
About how you and I are sunk as well.

Under the aspect of eternity
The world has already ended anyway.
And, without you, my life can go to hell
On roller skates, as far as I'm concerned.
Two things are clear: these quatrains should be burned,
And love is awful, but it leads us to
Our places in the human comedy,
Frescoes of which abound in Italy.
And though I won't be sitting next to you,
I'll take my seat with minimal complaints.
May you sit in the company of saints
And intellectuals and fabulous beauties,
And not forget this constant love of Trude's.

...totally fun, occasionally over-the-top. Enjoy!

Mary Oliver

2005-12-11T02:03:00.000-08:00

Poets like White Elephants was really, really good. Just sayin'.

I'm a twee bit drunk & writing a personal statement for law school (the twine shall ne'er meet again)

enjoy some Mary Oliver!

Black Oaks

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,

or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.

Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen

and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage

of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another -- why don't you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,

I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

Kasischke

2005-12-03T14:55:00.000-08:00

Ever since I saw her poem "Hostess" in the Poetry Daily 366 Collection, I've adored Laura Kasischke. I couldn't find the poem online and it's mega long, so I'll just brief you on my favorite bits:

In the beginning of the poem, these lines:

He smiles. He says, "I'm
here to ruin your party, Laura," and he does.

...and then, at the end of the poem:

When I
passed him in the hallway by the bathroom, I
thought I heard him say, "Laura, I want

to ruin your life," and, trying to be polite, I said,
"That's
fine." I said, "Make yourself at home."

Here's a newer poem of hers, from the NER (be sure to read it aloud, there's some subtle rhyme schemes at play):

http://cat.middlebury.edu/~nereview/Kasischke.html

Miss Congeniality

There’s a name given
after your death
and a name you must answer to while you’re alive.

Like flowers, my friends—nodding, nodding. My
enemies, like space, drifting
away. They

praised my face, my enunciation, and the power
I freely relinquished, and the fires
burning in the basements

of my churches,
and the pendulums swinging
above my towers.
And my

heart (which was a Boy Scout

lost for years in a forest). And my

soul (although the judges said
it weighed almost nothing
for goodness had devoured it).

They praised my feet, the shoes
on my feet, my feet
on the floor, the floor—
and then

the sense of despair
I evoked with my smile, the song
I sang. The speech
I gave
about peace, in praise of the war. O,

they could not grant me the title I wanted

so they gave me the title I bore,
and stubbornly refused
to believe I was dead
long after my bloody mattress

had washed up on the shore.

Another Reading-Free Wine!

2005-12-03T12:21:00.000-08:00

Just do it, yo. A week away, the UW MFAs play:

Poets like White Elephants

Thursday, December 8th Pioneer Square, 89 Yesler #3
Free Wine & Snacks
Reception begins at 7pm; Reading is at Eight

Poems of Questionable Taste
By MFAs (Mostly Female Alumni)
· Dana Elkun · Julie Larios
· Rebecca Hoogs · Sierra Nelson
· Johnny Horton · Susan Parr
· Ariana Kelly · Jonathan Shapiro

I know Johnny and Sierra's work--both fun & good--so, worth attendance. Did I mention free wine?

~Dani

Joy!! SAL Series announced

2005-12-02T16:59:00.000-08:00

Yes, SAL has announced the 2006 line up (finally!)

http://www.lectures.org/poetry.html

The line up:

Robert Bly: Monday, March 6, 2006

Adrienne Rich: Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Tony Hoagland: Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Peter Gizzi, Tyehimba Jess, and Mary Ruefle: Monday, April 10, 2006

...very, very excited. There are cheap tickets for students, and the series does usually sell out. Catch it if you can!

~Dani

Steve Mueske

2005-11-28T20:15:00.000-08:00

I dunno how to say his last name.

http://www.newhampshirereview.com/mueske.htm

one of these is up for a Pushcart. This guy's got some poet's joy goin' on:
(you should visit the site--there's a recording of him reading, and the italics are still in there. I always lose the formatting.)

The Shrike in the Garden of Machinery

i.)

A lesser god in the kingdom of thorns,
I carried Eve out of storage
one sleepless night, plucked her eyes
from their velvet case, oiled her rusty joints.
By lamplight, I planned to remake her
from memory, a goddess before good and evil,
the original Conversation. All that.

I blew the dust from her hair,
set the torsion of her fingers,
wound the key in her back. Why?
To watch her mouth bloom. So I could,
as a drunken bee, buzz at her lips.
I wanted her to speak to me, undress
with conviction. But she was dead. Folded
into the book of days like a flier for happiness.

ii.)

Isn’t this the way of things? Clematis flowers
sprouting and rotting on the same angry vine. The one thing
you can’t have centered in your mind, a splinter.

The clot of traffic, those in the city drowning
on sidewalks. The improvisation of ventricles,
dilated pupils. Hours dreaming the perfect Thing.

Portrait of man leaning toward window.
Man waiting for bus. Man wedged in slices of bread.
A refrain: one day the next day the day before …

It won’t be long before the hatchling pecks
through the skin of that building, and that, emerging
wet and weak-necked, sport for a new breed of man.

And still there is the hunt for the Fruit.
The blood of erasure. The Serpent’s belly rasping
on steamy roadside grates. Do you know, yet,

the price of knowledge? There in the center of it all,
the spike, the compass lined with bodies.

iii.)

Listen. There are three ways to speak.
One involves hiding in the weeds, covered

with stories. Though you may be tempted to,
don’t call me Adam. I’ve never been here before.

I come out of the redness of earth.
My eyes are on fire.

The solid weight of the Pomegranate is a real thing.
Everything else is a mnemonic for desire.

Award for best title ever:

Song 119 From the Ultimate Fake Book

Here we are, little pint of cider,
half drunk with invention, singing
an improvisation in G
to the snakes in the trees,
the hissing beetles
battling in smoky shade. O
little flower of necrosis, see!
I am naked, adrift
in this wilderness
on a loosely-lashed raft.
Below me, the river stirs
with many-toothed fish,
the small gray kind,
who are underpaid and hold grudges,
schooled in the wily arts
of insurrection.
Above me, the deft birds,
with their blurry punctuation,
their daft and noisy counterpoint:
Look at me! Look at me!
And I am looking, O
coda of the green mind, O unformed
thought, for a polysyllabic word
meaning threnody, rhapsody,
the throat filling
with the unspeakable
and then letting it go.

Theodore Roethke

2005-11-25T01:28:00.000-08:00

...post-veggie-Turkey Day, we were watching the Roethke KCTS special for a bit:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2002642814_roethke24.html

another handy link: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/roethke/roethke.htm

http://gawow.com/roethke/

..I rather like the UW annual Roethke readings--no, not just because there's free wine & loads of poets milling about

Here's a few poems:

Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

The Far Field
I
I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

II
At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

-- Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I'll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

III
The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

IV
The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, --
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

Jay Thomas

2005-11-20T20:20:00.000-08:00

Another shout-out to the U San Francisco Poetry MFA program:
http://www.mipoesias.com/2006/thomas.html

A Few Coins

Blue ones
under brown.

Not eyes but houses.

Almost evening. Paper sheets
that scurry from the shadows.

Advertisements, bodies
lit from within. Spotlights
on hand-printed walls.

Rain soaks through.
Separates ink

from glass. Yanked wires
dangle. Our tiny legs

one hundred feet
above the snow.
_____

Celine Half Hugs, Half Knocks Him Down

Got his smile washed
in the glare of the propositions.

Some diligent mutt. God-of-the-hay?
Must’ve been a different year,

bus wire threaded through the alley’s
narrow passage, paint

strings looped to Tennessee.
She stands his picture still.

“Champagne for representation
and a dip in the Chesapeake!

Hats off to the moon who makes
the nectarines grow!” As if all those trees

were graves. As if she could deny
the low sad panoply

of logical form or the iron
tension between his bones.

He blows the sidewalk,
gaze down.

Aaron Shurin

2005-11-19T03:38:00.000-08:00

Again, I've plucked something from Silliman's blog--but, there are more linkages this time: Shurin has read at the local Subtext readings, and also teaches in the San Fran U MFA, which Dr Heuving likes to laud. Turning up his work online was a bit tricky, but I found some:

http://www.epoetry.org/issues/spring01/text/poems/aas1.html#xiii

Three poems from Involuntary Lyrics

XIII.

Jeffrey pines at Lassen leak vanilla sap in sunlight, bear-
clawed trunks scary about any possible bend in road we're
hiking; fallen Douglas fir dissolve as reddened sawdust in situ, literal shadows of decay.
Alice the fucking ground here is live
fumarole and boiling pot, what's to uphold
our giddy bodies, oh, the boiling ground will do. You prepare
the fire I'll enact the food. Day
is over there valley's end behind hill, no mountain, we climbed; has no more to give
before we roll into the tent. Hmm, that was one, two, five months ago. Too cold
now for tenting. Simple statements lie, but lease
this partially, later we'll chase down perplexity: I know
if there were
further red maple swamp or city grid or winter dune indigo or cowpie pasture facing we'd go so
fluently, improvise our foolish walkalong songs with such fraternal ease…

XLVI.

music lies
inside a war
on words impaneled
with oak notes in sight
of codes gaps fooled heart
overdrunk at the bar
with intention determined
to (be) right
any part
of that lie
swings groove-part
you metonymy eyes
take over for loaded mr. heart
no incoming beam deny

LV.

waking up gastric into memory
of who I betrayed lying monuments
to — what? — enmity
against — what? self? father? — why dream now not really dream but rhyme
psychic disposition to unfocused other room
peopled spewing contents
of — what? — locked in brain posterity
replay diminishes time
mobius mirror doom
same view over same view overturn
not "mine" but structures of interplay arise
doubled self as other or other as self such masonry
behind eyes
looking at — what?— make eyes burn

...and here's a link to his MFA's ezine:

http://www.swback.com/

this work is super out there. I'm going to have to read these a few times.

~Dani

Political Poetry

2005-11-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

Googling political poetry turns up quite a few blogs & E-zines. My current poetry course inspired this particular Google, as we're reading the Beats right now (which I'm not overly enjoying, as I find them verbose, sloppy & self-involved, but the history is interesting & their impact is undeniable), and all of this is reminding me that occasionally poetry rises to prominence because of politics--because someone writes such an artful polemic or poetic call-to-arms, we all tune in. I'm not sure that the Poets Against the War project (or whatever that thing is) accomplished what they set out to do, but I am fairly confident that current affairs are ripe for the poetic picking.

Par example, Willie Perdomo:
(http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa052301a.htm)
(http://www.nortonpoets.com/perdomow.htm)
(http://www.artistsnetwork.org/eventsIcore/perdomo.html)

“Crazy Bunch Barbecue”
Jefferson Park, Summer 1999

This is definitely
for the brothers
who ain't here
who woulda said
I had to write a poem
about this get together
like a list of names
on a memorial
to celebrate
our own old-timers day
for those of us
who age in hood years
where one night
can equal the rest of your life
and surviving the trade off
was worth writing on the wall
and telling the world
that we were here forever

The day started with snaps
on good-livin' pot bellies
receding hair lines
and new roles as Mr. Moms
Jerry had the best joke of the day
when he said that my family was so poor
that on Thanksgiving
they had to buy turkey-flavored Now & Laters
the laughter needed no help
when we exposed the stretch marks
of our growing pains

Phil had barbecue on the grill
He slapped my hand when
I tried to brush extra sauce
on a leg
“Yo, go find something to do
write a poem
write something
do something
I got this
I'm the chef
You the poet
Talk about how you glad to be here
do something
look at that little boy
on the baseball diamond
running circles around second base
today is his birthday
look at him
beat the wind
with his balloon.”

It used to take a few drinks before
we could cry and say I love you
we have always known how to curse
and bless the dead
but now we know how to talk in silence
as we walk into the sun
like the little boy's sneakers
we disappear in a cloud of dirt
and we go home
grown up
and full

This is definitely
for the brothers
who ain't here
who woulda said
I had to write a poem
about this get together
like a list of names
on a memorial
to celebrate
our own old-timers day
for those of us
who age in hood years
where one night
can equal the rest of your life
and surviving the trade off
was worth writing on the wall
and telling the world
that we were here forever

It's sort of like Harryette Mullen mated with Kerouac circa On The Road. Or something. The capture of time/place is undeniable here, and the vernacular is startling for those more frequently buttered up with the 'more proper' side o' things. It still reads as more slam-like than normal 'page poetry,' but is closer to Patricia Smith in its ability to straddle that particularly finicky line.

Dani

Slope

2005-11-15T11:44:00.000-08:00

...I'm always pleased when I turn up a nice new online journal:
http://www.slope.org/21%20poetry%20bolster.html

Stephanie Bolster poems:

Ubiquitous in this domain

The pygmy hippo comes with lettuce.
Polar bear with a red ball, everything
with pigeons. The smaller, indoor animal

draws back as though admitting you
to a parlour, walls painted into the distance
of where it might have lived.

Africa’s the height of popularity,
strollers dripping ice cream and mustard.

In Paris, Chicago, Barcelona, the paddock
for giraffes is just like this. There are things
of which it can be said that no such things exist.*

*Alexius Meinong

Peacock

The world in a tail, that’s what
we came for. The swirl of oil spilled in a lot
one June night outside the cinema.
Just past sunset, what the day was
flashes up, purpled with what
some wince at as regret.
The call erodes the throat
of the listener. What lack! The tail unfolds
its devastation: many eyes emblazoned
turquoise, emerald, witness
our disregard for each thing other
than their beauty. Our eyes dilate
to the backs of mirrors.

Changing Room

The same grated drain.
Where girls don’t look away
and let their mouths drop to gapes
or laughs, a curtain hangs its plastic strips
for the visitor to part. The animal is washed.
Instead of lockers for the towels
the mothers folded, a trough.
The door with its bolt. A daily bar of light
across the back’s shellac.
To refresh, a whiff of bleach.
Girls wait for their mothers, wrung suits
damp in their bags, still in the room
in which their mothers still live.

Jardin des Plantes, Winter

Where in the garden
is the garden? Rain

pools in the gravel
paths. Sculptures

of the eminent,
teary with mildew.

No one here.
This is the heart

of old Paris. Once
the outskirts. A labyrinth

and a vertical installation
through which sand does not

move. In spring, a carousel
of poppies will ruin it with joy.

...such good nouns here. Always show your nouns some love. Seriously--take a compelling poem or two & underline all of the nouns (the same could be done with verbs.) 999/1000 times, the nouns will be surprising & compelling. Work your vocab--take a word or two you're not comfortable with, and make yourself comfortable with it. Wedge yourself firmly into the new.

Dani

Exquisite Corpse

2005-11-06T23:43:00.000-08:00

This site is really worth a gander:
http://www.corpse.org/index.html

related--this site is great: http://www.exquisitecorpse.com/definition.html

and this one:
http://members.tripod.com/raeven/excorp.html

...get some friends, or even strangers, and write a poem! The nouveau coterie.

~Dani

Purity of Voice

2005-11-05T14:53:00.000-08:00

One of poets' favorite things to argue about, I've found, is the idea of 'voice'--what is it? Does it exist? Is it important? And one of the permutations this argument often takes is the path 'o purity--this is often the argument put forward when someone does not want to revise their work, or take offered advice, as it might somehow affect the "purity" of the original thought, original voice in the poem.

I'm going to try and build an argument here: This idea of voice *is* important. BUT--this voice is cultivated over weeks, years, decades--it incorporates what one has read, what one emulates, specifically and accidentally, and often includes a healthy dose of "inner voice"--how you "think" comes out in what you write. I would argue that the 'voice' of a person is constantly evolving, and thus should be amenable to change, if one is being honest with themselves. The idea of 'purity,' to me, contradicts the notion of change--it indicates a poet feels good about where they are, for whatever misguided reason (because I tend to think poets should always be seeking out the 'new,' and not be settled on their laurels doing the same damn thing ad infinitum--what's the point of being in a medium such as poetry if you're just going to repeat yourself?).

...whatever filters we have can cause us to say things in a vernacular particular to our own experience, but the idea of 'preserving' that voice seems just odd--I think it would be fairly difficult to 'remove' voice from poetry, unless someone were methodically adding the words/ideas of another person verbatim. 'Voice' is in there and will stay in there, with revision or without, in other words. What runs through our own heads in a good faith way can become our own--this is why some poems seem like a great twist on an old idea, when other poems seem like poor parodies. So, in sum, I'd argue it's not about 'purity of voice'--it's about honest self-reflection, and the ability to assimilate what is needed, and discard what is not. Trying to pretend we're poet tabula rasas, impervious to outside influence (& believing that is a *good* thing) seems laughable. You have to read to see what is out there already, and to see what it is that flips your switches. Writing blindly, with no greater context, 999/1000 times leads to horrific poetry--pure voice or no.

But, don't mimic--evaluate, assess, assimilate. Reading loads & loads of poetry will help with this process. So will workshopping, if your ego is up to the needed bruising. ;-)

But hey, that's just me.
~Dani

Literary Journal Class

2005-11-03T23:04:00.000-08:00

I am so ecstatic about how much love the idea of a lit mag course has garnered on campus--I was student #5 to officially get an add code, and Dr Rosenberg said there are a few more students lined up to interview. Looks like we're really going to have a crew! I'm not sure what she's got on the docket, but I'm hoping that it's going to be a phenomenal group.

We're on the schedule--officially!--We're the very last class listed: http://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/B/WIN2006/bis.html

If you're interested in the class, best email Dr Rosenberg soon! Class sign ups start tomorrow, I believe.

~Dani

Marshmallow

2005-11-02T23:05:00.000-08:00

So, I was eating ghost Peeps in honor of Halloween and super-sizing my blood sugar levels, & I thought it would be funny to find a poem with marshmallow in it. This, when Googled, naturally turned up loads of crap...but wait! Could it be? A page dedicated to *Peeps Poems?!?!*

http://members.ync.net/pdunn/macgab/fun/fun-peep.htm

Oh yes. I'm not saying they're good. They are the brain-equivalent of eating a box o' Peeps.

~Dani

Christopher Bakken Poems

2005-10-31T14:23:00.000-08:00

...me likey. http://www.mississippireview.com/2005/Vol11No4-Oct05/1104-100105-bakken.html

First Objects

… unstoried, artless, unenhanced.

The moment we set off on the ocean,
steering pine boxes with nothing but faith,
we became ideas, the bas-relief
of an army the gods set in motion,
hardened with an integument of gold.
Dandelion, limestone, free enterprise.
A hurricane of glass beads and horseflies.
Things we believed at the dreadful thresholds
of canyons. All too grand. Steeple, chimney,
tower, sky: erections proved our destiny
to contract the size of the hemisphere.
We might have stayed put, but couldn’t bear
the sense that we were rising, calm as geese
caught between the sights of a shotgun.

Eclogue (4)

You managed to swell the conversation, plying
me with grog and a platter of blue-throated mushrooms.
Then I was awakened by the call of Silenus,
his frantic dirge from Thrace refracted through the leaves
of a pistachio tree—each branch smoldered
while we stared, then blossomed into a swarm of eyes.

I was awakened again, but didn’t hear you
wish you lived far enough from the world, wish some
hermit wisdom epigrammed the pages of your book.
But you won’t write an anchorite’s healing Bible;
your dreams spring from our common trenches of ash
and graveyards greener than green has a right to be.

I was awakened again, but didn’t hear you
since all I heard fell open like a broken gate:
I was dumbfounded by the hammering
clatter our lambs made when they plummeted to earth
--no one else could bear to see the semaphoric
epic they bleated out in their dying.

I was awakened once more when the sky’s atlas
scrawled its noise on the basin of my skull and five
armies marched between us, fighting over seeds
we spit. Three distinct excuses made them shell
the empty goat-pens, but I didn’t learn them.
Their pyres singe the edges of our poetry.

Outside everywhere, we see as far as vultures,
what history can’t, invent an anthem to survive.
Since there’s nothing beyond the rise, past the verge
of our vineyard, we invite nothing in, fix it
with our cairns, with our tangled wire and fence posts,
and allow ourselves the luxury of that lie.

Eclogue (5)

Now the season comes when the birds fall,
their migrations bewildered by missiles.
They litter our lawns without saying a word.

Thus every feverish apathetic
earns cash to buy his suburban beer:
we all must keep the country clean. So much

that is common has become uncommon.
Our pastures are supernaturally
green. The dirt itself is dying of health,

pleasing only the Emperor’s right eye.
From where we sit, our view is all volcano,
spurting with impossible crudeness.

The sacred bees, tired of mining essence
from thyme, swarm the public statuary
to vibrate the marble groin of Caesar.

Once, the cattle stopped chewing when we sang;
insightful goats wobbled from the mountain,
spurred by Pan and the promise of acorns.

Now that nature mocks us, we say farewell
to the oracles and caryatids
in favor of an awkward, backward bliss,

clip the hedge between dissent and despair,
no more unruly than a clutch of lambs,
yet company, somehow, to the vulgar.

Our distress is merely metaphysical,
we often wish, an inconvenience
we constitute, in spite of ourselves,

by continuing stubbornly to live.
So we pound out, with little sticks and stones,
the lewdest music: singing with our mouths shut.

Bakken's not afraid to veer about, or to cram a bunch of unexpected nouns together (see: dandelion, limestone, free enterprise; A hurricane of glass beads and horseflies). I mean, really-- "hammering/clatter our lambs made."

Enjoy!

Dana Goodyear

2005-10-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

A couple Dana Goodyear poems:
http://www.poems.com/twop2goo.htm

Oasis

We found (like the deserting) spacious calm,
drank a pair of Arnold Palmers underneath a palm.
Went for massage and mud, lacquer, love,
overheated minerals, a stimulating rub.
Then — as if it could be used, as if for art —
I placed a grain of doubt in your open-pored heart,
and watched what had been small dilate
and everything else evaporate.

Day and Age

Skimming by,
the milky spill of my old eye,
the mute white cat
now skirts me at the store.
Retarded and alert.

What good are instincts anymore?
Who does the math
for lengths of desperation
and how far to the door?

A woman, pregnant
like a red wool bud,
is circling the rink.
Catastrophe, I think.

...Ya, it reads like light verse, but it's fun! She doesn't contort her syntax or make anything overly complicated. This is supposed to be precise, light, and fun to read. If you're gonna play with rhyme sans meter, might as well go for broke. Note that she keeps it small and image-based, though--this isn't an abstraction fest. "red wool bud"; "milky spill"; "mud, lacquer, love"--there is precise joy to be found here.

~Dani

An Ezine

2005-10-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

...worth looking at:

http://www.southernhum.com/ I turned it up because I was enjoying the work of Cherryl Floyd-Miller in the November issue of POETRY. It's a good issue--I recommend picking it up! http://www.poetrymagazine.org/ They actual give half-price subscriptions to students. If the selections stay in the current vein, I'll buy in again.

Happy reading!

Dani

Elizabeth Bishop

2005-10-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

I was cajoled into attending the latest Cameron Diaz vehicle, "In Her Shoes," and was pleasantly surprised when the plot arc veered into poetry. So, an oldie but goodie, featured in the film:

One Art~Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

...this poem is a joy to read aloud. Read it, and read it again. The repeated sounds and words aid this. It's probably a villanelle; here's a link to clarify: (http://www.uni.edu/~gotera/CraftOfPoetry/villanelle.html). Your assignment: Play with repetition. Make it bold, make it clear, make it obvious. Shake from your brain the essay-based "never use the same word twice" lecture that leads us to abuse thesauri. (Though I do adore thesaurus.com--I'm guilty as the next.)

Two more poets

2005-10-24T14:10:00.000-07:00

Charles O. Hartman:

Honeydew

As the poem paces down Main Street
on its way to the sparkling harbor
it knows to notice tints on the pigeons' backs
but "tends to forget" the man heaped on the stoop.
The better the poem knows its business
the smaller its business needs to be.
Its shoes are tied, its jacket buttoned up;
its pockets are sewn shut. The man wonders
if the poem has any money, but the poem
has no money, is proud of not having any money,
of having only the sun to make gold of the sidewalk
and glamour the water in the harbor awaiting it.
A hole the size let's say of a honeydew
passes completely through its chest.

Parent's Pantoum~Carolyn Kizer

for Maxine Kumin

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group--why don't they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
The beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention
Then we won't try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention.
Don't they know that we're supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children--second-childish?

Perhaps we're too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we've chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we've chosen to ignore,
We'd rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don't believe our stories have an end.
They don't ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don't see that we've become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.

I'm not normally a fan of questions within poetry--too ponderous, or too nudge-nudge, or too shruggy--but Kizer does a fine job here (though some are better than others--"why don't they brighten up," or "don't they know we're supposed to be the stars" are both effective, IMO). Both are a bit imploring, and the question mark adds to this feel.

Hartman does here what I've seen done well in a few instances--taking the "idea" of a poem, and walking it about somewhere unexpected. The idea of poetry living and interacting is one I reckon I will not tire of, even if said 'poem' is up to no good.

Your assignment: Take a poem somewhere, as Hartman does. Think boldly--try putting the poem in truly improbable places, and see what that spawns. And maybe stick a question in there--while I may shrink at a question mark, this does not mean it is not a useful tool that cannot be employed to great effect in a poem.

Dani

More Poetry Shoppin'

2005-10-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

I've become increasingly pleased with the gems I've turned up in Seattle's used bookstores--I was in Magus Books just off the Ave last night, and I plucked two more unknowns (to me) from a rather large poetry section. Most books run around $6, so it is quite reasonable to pick up a few.

Here's a selection from Michael Earl Craig (http://www.jubilat.org/n9/craig.html):

IN THE JANUARIED MOUNTAINS

My little horse must think it queer.
But who cares what he thinks?
Listening to an animal might get me killed
look what happened to Walter.

And so I go on.
Not just with life in general
but with this particular day.
And I allow things to happen,
like the snow to come down,
like Tom Waits' Alice to create
a tiny stainless drain somewhere
in my core this morning.

And I dig out and put on
a very old pair of tennis shorts
that look like a dinner napkin.

And I step out into the yard
and kneel, and pet the studded radial,
like running a hand across an open field
of steel babies' teeth.

And I think about flogging him.
The horse!
I think about going back out there to find him.
And I think about Klaus Kinski.
What would Klaus Kinski do? I think
about how in theory the hammer
is never to hit the anvil.
I think about how a butterfly, if
permitted, will crawl neurotically
all over a soldier's face for half an hour.

The snow sifts down like so many blankets.
As I move out across the pasture
I think about this . . . and Kinski. And anvils.

I can't say I'm surprised to find
my little horse breathing a dent for himself
in the snow. Nor that the dent looks strangely
like a baby Jesus. A baby Jesus on his back,
sinking into the snow.

...I rather love the title--"Januaried." I like messing about with super familiar words in this way.

Here's a Robert Gluck:

Torch Song for
Bright-in-Fame Luck to Read

If mountains should
speak my language,
stars crumble, fall
and feel me this radiant

decay. Short Tight Tiny Skirt,
my name is eternity;
Mr. Motive, Miss Locket,
Mr. Jacket.

Say you want me,
strangers in many ways.
From fetus to antithesis
name me in the dark.

...so, again, my ability to pluck curious and unusual work from piles and piles of it was tested. I enjoy the process--I tell myself that I'm looking for work that immediately strikes a new chord for me--that seems unfamiliar straight away. It's getting harder and harder to turn up work that hits my retina this way, but I'm still managing.

Here's one link that popped up when searching for Gluck--it's got some Dodie Bellamy on it, who is an author who will be reading on the UW-Bothell campus this quarter.

http://www.cultureport.com/newhp/lingo/lingo6.html

...your assignment: Read loads and loads of poetry. Read for Beauty over content, at least at first--allow the first impression of the poems & language to wash over you. Building up a poetry "base" will help you explore unusual avenues in your own writing.

Dani

Starting Points

2005-10-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

Being in my current poetry class has reminded me how heated conversations around poetry can get. I imagine it's a good thing--poetry isn't all puppies and kittens, and we shouldn't spend all our time cooing away at each other with sweet nothings. Poetry often has tension, wit, anger--there's no point in shutting off the conversation in the name of niceness, or even *heh* civility (although dialogue is preferable to out-and-out shouting matches, I reckon). If you're new to the blog, I recommend reading through the archives--there's some good assignments in there, and a number of poems worth reading.

Something I've seen time and again are poems that cloverleaf off of a quote or found statement or phrase. This can be a good exercise as well, if you have something in mind, or if you have friends who would be willing to send you a curious sentence or two. It can be especially surprising to give yourself something really out of context, like lines from a recipe, something from a crazy advertisement, or bizarre newspaper headlines--these sort of triggers are more likely to dredge up something surprising from the back of your mind.

Take, for example, this Brad Leithauser poem:

After the Detonation of the Moon

"Hate Winter? Here's a Scientist's Answer: Blow Up the Moon." (WSJ Headline)

We *were* overwhelmed, just as they'd intended:
for wasn't this the greatest show of clout
the world had ever seen, and all without
loss of a single life--an exploit splendid
no less for its humanity than for
its sweeping expertise? And they were right
that life would go on as it had. The night
was still the night. The stars blazed all the more
in a cleared sky.
.........................These days we seldom fall
for that trick of the eye by which some tall
mist-softened clocktower or fogged street lamp will
recall a changing face, and something tidal
heave in the chest, then ebb, leaving us all
to wonder when if ever this sea too might still.

(I added the periods to get the formatting right).

...the rhyme doesn't become as apparent until the latter stanza; his meter is an irregular iambic, (you can hear it in these lines: for WASn't THIS the GREATest SHOW of CLOUT/the WORLD had EVer SEEN, and ALL withOUT/ & /these DAYS we SELdom FALL/--it helps to find meter by *really* exaggerating the stress when you read aloud).

so--find yourself a funny/sad/surprising line or two from somewhere unexpected, and allow a poem to evolve from it. Don't worry about editing right away--allow your brain to riff off of the idea, and cull later on, when the strongest idea emerges clearly from the bunch.

Best,

Dani

Is there such a thing as bad poetry?

2005-09-23T22:22:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-11T16:39:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-11T12:14:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-11T01:44:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-07T00:08:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

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

Everyday Things

2005-08-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

In the Limbo of Lost Toys~Alison Stine

Someone stole his sister’s best
and speared them on street signs,
lamp posts, poles, in celebration
of the school year’s end.

A lion bisected by a stop sign,
the straw ticking of his insides
spilled. A doll with x’s
in her eyes. The plush

kingdom softened, lost to rain.
Some of these I took. Some
were taken back, and it was
celebratory, like it is now

when the spoils were once alive,
pausing in their winter pick
of bark and lower branches.
Now the deer have open eyes,

and whatever dreams they have
are dreams disturbed by highway
winds, lashed to truck hoods.
I am told not to look, but look.

How still the dead. How you
are dead, and dead, I might
liken you to the toy horse, drowned
in the fish pool, the way all toys

meet violent ends, legs crossed
in axis, eyes full of milk. I might
liken you to hunters who are
waking up only to lie again

against mold-black trees, so still
as to pass for always. In truth,
nothing will scare the deer,
not even death: unreadable,

roped to bike racks. I might
liken you to everything I lost.
The white dog disappearing
in a storm, and later, the black

running into hacked-off fields
behind which waited flushing
birds, new families. But then
I am forever linking things

to animals. All this I lost
before I lost you, and like you,
all of it changed under new snow,
rain which cored finger-wide

holes, the first grass rolling out
wet and curled from inside
your eyes, which are wider now
but not surprised.

http://www.swinkmag.com/index.html

I picked up Swink magazine recently while looking for design inspiration, and was pleasantly surprised to find three of Alison's poems in the Early 2005 issue. Alison was a sophomore at Denison University when I was a freshman there, and hung out with a talented crowd of writers that included a fellow I was dating (and who I mightily wanted to impress). They all worked/read for Denison's student lit mag, Exile, for which Colin (the erstwhile beau) was the managing editor. I never wanted to be published so badly in my life--I felt if I could just get one poem through the anonymous selection process, I would prove my worth. I was an exceedingly impossible 18-year-old, and the fact that I had never properly studied poetry did not seem a hindrance in the least to me. I wrote and wrote, much of it nonsense, and not until the second issue (Exile was biannual) did I sneak through a solitary poem--it involved Plato, Leibniz, and detachable arms, and was loosely based on the difficulty of sharing a single bed when four arms are present. This was my first published poem--I suppose it whetted my appetite, because here I am, seven years later, still tangled up in the beauty of this process.

Anyways, back to Alison--she was insanely talented, and had a poem published in the Kenyon Review while still at good old Dension--which is impressive. I suppose she might have had the KR Poetry Editor as a teacher, as he was on campus, but she was still wickedly talented even if she was given an insider's nudge. I used to read her stories and poems and marvel at her control and development and subtlety--it doesn't surprise me at all that she's doing well and still publishing.

What I'd like you to note in her poem (above) is her careful footsteps--sometimes when writing poetry, there is an impulse to link every noun with a metaphor or simile, until the poem is a complex muddle of comparisons that seem disjointed. Alison never falls into this trap of being "overly metaphoric." She is unafraid to use short sentences, or to repeat words (death, eyes, signs, look, etc). She wants you to get what she's seeing and to follow her mind's progression--she's very gentle, I find.

I LIVE IN A YELLOW ICE CREAM TRUCK~Molly Tenenbaum

Red script flourishes, circling itself.
A blue square, one per side, sets off a white swan.

It was the rubber gasket
compressing
that whispered the hither.

I wondered, at first,
was it all one space or did each door close
on its own small box?

At the back, a pull-down gate.
A little bed, two books, a pair of socks.
The inside walls are quilted tin.

The swan, dabbed gray for shadows,
jogs as the truck jogs, over a bump,

and who knows if that counts
as motion—not even the blue
she's painted moving through moves,
her angle depends on the truck, on where

it's going, and under it,
on streets ascending, and under them,
on the whole dark dirt world, a city itself,
of mica and sand, wire and pipe.

I don't believe one world is more real than another.

Remember when they sent people to caves
to see when they would sleep?

One little railing for earrings and a mirror,
and for the night, a wide-mouth jar.

It would be better, I admit, with windows.
At night, hatches latched, it's pitch till morning.

What do I miss? Air.
I love the quilted sides
and the rumble of warming.

Darling, why am I sad?
There's nothing like a cubby.

Nothing like a pair of boots
and a bed that folds up.

FROM FIRE, THIS IS MY FIRST OF SEVEN LIVES IN WATER~Molly Tenenbaum

I thought swim meant to linger, splash toes.
The dog and I played Chase-the-Spray with the hose.
Leaping through sprinklers, a pose and a twirl—
Broke her leg, the neighbor girl.

My paintings were watercolor blots.
My chore, to douse fifty flowerpots.
The hose spilled the patio brick maroon.
I loved that word. Maroon, maroon.

At summer camp, last to lower in.
How could they stand it, shock on belly-skin?
What I really love at lakes? Pilings and docks.
Skinny dipping, I read, I lie on the rocks.

What I've known of pools: plugged ears,
And pounding a tilted head for years.
When it trickles out, it's hot.
Of showers: an ex who would not.

For him to undergo required serious debating,
Sympathy, and the house-heat to eighty.
Of baths: When it all gets intense,
Relax, they say, with candles and incense—

I wallow, but only in words of it—
Rill and rillet, guzzle, gullet—
Don't even care what they mean,
Stillicidous, ultramarine,

Pluvial, limnal, deliquesce.
I've never been in a boat, but took a class.
When I practiced on the rower,
The teacher criticized my hunkered shoulder.

The difference, I joke, is that jetsam is black,
As if marsh-talk and all the words for wrack
Don't rip, don't undertow.
Someday my mirror will melt, mercurial flow,

Someone will offer a drink, I'll tip up, slow,
A boat-friend will invite me, gulp, and I'll have to go.

http://thediagram.com/4_4/index.html

Molly is another poet I've met--she teaches at North Seattle Community College, and frequents local poetry events. I never had her as a professor, but I have always marveled at her work, and thoroughly enjoyed the reading she gave at Open Books in Seattle.

The above poems are good examples of how to bend sentence grammar to one's advantage--in my previous postings, I've been harping on grammar and sentence-level punctuation, but actually there are a number of poets who employ unusual structures to great effect. Molly fits this bill--some of her subjects seem implied, and many of her sentences are focused purely on an ongoing action. This gives her work a coversational feel, without drifting into confusion. The chance of confusing your reader is great when sentences are not carefully crafted--Molly shows another way to go about doing this. Plus, her poems are great fun! There's no boo-hoo-hooing here--just a quirky humor and a lively vocab.

Your assignment: All of these poems center around something from an everyday experience--toys, an ice cream truck, boating. Choose something from your own life that would not ordinarily seem poem-worthy, and see what you can build out of it. Sometimes simple beauty is enough.

Best,

Dani

Anaphoric

2005-08-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

Rune of the Finland Woman~Marilyn Hacker

For Sára Karig

"You are so wise," the reindeer said, "you can bind the winds of the world in a single strand."—H. C. Andersen, "The Snow Queen"

She could bind the world's winds in a single strand.
She could find the world's words in a singing wind.
She could lend a weird will to a mottled hand.
She could wind a willed word from a muddled mind.

She could wend the wild woods on a saddled hind.
She could sound a wellspring with a rowan wand.
She could bind the wolf's wounds in a swaddling band.
She could bind a banned book in a silken skin.

She could spend a world war on invaded land.
She could pound the dry roots to a kind of bread.
She could feed a road gang on invented food.
She could find the spare parts of the severed dead.

She could find the stone limbs in a waste of sand.
She could stand the pit cold with a withered lung.
She could handle bad puns in the slang she learned.
She could dandle foundlings in their mother tongue.

She could plait a child's hair with a fishbone comb.
She could tend a coal fire in the Arctic wind.
She could mend an engine with a sewing pin.
She could warm the dark feet of a dying man.

She could drink the stone soup from a doubtful well.
She could breathe the green stink of a trench latrine.
She could drink a queen's share of important wine.
She could think a few things she would never tell.

She could learn the hand code of the deaf and blind.
She could earn the iron keys of the frozen queen.
She could wander uphill with a drunken friend.
She could bind the world's winds in a single strand.

...it's a joy to read this Hacker poem aloud--the meter sounds like a anapest/anapest/iamb in each line (that's UUS/UUS/US, with 'U' meaning unstressed and 'S' meaning stressed), and with alternating end-words that echo each others' sounds, and occasionally allow for a perfect rhyme (a la well/tell). Anapests and Dactyls ('SUU', such as in 'happily', or 'secondly') are telling--they really make a poem "skip" when read aloud.

An anaphoric poem is one that starts with the same word or phrase (or ends with the same word or phrase) in every line. Generally, every line is one full sentence. Anaphoric poems can be free verse, or can employ meter and rhyme, as Hacker does here. They give a poem a built-in rhythm and structure, and give you something to play with. Anaphoric poems are great for writer's block.

Your assignment: Pick a flexible phrase and use it as the header or tail-end of every line in a poem. This should push you into unexpected directions. Try a few of these--start easy, with a phrase such as "When I was..." or "We were..." and build to more complex, colorful phrases, such as something like "She came to the door..." or "In simpler times..." or even "That time in the baby blue van.." whatever gets you going.

Happy Writing--

Dani

Simplicity

2005-08-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

Poems by Kay Ryan:

Waste

Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.

Blandeur

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

Felix Crow

Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule—
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out
his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
And every time
I like him
when we meet.

Repulsive Theory

Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it's got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending-off—
extending far beyond the personal,
I'm convinced—
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.

Kay Ryan handles the short linebreak with such aplomb...and, it never falls into faux-WCW-ville or nouveau-Dickinson, with just one sentence stretched taut on the page. Every Ryan linebreak plays with the sound and lightness of her work, and emphasizes whatever word or phrase she wants us looking at: Look at /swirl set up by fending off--/ or /or the arabesque of thought?/ Every tiny line is a gem. I've had the pleasure of seeing her read--I encourage everyone to catch her if she comes to town. Kay is tremendously witty, and admits to wanting to be a standup comedian in her youth. (Read this for a taste of her wit: http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0705/comment_171211.html)

Your assignment: Keep it simple. Take on small idea, flesh it out, turn it over, and allow yourself to write something small and delightful. This will be a good exercise in linebreaks and in selectivity--every line should glow in its own way. And, don't be afraid to "play"--Ryan is always prepared to pen a pun or a catchy rhyme here or there, to add to the overall joy of each piece. I mean, she couldn't help herself from writing "Quid Pro Crow"--I'm sure she still chuckles when she reads it. (Note Ryan's careful use of punctuation--she never allows a linebreak to substitute for a dash, or comma, or period. Short linebreaks sometimes seem to "remove" the need for punctuation in the writer's mind, but this affects the reader greatly--with short linebreaks, it becomes ever more important to ensure your reader can follow your sentence structure, and thus the logic of each phrase. So, punctuate carefully, and don't shy away from throwing in the occasional "Dickinson Dash.")

~Dani

Looking Under the Rock

2005-08-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

Skinhead ~Patricia Smith

They call me skinhead, and I got my own beauty.
It is knife-scrawled across my back in sore, jagged letters,
it’s in the way my eyes snap away from the obvious.
I sit in my dim matchbox,
on the edge of a bed tousled with my ragged smell,
slide razors across my hair,
count how many ways
I can bring blood closer to the surface of my skin.
These are the duties of the righteous,
the ways of the anointed.

The face that moves in my mirror is huge and pockmarked,
scraped pink and brilliant, apple-cheeked,
I am filled with my own spit.
Two years ago, a machine that slices leather
sucked in my hand and held it,
whacking off three fingers at the root.
I didn’t feel nothing till I looked down
and saw one of them on the floor
next to my boot heel,
and I ain’t worked since then.

I sit here and watch niggers take over my TV set,
walking like kings up and down the sidewalks in my head,
walking like their fat black mamas named them Freedom.
My shoulders tell me that ain’t right.
So I move out into the sun
where my beauty makes them lower their heads,
or into the night
with a lead pipe up my sleeve,
a razor tucked in my boot.
I was born to make things right.

It’s easy now to move my big body into shadows,
to move from a place where there was nothing
into the stark circle of a streetlight,
the pipe raised up high over my head.
It’s a kick to watch their eyes get big,
round and gleaming like cartoon jungle boys,
right in that second when they know
the pipe’s gonna come down, and I got this thing
I like to say, listen to this, I like to say
“Hey, nigger, Abe Lincoln’s been dead a long time.”

I get hard listening to their skin burst.
I was born to make things right.

Then this newspaper guy comes around,
seems I was a little sloppy kicking some fag’s ass
and he opened his hole and screamed about it.
This reporter finds me curled up in my bed,
those TV flashes licking my face clean.
Same ol’ shit.
Ain’t got no job, the coloreds and spics got ’em all.
Why ain’t I working? Look at my hand, asshole.
No, I ain’t part of no organized group,
I’m just a white boy who loves his race,
fighting for a pure country.
Sometimes it’s just me. Sometimes three. Sometimes 30.
AIDS will take care of the faggots,
then it’s gon’ be white on black in the streets.
Then there’ll be three million.
I tell him that.

So he writes it up
and I come off looking like some kind of freak,
like I’m Hitler himself. I ain’t that lucky,
but I got my own beauty.
It is in my steel-toed boots,
in the hard corners of my shaved head.

I look in the mirror and hold up my mangled hand,
only the baby finger left, sticking straight up,
I know it’s the wrong goddamned finger,
but fuck you all anyway.
I’m riding the top rung of the perfect race,
my face scraped pink and brilliant.
I’m your baby, America, your boy,
drunk on my own spit, I am goddamned fuckin’ beautiful.

And I was born

and raised

right here.

...This probably counts among the most powerful of poems, and powerful of poets, I have ever been introduced to. Patricia Smith is a four-time winner of the National Grand Slam for performance poetry, and she exemplifies everything that can make performance poetry spectacular--much of slam poetry can be categorized as extended whining or lamenting, and often "tells" instead of "shows," but Smith never falls into that trap. In fact, very few of her poems focus on herself--she likes to put herself in other's shoes. (Par example: Medusa http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=14307&poem=182254). (For a short dialogue on showing v. telling: http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=9912). Smith shows the anger of this man through his actions and dialogue--she doesn't ever state to the reader "This man is angry! He's really mad!" That's the power of good poetry--the message comes through implicitly.

Just imagine the above poem being read by a firey black woman, spitting each word into the mic with the same level of hate she illustrates in the skinhead she has created. I've never seen her perform this, but apparently it brings the house down. This does not surprise me in the least--it is explicitly an American poem, with American dialogue, character, theme, and issues, written to the hilt and filled with one of our more ugly cultural truths. Many of her poems are this way; indeed, if I were asked to point out an American-themed poet worth reading, she'd probably be it.

Your assignment: This one is tricky. Many, many poets try to write about the "underbelly" topics--suicide, cutting, violent death, abuse, rape--and often only succeed as a catharsis for the author, and not as a poem for general consumption. But, when an "ugly" topic finds an able writer, sometimes something tremendous emerges, such as Smith's poem. So--try writing about something painful or controversial-- many poets gravitate towards these topics naturally--but keep in mind what makes Smith's poem "work." Her poem never reads as a journal entry, or as a whine. She finds a way to channel her energy towards this topic in an unbelievably powerful way--through the eyes of a tormentor. Try on different hats, and perspectives, and tones, and metaphors--and know that if you try and tell a painful story through a poem, true or not, you cannot just trust that the reader will "get" the pain--you have to suck them into it somehow.

Unusual Forms

2005-08-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

Ghazal~ Michael Collier

When I was young I couldn't wait to leave home
and then I went away to make the world my home.

In England a poet's wife suggested a word for what I felt,
"heimweh." German for homesickness even when you're home.

The agoraphobe and claustrophobe respectively
cannot bear to leave or stay inside their home.

Our day-old son wrapped in a blanket in your arms
and I'm in the car waiting to take you both home.

Mortgage means "dead pledge." To buy a house
you need one. A house can be mistaken for a home.

It won't be hard to name the poet who wrote a sonnet sequence
about his mother and father. He called it "The Broken Home."

A shovel, rake, and pickax hang inside my neighbors garage.
Like a god he has ordered the chaos of his home.

Never let me forget: colliers mine coal. Michael's an angel.
In heaven as on earth the coal of grief warms the soul's home.

...caught on to the scheme of the Ghazal? It's this:
AA/BA/CA/DA etc... (with A representing the repetend).

There is no meter to speak of--the poem is focused around tight couplets, and one repeating word (in this case, home). This latter word is what makes Ghazals so tricky--finding the right word and finessing its placement can be irksome. But the end result is like snapshots of one thing from many perspectives, esp. if the chosen repetition is a noun.

And can I just say--I love couplets.

Here's another Ghazal--I like this better than Collier's, but it is a less traditional use of the form, as it rhymes, and McHugh has spaced out the couplets to emphasize this. That's just fine, IMHO--her use of the linebreak is very, very strong. The splitting of a word on a break is difficult to do successfully, after all.

Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun ~Heather McHugh

Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?
I blame the soup: I'm a primordially
stirred person.

Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.
The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.

The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar.
But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.

I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.
The mirror's not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.

As time's revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.
Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person.

The only cure for birth one doesn't love to contemplate.
Better to be an unsung song, an unoc-
curred person.

McHugh, you'll be the death of me -- each self and second studied!
Addressing you like this, I'm halfway to the
third person.

McHugh's is an excellent example of wordplay, and double meanings--she's wickedly clever, a trait I adore in a poet.

Two assignments: 1. Try for a Ghazal. You'll probably have to write more than 7 or 8 couplets to get the ones that will build into a poem--aim for 10-15, and cull from there. Take care in choosing your word--you can try a very malleable word, such as 'person' or 'home,' or you can go for the gusto and try something more difficult, such as 'avocado' or 'sunscreen.' Whatever gets you writing--you'll know when you have the right word. Don't worry so much about the couplets being thematically linked--concentrate on being crafty and descriptive with your chosen repetend. Try rhyming only if you're feeling as crafty as McHugh, because it'll be really tricky to do well in this form.

2. Just try writing couplets. This form will force you to be more careful with words and linebreaks. Try taking an old poem of yours and putting it into couplets--you'll probably be surprised at how much of the text you've written suddenly seems extraneous and worth cutting out. Couplets force the writer to really pay attenton to every single line, and help focus images. Consider this series of couplets by my fave Aussie, Les Murray:

Where humans can't leave and mustn't complain~Les Murray

Where humans can't leave and mustn't complain,
There some will emerge who enjoy giving pain.

A dreary intense groove leads them to each one
they pick to torment, and the rest will then shun.

Some who might have been picked, and natural police,
do routine hurt, the catcalling, the giving-no-peace,

but dull brilliance evolves the betrayals and names
that sear dignity and life like interior flames.

Whole circles get enlisted, and blood loyalties reversed
by self-avengers and failures-getting-in-first

but this is the eye of fashion. Its sniggering stare
breeds silenced accomplices. Courage proves rare.

This powers revolution; this draws flies to sad pools;
this is the true curriculum of schools.

..again, rhymed--hard to do, and he appears to have some meter in there (almost like iambic hexameter, but don't quote me--it doesn't seem overly regular)--and look at his linebreaks! Many poets try to endstop all end-rhymes (meaning every line ends with a comma or period); this can make a poem seem stilted and amateurish. Murray has whole rhyming couplets that require no periods, commas or semi-colons--that's the mark of a talented fellow. Note: the punctuation is not missing--most modern poetry is written in full, grammatically correct sentences. Writing without sentence-level grammar is insanely difficult to do well. We're not all ee cummings or WCW here. So, only remove your commas and periods with good reason when penning a poem. Missing punctuation rarely adds to writing when there is no greater purpose at hand.

Play with Words

2005-08-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
~Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Forget for a moment about what this poem may "mean." When reading poetry, I often let the sensation of the work wash over me, without worrying so much about what the author's intent was. It's a good exercise in reading relaxation, really--after all, poems are not essays. You don't need to spend all your time looking for the main thrust, or argument, or themes. Sometimes, all you pull from one poem is a line--just one killer line, or phrase, or metaphor. Of course, if you really want to dissect this piece, more power to you. But what I'd like to call your attention to is the language.

Read this poem outloud--the sonic play here is tremendous, esp. in the last few lines. These words were chosen for impact, for resonance--as most words in a poem should be. We don't always remember to read poems outloud, esp. when the poem does not rhyme. But, I think you'll agree that this poem cries to be read aloud.

Two assignments: 1. This poem starts sort of as a lecture, or instructions. It's very commanding--"take this, do that." It's a fun style to employ in a poem, because it is so hands-on--most poems are written for the reader to observe, whereas this poem demands that the reader "do" something--whether or not the thing is actually "do-able" is not the point. The tone, clip, and voice are all propelled forwards by this demand for action. So, try it on--demand something of your reader.

#2: Language. When poets try and get crafty with language, we often fall into the trap of getting too wordy, or using lots of multisyllabic latinates (such as: despondent, disconsolate, advantageous, appropriate, detrimental, unpropitious). These words are fine in fiction and in academic writing, but can bog down a poem quickly, making it sound stuffy and over-important (latinates tend to be "ee" heavy). Plus, their sound is uninteresting; compare the latinate word list I gave to these from the Stevens' poem: muzzy, nave, hankering, peristyle, masque. Much better-sounding, eh? Stevens' words are much punchier, and have more hard "cks" and soft "zzs" or "vvhs." These types of words make the sound of the poem more dynamic, and can add to the tone--lots of soft sounds can be soothing, and lots of quick, clippy sounds or "rrrs" can add an element of anger or frantic energy. Next time you're around someone who is speaking emotionally, try listening to their sounds instead of their words--you'll be able to pick up on their emotion just by the way they speak.

So, play with language--try starting with a few startling words, and build a poem around them. I recommend thesaurus.com for turning up unexpected words. And, don't be afraid to create words--it doesn't always work, but sometimes adding an -ness or -ic or proto- to a known word can create surprising meaning and usages. Aim to give your reader a phrase or two they'll really have to chew on, a la Stevens' "jovial hullabaloo among the spheres," or "our bawdiness,/Unpurged by epitaph."

Have fun!

~Dani

Free Association

2005-08-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

RED LICORICE ~BOB HICOK

Turns out the universe is an accordion.
I take this as vindication of the polka.
If it began with the Big Bang
will it end with the Big Suck? I like
physics more than psychics. These days
there are psychics all night on TV.
Nostradamus would be ashamed.
Why predict sexual dysfunction
when there are tidal waves in the offing?
If we didn't die we wouldn't care
about time. We'd make and break
appointments with a shrug. The top half
of calendars with pretty pictures
would be enough. Ansel Adams aimed
a slow exposure at the Rockies
but didn't know they were running away.
Maybe all matter is shy. This hubbub
makes me stay at home. Stop signs
have no effect on entropy. I'm saddened
by the eventual demise of red licorice
but not black. Yet consider how often
you've wanted a second chance.
Nietzsche said we do the whole thing
again and again. That life's
an endless waltz to a patient band.
If I come back I hope gravity's
reversed. To fall up. To be
with my wife but not have to shop
for shoes. Somewhere is the first atom
that existed. The next time
you feel nostalgic wait your turn.

Brainstorming and freewriting are some of the best methods of finding 'surprise'--to quote Robert Frost, "no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." If we sit down with a plan for a poem, often we end up sounding derivative, or rigid--"planned" poems can come off more essay-like in tone, with each line so logically following the previous in terms of sense that the reader is lulled gently to sleep, and not challenged in the slightest.

Hicok is a genius at this--his poems are carefully crafted, and do not read like a brainstorm (in terms of messiness) but still celebrate expansiveness, and a willingness to play. Yet, his language is careful--he moves from image to image, idea to idea, rather abruptly, not pulling the reader into anything more elaborate than what can be opened up in a line or two. This is a poem of "emergent properties"--the author never tells the reader what to think, or even takes the reader in any particular direction. It's more of a cumulative effect, with a richness that grows from multiple readings. Again, note the use of first person-- Hicok uses "I," but it hardly intrudes--most sentences, he avoids it entirely. Using "I" too much in a poem such as this would remove the focus from the ideas to the writer--which would be a real shame.

Your assignment: Just start writing. (Using lots of "I" in the free-write is fine, but plan to remove most "I" and "my" from any re-write.) Free-associate from one idea to another. Don't allow yourself to get too enmeshed in any one idea--just hop about, and see what emerges. After getting between 10-25 ideas down, start editing--make your language precise, your juxtapositions more surprising. The point is not to keep all of your ideas rigidly in the order they came to your brain--it's more to create a unique pathway for your reader to follow. Whip the reader through a thought process that involves many surprises--cut out all of the bulky, everyday thoughts that strike you as plebian or cliche upon a second read-through. (Note how Hicok uses the Big Bang, psychics and stop signs in unusual ways.) In this poem, do not allow yourself to say anything ordinary. Good luck!

~Dani

Something Unexpected

2005-08-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Hug
by Tess Gallagher

A woman is reading a poem on the street
and another woman stops to listen. We stop too
with our arms around each other. The poem
is being read and listened to out here
in the open. Behind us
no one is entering or leaving the houses.

Suddenly a hug comes over me and I'm
giving it to you, like a variable star shooting light
off to make itself comfortable, then
subsiding. I finish but keep on holding
you. A man walks up to us and we know he hasn't
come out of nowhere, but if he could, he
would have. He looks homeless because of how
he needs. "Can I have one of those?" he asks you,
and I feel you nod. I'm surprised,
surprised you don't tell him how
it is - that I'm yours, only
yours, etc, exclusive as a nose to
its face. Love - that's what we're talking about, love
that nabs you with "for me
only" and holds on.

So I walk over to him and put my
arms around him and try to
hug him like I mean it. He's got an overcoat on
so thick I can't feel
him past it. I'm starting the hug
and thinking, "How big a hug is this supposed to be?
How long shall I hold this hug?" Already
we could be eternal, his arms falling over my
shoulders, my hands not
meeting behind his back, he is so big!

I put my head into his chest and snuggle
in. I lean into him. I lean my blood and my wishes
into him. He stands for it. This is his
and he's starting to give it back so well I know he's
getting it. This hug. So truly, so tenderly
we stop having arms and I don't know if
my lover has walked away or what, or
if the woman is still reading the poem, or the houses -
what about them? - the houses.

Clearly, a little permission is a dangerous thing.
But when you hug someone you want it
to be a masterpiece of connection, the way the button
on his coat will leave the imprint of
a planet in my cheek
when I walk away. When I try to find some place
to go back to.

Tess' poem is striking--the "rabbit of the plot" hops from a fairly non-controversial scene, to something completely surreal and unexpected. And yet, you believe her--the poem never dips into sci-fi- non-reality, but rather revolves around a believable level of weirdness that sucks the reader into a delicious series of "maybes."

Your assignment: Take an everyday activity and "make it weird." You can start or end the poem that way--start surreal and end in the everyday, or do it like Tess, and evolve the poem away from the ordinary. You can go sci-fi, which sometimes works, or you can keep it on a do-able level--something that you probably would not do, but could if you wanted. Especially take note of Tess' use of first-person; it's very subtle and does not distract from the actions and images going on. While the poem is written through the eyes of "I," the poem focuses entirely on the hug. This is how to keep a poem from devolving into a "me, me, me" journal-entry--focus on the action, not the inner monologue.

~Dani

An exercise in amusement

2005-08-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Cartoon Physics, part 1

Nick Flynn

Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down -- earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

...I find that my favorite poems have enjoy a certain
bittersweet quality--a pull-tug between something
amusing, and something reflective, or even dour.
There's nothing dour about this poem--the poem has as
much fun as its subject, but still ends on a
contemplative note, bringing to mind the ways in which
children are often introduced to the subjects of
death, dying or accidents--that they are something
easily bounced back from, or something mysterious,
colorful or funny. I actually find a slightly macabre
undercurrent here, but that might have more to do with
the subject matter than the tone or intent of the
poem.

Your assignment: Write about something we see everyday
that, upon reflection, is highly amusing and surreal.
This can work for just about anything--how people wait
patiently for a crosswalk sign when there is no
traffic for miles, or how no one will look at each
other in an elevator, or how accustomed we are to TV
laugh tracks--whatever.

There are lots of everyday moments that are actually
pretty ridiculous if a poet shines a light on them.
So, shine your light, dear poet--find juxtaposed
images and unusual series of events that the reader
can do nothing but chortle at (and in the process,
chortle at themselves.) There is way too much
depressing poetry, and not nearly enough lighthearted
verse--so, get crackin'!

Favorite Poem

2005-08-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

...well, one of them. I'll add a little discussion about why it works for me at the end.

Why Fool Around? ~Stephen Dobyns

How smart is smart? thinks Heart. Is smart
what's in the brain or the size of the container?
What do I know about what I do not know?
Such thoughts soon send Heart back to school.
Metaphysics, biophysics, economics, and history-
Heart takes them all. His back develops a crick
from lugging fifty books. He stays in the library
till it shuts down at night. The purpose of life,
says a prof, is to expand your horizons. Another says
it's to shrink existence to manageable proportions.
In astronomy, Heart studies spots through a telescope.
In biology, he sees the same spots with a microscope.
Heart absorbs so much that his brain aches. No
ski weekends for him, no joining the bridge club.
Ideas are nuts to be cracked open, Heart thinks.
History's the story of snatch and grab, says a prof.
The record of mankind, says another, is a striving
for the light. But Heart is beginning to catch on:
If knowledge is noise to which meaning is given,
then the words used to label sundry facts are like
horns honking before a collision: more forewarning
than explanation. Then what meaning, asks Heart,
can be given to meaning? Life's a pearl, says a prof.
It's a grizzly bear, says another. Heart's conclusion
is that to define the world decreases its dimensions
while to name a thing creates a sense of possession.
Heart admires their intention but why fool around?
He picks up a pebble and states: The world is like
this rock. He puts it in his pocket for safe keeping.
Having settled at last the nature of learning, Heart
goes fishing. He leans back against an oak. The sun
toasts his feet. Heart feels the pebble in his pocket.
Its touch is like the comfort of money in the bank.
There are big ones to be caught, big ones to be eaten.
In morning light, trout swim within the tree's shadow.
Smart or stupid they circle the hook: their education.

...this almost falls into the category of prose poem; Dobyns is not overly concerned with linebreaks, although he does generally follow the oft-stated "it is best to break on a noun or verb" rule. Why it works for me? What a crazy idea--to take something like the word "heart," so over-used in general, and make it a character that stumbles about and gets into scrapes--I mean, really, what a phenomenal idea. He has a whole book of these. What I also enjoy are his use of questions--questions don't often work in poems, I find, because they end up sounding overly plaintive or philosophical. Here, he has Heart acting as a student--so, all of the broad-stroke questions fit right in with the theme. Finally, the last line/image--priceless. Very Rilke-esque, how it turns the previous narrative on its head (When I say Rilke-esque, I refer to the Archaic Torso of Apollo, and this famous last line: "for here, there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life." (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/4486/).

Your assignment: Create a character. Try a name that you have no associations with (Harold, Bluey, Finn the Swashbuckler, whatever). Build this person/character from scratch. Base your poem around their actions--not on who they are, or who they think they are, but what it is they do. Let the meaning emerge from the pictures you paint (yes, an exercise in show vs tell). Try for third person, like above--we tend to default to writing in first person, so it is good to break this habit now and again.

If you're a bit more avant-garde, go for weird associations and unexpected word pairings--surprise the reader.

Feel free to post any resultant poems in the comment section for general reading, or send them my way.

~Dani

Hello folks!

2005-08-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

I've started this blog for fellow UW-Bothell student and alum writers, who are looking to chat with someone about their creative works, find inspiration to start a poem or two, and possibly submit their works to the literary magazine, paperbox, this winter.

A little about me: I'm a senior at UW-Bothell. I have been the managing editor of two local literary magazines, Licton Springs Review (2003 issue, for which we won a few awards) and paperbox (2005 issue). I have sat on many selection committees for these and other lit mags, and done my fair share of workshopping--most notably with Rick Kenney on the annual UW Rome trip (http://depts.washington.edu/engl/abroad/romesummer.html) which I highly, highly recommend for any aspiring poet looking for a transformational experience. I've had poems published in Mare Nostrum, Bricolage, LSR, paperbox, Twice-Bloomed Wistaria (award-winning poem 'Socrates,') and Exile. All of these are college-based magazines--I've not attempted the national circuit.

...most of my "poetry education" has been self-education; mostly, this consists of cross-pollination among interested parties. I give much credit to PFFA (http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/), an online workshop that really stresses poetry as a craft; they don't take no mess, so if you check them out, lurk for a week or two before posting. And only broach those waters if you're interested in some (often caustic) criticism.

...that's not what this site is about, though--this blog is intended to be more cuddly than PFFA, although as vigorous and interested in craft and quality as the latter site. I'll be posting poems here, and ideas for poems, and musings on this and that. I heartily encourage people to contact me, or ask me questions, or otherwise participate in this poetry dialogue.

Best,

Dani