A Piecemeal Poet(ry)

new website, new blog

2011-03-24T19:58:00.004-05:00

For anyone who is still following me after all this time -

I'm redesigning my website. I have some cool ideas in mind, some of which won't materialize for another month and a half (as I develop the raw material in the form of images and videos), some of which will be implemented over the short term.

I'm going with WordPress for the backbone of the site, which also means I can incorporate my blog into the site itself. Everything is just a placeholder and a welcome sign at the moment, but jog on over to www[dot]jeffstumpo[dot]com* to start getting updates once again.

*The only comments I received in the last half-dozen or so posts over here were Chinese spam, so I'm not typing in the direct link to the new site in order to maybe, maybe help keep them off the new site for a while. It'll take an extra two seconds to fix up the URL in a copy-paste. Sorry about that.

NPS Day 4

2010-08-06T11:38:00.003-05:00

You'll notice I missed day 3. Sorry about that. I remember an awesome Head to Head Haiku event that went down to the wire between RC Weslowski and Patrick Shaugnessy, with Patrick S. coming out on top.

Day 4 events in which I took part:

Masquerade Open Mic: Consisting of nothing but persona poems (except for a couple of people who were confused by exactly what that means), this was one of the best readings I've been to at NPS. I put up "There will be no reinvention of the wheel" to some generally good responses (including one funny one - at one of the points where I "break down," someone in the audience actually yelled out, in a helpful voice, keep it together. As if I actually feel emotion during that piece.). Mckendy did his mermaid poem, a brief piece that was a smart move near the end of the lineup. Tim didn't get to go, which sucked.

Nerd Slam: Generally a good time. Some questions/nerds took way too long, but all in all it was a good time. Well-hosted, good nerd poems once the competitive rounds were over, fun prizes. Once again, Tim did not get to go, which sucked. I wanted to hear "Fraggle Uprising."

Our bout against Denver - Mercury, Dallas - Poetry Grind, and Team Orlando:

We sent up Tim in the first round to do "Prepared Batman." I think it was a smart choice, with Denver kicking things off with a very serious poem and Dallas shifting the energy to lighthearted with a love poem. One of the judges agreed, rewarding Tim with a high score, but the reaction from the others was less than stellar. I think Tim got robbed a bit, but he did a great rendition of the piece. SFOD at the end of round 1: 4th place.

In the second round, we went serious ourselves, but a different kind of serious from what everybody else was doing. Looking to change the energy, we put up Mckendy with "Dracula to Mina Harker." It's a slow burn of a piece, almost crawling, but very sexy. Other poets turned to us and indicated hairs going up on the backs of their arms once Mckendy finished, but again, the judges weren't having it. They wanted political messages, and at the end of round two we were still bringing up the rear.

Third round, we leveraged the recent Prop 8 judgment, putting up Krista Mosca with "Trans," going for both intellectual and emotional energy. Krista got not only our highest score so far, putting the bout back within reach, but a number of hugs on her way back to the table. Vulnerability paid off, though we were still in fourth place.

We had the last slot in the fourth round, always a good place to be for something energetic, so Mark sent me up with "ADD TV." The team tells me I knocked the place dead, which is nice to hear, and more pertinent to the scoring portion of this entry, I got the high score of the bout, enough to put us into third place.

We didn't make semis, but we impressed the hell out of the poets we went up against. I have no complaints, and plenty of happies.

Perhaps more thoughts tomorrow. I'm off to the comedy open mic, the Legends showcase, and, later on, to support one or more NorthBEAST teams in semis (there are three this year). Group piece finals tonight, and of course Underground Indies looms on the horizon - Krista is representing us in them this year.

NPS Day 2

2010-08-04T09:56:00.002-05:00

First things first. We won our first bout, and we were not up against slouch teams. Austin Neo Soul, Columbus Writers Block, and Pittsburgh Steel City Slam. I repeat: for the first time since it's been competing at the National Poetry Slam, Slam Free or Die took first place in a bout.

We decided to go big right off the bat. We were up second in the first round, following Writers Block. "Language (language)," our sign language team piece, made its national debut and rocked pretty hard. It wasn't the top scoring piece of the night, but it A) put us into first place by the end of the first round and B) caused a bunch of other poets to come up to Beau, Mckendy, and me after the bout and talk about how cool it was. I'm extremely proud.

Having established that we could put up intellectual poems, Mark changed things up for the second round and sent Krista up with "Scarecrow," a harrowing poem about a woman in an abusive relationship who (and here's the twist that makes it different than the many, many abusive relationship pieces you'll see in slam) is actually proud of the "attention" she receives. The audience got shivers, and Krista was actually tearing up by time she left the stage - that's how much she put into it. Quantitative result: we were still in first after the second round.

The general tone of the bout had been serious, and the third round proved no different. Beau took his turn and literally brought some members of the audience to tears with a choked-up rendition of "Kylie." When I say literally, I mean literally. There was even a poet who caught up with us later at the Encyclopedia Show, half an hour later, and told us that he'd been crying by the end of Beau's piece. Once again, we had maintained our lead as well.

Mckendy finished us off with his basketball/absent fathers poem. My apologies all around - I can't remember the title. He was alternately in awe and snarling, and the combination kept us in the lead by something like .3 points. I believe that .6 separated first from third at the end of the night, with Neo Soul in second and Writers Block in third. Mckendy built masterfully on the poem that preceded him, a racial call to arms, adding nuance and emotional levels to what the judges could see.

So there you go. I'm not quoting from people's poems, because my mind went kablooey as soon as we realized we'd won. It's a general description of our own efforts, but it's what I can do. For the first time in its NPS history, Slam Free or Die has taken a 1 spot. Wish us luck for Thursday night.

NPS Day 1

2010-08-03T09:32:00.002-05:00

I can't complain about my drive. I left Martin on Sunday morning and, after some construction and a wrong turn, ended at my in-laws' in Waterloo, IA Sunday evening. I helped my father-in-law load a truck with a bunch of stuff (furniture, memory boxes, etc) he's bringing down to Kate while I'm at the National Poetry Slam. After spending the night, I finished off the 3-4 hour trip to St. Paul and waited for the rest of the team to arrive. The reason I can't complain is that I got to sleep. Everybody else drove the 26 hours from New Hampshire straight through.

Registration and orientation went smoothly. I met up with the Art Amok folks. Their fearless leader, Karen G, stuck with Slam Free or Die during most of the 24/7 fundraiser, so it was nice to meet her in person. There was first-night partying to be had, but Tim and I retired to the hotel room I'd booked away from the action. We've got two hotel rooms - one at the host hotel, intended to be at the center of everything, and one a couple miles away, intended to be the rest room. I'll be manning it (and sleeping soundly) while we're here.

Tonight is our first bout. It's a doozy. Columbus Writer's Block, Austin Neo Soul and Pittsburgh Steel City Slam. We're going into it with a lot of different possibilities for pieces, but everybody is ready to do any poem at any moment.

Afterwards/afterhours is the Encyclopedia Show, which nobody wants to miss. It'll be a late night, but should be a very good one.

Further reports tomorrow morning.

$

2010-06-17T14:04:00.003-05:00

It's fundraising time for Manchester. Most of the team will be driving from New Hampshire to St. Paul, MN. I'll be driving from Tennessee. Then we have a hotel room or rooms to pay for. Oh, and food. We like to eat. Not huge amounts, mind you, but enough that are voices are louder than our stomachs when we're on stage.

For those of you in Manchester/Portsmouth/etc. there will be activities and fundraisers and features and so forth. In fact, we're plotting a 7-day 24-hour reading. That is, every person on the team, including the coach and assistant coach, will read for 24 hours. Back to back. Seven days of poetry, with only 15 minute breaks every once in a while for bathrooms and food. I'll let you know more about that as plans come together.

In the meantime, we've got a PayPal account set up. If you'd be willing to donate something, even a dollar, that's one less dollar that comes out of our pockets while we're at Nationals. I'm devoted to my art and, for the duration of the competition, to the sport aspect of it, but I don't want to go hungry, I don't want to sleep in my car (with several other people), and I don't want to nervously watch my tank get emptier and emptier as I cross the great expanse of the rural Midwest, hoping that there's a gas station coming up soon and that my card will be accepted there. So, please, take a look. Toss us an amount you think worthwhile.

In fact, just to tempt you further, I'll re-post the link to Arts & Crafts, my free album of poems, essays, and conversations in both audio and video formats: http://www.jeffstumpo.com/stage.html. If you like the kind of stuff you hear from me; if you want spoken word that plays with the boundaries of what spoken word can and should do, donate. If you don't like what you hear - hey, we've got a team with diverse voices. There's a good chance you'd be supporting somebody whose poetry you like. You want a sestina about Ol' Dirty Bastard from the Wu-Tang Clan? We've got it. You want a poem from a woman to the person who used to be her girlfriend, then was her boyfriend, and is now just a friend? We've got it. You want towering toasts to the everyday folks who could, if nobody was looking, be gods? We've got it. You want a poem about what would happen if the author had a talking hamster? We've got it. You want a piece in sign language, written for three people? We're working on it ;-)

Take a look. Take a listen. Take a chance (on me... yeah, now that song is stuck in your head). Help send us to NPS.

http://sites.google.com/site/slamfreeordie2010/

Manchester all the way

2010-06-05T08:55:00.003-05:00

I slammed in the Providence finals the other night. It was a lot of fun. I ran with three experimental/original pieces, and the judges absolutely did not approve. After putting out the untitled piece where I walk out into the audience and make a metaphorical poem of myself, "Wooden Boys and Deadlier Toys," and "There will be no reinvention of the wheel," I came in last. I remain a poet's poet, however, in that I sparked a great deal of interest among the other performers as far as new possibilities for what we can do in a slam. A big congrats goes to Trevor Liam Byrne-Smith, Phil Kaye, Jamila Woods, and Kai Huang.

This leaves me solidly on Manchester's team, and I'm quite happy about it. I think I've got a good feel for what we can do as a team, and it's time to begin plotting team pieces. I have one in mind, but I need to consult with another poet (not on the team) about the vocabulary. I don't want to delve into the overdone sing-speak-sing method of presenting a poem, but I'm very curious about our rhythmic and musical possibilities as a group. Finally, we may take some of our existing poems and rework them (extensively in some cases) into group pieces. Nationals should be prepared for a Manchester that, at times, comes straight out of left field with things not quite seen before. No revolutions, but definite evolutions. It doesn't hurt that we've got a variety of voices on the team - some funny, some serious, some intricate, some straightforward. This will be an interesting Nats.

No News Has Meant Good News

2010-05-23T21:30:00.003-05:00

Two months. Quite a stretch. I can't honestly say I haven't been blogging during that time, as I've kept up with writing Geeking with the Wife for Team Covenant. However, my electronic poetry hat has been on the shelf.

Things you should know as I get back into this:

1. Kate got hired as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee - Martin. This is very big news, and I'm incredibly proud of her. I'm picking up 2-3 classes as an adjunct and quite look forward to them. We're moving in early/mid July, with a house picked out and to be closed on in mid June. We're going to have a big yard again, which the dogs will love. We're both going to be teaching, which we will love.

2. The creative portion of my dissertation appears to have been satisfactory to all members of my committee. I'm now working, more slowly than I'd like but nonetheless deliberately, on the scholarly portion. The current realizations/fears - I'm writing about an aspect of several poets that I've never seen discussed. I can't find literature on it in their work, specifically. There's the first-level fear of the researcher, which is to wonder if I've just missed something, a conference paper, a dissertation, an interview. The second-level fear is that my committee will have a fit if I have extended tracts of my dissertation that are just me, a little bit of theoretical backing, and a whole lot of original analysis. Tradition has been stressed to this point, hence the worry.

3. I've thrown my hat into the slam ring once again, and most likely for the last time (due to the logistics - Martin is three hours from any major city). I've made the team from Manchester, NH, and I'm in the finals to qualify for the Providence, RI team on June 3. The semifinal bout in Providence was particularly skin-of-my-teeth. If you think you'd be interested in hearing about it, let me know. I can make it the topic of a post.

Political Haiku

2010-03-24T10:44:00.001-05:00

Left. Right. We never

let the other side finish.

Can't we all just get

Megan Thoma and the Current Big Debate

2010-03-22T08:25:00.003-05:00

If you're interested in a varied and ongoing conversation about the validity of criticism in a populist venue (read: poetry slams), white privilege, and victimization, start off here and here, then go friend Sonya Renee Taylor on Facebook and read her response to the second post here, then read Megan's third post here, then read Megan's response to everything here.

High points: A number of thoughtful considerations of how race is interwoven, even subconsciously, with our conceptions of what constitutes effective art. A number of thoughtful considerations of the place of victimization as a tool to either increase awareness and thereby try to end it or propagate it for shock value.

Low points: A wish for no more poems about race/rape/lesbians. A suggestion that physical violence is an appropriate response to a strong critique.

Surfing the Web

2010-03-13T09:05:00.000-06:00

Anybody else think this is a horrible mixed metaphor?

Brandeis gig

2010-03-04T12:42:00.001-06:00

I just got the call to play a gig at Brandeis University. On March 9th I'll lead a workshop from 8-9pm, watch the open mic, give my featured performance, and then host the slam, which will consist of the Brandeis team vs 1-3 visiting teams. I haven't played a college/university gig in a while - this should be a blast!

Two more "Geeking with the Wife" columns

2010-02-27T08:24:00.002-06:00

Episode 4: Bulls and Bears

Episode 5: The Name Game

I promise that I'm working on my dissertation and various individual poems, but this is the most fun I'm having while writing in the past month. Sigh?

Geeking with the Wife, Episode 3: Go Big or Go Home

2010-02-13T14:00:00.001-06:00

Another Week, Another Geek(ing with the Wife)

Now with more pictures!

Episode 3: Go Big or Go Home

Chuck Norris is wrong (as usual)

2010-02-12T14:50:00.003-06:00

I like using Chuck Norris in my Introduction to Composition classes. He has a regular op-ed column that appears at creators.com. I like using him for two reasons. One, when presented with an open field of seven or eight potential writers, students almost invariably choose Norris. Two, his tactics are fairly transparent (for analysis) and poorly-thought-out, allowing us to examine what not to do on paper #3.

The most recent issue I take is with the column my students selected today: "Is Justin Bieber in Danger?" In it, Norris half-joking says that the danger to 15-year-old Bieber is not Norris himself (Bieber Photoshopped the two of them together) but the federal government's increased spending and debt. Alert to my liberal friends - I agree with Norris that spending/debt is out of control. The trillions of the federal government owes will bite us big time, and sooner rather than later. That being said, Norris uses the silly and tired argument that the Founding Fathers disapproved of all debt. He quotes Thomas Jefferson:

who counseled to "put off buying anything until we have the money to pay for it." Jefferson also admonished, "The conclusion then, is, that neither the representatives of a nation, nor the whole nation itself assembled, can validly engage debts beyond what they may pay in their own time."

while ignoring one of John Adams's earliest assignments - to acquire debt by taking out a loan from the Netherlands. It is in the degree, not the existence, that our current government (and past governments) fail(s). I'm serious, Jefferson, the man behind the Louisiana Purchase (the original one, not the crap scandal-of-the-week one), famously spoke out of both sides of his mouth. And when it came time for action, which speaks loudest, he took on debt if he was convinced that it was for the betterment of the nation.

Again, I'm not saying Norris is wrong in that the fed is making a massive mistake. But in painting these black and white terms and attempting to rally history on his side, he just makes himself look foolish.

Spam

2010-02-08T08:57:00.003-06:00

Hey, folks. I know some of you out there are reading, but the only comments I'm getting are spam. Are you just reading quietly? Have I become boring? I'll be getting back to more poetry-related posts soon if that helps.

[insert uncertain emoticon here]

Real Estate

2010-02-07T20:51:00.002-06:00

Another week, another Geeking with the Wife. This also lets the cat out of the bag: we're buying a house in Martin, TN. I've left this information of out my blog posts because I didn't want the possibility of it messing with my own job search, but Kate landed a tenure-track position at the University of Tennessee at Martin. She was actually offered three jobs, and after long discussions about what would be best for her career, what offered me an opportunity to teach as well, and what looked like a good place to start a family, we decided on Martin. In less happy news, I believe that I've gotten all the rejections I'm going to get from this go-round of job applications. We'll see how adjunct work pans out in Tennessee.

Geeking with the Wife

2010-01-29T14:50:00.003-06:00

I'm guest-blogging at Team Covenant. Basically, Kate and I play a game of Monsterpocalypse each week, talk about our weeks, pop culture, academics, whatever, and I do a writeup. The first episode just went live and is called The Couch. Check it out. It's a marriage of boardgames and, well, marriage.

Playlist: Folkwagon

2010-01-25T15:24:00.002-06:00

Simon & Garfunkel - A Poem on the Underground Wall

Amy MacDonald - Poison Prince

Mumford & Sons - Little Lion Man

Megan Spellman - In this corner...

Ani DiFranco - Cradle And All

Del Vezeau - Blackhash

Jeana Leslie & Siobhan Miller - Lochaber to Argyll

Dan Tyminski, Harley Allen, & Pat Enright - I am a Man of Constant Sorrow

New Camera, Part 2 (The Good Part)

2010-01-22T12:49:00.006-06:00

1. I'm really out of practice with a good camera. It's not exactly like riding a bicycle (although I haven't ridden a bicycle in some time now, so maybe I would suck at that as well).

2. That being said, here are some of the promised photos I've taken so far. There are also a bunch of attempted shots of Stubby and Apple as I figure out just how high the shutter speed and ISO need to be to catch a running dog (I'm getting better at tracking already). They're not ready for prime time yet, however...

New Camera, Part 1 (The Bad Part)

2010-01-20T08:52:00.003-06:00

My old Canon Rebel 2000 inexplicably died at some point in the past year. I hadn't taken it out much, mostly because buying and printing film, especially given my proclivity for shooting a lot of film at a time, was just going to be too expensive. When I finally did go to start it up with a new set of batteries, it didn't turn on. When I took it in to a camera store for repair, it was going to cost me as much to fix it as to replace it with a new version of the same camera. With some money I'd received during the holidays (and in advance for my birthday), I decided to upgrade to a decent DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex). After a lot of research, I determined that the Canon XSi was the camera for me.

This is not a cheap camera. It is not a professional camera, no 5D or whatnot. But it would do what I wanted - give me a reasonable amount of control of my photographing process, let me use my old lenses (an f/1.8 50mm and an f/4.5-5.6 55-200mm), and have enough of a megapixel count to let me blow up the photos to a nice size (we hang some of my better work around the house).

The camera was not inexpensive, so I looked around for the best deal. Here's where the problem starts. I found the camera for $475, body only, at US1Photo. After ordering it, I received a phone call from Ken to upsell. That means that he tried to get me, quite rudely, to purchase additional accessories over the phone. When I kept saying that I didn't want anything else, he went so far as to raise his voice to me and accusingly say, "That's a great deal" (it wasn't). I wanted an extra battery anyway, so when he further lowered the price on one, I finally agreed to include it. He also offered to speed up the shipping on the camera for free. The experience was obnoxious, but I didn't anticipate anything particularly wrong.

When I received the camera, I didn't have a line-item receipt. Instead, the entire purchase, tax included, had been grouped under a heading of "Executive Package." Shady dealings #2.

When I turned on the camera to do the initial format of my new memory card, it wouldn't work. The camera turned on just fine, but it wouldn't interact with the memory card. OK, I thought, perhaps the card is bad. Tried a new card. Same problem. Tried both cards in another digital camera. Both worked.

Knowing that some cameras will come off the line with problems, I called Canon Tech Help to see if they could offer any. Troy ran me through a number of potential fixes, none of which worked. He took the serial number so that I could send the camera in for repair. He then told me his computer has crashed, and he would be back in a moment after restarting.

He came back to tell me his computer had not, in fact, crashed. Rather, my serial number was already in the system under another name, and he had to see if he was allowed to tell me this. I was infuriated. I'd been sold a used camera, one that likely had been returned for the very problem I was experiencing.

When I called US1Photo to ask how to get my camera replaced with one that worked, I got the runaround for several minutes as Kevin tried to insist that whatever had gone wrong was my fault. Maybe I bent the pins in the camera by forcing the memory card in, he said. I was having none of it, and told him that I wanted them to replace the camera. He told me to call back on Monday (this was a Friday), and we'd work it out. When I called back, he again tried to get me to send the camera in to Canon, implying that I'd done something wrong. When I confronted him with the information that Canon already had the camera registered, he told me, "We sometimes register the camera for the customer." When I told him it was under someone else's name, it was the first time in two days that he hadn't tried to cut me off mid-sentence. He finally acquiesced, gave me a code to put on the box when I sent it back, and hung up abruptly.

I ended up getting a replacement camera. It works just fine. I've taken a few pictures with it that I'll post tomorrow. I'm calling Canon shortly to make sure this one hasn't been registered with them yet. So the story ends on a somewhat happy note. Given my experience, however, I highly recommend that you do NOT use US1Photo for your camera needs.

Pardon the long post. I've been pissed.

30

2010-01-13T20:58:00.002-06:00

I turned 30 today. Still figuring out how I feel about that. Haven't accomplished nearly what I'd planned. Ah well, poets are allowed late-game moves. For that matter, most of the best moves are only granted to late-game poets, more's the pity.

English ABD, Chemistry PhD

2010-01-07T11:33:00.003-06:00

JeFF, reading aloud from F.T. Marinetti's "Geometric and and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility": We are hastening the grotesque funeral of passéist Beauty (romantic, symbolist, and decadent) whose essential elements were memory, nostalgia, the fog of legend produced by remoteness in time, the exotic fascination produced by remoteness in space, the picturesque, the imprecise, rusticity, wild solitude, multicolored disorder, twilight shadows, corrosion, weariness, the soiled traces of the years, the crumbling of ruins, mold, the taste of decay, pessimism, phthisis, suicide, the blandishments of pain, the aesthetics of failure, the adoration of death.

A new beauty is born today from the chaos of the new contradictory sensibilities that we Futurists will substitute for the former beauty, and that I call Geometric and Mechanical Splendor.

Its essential elements are: hygienic forgetfulness, hope, desire, controlled- force, speed, light, will power, order, discipline, method; a feeling for the great city; the aggressive optimism that results from the cult of muscles and sport; the imagination without strings, ubiquity, laconism...

Kate, in a meek voice: Acid plus base yields salt plus water?

---

Also: xkcd

Google-Fu

2010-01-04T21:45:00.003-06:00

So I Googled myself tonight. It's a new year, figured I should try it, see what's out there of me. On page 24 of the returned results (most of which are repeats on different feeds of poems I've had on Indiefeed, but a decent number are poems in online journals), I find this teaser:

It´s jeff stumpo, who blogs here. And he´s a cutie! too bad he´s straight! ;-) but he does wonder if he could identify as a "queering poet." that´s a start. ...

I really want to know who wrote that about me. The actual link provided is effectively dead - it leads to a concert venue site that doesn't contain anything real so far as I can tell. I'm just curious. So if anybody out there has better search engine skills than I do, come to my rescue!

The Waiting Game

2009-12-19T17:52:00.003-06:00

I'm waiting for the last of my students to turn in their final projects. These will either be analyses of nonwritten media (e.g. political cartoons, advertisements, dance routines, film segments, music, etc.) or original creations of nonwritten media. I like it as an exercise in composition because, let's face it, much of the composition we encounter these days is not based in words. Slightly more than 3/4 of our class time is spent on making our connection to words stronger, more deliberate, so I don't feel bad about going multimedia in the last project.

In related news, the papers are due by 9pm tonight. 7-9 on a Saturday is a horrible time to have a final.

---

The waiting also continues on the job front. I've heard back from a couple of places (rejections). I'll perhaps keep you updated. I'll perhaps not, as I don't think it appropriate to put all my job search information out here on a non-anonymous blog. One, it's respect for the system. Two, it's just covering my own butt.

---

The final waiting is for holiday visits to family back in the Midwest. We leave on Monday and return the 29th. I may blog during that time, but don't be surprised if you don't hear from me again until a year-end wrapup.

a priest, a minister, and a rabbi

2009-12-16T14:40:00.003-06:00

I've been on Indiefeed's Performance Poetry podcast twice before today, once with a creepy piece, once with a slow and philosophical one. I decided to do what I usually do, which is present another side to my work*, and sent Mongo a couple of funny poems from my feature at the Cantab. Both pieces will be featured on the podcast, and today it's "a priest, a minister, and a rabbi." I just really wanted to begin a performance piece with a joke, and this particular joke gave me a lot of room to be creative. It's a short piece, under two minutes, and the whole track only lasts about five, so this is a good one if you just want a quick jolt of kinda-funny-kinda-thoughtful.

*Most poets I know work at a particular style until they feel they've mastered it. I'm somewhat unusual in that I'm always trying on different styles and techniques. My page poetry ranges from concrete to free verse, formal to experimental. My performance pieces are quiet, loud, funny, dead-serious, political, everyday, theatrical, restrained. You can find threads amongst all my stuff, but you'll never mistake one poem for another. Since I'd already done two serious pieces, it was time to give another side.

Journals

2009-12-09T14:36:00.002-06:00

So if one were to come into some holiday spending money for oneself, to which literary journals would one subscribe? Oh, forget the "one," stuff, I want to hear from you. Yeah, you.

If you could pick five literary journals, preferably ones that include poetry, which would they be and why? For a great editorial vision? For excellent special issues? For the articles? What are the must-haves for Post(modern or avant or office or whatever)? For more conservative poetry?

I give not a rat's ass about reputation. I stuck with Poetry for several years based on reputation back in college and was disappointed on a monthly basis (it may be better now with the editorial change, but I haven't gone back to it to find out). Let me know which ones actually impress you, press into you, leave some kind of mark.

Poem in 45 Parts

2009-12-06T11:50:00.003-06:00

At NorthBEAST this weekend, I noticed a growing subgenre of performance poems in multiple parts. Six parts. Nineteen parts. Sometimes indicated by actually saying the number out loud (more common with greater numbers) or by indicating silently with a hand count (more common with smaller numbers). In the hour between the end of my workshop, Beginning with the Body, and the open mic, I decided to go to the extreme end of one of these poems in parts. I'll post the poem first, then a few thoughts on the creation thereof. Incidentally, the numbers should be read aloud, with almost no break between the number and the text that follows.

Poem in 45 Parts

1. In 3rd grade you made a mosaic.

2. It was supposed to be a fish.

3. It looked like a fish exposed to Chernobyl.

4. Seven years later you made a lamp in art class.

5. It didn't work.

6. Four years later you met me.

7. We kissed.

8. You tasted like ash.

9. You made a vase.

10. There were no flowers in it.

11. You made an ashtray.

12. It worked.

13. I fixed the lamp.

14. You said your lungs felt like Chernobyl just before it melted down.

15. You only showed me the fish once.

16. Two years later we moved in together.

17. I put flowers in the vase.

18. I realized I was the only one who ever turned on the lamp.

19. I asked you why a fish.

20. You said you mistook pieces for Pisces.

21. This was not the first lie.

22. This was not the first truth.

23. I forgot to turn the lamp on.

24. You didn't notice.

25. You didn't empty the vase.

26. Nor the ashtray.

27. I asked you why you left them full.

28. You said you mistook full for fool.

29. I asked.

30. You said you mistook ask for ash.

31. I asked.

32. You said you were having a meltdown.

33. You said you mistook born for broken.

34. You said you were drowning.

35. I replaced the flowers.

36. You threw the vase out the window.

37. You threw the ashtray.

38. You threw the lamp.

39. You threw the fish.

40. I looked at them shattered in the street.

41. I said you mistook me.

42. I said I was never trying to fix you.

43. This was not the first lie.

44. This was not the first truth.

45. I said I was just trying to keep track of the pieces.

If I was going to dive into a poem in multiple parts, I had several major considerations. First and foremost, there had to be a reason to divide this thing up. In this case, I came up with the first and last images first. Coming up with some kind of emotional fracturing would add a new layer to the idea of pieces. I wanted to keep with the mosaic concept, individual bits that resemble each other but bounce around so as to actually justify division into so many parts. Thus the jumping ahead in years and so forth. Secondly, I wanted to keep the language simple. If there were to be this many parts, then the structure itself should be the complex part, and the individual moments simple (a concession to a listening audience, since this is meant to be read aloud).

I'm not explaining this particularly well. Read it out loud to yourself as a somewhat brisk pace. It'll fall into line best that way.

Labels

2009-11-30T13:45:00.003-06:00

I think I have too many labels, and that I haven't applied them evenly. Anybody want to go back through all my posts and tell me what keywords should be associated with each?

I didn't think so. Neither do I.

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I've been getting a lot of emails this semester that begin with "Hi" or "Hey." I think it's because I tell my students they can call me JeFF, but they're too uncomfortable to do so. At the same time, they feel awkward going back to "Mr. Stumpo" having been granted the opportunity to be on a first-name basis with me. It's really quite amusing.

Oh, and don't worry, I've made sure that they know how to write a more professional greeting.

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Anybody out there think a poetic sequence and a long poem are basically the same thing?

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When people ask me what my dogs are, I'm very proud of being able to answer "mutts." I like saying mutts as opposed to mixed-breeds. Mutt has some balls to it, some scrap, some independence that just says, "I'm the only me in the world. Don't have a chip on my shoulder about it, but recognize, I'm the only me."

Advice #545

2009-11-25T11:09:00.002-06:00

If ever you are approached by a seven-headed crocodile, don't panic. While one of its mouths will drag you down to drown in the Nile's loamy bed, the other six will assuredly miss.

Home Depot is (still) not Venice

2009-11-24T11:44:00.004-06:00

See Karin Gottshall's hilarious post here first.

Guidelines for Witches and Wizards: Tools

2009-11-24T10:48:00.003-06:00

Performing magic requires the channeling of energy. For the most basic spells - slight glamours, spinning a coin, etc. - the magician's body serves as a reasonable conduit for this energy. The more powerful the spell, however, the more likely that the magic user needs a tool to act as a conductor.

The most basic item is a wand. These suffice for dueling purposes, moving a stubborn cow, or doing housework. Being fairly small and fragile, they cannot take too much magical pressure without snapping. Above a wand is a staff. Minor changes in weather, large explosions, and refacing a cliff are all reasonable tasks for a staff, as would be creating a double of a cow. The next jump in phallic wizarding tools (and let us not fool ourselves - wizards are always compensating for something) is an actual tower. With a properly designed tower, the enterprising witch or wizard can cause massive changes in local weather, ascend temporarily to the stars, or make all the milk in an entire village or small city go bad.

Of greatest power are circular objects, which, besides being yonic, produce a sort of feedback loop. Rings are popular items for being even smaller than wands, yet able to simulate a staff or even more. Flaggin the Bovinous was known to make entire herds of cows invisible and steal off with them in the night.

Magical energy can be conducted through another living subject in the form of a sacrifice. This is the basis for divination by entrails of a pig or cow, though it is considered far more ethical to simply use a (circular) mirror, crystal ball, or scrying pool.

The exception to the fragility of flesh comes in the form of the communal magic of various American Indian tribes. By collectively taking part in a dance or ceremony, the magical energy is dispersed throughout the group, and weather can be changed (which explains the lack of towers in North America). Experiments are underway to see if magical energy can be channeled through herd animals for greater effect, though the sudden and instantaneous death of hundreds of cattle has thus far proven to be a serious hurdle.

Guidelines for Witches and Wizards: Appearance

2009-11-23T08:43:00.003-06:00

Contrary to what you may have seen in the movies, witches and wizards prefer to look old. Age equals knowledge, and knowledge equals power, and power above all else is what magic users find attractive. Larger ears and noses, gray hair, a gravelly voice: these are relatively simple things that wizards and witches use to make themselves look older than their years. Liver spots, being a two-dimensional glamour, are particularly popular with young magicians who haven't yet mastered the third dimension. This is not to say that they do not see the appeal in a shapely knight or lithe princess, merely that among themselves, aged is better.

This is also not to say that witches and wizards are prudes. Quite the opposite. What grand appeal does a young body hold when one can add extra arms or legs to a body? Or summon a fey who has spent the last three hundred years honing its ability to tickle? Or consider Alexandra of Thebes, who would sometimes turn herself into an electric eel and her lover into a pool of water. Your would-be bedroom athletes cannot hold a candle to the experiences a good magician can provide.

Neither wizards nor witches, however, are given to cuddling.

Hiroshima Mindstream

2009-11-22T08:38:00.003-06:00

I just got facebook friended by Keith Linton. I encountered his multimedia (often acrylic, plastic, and canvas) work a few years ago and really liked it. There was one piece in particular, Mindstream, that stuck out in my mind. I had a postcard of it in front of me while later attending a lecture by Carol Mayor on Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the two media (four media?) started to mix and mingle in my head, the flashes of Hiroshima imagery on Powerpoint, the steady but dim image of Mindstream on the table in front of me. What resulted was a poem called "Hiroshima Mindstream," which never made it into the ekphrastic journals but was included in my second chapbook, Riff Raff, which consists solely of poems based on other works - paintings, poems, graffiti, movies, etc. The poem is below, and to see Keith's piece, visit his website and go to the works section (Mindstream is in the first column, third row).

Hiroshima Mindstream

One side of the canvas is lying

No line recovers so smoothly

So quickly

After this multicolored devastation

Babble of Hiroshimatic Japanese

An instant overflown

From 31,000 feet the impact site is small as a marble, or the bomb is small as a marble, or the marble flattens and expands to cover the ground in glass, a Borgesian map of its own destruction

Cobblestones become Venice

Pompeii streets fused with soles

This is not the roundness of a marble

No karma, no chakra

This is the door burst as the eyes of a woman looking at Little Boy

The floor fallen away as the jaw of a boy radiated, all teeth and roof of mouth and too soon this roof too will rot

Encapsulation shifts impossible as

skin bubbles and organs no longer hold

their place

Not sciomancy but anthropomancy

This is the memory betrayed

Memory recognizing itself in broken mirrors, recognizing the mirrors are not really broken

Perhaps this is not a lie

Perhaps I need it to be a lie

Community and Individual

2009-11-19T17:30:00.003-06:00

If you're a college professor who has never mandated that your students meet with you individually at least once during the semester for a significant amount of time (say, at least 20 minutes), you should try it. Once a semester, I'll cancel class for the week and meet with each of my students in half-hour blocks. I usually try to schedule this such that we can discuss the most difficult project of the semester. In a composition course, that's the third one, wherein they identify/contextualize a problem in their local communities and offer a solution to said problem. In literature, it's an earlier paper, generally because I introduce literary theory (e.g. Feminism, Marxism, Structuralism) at a pretty early point. In creative writing, it depends on my feel for the class - things tend to be more fluid in my creative writing courses than the others, and I try in any course to react to the needs of my students.

As far as the writing projects are concerned, the sessions are always helpful. I have the opportunity to ask pointed questions and really get individuals thinking in new ways that aren't impossible but are more difficult in the classroom. I can tailor my critiques to their personalized grammars/styles, their topics. Those who are afraid to raise their hands in class to request clarification are always willing to do so in a one-on-one situation. It's good for the paper, which is good for the grading as well (for those of you wondering if it's worth the extra effort up front).

Just as importantly, I actually get a feel for what my students want to do with their lives. I'm not taking this route as strongly here at UNE as I did at Texas A&M, but it's still a question I ask. What does this person want to get out of my class? Out of college? Out of life? At A&M, much to my chagrin, the advisors were overworked and let too many students fall through the cracks. I remember talking to a senior in a CW class of mine who was actually interested in journalism. Nobody had suggested to this student to try getting an internship with the local paper. Nobody had suggested working with the school paper. Nobody had taken any interest other than to note that the journalism program had been disbanded earlier. Even at that stage, nobody suggested that perhaps transferring prior to senior year might have been the best course of action. They just shunted this student into English classes because, hey, it's all language-based, right? That's wrong. UNE is small enough that I don't see the same problem happening. I'm also reticent to jump in before I understand the culture here more thoroughly. But really, somebody should be asking these young men and women to examine their dreams, not just dream them. That's part of what we do.

As my wife puts it - we encourage critical thinking, creativity, and communication. I add to that community, of which we are a part. Sometimes we best find out place in the community by interacting as individuals.

The applicability game

2009-11-14T11:35:00.004-06:00

There's water on the Moon.

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In related news, I just finished submitting manuscripts to the Bakeless and Yale Younger Series competitions.

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In unrelated news, the feature at Stone Church was great.

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In related-to-that news, no video or audio was recorded, which is probably for the best, given my inter-poem banter. I'm not sure that one family will ever be the same...

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In unrelated news, my dad is on business in China for a few days. We're trying out Skype. I'm liking it so far, much better than telephones.

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In related-to-China news, got a new Monsterpocalypse piece, Gakura:

Yes, that's a giant ape wielding a passenger train as a flail. I love this game.

Last feature for a while

2009-11-10T14:02:00.002-06:00

I'm featuring tonight at the Zion Hill Reading Series at Stone Church in Newmarket, NH. This will be the longest set I've had outside of classroom performances at high schools and universities - a full forty-five minutes. I plan to do the 30-minute set I did at the Cantab, Poets' Asylum, and Got Poetry, plus a Russian fairy tale that I've heard as "The Soldier and Death" but which I change up a bit and call "The Wanderer." There may be some time for an improv or two as well. I'm excited.

With any luck, the whole thing will be recorded (both audio and video). If there's video, expect me to try to turn this into a (relatively inexpensive) DVD in the near future. If there's just audio, expect tracks to appear over the next few weeks for free.

Stubby on Deck

2009-11-03T10:21:00.007-06:00

Stubby has figured out how to jump up onto the table on our deck. He feels bigger up there, which is appropriate, since he thinks he's about twice his actual size. Or so I imagine based on his desire to wrestle with dogs that tower over him (note: wrestle, not actually fight). Apple figured out how to get on the table after watching Stubby, but I don't think she feels bigger. She actually thinks she's about half her size, based on how she always goes through the smaller of two spaces when weaving around legs and such. She's also afraid of the digital camera, so no photos of her up there.

Time and Space: Enjambment

2009-11-01T13:16:00.004-06:00

I've commented before on this blog regarding time and space, how the primary dimension of performance poetry is time and the primary dimension of written poetry is space. In looking at long poems and poetic sequences with a strong visual element, I'm coming to revise that statement.

The long poem traditionally exists primarily in time. It consists of a narrative, which is a temporal device, moving along through events in a (generally) chronological order. If events are taken out of the time sequence, these sections are marked off as being a speech or song or flashback or otherwise made easily comprehensible within that boundary that is time. It also traditionally falls back on meter, which is a more blatant temporal device. Meter creates effects over time, whether actually out loud or in the reader's head.

The visual poem exists primarily in space. It exists on various parts of the page at once and must be negotiated not with regard to proper meter or narrative, but a piecing together that can happen at any pace whatsoever. The obvious incarnations of the visual poem, then, are creations of folks like Apollinaire, The Futurists, Cummings, and the concretists of the latter half of the 20th Century.

There are less obvious poems that ought to be called visual, though, and which blend these two states. diluvium strives for both spacial and temporal recognition. But consider any long poem that features enjambment. To enjamb is to assume a reader, not a listener. It is to force that reader back in space, not just in time. And yet the overall narrative, this being a long poem, pushes forward. This is truly hybrid work, asking us to use two very different areas of the brain. What is the first narrative poem ever to use enjambment? I don't know. I'd like to know. Google is pretty useless on this end, so someone smart out there should feel free to chime in.

Working under this concept, can I open the door to calling any of the consciously-different long poems visual ones as well? Is Whitman in the door, at least in the 1855 Leaves of Grass, because he intentionally printed the poems with their full, long lines? He published the subsequent editions with the lines shortened on the page, so that despite the preserved meter of his voice, the effect on the reader (not listener) is distinct. Do I call The Waste Land a visual poem, with its free verse ranging not through meter but through line breaks? Is it a visual poem only in contrast with the typical long poems that precedes it (do we notice its form only because that form is so different than its contemporaries and forebears)? And if the break with prior assumptions is necessary to the visual, are free verse long poems today no longer truly visual, since we've accustomed ourselves to viewing them? Do I call Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette a visual poem despite her explicit effort to create a new meter because said meter is cordoned off by the visual device "of constant" "quotation marks around" "phrases?"

Remains

2009-10-28T17:59:00.003-05:00

For those of you who are still reading/subscribing:

1. My computer died in early November. I've been borrowing a laptop, but haven't bothered to post here on it. I now have a new laptop of my very own, an HP dv4t, and I'll return to posting. Expect updates on

2. Poetry. diluvium is getting a thorough vetting by my chair right now. I'm not going to comment on that process, as I consider it something to be kept between my advisor and myself. But poetry and the editing process is definitely on my mind of late.

2b. Poetry. It's about time I start weighing in seriously on the prose/scholarly portion of my diss. I've had thoughts tumbling around for a while now, but have concentrated my efforts on the creative section. No more (or at least not to the exclusion of the scholarly stuff). Might as well put some of those thoughts up here while I'm working through them.

3. Also expect my thoughts, whether you wanted them or not, on Windows 7. I don't have it installed yet, but a free copy is coming because of the timing of my laptop purchase. I'd gotten quite used to Linux Mint, so switching back to Vista has been odd. Good news - I don't have to hack into my own iPod Touch anymore (i.e. I can run iTunes again, though I miss Amarok 1.4). Bad news - It's slower than Linux Mint. Good news - the Search option isn't as powerful as Gnome-Do (i.e. it doesn't learn which programs, folders, and files I access most often), but it's actually finding all my files correctly this time. Bad news - need to get used to fewer customization options again.

Music of the moment: Woodchopper's Ball by Woody Herman. "Blue Flame" and "Goosey Gander" are awesome. "Blue Flame" especially.

Enough Rope

2009-10-01T07:06:00.002-05:00

I am, as I always am at this stage, a little worried about my classes. It's not undue worry, and it's not unexpected worry, but it's there. It's anticipation, excitement, concern all rolled up into one ball that will be released beginning Friday.

Their first papers are due that day, and some of them only had a paragraph (or less) written by Wednesday. This is not necessarily a problem. In fact, I'm a bit of an oddity among composition teachers I know in that I don't require an outline, then an annotated bibliography, then a draft, then everything along with a final draft in a portfolio, with each step being graded. I offer most of these steps along the way in some form, but I know that students write in very different ways. Drafting an outline is not guaranteed to be helpful, and I hate busywork in college classes. Annotated bibliographies were the bane of my existence as an undergrad, and yet they're useful for some people to organize. Instead of requiring these elements for a grade, I build in a day on which my students share with the class what information they've found so far and where they seem to be going with it. It's an informal sharing, but one that allows students

A) to find out if anyone is working on a similar project and thereby collaborate on resources
B) to practice some oral communication
C) to have a soft due date that pushes them more gently towards completion

I also build in a day on which students do group revisions, partnering up to read another person's paper aloud to that person, trading papers to look very specifically at punctuation, at evidence, at theses, at spelling, etc. Their grades will not suffer automatically if they don't have much done for that day, but it definitely benefits anyone who brings as much as possible.

For the first paper, students (freshmen especially) don't always realize the benefits. They know that their papers are not due until Friday, that there is plenty of time, that perhaps instead they'll concentrate on a biology exam. They're still thinking in high school terms, that the stick is more powerful than the carrot, to react to negative pressure instead of proactively pursuing positive feedback.

Every time I do this, I end up being pleasantly surprised by a few papers that turn out wonderfully despite having been written the night before. It's silly, but if they can make that work, I don't begrudge them. Every time I do this, I'm a little bit saddened by papers that have decent ideas but really needed another few drafts to become good. I've warned them, but it won't be real until they see their grades in about a week. As usual, some will take it in stride. Some will change their work ethic about college as a whole, which is my favorite reaction. Some will wonder why grading got so "unfair" between high school and college, which is my least favorite reaction. Most will reflect on how they went about the paper, and that's part of the lesson, too.

A moment of crisis

2009-09-22T18:06:00.001-05:00

Vis a vis diluvium

My heart is a modernist one. I like thinking all this knowledge will do me good some day, that Noah and his wife are on a trajectory that leads them to enlightenment, that all the languages of the world can swirl around each other into one clear symbol, that there is a (G)god who responds to the prayers of two people alone on an ark. My mind is a postmodernist one. I end up thinking that, as I put it in another poem, “knowledge is merely that / which is forgotten,” that Noah and his wife will end up landing in the New World and starting the events of El Oceano y La Serpiente all over again (or perhaps it will be one of the ships they create from their wants that lands on that shore and destroys the Aztecs or whoever it is in that dimension), that all the languages of the world swirl around each other and just create more language, that (G)god doesn't get his/her/its/their own font and is therefore everything and nothing in this poem from the very beginning.

Can I have both? Can I?

Are you looking for a song?

2009-09-19T13:16:00.002-05:00

If you're a songwriter looking for a quirky love song, I've had this chorus bouncing around in my head for a few months. I've got verses to go with it, but am holding all but the first back as bargaining chips.

Verse 1, part 1

I was always straight-laced

You always liked to follow a plan

I was brought up in a flow-chart faith

You were brought up at your father's right hand

Chorus

We said we'd just get a little stoned...

Next thing you're wakin' up next to me

And I'm wakin' up in Mexico

Two Steps Forward...

2009-09-15T09:11:00.003-05:00

Sometimes as a professor you have a good idea. Sometimes it's a really good idea. And sometime the version of that idea that you've used successfully in one place simply doesn't hold up in another. That doesn't mean getting rid of the baby and the bathwater, just admitting to a class that you have to re-tailor an assignment.

In this particular case:

At Texas A&M, I always began a composition class with a research assignment. Visit the university archives and find an event or tradition, give it a context, and offer a brief argument as to why a current student should know what you now know. It played particularly well at A&M, given the culture of tradition there, but I stand by my thoughts that it should work at any institution of higher learning. This is the first time (most likely) in a student's career that s/he has chosen where to learn. By that very fact, some part of the student's identity is wrapped up in the university's identity, either aligned or opposed. Finding out about your college or university is finding out about yourself. It also means working with primary materials, not just going online and bopping around until you get something that looks kindasorta helpful. There's a respect for the material, for libraries, that comes from working with old things. When you look at a photograph that's 70 years old, it's very different than looking at a copy of that photograph in a textbook. Finally, it teaches students how to work with librarians, one of the most helpful things I teach them in the entire class. Librarians are a sorrowfully underused resource, and often a maligned one. I want my students to respect them, to learn from them, and to use the help they so gladly offer in most cases.

This semester, my first at UNE, I wanted my students to do the same kind of research. I met with the archivist at the Westbrook College History Collection, Bobby Gray, and worked out some meeting times. We talked about potential research topics. Everything fell into place quite nicely. Then came the first couple of days of class, and the discovery that most freshmen here don't have cars. The WCHC is about a 35-minute drive from the Biddeford campus where I teach. I tried to arrange carpooling. It started, then stalled. I tried to access a student driver or drivers and a university van or vans. On such short notice, it was going to be very aggravating. In short, this field trip, and the subsequent individual/small group research trips, not going to happen.

I found an alternative in town. There is a free bus that runs very close to the McArthur Library in downtown Biddeford, which also contains archival materials. The librarians there have offered their assistance to all 40 of my students (in fact, they seem overjoyed that we'll be taking advantage of the collection). The assignment will be modified, but should still benefit my students in most of the ways I want it to.

Now I just go into class on Wednesday and tell them all of this. I don't mind setbacks - it gives me a chance to talk about them. I'm very open about my pedagogy in class, often explaining precisely why I do something, and if something doesn't work, explaining to the class why I think it failed. No matter what, there are valuable lessons to be extracted here. Given that the overall theme of the first quarter of class is "context," my misunderstanding of the context of UNE (transportation-wise) should be a lesson in and of itself.

In case you Google your professors

2009-09-10T09:35:00.003-05:00

Dear ENGL110 Students,

As I mentioned in class and an email, I'm going to push you fast and hard. Composition is not just throwing words on a page and hoping they stick; it's an entire mindset. That's what we're going to learn this semester - how to find the best possible mindset for yourself during your college career and how best to express that mindset through (primarily) words.

That being said...

I threw a lot at you on Wednesday. It was certainly more than most of you expected, and likely more than most of your other professors did. We didn't even get to meet each other properly, just dove into exercises and expectations. We'll fix that to a certain extent on Friday. If you haven't played Apples to Apples before, you're in for a treat. It's a good icebreaker game, a way to get to know people in a wholly unusual manner. It's also a good time to start practicing your argumentation skills, with little on the line but others' initial impressions of you (which is, of course, a lot). The lesson won't be a throwaway one, but it will pay dividends slowly over the course of the semester.

Be ready. Have fun.

Providence, Post Office, Publish, Perish

2009-09-02T10:26:00.005-05:00

Thanks to the crowd at Blue State Coffee for a nice show last night. Witty hosting by Tony Brown and Ryk McIntyre. It was also good seeing Megan Thoma, Mike McGee, and David Perez read again. If you want to laugh your butt off, Megan's featuring later this month. I'll put up info when I have the exact date. If you want somebody else roaming the lines between slam and academia (in this case an MFA), check out David Perez tonight at the Cantab or Friday in Manchester.

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I'm about to send out a lot of stuff.

I've been bad in the last year about submitting work. I've been concentrating so much of my energy on producing that I've forgotten about the whole publish/perish dichotomy, which is especially important since I'm going on the job market this year. I look around at some of the MFA grads with whom I'll be competing and know that I'm competitive as far as total publication records go. I'm no Seth Abramson, in all the named journals (and probably never will be), but I've got a few decent journals under my belt and three chapbooks through real publishers. diluvium will of course be the big shot this time around, and I'm sending it to the major first-book contests: Yale Younger Series, Whitman, Bakeless, etc. But I'm also pulling out the individual poems that have until now been serving as fodder for the ocean in diluvium and sending them out to journals. I've gotten positive responses on them from some poets I greatly respect (and who would both know good stuff when they saw it and not BS me about whether or not what I'd just shown them was so). We'll see how the readers react. As usual, my big problem will be choosing work. That is:

I'm one of the few poets I know who doesn't quite have a shtick. Whether it's performance or written work, I write a wide range of material. On the one hand, it's great when you see it all together. These sets that I've performed at Worcester, the Cantab, and Providence have been like one-man variety shows in a sense. I've written before about The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series and how it forms a spectrum of Icarus poetry. But when I just have to choose 3-5 poems to send off to a journal, I get a bit lost. Do I choose the ones that have similar themes? Similar styles? Do I try to show off range and therefore pick three very different poems? Grouping by style is usually the safest bet, as the journals I've seen tend to choose this way. And yet it chafes me. That's another reason I haven't submitted much lately - it hurts to break pieces apart instead of letting them build up into a greater effect. It also hurts to say several things that are all very close to each other (though I suspect my "very" might be "somewhat" for others).

If you've read any of my stuff in the past year and have suggestions of places I can submit to, let me know. In the meantime, I'll be going through back issues, looking for similarities in style, and sometimes comparing to Jeffery Bahr's Publication Ranking list. I prefer to submit to places that I think look good, which is not to say I'm being shallow, but that I particularly like journals that have a coherent aesthetic that extends even to the production of said journal. I have to admit that some of my submissions this time around, however, will be based on the reputation of the journal, deserved or not.

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Lastly, I'll likely be blogging a bit more this month. Ironic, given that I'm starting an adjunct professorship at the University of New England as well as continuing work on my dissertation. If I'm going to have less time, I might as well have drastically less time.

MIT Tongues

2009-08-23T13:55:00.003-05:00

The other week I went to the MIT Museum. There was some great stuff, and even an exhibit that will be useful for my dissertation, amazingly enough (the folks involved produced visual "poetry" like 2D busts formed by terms used in a blog). My top takeaway for the day was a child's contribution to the "Wall of Ideas" in the second floor robotics area. While most other children had drawn some kind of boxy robot equipped with laser beams or nigh-magical rocket boosters or some other kind of high-flying-no-practicality inventions, this child had simply written, in all capitals, "TODAS LAS LENGUAS!!"

Much Love for the Cantab

2009-08-20T21:14:00.004-05:00

In case anybody from the Cantab comes across this blog as a result of buying my chapbook or Googling me or Facebook linking or whatever: thank you for an awesome night. You laughed when I hoped you'd laugh. You went dead silent when I hoped you'd be listening. You played along with any requests I had. You multiplied my efforts. You were, in short, an ideal audience, and I was so glad to have been there from the beginning of the open mic to the end of the slam that followed my set. Thank you.

Capital Fs

2009-08-12T21:24:00.002-05:00

Yes, I capitalize the Fs in JeFF. I do this in publications (journals and chapbooks, even in my one scholarly publication so far), on my syllabuses, when signing off to family members in a letter or email. Sooner or later folks ask about those capitals. I've got three reasons.

1. The capital Fs were spawned from the way I make my signature. It looks like the Fs are uppercase, which is just a quirk of my writing. But a gentleman by the name of John Greenwood started printing them capitalized in a writing workshop we took as undergraduates.

2. I liked the look. There's a balance to JeFF Stumpo that I don't find in Jeff Stumpo. Somehow the weight at the beginning just looks right to me.

3. It makes people ask. On the downside, somebody might wonder if I made a typo in my own name. That's a rare event, as the two capitals make it appear pretty darn intentional. It's silly and vapid, but it gets me a second look from time to time. Sometimes (submitting poetry without a guardian angel comes to mind) that's needed.

Sorry that the story doesn't involve going through demon trials to upgrade the letters of my name one at a time, and if only I can defeat seven dancing genii by midnight tomorrow I'll get all the letters capitalized. Or a horrific typewriter error at the hospital when I was born, the ramifications of which later trickled into the internet and the untold millions who can't type properly. Or that time I was approached by [insert famous artist/musician/puppeteer here] who granted me a new name in exchange for one of my poems.

Signing off,
JeFF

Set List

2009-08-10T12:50:00.003-05:00

If you saw me last night at the warm and welcoming Poets' Asylum in Worcester, this is the set list you heard. If you're going to see me at the Cantab on August 19 or at GotPoetry! Live on September 1, this is the list you'll hear*. I really like how it turned out - it has a progression (with the exception of the first poem) from simple to complex performance. That is to say, the pieces get more and more involved in terms of motion, tone of voice, use of persona, etc. It really lets the audience slowly build up into the complicated pieces, all the while bouncing back and forth between serious and silly so as not to overwhelm with one tenor. All told, the set lasts about half an hour (give or take a couple of minutes depending on improvised banter between a few poems, but I try to go from one to the next without much interruption).

Vom Kriege
Icarus comes in first
Icarus applies for a grant from the DoD
in absentia
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi...
Love After Marriage
Mother Earth
[scheduled banter about truth in poetry]
Esteban Peicovich and the Theory of Relativity
Wooden Boys and Deadlier Toys
[option for There will be no reinvention of the wheel depending on the audience]
Sign of the Turtle
ADD TV

*If you go see me at the Zion Hill Reading in November, you won't hear this list. Instead I'll be telling a Russian fairy tale for about 20 minutes.

Smooth, Not Criminal?

2009-07-31T13:14:00.004-05:00

Most of the poetry in diluvium is my own. All of the central 8-line poems are original, and the vast majority of the lines in the surrounding ocean are either created specifically for this sequence or adapted from other poems of mine. There are, however, some exceptions that I fear may cause me trouble later on.

I quote from a huge variety of sources, anything from two to eight lines: song lyrics, poetry, computer error messages, scholarly works. At the end of the sequence, I plan to include a Waste Land style set of endnotes: On page x, the lines that begin with y come from source z. In no way, shape, or form do I wish to plagiarize, just collage.

I've recently become concerned about the different between plagiarism (which is readily solved by providing credit where credit is due) and fair use (which is concerned with protecting the use of exact words, whether or not credit is provided). That is to say, if dreams come true, and diluvium gets published, can the poets and bands I crib from come after me for using their lines without permission, in a context they didn't approve?

I'm already starting to write some of the poets, some of whom I've met and will probably be OK with the project. Some are dead, but their works are still under copyright. Some are so big (e.g., U2) that I'll never hear anything regarding permission to use the lines until there's actually a book coming out. I'm going to let large fish and dead fish (who are large by virtue of being controlled by publishers more than individuals) get fried by the publisher, whoever that is, when the time comes.

Anyone out there do a lot of collage work and/or a lot of quoting and have any advice? Am I just being paranoid, since nobody comes after poets for this kind of thing anyway? Am I just being nice, since I might not really have to (by virtue of being under the radar) but choose to tell the people I'm quoting?

Another diluvium sneak peak

2009-07-29T08:13:00.002-05:00

I'm realizing that I don't so much mind putting samples of diluvium up here. As I learned with El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent and The Icarus Sketches, people react quite strongly (in a good way) to the finished sequence, but very few journals are willing to touch the individual poems. Here's a draft of Noah's wife on page 19, fretting about the rut they've gotten themselves into:

The Legacy You Never Expect

2009-07-23T09:50:00.004-05:00

So...

When I wrote El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent, I was writing for people fifty years from now. I was trying to do something that hadn't been done and that, if it had gotten any serious press, would have caused people to redefine their conceptions of bilingual texts. Ambitious, a bit cocky, but remember that A) I was only 22-23 and B) really, you couldn't find facing, symmetrical texts in two languages that were not translations but antitheses. I've since seen something approaching that idea, but it's still unique. Any exceptions, please tell me about them.

Almost nobody knows about it.

I'm now writing diluvium, and I want it to last for at least fifty years. I definitely haven't seen anyone combine accessible and difficult and traditional and visual poetries in this way, and I'm actively searching. The closest I can get to what I'm doing visually is Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission, and that's straight-up difficult work.

I fear nobody will know about it.

Which brings me to a creation of mine that I devised in January 2006. A creation which still lives on in name and spirit, having spawned three or four or more message board threads containing literally thousands of posts. Not all of them directly relate to this creation, but the "old-timers" on the boards still talk of it.

I'm talking about Krede the Mighty.

In January 2006, Wizards of the Coast held a dragon-making contest. You, the readers and players, design a dragon. We'll take our x favorites and put them head to head, letting visitors to our website vote for the winner each week. Almost everybody was coming up with really complicated, high-level dragons that nonetheless didn't really spark. There was creation, but not much creativity.

So I decided to introduce a dragon who had been cursed into the form of a duck. I decided that he would always remain in character and, as per one of the grand rules of improv, always play along with what others were doing to him with one exception: he could never actually gain real "power." I determined that this was because the curse was not specifically to turn him into a duck, but to warp magic around him such that it took the most embarrassing form possible. Thus, an attempt to grow him to his normal size resulted in only his butt getting bigger (and launching a remix of Sir-Mix-A-Lot). When somebody happily played along with Krede, imprisoning him in a Forcecage, I began a series of faux-Civil-War-style missives, at which point even more players began writing to and about Krede, inventing factions and skullduggery in the upcoming contest. Someone went so far as to make an entire thread called Krede's Pond wherein the activities could be continued. Then that thread got too big, so we made Krede's Cafe. Then someone opened Krede's Tavern. Which was followed by similar threads (which invoked Krede by name). The Pond and Cafe have been lost to the recesses of the internet, I think, which is actually a pity.

All I'm saying is, it's entirely possible that more people know about Krede the Mighty than about my poetry. The later threads (from Cafe to Tavern and beyond) went hundreds of pages, with dozens of participants (myself participating less and less as others stepped up with interesting personae). There's a part of me that's really amused by that fact. There's a part of me that is telling my dissertation-writing self to just get a dayjob and write fantasy, because obviously I did something right. There's another part of me that's kind of sad. There's a part of me that realizes that Krede's postmodern sense of humor is already part of my poetry. And there's another part of me that just wants to lay the quack down on somebody.

I'll let you know when I decide.

A Neon Icarus, An Old New Date

2009-07-17T16:04:00.002-05:00

The cover image for The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus series is now viewable at the Seven Kitchens Press blog. Instructions for pre-ordering (it hits at the end of the month) are available there as well.

Oh heck, I'll put up the image, too:

Again, this is an accordion-fold chapbook, so you can read through my poems, turn it over, and keep going with Crystal's (or vice versa), hence the double cover.

---

I just rescheduled my appearance in Providence, RI. I'll be at Blue State Coffee September 1st. Check the sidebar for times and links and so forth.

OE

2009-07-16T09:47:00.003-05:00

Anyone out there remember their Old English rules better than I do?

I'm trying to make the smallest of adjustments to Caedmon's Hymn for part of the ocean in diluvium.

It currently reads:

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard,
ece Drihten, or onstealde,
heofon to hrofe, [eth]a middangeard,
abieteende

Which in contemporary English would go something like

Now we must praise heaven-kingdom's Guard,
eternal Lord, the beginning established,
heaven as roof, then middle-earth,
breaking [with implication of storms]

I'm also thinking about replacing "or onstealde" with the bit from the line below, "He aerst sceop" (He first made), which is a bit better sensewise even as it discards the alliteration.

I got Cs and Bs in my OE and Beowulf courses due to trying to create good poetry instead of laser-accurate translations, but I don't want to totally botch this one. Any help is appreciated.

Small news, Big news

2009-07-08T09:51:00.004-05:00

Small news: Taught my first class at Hesser College in Concord last night. Structuralism as it applies to the detective story, and how structuralism might pop up in their non-literary lives as well. Good group of students. They didn't freak out at seeing how fast and far I'm going to try to take them (I believe in pushing hard and rewarding students for it).

Big news: My brother gets married on Saturday. Need to prepare best man remarks. I'll be away-from-blog, but may have photos to post when I get back. Hooray!

Revolutions, Roleplaying, Reverse-psychology

2009-07-05T15:06:00.005-05:00

A belated Happy Independence Day to those of you celebrating it. Here's my day-after sketch, whilst thinking in the backyard about revolutions:

---

A bit I'm incorporating into diluvium from the smartest role-playing game ever devised, Nobilis. Most RPGs have what's called flavor text, wherein the quantitative component of the game is expressed in more qualitative terms. For something like Dungeons & Dragons, you'd get something like: "Rekzor advanced and smote the goblin on the head with his glowing mace (critical hit with mace +1). Nobilis has flavor text like this:

Once, a man was so well-liked that he set the fields ablaze and the peasants didn't mind.

Then he killed all the animals, gave his folk dust to eat, and they didn't mind.

Then he dirtied the water with blood from his wars, and they didn't mind.

Then they tortured him slowly to death on the Stone Wheel, and when his heirs asked the peasants why, they said, "We thought he liked that sort of thing."

Or, the lines I'm putting into diluvium:

8. Lady Urvasi and Lady Iya stood at the entrance to Hell. "I am strong," said Urvasi. "I can survive the worst torments of this place."

9. Lady Iya said, "You are strong; but is that strength an asset, here?"

How often do you get a game that lets you argue serious philosophical points not as a sidebar, but as one of the primary goals of the experience? It's like a living Sandman comic.

---

Lines from my spoken-word/performance piece "Zahir," which will end up on the same page as the hell bit from Nobilis:

Don't think of a tiger.
Don't picture the black and orange stripes undulating through tall grass.
Don't image the huge pads silent as the new moon, the low rumble of thunder in the lungs, the electricity in the sinews that precedes the rush and clutch, the chaotic tumble, the crunch of a dead deer's vertebrae.

In which I do a little dance

2009-06-30T09:37:00.002-05:00

Just got offered a class in Mystery Writing and the Detective Story at Hesser College in Concord, NH. Tuesday/Thursday evenings. I have to reschedule my featured poet gigs in Portland and Providence, but both venues are being cool about it, you know, recession and all.

A Wall

2009-06-25T13:29:00.002-05:00

Since my last post advocated multiple points of entry into a book, I figured it made the most sense to put up a less-than-forthcoming freewrite (i.e. a wall):

growling & muzzled, grizzled & feckless
composed of right angles behaving obtusely
lie dreaming or convey simply falsehoods goldenlocks
nightblack in the fountain we drew on our intestines
jack ketch caught hell and headless drowned
decomposing Mozart flackjacketed sonatas
last notes for meal and missive the lines bid goodbye
guitar strings unstrung themselves & bestial lit the cosmos

Accessible like a Building

2009-06-23T09:14:00.003-05:00

First off, go read the post and conversation called "Accessibilty or Crass Commercialism?" over at John Gallaher's blog.

Second, go check out Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. It's a book on architecture, and it will cause you to adjust your expectations for collections of poetry. How?

Alexander and his team studied the way in which buildings are constructed in various cultures and came up with a set of guidelines, patterns, that best captured things we culturally need. There are patterns like "light on two sides of a room" that reveal why apartments with one small window (or even one medium window that only casts light from one direction) are disturbing to us, creating deep shadows that prevent the reading of faces. There is an admonishment to connect town centers by walkable streets that curve or fork rather than long straight lines, as the former keep the mind occupied on possibility rather than give the impression of interminable length.

A Pattern Language has been adopted by computer programmers for its metaphorical applications to coding and design, and I attempt to follow it, to a certain extent, regarding the construction of a collection of poetry. I specifically refer to the idea of layered entrances into a home or other building. To immediately go from the street to a bedroom or the office of a president of a company is jarring - too quickly we have to shift our expectations from public to private, in all connotations thereof. Instead, the most comforting homes and businesses are the ones that provide a covered entry, a foyer, a general gathering space, and a series of more private spaces.

This advice is rarely followed in collections of poetry. We are thrown headlong into a volume with only a cover (which, if done well, does provide a good entry) and a block of poems that are very much like each other. It is rare to find an introduction, unless said introduction is made (briefly) by a judge in a prizewinning volume. These introductions rarely do the work of decoding, either, instead taking their time to offer more praise for the poet, acting as an extended blurb rather than a place to clean off one's shoes and prepare for the type of poetry to be encountered. It is even more rare to have poems ramp up in difficulty/expectations on the reader, offering an easier/more accessible first portion (the public gathering space) before leading off into more complex/personal/experimental/whatever spaces later in the volume.

The handful of works I pointed out to John as examples of volumes/performances that do provide an accessible-like-a-building structure, at least to some extent: Ed Dorn's Languedoc Variorum, the Collected Poems of EE Cummings, the performances of Flying Words. I'd also add, in hindsight, Shakepeare's plays to that list. My list is sadly short of female poets and poets of color at the moment. Some of that is due to my own reading discrepancy (which is not to say I lack for examples of good writing from these categories, but of writing that specifically addresses the topic of the post). Suggestions are more than welcome.

Time to Pre-order

2009-06-19T09:38:00.003-05:00

I just got the proof copy of The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series in the mail yesterday. This volume is going to rock. It's accordion-fold, so if you open it from one side, it's my poems. If you open it from the other, it's Crystal's poems. There's a huge variety of material despite everything being about Icarus, so you should consider assigning it to your class if you're teaching Intro to Creative Writing in the Fall (hint hint).

I'll add photos of the actual construction and cover image once those get sorted out in a working copy. In the meantime, here are sample poems from Crystal and me - if you like what you read even a little bit, head over to Seven Kitchens and tell Ron you'd like to be on the pre-order list (instructions in his sidebar). It's going to be an absolute steal at only $7.

2 poems from JeFF:

Icarus Comes in First

Ten years old and quick as light,
Icarus races downhill to victory
in the annual soapbox derby, the result
of late nights in his father's workshop,
but not his work. He decides the next year
to dabble in physics, something about gravity,
and gives up science after winning
the Fair. He develops and discards
interest in woodworking, car repair,
loses patience when the lines he produces
for sophomore Art are not the perfect
proportions of an engineer, sputters
excuses for undone math assignments,
Ariadne's panties, and the picture of a white
bull in his dresser drawer, wrecks
the car, steals from Minos, spends
a night in jail. Atop the school,
he spreads the wings his father made,
steps to the edge and leaps -
racing gravity and Daedalus downhil,
all on his own, quick as light,
and winning.

Icarus Interviews Orville

I: Were you close?
O: Wilbur and me? Closer than any brothers you'd ever meet. We even married sisters.
I: I mean to the sun.
O: Well, I was only ten feet off the ground that first time.
I: Did you feel the heat?
O: It was December.
I: ...
O: Wilbur had the most controlled flight - 853 feet.
I: ...
O: Of course, it wasn't our only attempt.
I: ...
O: ...
[Interviewer leaves]
O: Yes, in all my veins, I felt it.

A poem from Crystal:

III : : Hubris

the boy was of boxsprings
born of a lighthouse he knows
that you live not by birds alone
that watching is a tongue that flies

One clear note

2009-06-16T11:29:00.002-05:00

You may or may not have noticed the weeklong break. Been productive. Here's a rare share, two central poems from diluvium. These are part of a conversation that represents a pivoting moment. Noah's wife has begun to leave her depression, having realized that she can take control of her own life. Noah is still in the doldrums, and these two poems are the part of the conversation where she says something that finally gets him to realize that he, too, has the power to endure.

It's the hitting,
not the bottom,
that hurts, mistakes
cause for symptom.

I was wrong.
Go below.
Put your pain
in one clear note.

This moment, incidentally, contradicts an earlier, snarkier note from her that said nobody goes into the underbelly of the ark in order to create art, but to shovel shit. She then spends her own alone time down there and does in fact come to a realization (for which you'll have to wait for the book). Now she can both apologize and stand over Noah on real terms.

Been singin' Blues all this time.
Yes, I been singin' Blues all this time.
Baby, I been singin' Blues all this time
and it never crossed my mind

that the Blues ain't all
about lack.
Singin' blue means you
ain't faded to black.

I've been working on various song lyrics in my head over the past few months, and it's really unfortunate that I'm tone deaf. Some of them are funny ("We said we'd just get a little stoned... / Next thing you're wakin' up next to me, / and I'm wakin' up in Mexico"), some are not. I've been listening to a lot of Blues, which is a useful lyrical format for diluvium, tight-packed with witty wordplay in the best of it. I'm not sure if I'll have to go back now and make Noah more of a Bluesman throughout.

"The difference between the font of 20% more

2009-06-08T10:07:00.003-05:00

and the font of... Teriyaki / You tell me / How does it make you feel?"

Opening with an Ani DiFranco quote makes me feel better about asking a favor of you, dear readers. I'm making good progress on diluvium, and I've been reading the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman for inspiration. Not for the mythic quality, but because the lettering is really, really well done. Each character has a font and a word bubble that really expresses the qualities of that character well. The Endless in particular just match well with their fonts (not that it's quite a font, since everything is hand-lettered, but you get the idea).

The major characters/concepts in diluvium are to have their own types. Making the decisions on which ones to use is both a matter of economy (I can't afford to go buying fonts just for this) and theme. I don't want to have to label each page with the name of the speaker, and using different fonts for each voice seems the best way to go about that. With that in mind, I'm asking for suggested fonts for the following qualities:

1. Someone who is uncertain of and rightly offended by the place given her in the world, therefore she laughs a little too meanly and too readily at that world. This character will eventually find a new place for herself, one that is self-directed instead of handed down.

2. Someone who charges ahead, at first in terms of a vision that means ignoring what's around, later in terms of immediate feelings at the expense of a lost vision. This character will eventually slow down enough to really observe both immediate surroundings and long-term vision.

3. A tentative pairing or compromise between 1 and 2.

4. An inhuman view of the world, translated for our benefit but ultimately on its own terms.

5. An all-too-human view of the world, translated for our benefit but ultimately on its own terms.

Suggestions? Should I show you fonts I have available to me for free?

Why the 1856 Leaves of Grass is a better value than Wii Fit Plus

2009-06-02T12:23:00.004-05:00

Wii Fit Plus: 6 more yoga/strength exercises, 15 new minigames, for a total of 21 new items
Leaves of Grass: 20 more poems than 1855 edition, total number of new pages difficult to ascertain due to smaller size
Winner: Wii Fit Plus

Wii Fit Plus: Requires Nintendo Balance Board, which can be stowed neatly under a seat or leaned against a wall
Leaves of Grass: Fits in a large pocket, definitely in a purse, briefcase, or backpack
Winner: Leaves of Grass

Wii Fit Plus: Lets you imagine yourself Mario
Leaves of Grass: Lets you imagine yourself a kosmos
Winner: Leaves of Grass

Wii Fit Plus: Rowing, squats, downward dog, jackknife crunches, sun salutation, skateboarding, others
Leaves of Grass:

The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen
as he swims through the transparent green-
shine, or lies with his face up, and rolls
silently in the heave of the water,
The bending forward and backward of rowers in
row-boats, the horseman in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their per-
formances...
The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver
guiding his six horses through the crowd,
The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys,
quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born,
out on the vacant lot at sun-down, after work,
The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of
love and resistance,
The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled
over and blinding the eyes;
The march of firemen in their own costumes, the
play of masculine muscle through clean-set-
ting trowsers and waist-straps...

Winner: Leaves of Grass

Wii Fit Plus: Allows you to create exercise routines of 20, 30, or even 60 minutes
Leaves of Grass: Contains poetic sequences which can take well over an hour to read
Winner: Tie

Wii Fit Plus: No jumping on the Balance Board. No sex. Ever.
Leaves of Grass: Jump in the grass. "Jump" in the grass. "Jump" the grass itself, if that's your thing.
Winner: Leaves of Grass

Overall winner: Leaves of Grass

Touring at Last

2009-05-29T08:23:00.002-05:00

I should have gotten on this train back in Texas, but things just never fell into place. I did a lot of hometown organizing, but didn't get my own work out there as much as I could have. I'm trying to make up for lost time a bit and have been contacting various venues about performance/reading gigs in the Fall. So far I have features lined up in Portland, ME (July 14), Worcester, MA (August 9), Cambridge, MA (August 19), and Portsmouth, NH (August 20). These are all performance gigs. Once I get hold of an advance copy or two of The Icarus Sketches / on being crippled, I've got some independent bookstores who may toss traditional readings/book signings my way. Stay tuned - the complete list is over in the sidebar to the right.

Time Off

2009-05-21T13:56:00.002-05:00

I've been getting quite a bit of work done on my dissertation lately - am working on three to four drafts of poems each day, with one to two of those being likely to end up in the project. It's a good pace, and I don't want to distract myself from it too much. I'm taking a blog break for about week, so unless some kind of good news pops up that I can quickly note (upcoming gig, publication, etc), it'll be quiet here at A Piecemeal Poet(ry). If you're Following or have subscribed, it'll be easy to know when I start up again.

Frameworking Sorrow

2009-05-20T16:48:00.005-05:00

I try to never put joy into my poems. Wit, hilarity, amusement, bittersweetness, play, observation of some happiness at a distance - these can all appear. But never joy.

This is not a holdover from some teenage emotional period when all I felt was turbulence. I don't have some black/white conception that all the world is either horrible or wonderful. I do experience joy in my life, generally on a daily basis.

But to transcribe that joy is to limit it. It is to place boundaries around joy and say, "Here is where this has existed, where it can exist. Here is the moment, which I have now codified." I don't want to do that with my happiness. I want it to be blurred and shifting, dangerously/wondrously movable.

So when I write sad poems, or more often for me, poems of mixed and contrasting emotions, what I'm really doing is limiting my sorrow. I'm building a framework within which someone else can place their (preexisting) sadness.

Thoughts from those who write happy poems? Any sad-poem-writers who now have a theoretical framework to justify your productions?

Poetry (Jam) is Doomed

2009-05-18T09:08:00.002-05:00

From Scott Woods, former president of Poetry Slam, Inc, in reference to the recent "Poetry Jam" at the White House:

In fact, poets should be applauding that poetry is getting any attention at all at this level. That’s what some poets keep telling me anyway.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? We want our art form shared, but we want it to cover our agendas, not Def Poetry Jam’s (and by extension, Brave New Voices…which just sounds like louder, more cynical versions of the Tired Old Voices). We want voices that sound like ours, that tell stories other than the ones that slams and open mics have become sick with and made us easily lampooned. We want these instances to express our many senses of humor, not just our redundant pains. We want the world to see our exceptions that weren’t always exceptions. We want them to hear us emote with a whisper, not just a cracking and loud bluster.

Read the rest of this installment of Poetry is Doomed here.

Sentences with line breaks

2009-05-12T10:15:00.003-05:00

You hear/see that phrase get tossed around quite a bit, and it's generally code for "poorly-written narrative poetry." There's a general backlash against narrative in the current analogue to an avant-garde (I won't call it an actual avant-garde, as I suspect our postmodernity prevents a typical AG from occurring - the most AG productions these days would actually be reactionary ones). If there is to be narrative, it should be distrusting of itself and its own language. It should cancel itself out, suggest alternates to itself, or otherwise undermine the reader's attempt to make it linear/straight (puns intended).

I'm actually very much in favor of this approach, to a certain extent. Even as diluvium, for example, will unroll a narrative tale, all the seeds of that tale's dissolution are contained in the same pages (e.g. the second page has Noah and his wife thanking God for their new lives in language that evokes birth, while surrounding them are, among other lines, bits of Apollinaire's "Il pleut" that begins "it's raining women's voices as though they were dead even in memory").

What I don't like about the phrase "sentences with line breaks" however is the tacit assumption that if it is a sentence, it will be sensible/narrative/prosaic. I link you here to an excerpt from James Longenbach's The Art of the Poetic Line in which he tackles a series of lines/sentences from King Lear. Lear's madness is expressed through a series of sentences which, while remaining syntactically normal (i.e. the grammar all works), bounce crazily from subject to subject, tone to tone. By jamming the abnormal into a recognized framework, Shakespeare makes Lear's insanity even more disturbing, more postmodern, as it were, than if Lear were simply babbling syllables the entire time.

Longenbach's example is hundreds of years old, but let's not pretend that conceits we consider postmodern don't appear well before the 20th century (Beowulf and The Frogs, I'm looking at you).

I'm as annoyed as anyone (maybe even more so) when a so-called poem is just sentence after sentence with no real reason - there is no rhetorical building, no musicality, no jumbling of disparate subjects. But can we stop with the automatic dismissal of the sentence?

Oh the places you'll go

2009-05-11T11:08:00.004-05:00

A belated wrapup of blogs I was reading during National Poetry Writing Month, plus somebody saying really smart things that help newcomers (students of all ages) "get" poems:

Poeta y Diwata is the blog of Barbara Jane Reyes. She weighs in on a number of cultural events ranging from Filipino/a books to the recent Star Trek reboot. But during April, she had an ongoing sequence called "Poem: For the City that Nearly Broke Me," ultimately containing 12 parts. Go read.

Mairi's Secret Poems from the Times Literary Supplement is a wonderful project, taking a line or phrase or couple of sentences from the aforementioned periodical and using it/them to spark an entire poem. Her efforts continue into May, so continue to visit for new poems.

Mike Theune talks a lot about Structure and Surprise, centering in large part on the Turn, the necessary moment at which things shift in a poem. Visit his blog for micro-essays on specific poets and how the structure of their verse is as important as their word choice.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Barbara Jane let me know that her sequence is ongoing as well.

Calendar check

2009-05-06T13:13:00.002-05:00

I just added what I think to be the code such that you can add my upcoming events to your Google Calendar. Would somebody who uses that do me a favor and click the icon (or text) for Beat Night over in the sidebar and let me know if it works?

It's heeeeeere

2009-05-05T09:25:00.002-05:00

Mostly I've been working on diluvium over the past few days. Am feeling pretty good about a series of exchanges between Noah and his wife meant to question their identities. This is a conversation after they've gone through their rough patch and are reinventing themselves as both people and symbols. Among the questions they have to ask - would you love me were I someone else? A different color? A different sex? The answer here will be yes. I'm just trying to find words that are simultaneously poetic, clear, and convincing.

So the poetry is here. Still getting on the ark two by two (if only it were seven by seven), but here.

In the meantime, my guilty pleasure has arrived. Photos below linked from my profile at BoardGameGeek.

Cthugrosh consumes a fleeing S-Shinobi

Despite the combined efforts of three Carnidons, Gorghadra need only stomp once to lay them flat

Distracted by two Squix, Sky Sentinel doesn't notice Zor-Maxim sneaking up from behind

We do not welcome our Martian overlords

So the game is here.

Last but not least, Kate and I are starting to catch up on Fables. The war against the Empire has begun, though we haven't yet reached an issue centering on the war itself. In related news: Willingham's Cinderella kicks ass.

If I totally lost you at any or all points during this post, my apologies. It's all straight in my head. Really.

Improv Poetry

2009-05-02T09:38:00.002-05:00

Inspired by Tony Brown's reading in Manchester last night, I suggest a variation on something we used to do weekly at Revolution Cafe in Bryan, TX - improv poetry.

By this I don't mean the whole night should be improvised, but perhaps a ratio of 8 "prepared" poets followed by 4 poets who agree to do work written that night, based at least in part on the poems that precede them and/or input from the audience.

The concept here is to reinvigorate old hands. You have to listen in a very different way if you know you're going to riff on someone's material, and so there's a level of both respect and playfulness that comes of this activity. It also can provide some indirect feedback for the first eight poets, insofar as lines remembered by the improvisers are often some of the best ones from a poem. Lastly, if you have any poets in your venue who come back and do the same poems week after week, this is a way to find new life for those creations, essentially remixing them.

Also, and this is where the inspiration from Tony's rip-up-reading comes in, it gets back to one of the (core) tenets of slam, that it's about giving something to an audience. If you improvise, there's a very good chance that this will be the only time a particular piece is heard. It's a gift to the audience, whether it works (in which case the gift is the poem/performance itself) or doesn't (in which case the gift is opening oneself up in a way even slammers rarely do).

[cross-posting this to the What's Next for Slam Poetry group on Facebook]

Playlist: ch33rup

2009-04-30T11:47:00.003-05:00

For when I want to go from bad mood to doing the robot through the use of somewhat grindy/gritty electronica and/or hip-hop. Also, I got my head back on my shoulders and am linking to Last.fm where available for all these songs.

Playlist title: ch33rup
Length: approximately 19 minutes

Artist - Song

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole (team9 remix)
Nikk Shifter - Trippin' on Acid Lines (write me for this mp3, which I got off mp3.com back in the days when it was a site for sampling the work of independent artists)
Micronaut - Northern Style Kung Fu
Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
The Beastie Boys - Intergalactic

Playlist: Turtlenecks and iPhones

2009-04-29T12:45:00.003-05:00

Current playlist, which will expand over time

Playlist title: Turtlenecks and iPhones
Length: approximately 40 minutes

Artist - Song

The New Pornographers - Myriad Harbour
Feist - I Feel It All
Beck - Gamma Ray
Shirley Ellis - The Clapping Song
Duffy - Mercy
A Tribe Called Quest - Excursions
Us3 - Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)
Fiona Apple - Criminal
Sara Bareilles - Come Round Soon
Beston - I Think I'm Falling In Love Again
Cat Power - New York

I'm a Queering Poet(?)

2009-04-24T13:49:00.002-05:00

I recently popped in at Steve Fellner's blog, in which he says,

I like to think of [Alice Notley] as queer. In the broadest sense possible. Her rejection of PoBiz, her rejection of white, middle-class values; she refuses to be categorized, shifting her poetic project from narrative to the experimental and back to lyrical in a mere second.

This question of who is or is not a queer writer is recently in my mind due to conversations with a friend of mine who has been wondering whether or not to identify as a queer poet. She is bisexual, but her personal sexuality rarely arises in her writing. On the other hand, she does a lot to question norms both social and sexual in her work, leading me to suggest to her that she is a "queering poet." That is to say, the emphasis is on what she does rather than who she is. The emphasis is on the question rather than the answer. The emphasis is on mini-narratives, not a grand all-encompassing one. The emphasis is, to my joy, on guiding the reader through a process rather than presenting said reader with an object.

With that in mind, can I identify as a queering poet as well? I want to say yes, based on the nature of my work, but I think I need some friends and colleagues to weigh in, to argue against a straight male as being able to queer. Some devil's advocates, as it were (but play nice, please, in the process of doing so).

In which I play catchup

2009-04-22T12:43:00.004-05:00

Round Top rocked.

Rather than do the more-organized yet more-obnoxious manner of posting (which would be to backdate individual posts for each of the days I was there), I'm tossing all posts in at once, accompanied by the date, separated by my usual three dashes.

---

Wed Apr 15

Flights felt long. Time with Carl and Elizabeth felt like not nearly enough. Boom Blox is awesome. There is a sketch of me/someone as a harried business traveler. The photo is shaky. The sketch is shaky, too, but not as shaky as my photo-taking arm in too little lighting.

ZzzZZzZZzzzzzzzzzz

---

Thurs Apr 16

I'd missed people. I missed some people. It was good to be on campus for a couple of hours.

That night got to meet Gwen, one of the caretakers at Round Top, who was nice enough to point me to my sleeping place when I got there past the time I should have and couldn't find anybody.

ZzzZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz

---

Fri Apr 17

Badgerdog! The buses were late by nearly two hours, thanks to a torrential downpour that covered Austin, Round Top, and any number of regional towns and cities Friday morning. The kids, however, were great.

I ran two workshops of about ten students each, middle and high schoolers. Each group had a couple of real wiseasses, which warmed my heart. May these kids not have the sense of intellectual adventures beat out of them by the TAKS tests. Here's the thing that really made me happy - it's not that they laughed at my jokes (which is ingratiating but something I can separate during my assessment of the workshop), kit's not that they asked some decent questions (even one good question in fifty minutes under the circumstances would have been pretty darn good, and they came through with more), it's that almost half of them got up to read/recite during the open mic following lunch. A huge part of my message for this age group has to do with confidence and identity, that it's OK to put yourself out there, to be somebody else or even pretend to be somebody. More than that, it's OK to put yourself out there as you, the you you want to be seen as. It's a chance to truly control others' perceptions of you. It's scary, but it's also empowering. So when the first student blanked out on a poem she had thought she had memorized, I made sure to have everyone clap a second time just for the guts it took to try. Some of them were playful, some serious, but all put themselves on the line. Sometimes twice. All of them came a little closer to being their own persons. So to Ashley, Andrea, Mac, Danielle, Daniella, Nayeli, Sarah, Roberta, Tiffany, Yvonne, India, Viany, Amelia, Perla, Ashley, Ariana, Trinidata, Tre', Amber, and Lisa: thank you.

Additional thanks to Jo, Wendy, and Tamam, my new poetry buddies and with whom I enjoyed much of the weekend.

---

Sat Apr 18

I read "Icarus cannot be a palindrome" and performed "Mother Earth," "Sign of the Turtle," "Wooden Boys and Deadlier Toys," and "ADD TV" at the 9am reading. Got to meet Abe Young, and she was a real pleasure to hear. Even with a 9am slot, performing on the Festival Hall concert stage was a blast. I could have gone off mic for all but the beatboxed static at the end of the last piece. Some day I want to do a full-length show there.

Three other highlights for the day:

One, Fady Joudah's commentary during the panel discussion. This guy's poetry is good - not that a Yale Younger Series winner needs my endorsement - but what impresses me most is how deliberately and thoroughly he considers his work, its relation to himself, its relations to the world, and the implications that arise. Case in point - a Palestinian-American poet with a major award behind him and time spent in Doctors Without Borders wondering to what degree he takes part in and even perpetuates a spectrum of suffering that results in aid only for certain groups who are eventually forgotten in favor of a new group that suffers "more." This is not blind liberal guilt. This is seeing the connectedness and brokenness of the world.

Two, Naomi Shihab Nye gives great readings of great breadth. I love that she reads from her own work (and reads it well), from the work of poets she enjoys and respects, and even tosses in poetic moments in overheard conversations. When Naomi reads, you realize that she finds poetry everywhere. And by this I don't mean she forces the issue by trying to rank her speciality above all others, comparing every art to her own. That's a small-minded trap, meant to further the ego of the artist involved. Rather, whether or not you like Naomi's style of poetry, you have to admit that she is always looking outside herself, always looking to channel the brilliance she believes surrounds her all the time.

Three, hearing W.S. Merwin read. I like Merwin. He's deep, he's pretty funny, and he's humble. Not bad for a (now) two-time Pulitzer winner.

---

Sun Apr 19

Two highlights:

One, Bruce Noll's Pure Grass that morning- better than trying to be Whitman, Bruce figured out how to embody joyously Whitman's poems in a recitation/performance that was unabashed and inspiring on both technical and emotional levels. If you ever get the chance to see him work, do it.

Two, improv tag team with Adam Mitchell, Mic Check's musical guest that night. I performed "Sign of the Turtle" and "ADD TV," read Shira Erlichman's "Daddy's Parking Lot Sermon," performed Glenn Phillips's "Ma'am. Please Put Those Jeans Down" and "Wooden Boys and Deadlier Toys," and then got Adam to hum a little gospel as I read "A Reading from the Book of Mendeleev." Crowd loved it. I like this guy's playing and would have bought a CD had any been available. Revolution Cafe remains a cultural force in the Brazos Valley.

---

Mon Apr 20

Marley & Me on the plane almost made me tear up, even without the sound.

Good timing, since I got to see my own pups again. Hello dogs!

It gets even better. Hello wife! I'm home!

---

Tues Apr 21

Shouldn't I be unpacked by now? Shouldn't I be blogging again by now?

---

Wed Apr 22

Oh no, I've entered a wormhole and am typing before I begin to type. Or typing after I type. Or something. Doing errands. Revising poems I wrote while at Round Top. Will post those tomorrow - the weather is beautiful, so screw my plan to post twice a day!

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #11

2009-04-14T13:57:00.002-05:00

While at Stone Pigeon last night, I heard Ryk McIntyre do a love poem from a chupacabra. I'd already planned to do my Monsterpocalypse haiku, but I was inspired to write a fourth one on the spot.

Relativity haiku #4
for Ryk McIntyre

Love is half monster,
and it's the part that looks like
us that frightens us.

Let's Do the Time Warp (just once)

2009-04-14T13:48:00.004-05:00

No, I'm not putting up an image of either Tim Curry or Anthony Stewart Head here.

No.

I see you waiting, about to open your mouth.

The answer is still no.

OK, moving on.

Hey, I said no. I meant no.

All right, I'm going to be out of town for a while. I'm teaching a workshop in performance at the Poetry Festival at Round Top (see sidebar). I leave Wednesday (tomorrow), will be on Texas A&M's campus during the day Thursday, and will be in Round Top Thursday night through Sunday afternoon. I return to Bryan to feature at Mic Check at Revolution Cafe Sunday night. I'm on a plane early Monday morning to return to New Hampshire via Boston.

I will write interesting stuff about the festival. I will take photos. These will be posted upon my return and backdated to their appropriate days and times. If you check this blog daily, however, you'll be out of luck for a little while. I will have my iPod Touch with me and thus the ability to check email, but there's no way I'm writing extended monologues/conversations on that thing (hint hint to Apple - give us a physical keyboard accessory).

Oh, and one more thing:

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #10

2009-04-13T08:49:00.003-05:00

OK, I missed two or three of these, so you get three complete haiku from this morning, all sparked by meditations on Monsterpocalypse.

Relativity haiku #1

Monsterpocalypse:
massive urban destruction
one one-thousandth scale

Relativity haiku #2

Three heads? Check. Lasers?
Check. Tentacles? Check. Game night.
Everything's normal.

Relativity haiku #3

We all want power.
We pretend to grow out of
smashing block towers.

Do you want to play a game?

2009-04-13T08:04:00.004-05:00

Greetings, Dr. Falken,

er, dear readers,

I like games. Actually, I'm fascinated by any situation in which people get together and behave irrationally within the boundaries of arbitrary rulesets. Soccer. Global Thermonuclear War. Starbucks. Poetry.

My wife and I also love playing board games. Not Monopoly or other largely-random games, but more strategic ones that involve an element of luck but place more emphasis on crafty play. Settlers of Catan. Citadels. Bohnanza. Ingenious. Scrabble.

There's one in particular that I've got my eye on lately, called Monsterpocalypse. From everything I've seen (positive and negative reviews, plus videos), it's a well-crafted set of rules meets pokemon collectibility (in the form of 3" miniatures) meets my inner child's love for Godzilla.

It's too expensive to go hog wild on purchases right now, but I'm expecting to order our first pieces in the next couple of days. With that on my mind, I wrote three haiku this morning. They'll mark my return to double-posting each day.

I wish I could end this post with another Wargames reference, but when it comes to poetry, to board games, to soccer, to Starbucks, (but not to Global Thermonuclear War), it's more fun to play.

Tardiness and Tone

2009-04-12T16:02:00.003-05:00

OK, the tardiness one: I will respond to Karin and Mairi's comments tomorrow. Have little time on the internet today.

The tardiness two: just realized that I've missed posting poems (the bonus posts) twice now. Have been revising instead of writing new stuff for two days. Will try to resume that on Monday as well.

The tone: A question about Good Friday (which I'm tardy in noting): What's the appropriate tone to take for stories of Good Friday? Easter and Christmas are easy - celebratory. But Good Friday is a tough one. It's sad - somebody dies. But we all know that the death isn't going to last. It's not even the movie where you're pretty sure the hero's not actually dead. It's the movie where you got to read the spoilers that said the hero's not actually dead. Or at least coming back. I'm not trying to be flippant with the Christian faith here. I recently made a comment on Facebook to the effect that I'm often heretical but rarely blasphemous. My question is a serious one for writers, even if phrased a bit awkwardly due to limited time available to me at the moment. I wonder if GF should be more like Thanksgiving. Or at least, instead of being a sad day, one of quiet appreciation. Of course, then we'd have to write quiet appreciation instead of sadness, and the latter's far less subtle.

Other holidays, holy days, secular days, or times in general that are difficult to pin down an appropriate tone?

Space and Light (part 3)

2009-04-11T18:29:00.003-05:00

In one old volume and two forthcoming (OcSerp, the Icarus project, and diluvium, respectively), I want(ed) white space. That white space is there for you, dear reader, and I recently came across someone else thinking similar thoughts about it.

In her essay "American Poetic Music at the Moment" in Coming After, Alice Notley refers to white space in poetry as a "non-narcissistic possibility." This is precisely what I was trying to achieve in OcSerp by having facing pages mirror each other, yet contain antithetical material. It sets up a spectrum, implies by its very nature something between the pages that is lost on one side or the other. The play with history, as some reviewers noted, suggests that there are poems extending out to either side as well.

In the upcoming Icarus chapbook containing a sequence by Crystal Boson and a sequence by myself, it's not just about putting two authors in one book. It's about putting together two sequences that take nearly opposite approaches to the same project, stylistically speaking. If we're lucky, readers will find space for Icarus poems of their own. That space will owe itself in part to the space created between us and the existing batch of Icarus poetry, nearly all of it a simple retread of the myth or a reaction to Breughel's painting.

In diluvium, literal space is crucial. On days when the main characters are particularly stressed, fragments and lyrics from the edges of the page creep in and obscure the reader's view of the conscious poetic utterances in the center. This opens up a space wherein the reader is forced to negotiate among sections of the page, to establish personal hierarchies of importance, not just interpret for a single answer.

Three sequences I'm researching for my dissertation take this tack in startling ways. I may include bits and pieces of what I'm thinking about them specifically in future posts. Those sequences, incidentally, are Tom Phillip's A Humument, Anne Carson's Plainwater (which I treat as an extended sequence, not just a book containing several sequences), and Ed Dorn's unfinished Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics.

History, Research, Ethics

2009-04-10T09:10:00.003-05:00

I just had a sequence titled The Boke of Maneres published in Bathhouse: A Hypermedia Journal. You'll need Adobe Reader (or some other PDF reader) installed to see it. I'd like to spin my wheels for a moment on the subject of history, research, and ethics.

There are few excuses these days to dumb down history in a poem. The presence of search engines like Google means that if you read a poem and have no idea whatsoever who Sulla was, and why his reaching across the pomoerium was a big deal (and applicable to the US today), just plug those two terms into a Google search and spend three to an infinite number of minutes doing some research. The connotations may not resonate fully for you until you really get into the subject, but with the work I consider my most important, that's part of the point. You don't get to treat the poem as the endpoint of history. You treat the poem as a process through which to enter/view history.

This is slightly different than the traditional/Modernist stance we're used to. I rarely take history at face value. OcSerp is in large part about how history is filled with gaps, or rather wounds left by conquerors. It's also different because our access to history is different. It's at our fingertips, along with variations on the same. Official versions, conspiracy theories, repressed realities, it's all right there. We don't have the same excuse of obscurity that a generation ago did. Though we may not have the historical training of our literary ancestors, we can rectify that problem with greater ease.

That being said, there remains an ethical issue. Is it easier to abuse history (in the sense that Mairi uses it, per Sokol and Bricmont, in a Plumbline School post) because we have such easy access to its surface? I could pick on some friends and colleagues whose poetry I love, but engages history only at the most superficial level, say a farcical piece about Freud's love of cigars that nevertheless shows no real understanding of Freud's contributions, crap and otherwise, in a historical context? Or a poem about Genghis Khan's love life that uses conquest as a trope, but doesn't reveal any knowledge that distinguishes Genghis from any other conqueror? I'm making these up so as to not actually embarrass the real friends and colleagues, but the comments section may be fair game so long as we're all civil.

Your thoughts, dear readers? Am I asking too much if I expect that you'll do research based on a poem? Am I going about poetry a wrong way (not "the" as there is surely more than one wrong and right way) in general here?

NB: I'm working up a more formal version of this post to submit to Poets & Writers or somesuch as an article. If anybody contributes a particularly good question or answer or critique, I'll be sure to note as such should you be willing.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #9

2009-04-09T13:27:00.002-05:00

Middle and end portions of a reverse-sonnet titled "This one time I will tell you"

full of teeth and closing when
I recalled the mouse caught earlier
down in the basement,
felt it burst between my molars,
...........
everything to do with putting one
foot in front of the other, praying
the floor will not pull back like a tongue.

NaPoWriMo Elsewhere

2009-04-09T13:20:00.003-05:00

I'm doing this two-post-per-day thing, but there are a handful of folks who I'm also checking out daily (usually thanks to the ease of an RSS feed, but I'll visit their blogs on my own regardless):

Oscar Bermeo has an ongoing series titled "Anything to Declare?" that is worth comparing and contrasting (I think his interesting subtitle for each piece - Version x - asks for a compare and contrast).

Karin Gottshall runs Cafe Babblecat, which remains one of my favorite blogs to pop in at. I like the combination of poetry bits (the mouse poems in particular are great), little memoirish notes, crazy games, and photography experimental and traditional.

Lindsay Penelope Illich has a number of "Evening Poems," most dealing with motherhood. She's got some polls up asking for opinions on possible titles for 14 of them right now. A good read - take the time.

Of course you can look at my profile to see whose blogs I follow, but these are three folks I wanted to highlight briefly for poetry or otherwise creative writing that I've been enjoying on a daily basis.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #8

2009-04-08T13:56:00.002-05:00

Someday I'd like to work on a video game. A few things that I'd incorporate (not all the ideas I have, since these ideas are more likely to be stolen than ones for poems):

1. Have an avatar creator that is incorporated into the storyline. If the game is to be dreamlike or surreal, have a voiceover talking about a dream s/he had in which s/he was molding his/her own face, like clay. If it's more realistic, perhaps use backstory questions as a way to semi-randomly assign features (e.g. "Are you a tough guy?" Affirmative answer gives the avatar a scar).

2. A game that involves dimensional travel through mirrors. If you fix a problem in one world, another problem arises in the other world. You can never fix all of them. Insert plenty of revelations for the player, such as realizing that the [highest government official] of the current world must be corrupt, because the other one is a saint.

3. Offering players the chance to play as three different characters who will ultimately come into conflict. Don't tell the player this until the conflict is immanent, at which point imbalances will already have arisen. The player cannot "lose" this situation, but it may turn out differently than s/he would have planned.

The Inside of My Head

2009-04-08T13:50:00.004-05:00

The first draft(s) of "Icarus the Young," the final text of which I posted yesterday.

Things are always moving in there. Sometimes loping, like a butterfly.

Sometimes I really have to grind away at an idea, like it's not even mine.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #7

2009-04-07T13:28:00.003-05:00

Lucky #7. Rather than give you something new, here's two poems of mine that will appear in the joint Crystal-JeFF Icarus production:

Icarus the Young

Schematic embryo. Star-crossed fetus.
Small as a period, a cluster of cells could not stop
Growing, could not but motion slowly
In the unnamed womb; were molded
By flesh-electric waves, programmed
With illusions of a user, else we might
Say these cells would soon be tricked
Into the light, as though any had choice
In the face of the atomic.

(first published in the 2008 Poetry at Round Top Anthology)

Icarus Interviews Orville

I: Were you close?
O: Wilbur and me? Closer than any brothers you’d ever meet. We even married sisters.
I: I mean to the sun.
O: Well, I was only ten feet off the ground that first time.
I: Did you feel the heat?
O: It was December.
I: ...
O: Wilbur had the most controlled flight – 853 feet.
I: ...
O: Of course, it wasn’t our only attempt.
I: ...
O: ...
[Interviewer leaves]
O: Yes, in all my veins, I felt it.

(never published in any journal, though several places asked for a copy of the chapbook when it comes out based on this poem)

A Tiny Compendium

2009-04-07T13:14:00.004-05:00

Some time ago my manuscript The Icarus Sketches was picked up by Seven Kitchens Press. I've seen some of the chapbooks Seven Kitchens has put out and been impressed, so I was quite excited to see Icarus in the light (bad pun, sorry).

The poems I devised are a sequence, beginning with Icarus the Young, taking him through various childhood issues, then letting him live (he's offered the chance to live so long as he serves as a symbol of the long journey not taken), but each poem mimics the structure of the original myth, the rise and fall. So whether he's applying for a grant from the DoD or acting as a snarky docent, he's Icarus. I think the sequence stands as a damn good chapbook.

Then I saw the sequence my friend Crystal Boson was writing. It, too, took Icarus as a subject. It, too, reinvented him in a way few writers have bothered to try. But where my individual poems are fairly simple, hers are Ashbery-dense. Where her poems are fairly similar in style and voice, mine have a great deal of variety. The two sequences do really interesting things next to each other, effectively creating a space wherein the reader can imagine a whole spectrum of new Icarus material.

And here's the happy news / kicker. Ron Mohring at 7KP is going to publish both sequences in one chabpook. We haven't worked out all the details yet, but this will be a tiny compendium, containing two distinct works by two authors. Given my love for The Scarlet Compendium by Alice Notley and Douglass Oliver, I'm doubly excited.

Details will come over the summer. Anybody who wants to pre-order and/or review and/or would like to see Crystal and me reading side-by-side, drop me a line.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #6

2009-04-06T11:54:00.003-05:00

Opening and closing (in this draft anyway) to a poem tentatively titled "The Tangible Inn":

At the Tangible Inn, M. Abstract takes a vacation...

...The hundredth door is made of warnings, and the lock
is made of fear. But behind the door is a black horse
M. Abstract wants to ride, so he will enter, he will ride
across the dome of Ymir's skull, he will be thrown.
Come lunes, M. Abstract will return to work missing
an eye. We all know the story by now. We do not ask anymore.

Nah-vant Garde

2009-04-06T11:32:00.004-05:00

1. I flippantly used this term after AWP.
2. I re-used it over at John Gallaher's blog recently.
3. What the hell do I mean by it?
4. First of all, I'm not trying to pull either a Silliman or an Abramson. This is not a new category I want to invent. See #1 regarding flippancy.
5. That being said, I do mean something by it.
6. I'm getting to the point, really.
7. If the avant garde is by definition the new, then we our first problem is establishing a timeline of the new.
8. Time being the key factor?
9. See, already there's a problem before the first problem.
10. Hence this idiotic numbering system.
11. I would first like to note that in order for something to be new, said newness has to occur faster than it used to. Much like processor speeds and fads, creativity is apparently given an ever-shorter shelf life.
12. When poetry goes bad, it smells worse than old socks. This is one reason we try to weed it out.
13. Of course, the metaphor is now hopelessly tangled, so let's get back to the new.
14. Advertising wants newness. Products want newness. Ezra Pound's dictum has been grasped by the anti-poetry of the world. Why in the name of all that is (un)holy do we want to blindly follow that path?
14a. The Italian Futurists went after the New. They also thought Fascism a pretty good idea. Newness =/= automatically good.
14b. Whitman went after the New. Dreams of peace and prosperity and gender-friendly erotica. Newness =/= automatically bad.
15. Newness for the sake of newness = planned obsolescence = Windows Vista poetry.
16. Oldnes for the sake of oldness = planned obsolescence = Windows Vista poetry in some number of years.
17. Read #12 again, just because it was vaguely humorous, and I'm getting on my soapbox about now.
18. The nah-vant garde is that which demands newness because what is old must be bad (see 14a and 14b). The nah-vant garde does not admit to itself that it in fact holds power and/or has existed long enough to no longer be avant. It is in, perhaps even behind, the garde.
19. I write a lot of different types of poetry. I read a lot of different types of poetry. Screw the garde.
20. Give me the garden. With Whitman and Futurists. And Anne Carson and Mary Oliver. And Lisa Jarnot and Tom Phillips. And Shakespeare and Aristophanes. And lots of glass walls, because some of these folks would smack the shit out of each other trying to weed out perceived problems.
21. We can train them like sharks in an aquarium.
22. Oh wait, too late.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #5

2009-04-05T17:54:00.003-05:00

One section from a short sequence I started writing this morning. The working title is "Lives of the Immortals," as in the general concept of one who lives forever as well as the specific concept of elite warriors in the ancient Persian Empire.

2

consumed by birds we were
rebirthed mid-air and useless
falling then falling no correction
possible in the amorphous
wind

Sick as a Norwich?

2009-04-05T17:28:00.003-05:00

Dear readers,

When you get sick, do your powers of imagination improve? Does the world unhinge a bit? Do you still manage to write during your illness? Are you able to remember things as you perceived them later, when you've recovered? Do you ever wish yourself in this state? Do you try to recreate this state through the use of alcohol or other drugs? Have you ever done yourself mental harm, even as light as staying up for multiple days at a time, in pursuit of a line or image? Have you considered that all these things - the illness, the lack of sleep, the drugs - are ultimately ways to reduce consciousness?

Consider consciousness not as an additive but subtractive process. Your unconscious mind takes in vast amounts of data every second, so much that your conscious mind would overload attempting to keep track of it all (e.g. learning to walk is in other words the process of making walking an unconscious action - you can't concentrate on anything else until you transfer responsibility for walking away from your consciousness). Consider poetry as a type of verse that taps into the unconscious - whether using imagery, rhythm, or other elements, poetry works on more levels than the conscious mind can handle at once. Thus the power. Thus the separation from the popular world.

Reading assignments if you find yourself interested: Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. The User Illusion by Tor Nørretranders.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #4

2009-04-04T15:50:00.002-05:00

[sandbagging: this is more (stereo)typically "slammish" than I usually write, but you have to have variety - and with any luck, there's some nuance in the position presented here]

A reading from the book of Mendeleev

I don't know any snakes looking skyward

for explanations of their vestigial legs

Nor any whales who, surfacing,

blowhole prayers regarding their horselike hips

And while I know a few primates

who crack brachiating arms across their chests

and insist they are not related to apes

My appendix remains confused

by hymnals

and my full set of ribs

resonates soundly with this verse

My brothers and sisters,

My god, if such exists, did not make me in his image

Because if I am in the image of God,

then God is a more ideal version of me

and based on humanity's track record,

my god, my God is the scariest motherfucker in existence

My god, if such exists, does not lie

in the sterility of dogma,

did not create and is not interested in

perfection

My god, if such exists, is not

in the insoluble words of a book

but in the decaying of its pages,

the echo of voices not reciting

but renewing

My god, if such exists, did not plan

the oak tree, but thrives in photosynthesis

My god, if such exists, rides the spectrum

which includes male and female,

knowing it's not just frogs and fish

who sometimes need to change sex

My god, if such exists, is the blooming

but not the bloom,

the exploding

but not the explosion

My god, if such exists, is all verb,

ill-defined, beyond boxes

textual or ideological,

is perhaps only in my head,

is perhaps everywhere,

meaning nowhere,

meaning everywhere,

is paradoxical,

unowned,

not beautiful

but beautifying,

not dead

but dying,

not risen

but rising

Is quantum, knowing everything

you could possibly do at any instant

but leaving the choice up to you

and so does not wonder

why anyone would reject history, knowledge,

a chance to improve

In some version of this world,

we don't

In some, we do

Will I always wonder?

2009-04-04T15:39:00.002-05:00

Competed at Slam Free or Die last night. It was the last qualifier for the semis, which in turn lead to the finals, which in turn determine the team that Manchester will send to the National Poetry Slam in August. I like the poets here, so I was actually quite interested in making the team. Not so interested that I didn't be my contrary self - I have a couple of poems that would have worked the judges a little more directly, but that's not my game. I'm not cut out for slam because I still want to stretch all the boundaries instead of playing them to my advantage.

In any event, I went first. For those of you not familiar with slams, pole position is not a good thing to have. As the audience and judges warm up over the course of the evening, scores tend to rise - an effect called score creep. When we're only slamming for two rounds, and only five of eight poets will go on to the second round, you don't want to be the guy/gal who doesn't benefit from score creep. However, I ran with "ADD TV" because the sacrifice poet was fairly ADD in her own performance - I'm still not sure how much of it was actually planned - and was in fourth place at the end of the round.

In the second round, I performed "Sign of the Turtle" and, due to another poet going over time, pulled into overall third place. Only the top two would advance to the semis. But hark, my ears detect a clamour! The second place poet can't attend the semis, so I get to advance! Oh frabjous day! Oh wait. You're telling me that instead of a month from now, when the next slam would normally take place, the semis are on April 17? When I'll be in Texas at the Poetry at Round Top Festival? OK, fourth place poet, back-patting time!

Will I always wonder what might have been? Would I have given in and performed crowd-pleasers in the semis, and perhaps even at the finals, attempting to get on this team? Unlikely. I really like the Manchester poets and would love to work with them. But I'll just have to arrange that on the side. In the meantime, you get an entire draft of something I've been tweaking - found it in an old journal and am making changes to it for potential performance.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #3

2009-04-03T14:52:00.003-05:00

a freewrite to David Bowie's "Hallo Spaceboy (PSB Remix)" from the Best of Bowie album:

government pyramid masonic sonic explosion starfield improvewaves flucutate zeus with eyelids drooping lightning in a nebula nubular lar lar lar lar flock above daydreams as in trutledoves shells unflolding moondust trickles down economic relapse of the internior monologue say adios say hasta luego and lie burning burning tra la rome tra la travail avail hail hale hearty nevermind here we go again picking up speed spicking up leeds up reeds up feeeling feeds feeling ash buries pompeii and in the mirror of bronze convex vex aggravating feelings again feedings again the sluggoth my dear boy the sluggoth dreaming again below the sea the sea of stars the stars of the stars of the fish the fingers the legs the arms my god it's growing the arms wriggling like octopi the gnarling universe too large and grinding gaxes ashes axes yggdrasil flipside hello hello hello do you tell you willliam you lancelot and fell lancelot and golden lancelot and the knight green swinging like a galaxy [and the music player just crashed]

Go, Iowa!

2009-04-03T14:19:00.004-05:00

Now that it's not just on the coasts, perhaps the legality of gay marriage will move beyond straw-man arguments comparing it to incest, bestiality, and polygamy. Probably not, but if things continue to go well in Iowa, it could just happen.

There's a peculiar Midwest version of "progressive" vis-a-vis homosexuality. It basically goes like this: "We ain't too fond of what them folks is doin', but so long as they're doin' it in their own house, who cares? I don't want nobody comin' into my house and tellin' me what I can do. Besides, I got to know a couple of those fellas, and they ain't like the ones always up on FOX News." It's not exactly welcoming the gay community with open arms, but this attitude is more prevalent than you might think. It often only pops out when the speaker isn't around too many other people. In fact, it goes hand in hand with that idea - so long as you're not too loud about whatever it is you're doing, it'll slide. You don't make change in Iowa by making waves. You make it by getting to know one person at a time, conversing, even arguing, but actually getting to know an individual. That's one reason change takes so long in the Midwest.

This is in many ways a disappointing reality for my gay friends and for myself. It would be great if things moved at a faster pace. On the other hand, things do change there.

Every once in a while I'm asked (seriously or rhetorically) why gay rights even show up on my radar. I'm straight. I've been married for nearly six years. Not my fight, etc. I have a number of gay/lesbian/bi friends, which is personally reason enough. I want them to be happy, and if marriage (and more specifically the rights accorded by marriage) increase their happiness, then I want them to be able to get married. The personal reason isn't quite enough, though, for an extended defense. So here's the most basic level by which I justify gay marriage: I don't like hypocrisy.

If the reason for marriage is the production of children, then childless couples should no longer be considered married. If the reason for marriage is love, then anyone who loves regardless of age or sex should be able to get married. If the reason for marriage is legal rights, then we should treat marriage as a business partnership consisting of any number of consenting adults. I'm only half-facetious about all this. The serious part - marriage as we treat it in the US (and many other countries) is equal parts religion, social standing, and business transaction. We get married because we are brought up in communities that teach marriage as an ideal representation of love (love being the highest gift of the divine). We get married because we are brought in communities consisting of couples. We get married because it affords us legal and economic opportunities. These three categories are not mutually exclusive, and that's part of the problem.

There are two paths that I see as the least hypocritical approaches to marriage. I know that one of these will never, ever work out. The other one simply allows two consenting adults, regardless of race, sex, or gender, to be married.

If you've reached this point wondering what all this has to do with poetry, since I ostensibly put this blog out there as a (piecemeal) poetics - politics can be poetic (see notes on hypocrisy), and poems can be political (anything from Yeats to the Beats). Gender concerns crop up in my poems for a number of reason. But again, the big one is that I don't like hypocrisy in my poetry, either. I was one of the few spoken word poets to never issue a poetic call for revolution while at Revolution Cafe. It's not my style, and I don't think a real revolution is the way to go. So I'm not going to insert that kind of languge into my poems merely because the audience will agree with it. I'm going to pick at holes, point out bits of history, and slowly develop a relationship. Then I'm in your house, and you're perhaps in mine. Then we can really talk.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #2

2009-04-02T21:28:00.002-05:00

The closing lines of a spoken-word piece I began today:

There is no rim, so
He bounces the ball, throws it, and chases.
Bounces the ball, throws it, and chases.
The ball. The boy. The ghetto. The world.
Until one or another goes flat.

5 + 2 Performances =

2009-04-02T17:00:00.008-05:00

Oscar Bermeo blogged the best list of influential works that I've yet seen. He went beyond the typical confines of the meme that made its rounds a while back, choosing not only influential poetry books, but nonfiction, recorded performances, and live performances. I won't try to one-up him here, but I would like to present 7 performances, live or recorded, that resulted in the version of me that gets up on the stage.

These first five occurred while I was an undergraduate. They set the stage (har har) for the style I developed in earnest later on at Revolution Cafe.

1. John Firefly. Open mic at the Underground at Illinois Wesleyan University. Various poems. John was/is a local homeless poet in Bloomington, IL. He was also the first person I saw really invest himself in a performance, really give life to the words on the page. I have a few poems of his that he mailed to me, including the one that got him banned from campus (let's just say he really, really insulted the then-head of the English Department). But it was that first open mic at which he cut loose that made me go, "Hmmm. Sound." What I most got from John was a sense that he was channeling words, even if reading them off the page, and using himself as an amplifier. It was a far cry from the staid readings I'd encountered before.

2. John O'Leary. Walking around IWU campus. Various poems of his own, plus passages from Milton and Shakespeare. Whereas John Firefly opened up the possibility of sound to me, John O'Leary brought home the concepts of memory and tradition. He wrote these fractured sonnets, as he called them, and revised them in his head. They worked on the page. They also worked out loud. Not only did he know his own work, however, but you could walk up to O'Leary, say "Paradise Lost, Book IV," and John would begin reciting it from memory. It was impressive, not gimmicky at all. I still haven't memorized as much work as I now know I ought to. You can listen to an interview with John on Cross Cultural Poetics #60.

3. John Firefly. Barnes & Noble Bloomington, IL. I invited both of the Johns to read at the Barnes & Noble at which I worked part-time during my undergraduate years. They arm wrestled to see who would go first, which drew a crowd. One poet, homeless, and another, looking homeless, about to burst blood vessels in the Starbucks. Firefly ended up going first, and proceeded to lead off with a poem about watching himself in the mirror as he had sex. Little old lady gets up and leaves. Followed by another. Followed by another. We had more complaints that night than any other in the history of the store. Lesson learned: words have power. Not always that lovey-dovey, power-to-move-you-positively power. But people will react even to poems.

4. Taylor Mali. Poems from the Like-Free Zone. "The the Impotence of Proofreading" and "What Teachers Make." Playful and smart, in the way that a young George Carlin was. Combine this with his attention to teaching stories (by which I mean both stories about teaching and stories that teach), and this wannabe-teacher was hooked on phonics. Or at least the presentation of potentially arcane material in such a way that the audience accepts and even appreciates it.

5. muMs da Schemer. Def Jam Poets at IWU. Everything he did (just kidding about the last of those three links - there was no classical music at the performance in question). muMs was a revelation. His theatrical style, use of persona, and the smartest sound poetry I'd heard to that point all made this guy my #1 influence when I started developing seriously as a performance poet. I don't give him enough credit on Arts & Crafts, and for that I'm genuinely sorry. He did one piece, whose title I can't recall, that ended with him miming an eagle, screeching, and slowly the screeching became beeping and the eagle an EKG meter flatlining. It was amazing, and "ADD TV"'s ending owes a lot to the ending of that piece. Actually, all of the four or five pieces I do that specifically explore opening and/or closing poems owe a lot to that piece.

These last two are performances that struck me not only for their incredible quality, but for the inspiration they gave me to create two of my most well-received poems.

6. Flying Words. Slope. "Language" (to see/hear it, check for the judges in the Slope issue). The first American Sign Language poem I'd ever seen that wasn't an interpretation of written/spoken words, but actually devised from the start to work with both spoken and signed language. Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner stand one in front of the other (Cook, the deaf member, in front) and co-sign a poem, while Lerner speaks from the back (his head is covered). Everything about this poem was intentional, from the way Lerner's and Cook's hands formed the sign for language (because you need two people to have communication), to the banter with the audience (at one point, three hands are engaged in playfully signing "poetry" over and over - while this is going on, Cook uses his free hand to point at someone in the audience and ask whether that person wants to get a drink later). It was kinesthetic, or better yet, kinaesthetic. "Sign of the Turtle" owes its specifics to Genelle and KellyLynn, but the manner in which I deliver it comes from Flying Words. I have a three-person ASL piece I want to perform some time that was inspired by "Language" as well. Some day...

7. Shira Erlichman. Famecast.com season 2. "Daddy's Parking Lot Sermon." I'll keep this one short, simply because I bring this poem up so often. The first time I saw it, I was checking out my competition in Famecast.com's Spoken Word contest (incidentally, I came in 10th out of 80 poets, but learned to seriously dislike Famecast's model - I recommend never, ever competing at that site). I immediately reacted to not just the delivery, but the poetry, calling fellow graduate students to come watch. I remember Roger Reeves pursing his lips and going, "Ohhh she's a real poet." This poem inspired "There will be no reinvention of the wheel." The bad male figure is the obvious link, but here's the real connection, the epiphany that I had that made Shira's poem more than just a good-creepy persona piece. You ready for this? Listen to the poem again, and realize that the "daddy" is using the exactly same kind of langauge as the son. Perhaps even more poetic language. There will be no reinvention of the wheel, indeed.

If you can find any of these people, live or in recordings, you owe it to yourself to listen.

NaPoWriMo Bonus Post #1

2009-04-01T20:20:00.002-05:00

So here's my pledge, which I will assuredly break: That I will write a blog post each day in April on some variable topic. Furthermore, I shall make a bonus post containing the kernel of some creative endeavor - lines from a poem, a concept for an extended series, a nice title, the first sentence of a story (which, since this is National Poetry Month, we'll pretend is the first sentence in a narrative poem).

Incidentally, I have serious issues with National Poetry Month as a concept, similar to the objections to Black History Month and so forth. I can, however, have fun with this, and so I shall.

Today's bonus: The two sentences to a story:

From the age of four through the age of ten, Jonathan William Bradford was convinced that his middle name was actually Fucking, an appelation not completely undeserved. Little Jonathan Fucking Bradford had certain habits and inclinations that rendered past nomenclatures (e.g. "The Menace") insufficient.