Megan Thoma and the Current Big Debate

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.

Time and Space: Enjambment

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?"

More questions later, perhaps.

A moment of crisis

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?

Accessible like a Building

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.

Frameworking Sorrow

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?

Sentences with line breaks

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?

Improv Poetry

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]

I'm a Queering Poet(?)

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).

Space and Light (part 3)

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

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.

Nah-vant Garde

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.

Sick as a Norwich?

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.

Go, Iowa!

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.

Space and Light (part 2)

[Insert various jokes about how I've kept my space from this blog for a couple of weeks now here]

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I've not written much online in the last couple of weeks. There are a number of reasons, but the one that applies to this post has to do with space. I've been enjoying it, walking around downtown Portsmouth, walking across the bridge to Maine (which is fun to say, but I have to admit that it's only about twenty minutes to the border from here). I haven't wanted to be inside. I do a lot of revision in my head anyway, so this isn't necessarily a problem.

I've been thinking a lot about composition as it relates to place lately. My last space and light post had to do with spoken word, but I'm curious about their effect on written work as well. I'm not certain that my physical confines actually do much to my writing, which strikes me as odd. I feel like it should. A few questions that I feel like I ought to be asking:

If I were denied paper and pen (or computer), would I end up like my former professor John O'Leary, composing sonnets (or variations on sonnets), since the form would help my ability to remember and revise them? Would I do more with sound as I spoke aloud to myself? If I composed on scraps of paper, would I compose more fragmented poems, or prose poems, or haiku? If I wrote on the backs of grocery lists, would my line breaks come more often and lose any relationship to sound or sense? If I got a bigger monitor (which I had to do, as mine died around the time I stopped blogging - no coincidence), would my poems become more visually expansive (see Fig. 1)?


Fig. 1

I'd be a more useful blogger, perhaps, if I could draw a correlation here. But the truth is no. In my journals, I scribble all over the place, to the point that I now use an unlined Moleskine because I draw arrows and upside and sideways anyway. The poem in Fig. 1, the first poem in a sequence that will be published in Bathhouse: A Hypermedia Journal, was possible because of the broad bounds of a word processor, but I didn't "need" the word processor to conceive of the scattered words. I like to lay down while writing in my journal because it seems to make the space between me and the page smaller. But I like leaning back and listening to another poet and letting revisions and ideas just wash over me. And I also like a relatively clear computer screen, without icons all over the place, the opposite of my journal.

Here's the unlined Moleskine with notes for my audio essay "Persona," available on Arts & Crafts:



I've lost track of whether or not any of this is interesting to anyone else. Anyone else?

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Just because I like it - here's a picture of my current desktop on the new monitor. Geeky joy indeed.

Advertising drove me to Poetry

The gap between my last post and this one is perhaps the longest since I've started blogging. I have several things I'd like to post about, but the "20 books that made you fall in love with poetry" game that's been going around the blogosphere has been weighing on my mind. Once I get this off my chest, I should be able to write those other, probably more interesting posts.

Here's the thing: I don't have 20 books that made me fall in love with poetry/Poetry. It only took three authors to make me fall in love with it. One, Shakespeare. Two, EE Cummings. Three, an ex-girlfriend who wrote a lot. This was all in high school. Anybody I read after that added to my knowledge or gave me new ideas or became a particular poet whose work I loved, but it only took these three to give me the bug.

More importantly than that, even, is why I decided to become a poet. I wrote, as many children do, ditties and song lyrics as a young'un, rhymes to sing-song in time with a swing or teeter-totter. They were crap, as most of these things are. In high school, influenced particularly by Cummings, I tried to blend form and content. If I wrote about two people from opposite sides of the tracks, I'd have the lines going in different directions on the page, mirroring each other. But this was just something to do in my free time, to show one or two other people. Even entering and winning a poetry contest (READ magazine) my senior year was due primarily to the encouragement of my English teacher, Mr. Murawski. I had no intention of BEING a poet.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I interned at a major advertising firm. I worked with words every day, copywriting. In a set number of words, we had to influence people, create a particular emotion or association, a longing for a product or lifestyle. I learned far more than I contributed during that time, and when I was done, I was no longer a historian who happened to like words. I was a poet who really liked history. This was as much a rejection of the advertising world as it was an embrace of Poetry. I (somewhat naively) made a decision that I did not want to use any verbal talent I had to get people to blindly accept what I was telling them. That's propaganda, advertising, reducing consciousness.

I chose poetry because it did the opposite of what we were doing as a firm - it forced people to think, to question. Sears, Jim Beam, Pokemon, Star Wars, Taco Bell. These are the things that cemented my love for Poetry.

Greatness/Smallness in Perspective

Poets are (rightfully) up in, well, not so much arms as gesturing angrily from their arm chairs over the NYT article by David Orr. I'll not rehash the whole thing here. You can Google the hell out of Orr and Greatness, or jump over to Poeta y Diwata or Nothing to Say & Saying It, where I've been at least tangentially involved in some discussions.

But just to keep it all in perspective, it could have been worse. I mean, Orr could have called Super Mario Kart the most influential video game of all time like Guiness did recently. You want a group of people who will get even more rabid about crap rankings and claims than poets, just say something idiotic like that and teh interwebz will just about explode from gamer froth. Mine included.

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If I'm lucky, you laughed a little bit at that one. Here's something that's not funny at all. I'm angry at whatever jackasses followed this woman and harassed her. I'm angry at Microsoft for not pursuing said jackasses. I'm angry at people on message boards saying, "Oh, XBOX Live is no place to put your sexual habits."

I'm happy with the (greater number of) people defending her. I'm happy with the posts noting that to point out one's sexual orientation is not to detail one's sexual habits. I'm happy with straights and gays writing to Microsoft or at least writing about this to give it greater attention and discussion.

Space and Light (part 1)

Something was off with AWP this year. I've been trying to put my finger on it, and it's not panels (there are always good and bad in terms of content, and I went to both), it's not the bookfair (didn't have to eat larvae lollipops for journal subscriptions, but played games, met editors, and made contacts), it's not the location (walking the ten or so blocks from Union Station was actually invigorating each morning). It was in fact the physical confines of the rooms.

The bookfair in New York took place, at least in part, in rooms above the lobby. Two of the bookfair rooms even had extra high ceilings. No matter how many people were bustling about, no matter how "conferency" the tables appeared, there was a hint of natural lighting and enough space above my head to feel open. The Chicago bookfair was in the basement. OK, it's not precisely the basement, but it's belowground, such that you have to go down stairs or an elevator and then go down stairs again - which produces an opposite effect to going up several stairs/elevators to reach the NYC tables. The lighting was adequate but totally florescent. It was largely subliminal, but it wasn't as comfortable being in the bookfair rooms this year.

The rooms in which panels took place were comparable to NYC's. Some rooms were better than others. But none of them were really designed to take advantage of multimedia (this is the same as last year, when an electronic literature panel found that its room had not been granted internet access). Once again the Afterhours Slam was provided with a podium, not a mic on a stand. Once again some rooms were oriented so that there was a pillar blocking line of site to the podium if you sat in the back-center of the room. Low lighting in the morning may be kind, but also lends itself to making us even sleepier at those 9am sessions.

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The Green Mill is a good space. You can understand a lot of the Green Mill's style, or any other regular venue's style, by examining from where people perform. The stage is raised, so a poet looks down on the audience. This doesn't necessarily equate to developing a "better-than-thou" approach, but it does lend itself to authority. It's harder to get up there, where you literally have to get up there, and then do self-effacing work. It's also difficult to be dramatic in terms of moving around. The stage isn't very large, and if the three-piece jazz band sets up behind you, you've got almost no room to move. Getting out into the audience is difficult, as one poet discovered by bending over, slamming his hand down on a table for emphasis, and knocking over someone's drink. The audience is not invisible (the spots aren't too bright), but individuals beyond the tables closest to the stage are hard to see. An anonymous mass develops the closer one gets to the bar, which not surprisingly is where most of the heckling begins. Again, this isn't a critique (meaning negative appraisal) of the Green Mill so much as it is a critique (examination of hows and whys) of the connection between the room and the type of poetry that is most at home there.

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Performing at IWU was difficult. I could say it's because the students have become more respectful since I graduated, trained to not react at poetry readings. But it had more to do with the Turfler Room. The lights cannot be trained on the reader/speaker. You've either got lots of light on everyone in the room or a little light on everyone in the room. The mic was set up far from a group of tables, making it look like the furniture was attending a junior high school dance. I went off-mic almost the entire time, standing as close as I could to the tables (moving among them at times) without sitting in someone's lap. The room has several entrances - the door to enter the room for the event was behind where I was supposed to use the mic, which would have been awkward had any latecomers interrupted a poem - and the other entrances were massive doors that led to the dining hall (even though they were closed, they dominate their space and pull attention to themselves). Even if you wanted to be raucous in that place, the room itself tries to get you to settle down.

AWP Day 1 / Out of Sequence 2

The New England Review reading was great. The fiction writers in particular gave life to their selections, and the audience laughed. A lot. This is important.

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Some panels, which will go unnamed, were not so good. This is a sketch of a bad panelist about to neuter the poetry s/he claims to love:



This is a sketch of a series of panelists so in love with themselves that their egoheadballoons begin floating up through the empty room.



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Got to meet C. Dale Young and John Gallaher in person. Yay nonvirtuality!

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Received an email from one of the high school students I performed for yesterday. He was too shy to raise his hand when I asked if there were any budding writers in the audience. He notes in his email that he's been trying to look at things differently, like looking at a tree stump and instead of thinking "a tree was there" thinking "a homeless man's stage." This kid gets it. I haven't responded yet, but I'm very excited.

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Talked with my veryvery good friend Logen, who expressed disappointment on how fame works. Specifically, how the production of one good volume of poetry can get a poet "in" with a press, which then gives that poet seeming cart blanche for publication. Yes, we were oversimplifying a bit, but there's something about the sequence of publications that is disturbing. The work doesn't always improve. It often gets worse.

I added some comments about my performances at the high school yesterday and how changing the order of poems affects the reception of later ones. If I performed "Ma'am please put those jeans down" by Glenn Phillips (since I have it memorized, and it's rightly a crowd-pleaser) or "ADD TV," the kids would go crazy for anything else I did after that, even if I screwed up. Maybe the masses aren't quite so fickle as we think? To a/our fault?

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Incredible Hulk Quandary Haiku

rippling suddenly
with verdant musculature
what would you do first?

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I'm officially coining the term "nah-vant garde." So there.

Out of Sequence

Kate and I went to a local bar called the Press Room on Saturday to listen to a 14 piece band play music from the Depression. As in "Brother Can You Spare A Dime" and "One Meatball." It was great. We then watched Springsteen rock the Superbowl halftime show (on TV).

Every kid who wants to grow up to be a musician/singer/rockstar needs to watch Springsteen live and listen to a good jazz band interpret old songs. This weekend was an exercise in letting the music/performance flow through you - you might not get every note right, but good gods you're having such a great time up there that it's no longer about ego, even as your body is the instrument through which people are entertained/moved.

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I will go back and comment on the ordering of those four poems from a couple posts back. Promise.

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Anybody else out there have songs that just kill other songs for you? If I put my whole collection on shuffle and end up listening to, for instance, The Cranberries' "Zombie," I just can't listen to anything light and poppy afterwards for a good long while. That particular song is just so intense and dark and "real" that most other contemporary music feels like some kind of betrayal to listen to.

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No. No you're not.

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At poetry slams, there's an effect whereby one poet can draft another's energy, but it only lasts so long. For example, the first poet up does a funny poem. The second does a funny poem as well, one that is just about as good or better than the previous, and the audience reaction is better than if the second poem were a one-off. This drafting effect can go three, four poems at the most before there is almost invariably a downturn in energy and the poem-topic/style has to shift or suffer the increasing wrath of the audience.

I realize now that I designed certain poems like "ADD TV" to be draft-breakers. It's so unlike most of what I'd see on stage that it would break the slam's momentum. It's not an easy poem to follow insofar as the next poet can't go "Ah, I've got something funnier than that poem's funny parts" or "I've got something that refers to pop culture in more ways than that poem." At the same time, it's not "Zombie." Nobody is left feeling as though they would be wrong in trying to top it somehow.

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Mike Guinn has a poem that begins "There will be no more funny poems tonight" and goes on to describe some of the horrible things he witnessed as a social worker. It often works. All other poets are afraid/respectful enough of what he says to not try to be funny on that same stage.

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When Springsteen took the stage at halftime, did the physical presence of a stage matter as far as his owning the space? I mean, if he had just rocked out on the grass, would we have reacted as strongly to him? I mean, not because that's an inappropriate place to play rock and roll, but because it would have appeared to be on loan to him? Or did he channel energy such that he could have taken over any space in which he played?

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[This space reserved]

Bouncing through Blogland, or, Yes, No, Yes

I regularly read C. Dale Young's blog, which in its last entry linked to Reb Livingston's blog, which was commented on and linked to in Andrew Shield's blog.

First off, a big yes to Livingston's post about Elizabeth Alexander's poem. It was an intentionally small part of a very big day, and the day wasn't about poetry. Poetry was a supporting cast member. Poetry will not be up for best supporting actor/actress. Move on.

Second off, a big no to Shields' comment that

contemporary poets don't stand a chance when reading their work before or after politicians or preachers. But I also noticed that both Obama and Lowery are not shy of being *orators*, while EA (like just about any contemporary poet who might have accepted the gig) completely avoids anything "oratorical" in her presentation.

It's not contemporary poets who don't stand a chance when reading before or after politicians or preachers. It's poets who actively avoid reading before the public and even look down their nose a bit at such an activity. I won't even say academic poets, which is where some of my colleagues (academic and bar-bound) would draw the line. I've heard poets in the academy who can read/recite quite well: Nikki Giovanni, Stan Sanvel Rubin, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath (holy shit does her reading of "Fever 103°" put a chill up the spine), Gary Snyder, Christine Hume. I'm not saying you have to like these poets or their work (Levine, for example, is a one-hit wonder, and Giovanni writes absolute drivel). But they can all read and not just keep an audience's attention - they draw the audience increasingly to themselves as they read. This of course leaves out contemporary poets known in large part due to their excellent performances/readings: Patricia Smith (who has straddled the page/stage divide like no other), Tracie Morris, Taylor Mali, etc. Again, maybe you, dear reader, don't like these particular poets, but they are contemporary, and they rivet listeners.

Third, and on the other hand, I really like the conversation taking place here on Shields' blog about the possibility of conversation among poets of differing aesthetics. The use of musicians as a metaphor is likely a good one, and I'm going to keep track of the various posters as they refine that metaphor into (hopefully) increasingly useful distinctions. Also, he brings in Borges in a smart way, and that always makes me happy.