The Waiting Game

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.

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

See Karin Gottshall's hilarious post here first.

Guidelines for Witches and Wizards: Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Remains

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

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

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?

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...

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

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

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.

---

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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(?)

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

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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Tues Apr 21

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

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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

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)

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: