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]