I just came in at the end of the Usula Rucker Workshop. It looked like some intense connecting. People seemed to have a satisfied pondering about them, walking away better for it.
Rusty Priske said the day before, “It a festival that was full of wonderfulness, Rucker / Partridge / McGee / OpenSecret made it overflow. Our poetry cup runneth over.”
There was a scrum of some CD signing going on.
Next up was another meaty bit. A poetics talks sponsored by Factory Reading Series. I love this level. It balances out the diet of people performing poetry to dig a little deeper.
Life is what happens. Poetry isn’t what happens, or even how you feel about what happens, but how you feel about how you feel about what happens. That more mixed attitude and posture.
Thinking about this gets under the performances, looks at the how and why that drives the poetry. The attitudes in retrospect. The results, in this case, get published in 17 Seconds, probably this fall. (The ones from last year’s poetics talk by Marcus McCann and Monty Reid are now up in issue 4.)
Paige Ackerson-Kiely was first up. She is a lifelong fan of arctic explorers. She wanted to get into their head so she fasted (that lasted a little while) and tried to take a vow of silence (that lasted a day). She tried wearing the same outfit for a year and that proved problematic at work, but more so because she lives in Vermont where the temperature fluxes a lot more than the arctic so a polar fleece dress chosen in January eventually is sweltering.
She tried living on pemmican, little rounds of it in muffin tins in the fridge. Their fat and berries “provide a complete nutritional profile!” but it’s like a bad joke: at first you think you will be able to endure it, then you realize it might be interminable, and start to dread, and then, finally, it becomes hilarious because it just might never end.
In the end she decided all these efforts were more precious than effective but got her thinking about poetry in our culture. Is is used to assuage boredom in a culture of glances? It is easy to get swamped by too many particulars and we settle for the illness of glancing and for general impressions instead. Poetry is about attention despite.
She considered the practice of parataxis, that juxtaposing two parallel texts for the reader to make the leaps. What does it aim to do? To create emotion in a society that dampens it down? Is it rewriting permissions on what to notice and feel and encouraging others to as well. She wrote in a poem, “it was good clean water and he drank it as if it were not a miracle.”
Like many poets she assured she really is happy. She isn’t inconsolable although she said she “expresses everything with a need for consolation”. She speculated that her generation, or perhaps her crowd are in the habit of relating thru complaints rather than thru joy and gratitude.
Barry McKinnon spoke around his essay next. He said he’d not inflict the worst possible impact of a reading, and that is boredom. He certainly managed. He covered a lot of ground but engagingly. (Sometimes it seems like festivals in this town are catered for me personally.)
He talked about the journey of his poem “Bushed” into an anthology by Margaret Atwood then to an anthology translated to Chinese. His name phonetically in Chinsese means “wheat gold peasant”. He had his Chinese version get translated back to English and read us both. (You’ll have to wait for the fall. I can take notes, but not at that speed.) Suffice to say, Alterations Were Made. He speculated on a book made into a career of just one poem translated over and over. That would be like Blissful Times in perpetuity.
He reflected on his “translations” of Dante, mucking about with raiding the Inferno and emails and various other poems by others as source text. The goal is to follow TS Eliot’s dictum about escaping your own emotion and personality in the process of creating poems. Even still it’s a muddled process because “emotion is the poem’s fact” and besides which, if you achieve a departure from self, and it resonates with yourself and others, you’re still in the bind of reaffirming self.
He was once asked by a nervous interviewer, “Do you write traumatic monologues” and he had to answer immediately, yes, yes I do.
I believe it was Olsen who quoted who said poetry needs to say things that are immediate truths in the world.
A disadvantage of oral is spelling…he recounted the relationship of a poet to his work. Jack Daw bought an industrial shredder and tried to destroy every manuscript, magazine and collection he’s made, even the poet’s beret that Robert Creeley gave him went in. He diligently tried to quit poetry but reentered the fray and into language poetry, that habit of anti-semantics, of academia vocabulary that tries to break ideology thru the ankle of syntax. But then he shredded all that he could get his hands on of proof of that too.
He teased that he might play the bongos but didn’t. (Perhaps I should have given a request in the Q&A.)
Here rob mclennan extends the mic to an audience member.
The Q&A time did better than most for these sort of things in public forum. Often there is a person who just needs to say something because there’s a gap, or there are crickets, perhaps one good question, but here were 4 or 5 engaged questions; 4 if we don’t count the inquiry into whether leather pants are comfortable and warm. (And for those interested, the answer is no.)
There was a question into a suggested course for prairie poetry if the rural has disappeared, since the grain elevators are more for tourism than life now, what would be a good focus.
McInnin replied, whatever you need to write about. Oil fields may not be a historical cliche the way a patchwork of fields are, but when one writes personal history, one needs to write what is your story that matters to you.
(Other questions were asked but I rolled them back into the earlier bits.) If you haven’t caught it already, Amanda’s recap is up too.
Because this is a long post, I’ll split the day, but then, the title tipped you off, didn’t it?