The OIW talk was lively. More than half of the 26 or 28 people who came asked questions. Pretty stellar amount of engagement. rob and I fielded questions, asked questions back so it became more of a roundtable of practice being discussed from how to publicize readings to what prose poetry is to how to respond to edits and how poetry responds to different times.
rob gave the best answer I’ve seen to that chestnut of a question of “what inspires you?”
My father farms. He milks the cows every morning. He doesn’t wait to be inspired.
Among the handouts I gave, (with Dan Weber’s sestina’s on offer as well and an updated chart on editing your poems) I included these handy poetry links
bywords event listing
Versefest
Writers Festival
OpenBook Ontario Events
Poetry Daily
Serif of Nottingham
nationalpoetrymonth.ca
NaPoWriMo.net
linebreak
Fishhouse Interviews
dverse poets
UBU Ethno
We started to touch on some of one handout at one point. Some of it is below:
Poetry can be split in any number of dynamics:
– according to attempting to make beauty or avoid beauty, make or avoid meaning
– according to the degree of internal or external performance, to inkblot with self or elicit an audience
– according to responsibility to which audiences, active or passive, in which community standards
– according to momentum, wanting to reinforce or change or observe
– according to how much it is raw or cooked, preference for level of polish
– according to what it the unit of language, of “natural” conversational or towards the smallest unit of the materials of compositions, the phonemes of sounds or the characters of text to new shapes
– according to style of craft (lyric, dirty concrete, haiku, confessional, sonnet, spoken word)
– according to the desire of the poet to embrace clarity or obliqueness, conscious or unconscious ink
– according to an attempt to resist politics or pretend social issues don’t exist
– according to using poetic devices or avoids them
– according to amount of editing and reading and thinking and time put it
– according to the needs driving the writer and,
– according to a writer’s role, which can be split into roles in relation to others in time.
Community historian
to record family or community history
– by retelling story of parents
– by head-hopping into life of historical figures
– by collecting bits of local history
Why: to perpetuate stories for the future
Thespian
to get words to enact your emotion’s story
– by story
– by allegory of myth or myth-ing persons
– by disrupting language to create sensation
Why: to reinforce, perpetuate, intensify or provoke a feeling
Explorer
to mess around with ideas tools
– by dialoguing with other texts in English or other languages
– by using form poetry, homophonic translation, flarf or appropriation
– by remixing language, examining grammar’s boundaries
Why: to see what happens and examine and build, or perhaps to change your own mind, ideas, behaviors
Escapist/Rebel
I’m sorry, that role is off daydreaming of
– is not available for comment at the mome–
Moralist
to preach the way the universe works
– in order to change someone else’s mind
– in order to convince and comfort oneself
– in order to create/build or deconstruct the notion of nation or man or political system or social behavior or Christian or other constructs
Why: to cause an effect in emotion or behavior, to control
Watchdog
to pay attention to immediate world
– by being observant to details
– by synthesizing information to arrive at new patterns for old data or reinforce old patterns with new data
Why: to meditate, slow down, find inner clarity, transcendence or truth or to direct attention
Some people and some poems and some phases of life or mood take on different prevalences. Personally I think I’m hard into the preacher class. Moralist, with bits of Watchdog and Explorer.
We are “waist-deep in poetry”
A write-up on the event by ryan pratt is at:
http://www.ottawapoetry.blogspot.ca/2012/05/oiw-talk-on-contemporary-poetry-feat.html