Tonight’s the last of Sandra Ridley’s workshops for the Tree Reading Series, held at 6:45 to 7:45, Floor 2A of the Arts Court on Daly Ave.
Topic: On silence and risk. And reading works by Borges and Michelle Desbarats.
People may bring their own poems to be looked at by the group.
Upcoming Tree writing workshops, next cycle by T.A.Carter (workshop faciliator)
Workshop 1 Feb. 23,2010
Found Poetry: This workshop will focus on the incorporation of popular culture (song titles, ads, headlines, quotes) into poems. Writing exercises will be based on juxtaposition of images.
Workshop 2 March 9, 2010
In 1946, when Charles Olson reviewed Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, he used the word “post modernism” to describe the intersected work. Writing exercises will focus on word fragments and jazz-like improvisation.
Workshop 3 March 23,2010
Ladies Night Out (gentleman welcomed, too) P.K. Page. Louise Bogan and Marianne Moore – one poem from each of these women to poke, prod, inspire our own writing.
Workshop 4 April 6,2010
The leftover Beats: Gary Snyder and John Brandi. Be prepared to be inspired by eco– spiritualism and travel — mysticism.

Too much baldly straightforward creates its own kind of noise at all that is being left out. A lot going on allows more to come from the page and less from the reader? What is going on in the process of processing? Given more data, the organic patterns can lift out of the subset chosen by the author. Given too little data, the reader has to only receive.
When I read poetry, I want it torqued a little. I hear better when there’s a high density to absorb. That’s selfishness on my part of wanting the information flow to come to my speed rather than slowing down to the pace of who I’m listening to.
I know I like high-compression of poetry. S. likes clarity, simplicity, not a wasted word. I respect that. Our pacing ideals are different. If each poem is a gesture, his is a smooth sweep and mine are uneven fluttery darts. If poems were teaching styles, he would by silence command attention while I tried to grab audience thru animation. The resulting energy is different than what I would build on the same subject with the same words.
If I keep in game mind, I can toy with words to one point. To be clear cut in this way is the part of the point of the 40 Word Year exercise. I want to focus on one core idea there. The constraint of length, truth, and not repeating people force me to winnow down and keep to the K.I.S.S. principle. But I don’t count those as poems, only tributes, meditations, thoughts.
I don’t avoid the aha juxtaposition in haiku, but in other poetry, am I in what Steele called a Faustian pact with radical novelty, leaning too far towards superficial random? Language is a nice thing to be in. Is it sufficient in itself? Story is also gratifying. I aim away from any superstitious, irrational as a rule. Absurd and nonsense are good but language leaning towards provoking emotional response worries me. I’d rather be circumspect and break my own verse’s momentum.
Call that giving mixed signals, muddy, or oblique, or fear of commitment or fear of propagandizing one thing. I’d rather hold multiple points of view, each subverted by the acknowledgement of other point. I’m self-conscious of what it would Mean to give one pat view. But if I give dispersed views, each had embedded assumptions. By making a complex picture, I don’t avoid having a sub-text, only avoid the primacy inside the frame of one poem. What could that gain? Once there’s more than one utterance made in life, there is automatically a loss of one primary message, unless one is being extraordinary repetitive.
One thrust — even inside the confines of let’s pretend for the duration of the poem, for isolation of one factor looked at singly and linearly that only it exists — and I feel that I’m not serving observation correctly because the data stream is cluttered and contradictory. Things that acknowledge things that don’t fit delight me, gets around my defenses.
We each have different pros and cons to our take on what is poetics and what is a good fit. We do what we must in the way we must. We can shift style and our sense of worthwhile content that must be said, but there’s a sense of being hooked on saying something.

Of course, effectively, uptake matters, or pleasure of the partaking, not the label but, but but.
What makes the difference between poetry and prose? One series I’m working on is peculiarly plot-driven. It hooks forward in a genre-fiction way. It has distinct voices and parts are not poetic even tho in form. It’s an odd thing for me. I feel as tho I am coaxing it back to painterly from photography, applying some acceptable digital filter to make a voice look like an oil canvas but it feels forced. What do with poems that insist on doing themselves their way?
I question what I think is poetic. Out of a hundred page long list to sift, I had 3 instances of the phrase “blues guitar”. That seems disproportional to my life or the clustering theme. Do I think blues guitars are somehow more poeterly than most things? or more worthwhile to promote? And 3 instances of dust bunnies, which is just, well, odd, although at least maps to life experience more tightly. And they’ve had enough promotions. They are SuperBunnies.
Doing is believing so what does what I have done tell me about what I believe?
This idea of poetry as needing to “feel like a poem” or have insight, or accuracy, or emotionalism, or structure deriving from observation and rational contemplation, all are one part of the blind man’s elephant.
When is it a poem? Baker’s character, looking at the poem in The New Yorker says,

Let’s have a look at this poem. Here it is, going down. You can tell it is a poem because it is swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it is a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they’re saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now this is going to be good.

This is from p. 21 of The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker is a novel of a man writing an introduction to his anthology of rhyme, or rather avoiding writing it. (Exact strike on my funny bone incidentally.)
When a poem has end stopped lines, I tend to have a ping in my head and my hand reaches for the inkpad and PROSE stamp.
I temper the reflex. I know its not the case but I’ve been thinking more into this dispersed debate I’ve been in for 5 or 6 years over line breaks.
I keep doggedly insisting S., should play with his line endings. He tactfully replies, in effect, different but equal. Different goals for style and effect. He’s a patient fellow.
If I think as I say, he could do more verbal play, does that mean I think the distinction between poetry and prose is in the clever factor? That would be rather damning.
If the content stays the same, why should I suggest enjambing as superior to what he’s doing? The oral content would be the same, and only page-visual different. Would that imply that I think poetry is about style not communication?
With the extra time to prepare, one can add more entertainment style and bonus easter eggs to the communication. Perhaps that’s a matter of thought habit and not about prose or poetry, written or spoken, not particular to the type of content.
Perhaps it’s worldview-based. Poems of pretty abstractions, perfectly poised self-contained views make me feel restless. Perhaps it’s a matter of class consciousness. A workingman poem where there is perfect conformity to type has the same effect as nature priestess as world is universally malevolent clatter, with no counterpoint in the terraforming of the poem. I like a nod to what the poem omits, to a wabi-sabi or else I feel talked down to by a superior posture or think the poem is not being true.
What does it mean that I think he should mess about with his line breaks? He likes lines to be end-stopped or coincide with a natural grammatical and meaning pauses. I’d rather break against meaning and add another entendre.
Do I value variety? If I value variety truly, should I be dabbling in his way more as well? A measured, considered speech, oratorial building to one reinforced conclusion. He still has the thought and literary challenge of all things meshing, unexpected parts fitting in with the sense of inevitable. And the pleasure that comes with how that comes to be implemented.
From p. 55-57 of The Anthologist,

Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It’s like chain-smoking — you light one line with the glowing embers of the last. You set up a call and you wants a response. You posit a pling and yu want a fring. You propose a plong, and you want a frong. You’re in suspense.
[…] Alcohol, coffee, rhyme, murder mysteries, gambling, Project Runway, anything with suspense. Sending out letters. Poets who have reached a certain point of depression are great letter writers, because they write a letter, and they send it out, and until they get a response they are in suspense about what the response will be […]I never never answer letters, so I keep my correspondents in a state of permanent suspense.

He is unabashedly silly by runs, yet it’s a vehicle for his subject. His intercut leaps are quirky, which I haven’t sampled there. The effect works by the long run and sudden turn that loops back pages. It’s the shifts of energy and what all. I’m not sure. But if I laugh-squeak could split atoms, we’d have a new reactor here.

That ramble I made on women and literature is in a slightly modified form as the newest essay up at AngelHouse Press.

“ditch, anthology 2 (canadian women) (innovative poets)” was launched on the ditch, website (www.ditchpoetry.com) on February 1, 2010: ditch anthology 2
People in the anthology:
Marine Gadd, Nathalie Simpson, Erín Moure, Chris Turnbull, a. rawlings, Nathalie Stephens, Margaret Christakos, Amy Dennis, J. Mae Barizo, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Christine McNair, Lynn Crosbie, Liz Worth, Alice Burdick, M. Jay Smith, Louise Ball, Ingrid Ruthig, Frances Kruk, Judith Copithorne, MAC Farrnat, Nathalie Zina Wlaschots, Meredith Quartermain, Susie DeCoste, Camille Martin, Pearl Pirie, patti Sinclair, Sandra Huber