Geof Huth’s pwoermd

This is another of these discoveries. This person has been known to so many people and writing for decades winning prizes. Where have I been to only see now?

Quotes: “I don’t think the eyes are enough. The eyes reduce reality.” and “Writing and life are not in oppposition but they can obscure each other.”– Ben Okri

What a wonderful voice in content and timbre. He’s a thinker, a poet and Booker Prize novelist, Ben Okri, is on myspace and has a video of him discussing his approach to writing, a story as “phases of music”, and films compared to the written page.

I’ve got his last poetry collection, Mental Fight, from the library now although with what I see, I don’t normally do novels but could make an exception since the novels have the same sort of rhythm and rich imagery.

P.S. Going thru my shelves, what do I see but a May 2006 issue of Ode magazine with a feature article on him, which I must have read since I read each issue cover to cover. How quickly I forget.

Untamed Daughter by A.M Juster and another of his sonnets, Rimbaud in Abyssinia impress me immensely. Such control and flow while doing the mental exercise of meter and rhythm hurts my head, in a good way.

Poewar has a 30 poems in 30 days prompt set [found via Cherry Floyd Miller]

Each prompt has a page elaborating, and sample poems from a focus poet and recommended books. In very brief paraphrase, this is the summary to date. It is now day 6.

Day 1:
Poem from your childhood
Explore an actual event that had some emotional significance to you.

Day 2:
A persona poem, yourself as a character
Write about an event in your life that happened within the past week. Rewrite.

Day 3:
Political social issue-oriented
Find a news or opinion article that was published on the web this week.

Day 4:
Poems of place
get out of the house and write from a particular location with all senses

Day 5:
Pivot yourself, adopt a POV
Write a persona poem that incorporates either a social issue or a strong sense of place. Do the back story in character.

Day 6: Your voice
Don’t stretch. Clear your head, meditate, begin to write as you normally speak.

In other prompt news… the new prompt site, Writer’s Island starts weekly this Tuesday. The first is “My Imaginary Life”. Poets Online does prompts as well, as in poetic responses to poems. [via Diane Lockward]. One Deep Breath will be doing their prompt and response carnival on site rather than people going off to all the individual sites. That might mean less posting here. Although there is a certain democratic voice rising in the comments of not complying with the new idea. We’ll see how it all flies.

Nick Bruno mentioned being socialized by books, about that disconnect between local language and custom and what we read growing up, to raise ourselves in effectively another idiom of life. Interesting framework. We all have the many dialects of language, one for dealing with professionals or school or business, one a home language. In some areas they are different official languages, in some areas different pidgins, or dialects or registers. The extra piece of the framing for me is that they are also, within the distinct schemas, rules, different sets of socializations. The pluralism that we integrate automatically in our head, the parallel ways of being.

[That I suppose sounds and is abstract paraknowledge. For concrete, there’s the springboard post by Reginald Shepherd that Bruno sprang from on where he came from and where people assume one comes from if one is a poet, with privilege embedded as if poetry were something elitist and non-core.

Elsewhere, poet as specialist, a notion that is a by-product of our times. Renaissance would have da Vinci as a thinker, not known as an anatomist or engineer but a poet, even though, when they are career poets, tend to wed all arts and thinking, dabbling in paints and social criticism, political protest, non-fiction and design, can be thought of in a smaller frame

The poet’s identity will be even more different from those of the scholars and critics, who occupy an entirely different wing of the English department. And the institution defines the poet as even more different from that utterly alien creature with her strange ways, the playwright, who is housed in an entirely different department (theater) and exiled to an awkward corner of campus near the parking lots.

Cross-pollination is natural but in a large group, simplifying down to artificial distinctions for clarity is natural. We have to remember that our categories are our own creations not some platonic reality. That is, so far as social constraints allow and enforce reality. As Robert Archambeau, there’s a matter of territorial niches drawn. There are boundaries, if for no other reason, than to fill out the forms for funding, or throw a sales pitch in whatever form. After that, we can get real again.