pesbo blog – Page 362

Various things have caught my eye lately of people blogging about poetry, reading or writing it. At the Guardian there was an article of a woman reflecting how she felt after she read the entire stack of books nominated for a poetry prize. After immersion in poetry she started to crave novels but when free to read anything again, she started getting an itch for more poetry. [via poetry blog hut]
Do other people know about the electronic literary organizers of online poetry. It’s a bit out of date with dead links here and there but has some fascinating things among its “2084 works, 1083 authors, and 151 publishers”. Flash-done poetry was in there somewhere.
Elsewhere, you can watch poets write a poem, like Marge Piercy, in real time or at 4x speed.
By some forgotten chain of links I found myself at the samples for American Tanka Magazine. There’s some really outstanding poems there that are much more resonant and dense than other places I usually come across.
Ira Lightman’s statements included some interesting ideas, for example, puzzle poetry, that habit of writing where there is a code-breaking, allegorical reading where one needs to delve over and over to catch the layers of symbols. It’s a good term for it. He also mentioned the idea of font or formatting as airbrushing ideas. I’m not sure that I’d agree with the notion that it is as cosmetic, or part of refinement or mood. It seems integral in some parts. But taken to a larger degree, would an idea be altered by nature of being stuffed into Times New Roman when its true nature is more Arial or handwritten. At what point would changing spacing make the poem, or it make the spirit of the poem to be in an unrecognizable disguise?
Collin Kelley is frustrated over what counts. Deborah at 32 Poems joins the debate that never dies of what counts. Here angle is Do blogged posts count as published? It seems seems similar to no simulantaneous submissions rules. The most amusing criticism I heard against that is what if you were out of work and only allowed to apply for one job at a time but had to wait to hear back about it for 6 months to a year? It’s a false analogy, there being more poems than the one person. Still it seems reasonable that if readership were overlapping that a poem shouldn’t be in both places, a blog and the print or online publication. But since the readership isn’t likely to be in both places, I wouldn’t think there is competition. It seems overly traditional to secure rights that way.
What is courteous use that makes everyone feel good seems to be the bottom line. Some people seem paranoid to never blog their poems because it will be stolen. Certainly once something is in the public sphere, it goes out of ones hands. To take an analogy, once someone paints a painting and then sells it, there’s no control over where it goes. Someone can reproduce it, paint over it, build on it, sell it on mugs, photocopy it and incorporate parts into other works. It all might be seen, by this changing, to dialogue with the art, promote it. What if the artists name is no longer attached? Does it not matter because it’s the idea or the subject or the feeling that matters not the credit. Think of When I am Old I shall wear purple poem that gets distributed with “author unknown” by times instead of being attributed to Jenny Joseph. It spawned the whole red hat society, which itself seems to be a unique snowflake with patent protection despite it being a group of free social association. But I tangent.
Giving credit to where it is due matters. Supporting the magazines that support the writers can work a good feedback loop. One would want to do mutual promotion ideally. When a poem is produced later, give a plug to who supported it first. When a publisher produces later things, give a plug to who they published earlier, in cross-promotion, relationship-building.
Relatedly to that, Joe Blades made some points on subscribing to literary magazines vs. submitting to them. He talked about the real cost of researching markets i.e. subscribing to magazines before you submit. It would run for him, $1500-$2000 a year. That’s before we consider shelf space and time for all that lot. In a way I want to subscribe to loads. At the same time what I like to read is not necessarily what I like to write and there’s only so much I can read.
I can see both sides. I’ve been an editor and seen what people give me and been dumbfounded that they didn’t even look at where there were sending it. It gives something of a low-earning salesman handshake looking straight past a person to receive a scattershot submission for the slushpile. Even a peruse of the table of contents would answer their questions of length or scope. It’s frustrating if you let it be.
On the other hand, how many thousand literary magazines are there? Anyone can set up a circle of friends, a blog or pdf, or a photocopier print run up to getting a publishing house and perfect binding and keep it going for decades of volunteer hours.
To know the entire scope of any given community and history of a magazine is basically a relationship. It would take years, and then the editor changes and you can’t use that knowledge. To fit to market, it’s a bit of research, a bit of luck, a bit of poking around and seeing what works when as a match for style, ideas and timing. A bit random what gets picked up as people were saying at Nick Bruno’s.
K Silem Mohammad’s post takes the ideas wider at lime tree. He was talking about accessibility and how poetry is culturally embedded. Without the context of what the reader brings, there is no drama or crisis or arc in the poem. The crisis is outside the poem in the sense that, although the poem may reach for a resolution, the poem doesn’t struggle hermetically inside itself. Naturally enough. How could it?
He said in part about the clash between territories of schools of thoughts of who gets to call their communication poetry, “most of them [crises in poetry] are attributable to the fact that more or less equally intelligent people disagree with each other violently on questions of value, each side presenting perfectly reasonable arguments.” This seems sound.
In comments Kent Johnson quoted James Matthew Wilson in the Contemporary Poetry Review as saying,
“This poem was intended to appear in a journal, to be glanced at by other young â€œpoetsâ€ of certain ambition, and to reaffirm for them that poetry consists of little more than a series of ill-configured disjunctive sentences. Such a practice derives historically from the surrealists but, as we shall explore in a later chapter, has no connection with surrealism besides the historical.”
This is much harder for me to gain an entry point. All I get is some sort of railing such as one would do against jargon or a particular dialect or register as being proper and improper. Does the poem communicate something in the ballpark of what one intends to who wants to get the communication. If not, there’s something we know and can make actionable to be more a custom fit to someone else, or the people engaging coming to research one another so they can widen themselves to the worldview of the other to build a common ground and appreciate where the other is coming from, why the style or content matter, who they are referencing and what internalized norm they are reacting to.
On one last note, John Baker, a crime fiction writer in the UK, is spending the month posting responses he got to the question What phases are involved in the creation of a text?. How different people conceive of the process should be interesting to see unfold. my response is already posted.

Camping Haibun

Toes tight curled in shoes, arriving in a private park near the border of B.C. and Alberta, driving down the switchback lane down bluff, with a guard rail looking like a wriggly gum wrapper caught around the worst curves. At dusk, setting up camp, peg poles in by feel, fingers finding lilliputian cacti. Overcast night with no fallen net of city’s stars anywhere, the negative ions of the rushing river sent over a nervous energy, filling the limbs with motion. In the night white caps and thoughts rise and flatten black. Eventually hips rise from the small cacti that latched to sleeping bag, and feet follow sound. Before dawn, the trains running parallel to river, my lipline a low angle to where dawn will come, lying across the peninsula of shore stone, mind too heavy to turn, too bedsore of old thoughts to stay.

tide washed stones
palms leaned on for hours
pressed shinier

People respond in haibun, haiku, senryu, tanka and other short forms. Other responses Bodies of Water prompt at One Deep Breath

Factory Reading: Sharon Harris and Ian Roy

Poet and Photographer Sharon Harris read first. The subject was the pataphysics of the science of love. It is based out of love and her Avatar collection of poems. For its launch she painted herself purple. John W’s Photo of Sharon Harris at the Factory reading July 19th catches the spirit of her presentation, in lab coat, explaining in a sort of fringe fest presentation how the basic natural law of science is Love. She showed slides of how Love stretches and connects, in the atom nodes of the word itself as she talks of metaphors of love.

She played with it in so many turns, from taking a bpNichol poem, Blues, converting it into a braille of the same shape, zooming in on one dot, seeing that is is under microscope a quandrant swirl ressembling the brain, and made of the word love. The visual poetry was just delightfully deadpan and quirky.

She demonstrated with all kinds of visuals, including simulated dog-poop that spelled out I Love You, part of her collecting images of I Love You for her I Love You gallery. She showed how the phrase is changing the urban landscape in Toronto and New York. In Toronto a graffitti artist had spray painted it 150 times around the city. The guy in NY was arrested twice but the police hadn’t the heart to punish.

It reminds me of how when the tag artists were working near my old workplace. I was told sternly and firmly that I was to report any new graffiti. The tired voice took the report, took a deep sigh and braced herself for the answer to what does the spray paint say? When I said the side of the building was covered with God Loves You, she laughed and said, hm, you know that’s kinda nice. Maybe we can just leave it?. Love’s the answer.

Ian Roy‘s reading was more improv. He read from his book Red Bird released only a few months ago as well. He preambled with loads of sidenotes. His poems covered his travels thru the East of Canada and U.S. As well as an assortment of dead animal poems which he remarked, with self-deprecating wit, that he’d continue on since he was on a roll with the dead birds.

One poem written as a letter to the photographer he admired, dialoguing with the image, the portraitist, his future and past selves and the reader or listener cast something of a spell. Not a pin dropped.

One of the attendees remarked on how it really helped him contextualize the poems, to hear more of the spirit of the writer.

Some of his poems from this book are being expanded on through videos. On the first business day of each month Roy is releasing another of his Chapter Project videos. It takes poems from the collection, mixed with music by his friends and combined with images. A recent video had one of his sons in it who wondered if that made them famous.