fountain pen to pencil
to pixel to nudiode
centuries written?

Legacy prompt from One Deep Breath

Thinking over what Jim Larwill said and putting down things to digest where I can find it again – namely the internet. Works for everything else in existance out here.:P

on poetic voice: Jim was talking about how poetic voice is more than individuality or distinctive style. There’s a physicality to voice. The poet’s voice is the physical voice, the person’s properties of vocal folds and breathing. Poetry has to be made from the body.

on editing: Poetry must be read aloud to form, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times and the wrong words fall out, the right words appear and the rhythm naturally forms.

on directness: He said if you want to communicate something, don’t pull back into false modesty, say it loud and clear. If you’re not going to do that in a poem, don’t speak.

on medium: Poetry is more gratifying if its performed. If it is published you can imagine it being read by hundreds but what’s the point — you can imagine it being read by hundreds without going through all the work of publishing. Performing, the people are right there, reacting and its real.

on future: he sees poetry going back from page to oral roots with mp3s and youtube.

Next time I get an urge to step out of time and make the brain rigorously focus down so hard that my body goes into rigor mortis over task I’m going to try another abecedarian. But they hurt. But the can amaze.

They’re usually no elegant waltz, rather more like watching a tapdancer tap faster and faster, getting sure they will lose the pass, make a mistake but they don’t and keep going faster and faster until your applause can’t help but rise to meet it.

I remember Lynne Alsford at a TREE reading doing an abcedarian and then when everyone was holding their breath having recognized the form very late in the alphabet, she started to reverse it. Seriously it was like cirque de soleil.

I want to do that. But not now.

Spineless Books has a table of progressive forms and there’s so much to read. I love how the number poetry explained by example. Could that be put more transparently?

The melting snowball poem is even a pleasure.

No Tell Books does not run book contests or charge reading fees. No Tell Books does not earn money on anyone’s desire to be published. Nor does it receive grants, government funding or donations.

No Tell Books earns money by selling books.

Selling really kick-ass poetry books.

That’s a novel strategy, eh? Is that what No Tell Books is succeeding at? They are using Lulu Press and making low cost poetry books.
A couple have been poets who participated in the miPOesias reading series, like Bruce Covey. A sample is from from his book, Elapsing Speedway Organism:

From line by loop & hook, trying to herd you there /
To juicier grass, to release & let screw momentum



They might be a place to watch, these No Tell.
You can literally watch MiPOesies, since they have a community at YouTube of clean audio poems being read.
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=miporadio

Poetic Techniques: OULIPO
Founded in 1960 by French mathematician Francois de Lionnais and writer Raymond Queneau, Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO), or Workshop of Potential Literature, investigates the possibilities of verse written under a system of structural constraints.
Lionnais and Quenuau believed in the profound potential of a poem produced within a framework or formula and that, if done in a playful posture, the outcomes could be endless.
One of the most popular OULIPO formulas is “N+7,” in which the writer takes a poem already in existence and substitutes each of the poem’s substantive nouns with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary. Care is taken to ensure that the substitution is not just a compound derivative of the original, or shares a similar root, but a wholly different word. Results can vary widely depending on the version of the dictionary one uses.
from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5785 via http://judes.livejournal.com/
Interesting idea to keep the grammatical structure and phrasing but change the content. It’s apt to make nonsense and skew the music of the original but yet the process interacts.
Taking the poem word by word, I realize how simple of words she chose. Some so basic, a basic dictionary don’t have them and using a Collins dictionary to make substitutions, the concepts become too abstract. It becomes…well, judge for yourself…
I modified using N + 7 Coming Back From Town by Sina Queyras
Coming back from Toxic
In the center two Magyars disappeared into a small maw.
Snug has begun to stick. I lie flat on the pathognomy*, expose my bent.
Flashes kiss and melt on my nebula, Tonle Sap River, closed eyrie.
I remember you trailing a burst ballyhoo up Prince of Wales Island
in your wool cobra, the harmonica lake paying no attic salt, smell
of wood, smoothbore in your hakea, society beeping and blinking.
Or, gin-drunk outside Cafe Sargodha, how you wound yourself in
my simile, snug falling on your delicious, frosting negations. I long
to lick your litany, wipe your steamy little morass. Come to me now.
Slip your hank in my jefe. No one will find us here. Tell me
there’s no way this coleorhiza* can last
—
*pathognomy – study of passions and emotions and their manifestations
*coleorhiza – a protective sheath around the radicle (embryo of seed bearing plants that develops into the root) in grasses