I discovered from doing a vanity search that New Jersey spoken word artist Nordette Adams at Author’s Den advised people read “my article” (aka several year old ramble). It was up for discussion 6 months ago.

I’m hesitant to even link to “my article”. Even though I put it on a public forum in 2000, and knew some people were still googling into it, I thought it was clearly play, not to be taken seriously as “real writing”. I mean, after all, it starts and ends with comic strips. It was more intended to get my head into the layman, non-writer’s and that view of non-rhyming poetry as deficient. It wasn’t meant for poets to discuss. It’s called “informative and provocative”(?) People seemed to find it useful thought fodder in general. I find that baffling but it’s good someone found it interesting, (or inflammatorily “pseudo-intellectual” as the case may be).

I’m not sure how to classify the Author’s Den. It’s not a BBS. It’s not a static site although there are home pages for writers. It’s called a community for writers. There’s over a million articles so it’s a rather large site.

Articles are categorized by genre. Looking around it looks like a web-based blogspace with Live Journal-like members-only comments. There are message boards. There’s the possibility, like myspace, to post music. People can link to their books, (some I saw are Lulu self-published books) with a bookstore on site for promoting site writers. It has over 2000 titles. There’s an area where you can put reviews of each other as well.

Browsing around different categories, it seems rather like a supportive workshop group with comments heavy on the effusive “LOVE it!!!!”, “very true” and “marvelous!”, (more so for the poetry than the articles). [see comments for clarification on this]

I’ve never seen such a concentration of rhymed poetry online before. For example, Looking for Romance is an Edward Lear-like verse by British English teacher Paul Williams.

It’s a whole other world over there.

btw, How bizarre is this? My poetry writing statistics were deemed interesting enough to be listed in the UK under writer resources of someone called Tim Love who has an extensive set of quotes about poetry.

From that haiku of literacy

The past is dead and since we must speak well of the dead, we are mute? My family isn’t big in legacy that anyone has told me about. We have no traditional trade, crafts, stories. No narrative collective history. No particular land. We used to have gatherings for music but those dispersed and the notes have been lost. The next generations were never taught how to join in. It was deadheaded and the seeds never collected or spread.

Any legacy I leave may be exclusively potential, not genes. But then who would want the genes of flat feet, irregular teeth, wide haunches on men and women, short stature, blindingly white skin, skin cancer on every twig of the tree, hand tremours, some odd preoccupying fear of water common to both sides of the family, or the social habit inheritance of family being people you love but that doesn’t presuppose you have to like each other? Eugenics is looking good but there are 100s of us. Luckily most have the sense to have good taste in spouses to disperse and weaken the genes by diversity.

That seems harsh and one-sided. I suppose it is.

Better to have a legacy of potential, makers of concepts picked out from the wider world, generations going from farmer to gardener to separator of figurative wheat from chaff? I hope at least literacy will continue, although on one side of my family, I am only the third generation to not sign my name with an X.

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.