nablopo(etry)mo #18 (alternatively titled ‘i <3 jacob’)
November 18, 2008
I thought I’d start this post off with a random quote from Dave Bonta. Here’s what he had to say this morning about his broken sink: “Now I know what impotence must feel like / all the parts are there but the plumbing don’t work.”
* * *
My friend Jacob Jans emailed me the other day and invited me to an open mic reading/musical performance event organized by Jed Myers. It was held in a new venue, Casa ‘D Italia, located in Seattle on NE 65th St. Jacob and I read the collaborative abecedarian poem we wrote last week at Big Time Brewery and Alehouse, as well as reading a few of our own pieces.
We decided to read the collaborative piece line by line, even though we didn’t exactly write it line by line. Jacob is about 4 feet taller than me, so passing the mic between us was no small undertaking, but we managed.
I hope the group continues to read there on a regular basis. The restaurant is quite wonderful, not only the food but the atmosphere that owner and chef Anthony Donatone creates. He spends a lot of time with his customers, making sure they have what they need. He even listened to people read, which was definitely beyond the call of duty.
And Jed! Jed did a magnificent job of organizing the reading, setting the tone, encouraging the performers, and creating a vibe for the event. At a lot of open mics, people don’t listen to one another. They busily read through their own poems or even write poems as others are performing. Or they get up and leave as soon as they’ve read. That wasn’t the case here. Everyone paid attention and seemed engaged with one another’s work. It’s a nice feeling to stand up in front of an audience and feel there’s a “there” there.
I’m breaking my rule today, kinda. Instead of sharing one of my poems for NaBloPo(etry)Mo, I am sharing a poem by Jacob. He said I could post it until he sends it out for publication. It’s a piece he read last night, and it demonstrates why he’s such a wicked-awesome poet. And his poetry is half of why I like him. The other half is because he’s a good person. And the other half is because — as the photo above illustrates — he’s pretty.
Yeah. That’s a lot of halves.
* * *
Collision
Enter a room brambled with gazes,
mouths locked to faces, shoulders
soft for heads to rest on, and
pulse your breath esophagus deep,
breathe into all the breaths,
walk through them, swallow them,
watch the glint of teeth that shape
the pockets of heat, the give and take
of air ruffling your skin.
When you walk into a room, your shoulders
and mouth, your hair, your capillaries,
your synaptic firings, your cellular
duplications, your thoughts, your
body shifting from place to place,
the trajectory of the breaths you’ll take
unfolds, it all unfolds, walks toward you open faced,
and your past is there to carry the load
a silhouette gleaming dark
in the frame of an empty door.
warning: this post has crabs
October 24, 2008
Retrospective of a Myth (continue) by RossinaBossioB
Hey, you. Yes, you. Go check out Postal Poetry. We just shared the first of several winning submissions from our September contest. We’ve also kicked off a second contest, and you have until Nov. 15 to submit work. The details on that contest are here. I’m warning you, though, wearing feather boas is involved. So you’d better have a couple at the ready.
(If contests aren’t for you, no worries. Just send in whatever work you like. We accept submissions outside of the contest.)
Also, don’t miss Read Write Poem. It has a new layout and several additional features, including a Monday image- or word-based writing prompt and a newsfeed featuring links to poetry- and participant news.
While you are making your way around the internets, check out Ouroboros Review, a new publication that Christine Swint and Jo Hemmant recently started. It’s going to be fantastic.
Those are all the places I can think of to send you. These links should keep you occupied for a least a little while.
Oh wait. Just one more link. This one is about hermit crabs. They have a housing shortage, you know. It’s serious stuff.
*I made the poetry postcard above with an image by RossinaBossioB in accordance with her Creative Commons license on the piece.
skeleton poem up for grabs!
October 21, 2008
*** prize involved. read entire post, k? ***
No, not a scary Halloween skeleton poem. I don’t like scary and I don’t do scary. I prefer to ignore Halloween and hope that one year people will come to their senses and stop celebrating it.
What I mean by skeleton poem is the kind we played with over at Read Write Poem recently. (In case you missed that writing prompt and want to know what the heck I’m talking about, here’s the link: Bare bones, stripping the work down.)
Here’s what I did. I rummaged around and found a very old poem of mine. It’s dreadful really. I stripped it down and am posting it here for people to “complete.” I have some rules, though:
- Try to make it good. It can be funny or whatever — I like funny — but make it good. Don’t treat it like a Mad Libs game. (Or do. That might yield the best poems.)
- Don’t feel like you have to follow the spacing lengths for each word you choose. I simply included the spaces the way I did so you would have an idea of the overall form of the original piece.
- I want everyone to do this. And if you are not a poet, that’s no excuse (see item #4).
- Don’t feel like you have to be a poet to do this. C’mon. Just do it. I mean you, Churlita. And you, Neil. And you, Palinode.
- Feel free to post your poem on your blog, but please link back to this post so people will know where you got the inspiration.
- Either leave the link to your poem, or the poem itself, in the comments of this post.
To sweeten the deal, I will mail a poetry prompt/memento to the person whose response floats my boar. I mean, my boat.
To clarify, my boar does not float at all. He is heavy and meaty and hairy and somewhat dirty and wild and friendly and omnivorous. He is all those things. But he is not a swimmer or a staying-above-water-er. He sinks every time. Every. Damn. Time. I even had him fitted with a little flotation device. But still. He sinks. And sinks again.
OK. Enough about my boar. Here’s the skeleton:
[title]
__________ on _______
[body]
___ _______ _______ ______
in ______ and ____, ______ ____________
of _______, the _____
of a _______.
__, ____ a _____ _____. _____,
the _____ _____, a _____
of ___________ _____.
_________ in ___ ___ _____.
____ ___ ___ _____
______ the _______ of a ____,
___ _______ ______ in the ___.
______ _______.
An _______ ______, ________.
___ __ ___ the ________
_______ ____ ____ ___ ____
____ the ________ of
___________ _____.
____.
The _________ and the ___.
__ _________.
____ the ____ of _________ and ___.
i love you: poets getting over themselves
October 20, 2008
I’ve been quiet for a few days now. Partly that’s because I’m overwhelmed and partly that’s because I had a phenomenal experience Saturday and I have no way of expressing what made it so phenomenal. I am speechless. And for those who know me, you know it takes a lot to make me speechless. I usually ramble on about any and every little thing.
But I have to write something about what happened Saturday or I won’t be able to function. I need to process it, put some words to it, since that’s what I do as a writer. Here goes.
I was minding my own business the other day when I received an email from Mimi Allin. Here is what it said:
we STILL need poets for…
POETS GETTING OVER THEMSELVES
Saturday 18 October 2008 at 2P
Coordinated by: Aaron Silverberg & A. K. “Mimi” Allinif you’re wondering, YES, you’re a POET! please join us.
This 2hr instigation happens Saturday Oct 18th at 2PM at Green Lake (on the path at the promontory between Meridian & Orin Ct. — Arrive no later than 1:45). 20+ poets will sit in a line along the speedway. We will each wear something red (I’ve got red scarves for those who forget). We’ll say in turns, to passersby, “I LOVE YOU.” “I LOVE YOU.” “I LOVE YOU.” This is about poets getting out of their heads and INTO THE WORLD. Do you think this needs to happen? I do. All are encouraged to participate!! Just show up. Bring a fold-up chair, a sense of humor and layered clothing. This is an RSE (Rain or Shine Event). I’ll provide umbrellas! We’ll finish by no later than 4 and walk to a café for hot cocoa. Then … and only then … can we share the poetry.
This action is brought to you by working poets in Seattle. With every poem we write, we love you. We love you. We love you. We love you. Thank you for being there. Thank you for hearing us.
Press Contacts –
Aaron: coachajs@comcast.net
Mimi: mimiallin@gmail.comRSVP if you can … thanks!
Let me just point out that this is not something I would usually go for, not so much because of the telling-strangers-I-love-them part but because of the getting-together-with-other-poets-whom-I-don’t-know part. I do fine in social situations once I am in them, but I always imagine myself faring poorly and making an ass out of myself and being mocked and whatnot — I would like to thank several high school bullies for these unfounded fears — so I tend to talk myself out of, rather than into, social events.
But something told me to get on this thing, to go for it, even though I didn’t really understand the event. It seemed sort of nonsensical and silly. But I am all about nonsensical and silly — I can’t deny that fact. And I had just been talking with my new friend Jacob about the lack of poetry community in Seattle. We’d both expressed a desire to get more involved with poets here, so I asked him to come with me. What the hell, we figured.
There were so many incredible and varied reactions as people walked, jogged and strolled past us. Many were open to the experience, shouting “and I love you” back as they opened their arms. Several said that they were in a bad mood until they walked past us and that we’d turned their day around.
Other highlights:
- Two young women high-fiving all of us each time they jogged past.
- Giving and receiving a number of hugs, which wasn’t really part of the action but what are you going to do? People like to hug. Heck, I like to hug, even though hugging is sort of a new thing for me.
- A number of people stopping to talk to us, and a few even joining the event — including one poet/songwriter who just happened to be in the park. (How cool is that?)
- A woman holding hands with one of the poets then coming to tears as she told that poet, I could not live without your love.
- Perhaps most touching, for me, was a young man telling us he loved us in American Sign Language as he passed by.
Some — and I can’t blame them — assumed we were selling or peddling something, that there must have been an ulterior motive to what we were saying. Three or four asked us what church we were with. Several were disheartened that we weren’t reciting poetry (although we had books of poems stacked up on a bench nearby with a sign asking people to sit and take a look).
We received a couple of more heated reactions, which are equally valid (even though they aren’t the way I happen to see things). Two or three people told us we were being manipulative. One even said we were committing an act of violence. It was interesting to see people getting so disjointed over the words “I love you.” Those who were upset subscribed to the notion that we can and should only love those we know intimately, and that to use that phrase to communicate how we feel about one another in a general sense is an act of betrayal, of cruelty.
Most disconcerting were people who were clearly in pain. They were the ones who shrunk and winced when we said the words. Several people asked us how we could love them, as if their story of themselves and their lives didn’t allow for them to be loved.
The group dynamics were interesting, too. People would pass in waves. If the first people in any given wave responded positively, then almost everyone in that same wave would respond positively. In contrast, if the first people did not respond positively, most people in that wave would also not respond positively. We had an ever-changing crowd coming through, and each group of people carried with them a collective energy, which for me says a lot about how we affect others without even saying a word. Whatever we are carrying with us takes up residence in other people simply through our being near them.
Those micro-collective energies would have been present in each wave of people who passed, with or without our being there to draw out whatever that collective energy was, to bring that energy to the surface through our words, to make that energy palpable.
The poets involved in the action also created a group dynamic and energy. I didn’t know anyone there, really. I’ve met Mimi a couple of times and I know about her work in the Seattle community with regard to poetry and art, but I didn’t know her personally. I also barely knew Jacob, having just met him at the Sam Hamill workshop. And I didn’t know anyone else there at all.
But I’ll tell you what: If you spend a whole afternoon saying I love you to strangers along with a group of creative, intelligent, energized people, something happens. Try it sometime. I double dare you.
I haven’t felt this kind of community since I was in college, when the friends I was studying with came together to talk about what we loved and to do what we thought was right. I have this sort of community online, mind you — with The Poetry Collaborative and Read Write Poem and all the poets I associate with in a virtual sense. But it’s a real gift to find that community in my own back yard.
That’s kind of it. My words don’t come close to doing the experience justice. I didn’t even touch on all the stuff I wanted to say about awareness and shifts in consciousness and trust. But no worries. I will be posting more on this, namely about the instigation group we spontaneously founded that day, which we’re calling World of Wonderment: Invisible Theatre (WOW IT!). We’re putting some language together to describe the group, and I’ll share that along with the names of all the founding members very soon.
Before I go, I should explain the “I love you” part — why we were saying that and not something else. The way action co-organizer Aaron Silverberg put it, as poets our ultimate purpose is to connect with one another, to reach out to one another. Our poems are a way to do that — to observe, accept and embrace humanity.
With or without the poems, what are poets really doing if not affirming humanity, connecting with other people and ultimately saying that we love each other? And the event name “Poets Getting Over Themselves” is derived from the notion that too many poets are stuck in the poems, on the paper, and not connecting to other people. So this action was a way to make that connection.
Yeah. Not so nonsensical and silly after all, is it? Huzzah!
Oh, and we got YouTubed. I am the first one on the left.* This video was taken before everyone showed up, and before a few people wandered over and joined us, but it gives you the general idea of what we were doing. Here’s the link: Poets Getting Over Themselves.
*I would like to point out that my hair looks better than this most days.
my gorgeous conversations: paul nelson, part one
October 13, 2008
Many of you know that I am a poet-stalker. That I am. If you are a poet, you know firsthand because I have most likely stalked you. (Yes, that was me crouching in your bushes the other night, trying to take a peek at what you’re reading and writing.)
Knowing what you know about me, it should also come as no surprise that I poet-stalk folks right here n my neck of the woods. Take Paul Nelson. He’s extremely active in the poetry community here in the Seattle area. He’s known for his incredibly high-energy readings, for his ability to create and engage an audience, and for his all-around awesomeness.
Paul is the co-founder of Northwest SPokenword LAB (SPLAB!) and holds a Master of Arts in Organic Poetry. He’s had poems and essays published in numerous journals, including Golden Handcuffs Review, Jacket Magazine, Fulcrum, OlsonNow Blog, The Argotist and Raven Chronicles. He has interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Robin Blaser, Sam Hamill, Wanda Coleman, Eileen Myles, Jerome Rothenberg and George Bowering, among others. His serial poem that reenacts Auburn, Washington, history — A Time Before Slaughter — is slated for publication April 2009 (Apprentice House).
Paul generously allowed me to stalk interview him a few weeks ago. My robot, Feldman, was actually going to conduct the interview, but he chickened out at the last minute, so I had to step in and take over. We met at a Starbucks, not because we like or support Starbucks but because the independent coffee shop down the way didn’t have enough outlets and we needed access to a laptop.
* * *
Hey, Paul: I don’t like to sit on this side of the table because I am not aligned with whatever I am supposed to be aligned with. You’ve heard about the cows, right?
I have. I think that cows are aligned, as all animals are, with different fields. And we being animals, we’re aligned with certain fields. I mean Rupert Sheldrake has done really interesting work about dogs — you know, when their owners are coming home. He was also doing a lot of work with studying the connection between mothers and daughters.
But don’t people say animals only know things because of smell or other senses?
Sheldrake’s heard all those arguments: Is it about scent; is it about the way the wind’s blowing; is it about this; is it about that? But he disproved all that through his research. I think the problem here is that, if you google morphic resonance or even go to Wikipedia, you find that the official definition says Sheldrake’s theories are considered faulty by the scientific community due to the inability of his assertions to be falsified or because they make predictions that contradict current models. For this reason, the morphic field concept lies outside the scope of mainstream science and falls into the realm of pseudoscience. And that’s accepted as fact by Wikipedia. But you know, the truth is that Wikipedia is coming from a very Newtonian perspective. Sheldrake is not. He’s coming from a perceptive that transcends Newtonian thought.
Did you know that Wikipedia’s editors go through entries every day and delete those they deem irrelevant?
Yeah. They deleted one on American Sentences. The Wikipedia editor said I didn’t have the right to quote myself.
Do you want me to write an entry for you and quote you?
[laughs] If you want to do that, you’re more than welcome.
I think the American Sentence is an important form and people should know about it. A lot of people go to Wikipedia to learn things, so I think it’s important for your entry to be included.
I thought it was important. I spent a lot of time on it, but then they deleted it.
I can’t believe that you write American Sentences every day. I mean … I believe it. What I’m trying to say is that I’m impressed.
It’s a very simple thing to do. For example, I got up last night and I wrote something. It probably won’t be something that’s on my American Sentences website, but at least you keep your hand in it, which is a good thing: “Midnight love under the harvest moon, we may have a few good years left.”
Here are two more. “Crow completely black except for remnants on his beak of Cheez-Its.” And, “What I thought was Sam’s Zen golf concentration was actually his hearing aid turned off.”
That’s like with Feldman! We took his sound sensors off and he is completely Zen now. He doesn’t have his touch sensors on, either. He just has his visual sensors on. It’s a different world for him.
I can imagine. [pauses]
If you write 365 American Sentences in a year, there are probably 12 of them that are worth saving. I like them because they remind me of certain places and times. Here’s another: “In Lakehead, California, the old mannequin in the bathtub trick.”
That’s a trick? I’ve never seen … that. Where are you hanging out?
It is kind of a trick because they’re putting it in there as a way to startle people.
I’ve never had anything weird happen to me in bathrooms. [pauses] You know, that wasn’t my own doing.
I see.
We might need a subgenre: the Bathroom Sentences. I have one about a guy who was urinating while talking on his cell phone.
How many arms did he have? Standard issue?
Yes. He just had two.
So what you said about the pieces reminding you of where you were and your past. I think it is interesting because that’s a lot of why I write. But people tend to balk at writers who say they write for themselves: as a record of what they’ve done, of who they are at any given moment, and as a way of remembering the details of their lives.
What you point out is one of the key things about the stance toward reality that underlies, as I call it, the Organic process. People who are skeptical regarding that process are very much in the competition/domination mode. Life to them is competition and domination. It is getting ahead. It’s a he-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins kind of thing.
Then there are those who come from a more organismic perspective, which is why I decided Organic was a good term for it because it reflects an organismic cosmology. Alfred North Whitehead’s writing resonates with this. Hua Yen Buddhists understand this perhaps better than anyone ever has.
And I think it’s the notion of indigenous people all over the world that life is more of a process, so to write down exactly what your mind is at the time where you’re at — you may be embarrassed by it five years later, but that’s essentially who we are as human beings. So if you’re not doing that, if you’ve learned writing in another way, it’s likely more of a construct. And I’m not interested in writing that’s a construct. I’m interested in writing that’s a reflection of the whole person.
There are many fine writers who write poetry or prose in this way, in a way that’s a construct. But I find that there’s something lacking in it, and I find that writing organically is more difficult because it really exposes the play of the mind. And if there’s not much of a mind there, you’re going to get some real shit.
I think people misunderstand that there’s a difference between writing organically and writing just whatever shit comes to mind.
It’s writing mindfully, right?
Yeah. There has to be a poetics that are alive and conscious. That’s what Michael McClure said in his introduction to Three Poems, the book in which he points out that writing from this stance is very difficult. And people say “That’s easy.” Well, it’s easy to do poorly. That’s like saying playing jazz is easy. But how many Coltranes were there, how many Miles Davises were there? And they were improvising on the bandstand. That’s part of the beauty of it. In fact, not just on the bandstand. Kind of Blue was all done in first takes, with the exception of “Flamenco Sketches.”
What about when people talk about their muse? What do you think about that language and concept?
That particular phrase is clichéd, but there is inspiration that does come from outside you. And what’s not clichéd is what Robin Blaser who wrote “The Practice of Outside,” which appeared in the collective poems of Jack Spicer. Blaser is one of the most-accomplished practitioners of writing in this way that I would call organically. I don’t know if he’d go for that label but if I explained it to him, I think he’d agree with me. But he’s never used that language.
I guess what I don’t like when people talk about their muse is that it seems to envision the muse as a possession, as in ‘This is my personal muse, one that exists only for me.’ Similar to the way people want to have their own personal Jesus.
Well, I think one of your previous interviews that I read before coming here — as well as Sam Hamill’s and Lewis Hyde’s notion — all resonate with the notion that the poem is a gift, that the poem is part of the gift economy. And I think that’s a really healthy way of looking at it: that the poem isn’t yours per se but is a gift to you. You happen to be the one who’s channeling it through your particular flavor, but its source is outside of you and its ownership is outside of you.
You said something in your essay about mind being nonlocal.
That’s a physics concept, and of course that’s quantum physics as opposed to Newtonian physics, the notion of nonlocality. We’re very materialistic in this society. It has seemed to pay off because this is a very wealthy society. But we are starting to see the limits of that, especially in how we’re affecting the planet’s ecosystems with our lifestyle. Mind is larger than just the individual brain. It extends beyond that.
I feel like when I read a lot of the work of poets — emerging as well as established — a sort of “ownership” concept permeates their work, their approach to writing, their views about writing: selfishness, stinginess, fear of someone taking it, fear that they won’t be able to keep writing, that sort of thing. It’s kind of a politics of scarcity: “I only have this many poems and thoughts about poems. They might be the only poems I ever write and the only thoughts I ever think. I need to keep my poems and thoughts safe and not let anyone have access to them or they’ll take my essence as a poet.”
That’s not really a question.
No, I agree. I don’t care for that approach at all. I was like that. But also, since I started being serious about writing poetry, I’ve always resonated with an organismic approach. When I read Projective Verse, it occurred to me that I was already writing in a sense like that. I wondered, “Is this projective,” and I wanted to ask Michael [McClure]. It seemed that he was being very obtuse about it, but as it turns out it’s not really easy to identify and discuss. It’s not easy to elaborate on. It seems as if one is sort of purposefully going around the subject.
It’s like language is faulty. And so how do we get at something that’s beyond language?
It’s inexact, absolutely. Bowering says:
I do not compose poetry to show you what I have seen, but rather because I have seen … this poet’s job is not to tell you what it is like, but to make a poem … Not trying to use your poems to prove a point, or address an argument. Not to try to control what they’re [the poems] are doing … but rather to be a kind of audience listening to where the poem is going to go … the practice of outside … Try to forget your own voice … and listen hard for what the language is saying… you yourself are the audience, hearing a voice you’ve trained your ear to receive … .
One thought that occurred to me as I was reading it — “I don’t tell you what it is like” — see, that’s what people who are creating constructs are doing: They’re reconstructing this experience of “Here’s what it’s like … ” but they’re already once removed when they do that.
You say you don’t like poems that are constructs. How can you identify those poems?
You often just get a sense of it, like there’s something lacking. It’s not the same thing. When you hear something like George Bowering’s poems or José Kozer’s poems or Eileen Miles’ or Wanda Coleman’s — you can hear that these people all write with different degrees of organicity, if you want to make up a word like that.
I think the Organic is a continuum. McClure talks about the poem being a spiritual experiment, where you’re just going to write it however it comes out. That’s the way it’s going to be. That’s one pole. The other pole is the Formalists who maybe even know what the final rhyming couplet is of a sonnet they’re about to write. So I think that’s probably about as closed as you’re going to get.
So I think it’s a continuum and you can get a sense of how much a true reflection of the whole person is in a poem or the feeling that it’s a construct and you’re not getting the same kick from it. You know? You could use a food analogy. You could use any kind of analogy. You could use a drug analogy. Boy, the first time you take a hit of tobacco, it just knocks you on your ass. You’re like, “Wow, this is great.” Then you take another hit, and it’s not the same. You can use many different analogies for looking at it, but you get a bigger kick — at least I do — from stuff that’s not a construct.
* * *
This is part one of three interviews with Paul that I will be sharing on this site. Look for parts two and three in the coming weeks.
my little poetry pep talk
October 10, 2008
The shit is hitting the fan. In my life, in my friends’ lives, in everyone’s lives — or so it seems. I’ve been thinking a lot, more so than usual, about poetry the past few weeks. And by that I mean I have been dreaming about it, since I was already thinking about it nearly every waking moment.
What I think is this: We are all going through tough stuff. Every one of us. And poetry is more important to us than ever. We need it. Others need it. The gift economy is where it’s at when the other economy fails.
We are at war. I see us — every single committed poet — as being at war against silence, against sloth, against insult, against injury, against conventional thinking, against greed, against selfishness, against the turning away from self, against depersonalization, even against fear.
I see some poets turning away from poetry, out of necessity in some cases. But in any case, the turning away is an act of betrayal. I had a poet email me two days ago saying he had to stop focusing on poetry and start focusing on what would pay the bills. Yes, pay the bills. By all means. I am in the same boat, so I know where you are coming from. But don’t leave poetry behind in the process. Do not commit that betrayal because it is a betrayal of self and of the life you’ve given yourself over to as a poet.
I see poets leaving the ranks, and it makes me sad. Because of money, because of fear about poetry, or because of the perceived inability to write poetry. Because of any and every impulse in society that tells people poetry is not a worthwhile endeavor or that it is only a worthwhile endeavor by and for certain poets or through certain mechanisms of study.
Sam Hamill says, “The way of poetry is a way of being alive.” I believe that. Poetry makes us stronger. It changes us. It is our gift to ourselves and to each other. If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.
Yes, it is difficult to stick with poetry, to turn to poetry when our world and our lives are a mess. But that is the trick. That is precisely the trick: to create poetry in the midst of the mess. To create poetry, you must enter the mess. Poets enter the mess of the world in ways most can’t or won’t. We have to do that work, and report back: to articulate the confusion and frustration inside the poem. To let the mess be the poem. But in a way that conveys, that communicates. For, as Hamill also says, “The possibility of the poem exists in communication.”
We must be here for the poems, and in doing so, be here for one another. This is how we talk. This is how we talk to each other about what matters.
I’ve been trying to ask myself every day when I wake up: “How can I use poetry today to change my life and the lives of others.” That is how I am entering the mess and staying deep inside the mess.
‘This is one of the things i most love about poetry … how language can be used to change perceptions, to rewire …’
September 21, 2008
This post started as a comment on Nathan’s blog, where a ridiculously awesome conversation sprung up in his comments section for this post. Check it out. I’ve excerpted my latest contribution to the discussion below.
“This is one of the things i most love about poetry … how language can be used to change perceptions, to rewire … ”
Jo, Nathan and I were just talking about this the other day. How we now know so many things are capable of changing the brain. Exercise, for example, literally promotes neurogenesis, the creation of new brain matter. And that’s not a fringe scientific finding.* It’s being studied and reported on all over the place, including the Centers for Disease Control. Perhaps most notably, this phenomenon of a changing brain can be seen in people who suffer strokes and who have certain types of reversible dementia. The brain can and does rewire, rebuild itself.
But the brain isn’t relegated to re-growing into its previous shape, simply hooking up old connections as if it were an operator at a busy switchboard. The brain can make never-before-established connections, grow into new ways of experiencing and understanding the world and into new ways of relating to the body and processing signals from and for the body. This is where things like meditative practice can come in. This is where things like poetry come in.
We spend so much time running our brains along the same ruts — the same fears, concerns, worries, preoccupations — in short, the same (often dysfunctional) thought patterns. To break out of that, we need our minds to be broken into, in a sense — both as readers and as writers.
As a poet, when I write I do feel something from outside, something I will loosely and erroneously call “other,” is taking up residence in me and helping me to see things from a different, often unexpected and inexplicable, perspective. This in turn helps me to experience the world in a different way. I am rewiring my brain. I do this often enough, and my thoughts start to change. My perceptions change. I get out of those ruts and possess — for lack of a better word — a different consciousness. I become other.
And that’s what empathy is, is it not? To start by embracing and experiencing self, then to move beyond self to understand and embrace, accept, other. Then to realize other is not other at all, and self is not self at all. There is no differentiation. There is none.
This shift in consciousness which I experience when writing also happens for me when I read poetry. This is why I feel poets are doing themselves a great disservice when we don’t read other poets’ work. We are losing half the transformative experience, if not more. I would argue we are losing more, actually, and that it takes a lot of transformative reading experiences to result in one transformative writing experience.
Sometimes people balk at me when I say poetry can change the world. They are wrong. If poetry can change me, or you, or anyone who read and writes it, then it can change the world. Because that’s where changes in the world begin: in each one of us. Change is like a brush fire. So small you don’t notice it at first. Then heat. Then a glow. Then, before you know it, the flames are everywhere and everything that moves is hauling ass to get the hell out of the way.
Besides, if any one of us is changed by poetry, we all are in a sense. The world has already been changed by poetry. We have already been changed by it.
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*This is not to knock fringe scientific findings which, in my opinion, are some of the best scientific findings.
collaboration might look bizarre to you, but there really is a point
August 22, 2008
(photo credit :: Drawing - Insect/Mechanical by Jeff Werner)
Some poets seem to operate from a position of scarcity when it comes to poetry, not one of abundance. They feel more gives you less in the end, as opposed to giving you more in the end. As if we only get so many poems in our lifetime and to play around with poems means we’re going to run out of poems faster. Like the outdated notion that men have a finite amount of sperm and masturbation will result in dried-out plumbing.
But isn’t art about process, after all? Visual artists seem to have a better handle on this concept. When did so many of us poets become product-oriented, product-driven? Poetry is not an assembly line.
From deep play, stretching into new ways of writing and trying new things, come deep discoveries and meaningful leaps in writing. There are many ways to play, stretch and try new things. Collaboration is certainly one of them. At its best, collaboration values process over product, gives writers the chance to take the pressure off themselves — which in itself can lead to new ways of writing and experiencing poems — and allows new voices to emerge, which may come back to resonate in one’s individual writing. And it’s fun. It’s the kind of fun poets ought to be having, the kind of fun that makes magical, stunning moments possible.
To help people understand what the hell we’re doing over at The Poetry Collaborative and why it’s not misguided or juvenile or a waste of time, we’ve adopted a mission statement of sorts for the work we’re doing and what we’re trying to accomplish as a group. It appears below.
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Why The Poetry Collaborative?
We want people to see the whole gnarly, brilliant, iterative, process-oriented mess that is the heart of any collaborative artistic endeavor. We also want people to see that collaborative writing can be tough, wry, honed, gorgeous, life-affirming, life-altering, sinuous, brave, wrenching and achingly funny.
We’ve assembled a group of women whose individual writing possesses all these qualities, and in writing together we are creating a kind of collective voice and entity: this smart, sexy, witty, fearless and haunting presence who has all of our words coursing through her veins, but who at the same time is a kind of apparition. We know her, we recognize her, but she is not us. She is a mystery. She is foreign. She is other. We are at once drawn to and a little afraid of her.
Being with her is like looking in a mirror and seeing someone who resembles us yet is not us. The journey with this collaboration is to learn more about who she is through a continual dialogue with her, through being brave enough to — over and over again — move into her space, her body. To inhabit her and wear her around like a living garment. To confront the “other” that is her and in so doing learn more about our own writing and in turn about ourselves. Our mission is to move from experiencing her as “object” to experiencing her as “subject.” To make her whole and to embrace her entirely.
put a poem in a poetry time capsule!*
August 21, 2008
*post updated after finding out about FutureMe
Yesterday, a friend sent me a poem that I’d written exactly two years earlier. I was dashing off a lot of poems at that time and sent many of them to this friend so he could take a looksy. (I’d just started writing poetry again, so that explains my enthusiasm and my annoying tendency to foist my poetry on innocent bystanders.)
Anyhoo, my friend ended up sending that poem back to me yesterday, and I looked at it as if it weren’t mine. That because I didn’t realize it was mine at first, having written it and sent it off without keeping a record of it anywhere.
I was able to read the piece in a new way — as if it were someone else’s work. As if it might be a real poem, and a good one. I was free from the baggage I usually haul around when I write, that inner voice (and sometimes outer voice, when I am moved to literally articulate my disdain for my writing) that says, This shit sucks donkey balls! You’re not a real writer! When are you going to produce anything good?
OK, that voice isn’t there all the time, but it is there some of the time. I also sometimes tell myself. Hey, this poem is neat and can’t be beat, but those times are fewer and farther between.
My point is, I think a poetry time capsule would rock, and there’s a nifty site out there called FutureMe that allows people to submit letters which will be sent back to them at a specified point in the future.
So why not use that site as a poetry time capsule by sending in a poem instead of a letter? Here’s how I suggest going about doing so:
1. You dash off a poem (or two or three or however many) then send them to FutureMe.
2. You *do not* make a copy of the poem or poems for yourself. You keep absolutely no record of the them in any way. After all, you want to be surprised when they come back.
3. On the appointed date, your poems are returned, and you are delighted when you receive them. You go to work, polishing and whatnot, and you see the poem or poems in a completely new way.
So there you have it. A poetry time capsule. What’s not to love about that?
postal poetry is so awesome that this post doesn’t even need a snappy title like all dave bonta’s snappy post titles
August 19, 2008
(photo credit :: collage play with Nance at Crowabout by Judy Scott)
Postcards: awesome.
Poetry: awesomer.
Postcard poetry: even awesomerer.
Dave Bonta and I want you to submit to the awesomest poetry postcard site on all the internets: Postal Poetry.
While you’re over there taking a look at the site, make sure you read through the about page to learn about all the fandangly neat-o ideas we have for the project endeavor happening whatever we’re going to call the damn thing.*
Also, take a gander at the poet-artist matchup center, located at the bottom of the site, where (as the name implies) you can find other poets and artists to work with on collaborative submissions. K?
So get your postal poetry on, pronto. (But only if you wanna. No pressure or anything.)
*Dave has a weird thing about the word “project,” so we’re trying to figure out what the hell to call Postal Poetry.
[A note about the art: I took a piece by Judy Scott, whose work I used with permission, adding my own text using Photoshop.]
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. — Ray Bradbury
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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i cannot be bought
