Pesbo

this to...http://pagehalffull.com/pesbo
archives and comments included.

and I guess I could mention also the
food blogging here: http://www.pagehalffull.com/eatenup

and the regularly general life blog here:
http://www.pagehalffull.com/humanyms

and maybe even the bio shorts of impactful people:
http://40wordyear.blogspot.com

I had a few ideas going into the workshop about what to do to get past inner obstacles to make a spark. They are below. At the other blog is what the brainstorming and wisdom of crowds came up with.

So can't write, what to do?
Nothing to Say, Visualize...
….Immerse and float. Write "into inspiration" instead of "out of inspiration". Do visualizations: Picture a word and a scene where you felt the word. For example, safety, disinterested, eager. Use all senses, get into yourself...

Close your eyes mentally and discover what you smell, hear, taste?
What is the size of the space? Humidity? Temperature?
How do your muscles feel? How does your skin feel?
Is there cold or tension isolated in one part of you?
Finally look, what is straight ahead, to the sides, peripheries, behind you?
Scrap any comparisons. Write direct. Be present there. No future nor past.
~ writer's block from my own site in 2002 imagine the setting in detail

Set aside the correct and significant
....Try direct seeing of the smallest possible thing in the smallest possible detail. Think of the undergrad Robert Pirsig described who has inflexible filtering that let in too much. She was a contracted listener. She was committed to a large important canvas. She chose a broad topic and then got stumped. "She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard." Don't avoid what has been said. Don't seek to reference what has. Don't plan where it is going or pace it. Just describe.

"She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.” [...]“’Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.’ Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.” - p. 170-171, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Disconnect culpability and identity
...it's not you. Write in a character as different from what "you" would write or say as possible. Your evil twin. Your saintly twin. You if you were stupid. If Stuffy. If rude. If impossibly polite. If you were born as your irritating neighbour. Appropriate any voice and run it as long as you can. And/or swap about consistency when you tire of one, even if within phrase. Channel flip until something clicks. What would your pseudonym say?

No Time
- Speed write, push as much thru as possible for 5 minutes then cull
- Write short: twitter-length
- 5 word bio of this moment
- do a Fibonacci (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 8 syllable lines)
- Decompress, make time to make very few words but the right ones

Can't Make Nothing Out of Nothing
…Use 5 prompt words to spark ideas and a time limit of 10 or 20 minutes to produce something. Sometimes it will have a few lines of use or keeper phrase.
…Add constraints, limit options. Start to list words with or without certain letter(s) to force assonance (same vowel sound) or consonance. (see online tools list). See what words end up near each other and how the word play into ideas.

Flip your usual habit
Do you have a plotter or pantster style?
...normally free write then edit? Make a mind map or pile on the constraints use a strict form and fill in the slots by meter and rhyme pattern or word lengths.
...normally do a brainstorm and outline before writing, do automatic writing and don't let pen leave page. No pauses allowed. Sense optional. Sentences fragments. Phrases. Can't think of a word leave a blank line or sketch something but keep moving.

Read what you don't like
...Until you can't help but throw the book, retort or get where the person is coming from. (Preferably all 3.) Expose yourself to what is against your bias or outside your reach. If you only reinforce what you know, you aren't challenges. Irritate yourself into growing.

Other Things to Do with other people's books
….tear all the words of the right margin. Rearrange those into a line or few.
…plunder the one you love. Take a poem you like and use some of the words in it in the order it appeared in that poem. Make your new setting for them.
….tell another version of what that poem said, keep its subject but change the point of view
…retell in formal language, slang language or using another form of poetry (from free verse reduced to limerick, or from pantoum to sonnet, for example)
…substitute your words slotted into their grammar and rhyme. Or use their meter but your ideas and sounds into the slots.
…copy the first 4 lines or your favorite 2 and then take it your own direction
…use a system for getting a random choice of starter batch lines. Throw dice twice to get a page number and the words to use as material by counting in.
…OR spell your first name as numbers. That's the page # to pillage. So Pearl = 7 + 5 + 1 + 9 = 22. Spell your last name as #. (That's the line # and # of words to take as your starter batch.)
(A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=6, G=7, H=8, I=9, J=1, K=2, L=3, M=4, N=5,
O=6, P=7, Q=8, R=9, S=1, T=2, U=3, V=4, W=5, X=6, Y=7, Z=8)
If your name is a bigger # than the # of lines or pages, sum your name as in numerology. For example Pirie = 7 + 9 + 9 + 5 = 45 → 4 + 5 = 9 So I would start on page 22, line 9 and take 9 words there. (You could just point at a random part of the book but working for a number makes it seem predestined or that you've made an investment that you want to pay off through poetry.)

Online Prompts and Workshops

It isn't the idea but how much you bring to it, explore and develop and polish...but if you're looking for somewhere to start, some grain to form your snowflake around...here are some starts.

Poets Online
Has monthly prompts of a subject or form with an example poems by expert

for example: poems by Robert Hass and, having read those, write about the conversations of couples in your own way

Friday Fives
set of words to spur or stir story, memory, flash fiction, poems.

for example: freckle, evade, peck, scoot, dash

One Word

60 second to expand or spin-off word in whatever way comes to mind from the prompt word. it cuts you off after a minute.

for example: tarnish, noose, or symbol

Language is a Virus

A prompt list. you can only see 1 at a time (can't be so overwhelmed by options)

for example: compose an index. Of anything.

Guardian's poetry workshop
with one prompt per month from the likes of Annie Finch or Mark Doty

for example: a close study of another species or elegies

Charles Berntein's list of 88 experiments

for example, pick 20 words and write three different poems using only these words, homophonic translation from a language you don't know, lines collaged from media

Sunday Stealing

Meme questions that might not occur to you from which to springboard

for example: Back in the day: Been caught sneaking out? What happened the last time you played sports? Ever licked someone’s cheek?

NaPoWriMo 2009

for example: follow a word trail to see what starts, from synonym to synonym or its perfect rhymes or pseudo-rhymes and see where they take you. “Papal” becomes “apple,” which becomes “grapple.” If you add “dabble” or “baffle,” what an interesting story you may have!

One form a day for April

for example: A French rondelet. One stanza. Only 2 rhymes with a strict pattern, repeated refrain. Line 4 must rhyme with the refrain.
                      _dog days_
Line 1 :: A -- four syllables             wilted flowers

Line 2 :: b -- eight syllables           at the window smell like swamp gas

Line 3 :: A -- repeat of line one      wilted flowers

Line 4 :: a -- eight syllables
         from you who are gone torque powers,
Line 5 :: b -- eight syllables          stink, to prod me to sun and grass.

Line 6 :: b -- eight syllables         rubber stems safe in wet, harass

Line 7 :: A -- repeat of line one      wilted flowers

30 in 30
Another set of Napowrimo prompts

for example: So today I want you to pay more attention to the Shape of your poem.
Play with the spacing of l e t t e r s.
Feeeeeeeeel how your man ip u lation of the English language is when you add a visual element.

Poetic Asides
Writer's Market April Challenge (over 10,000 responses to 15 prompts so far)

for example: Two for Tuesday: write a love poem and /or an anti-love poem

Messing in Meter
Messing about with rough text, then metered it into dialogue, then for interestingness. It's not the material or idea but what you do to it.

for example: Patrick Gillespie took the purple prose by Thomas North converted from prose to blank verse to more oomph/personal style added

hard by her, on either hand pretty fair boys appareled as painters
do set forth god Cupid, with little fans
in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her.

On ei|ther hand |were pret|ty boys | ap-par-eled
As if |they each |were Cu|pid, fan|ning her

To keep |the wind |up-on | her.

On either side stood sweating boys
Like Cupidons with multi-colored wings
They teased the air with fans
That almost robbed the swooning breeze…

Weekly exercise prompts
for example: In 400 words or less, create a story that might explain the origin of an idiom.

Online Wordly Tools
Do erasure
use a black marker, keep a few words from a whole page

Wildcard dictionary
look for part of a word or sound such as (stats with a bl, ends with a rd) bl*rd (also a reverse dictionary at the site)

Anagrams search

Rhymes and slant rhyme Dictionary

Scrabble Helper
search for certain sounds such as you need all voiced and harsh tpkgbd???eea

It's good to exercise the composition muscles.

Today's challenge at Poetic Asides is to title a poem as "All I want is ______". I added a second constraint for myself of doing it as a reversing Fib.

All I want is more

tad
titch
smidgen
of excess
to push back wall scrapes.
exponential growth is freedom.
what's sustainable?
smaller loops
golden
mean
twists


Yesterday's challenge was to title with a color. I bumped up the constraint by making it a Rondeau as well.

Seeing Red

Our Land: Back Off Government!!!       A rare threat,
these rural signs by cinderblocks, cars set
up:     Gas, Bait 'n' Ice Cream Fireworks Gift Shop
  Your Dock & Deck Specialists.     Bob's Truck Stop
2 Buck Breakfasts.     FR3SH LO3STErS.     Guitars sweat

the blues dropped.     Softly, our losses are debts
but waxing nostalgic spatters the carpet.
An ice cube makes brittle, knife up off pop... 
Our Land. Back Off.

Stains, textures are lost in the discarded.
What are your feelings towards my man? (Guarded
mumble reply): I'm fond of the guy.      Chop 
shop welding torch eyes! (She misheard.) Stop
fight! Not, "I fondled the guy."  Cigarette... 
Back off!


A couple days ago, the challenge was for a love poem, and/or anti-love poem. I added the constraint of it being a sonnet. This is what I came to from that...


Foible Acceptance

Your requests? Rational. Forgetting task
-- while distracted into focus -- I write
of you, my sweet. Not washing dishes, whites
and windows. Papers slide in piles off desk.
What's daily asked, it isn't much. I bask
in words, sit blind. I swear I don't incite,
deliberately, as tease or test. (Quite
absent-whatted?) Clothes doffed to floor. I'm brusque
at lunch, leave doors ajar. It's not malice
nor unspoken griefs, nor any lash at you.
I love you -- failings intact, in palace
of clouded head — and I strew. Don't construe
love's lack! It's just, I'm lax! I'm busy too!
If true, "Time makes all whole" this too shall bliss.

Waiting for my order to come, I ended up using a gift coupon and buying other things to hold me over. Never mind the 2 library books I haven't finished, or the 7 owned books I am actively reading, or the 1 other from a friend that I'm reading, the pile reshuffles, again.

Li-Young Lee's book that arrived, admittedly, I got because I have all his other books, including autobiography. I buy it for completion as much as for the gems of poems. There may be diminishing returns. From peruses he has reshuffled understandings of previous memories of family, but the shifts, where and how may be interesting. Other things must have blipped his radar in life but this is what he needs to revisit until he doesn't. A person goes where one has to at each stage.

His direction is going expansive which I am reluctant to go with. I resist his broadening out to the Rumi-ecstatic, the turmoils of self-torture bouts with the romance of melancholy. His poetic peers perhaps push him to do more of the same lyric sentences of lived experience. Or that may be a matter of how his mind shifts not any outside influence. He is naturally a long polisher. His words are a slow-write and slow read not a rush through but slow pick thru. Borrowing doesn't make sense so I buy it. It buy it too for the voice. This one comes with a CD. His is a lovely reading voice. It would be better to see him perform again but the where or when of that is unknowable.

I think I prefer poems on the air, live, adapted to each telling and audience. There can be a constancy of page for archive but after first telling, the interest is in the nuance and shift. It's like recorded music or any paper-print. They are fixed, canned, vinegary.

I'd rather see music being created or stories being related interactively when the sharer knows I'm there, as much as a love books. Recording is the access to something, asynchronously gifted, some shard of idea but the completion is the exchange, the performance without it being stripped of 2 breaths, the potential for flub or improv or improvement. That makes it vital...

A paper page is behind authorial glass, a control-freak's space, that can't be lived in without the audience fearing to crease, without the hesitancy from recoil of the mandate that one must not opine in. The meaning is set out to be received, not dialogue with.

Dialogue becomes more complex in print, protracted monologues exchanged that can't have course correction if someone drifts off on some point. A long blather and one small portion taken up. You have to go on trust, all was heard instead of with small parcels of information, each with acknowledgement. Misunderstandings or judgement can cantilever instead of the natural continuous feedback of pinging back and forth in live words.

What is in recorded is final. Until the internet and the erasure and overlay that emulates oral, unless the archivists get to it.

But still, all that aside, 3 new books today. Behind my Eyes, Mountain Tea, Area of Fog. I'm heady with anticipation to dig into them all. And yet still 4 projects of synthesis (of which writing here is none of them) before I can conscionably dig in.

To expand and apply from yesterday's examination of how Yeats did that complex structure of rhythm, rhyme, semantics and argument, I have a response to the Day 15 challenge to the exercise to change the title of a poem and respond to it with a poem. One can stick as closely as one likes. [I edited since what I posted there and since I posted it here yesterday; still bumps in it.]

The Orchid in the Tree of Her

"All things uncomely and broken,
all things worn-out and old" - W.B. Yeats

His excuses are collected sod
from mouldy leaf and the sand
that would sting an unblinking eye.
It all lodged in the crotch in wait.

The seedling's soil -- in the fork
when a sapling -- just fanned
off the breeze's small back. What's lost
were just motes. To earth, new estate.

The grains, if retained or dropped
from her furrowed bark, she understands;
there's no mutual harm. She's not food
but a table. The nursery sates

self. The water, the leaves and the buds,
of her trunk have created their blossom's chant
off the breeze's small back and what's lost
were mots juste to earth. New estate.

I tried to keep to the transition of high ratio of anapest mixed into iambs until its all anapest, and to keep the rhyme and repetition structure intact. I want the structure to not draw attention to itself naturally and come off as unforced as his. (Aim high, crash into the ground. ;)) His is naturally flowing, and a natural sounding poem.

I set out to retort the brunt of the bitter turn of The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart and answer with the same concept of a flower within. I aimed to reframe and spin so that she is not a rose that loses her color quickly, taking a note from Carl Smith's

I overlooked an orchid/while searching for rose/...The orchid is a flower that blooms so tenderly/If placed beside a blushin' rose/ the rose could not compare

The object of affection is not a plant with the only relevant part being embodied by a flower, in fact, but a tree that lives in symbiosis with a lasting orchid (cue Georgia O'Keefe) and spurns the spurn and dirt throw at her and the too early declaration of grave.

I'm still fiddling with it, but it may have some potential.

Rather a metaphorical wall is that the orchid is such a general word for the largest flowering family with over 20,000 species, some terrestrial, some aquatic, half of them epiphytes/on air, and include everything from bladderworts to those feather boas in freshwater lakes to venus fly traps.

The epiphyte orchids which flower from the bark of trees live incidentally with the tree, not sending roots in parasitically, or in mutual symbiosis, just prop themselves inert in mutual non-harm, a form of commensalism.

What would that mean for the figurative? The orchid is not nurtured in soil caught by the tree, thrown by forces and drifts of nature. The dirt accumulates but is not critical.

Would the biology of commensalism be denouncing the relationship of her own sexuality (as orchid) if woman is tree. The tree is untroubled and there's no interaction except being in the same sun. That biology troubles the flow of the poem.

At least I think I understand the 3-beat meter better now.

How not to write Iambic pentameter is as much about how not to write it by Patrick Gillespie. He starts with purple prose and plays with the materials...I like this. He tears things back to base ideas, building blocks. An idea isn't too precious to mess with. Edits are substantive yanks. This I can grasp.

He was talking about process of moving from idea to vividly written and metered. It doesn't matter the idea or the starting point. It's what you apply to it.

Where do you start?
The first thing you might do is to lineate the prose. [...]

Ta da! We now have a free verse poem. And this is probably where 99 out of 100 modern poets stop. Free verse is the easiest and least demanding literary form ever created. But for those who like to juggle with more than one ball, let’s try two. The next step is to transform this passage into Iambic Pentameter.

[...]The blank verse (Iambic Pentameter) is competent and passable poetry. And  this is where many poets stop (those who write meter); but this is still juggling with just two balls. Now let’s juggle three. Let’s vary the meter and give it some life. [...]

Study closely how little additions and adornments turn ordinary prose into poetry. It’s not the content that makes the poem.

To paraphrase what he says of the next stage, you could add characters. Convert to dialogue. Add internal linkages of extended references to one base of metaphor, add wordplay and style.

It's a mechanic bent, but more can be said with that than talking from the perspective of poetry as mystic.

I like the exercise point of view rather than let us make something which is complete and true in first draft which is no more than tweaked for spelling. I'd rather tear something to component parts. All is lego.

I like making a long poem then just tearing the right margin words off and keeping those, or a subset of. It's not a pride issue to spend 2 or 3 hours on a poem and then throw it out. Process can be more interesting than product. And more useful.

To build into a structure or disassemble something which has structure are both interesting. For example, I took this Yeats poem and looked at it's structure, from rhyme (ABCD EBFD GBHD IBJD) to which sounds are most used and their place of articulation to see if there was a pattern (mostly voiced sounds but nothing strongly disproportional to normal, a lot of short i, and long o but not a strongly leaned on, dominant device of sound in this way). And then I reparsed the meaning.

S1-S2 things (example list of 1,2,3, then #3 expanded on, each line end stopped semantically) are dissonant against the memory of your beauty.
S3 world's too ugly a setting for you. I'll redo it.
S4 the new earth as your casket, and a casket for my dreams of you, my unattainable/inaccessible love.

The lines are ragged lengths with uneven number of syllables but it has a regular feel. What's going on? Yeats and Swinburns and the 19th century are characteristic for mixing iamb and anapest. I next looked at the meter which wraps around lines, so here I'll condense the couplets into one line since that how the meter neatly falls.

iamb iamb anapest anapest spondee iamb
iamb anapest anapest iamb anapest anapest

iamb iamb anapest iamb anapest iamb
iamb anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest

iamb iamb iamb anapest iamb anapest
iamb anapest anapest iamb anapest trochee beat

anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest
anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest

That much regularity in meter cannot be by accident. It's not the same length of line by syllables but it is regular length by counting accentually. Each line has 3 long (or stressed) syllables.

There's one exception, that last line of the second last stanza. (The word knoll throws the rhythm, foot, and pattern of 3 stressed syllables, couldn't not be accidental. It's also the pivot point of attitude where it shifts tone. The rose goes from hidden and protected to dead and buried. Is this a love poem? or smitten from afar; can't have you; wish you to be dead; how romantic manic.)

12 feet per stanza and 4 stanzas but the base is 3. 3 stressed beats per line. There are 6 stressed beats per 12 feet. Some are iambs, some anapest, increasingly over length, anapest. The last stanza which is fastest (since one speaks an iamb in the same speed as one speaks a three beat anapest but with 1/2 more content) also has the most even roll with regularity and consistency giving a stronger resolution underscoring the summative feel.

Does this make sense more when we add back the words?

The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart

All things uncomely and broken,
all things worn-out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway,
the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman,
splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,

With the earth and the sky and the water,
remade, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

- William Butler Yeats

for OSI: Water Prompt a rearrangement of words of another poem.

rock squints a mica wink

azure is to each
as far. the blue
in the while 
is in each,

wild waves
beneath. sun
unfolds ray of
air-immersed beauty.

breathing a life coil
they touch whisper
the ocean, sky
neither impossible.

A lot of days of writing what I don't like. As Nick says, it is often a poem speaks to you.

It is almost better to read and write by long turns rather than flipping to and fro, being continually caught back by how good others are. Inhibiting that. Or to read what doesn't catch at all, a tiring sort of channel flipping from poem to poem, feeling there must be something that would resonate soon. Something I can hear and feel and which is well-rendered. It feels like playing the slot machines sometime. I just want a hit. Something ahead to rest in. Whether written or read.

Huerta might be my fav find so far from the Poetic Asides Challenges.

I think my newest favorite poem is from Paul Muldoon Poems 1968 - 1998.

Wind and Tree

In the way that the most of the wind
Happens where there are trees,

Most of the world is centred
About ourselves.

Often where the wind has gathered
The trees together and together,

One tree will take
Another in her arms and hold.

Their branches that are grinding
Madly together and together,

It is no real fire.
They are breaking each other.

Often I think I should be like
The single tree, going nowhere,

Since my own one arm could not and would not
Break the other. Yet by my broken bones

I tell new weather.

Each phrase placed sensitively, it extends and extends and still works. It is so literally and figuratively accurate. The end stopped lines or enjambed corral pace. It bears reading and rereading and forces itself to tongue, not content to stay on page.

Poetic Aside daily challenges can be broad (a memory, an animal), but then, it's never the idea that's valuable or unique, it's the implementation. The official NaPoWriMo (National Poem Writing Month) prompts for the U.S. are also rather open ended (write about paradise, or nicknames) but Joanne Merriam is setting a different bent with the lists she's running. Her normal blogging practice is to pull out quotes from books daily, but now she's posting links to poems to inspire a response, such as “Political Meeting” by A. M. Klein to “The Language” by Robert Creeley and “They are hostile nations” by Margaret Atwood. I'm a sucker for specificity.

Narrow Road to the Interior (Shambala, 1991) of Matsuo Basho's trip about northern Japan in 1689. Sam Hamill's forward says that over the 4 years it took Basho to polish his travelogue of the trip we took with his friend, some things shifted to more figurative than the literal walkabout. Like the tight zoom on details of the farmer saying there are too many intersecting roads, best to take his horse, which they did. "Arriving at a village, I tied a small gift to the saddle and the horse turned back." Better than taxis, hands-down.

We're pecking away at Guy Thatcher's A Journey of Days: Relearning Life's Lessons on the Camino de Santiago (GPHB, 2008). I like its historical footnotes and direct quotes of people who have walked Spain's Camino over the last couple millennia. Unlike others who walked for a month or so, he goes with a convivial why-not attitude. Unlike those who have travelled it historically, he is neither pilgrim nor thief. I'm curious to see if he'll fall in with either...In any case it doesn't sound like a glamour trip. Its play-by-play feels like going there vicariously. And since options for anything we would eat seem quite limited and its become so popular to be ecological runoff of people, maybe doing it thru the page is the best way.

I suppose that it's fitting that I get to 2007's light summer read only now since it's called Fashionably Late. Nadine Dajani's novel (subtitled, "what happens in Cuba, stays in Cuba") had me from the moment she described the smitten on sight as becoming a sudden Snuffleupagus. Is that not perfect? Swaying, ungainly, no one would believe you exist like this here, instantly a child and yet feeling huge and conspicuous. It's basically college teenagers barhopping and squealing yet she tells it in such an appealing way. It's bouncy.

Sean Stanley's deliberate nonsense of Etcetera and Otherwise is hard to describe. It is nonsensical, like if Edward Lear had sex scenes (ending with "We redressed ourselves, and then put our clothes back on", p. 35). The grammar and world regularly upends on a tiltawhirl - "as he spoke he fiddled with his dagger, only to discover the blade could be turned inside out, which released a cloud of mayflies he'd never known were there." (p.53) I wonder when/if there'll be post modern breaking the 4th wall addresses. It's ruthlessly playful, puns and spouts of versey rhyme of the two travelling journeys impossible to conventional ways of thinking. Tightrope Books has published a very strange little work indeed, but glad they did. It's goodly bizarre.

In the wings of the desk are the Pocket World in Figures: 2007, Persimmon Moons (Imago Press, 1998) by Marshall Hryciuk, Ursula Le Guin's the wave in the mind (Shambala, 2004), American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, Norton 2009), Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros, (Vintage contemporaries, 1994), Open Letter, spring 2009, bpNichol + 21 issue, and Canadian Poetry: Volume One (Edited by Jack David and Robert Lecker, 1982 NewPress)

which I will probably double-back on momentarily... probably even during...

I am trying to sort out the drive and appeal of subjects and tones chosen. Why does something matter to someone in the context of their lives? Why decide what someone says is worth saying or reading?

Another has the same pieces to life puzzle therefore one should a) commiserate and congratulate b) compare, debate finer differences c) move on because it is the same-same; only fresh matters.

Another has different pieces to the puzzle therefore one should a) challenge b) find incomprehensible c) marvel d) absorb, internalize

It seems terribly contentious this idea of meaning. If you are communicating, you must *mean* something, intend to persuade of something or else it is gum-flap wasting everyone's time. People are willing to sleuth to code-break if they have to. It's the mentoring/savior urge. There is already too much which is surface and random. Let us impose a meaning or pattern in language at least. The story behind the story. The relationship fodder build on going thru the hoops of Times New Roman, or grabbing the ligature of literature and touching the skin of a person in the process. Poetry is just a convoluted way of communicating and if we can cut past that and just converse, so much the better. Poetry was a kludge that served and can be dropped. That's what I've got from some conversations.

And from this British comedy. Which puts its finger on the absurdity of the matter.

Our human brains work on significance, on story. How do we absorb otherwise? Too random and nothing registers (except for those who add 9/10 of content to any random object, event, word.)

How do we succeed in denying the right to read between lines? To say there is no story here is seeming to tease some kind of hard-to-get. Nothing is without purpose and people will impose their imagination on stars until some constellation comes. Why not proactively pitch an arbitrary significance so we can move past into the nitty gritty of sound and play and experience of language.

Poetry is fiction and other lies mixed in with truth. Officially, the story is that the narrator is not to be assumed to be the speaker. This is practical. It allows speech to be made at all without losing face, a sort of double ledger; I declare this crafted vision of the world but declare, I don't speak of myself. You can try out ideas without claiming them as your identity. Everyone knows its pretend. People still speculate much like one would over people who are just room mates, wishing for the seeming to be sordid.

Still stuck in my craw is the charge laid against me a decade ago that writers are all liars and cannot be god-seeking with that chosen profession. Cue the boilerplate of lies are more true than truth. He who assassinated my paper silhouette also dismissed English poetry as being inferior with no precedents used, no layers, no need to reference what went before and a readership who are gladly illiterate and cannot recognize their own cultural references. The truth of that gets me still.

I still answer myself to it. But when I read does not comfort or teach. So little can captivate me. And that is my wanting to always be on the high of hearing, the next hit of new angle, of novel take, of special phrase, but that is only meaningful with a contrast of downtime. Nothing can stand out if all things are equal.

I feel largely deaf. And cranky. But I would rather fight to understand than gloss over blankly. I would rather there be something to get, even if it is the punchline of gut laugh at life is a cosmic joke, let's remember it's all nonsense. I would rather get what someone put into it. I can make stuff up without getting anyone else involved. If someone else is speaking, I want to know what they know. If they speak and I talk and impose, neither of us get any gratifaction of being heard.

"The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions." - Adlai E. Stevenson

But looking back at what was written, there are all kinds of filters of cultural distance and my own bias reinforced when I want to break my own bias away from systemic patterns into one-off instances, blown into molocules. I don't want to hear my own assumptions whereever I go. If I could live outside myself, I would. And I try to when I listen.

I'm blind. I'm calloused when I hear some words, some tones. A pattern to dead end of someone going self-pitying, someone being entranced by the romance of fearful beauty, of looking uncritically and speaking at the level of construction sites instead of bricks. I get blocks I don't want but I can't sidestep my bias fast enough to hear the person behind the words. It is a humble thing to hear the person even when the person is angry with pain, or blowhard with insecurity or tremulous with overcompensating against fury. Or whatever. I want to understand where it is coming from. Which is story, which is person, which is too intimate when we want to arms length of words.

So we go to thin-slicing, a piece of salami of world view to the vegan. Another woman dismissed in succession. Embedded presumptions like nails deep in tree buck the saw. If I wish to be irritated, non-poetry life has ample opportunities without being struck by how as female I have the option of pat domestic nice dears, dysfunction-loving suicidals or balanced and intelligent lesbians. Maybe that makes my issue one of tribe of like-minds, coming from and going to the same place. I don't want to be challenged by underlying assumptions or trip at low level but move on to pure ideas, beyond color, class, gender, generation.

We have to speak for what matters and not hide in the sand.

We must play in the sand in what is sensory because all else is constructed and passing.

It seems two sides of the same furtive coin to a) elaborate out a poem to make patently clear what the person means and why by slant and expansion as to what the reader should think as it is to b) be evasive, anti-semantic and make impenetrable poems or oblique that fail is they show the life or ideas of poet or the environs.

Both are poet-fronted. The first evangelically chases to tag passersby and the other stands with cap out, periodically touches and declares no touch-backs. Both are monologues that seek to provoke. Both come from somewhere deep at different angles.

The middle ground that is not near the poet, where there is a retelling a transposed version of ancient story or historical biography, or talking about things out there without commentary such as some haiku seems to be a different coin.

It can be plain-spoken or not, but it's position towards the reader is more withdrawn and in that way allows the reader to approach without expecting oversharing or refusal to engage. It wants to participate in culture, dialogue about what the poet has harvested, rather than conscientiously abstain or hotly lead.

"Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider." - Francis Bacon

Maybe what I'm groping towards is this reservedness of mainstream, versus specialized stylistics, experimental or workingman poems.

The attachment of the poet to the poem may be less if taking about a re-vision of a tale, or narrating nature than if it has a political bent or L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E bent. It is about out there instead of hooked so close to identity. When there is detachment is more of a sense of option, less imposition of intensity.

Maybe what one is trying to tell is not to tell to me. It is an eavesdropping on what I don't have the hooks to understand. My life and bias don't overlap enough. Our dialects are thick to one another. But perhaps I am corrupted by the idea of universal translator. I want to understand and then know which way to go on a simplistic dynamic: am I ahead and should lead or am I behind and should follow?

An English teacher finds himself fallen down the rabbit hole and stands now before the giant mushroom:

"I mean that I teach poetry."

"I'm not surprised," said the Caterpillar. "Poetry has a thing or two to learn. It has more feet than I do and they're terribly difficult to keep track of."

A quote from "A Common Night," by Bruce Holland Rogers in the anthology Fantastic Alice (Margaret Weiss, ed.) [via Some thoughts on meter]

This Thursday the next edition of the A B Series brings Penn Kemp to town.

Later this month is Clifton Joseph, John Sobol and Robert Priest come.

Mid-May it's Christian Bök who spoke and performed at the 2008 Canadian Literature symposium, which had a focus on the postmodern last year (and there's a sound file there of him among others).

There was a Factory Reading at a reading at Saw Gallery March 26th.

The winner of the PK Page Founders' Award for 2009 is Shane Rhodes.


He read from his newest poetry manuscript in progress, "The Air". It's a sometimes Eunoiaesque explorations of subsets of sounds, looking around at etymologies. His skill in using devices of rhyme and meter is clear. One poem was a tribute, a monologue to a man who died of HIV, the narrator rebuking his whine that it wasn't AIDs that messed you up; it was the decade of coke-use. Another poem spoke of a backyard where among the garden, melons, were the wrecks of old cars, warted leather convertibles that would be fixed into former glory one of these days.

His last work published was The Bindery.

(The painting in the background is an oil by Michael Harrington. Each has an interesting quality of light and color.)


Paul Tyler read from a blue chapbook. (I know, that's as useful as "what kind of car do you have?" "Blue".) They were poems about politics ("desire inventing dogma from the dust" in one about the Taliban blowing up Buddhas because they are unnatural, not created directly by Allah and he said something like as if history left alone grows Buddhas in the desert).

He also wrote of past workplaces, butcher shop and end-stage care of seniors and the people his mind can't erase. And wouldn't want to. Like Robert Louis Stevenson's windows, it's all communication made to be heard. There were some lovely phrasings that were easy to grasp on first pass such as all of the doors of me wanting this.



A good night out of poetry. 20 or 25 people came despite the cold rain and it being end of week.

Robert Brewer interviews Patricia Fargnoli, the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She says, "I only occasionally do simultaneous submissions [...] more lately because I am 71 [...] I can't afford to wait a year to hear results anymore...especially since the competition is so fierce and rejection so frequent."

Ross Priddle did a callout on issue #400 of 1cent which he and I are in (and he gives a full list of all who is).

What is a writing Workshop? from St. Augustine's confessions.

"Conloqui et conridere et vicissim benevole obsequi, simul leger libros dulciloquos, simul nugari et simul honestari ." ("Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions,")

As Stephen Kuusisto adds there, "There's no room for a crystal throne in a good workshop."

Equals as partners in learning getting along.

And how blessed of state it is when serendipity and whatever else is at play makes it happen and reoccur when it does.

Rather than double-post I'll point to the other blog: Leifso at Tree her new Brick Book and the issues it raises.