Lining the walls of my shack

- A wire from the frontier.

Ira Glass on Storytelling

Part of a series really worth checking out. 

Basically: Trust your gut, stick to your guns.

Poetry outside poetry: Social sites

I used to write — poems, stories, essays, daily journal entries, thoughts on napkins, whatever I could use to spew ideas on. . . . I got into building more websites “just for fun” — there’s a lot of creative energy that goes into getting the CSS and HTML, the content and audience, just right. And now I organize. My creative needs are met by arranging people, ideas, and spaces together like I used to string together words or snippets of code. The result is still a piece of art — something I can point to and say, “I did that, and it’s beautiful, it’s even more interesting than I imagined it would be, and it has an effect on the people who encounter it.” Only now the art is much more alive. It grows and changes and takes on its own personality and it needs to be constantly fed and nurtured to survive.
I’ll be honest: poems were way easier. They certainly didn’t care if I got sick.
About a month ago, when I was having a crisis of direction, I called my dear friend Melissa and demanded,“What do I want to be when I grew up, again??” She said, “Sarah, you’re a poet who raises armies and brings people together, and sometimes those poems look like websites.” And sometimes those websites look like armies. And sometimes those armies look like poems.

- Sarah Dopp, Professional Creative

This is a long quote, but I kept it mostly intact for a couple reasons:

1. Sarah Dopp is a great friend of mine who deserves all the attention she gets. If you have a creative social project for the 'net, she's one of the first people to talk to.

2. I usually think of poetry as merely language, organized observation in service of restructuring the apparent world. But this quote raises the question about "poetry" as it relates to other art (and non-art). To hear Sarah and her friend Melissa tell it, creative social websites like Genderfork are much like poems. Genderfork takes a series of observations concerning the world, namely gender, then uses language (both visible and invisible (css, html)) to structure an exploration of those observations, the result of which is surprising to the "author" and elicits an emotional response from the reader much like a poem.

Genderfork started as a series of positioned statements in the form of picture and narrative. What happened next is really interesting and perhaps informs the evolution of poetry on the 'net: The singular author became multiple authors, each working together to extend the content, tone, and ultimately the "life" of the site. Just like a written poem, Genderfork left the control of the original author and was consumed and appropriated by its audience. And instead of keeping it at arms length, they rolled up their sleeves, stuck their hands in and made it better. If it's not poetry, it might be more successful than any poetry I know.

Even at more traditional(?) literature collaborative blogs, such as HTMLgiant have a slightly poetic feel. However, sites like that, though full of collaboration and displayed language construction, are still mostly external links. Genderfork is mostly internal language published.

Also of note, quickly, is the reference to poems being "easier." I understand the sentiment: that creating an ongoing site/project requires more energy from the author, but to what extent? When the authorship multiplies, the effort fades, correct? Something to chew on.

What do you think? Can websites be poetry or merely poetic? Does Genderfork fill the requirements of poetry? Is there a future of ongoing poem-sites that become fixtures in the poetic landscape? Do they already exist? Let me know your thoughts, give me examples!

Reading Recap

The reading on Wednesday was a huge hit. I would love to thank everyone who came, especially Tim, Sam, Joe, Ben, Eli and Carl. Oh and my mom, who pulled the classic mom stunt of saying: "come here, you have something on your face" moments before I was introduced. (I couldn't believe she actually said that without any sarcasm or irony in her voice.)

I had thought the reading would be small (I mean, come on, Exeter NH?) but as I walked in there were at least 30 people there. The number would swell to around 60 when two high school English classes showed up, complete with an old teacher of mine (who remembered me? It has been 10 years!) 60 people. Needless to say I was pumped, and it showed.

Pat followed, and I really appreciated her candor. Her husband of many years had passed in the past month, and she dedicated the reading to him. It follows that she read a lot of poems about him. There was a bit of sentimentality, but the best poems really approached the relationship with an attentiveness and perspective I was jealous of. Given the situation, it was all entirely appropriate and made me think about the traditions of poetry in every day life. I only hope to be writing at her age.

The open mic was almost as long as the reading, with about a thousand high school kids reading poems from class. Brings me right back to my high school days. I'm glad I wrote, but I feel bad for those who had to listen to me read at open mics.

Reading was followed by some drinks and conversation at my house, thanks to all those who showed up and listened to my best Truman Capote impressions.

So I got some good comments on my poems, some more good comments on my reading (Slam Poetry did SOMETHING good for me) and overall can't wait for the next reading. hear that people,
BOOK ME.

Colors and Compositions

- A wire from the frontier.

Reading? Reading!

This is my first reading in a long, long time. I'm taking the place of Harvey Shepard. I would love for all you wonderful people to come to Exeter and watch, read a poem of your own. There is an open mic and I would love to have a round robin of wonderful poems (and short fiction pieces)

* * *

Pat Parnell is a poet, teacher, and journalist. She is Professor Emerita at Chester College of New England, (formally White Pines College). She has published two books, Snake Woman and Other Explorations, Finding the Female In Divinity, (2001) and Talking With Birches, (2004). In addition her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Don Murray, Boston Globe columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, called her poetry "a gift for each reader."

* * *

Jeremiah Gould lives in New Hampshire and is working on splitting himself like an atom. He falsely believes this will make him more energetic. In fact, it will only make him more apathetic.

After the featured readers we open the floor for an open mic. Bring one or two poems to share, or just come to listen.

Location:

Water Street Bookstore
125 Water Street
Exeter, New Hampshire 03833

What is a Poem?

"A poem is itself first, then something afterwards. An essay is always first about something." - W. S. Merwin

From The Art Of Poetry: A Conversation With W.S. Merwin

e asu e = anslationtray?

I've been spending a lot of time (one might argue too much) at the homestead, scanning endless pages of internet about poetry and things related to poetry. Like watching out the window onto a busy street, one tends to find the same subjects passing by intermittently. I've lately been finding The ms of my kin by Janet Holmes passing my "window." I have not yet read this book, and i stress yet, but its presence has opened me up to the wonderful complexities of erasure poetry, to which I'm thankful.

Erasure poetry had escaped my notice: I have always been mired by inattentiveness. The idea of creating new context for previous was at first repulsive to me. What was so different between erasure and say, graffiti? (It's an analogy that's got some holes: graffiti usually a medium on top of a different medium - paint and/or poster on architecture; erasure strictly of the same medium - literature on literature) Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but let's just say I wasn't too keen originally with the concept of erasure poetry.

I am not alone. Silliman, in his blog, questioned his favorable first impression of Homes' book, saying he was "ill-at-ease" with a book that was, in his eyes, well-executed and somewhat of a "delight to hold." What made him hesitant is the question of spirit of innovation and poetic expansion. The entry is a good read and thought provoking. What I think is interesting is Silliman's last assertion that if previous erasure projects, such as Ronald Johnson's Radi os, are literary pioneers, Holmes is more of a settler in the "town & farms" sense. This analogy is fitting. What is the frontier without the contrast of towns and farms?

Chewing on Silliman's post for a bit, finding mentions of ...kin, made me wonder of what use is erasure? And do I really want to start blacking out lines of old Goodwill .95$ treasures to find out? Luckily for me, I didn't have to destroy an actual book to experiment in erasure. I only had to click on over to Wave Books, who have a section on their site that allows one to create (and re-create) erasures with all the joy and none of the contact high.

With a veritable wall of text confronting me, I quickly realized that the creation of an erasure poem from prose is deceptive. I quickly accumulated a series of creations that were merely masquerading as poetry. I believed the presence of a narrative would make things easy, that I could quickly pick apart the text and discover its secrets. This was not the case. Any series of words that jumped off the screen at me were too easy: were hollow. I'll spare you the torture of reading any of these "poems." I'll just say I found myself with the same feeling that I have when I'm confronting writer's block, only worse: now I had someone else talking in my ear while I tried to write.

Again I was brought back to the work Holmes did, and came across an interview by Rauan Klassnik. He asked a couple of questions about the craft of erasure poetry; about the rules, tricks and so forth. A quote that stood out for me, was

... it felt [at times] like collaborating with Dickinson: the words were telling a narrative so like the atrocity we had lived through, and they were already there to be unearthed.

This sparked something I was listening to this week (the auditory necessity of poetry should be a post for another day). Steve Scher talked with W.S. Merwin for a bit, touched on the usual talking points about craft and reading, but something Merwin said both intrigued and dismayed me:

[Writing poetry] means learning language, your language. The way to learn your language is to translate. You translate from other languages. It will teach you your own language ... That by the time your finished you've found 20 different ways of saying [a phrase] that you would have never found any other way.

This is first depressing because, while peers have learned Spanish, French, German, I took Latin from 8th grade through my freshman year of undergrad. Took it and then forgot it all. In this way, until I start to learn another language, the importance of translation might be lost on me. However, what's really intriguing (and you can see where I'm going) is how this thought on translation interacts with the earlier quotation from Holmes.

Given Holmes' assertion that at times she felt like she was working alongside Dickinson, as if she was unearthing a meaning hidden within the text, doesn't erasure in some way act like translation? Both require an attentiveness to what is already there, to the intent of an author, a channeling of language, a re-imagining of image that often has no translation. Although I have only dabbled in half of this equation, it is exciting for me to think of erasure as English to English translation. An exercise to create meaning within seemingly narrow confines, teasing as many meanings as possible from a poem seems to perform the function that Merwin proposes.

This leads to many questions, both interior and for the greater "community" What do you think? how similar is the process of erasure to translation? What are the differences (an obvious one is recreation vs. separation)? What, if any, worth is there in having lots of poets practicing erasure? Isn't it good to have "town & farms" in poetry? Should it be practiced in schools?

I know I will be exploring this practice (and picking up Janet's book, i swear) in the future, if only to learn more of my own (personal) language from the language of another.

Just gotta adjust myself...

As some (though few, and hopefully none) of you might have realized, this blog has been off-line for a few months. Not that I did a good job of updating, but now that I realize Facebook isn't the best place to share links, photos, ramblings, it's time to concentrate the soft accumulation of information to this wonderfully strong net.

Cheers,

J