Big Bang Poetry

Big Data Poetry Studies: Poems in Newspapers

April 30, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So a few years ago I bought a 2-year subscription to a Penn State journal called Studies in American Humor. I now have about four issues and I’ve only read one of them so far. They’re very dry. And less funny than you would think.

This would show I do not actually ‘subscribe’ to the idea that to study comedy is to kill it. There is no small amount of the unknown about art and our responses to it, but to me the mysterious element just proves (like the mysterious universe itself) that we just haven’t studied it enough.

Anyway, one of the journal articles inside Vol. 7, No. 1 proved very fruitful for this blog. It was called “Viral Jokes and Fugitive Humor in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reprinting” by Todd Thompson (2021).

Because we can now study large sets of content electronically through searchable databases, we can see patterns we were never before able to see. We call this “distant reading” as opposed to a “close reading.” And this author here was interested in how jokes travel from newspaper to newspaper across the United States in the 19th Century. For example, “one viral joke was reprinted more than a hundred times in American periodicals between 1856 and 1877.”

Scholars and anthropologists can now do this research with recipes, old songs, marital advice and even poems, as we will see below. Many of the more popular items “circulated for decades.” And we can now see how content often needed contextual understanding from the audiences reading them.

The joke Thompson studies is called “A Yankee Boast” or “Not to Be Outdone” and his whole effort here was based on a poetry study already done on searchable databases called “Fugitive Verses: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” by Ryan Cordell and Abby Mullen.

The basis of the joke was “a friendly argument between the United States and Britain” that first appeared in the Boston Transcript on 24 December 1855 and the gist of it was how Americans can get ridiculous in the game of one-upmanship. Constance Rourke describes the situation: “Half bravado, half cockalorum, this Yankee revealed the traits considered deplorable by the British travelers; he was indefatigably rural, sharp, uncouth, witty. Here were the manners of the Americans!” The joke plays on “the aggressive exaggeration about frontiersmen’s superhuman abilities to conquer their natural surroundings in the service of westward expansion and empire building.”

And the joke kept getting resurrected in bursts as the United States expanded, for example when the U.S. annexed Alaska. In the essay on poems below, the authors call this “multiple waves of popularity.”

The joke “elides the fraught politics of expansion in the late 1850s” and traces how the joke changed over time in reprints, by accident or by editorial interference, in one case eventually being used to make a serious editorial case in favor of manifest destiny.

And when studying a piece contained in a larger newspaper, the frame of content around that subject matters, so Thompson also studies where in the newspaper this joke would appear, what page, what ads and editorials where nearby, “how a joke’s meaning shifts….based on its collocation with other news items….the joke’s relative elasticity allows it to mean something different to readers who consume it alongside one or more…recurring themes.”

He also studied historical humor themes: “Comic exaggeration and the immensity of America’s natural features tended to go hand in hand in nineteenth-century American humor.”

So then I went to JSTOR and downloaded “Fugitive Verses: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” (which appeared in American Periodicals in 2017).

And this study was interesting to me for one reason: most poetry studies I read deal with the meaning or the development of a work in the literary canon as it exists appreciated in modern times. Okay, well maybe someone will sometimes delve into an obscure artist, but even then everything is based on our sense of taste today either collectively or individually. Rarely have we gone back to see what people found interesting in their own historical culture.

Often you see lists of names, long forgotten poets who were allegedly hugely popular during their day, but never anything much to explain or quantify the context of their popularity.

Distant reading can help with that.

And just as Thompson did with the American/British joke above, Cordell and Mullen follow the changes in poems over time. They explain how people once would cut poems out of newspapers and make scrapbooks from them. I would imagine they did this with jokes, songs and recipes, too.

The first poem they track is “a largely forgotten nineteenth-century poem” called “The Children,” a poem “not collected in The Norton Anthology of American Literature,” i.e. the canon, “but it was exceedingly popular in its day…reprinted at least 171 times…between September 22, 1864 and December 3, 1899, making it one of the most widely reprinted poems from the nineteenth century.”

A funny thing seems to happen when a poem gets reprinted so many times in so many places. It takes a life of its own through “remediation” and the poem separates from its author (often being attributed mistakenly to the wrong people or as an anonymous poem). The author loses the thread. Even for kingpin poets like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, America’s best seller. Even his poems lost track of him occasionally.

These were “messy realities of nineteenth-century print culture.” There were “mistakes of fact or typesetting that ripple through the newspaper exchanges, to debates over authorship.”

Sounds fun.

And again, context supplied additional meaning. Was the poem printed on a literary page or on the front page surrounded by related news. Imagine that, a front-page poem!

Anyway, “The Children” was written by Charles M. Dickinson. Foreshadowing that this familiar name would complicate authorship someday, as well as Dickinson’s use of a pen name sometimes. Most early reprints of the poem had the author mistakenly listed as “Dickens,” some as “Dickinson,” some as “The Village Schoolmaster” (his pen name) and some as anonymous.

And then a false story went around that the poem was found on the desk of Charles Dickens when he died. Sounds far-fetched but most people believed that story as it was reprinted so often. As a Charles Dickens poem, the poem took on extra meaning because you would naturally attribute Charles Dickens’ literary preoccupations to it.

The author’s quote D. F. McKenzie to label that kind of meaning-making “the poem’s social text.” And unfortunately the way people read the poem also started to affect how readers then viewed Charles Dickens.

This is how the poem becomes “fugitive.” On the run from its ownership, “that it has escaped its owner” and begins “circulating surreptitiously.”

This seems like a nightmare for anyone who has the idea of a romantic auteur about themselves. But “the nineteenth century developed the nearest thing that publishing poets have ever had to mass readership…the broadest and least controllable distribution channel for poets during the period…a highly variable network over which typical literary authorities had little say.”

So yeah…a mixed bag.

Author’s protested misattribution but those protests appeared mostly in literary magazines and books and who reads those?

And poor son of Charles Dickens who kept having to say the poem was not written by his father and having to write “a large number of letters” over “seventeen years” to try to clear up the mess.

This is funnier than the Yankee Boast, to be honest. But I’m saying that from 2025.

The article then traces another poem, “Mortality” by Scottish poet William Knox that was first printed in the U.S. in 1832 and got confused to be a poem Abraham Lincoln wrote just because he liked it so much. Through recitation and reprinting, stanzas got omitted and words changed. The most popular version should maybe be considered a “reauthorship,” according to this essay. And then after Lincoln died and the poem was included in his biography, the title was changed to “O Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud” which caused a further shift in the poem’s meaning.

And then poems were often printed with little editorial intros which affected how they landed in readers minds.

“Between 1859 and 1895, a poem named ‘Beautiful Snow’ circulated through more than 276 periodicals, across continents and across oceans.” It’s a poems the authors say is not found in any scholarship or anthologies. But it was a very popular poem about a fallen woman and for years many debated its potential authors among actors, socialites, newspaper editors, writers and prostitutes.

“One British paper wryly observed, ‘In the United States of America there are 6,000 people who wrote the poem “Beautiful Snow” under a nom de plume, and they are increasing at the rate of forty-three monthly.”

Cue the parodies. This poem became so talked-about that it was called “a beautiful vagabond” and “not a poem, but a series of events.”

To paraphrase the authors, poems that were printed in newspapers had a life of “uncertainties and slippages.”

So there was no easy life for poets back then as now. You might have the most popular poem of the day but it would be attributed to Taylor Swift.

You don’t need JSTOR, you can read a draft of the article here: https://viraltexts.org/2016/04/08/fugitive-verses/

Developing Translations

April 28, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’m finishing up two other poetry books today, serendipitously both combined works of poems and essays, albeit each organized differently. One is La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge, Poetry y ostras movidas by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and the other is Marilyn: Essays & Poems by Heidi Seaborn. For the most part, I have liked the essays better in de Alba’s book and like best the Seaborn poems that delve into Marilyn Monroe’s biography, although Seabourn’s investigations into her own personal insomnia are interesting, there’s just a lot of that to read through.

But last week I found out my friend, the poet Ann Cefola, has a new book of translations available with the French poet Hélène Sanguinetti, Alparegho, Like-nothing-else, so that book has been moved to the top of my to-read stack.

To launch the book Beautiful Days Press hosted a transnational, bilingual poetry reading between Cefola (in Long Island, New York) and Sanguinetti (in Arles, France) held on Zoom with attendees from all over the world.

The publisher began by quoting from prior reviews calling Cefola’s prior translations of Sanguinetti “splendidly nuanced” and created “with scrupulous fidelity.”

Which sounds like well-made translations to me and I’m fascinated with this whole process of translation, especially as it was described in this Zoom reading.

Cefola talked about how Sanguinetti’s words have “muscle” and that “they struggle on the page.”

Sanguinetti and Cefola then each read the same section, first Sanguinetti in French and then Cefola in English, Sanguinetti beginning using a finger drum and that followed by a very impassioned reading.

I was able to attend the first Cefola/Sanguinetti reading years ago in Los Angeles for their first book-length effort (Hence This Cradle). Back then we gathered at the Otis College of Art and Design and it was 2007, which seems like many lifetimes ago in the world of Hélène Sanguinetti.

Based on the comments of the attendees on the Zoom call, I will be expecting a collection of experimental quest poems. One reviewer called it a mock-epic. Sanguinetti talks about the quest being the “adventure of our lives.”

After they both read from the book, one attendee said the poem was “lovely to the ear in English and French.”

When asked about how Cefola works with Sanguinetti as a translator, Cefola said “the tracks are there” and that she understood how different English was with its often harsh, Anglo-Saxon sounds. Her job was to mediate between the English and the French but in doing so she had to get “rid of a lot of prepositions that make French so lyrical and beautiful.”

Cefola said her first pass was to capture “accurate words” and then a second pass was made to choose words that “fit the sound,” words that would “resonate” with Sanguinetti’s French.

Cefola admitted she wanted to make Sanguinetti sound more lyrical in the beginning but Sanguinetti told her “this is not what I’m doing,” that Sanguinetti wanted “a struggle on the page” and so Cefola had to “let her work be difficult” and in doing so she had to “set aside [her] own traditions.”

Which is a larger exercise (and lesson) in human understanding and empathy.

Another attendee asked about the idea of a bridge being used as a symbol in the book and Sanguinetti talked about how it could illustrate courage and the unknown. Cefola later told me that “the broken bridge is also about the writing process” and how the “rider has to make leaps even if the way ahead is ‘broken.’”

Sanguinetti says “Alparegho” is an invented word that is both “similar to myself” and “similar to nothing” and she talked about paradox, which feels like much of her work to me.

She noted with mild frustration that people have told her they understand her poems better when she reads them aloud. And the performance of her poems is definitely worth watching but the look of her words on a page is equally interesting.

She then showed us an abstractly human-formed sculpture. She said she makes objects with clay and plaster and this was a character she made covered in yellow acrylic paint with a bird’s head and horns. She said she gave it a red stain for a heart and added a pebble and a button. When it was done she asked it, “who are you?” And this figure became was a starting-point for her character Alparegho, “a point of departure, half sun, half moon.”

She talked about Alparegho rhyming with the word escargot (and how the book contains a snail’s journey) and the hermaphrodite nature of the character.

As an aside, this point of departure reminded me of Georgia O’Keeffe and how her paintings were often influenced by music. The O’Keeffe gift shops in Santa Fe and Abiquiu even sell a CD compilation of some of her favorite pieces, Georgia O’Keeffe, A Musical Perspective, which includes work from Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Stravinsky, Copland, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gershwin and Vivaldi. There’s also a Joel Goodman piece on the CD called “O’Keeffe’s Colors.” I was disappointed the CD booklet did not (or could not) trace specific music works back to certain O’Keeffe paintings. But the bridges that form between music, words and art is yet another kind of translation that is fascinating, and O’Keeffe shared it with other painters, sculptors and photographers. She also developed close friendships with writers.

In a second question to Cefola, she explained more about her translation process, that she doesn’t read the poem in full in French at the begining, that she translates it as she goes, a very “basic translation” and that the poem then “develops like a photograph” in a darkroom.

“I see it as I translate,” she said. In the second pass, Cefola will “fine-tune” the meaning and the language “to convey the spirit to an English-speaking audience. She said “accuracy” was more important than any kind of “meaning” and it’s interesting to think about the fine-lined difference between those two concepts.

Sanguinetti then expressed her admiration for Cefola’s translations, called them “incredible” and said she felt they read better in English than in French to which Cefola interrupted with an emphatic “no, no, no.” Sanguinetti said there was sometimes a word or two that was translated in a way that gave an unintentional meaning but that through the translation process she often discovered aspects of the work she hadn’t seen before.

How great is that? Looking forward to reading this book.

More reviews and a synopsis: https://asterismbooks.com/product/alparegho-like-nothing-else

To see a recording of the book launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8HPP10pdLk

Purchase the book here.

Discovering Brian Eno and Oblique Strategies

April 17, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Like I said on Cher Scholar, I am now publishing blog alerts and new content on Substack due to recent political and news events. So discovering a three-hour Brian Eno documentary (“The Man Who Fell to Earth”) last week feels like a good moment of refreshment for Big Bang Poetry. Some fresh projects, a fresh bulletin board.

Not only was the documentary long, but it only covered 1971-to 1977!! Monsieur Big Bang is a Brian Eno fan and picked it out to watch. Whenever we talk about Roxy Music, he will say “Roxy Music was better with Brian Eno in it.” And now I understand why he feels this way (although I still like the later-day Roxy Music).

This post could almost cross-pollinate with Cher Scholar in the ongoing arguments over the use of voice-manipulation-technology in “Believe” (and also Eno often planning an up-tempo record side and a downbeat side which Cher tried with Closer to the Truth and I hated it), which has a tiny but direct lifeline back to the ethos of Brian Eno, a self-described non-musician who has managed to spend his whole career working with technology in music as an art form in a very commercial space.

The avant-garde’s attraction to technology is one of the main controversies of our time. Like the defenders of “Believe,” the documentary’s talking head pointed to the emotional connections of Brian Eno’s music, one commentator pointing out the way Eno can explore work with machines to produce “great humanity and warmth.”

The documentary also discussed ideological tensions around the idea of virtuosity and yet Eno works with practiced musicians. So it’s complicated. You can feel the threat of AI coming now while watching; and the contempt of craft that comes around every few decades. But there is also something interesting about the idea of play. As was said of Eno and an instrument or machine, he “plays with it versus plays it.” It reminds me of the kind of digital “poetry” that uses vocabulary as a material but words separated from grammatical meanings, making it more a visual art using words like a material object. The same thing could be working here for Brian Eno (he uses sound for art’s sake versus music’s sake) except that I think his work appeals to musicians more than digital poetry appeals to other poets.

The documentary explores early technology experiments with Pink Floyd and Kraftwork and Eno’s work with Roxy Music, Robert Fripp, Cluster, David Bowie and the Talking Heads.

The doc also draws a line from Erik Sartie (and his “sound furniture”) to the chance operations of John Cage (who crosses over to LANGUAGE poetics and mesostics) to Brian Eno’s ambient music. I made a list of albums to listen to and have only yet finished No Pussyfooting (with Fripp).

But there were a few things that really appeal to me about Eno. One was his stance against rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Having grown up romanticizing rebellion (heroizing it even), I’m ready to look at another way.

The other thing was the Oblique Strategies cards, which are all about generating new inputs if you are stuck. He made them with painter Peter Schmidt from their separate notebooks of ideas they used when they were stuck on something.

The randomness of cards, the tactileness of cards has always attracted me. Growing up in a poker-playing house, I was only interested in the cards at a tactile level, the way the sounded on the shuffle, the feel of the slide, the many ways to paint them.)

Anyway, I went looking for these cards on eBay and they are very, very expensive, prior editions going for hundreds of dollars, the original edition for over a thousand. Brian Eno is selling new decks from his website for only $50.

But I decided to dig out some unused business cards in my office closet (who needs them after VistaPrint?) and hand-write my own set. This would also give me a chance to do another archaic thing I love to do: laminate shit.

Considering Eno is a technology artist, the cards are a very beautifully physical tool to use. I love that about the context of the whole endeavor. It reminds me of my own need to play around with browser poems and then hand-write haikus.

Version 1.0.0

The set of 115 cards were written to be recording studio aids for when artists get stuck, when things just are not working. But I think they would be just as useful as writing aids, like the Creative Whack Pack or Stones for the Muse.

Reading them over, I came up with the following example categories and my thoughts about some of the cards:

Shake the creative jar:

Change instrument roles (that sounds interesting)
Abandon normal instruments
Reverse
Use fewer notes (Is that the Emperor talking to Mozart in Amadeus?)
Look at the order in which you do things
Faced with a choice, do both
Convert a melodic element into a rhymical element

Do some abstract thinking:

A line has two sides.
Repetition is a form of change
Always give yourself credit for having more than personality
Do we need holes?

Beginner’s Mind:

Ask people to work against their own better judgement
Use unqualified people
Don’t be afraid of things because they are easy to do
Idiot glee
Question the heroic approach

Some of the Beginner’s Mind ideas do work against our narcissistic tendencies but I’m now questioning some of these impulses, which have been popular for some years now. The problem is that this kind of chaos-creating has got us where we are now socially and politically because it has led us into to a fear of expertise or maybe a distrust of expertise. (This is the essential tug and pull of an artist like Brian Eno).

In truth, we need to beware of our fear of expertise as much as our glorification of it. Because it’s almost like someone is trying to run a country this way and it can cause a massive-scale of suffering. The beginner’s mind is a way to break out of the spell of a creative block, not a system-entire operating strategy (or at least it shouldn’t be). We’ve come this far as humans by figuring things out. I don’t need to understand quantum physics but someone should. And I should respect their understanding that is beyond mine.

Where are the cards for tapping into all that we know and allowing others to contribute their expertise to our enterprise? Not that these cards are the antithesis to that. They’re not.

Jump starting the brain by adjusting the body and other sensory adjustments:

Breathe more deeply
Water
Ask your body
Put in earplugs (a personal favorite)
Shut the door and listen from the outside
Remember the quiet evenings
Twist your spine
Get your neck massaged
Do the washing

Stop stopping (or guarding) yourself (this is a big one):

Don’t be frightened by cliches (I have a poem in a new collection that says the same thing)
Allow an easement (I think this might make more sense to a songwriter)
Honor thy error as a hidden intention (the power of failure)
What would your closest friend do?
What wouldn’t you do?
Discard an axiom
What mistakes did you make last time?
Emphasize the flaws
Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them (one of the laws of mining for comedy)
Go to an uncomfortable extreme and then move back to a comfortable place
Be less critical more often
Accept advice
What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate. (honesty, truth)
Trust the you of now
Courage? (perhaps the most valuable card in the deck)

What Is Poetry: To Reveal the Self or Disclose the World?

April 9, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This is our last blog post covering questions about what poetry may be. We ran out of Elisa New questions (from the Harvard Emily Dickinson MOOC) in the last post. This question is a bonus question I cobbled together somewhere between reading about Gary Snyder and Jack Spicer last year, a question poised somewhere between the Confessional/Beat poets (who make appeals from the self) and the LANGUAGE poets (who try to reveal a reality which does not include ego-driven ideas of the self).

I find this a very interesting, advanced question: what is the purpose of poetry, to reveal the personality or to disclose the world as authentically as we can (in all its scary nebulousness), to explore our many personas or to abandon the idea of individuality altogether?

Poetry camps each feel very strongly about this. And, as you can predict, I hate to take sides in these poetry matters. Again, how can you choose? Like all these attempts to define what poetry is and what poetry does, there are easy cases to be made outside of any staid definition.

If we’re honest, most humans can’t really function outside of a sense of self, despite the precariousness of the self in any biological sense. Psychologists can show how and why we construct our ideas of ourselves so we can mentally move through the world. And we need the idea of other selves to help us come to terms with the mysteries of human behavior in others.

But some (very Zen) humans can also operate with a more fluid sense of self, of being part of a collective self (without feeling threatened by losing the assurance of an ego). Other people need a strong sense of self, a bolster that helps them understand where they begin and end in the world. And then some people just want to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

So this determines the kind of poetry each type of person needs to write.

It’s probably a healthy practice to try both kinds of consciousnesses and write poems that explore each point of view (or pointlessness of view).

After all, without personalities to communicate from and to why bother? On the other hand, with an intransigent sense of self, you are going to get stuck in the pointlessness of that as well. Without being willing to a kind of fluidity and openness to changing your mind, why try to communicate with others? Because if your goal is just to force your perspective on everybody else, you are doomed to fail and feel alienated as a result.

What Is Poetry? One Moment or an Eternity

April 3, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We are to the last of our Elisa New questions from the Emily Dickinson MOOC. We have one more bonus question later but this is the last in New’s string of musings to her students about what poetry is or how we can define it.

This last question is long: “does a poem live more fully in one distinct moment of performance, like a theatrical performance, like a dance performance? Or does a poem live across time, such that any one performance is inadequate to what the poem actually is?”

Unlike how poems were originally transferred from person to person before the printing press was invented, and unlike how music, theatrical and dance performances operate as one-of-a-kind, communal experiences, poetry can also be transmitted by the technology of books, its own machine of mediation.

So “performance” takes a different meaning if you consider the “performance” on the page. How does a poem perform across and down the white space of paper and across pages? A private reading is also a kind of performance in your own head, in your own imagination. You are the eternal performer in all your readings.

Live events are communal events. Who hasn’t felt the energy of being part of an enthusiastic audience? Any piece of work that has been preserved and then experienced in another time and place through a mediated device is a different experience. Just as experiencing the plays of Shakespeare are unique to their time as opposed to their very first performances. The cultural context has changed. Time changes culture which changes the context of reading any art.

The media also affects the experience, changes in books, new technologies. Watching a video on MTV in the 1980s is a different experience than watching it on YouTube. Hearing AI read a poem aloud is quite different than hearing a monk read it centuries ago. A paperback book is different than a computer printout which is different than a book that was handwritten. These are both intellectual and emotional differences. They land differently in our heads and hearts.

Are all these pieces of art different if differently experienced? They may use the same words from context to context and medium to medium. Does even the reader change what is read? I recently read a allegory for fandom that described two people riding a roller coaster. Their bodies experience the same ride in the same objective way but one loves the ride and one hates it. Their interpretations are based on their personalities and expectations of pleasure.

So one set of words could have infinite performances across time and media, and infinite performances even in one moment across the array of an audience.

What Is Poetry: Is a Poem a Container?

March 19, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We have three more of these to do, three more Elisa New questions from her Emily Dickinson MOOC many years ago. This time we have two related questions she asked: Is a poem a container that holds a set of meanings or is it an expansion or dissemination that defies all containment?

I feel like this must be the easiest question she’s ever asked us. Because nothing is a container. Not even a Tupperware container. And yet…poems can be usefully seen as tight little containers (compared to novels, for example).

Maybe formalists build poems to be containers. But nothing we really do or say can be hermetically sealed. Even, I would argue, if we never ever share that poem with a single other person. It disseminates and expands into us as creators.

Like man, no poem is an island. And yet it is truly maddening for some people to think about how porous the borders of all things are, even their own skin.

Often people rely on black and white thinking, probably the most popular coping mechanism devised by the human mind for all of time. But like trying to seal the unsealable, black and white thinking is very unreliable, if not just plain self-sabatoging.

Things are not either yes or no. They are always yes and no.

I learned this at a very young age. It’s a story that has to do with a family member with depression and it’s not a story I can tell in a forum like this but suffice it to say the experience taught me a foundational lesson in what we call a paradox: two seemingly contradictory facts often can be, nonetheless, true at the same time.

And not only did I learn this lesson at a very young age, I also found out that once you see a paradox in one place, you can’t help but see them everywhere. It’s all or nothing. Which is why my thinking often hops from a definitive statement to “well, but except for this….”

This is the kind of thing that sends men out babbling into the street. It’s mentally hard to reconcile with. It’s emotionally hard to reconcile with. Enter black and white thinking. As I see it, people have three choices in this world when dealing with life’s plethora of paradoxes: (1) go nuts, (2) retreat into black and white thinking or (3) do what Georgia O’Keeffe calls “walking on the edge of a knife.” It’s the hardest of the three things for sure.

Speaking for myself I can’t use black and white thinking. It would be a constant argument with reality for me and I don’t have that kind of energy. I also prefer not to go crazy, so that leaves the knife.

And speaking of Georgia O’Keeffe, Gene Hackman who recently passed in Santa Fe, was one of O’Keeffe’s Santa Fe museum’s celebrity supporters, serving on the museum board from 1997 to 2004 and narrating the museum’s video that was played multiple times a day for many, many, many years there. I’ve taken quite a few people to that museum and watched that welcome video so many times. It explains northern New Mexico, my family’s terra sancta, like no other I’ve ever seen. It’s in this video that O’Keeffe talks about walking that knife. And that’s why I’ve always remembered it.

It applies to more than painting and writing. Nothing is simple. Nothing is simply its own self. Nothing is only one way or another. And that is both immensely frustrating and incredible beautiful, as any paradox is.

R.I.P. the great Gene Hackman (and also the great Georgia O’Keeffe).

Turn and Face the Strange Changes

February 20, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Well, the world is feeling like a Goya painting right about now. And it’s been a while since I posted. The dregs of 2023 turned into the insanity of 2024 which became the horrors of 2025.

But I’ve been meaning to talk about a stack of books I have on my office floor. Some books I recommend and a book I just can’t break into after many years and many attempts.

My big problem is that I’ve hit up against more pressure that extends my crisis of mission with this blog.

First of all, what does it mean to be a creator in the new world of AI where if you create a poem without AI, could you prove it?

And how can you be a public writer (an Internet writer) in a world where AI scrapes what you create in order to take creativity out of the hands of the creators? My little corner of the universe, rarely visited, has always seemed a perfectly safe corner, secured from a largely disinterested populace. But from scarper bots, not so much. From a government that has ceased to believe in human rights and privacy, very much not so.

Last year ended badly, with the convergence of advice from other writers to protect my online writing. (Actually that advice came during a writer’s retreat in Winslow last spring, which then set to nagging at me). Then there was the scary research being done by Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans about AI (which I could feel myself wanting to avoid in conversation but from which I was unable to stop listening or support the poor soul who was reading the worst of it).

Then there was a novel I chose to read in December about the abuse of social media to kidnap people (which freaked me out enough to made me want to go off the grid immediately), a book which was unfortunately immediately followed by a novel given to me by my bestie for Christmas about smart women who fall for amorous predators (the story did not end well) and other stranger dangers; and add to that a family identity theft, a health scare, government shutdown predictions, threats of job outsourcings and well isn’t that enough?

No. The universe said, I give you 2025: plane crashes, fires, fire-related insurance dystopias, data theft, government coups. Now all my friends are also having a bad year and not just me. Isn’t that swell.

I have to change my life. I have to change how I sell books. I have to change how I distribute my thoughts. I have to accept that my time in that world may have to come to an end. Because I have to remember how I was living before the Internet and social media and free shipping and the world being delivered to my feet.

The fact is the Internet is a very public space, and likely no longer a safe space. There are new articles around instructing us how to make our lives more secure and this has to do with removing our public selves from the Internet and going private. This is, honestly, very challenging for me. I am not a public figure by any means, but I am a public person. I have loved meeting strangers and making connections. I have loved sharing and helping others through words and with my sites and blogs. And I believe, in maybe a very small personal way, I have made a positive contribution. I hear from poets and Cher fans throughout the year and I am moved to help and to be informed how I have helped people in even small, informal ways by an idea or a tone of response.

I’m a helper bee to the core. I had to always make that clear in interviews for admin jobs in Los Angeles, where everyone was looking for gate-keepers. I had a boss at ICANN who literally had to tell me where all the gates where so I could resist helping people. It’s just not my natural disposition. I seek to help. But what does that even mean in a world gone mean?

On the Intro 2 Anthro with Two Humans AI podcast episode Monsieur Big Bang says somewhat significantly that as a person committed to lifelong learning and creating, “I can feel myself disappearing.”

I feel the same way.

The only difference is that I see a small ray of hope where he does not. I think this dystopian situation will push us toward more local and in-person lives again. Speaking for myself, I have taken some small steps to regain stable ground as a person in this world, I have made changes to the stores I shop at, the browser I use, the email service I use. (And doesn’t it seem when you move from email address to email address in this life, or from social platform to social platform, part of your life history disappears with it?) I’ve secured some unsecure things. I now think twice about adopting free services and I now opt to pay for more secure products. I’ve moved a lot of content behind passwords. I’ve printed down important documents and am in the process of removing my content from many cloud-based services.

I am becoming a physical, meat-space person again.

I am also “unfriending” people who seem to be taking delight in the suffering of others right now. Because just being around them leaves me feeling that the world has become a grotesque place. Which maybe it has.

In fact, to motivate myself forward, I’ve instituted Outing Day for myself every Friday. It’s a day where I gather a list of things I would have purchased on Amazon or other delivery sites and I get the hell out of my house and go to brick and mortar stores to buy all my shit, sometimes compromising on what I wanted to accept what I can find. It’s beyond the idea of supporting my local, small businesses. In the last few months, I have seen many ways big national and international corporate companies are failing in their bigness. So it’s just as much about protecting myself as it is supporting smaller things.

This is why on most Fridays you will find me visiting Books on the Bosque, probably the smallest new-title bookstore I have ever been to. I’m making friends with the man at the front desk as I give him my weekly list of books I would like to order. The out-of-print-rest I get now from Thrift Books. (Abe’s is now owned by Amazon.) And then I wait for them to arrive, sometimes for a whole week! Brave new world.

Anyway, aside from all that, here are the books from my office floor I want to talk about today.

The Book I Can’t Read

As part of my cowboy poetry collecting, years ago I bought a very used copy of “The Land” by V. Sackville-West (1927) and every few years I try to read the thing. It’s written in four very long poems (based on the seasons) of very dull impenetrable, tangled blank verse. I am giving up on it yet again, but once in a while I pull it off the shelf and read a random page and somehow that makes more sense.

Recently I did find a cowboy poetry anthology on the shelves of my parents new independent living library in Ohio. I have purchased my own copy and will be attempting that one next.

Black History Month Books

There are a few black writers that I’ve been reading over the last two years in this stack as well. And since it’s Black History Month, an effort currently being attacked, I feel this is a good time to highlight these books. In fact, while I was in the Cleveland area recently I heard a radio DJ there joke that night itself will soon be made illegal because it is so black. He was joking but it’s not really that funny in light of all the books on slavery and civil rights that are being banned from American school libraries as we speak.

Percival Everett is a popular author in my Difficult Book Club (our book list is one of my most popular pages). I recently had a chance to read one of his books of poetry, re:f (gesture) from 2006. I didn’t love it. In fact I mailed it to our group’s Everett superfan over Christmas. It seemed simultaneously thin and unwieldy. But I will definitely keep trying his other poetry and highly recommend his novels (of which I’ve only read three so far but he is one of those authors, like Murakami, Twain, David Foster Wallace, Anne Carson, Albert Goldbarth and Thomas Bernhard that I keep craving every once in a while.)

For my intentionally woke book club (we call it the anti-racist book club), my two St. Louis friends and I read a book of erasure poetry called the ferguson report: an erasure by Nicole Sealy (2023). My two friends are from nearby Ferguson in St. Louis (Black Jack) and they are very heart-invested (as two white catholic school girls who grew up there) in that now mostly-black community. I was from West County, an area between the small suburban cities of Creve Coeur, Maryland Heights and the more affluent Chesterfield. St. Louis (and the state of Missouri) is a pretty racist place so that gives our book club some solidarity. West County tends to be obliviously privileged so that makes me a very proud graduate of the DEI-since the beginning-of-time UMSL college.

The eight poems of the book are lifted from a reprinting of the official Ferguson Report from the riots of 2014. The report itself has been grayed out and a handful of words and letters pulled through. For this reason the book is not like other erasure poems with a higher concentration of words per page. And because the report is not really readable itself, my two friends took the extra step of downloading the report separately and reading it. I was unable to do that last year because I was tied up with trips to Cleveland and the contemporaneous act of losing my mind. But I should because my friends tell me the report was actually a more meaningfully and impactful read than the poems. But that said, we all liked the resulting eight “lifted” poems which are also reprinted in the back. It was an interesting and worthwhile experiment.

The book I would most highly recommend, Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (2008) is about the black experience during Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005 in New Orleans. The narrative thrust of it, the tribute to the city and the meaning Smith can always draw from public and pop culture events all make the book a amazing read. Poems take the voices of many characters, including a dog named Luther B and the hurricane itself.

It’s heartbreaking and monumental and one of America’s best poem sequences.

What is Poetry: Is the Making of a Poem Largely Interior?

December 12, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So we are back to these questions Elisa New posed in the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is pretty short: is creating poems “largely” interior?

Is anything “largely” interior?

It sure feels that way. But I would argue it really isn’t. I would argue it’s impossibly interior and “largely” exterior. By design or accident.

I keep coming back to this quote , “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.”

This quote is often misattributed to the French leader Charles De Gaulle but in fact it originated from the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis from “Greek poet’s odyssey”, 17 Jan 1964, LIFE Magazine, ‎Vol. 56, No. 3, Page 75 (according to Wikiquote).

We are so full of influences, how would we even know where ideas are coming from. That’s why it’s so easily believable to be divine inspiration. You could say maybe the synthesis is largely an interior process. But the edges of that are even fuzzy.

Where do we end and the rest of it begin?

Of course, I’m writing on the other side of the narcissistic outcome of a 2024 U.S. election, so I can see how this idea will lose traction soon, as it is losing ground even as we speak. More self-centered ideas of supreme authorship will come back into popularity, I predict. Actual studies about how the brain works during creativity and the human psychology of knowledge will become suppressed as there seems to be a new surge in locating one’s particular life experience as the center of the universe.

A lifetime of ads telling us we deserve it “our way” has come to envelop belief systems now. Good times.

But I’m asking myself these questions so…yeah.

That awesome print above by Loreillustration can be purchased in various formats on Etsy.

Cher v. Poetry

November 22, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This Frieda and D.H. Lawrence photograph reminds me of this Sonny & Cher photograph, which is also a play on the fact that Sonny bamboozled Cher into thinking his name Bono was shortened from Bonaparte. Those crazy kids.

So anyway, Cher was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month and is creating a sensation this week with her new memoir and so what is the first thing I want to do after after all this? I want to do a poetry post. I’m literally two months behind blogging about Cher events and I’m itching to talk about this topic instead.

Why is that?

Well, for one thing, the list of Cher stuff has become somewhat overwhelming. It will surely take me four months just to catch up on the two months of activity. That makes me sleepy just thinking about it.

But also I’m really enjoying it all and the idea of blogging about it is like putting a cap on it and moving on. I’m not ready to wrap it all up just yet.

And then there’s the fact that the poetry side of my life is the yen to the yang of my fandom of pop culture. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in light of recent political events and my sudden lack of desire to be a writer in this world anymore. Considering the things most people care about. I suddenly feel a great urge to draw in. I don’t really want to be a tormented poet in a tormented world. I’ve always wanted to be a happy poet in a happy world.

But this year has been unprecedented, full of hives and worries and pending departures and disappointments and a long, slow heartbreak. I’m just wondering what’s it all for, these little blog posts in the backwater of a rapidly, putrefying Internet and people preferring when poems are written by A.I. Oh, and speaking of the Internet, my job. That hasn’t been a beacon of wellbeing either on multiple levels (see hives above).

And speaking of that, in April some poet colleagues of mine recommended I remove my online experiments due to A.I. concerns, so those will be moving behind a password wall. So depressing, all of it.

And I can’t resolve any of those issues right now. But I do know one thing: the poetry blog helps me be a Cher fan and the Cher blog keeps up my interest in poetry. And that has always been true.

When writing about Cher or pop culture and it all becomes too ridiculous, turning to write about poetry feels very satisfying. At least the poets are charging respectable reprint fees and are not insisting people avoid eye contact in rooms with them.

But then when poetry starts to take itself too seriously (which doesn’t take very long), I move back over to Cher and pop culture. At least they’re making some money over there as pop stars.

But OK maybe there’s too much money over there. Poets aren’t getting exposed in sex trafficking scandals. (Well, except for maybe Byron.)

But poets can be very annoying and competitive considering how low those stakes are on their side. The egos certainly don’t match their bank accounts.

You see how this goes. It’s very convenient, really.

Occasionally it’s delightful when Cher and poetry come together. Like when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I could write about it on both of the blogs.

Or when Cher recites Rudyard Kipling’s “If” poem.

Throughout the years I’ve found Cher in quite a few poems:

Or Cher playing Rusty Dennis in the movie Mask trying to avoid hearing her son Rocky’s poem.

Here is the poem:

These things are good:
ice cream and cake,
a ride on a Harley,
seeing monkeys in the trees,
the rain on my tongue,
and the sun shining on my face.

These things are a drag:
dust in my hair,
holes in my shoes,
no money in my pocket
and the sun shining on my face.

Watch Eric Stoltz as Rocky read the poem in the movie.

What is Poetry: Is Making a Poem Different From Making a Painting?

October 11, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

On we go through Elisa New’s questions about poetry from the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is, in full: “Is the making of a poem, that essential creative act, different from making a painting?” She goes on to wonder, “Is it different from playing an instrument? Does one, while making a poem, hold a little linguistic instrument while one makes a painting hold a little brush? Does one hold that brush in mental fingers? Ply language on some sort of cerebral tongue?”

This is a much more specific question than how poetry is similar and different to all the other arts. But as I said in the last Elisa New post, there seems to be more of a brain-to-body coordination necessary in fine arts like painting and sculpting or than in playing a musical instrument. Those all take physical and mental practice. Children learn to write pretty fast and it doesn’t take much time to learn to type on a keyboard.

Impulsively, conceptually, though, there may be similarities.

So da Vinci had opinions (as seen in the image above). Frank O’Hara also thought about this quite a bit, about the intersection of painting and poetry. Probably as part of his job description. He worked himself up through the ranks to curator at MOMA in New York City and was friends of many of New York’s abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s. Two of his painterly poems are “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “The Michael Goldberg Variations.” Funny I came across this later poem today because yesterday I finished The Loser, a novel by Thomas Bernhard which features the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and his performances of “The Goldberg Variations.”

I also wrote a poem about the conversation between painting and poetry while I was a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College (so this would be the mid-1990s at the house at the top of Brandt Terrace in Yonkers, New York), a poem that ended up in my first book of poems about space exploration to Mars, Why Photographers Commit Suicide (2012). I remember sitting on the floor writing this. The movie title, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, was on my mind and Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” was on the radio, which is where the bristle bone line appears. In fact, I think a workshop edit suggestion at the time was to change the verb unbreak to healing in order to further distance the poem from the song, which was getting a lot of radio play at the time.

On a Clear Day You Can See Jupiter

Mary McCray

Some nights when the universe dips in and out of my street
like a dancer, I can see Jupiter through my window.
And I wonder where you are and how things are for you,
like performing resuscitations on a dream.

And although we are together—fundamentally here
on the same hemisphere, you don’t have to answer me.
You don’t have to reply to this untethered planet heart.
It’s too late for us and I surrender to the war
of my fates—where poems burn into pieces of litter.

Take your watercolors and color my window with Jupiter.
Crack open the glass with your knives and turpentine.
Paint these words of mine, life-full of hue and value
and watch my heart healing like a bone
inside the tornado of a thousand bristles.

You don’t have to answer me. You just need to know—
on a clear day you can see Jupiter—in my eyes
and on your fingertips, where the universe
dips in and out of your street like a dancer,
in my words and through this window where I’m on the horizon.

I would probably change the bristles from a thousand to a hundred. That’s a bit much. As was the melodrama of too lateness already in my mid-20s. Wow. What did I know?

More conversation between O’Hara and his painters: