Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 2 of 6)

Pop Song Poetry

August 22, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

I got back from a road trip to Cleveland this month which is a three-day drive I quite enjoy and have done a few times now. In the car, I spend much of the time scanning through various Sirius music channels and occasionally Spotify’s radio channels based on artist algorithms. Usually I come home with a list of new music to explore from Sirius stations like The Spectrum:

https://youtu.be/wJO0IoWY4t4?si=VfFHx-iSFO7Xpk6f

https://youtu.be/zccVGbRbjII?si=pyKfLD4m8SlUPXOP

https://youtu.be/5cXCUp6j5M8?si=PoLY7_WGGmTvOrjK

Or (not-so) guilty pleasures I haven’t heard in years (I totally forgot about these guys!): https://youtu.be/sGsWJ0PcLfU?si=n-I8-fZOAT8xH7Lh

But this trip’s music plays served up a song or two that I hadn’t heard in years if not decades and their lyrics reminded me they had been substantial life guides to me from back to childhood or young adulthood.

I can’t think of a single equivalent poem that has done this for me, a verse with a line that pretty much guided my entire life. For example, since poet Andrea Gibson died recently of Ovarian Cancer, she’s been on everyone’s mind (for some, like me, for the first time). My friend gave me her 2015 book Pansy and as I read it I haven’t found a poem I didn’t love. I’ve underlined most of the book’s amazing metaphors and lines. The book will definitely guide me in activism and on sorrowful days, but poetry tends to be complicated and to complicate. It tends to beautify the complications, not to simplify them.

And as I get to the end of my life, I can appreciate how solid some of the pithy pop song advice actually was.

The first song along this line was “Peace of Mind” by Boston, a band my two older brothers both listened to. I remember driving around St. Louis before I even started working full-time jobs, coming across the song on KSHE while flipping through the dial and thinking these lyrics sounded like very sage advice written by the band’s Tom Scholz.

“I understand about indecision
But I don’t care if I get behind.”

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s we didn’t have lyric websites (or even websites) and so my version of the lyric was “I don’t care about gettin’ real high” (corporate-ladderly speaking). Same idea.

“Now you’re climbing to the top of the company ladder
Hope it doesn’t take too long
Can’t you see there’ll come a day when it won’t matter?
Come a day when you’ll be gone.

…People living in competition.
All I want is to have my peace of mind.”

The amazing thing is, I have never questioned this idea and have followed this advice at every decision point of my office and writing life. I lived this and have no regrets. I didn’t climb the corporate ladder. Maybe I would have been more envied or more laid if I had, but I had me some great peace of mind.

“Lot’s of people have to make believe they’re livin’
cant decide who they should be.”

I’ve seen this everywhere, year after year, in friends, family, co-workers, on TV and social media, people presenting a life that is enviable I guess, but pretty worthless tbh. I’ve had a lifetime to see it play out.

And how increasingly emphatic was Scholz’s final suggestion?

“Take a look ahead.
Take a look ahead.
Look ahead!”

I heard the same idea expressed in the positive this week by Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” with its declarative “I’ve got a song. I’ve got a song… If it gets me nowhere, I’ll go there proud.”

There are no poems I’ve read that can compete with this good counsel so compacted. And not even any line from a movie I can think of. Although I did write a poem a few years ago that mentioned how lines spoken by Jessica Lange to Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie have always guided my decorating decisions, specifically as regards to wallpaper, but that’s another story.

Dustin Hoffman brings us to the fact that I saw Rick Springfield in concert a few weeks ago with two younger gal pals and I pitched to them about my theory that Rick Springfield once caused a lot of early-80s tween girls to go suddenly boy crazy. I asked them who it was in the later-80s tweens who might have turned them boy crazy (even though I already knew the answer). They confirmed it was Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. A large swath of girls my age and younger did go nuts for the boys in Duran Duran. But I had no such rock singer for myself because all my crushes were on actors, with one exception later. Maybe I took this Peter Allen song too much to heart at age 8. Musicians seemed like bad news. Although, as annoyed as I was with Rick Springfield, I would have picked him before Simon Le Bon. Turns out actors weren’t such great news either. And comedians could be the worst because they’re always on and everything in their lives is fodder. (It’s the devil you know.)

Anyway, the actor who convinced me that boys were worth the trouble was Paul Sand (and not Barry Manilow as one could imagine; I had a sixth sense about that one). And interestingly, I eventually discovered this thing I loved about Paul Sand was not transferrable to other boys who looked somewhat like Paul Sand. This was necessary because Paul Sand was very, very obscure and I didn’t have a video recording device back then to catch him on The Mary Tyler Moore Show or The Carol Burnett Show. He was hard to come by. I tried to like Dustin Hoffman (meh) and Jeff Goldblum, who is very interesting person but he didn’t take, although I came across this very funny thing today:

…and later Al Pacino (which did take for a minute because he had the best movies, but my enthusiasm for him also did not last).

There was just some essence of Paul Sand that went beyond the markers of his physical self. And it operated on a level of intuition I could not rationalize. Maybe it was contingent upon past lives or maybe it was simply a heart’s broken mold.

But anyway I was driving to Cleveland after the 80s Rick Springfield show and his self-penned song “Don’t Talk To Strangers” came up, another song that seemed like a monster-hit during that time I was losing all my friends to Springfield’s pop enchantments. It was for this reason I had avoided the song and its lyrics at the time. But this line came through to me now:

“Who’s this Don Juan I’ve been hearing of?
Love hurts when only one’s in love.”

The simplicity of that caused some laughter in the car. But it soon occurred to me that hundreds of thousands of pop songs have been written all-to-say. It’s actually the ultimate statement of the situation. I mean…all other explications are always appreciated forever in perpetuity, but this is the tightest summary for sure.

To love someone all-of-itself should be enough. As one of the great show-tune lyrics of all time states, “to love another person is to see the face of God.”

But that is never enough somehow. Like 500 miles away from enough.

Which brings me to the another song that has guided my life through many decades, although unlike the Boston song, I’ve always struggled to follow it.

As someone from a gambling family, (I convinced a friend in St. Louis to play credit-card-roulette a few weeks ago), I’ve always appreciated the extended metaphor that is “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers. Whenever a teacher asked a class I was in to assemble a list of our favorite poems, I always included this lyric by Don Schlitz in my list. The song is a fully-realized extended metaphor about how to live life, the tenor, through the vehicle of playing out a hand in poker.

“You gotta know when to hold ‘em,
Know when to fold ‘em.”

This is a good time to say I am a family-famous terrible poker player. The game always demanded quicker decisions from me than I was ever capable of making and I never could make sense of all the possible patterns in front of me. (You can work out the life-metaphor there yourself.) Years ago I was playing with my family in their tradition of playing among variations of the game. We were in my oldest brother’s kitchen (in Boston coincidentally). I was always coerced into playing and for me it was always a few hours of feeling both performance anxiety and boredom alternatively. I was allowed a cheat sheet that made no sense to me (I was in my mid-20s, too.) My brother declared himself the winner of a hand and started pulling the chips into his stack. Then it was my mother who said across the table, “No actually, Mary has a Straight Flush.” I couldn’t see it. My brother had already confused the pots. And he was pissed off! He angrily said, “Mary shouldn’t play if she doesn’t know what’s in her own hand.”

(Lord have mercy, metaphor. Lord have mercy.)

And that was it, the last time I have ever played a game of poker or ever will. It was like a (somewhat traumatic) get-out-of-ever-playing-poker-again card.

And now, looking back over my life since I first heard these words of “The Gambler” sung so deadpan by Kenny Rogers, I see so much does seem to depend not upon a red wheelbarrow but upon knowing when to fold ‘em. You could spend decades of your life holding on to what turns out to be, if not technically a bad hand, (after all, every hand’s potentially a winner and a loser), but one of those hands that you will never be able to win with.

Knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em is where all of life’s most heartbreaking lessons in love and in work seem to be, especially for those of us who have never been able to tell the difference.

Poems in Pop Culture: Murder Mystery Games, Movies and Sculpture

July 8, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

Holiday weekend was a staycation birthday celebration for my friend Melo. We were all going to go away to cabins up north, but due to all the instabilities in the country, we switched our plans to a weekend of local things, including a group walk on the Bosque, game night, bowling, breakfast out and a trip to an Albuquerque art museum. We had downtime in the evenings which for me entailed a night of watching 1970s YouTube videos of the Dutch show TopPop and the next night watching the movie Deadstream.

Interestingly, in almost everything we did, poetry popped up.

Game night

I have a few Deadbolt Mystery Society games, (a company which seems to be drastically downsizing now, sadly), which some of my friends like and so the six of us spent an afternoon playing “The Cleansing of Killian House.” These murder mystery games are group efforts to solve mysteries with puzzles. Some puzzles lead you right into the final answer, puzzle by puzzle, and some force you to use logic to eliminate innocent suspects until the final one is revealed.

I’m actually terrible at puzzles (and board games), but I love the doo-dads of the game, the way the story is assembled with little narrative scraps; and I can organize and facilitate the process for others who are have better minds for puzzles. Rarely am I helpful. I did solve the puzzle depicted in the picture above (which is why I took a picture of it, being a momentous occasion and all).

This game’s theme was ghost hunting and the “guest host” of the game was Nick Geoff from Ghost Adventures among other TV shows. I once really enjoyed the show Ghost Hunters but then decided all these shows, despite the evolution of their ghost-detecting technology, never did really unearth much.

For example, the green cards above depict a technology that was much ballyhooed when it came out, the SLS camera, which could apparently capture ghost folk in stick figure form. This was actually made ridiculous on one show that was investigating a western ghost-town dance hall and the SLS camera allegedly captured a stick figure who appeared to be doing a boot slapping dance. I found that pretty funny. Anyway, after a false start with this puzzle I figured out that the stick ghosts were actually pointing to directions of push-able bricks in a secret door of a brick wall. It’s complicated but the point is we got there.

During the game we had to explore six rooms of a mansion (six envelopes with cards, paper and toy objects in them) and one room was the Library which made us solve a book-spine word puzzle and the story introduced us to the Library’s hired book collector who collected antique books and was invited to the house to validate an original copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems but then he got murdered.

Movie Night

On Saturday night after an afternoon of bowling, Monsieur Big Bang said he wanted to watch a comedy horror. This was surprising. When I met him back in 2005 we had to sort out one very important issue: he hated the horror genre and I loved it. Fast forward to today and he (and his family) are doing the ghost hunting, watching all the ghost-hunting shows and M.B.B. spent one season obsessing over Italian Giallo films.

But back then he loved to pick apart the horror movies I made him go see. And there are things to pick apart in those movies to be sure. But the latest generations of horror filmmakers are doing some great things, including people M.B.B. knows like Jason Blum and people M.B.B. admires, like Jordan Peele (Get Out was a property of both). But there are other smaller auteurs who are making low-budget horror films for the streaming channel Shudder, which I don’t even watch and I’m not even really into anymore. (I haven’t even seen the Chaz Bono TV shows and movies yet.)

I just happen onto some of these good things in passing. I tend to like to see how a moviemaker can stretch the genre (which is what I like in westerns, too). A genre is like a poetry form, a sonnet or a villanelle. It has rules and structure. How can the form work to tell a story about racism or the sexes or culture itself? How does horror comment on our collective fears?

If you’re looking for just funny scares, Shawn of the Dead is probably the best. And I don’t feel the Scream movies hold up but Scary Move 2 does. (I’ve seen it many, many times just for Chris Elliot and David Cross.) Get Out is a great example of a modern story about subversive racism, as was the classic Night of the Living Dead before it.

Josh Ruben’s Scare Me was billed as comedy-horror and it was humorous but it’s wallop was very serious and two-fold, (1) being an engaging horror movie with a limited set and mostly based on dialogue, and (2) having an unlikeable female lead character that challenges everyone’s (including women’s) internalized sexism. The lead male was a fragile and bitter failed writer and I heard myself shouting at the screen at one point, “Oh no! Don’t offend his ego! He’ll kill you!” And then “Did I just say that?” That the filmmaker was a male writer and director asking his (male and female) audience to rethink whether a female character (or a real-life woman) is required to be inherently sympathetic and nurturing just because she’s a woman…well, that’s pretty amazing. It shows the problem in story form. And your response to it tells you more about you than could be found in a typical horror film.

Deadstream was written, produced, directed and edited by married people: Vanessa and Joseph Winter. The husband is also the lead and the soundtrack composer (used to comedic effect) and this movie is laugh-out-loud funny. But it also happens to be a commentary on influencer culture, the dare-devil male monster (Shawn) and the affronted-female monster, which in this case was a “social outcast” poet from the 1800s named Mildred Platt. The poet’s father built her the now-haunted house our influencer/dare devil protagonist is spending the night in to win back followers after a disgraceful downfall involving a racist incident. The poet’s tragic life as a failed poet and nearly-wife of a handsome publisher leads to her suicide and our influencer will now try to antagonize her.

To make the monster a poet was brilliant and probably not new. We’d have to watch all the old horror movies and I’m sure we’d dig up some dead poets who were upset about something. Poets are seen as somewhat “off” even in real time. I mean living poets are so obscure and rarely-read, they are quintessential anti-influencers.

Our protagonist, Shawn, is very unlikeable (and yet kind of likeable in a strange way), and he pisses off the poet-ghost who then tries to kill him. Meta comments running down his livestream occasionally are very funny easter eggs (but you have to pause the movie to see them), not to mention easter eggs in the writings on the walls of the fabulous set.

Soon Shawn finds a secret door which leads to a chest which has a secret compartment which has stashed in it Platt’s handwritten book of poems. Shawn is very disrespectful and dismissive (as he naturally would be) and he reads a bit of the book:

“Maybe this is the secret of the house,” he says (which is what any other hidden book in a haunted house movie would mean).

“The dianthus are blooming.
The birds are cooing.
Your visage is in the sunlit canopies.”

“Never mind,” Shawn interjects, “These are just poems. They don’t even rhyme!”

The poet responds (eventually) with the fury of the artist scorned. Shawn soon discovers that as the poet kills people who have lived in the house, they also become ghosts in the house and he meets them as the night progresses. During the climax of the movie, Shawn has an epiphany. He’s hiding in his car and he sees something he understands in Platt’s handwritten book, a phrase about pond water that had been repeated in the notes of a previous ghost-hunter.

“She’s forcing them to read her poetry!” Shawn exclaims. “What a freaking weirdo!” Shawn understands Platt suddenly. “She’s like me. She wants an audience. She kept trying to get me to read her poems. She’s building a following.”

Shawn goes back in the house and confronts the poet with, “I understand why you do what you do?” And he commiserates that they both, each in their own way, tend to go too far from time to time. To lure her out of hiding, Shawn reads her poems aloud as he walks through the hallways with a spear-cam (the cam jokes alone…):

“Echo my heart.
Echo my soul.
Bring my voice….”
(and he is interrupted by a noise in the house.)
“Black birds roam.
Their voices moan.”

“I mean, some of these are pretty good,” Shawn says and then whispers to the camera, “Not.”

(He deserves to die, this one.)

I had to have the ending explained to me but I was very impressed once I understood it. Many horror movies of late have ended on defeat for the protagonist. Deadstream’s ending even challenges our ideas of that in a very satisfying way that is also a commentary on having a following of any kind. The movie is a commentary about fandom, thirst and fame at all costs and a spoof of the most recent ghost hunting tv-show genre. And like the best of comedic horror, it’s very funny but also pretty scary. A very smart script.

Trip to the Art Museum

We all went to the Albuquerque Museum on free first-Sunday to see a show called “Light, Space, and the Shape of Time” which was a collection of pieces that use light as a material. One in our group happened to be the granddaughter of artist Florence Pierce of the Transcendentalist Painting Group and one of Pierce’s later pieces was in the show.

My friend Mikaela also does a good deal of family work tracking all the shows her grandmother is in so I was able to ask her about the lighting of the show and how difficult it is to light Pierce’s pieces in other shows.

There was also a sign-sculpture at the front of the exhibit that used sentences about the body. You could only read them at a certain angle due to the light.

The artist was Jenny Holzer and she often works with words.

https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2857-jenny-holzer/

https://unrtd.co/media/tate-modern-jenny-holzer-exhibition-artists-rooms

Poems in Pop Culture: The Mary Tyler Moore Show

June 25, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

I’m rewatching The Mary Tyler Moore Show. This is the third time since, (not to brag but…), I earned my Nick at Nite Mary Tyler Moore Show merit badge in the early 1990s.

It looks like this:

And, swear to God, I keep it with my nice jewelry.

Anyway, this week I watched Season 3, Episode 19 (“Romeo and Mary”) and it contained some poems!

In this episode, Mary Richards attempts to dodge the unwanted love bombs of Warren Sturges, played perfectly boorishly by the great Stuart Margolin.

You may know Margolin from playing Angel Martin, to equal perfection, on another show I love, The Rockford Files, starring the handsome James Garner.

Mary is having a hard time deflecting the daily wooing efforts of Warren Sturges (he actually handcuffs her to him one morning so she’ll have to go to lunch with him) and her three male co-workers at WJM, Lou Grant, Murray Slaughter and Ted Baxter, stand around talking about how hard it is to convince a girl to go out with you and what efforts they found that did or did not work. Lou says it took writing a poem to get his wife, Edie, to go out with him in the beginning.

Murray and Ted are surprised that Lou ever wrote a poem. Lou tells them that poetry writing was “his job. I was a poet, a professional poet. Sixty-five bucks a week on the Detroit Free Press. It was my first job. I wrote ‘Thoughts and Rhyme’ by Lois Hammersmith.”

Lou was a ghost-writer behind the scenes. Lois Hammersmith started the column, he says, and she “had kind of a following.”

Murray and Ted ask for a sample poem and Lou recites the one he wrote for Edie, complete with his poet-reading face on.

Autumn Wood

The light from the ever-waning moon
illuminates less and less
and to the autumn wood
doth bring on an enchanted glow
of loveliness. I walk. I look.
And in this dream you alone, my love,
are seen.

Ted gives it a quick and immediate raspberry. “It doesn’t even rhyme!”

Murray says, “I think it was very moving, Lou. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

Ted is then worried about his too-quick assessment. “Maybe it does rhyme. Maybe I didn’t hear it right.”

Ted is then reminded of a poem “he once made up.” He thinks about it to remember and then starts to recite “There was once a hermit named Dave / Spent 40 years in a cave.”

Murray interrupts disparagingly, “So you’re the one who made that up.”

Murray is referencing the dirty limericks that start with “There once was a man named Dave,” the most common variation I’ve been able to find was this:

“There was once a man named Dave
Who kept an old whore in a cave.
She was ugly as shit, And minus one tit (or alternatively, “You must admit, He’s quite a shit”)
But think of the money he saved.”

Watch the episode in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyBebDdmBXo

Episode #18 of the season, “The Georgette Story,” is also a very sweet one. There’s been some discussion around whether I feel more like a Mary, a Rhoda or a character named Sparkle from season one. But I feel there’s a little bit of Georgette in there on some days, too.

Here’s some meditative music to listen to while contemplating the question.

Short Story Challenge No.4

June 23, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

Man. I was gonna do a short story every other month from January 2024. But I didn’t finish No.2 until last May. Here it is June 2025 and well, it’s been a couple of gnarly years to try and have things like plans and all.

So what happened to No.3?

I drew cards for No.3 in January but forgot to post about it. I was in a rush preparing to move my parents in Cleveland and intended to work on the story while I was there.

That was a terrible idea.

But anyway, let’s recap this project since it’s been over a year since we started.

I met a slew of writers at Sarah Lawrence College (located in Yonkers, New York) in the early 1990s. One day, long after I had lived there but when I was back visiting Los Angeles, the partner of one of those writers took me aside and asked me to motivate that writer to start writing again.

This was a tall order because I have always felt creativity projects, like anything else, should be self-motivated. If you’re meant to do something you will feel compelled to do it. If you are not compelled to do it, you maybe are not meant to do it (or do it anymore). In this case, this person hadn’t finished a writing project in about a decade. So I was pretty sure they weren’t interested….really.

But I kept thinking about the problem. It was a friend’s request so I had to try. When I discovered all the writing prompt cards I thought we could gamify the process together and I sent a set of cards to this writer. We made a plan to begin in January of 2024. Well, when that time came, the writer begged off very strenuously due to life dramas going on. Later, they admitted they didn’t think they wanted to write anymore after all.

This felt both sad and like a relief in a way. Comrade down but clarity and all.

But anyway, I found the card process of random story points to be exactly the thing I needed to get me going because it liberated me from the road blocks of preplanned agendas and ideas.

I haven’t had nearly the time to work on them that I imagined I would but I’ll keep working on them, ever so slowly.

I just now finished the rough draft of No.3 (Saturday) and drew some new cards for the No.4 story challenge yesterday.

They look like this:

Step 1: I pulled one Spark card (adventure story) and used the two Riff cards and one Connect card to string together my opening sentence: “The secretary felt like a painting.”

By the way, my opening sentence for story No.3. was “Her arm moved like a drinking song” and it was a detective story.

2. I haven’t figured out the answers to the purple card questions yet. But we picked “secretary” from the Riff card so…the main character will likely be a female secretary.

3. Write the title: “The Path Into Wildwood” which sounds kind of hoaky to me but this turns out to be a fantasy-type of adventure story based on the fact that…

4. Characters and Conflicts cards were pulled and…

…there’s a character with wings. Que the fairies. Our adventure will have wings (and a time machine).

4. Random images to incorporate: a knotted rope, a rainbow on wet pavement and shipping containers.

Challenge No3. was titled “All My Love Stories Have Happy Endings” and developed into a story about a character based on the Dead Files show’s former-NYPD-homicide-detective Steve DiSchiavi, except he’s a love coach in my story instead of a NYC detective. My in-laws used to love that show and would want to watch it whenever they visited us. Anyway, the love coach befriends a female detective who isn’t a good as a detective as he is as a love coach and they solve a double homicide together. (If I ever create a master page for this project, I’ll add the #3 set of cards there.)

Anyway…while the world falls apart, let us write.

Poems in Pop Culture: Back to School and New Tricks

June 6, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

Back to School

Sometimes even the lightest fare can have little treats of poems in them. Recently I rewatched Back to School, the 80s comedy with Rodney Dangerfield and Sally Kellerman and not only does it have poetry, but Kellerman plays a literature professor who saves Dangerfield from being kicked out of college during his first semester.

Kellerman’s character, Dr. Diane Turner, played with the kind of sexy relish Kellerman excels at, enters the story of the first day of lit class not with a poem but a speech from James Joyce’s Ulysses (a book I have tried to read twice and have fully given up on even though I like Difficult Books):

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

See the clip.

Often Kellerman over-acts in things, but you gotta give her credit for making anything from James Joyce to salad dressing (see link above) seem like the sexist thing in the universe. And what a smile.

Dangerfield’s character is a self-made gazillionaire named Thornton Mellon who is going back to school in a sweet-hearted attempt to both rewrite his past and to help his son fit in and finish school. They are both attending Dr. Turners lit class and Mellon (the Senior) makes the first faux-pas of talking during the lecture, getting called out by the teacher and then trying to wing-it with an answer but fatally asserting the writer is a woman named Joyce. (Haven’t we all been there?)

Tuner plays the best kind of professor, one who is not willing to put up with Thornton’s intellectual evasions and trickery but also patient and kind with him.

Thornton Mellon decides he wants to be tutored by this sexy teacher and he tries to talk her into mentoring him. When she begs off for having to teach night classes, Mellon says, “Call me when you got no class.”

Classic Dangerfield.

But Turner finally agrees and their first tutoring scene starts in the middle of the session (with dinner of course) with Turner explaining a Yeats poem to Mellon.

Turner:

“Everywhere the ceremony
of innocence is drowned;
The best
lack all conviction…
while the worst are full
of passionate intensity.”

There’s a lot of other stuff here. Yeats goes on and on…and here’s the finish.

“What rough beast,
its hour come round at last…
“slouches towards Bethlehem
to be born?”

What does that make you think of?

Mellon:

Rough beast. My ex-wife.

Turner:

Well, that’s one interpretation. Not the right one, but it’s a start.

So okay, a flimsy link between the poem and the one-liner. Not great, “but it’s a start.”

Here is the full poem, “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And at the end of the movie, Mellon is forced to take a four-hour-long final exam orally because he plagiarized all his coursework. Like a true oligarch, he tried to delegate all his learning, including hiring Kurt Vonnegut himself to write Mellon’s paper on the books of Kurt Vonnegut, which results in the hilarious exchange with his Turner later. When she sees right through Dangerfield’s lies about writing the paper, she declares ironically, “Whoever wrote this paper obviously know nothing about Kurt Vonnegut.”

Funny!

The teacher and student fall in love, have some ups and downs and by the end, when the oral exam is killing Thorton, Turner helps him through it by asking him to recite the Dylan Thomas poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night.”

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

View the clip here. Thornton Mellon learns to love learning and alls well that ends well.

BBC’s New Tricks

Which brings us to Britbox crime shows.

When my husband turned 50, just like when my parents turned 50, they all became obsessed with British crime shows and mysteries. We’ve seen copious amounts of both campy and serious BBC crime shows now (from the cheesy Hetty Wainthropp Investigates and Pie in the Sky to the gravitas-laced Vera and many shows in between.

I chalk up the obsession to getting old and wanting things to f**king resolve in this world, to finally getting fed up by all the open-ended post-modernism and “realistic” tragedy. After witnessing a lifetime of injustice, they just want a TV show to end with some justice already. Plus my mother says the women look normal on the BBC. (And she’s got a point there.)

The show New Tricks falls somewhere between cheesy and serious, depending upon the season. Brian was my favorite character but by season 10 the writing floundered and things started making no sense. Sandra just became a one-note bitter butterball. So most of the cast departed and Monsieur Big Bang was ready to drop. We kept saying there was no show without Brian.

But then I just wanted to hang on long enough to see the new, post-Brian cast recombination. To our surprise, as soon as Sasha came on the show to replace Sandra, the writing miraculously got better and the new Sasha character was able to overcome all the other flat, uninteresting old men who were still left. Which is how we saw the “Deep Swimming” episode (Season 11, Episode 3).

In this one, Sasha is investigating an activist group and she quotes lines from this Wordsworth poem to put the smug, uber-nerd Dan Griffin in his place. Which was very pleasant because he’s a very insufferable character.

“Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” by William Wordsworth

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Big Data Poetry Studies: Poems in Newspapers

April 30, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

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 authors 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.

Authors 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 as a poem Abraham Lincoln had written 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 poem the authors say is not found in any scholarship or anthologies but was a very popular poem about a fallen woman; and for years editors and readers 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. Imagine this: you might have the most popular poem of the today but then it would be attributed to Taylor Swift.

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

Developing Translations

April 28, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

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

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

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

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.