Category: Books to Read (Page 1 of 14)

Another Good Poet But Not-My-Poet: C.D. Wright

May 4, 2026 / Big Bang Poetry

A few years ago I had this idea to try to find “my poet,” that poet who I could become a completist with, a poet I could become an expert in through intensive scholarship and fan obsession. I thought of it like who is my Cher poet, so to speak? Short of an actual fan shed, I could develop a fan shelf.

I read about other poets having their favorite writers “to scholar” about and I was feeling FOMO, like I should have one too. In a lot of ways seeing other poets have “their poet” can help you understand both poets better. Like Robert Duncan being a scholar of the poet H.D. It says something about what poets are attracted to other poets.

My first attempt at this was a deep dive into the poetry of Philip Levine a few years ago. Philip Levine was the first A-list, “famous” poet I ever saw in real life. He came to Sarah Lawrence one night in the mid-1990s to give a reading in the living room of Slonim House, a Tudor-style manor house on campus where all the graduate writing activities happened. I was standing in the entryway of the Slonim House and he came in with some of the other poets of Sarah Lawrence, probably Tom Lux and Marie Howe but I really can’t remember because Levine was like a superstar in this context. It was like the air was electric. He seemed a promising pick for my favorite poet. I even liked his greatest hits.

And so in the case of Philip Levine I spent months reading his poetry collections, interviews and essays. But I sadly came to the conclusion that he was not my poet. Although I loved his focus on labor subjects, it was all pretty humorless. And yeah politics can be humorless (especially now) but a poet should be allowed (or allow themselves) some breathing room in that area. Especially a poet as notoriously interpersonally funny as Philip Levine.

Last year I got the idea that my poet could be C.D. Wright. I came across an article on her by Stephen Burt from the L.A. Times. The article came from a huge stack of papers my friend Christopher who sent them to me almost a decade ago. (It’s taking me a minute to get through them.) The article is undated but it seems to have appeared after her sudden death in January of 2016.

This appealed to me particularly. Burt says,

“Wright’s artistic powers cannot be separated from her deep sense of democracy, her work against boundaries, rankings and exclusions, her insistence that poetry, and society, should become not a hierarchy or a star system or a way to exalt a singular self but a way to be generous, to share the powers we get, to give of oneself, to let everybody come in.”

I loved this. I feel this way all the time. Why is everything a f**king competition?

Burt goes on to explain how Wright came from the Arkansas Ozarks area. (And I grew up not far from the Missouri Ozarks area so I felt I might have some fly-over sympathy with her there too). Wright was incredibly worldly as well, having lived in San Francisco, Rhode Island and Mexico. (She died from a blood clot that resulted from an overly-long flight coming home from Chile.)

She seemed a good balance of worldly and local.

Burt calls her a “trustworthy” poet and he spent time with Wright and her husband, Forrest Gander. Burt wishes we all could have met her. And short of that he can be her critical champion: “What critics can do–maybe all a critic can do–is send you, with some encouragement or preparation, to the poems.”

So off I went. I realized pretty soon that I would love some of her long-form projects and not like the LANGUAGE or sentence-collage poems. In my favorite poems she had a beautifully meandering quality like what I love about reading Anne Carson. I felt a very similar pleasure reading these kinds of Wright poems, and the nerdiest parts of minutia like you find in Moby Dick and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But the collage ones made me want to skim. And so that rules out C.D. Wright as “my poet” but there is so much to love here and I’ll review the books I read, ranking them in reverse order.

Rising, Falling, Hovering (2009)

I didn’t love this book. The jacket calls it “deeply personal and politically ferocious” but I was lost in there. Nothing came at anything straight on and there was no guiding theme to keep me tethered. The book won the Griffin Prize. I feel like maybe this was a failure on my part but it is what it is.

The only single page I dog-eared was a page with these words:

“His face unfurls furls
Poetry
Doesn’t
Protect
You
Anymore.”

This came at the end of a section of long lines and shows you what a master of alternating lines she was. Every later-day book does this, long lines interspersed with short ones, just as any good novelists can take you through long Proustian sentences and then punch you suddenly with a short one.

I did also like “End Thoughts” when I read it again in the book below.

The Essential C.D. Wright (posthumously edited by her widower Forrest Gander along with Michael Wiegers, 2025)

This is Wright’s Greatest Hits and includes a few poems or excerpts from all of her books along with personal photographs.

This was a frustrating book to purchase for me. I had to pre-order it from my local bookstore. And the customer service people who worked there kept grabbing it for themselves whenever the book came in . Weeks later I would call to inquire about it and be told it had been sold by mistake. The owner apologized about this and even gave me a deep discount on another book. But honestly, I’ve felt weird about going back there ever since. I’ve been ordering from Bookshop.org and just sending profits over to my local (which is a great thing about Bookstop.org) but I have not been visiting the store in person.

I’ll get over it.

Anyway, this book shows Wright’s evolution over the years, how skinny her poems were in the beginning and how it feels like a move of assertion when she let her lines go long.

There were some uncollected drafts I really liked like “Abandon Yourself in That Which Is Inevitable” with it’s last stanza:

“Just. Could
somebody
please
tell me.
What did it mean
that I was a girl.”

And poems like “Sculptor and Model” and “Margaret Kaelin Vittitow” (a mentor who appears later in One With Others known as V) and the poem “Alla Breve Loving” from Alla Breve Loving. And then from the book Terrorism the poems “Obedience of the Corpse” and the music poem “Tours.” There’s a good poem “Clockmaker with Bad Eyes” from Translations of the Gospel Back Into Tongues. The book Further Adventures with You had the lines starting to lengthen out in poems like “Wages of Love,” “Scratch Music” and “This Couple.” String Light had a numbered list poem called “Remarks on Color.” By One Big Self: An Investigation she is fully into paragraph poems and experiments with not only line length but line spacing. By Shall Cross she’s back to short lines and few-lines of poems, like “Light Bulb Poem.”

This book was an interesting overview of things but it didn’t feel quite essential to me and maybe the fates were telling me something when I kept getting my copies snatched out from under me at my local. But also I think the problem is that Wright really shines in the book-length poem and she is not really reducible to these excerpts taken out of context of her very formidable momentum.

It’s sweet that poet-husband Gander writes her introduction here. I can’t imagine Monsieur Big Bang doing that for me as he’s not very interested in poetry (aside from me being one). But in a lot of ways, this poet-couple of Wright and Gander seemed of-a-piece.

Casting Deep Shade (2019)

This was the book Wright was working on when she died. It’s Wright’s long, obsessive ode to the beech tree.

Although it wasn’t my very favorite of her books, this one “grew” on me, (Ha!) and is surely in my list of great book-length poems. I even talked it up on a walk last weekend with some of my friends who are tree peoples.

The book reminded me of the obsessive cataloging in Moby Dick; and I always have respect for any writer willing to go overboard (more puns) while researching a topic and then to expose some of that research in the final product. It reminds me of visiting a historic building and having some part of its structure exposed as an exhibit. The New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe does this with pieces of the old adobe building the museum is housed in, going back through time and renovations. It draws attention to the compiled and assembled nature of things.

As her last book, this one was given elaborate binding, maybe a bit excessive. But the poem is interspersed with beautiful distressed and abstract photographs of beech trees taken by Denny Moers. There are also illustrations throughout. One page I dogeared has a description of the scientific “Miura fold” for solar panels along with a diagram and how this relates back to beech tree leaves.

Clearly this was a labor of love and it feels good reading it.

In Essential I also dogeared “Why Leave You So Soon Gone” with lines like “Sharpen yourself on rock Say yes Don’t forget” and the poem reads like a self help guide for us and for the trees!

Here is a video of the publisher showing the book and her husband reading excerpts.

One With Others (2010)

The first book I read and definitely one of my top three favorites of hers. I immediately recommended it to my St. Louis book group, the one that focuses on American racial issues.

This long poem deals with the racial violence that happened in her hometown around the 1969 March Against Fear and the research she did to try to figure it out. The jacket calls it “a stunning work of investigative journalism and poetry” and it is quite an amazing collage of introspection, interviews, oral histories, photographs and newspaper research.

Wright interviews witnesses, activists, police, fugitives and follows the firing of a teacher in a black high school and the black students who protested it and their threatening detainment in an empty swimming pool. Most intimately, it follows the story of Wright’s mentor, another teacher who became involved which led to her being run out of the state of Arkansas (Margaret Kaelin).

It is one of the best books of poems I’ve read dealing with racism in America. Up there with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler. My copy is dogeared and there are marginalia comments all over it. She deftly uses her page-layout experiments to evoke emotions and control the pacing and release of information.

Collage work at it’s very best. `

The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roach, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (2016)

This is Wright’s delightful ars poetica, her poems about the writing process and how one becomes inspired by other writers. It’s my favorite of all the books I read. So amazing, just poem after poem, even the off-the-rails title alluding to the messiness of the whole process.

Again, another book impossible to excerpt although this one is maybe easier than Casting Deep Shade or One With Others. She has multiple poems with the same titles where the same ideas keep getting reworked and mulled over and over again.

The “In a Word, a World” poems talk about word etymologies and connotations and parts of speech. Those are juicy things.

In most of the poems, she’s in conversation with her favorite poets and artists like Flannery O’Connor and Jean Valentine (all the “Jean Valentine, Abridged” poems, one example) and painter Agnes Martin and fiddler John Taggart, poets George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky and a list of others. Her poems titled “Hold Still, Lion” are all for poet Robert Creeley (one example). She has a series for William Carlos Williams all titled “Spring & All.” She talks back to them, agrees and disagrees, riffs on things they’ve said. She quotes her husband.

She attempts to define what poetry does. It’s so amazing.

“The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess.”

She gets academic. She gets political. She talks about how poems are building projects. She defends poetry. The title of one great poem is “Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the World’s Biggest Retailer” in which she says “Poets do not have the answer. They say what they see. They take their own pulse. They stay up thinking of lines of poetry that they might use.”

“Poetry abhors the lie” she says and the best of it “extends the line into perpetuity” and “enlarges the circle.” Poems awaken the dreamer and the schemer. “They draw not conclusions but further quantify the doubt.”

Yes, indeed.

She says, “Poetry is hard to abuse except by writing it poorly, and then the damage, let’s face it, is finite.”

She critiques her own project Rising, Falling, Hovering (how brilliant is that?) for four pages of dense paragraphs, like her own harsh review. She says, “Often lineation just does not bear up. Instead, she tried applying more pressure to passages that asserted themselves as prose.” The struggles of writing this book get continued in later sections and is all fascinating.

It’s fascinating how she holds herself accountable it all her messy, unsettled process. And accountable to the world. “Mostly, poets will fail. Words will tumble and fall. But in so failing and fumbling poets refuse to be accomplices.”

Like One with Others, my book is written all over and dogeared. This is a book every poet should read. And one of books I’ve read that makes me think, “I want to try that.” The whole book generally and “Questionnaire in January” specifically.

Of Robert Creeley she says what we would want anybody to say about us, “He was a man of his words. He was given to write poems.”

Of Jean Valentine she says, “She followed the string in the dark.”

Oh man. What a tangled and beautiful homage to the art of writing.

Cooling Time, An American Poetry Vigil (2005)

Separate from the poetry, Wright published a great books of essays, or a long meandering essay. I found this one pretty thick and impenetrable when I started it but then my brain broke through and I really loved it.

If the book above is an ars poetica, this one is a fluid kind of essay or group of essays. They’re very similar in some ways or both reaching toward the same thing from two separate ends. This feels more didactic or declarative than her normal verse.

From her “Op-Ed” intro:

“I believe the word uses wrongly distorts the world”

And then:

“Also I think that antithetical poetries can and should coexist without crippling one another. They not only serve to define their other to a much more exacting degree than would be possible in the absence of one or the other.”

[My point about autotune generally.]

On difficult poetry she says,

“It is not that complexity is overrated, but it is overcomplicated; it is not that obscurity is too obscure, it’s that the underside grows grungy if it isn’t exposed to a change of air.”

About trying new things, “it is about how differently things actually play out if you come and go by different portals, long live la difference; as for transcendence, well baby, that’s the sun’s job.”

And to those who work completely in experiment and beyond politics, she says:

“If you are so afraid of ending up with an opinion, afraid it will color your work, you might ask yourself how transparent is your refusal to make choices, how disinterested can any work be and still stand. How obvious is your withdrawal. What is the artistic advantage of neutrality, allowing such a condition never existed. How would it be distinguished from indifference or mere self-interest.”

That’s it exactly. You may have your motives but it all looks the same to the reader (because we’re not mind readers): neutrality and indifference.

And this:

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable alliances.

Narrative is. You have to know when to enter in, when to egress, when to provoke, when to let it be. However, narrative is overly identified with Southern poetry, whereas it is a life-long global condition not a literary convention. Poets should be willing to exploit the rind of narrativity, and be more than willing to be lost at the heart. Exceptional intellection is being exercised to decry narrative. I am not learning much from that line of refutation.

Never deprive the reader of opportunities for multiple egresses.”

A way with words, this one has. Later she says,

“If you do not use language you are used by it. If you do not recognize the terms peacekeeper missile and preemptive strike as oxymorons, your hole has already been dug.”

Page 92 goes into her theory of the line. She’s mostly suspicious of “line laws.” There’s a long statement about the survival prospects of poetry. She’s full of piss and vinegar in every direction:

“It is all to fair to assume most of us are poets or we wouldn’t be reading this, not when we could be watching the Redskins or be down in the den cleaning the guns or communicating something tangibly effective that we could either sell otherwise have the opportunity to make available to crowds such as porn stars and evangelists routinely reach.”

and

“I am among many of the hard-pressed to accept the fixed-foot-flat-earth-survivalist school of poetry calling itself ‘new formalist’ as being new much less formally interesting. By the same reading, only by lack of scrutiny and challenge could free-verse poets call verse free.”

She says, “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”

And this, this this:

“While some writers are choosing sides, others are building intricate arches over the gorge. Laying track. Crossing the borders by dark to take what they need from the novel here, history or astronomy there, and no more….

“The struggle for legitimacy is as unrelenting as the vigilance required to contain it…”

“We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going–often in different directions at once. And the behavior of language is such that parallel concerns and sympathies are available to serious practitioners on many levels, at any point in space and time–the formal, the inventive, the revelatory, the message plane itself…”

“Of the vanguard I can say, I admire their procedures, but I think their attitude stinks. Of the rear guard, I think their procedures and their attitudes stink. When this discord erupts into an all-or-none competition, the last reader can exit in a body bag…

“I submit you will have to strike down your own mythology about yourself, your loves, your ravishing and atavistic homeland. I am interested in the vision beyond this confrontational…I still want to keep pressing toward the outer edge of my own enterprise.”

Whew. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. So even if C.D. Wright is not “my poet” she is certainly a mentor and a kindred spirit at bare minimum. But just not someone I can obsess over.

Her website has many other poems to pursue.

While I was reading the long lines of C.D. Wright I got kind of tired, too. This happens also when I read Anne Carson and Albert Goldbarth. They are so intense and dense.

So while I was reading C.D. Wright I found a book on Charles Burkowski from my local library. Something about his thin, off-the-cuff lines on gritty topics worked like a refreshing sorbet while reading C.D. Wright. When I got tired of Wright’s sort of thick, dense tone, I could switch over to Burkowski’s irreverent one and then when I got sick of his somewhat spiritually-emaciated poetry I could go back to Wright for some meaty bones. But after I finished the library book, I ended up purchasing his Greatest Hits.

Essential Bukowski Edited by Abel Debritto 2016

Burkowski is a good poet of place, particularly Los Angeles. He is always refreshingly outside-of-the-academy system, although he works his own tramp schtick a bit cartoonishly.

Some of my favorite parts of the later book:

From “for Jane”

“what you were
will not happen again.

the tigers have found me
and I do not care.”

“the laughing heart” is perfect as a contrast in Burkowski’s cynical and optimistic gestures.

“You are marvelous
The gods wait to delight
In you.”

Turn and Face the Strange Changes

February 20, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

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: Should Poetry Be Heard or Read

August 21, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry

We’re making our way through Elisa New’s queries on what poetry is, questions she posed in the Harvard’s Emily Dickinson MOOC. Here’s the next question in the list: is poetry language other human beings necessarily hear or read?

It’s interesting that New specifies “human beings” because obviously animals overhear poetry spoken by humans, like a racoon stuck in an attic overhearing a poetry reading downstairs. It must sound like pure music for them, like listening to any unfamiliar language. But it’s humans who need to experience their language as poetry or want to. And there are humans who are satisfied to experience poetry simply as nonverbal music. Fans of Gertrude Stein, for example.

New also specifies the word “necessarily” as if this is the way we have to experience poetry, as a necessity, and the other way is possibly superfluous.

It’s probably not necessary to overthink New’s casual questions here but the fact is the hoomans have never been able to agree on an answer.

Some of us believe poetry is best experienced as spoken word. Poetry is primarily aural in this case. Some of us believe the page is where the poem is set in stone and formalized. And the page itself, the white space, the visual is crucial to its meaning.

And they both have a point here. Much depends upon what properties of a poem the author was working with, sound or visual tricks. It’s hard to bring visual chicanery to life in a spoken performance. On the other hand, you can get a slight idea of the sound effects when reading a poem silently, but you get a better understanding of them when you read a poem out loud.

Poetry predates printing and so spoken word and memorization is at the heart of its history. Musical elements made it easier to perform and pass along poems. Often, it’s the musical elements that set poetry apart from prose.

But then the printing press happened. Poems could come alive in the minds of readers and not just in the ears of listeners. Now we have even newer publishing platforms like web browsers and interactive applications.

In one MOOC I attended on Electronic Literature, the teacher talked about “affordances” which were like beneficial properties of any one platform. For example, you can take a book to the beach, get it wet and it won’t conk out on you. It’s still a very usable media platform even when damp.

On the other hand, a book in an e-reader might short-circuit when wet, but is weightless and doesn’t take up room in your house if you decide to keep it. You can also search it for content very effortlessly and quickly.

Likewise, our mouth is a platform with some very beneficial affordances.

Everyone has a greater need toward one or another affordance. I personally like the look of books in my rooms. I like the feel of books and paper.

Interestingly, I was going to search images for this post, one for “poetry reading” (as in the live event) and “reading poetry” (as in the book). But the search engine, of course, didn’t know the difference. So putting the words “poetry” and “reading” in the search field brought back everything and that is kind of metaphorically nice.

These are pretty stereotypical images of both options. The dark room with a spotlight and a dramatic performer gesturing with their hands. Contrast this with the manicured reader, enjoying nature no less with a latte with some artfully applied whipped cream.

So every one will have their own personal answer to this question; and how could it be otherwise? We all have different aesthetic needs.

For me, music itself satisfies my need for music. And the music of poetry often overwhelms me during poetry reading performances. The rhythms send me drifting off into my imagination and I come back a minute or two later having missed whole sections of the poems. There’s also the poetry reading grunt that I find pretty grating.

But then again I love to attend public discussions of poetry and literature, like the sessions of The Los Angeles Festival of Books and I like Ted Talks and stand-up comedy. So I do like the physical human presence of communication. It’s a fine line between that and other forms of spoken word.

I’m much more interested in poetry as a visual artifact. So for me, the page trumps the performance. Whereas for the live performance of a conversation, lectures or the performance of music itself, this is not the case.

Music has such a strong nonverbal element, regardless of its lyrics, a strong energy of spirit (in all its variation). Poetry, albeit with its own kind of spiritual effect less powerful, is more verbal and idea-based, despite experiments exploring the boundaries of that with either nonsensical or mostly musical writing.

For me, music does music so well. And reading platforms give poetry more opportunities to do what it does so well.

Ask a Poet: Hope is a Muscle

July 11, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry

Awhile back I had a string of questions to Big Bang Poetry. And I can’t find them now. But here’s a new interesting one that just came in.

Hi, as a class, we just finished reading In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle [by Madeleine Blais, 1995]. My teacher said that the title was based on an Emily Dickenson poem. I have looked high and low, and I haven’t found it. Since you’re an expert, I was wondering if you knew where it came from. Let me know.

This was an interesting question. Emily Dickinson thought a lot about hope but not so much about muscles. I did a google search for “Emily Dickinson” and “muscles” as a cursory check. Nothin.

She has a famous “hope” poem though which I figured was the most likely culprit but with a twist for the basketball team and the Amherst connection in the Blais book. Then I found an article where the author confirmed as much herself: https://www.thepostscript.org/p/madeleine-blais-heart-is-an-instrument

“The title In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle was also inspired by a writer, Emily Dickinson, the poet who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, the setting of the high school basketball team whose championship season I covered. Her famous poem claims “hope is the thing with feathers,” though Woody Allen has a joke about that thing with feathers is his nephew in Zurich who thinks he is a bird. I, obviously, had my own definition.”

According to Google’s Ngram viewer, Blais’ book is probably the first use of the phrase in 1995.

There is also an oft-revested quote by Krista Tippett: “Hope is a muscle, a practice, a choice that actually propels new realities into being. And it’s a muscle we can strengthen.” But from all I can see online, this seems to be a more recent quote.

There’s also a Bjork song using “hope is a muscle” from her 2022 Fossora album that is a very good read (https://genius.com/Bjork-atopos-lyrics) but a pretty typical Bjork experience to watch.

Literary Recipes

June 23, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry

I’ve been meaning to do this post for many months now but was unable to carve out the time. Recently, there was an Intro to Anthro With 2 Humans podcast about Roman food (“Pour Some Garum on Me“) and just like the Egyptian sex poems book, I was able to find literary crossover as a stream of books come through the house.

As I flipped through one book called Gastronomical Time Travel, I also happened to be reading The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook and I realized some of these recipes were related to famous literary works.

So I thought I would list some of them out.

Absinthe

I visited an Absinthe bar in Paris in 2008 and since then I’ve been noticing references to absinthe in paintings, novels and biographies. Painters and writers include Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Paul Verlaine, Picasso Vincent van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant and Oscar Wilde.

Absinthe recipe

The Mint Julep

The Mint Julep was made famous in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Here’s a Medium article on “The mint julep’s jaunt through literature.”

Mint Julep recipe

The Madeleine

The Madeleine is probably the most famous depiction of food’s impact on memory and the sublime, from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way.

Madeleine recipe

New England Clam Chowder

New England Clam Chowder as depicted in Moby Dick. I’m going to Boston in early August and hope to have some thick, creamy New England clam chowder!

New England clam chowder recipe

Fried Chicken, Cold

Cold Fried Chicken appears in many novels from Pride and Prejudice to A Moveable Feast.

Make the fried chicken recipe, then refrigerate.

Haggis

From the Robert Burns poem, “Address to a Haggis.”

Poets love to write about food. Here are 10 anthologies of poetry about food:”10 tasty food poetry anthologies for hungry readers.” I have The Hungry Ear which has anthologized food poems by contemporary poets.

Haggis recipe

Oysters Rockefeller

In The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Toklas talks about Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s return to America from France in 1934-5 and their discovering the new foods Americans were eating. One of the dishes was Oysters Rockefeller and Toklas captured a recipe for it. Mark Twain was also extremely fond of oysters in any dish, including the Oysters Rockefeller.

The Decades-Long Comeback of Mark Twain’s Favorite Food

Oysters Rockefeller recipe

More Lists of Literary Foods

New Learning Opportunities in 2024

January 9, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry

I’ve been meaning to write about this for months. But I wanted to finish the PBS series Poetry in America first so I could give a complete review of it. But my library copy of Season 1 stopped working halfway through. Then I purchased a DVD from Amazon and that DVD stopped working half way through, too, and so I returned it for a replacement. And it happened again!

All the Poetry in America DVDs for season 1 seem to be defective and they’re still selling them! So I went over to the PBS app and signed up for the $5-a-month-member to see the rest of Season 1 and found out there was a Season 3! Sweet!

Anyway, all this took time to work through.

Every since I’ve run out of poetry MOOCs (those free Massive Open Online Classes) and burned through a year’s worth of literary celebrities on MasterClass, I’ve been searching for online literary education again. Happily, last year I found it in two places.

The Smithsonian Associates Online Courses

I think I purchased Christmas cards from MOMA one year and then started getting a stream of museum catalogues (not an unpleasant thing) and one of them was just for online, live courses offered from the Smithsonian.

These are great courses offered in all subjects and taught by some pretty respectable teachers. I haven’t had a bad experience yet…except negotiating their website which is hard to log on to, hard to change the password for, and there’s no literature or book category per se. But you can search “literature” and this bring up all the upcoming lit courses.

I also appreciate that the courses are priced well for the time provided, about 25-35 dollars per 1.5-2 hours. This is much more amenable than $50 to $100 for a single course or a yearly subscription contract. Price point has been an ongoing issue for me. It’s just a shame you can’t go back and stream older courses. What an easy money maker for the Smithsonian that would be.

The first class I took was on Moby Dick (a book I still haven’t read and just unsuccessful pitched to my Difficult Reading Book group), a course taught by Samuel Otter, a professor out of U. of California Berkeley. He had helpful suggestions like reading the chapters out of order. He also put the book in the context of Herman Melville’s life to illustrate how unsuccessful the book was at the time. He discussed the Melville conference in Japan and how influential the book’s heroic monster has been to monster movies like Godzilla. He talked about the idea of “the world in the whale” and how a novel can “swallow everything.” In the Q&A they addressed how the book fit in with his other works, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s influence on the book. Interesting quotes from the class: “This book seems to know how you feel when you read it.”

I also took “Thoreau on Work” because I didn’t know much about Henry David Thoreau either. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, two philosophers who wrote a book on Thoreau’s attitudes currently resonating with the culture of quiet quitting, co-ran the session. They also recommended the Jennifer O’Dell Book, “How to Do Nothing” and talked about fulfilling work and privilege (interestingly Thoreau didn’t have much of that and did manual labor most of his life) and Thoreau’s idea of having “work that keeps your mind free” which resonated with me and how I’ve chosen my day jobs in this life.

I really enjoyed the discussion about plants and bloom times versus living a life beholden to mechanical clocks and what time has come to mean for us, doing work that you can take pride in (at least some of the time) and how some work leads men to “live lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau’s words). They also lightly covered the idea of Original Affluence and we see a lot of young people doing this, scaling down their needs so they can keep work to 40 hours or less.

There was a three part series called Art and Literature and I missed the first one. The second one was on William Blake, given by Jack Dee, an art historian, who explained the time and work of William Blake and how his illustrations intersected with the poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience. We studied these poems in many physical classes throughout high school and college and no teacher (that I can remember) spent time going through the illustration for each one and how it communicated back to the language of the poem. Dee also talked about how Blake’s wife was his collaborator and what she contributed.

The other session I caught was called Picasso and Stein, given by David Garriff. This was also a facinating dive into Gertrude Stein and her relationship with Pablo Picasso. The course suggested a long New Yorker article on the politics of Stein that got me reading Lifting Belly and The Alice B. Tolklas Cook Book.

These classes above were about an hour and a half and cost about $35 for non-members and $30 for members. The more expensive classes either went for an hour and a half over multiple days or were classes that lasted 3-5 hours.

Reading Faulkner: Chronicler of the Deep South, taught by Michael Gorra of Smith College, was a dream come true. Ever since hearing about the Faulkner class at Notre Dame I’ve been thinking about trying to finagle my way into such a thing. This was a class with three sessions (each on a book) over three months, one book a month (so you could read along). First book was The Sound and the Fury (a book I once read with zero understanding of what I was reading). After this session, I went back and reread it with much more understanding and appreciation for not only the novel’s stylistic experiments and narrative experiments but for telling a story about a woman through the voices of her brothers. Like for Moby Dick, none of Faulkner’s novels were successful (as we think of them today). Unlike Melville, Faulkner was unconcerned about this.

The next Faulker book we read was Light in August, one of my favorite books period. My best college paper, in fact, was on Light in August. I loved the novel even more after taking this class (even got a poem out of it). The last novel we read was Absalom, Absalom! which I haven’t yet read, but it’s a book that was also referenced in the Poetry in America, season 3 as an important part of an amazing Evie Shockley poem so I’m looking forward to starting on it.

I also attended a half-day Saturday class on The Russian Novel: Anna Karenina (which I’ve read) and The Brothers Karamazov (which I haven’t) given by Joseph Luzzi from Bard College. I accidentally slept through the first hour of the class. But luckily you get 48 hours to rewatch any recorded sessions. This was the professor who tipped me off to the Cambridge Companion books for authors and art forms.

I took another Luzzi class, one of his high school revisited series, for The Great Gatsby, which prompted me to read a few other F. Scott Fitzgerald novels (now sitting in a stack by my bed, including The Beautiful and Dammed which I’m reading as we speak).

Another interesting thing about this class was the handsome professor. During one of his Q&As at the end of the classes, one devotee suggested (with fluttering eyes you could entirely imagine) that Luzzi should start a podcast. In mild frustration he insisted that he was too busy with writing books, running his online book club, teaching and “I have a family!”

The most recent course I took was on Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Loss and Invention, taught by writer Robert Morgan, a class that worked well to overturn the myths of this most famously mythologized writer. This was less of a lecture than Morgan reading from a paper. So that felt kind of stilted, but he knew what he was talking about so that mitigated the annoyance.

Coming up I’m taking the class Cinderella: Beyond Bippidy Boppidy Boo (tonight, actually) and Wuthering Heights and Invisible Man, again with the handsome Joseph Luzzi as part of his High School Revisited series.

Poetry in America

This PBS show is another, little-known but excellent source for literary continuing ed that I loooved.

The half-hour series was hosted by Elisa New of the aforementioned Harvard poetry MOOCs. In fact, I vaguely remember her talking about filming such a new show poems exploring aspects of America back when I was watching one of those final Harvard MOOCs.

The production values, the ingenuity in illustrating the poems, the wonderful animations, the travels to the places of the poems, the pathos of the shows, and the stellar guest rosters of not only literary but subject-matter experts, just really, really superb and well worth the price of the one or two months of membership to PBS it might cost you to watch all three seasons.

Here are the poems and poet episodes listed below. I have to say, the episodes I was least interested in watching at first were probably the ones I enjoyed the most.

Season 1:

“I Cannot Dance Upon My Toes” by Emily Dickinson exploring the idea of fame.
“Fast Break” by Edward Hirsh about American sports and male bonding (I loved this one and I don’t really like sports).
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden talking about “the black sonnet,” the blues sonnet.
“Hymn” and “Hum Bom!” by Allen Ginsberg about God and The Bomb.
“Skyscraper” by Carl Sandberg about capitalism and the idea of the city.
“Harlem” by Langston Hughes about ruined dreams.
“Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden about suffering and war.
“Shirt” by Robert Pinsky about factory labor, particularly New York City garment labor.
“To Prisoners” by Gwendolyn Brooks about prison (this one was very moving, too).
“The Grey Heron” by Galway Kinnell about nature.
“New York State of Mind” by Nas about Rap music as poetry (a must see episode).
“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus about the immigrant experience (which included a guest singer I really like, Russian immigrant Regina Spektor).

These are available on DVD but good luck finding a playable copy of episodes 7-12.

Season 2:

“Urban Love Poem” by Marilyn Chen about the immigrant experience.
“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop” about grief.
“The Fish” by Marianne Moore about close observation.
“This Your Home Now” by Mark Doty about male barbershops and AIDS (I looooved this one).
“Finishing the Hat” by Stephen Sondheim from the musical Sunday in the Park with George about French painter Georges Seurat and the creative process. (I also love how this show incorporates music into its definition of poetry. See #11 above.)
“You and I Are Disappearing” by Yusef Komunyakaa about the Vietnam War. (Another one of my unexpected favorites on how to write about war).
“This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams about marriage.
“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman about the ideals and multiplicity of America.

These are available on DVD and I had no issues with Season 2.

Season 3:

“Sonnet IV” by Edna St. Vincent Millay about turning upside down the classic love sonnet.
Two southwest poems, “Bear Fat” by Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan and “Rabbits and Fire” by Mexican-American poet Alberto Rios — both about storytelling and tragedy in the southwest.
Motherhood poems by Sharon Olds (“The Language of the Brag”) and Bernadette Mayer (“The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters”) – another amazing episode, “The Language of the Brag” ended up being one of my favorite new finds.
“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost about when walls work and when they don’t work.
“you can say that again, billie” by Evie Shockley about blues, humor, racism in the American South, (another one of my favorite episodes).
“Cascadella Falls” by A.R. Ammons (also showcasing his paintings) about geologic time.
“Looking for the Gulf Motel” by Richard Blanco about the nostalgia of a lost youth, especially with immigrants for their homeland as places left behind.
“The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman about the Civil War.

I have loved every minute of these classes and TV shows. To find out more information about them, visit:

Experimental Poetry

October 9, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry

We’ve still some things to catch up on since I had to divert my attention to moving all my websites earlier this year. I kept on reading and now I have a big stack of books to review, so big that I had to divey them up into a traditional poetry stack and an experimental stack.

I’ll start with the experimental ones, because even that stack had sub-stacks: the ones I liked and the ones I didn’t. Sometimes I think I have a love-hate relationship with experimental poetry. If the experiment seems generous and comprehensible, I tend to really love it and it inspires me to try similar things: like strike-out experiments, experiments with bilingualism, footnote experiments, poems working side-by-side itself on the page.

However, if the experiments seem solipsistic or just an extension of the meaning-making experiments of parataxis or repeats of 100-year-old strategies modernism, I get annoyed.

Meaning-making is clugey, we get it. It’s hardly following Ezra Pound’s adage to “make it new.” Not that we have to keep up that death-march anyway.

But in any case, this all seems very subjective. Experiments I like fall flat with others.

Yield Architecture by Jake Syersak falls into the later category for me. The book itself is beautiful, which is why I picked it up at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books earlier this year. But I didn’t even finish it. And there are only a handful of poetry books I can say that about. I can usually stick it out (or skim it out).

This book is described as “an unyielding investigation of how linguistic and material structures intersect to shape one’s perception of reality” which sounds like part of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. experiments again. There are four sections with names like “Skins, Skeins, History, Hysteria & Dust” that seems mostly juxtipositional sound experiments, like one called “Soldered Opposite of Weather Was Yourself” which contains this untitled snippet:

architecture
              dear architecture,

to begin, I’ve written two-words side-by-side on yellow-lined
              notebook paper:

violet: violence

as a way of testing the bruises a colloseum’s pillars bury into a
              hillside, how the grass gathers around it

(what anchors me in all this?—alarms of nausea, nausea the likes of
              which can only be described as: nausea describes

For example: I wonder, how calmly your waters hold a swan’s gristle

And there’s much more like this going on for 81 pages but we’re done.

Watch Me Trick Ghosts by Robert Krut was also beautifully printed and does follow a thin kind of sensical narrative but the poems still didn’t quite connect for me.

From “Pedagogy” first stanzas:

He wants to be a teacher, but what
to teach when the world is a tiger,

when even walking out to sneak a smoke
is met by a town where someone

behind a mailbox whips batteries
or unsuspecting afternoon walkers,

The poem “Ghost Does”

Sky ghost prepares lightning.
Electricity ghost is acid on steel.
Thunder ghost speaks to tree ghost.
Tree ghost is you.
Foundation ghost stretches, contracts.
Wind ghost inhales.
Blanket ghost is bandaging.
Slate ghost marks in chalk.
Bone ghost is an echo.
Moon ghost is moon.
Sun ghost is moon ghost.
I am moon ghost.
Branch ghost is arm as body.
Rain ghost is a footprint on cement.
Leaf ghost lifts eyeline.
Tree ghost is waiting.
Tree ghost awaits.
Tree ghost is you.
I am tree ghost.
Tree ghost is moon ghost.
We hide, appear.

More excerpts: https://www.hypertextmag.com/excerpt-robert-kruts-watch-me-trick-ghosts/

Some people still really enjoy these things of almost-meanings. I remember my friend Laura and I used to write these almost-sensical poems in the third grade when we were trying to feel our way into language and didn’t have any real meanings to work with yet. They weren’t quite poems, but wordiness we would put in clouds, like thought clouds but they were really like simulacrums of what we imagined sounding deep and thoughtful writings would be (without any actual deep thoughts because we were eight).

But, at the end of the day, I do support any kind of poet lab/pure experiments no matter whether I can find a practical use for their ideas or not. Everyone is on their own path.

Janet Kaplan’s Ecotones (given to me as a gift in NYC this year for my birthday), is about half-and-half successful for me. There are three sections called Plasma, Chronicles and Technopastoral. Plasma used collages with quotes to make very faint points. Her concern with the vocabulary and typography of technology inspired me to think more about technology poems, especially the connective tissue of communicating in code. I really liked the Chronicles section where there seemed to be more of a person writing there. Technopastoral contained various spatial experiments.

And I think this book helped to clarify for me what it is I’m looking for in experiments, not too much abstraction and intellectualism at the expense of finding a breathing, feeling person somewhere in there living a life. This kind of personhood has been so lacking in experimental poetries (especially but not exclusively the digital ones).

I did love the word pictures in You Would Say That by Robin Tomens, which I received for entering a contest last year. These are completely typographical experiments, literally using words as a visual medium, (which I would usually just classify as visual art), but Tomens does something extra to give a snippet here or there meaning, and so we felt a person was coming through. Some poems were commentary on the process of thinking but not so much that they didn’t strike me as still touching, maybe due to the way they were drawn into the typographical art.

Samples of the text from the pieces:

POETIC GLAMOUR IS NO LONGER WHAT COUNTS MOST
BUT THE INTRINSIC INTERST IN THE THOUGHT

~~~

A KNOWS HE IS NOT READING, AND HAS A
SENSE OF JUST THIS WHILE PRETENDING
TO READ

~~~

IF SOMEONE COULD SEE THE MENTAL PROCESS OF
EXPECTATION

~~~

HOLD THAT THOUGHT

Some images from the book:

James Thomas Stevens’ The Golden Book was a take on the intersection of grammar and love poems, an experiment I was doing myself last year. Stevens’ poems seemed to be so personal, however, as to be almost cryptic.

Based on David Lambuth’s The Golden Book on Writing, a writing guide from 1923, these poems shared titles like The Paragraph, The Sentence, Words, Punctuation.

The opening poem called “A Warning”

Isn’t every
encounter a cross
to bear,
a cultural one?

The small battles.
The volleys.
The flag raisings.

They poems are pretty far removed from their source material, which seems more like a jumping-off point than any attempt to address the rules of writing directly. One I really liked was called “Set Up Sign-Posts” which is an adage of writing any kind of persuasive thesis paper.

Point to your beloved.
Remind him of his progress.
At the end tell him that
you have arrived – and see
that he understand it.

Don’t have him turning over the sheets and
saying with a start: “Oh, that’s all there was to it.

From “Know Where You Are Going”

Know which He you are writing of:

He, the pianist carpenter, or
He, the poet violinist.

In like lions, out like lambs.

I also liked a poem called “Simple Words for Big Ideas” which it hard to even summarize but a poem that covers sex, language and colonization.

Personal story, I worked with Stevens when I was a faculty secretary at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) in Santa Fe back in 2013-14. There was tension there between the dean and both the art and writing faculty around who got access to the copier (and me), all which made some of the teachers a bit grouchy. Stevens was initially very grouchy about this and I remember some chastising he gave me for taking over the copier for one of the Dean’s projects. Stevens had an exceptionally messy office. I told him his office was itself a Language poem. But I really liked his poems and he became less grouchy (as did the other faculty) as the semester went on (and I learned to make copies after the faculty left for the day).

More excerpts from the book: https://courtgreen.net/issue-14/james-thomas-stevens

A few weeks ago I picked up the $30 Anne Carson book Float from the local library. It comes in a plastic box and has about 27 loose booklets and front matter pieces inside. They were all disorganized and in disarray.

It was very satisfying to my Skittles-organizing mind to sort all the front matter out. The little booklets could be read in any order although there was a Table of Contents. “Reading can be freefall” the title page claims.

I used the same reading strategy as when our book blub read The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson, which was to read the smallest booklets first, working up to the longest ones. It’s the low-hanging-fruit of reading strategies. The book was like the detritus of Anne Carson’s writing drawer, stuff too small to put anywhere else, culled together to Float in one package. It was only loosely cohesive and again connections depended upon the principle of parataxis, random connections of proximity.

There were ordered lists, long poems, poem sets, theatrical scripts and essays. The booklets kept slipping out of the plastic container all over the floor.

Understandably the book had less cohesion than other Anne Carson collections and I can’t say this was my favorite “book” of hers but it did inspire me to try a few things. I loved “Maintenance,” “Eras of Yves Klein” and “Merce Sonnet,” “Reticent Sonnet” and “Sonnet of the English-Made Cabinet with Drawers (In Prose)” from the booklet called “Possessive Used as Drink (Me), A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets.” A few of the essay pieces even inspired me to create an Essay poem and there will be a Cheras poem one day, no doubt.

My favorite experimental book this year was from Unincorporated Territory [guma] by Craig Santos Perez. I picked up this book at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), the museum extension of IAIA, along with the Stevens book.

This is a book about the status of Guam as part of and not part of the United States and how its citizens can feel diaspora even while living in their own place, beyond what even some post-colonized aboriginal groups might feel due to continued militarization. It’s colonization in real time and the book explores what it means to “be home” when the definition of your country is changing. Perez weaves in document-speak and impact statements into a kind of meaning collage. The poems are too difficult to type out so here are some images of my favorite pieces:

The first poem, from the legends of juan malo [a malologue]:

ginen ta(la)ya:

ginen fatal impact statements

And here’s a poem on spam: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57827/ginen-the-legends-of-juan-malo-a-malologue

The Labor Poets

September 15, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry

After my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, my grandfather came to live with us for a while in St. Louis. And when my grandfather found out I was writing poems, (I was in college at the time), he told me to read the labor poets.

I had no idea who these labor poets were. They certainly weren’t in the Norton Anthology I had from school.

My grandfather said I should look them up at the Public Library. He told me to go to the reference desk and say, “Show me the labor poets!”

I wasn’t about to do this for two reasons: for one I was too shy to demand anything from reference librarians, (ok, not entirely true if it was an old Cher magazine I wanted from an archive), but also I wasn’t reading any other poets at the time. I was just a newb writing to find my own voice.

I should take a moment here to elaborate about my grandfather. I usually talk about my grandparents on my father’s side because their history is very mythological and romantic. But my grandparents on my mother’s side are none the less interesting (or mythological for that matter).

Some would call my grandfather an anglophile.

Now I live with a Francophile. So I know what this is. Monsieur Big Bang’s high-school friends still lament about trying to have a conversation with him back in the 1980s. Listening to him was like, “France, France, France, Proust. France, France, France, Proust.”

Monsieur Big Bang himself will tell you he was very much like the Italian-obsessed kid in the movie Breaking Away, a working-class kid enamored with another romantic culture. And just like that kid in the movie who had his own reality-check during the bike-race scene when the Italians cruelly sabotaged his bike, Monsieur Big Bang spent a good deal of time in France finding out the French are assholes too, just like everybody else.

But I don’t feel anglophile is quite the right word for what my grandfather was. Somehow the word anglophile suggests a range in an obsession. And as I’ve mentioned in my other blog, my grandfather had only a small set of topics he would discuss at any time:

What English people ate or did not eat. This suspiciously coincided exactly with what my grandfather ate and did not eat, like tomatoes. He said an Englishman would never eat a tomato. (We’ll come back to that.)
The superiority of British shipping history. I spent many, many hours with this man and I only had to hear the words “Sir Frances” or “Sir Walter” and I would gently float off to my happy place, which in college was thinking all the time about boys.
America was a completely corrupt country and soon our hard-fought-for unions would be weakened and demolished. This was in the 1980s during Reaganomics. Looking back today, I can see he was right about this, but at the time it really rankled me and my mother to hear it.
The last thing was The Ludlow Massacre. I heard about this tragedy all the time. “Remember The Ludlow Massacre.” It was his Alamo. When I happened to come upon a highway sign for the massacre site in Southern Colorado about ten years ago, I turned off immediately to visit the place (every American should). I had heard about it so many times in my childhood, the actual location always seemed more fantastical to me than real. It was like coming upon the exit sign to Narnia.

These topics all come together for my grandfather in his family’s Colorado pioneer history. Although my grandfather spent only a total of two weeks in the country of England during his entire lifetime (see below), his adored parents were both from Cornwall, both from coal mining families who immigrated separately to America, and both his mother and father were heavily invested in the American labor movement as it was happening at turn-of-the-century coal sites in Colorado.

My grandfather could determine a stranger’s political party in five minutes. And he could be incredibly difficult if he didn’t like you (say you belonged to the wrong one). He could also exhaust people with his small list of discussion topics.

In fact, my grandfather talked about England so much that when my grandmother, (a Germanic woman from a big family farm in Iowa), was offered a two-week trip to England during the family’s roots tour of 1977, she declined. She opted instead to “take care of Dave and the kids in Missouri.”

She chose Missouri over England! (I can’t even.)

She said she felt like she had already been there.

After my mother, Aunt Merle and grandfather returned from that same trip, my mother told me, “Mary I saw tomatoes everywhere.” I was like how would we know? How would we even know?

My grandfather talked about England so much that I benefited in being the remaining person he took to dinner every Thursday night for years when everyone else in his life had dropped out. (Dropped out of the restaurant dinners, anyway. My mother still cooked him a big dinner every Sunday.) He insisted on eating at more expensive establishments after working until he was 80 as a machinist and a mechanic. He had a good social security check and had been frugal most of his life and he wanted to eat well. He usually wanted to visit the same fine establishments over and over, too, which also tired everyone out. I was the last man standing and his driver except for those times he wanted us to splurge with a cab.

I once took him to The St. Louis Bread Company, (a direct relative of Panera), so I could show him this fabulous new thing called a bread bowl. He was offended that I had to “truck our own food” to the table and refused to be impressed.

“But soup! In a bowl of bread!”

So we were back to the fancy Bristols and Spiros soon enough. I missed most of the Seinfeld, Mad About You and Cosby Show episodes during those Thursday-night years. It’s a gapping hole in my cultural literacy.

Anyway, all these years later I have discovered Cary Nelson who has recently created a critical space in the American poetry canon to rediscover these labor poets my grandfather was telling me about. Revolutionary Memory is a book about how these poets were lost from anthologies in the first place. Next Nelson edited two major anthologies which reinstated these lost poets, Anthology of Modern American Poetry and Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

As I’m finding these labor poets in those anthologies, I’m deciding I really like them and I’ve been tracking down books of their collected works (if available; they’re still pretty obscure). These poets are all very funny and they don’t write about politics or labor issues all the time. But when they do, it’s poignant and crafted. Some of my favorite poets so far:

Kenneth Fairing, who also wrote a respectable crime noir book called The Big Clock
Thomas McGrath
Stanley Burnshaw

What you tend to want from your dead relatives is context. And back when my grandfather was alive I was too young and badly-read to even know what questions to ask him. Did he read these poets himself? Where did he come upon them? Did he ever subscribe to the socialist periodical New Masses or The Masses where many of these poets were published? (My mother tells me just now that he did take a Labor newspaper). Did these poets come up in conversation at union halls or in machine shops? I have my grandfather’s scrapbook of union and political clippings and there’s not a single poem in it as I can recall. Did he collect any of these poems somewhere else?

One final story. I was living in Yonkers and my grandfather would very kindly send me fresh canned tuna from Winchester Bay in Oregon in cases of 24. About every six months when I ran out, he would send me more. I’ve never tasted a better canned tuna than the fresh tuna from Winchester Bay, Oregon. My grandfather and I weren’t able to dine out together anymore because I was at Sarah Lawrence in New York by then and he had moved back to the coast of Oregon.

We still kept our standing date every Thursday night, if just on the phone. One time it took over two weeks for his box of tuna cans to arrive and he was really angry at the Post Office. During one of our Thursday night calls he said, “the Pony Express could have delivered it faster!” I took his point but truthfully, the Pony Express would have taken months and probably Indians would have been enjoying the cans of tuna instead of me. He then said very seriously, “You know in England they send all their mail through pneumatic tubes.”

I thought this was just about the silliest thing he had ever said. And in the years following I told this story of the tuna to many, many people as an example of the kinds of unbelievable things my grandfather would say about England.

Fast forward years later I’m in Paris with Monsieur Big Bang and we’re visiting some museum there, (the sewers? the catacombs? the city museum?), and they start talking about how Paris was once fitted with pneumatic tubes everywhere for quickly sending around mail throughout the city. I turned to M.B.B and said, “Oh shit. He was right about pneumatic tubes in England!”

The Essay Project: Silences

June 21, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry

In 1978 the writer Tillie Olsen published a book called Silences, “a landmark survey of disenfranchised literary voices and the forces that seek to silence them.” In 2003, the book was re-released.

This essay was photocopied from that book and appears to be its introduction.

Olsen wrote often about the political and social reasons why women have been prevented from writing. In our Sarah Lawrence College essay class back in the mid-1990s we usually passed around purely craft essays. But occasionally someone would pass around a political essay, which is kind of interesting since our professor, Susanne Gardinier, was a political poet. I’m actually surprised we didn’t cover more political pieces, just to, like, kiss-up to the teacher.

In the first part of this essay Olsen talks about creative silences in general, why artists may choose to go quiet.

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all….what are creation’s needs for full functioning?”

She talks about natural silences, those which represent a “necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation.”

But Olsen really wants to talk about unnatural silences, like for example Thomas Hardy ceasing to write novels and taking a religious vow that required he refrain from writing poetry. Or Arthur Rimbaud abandoning “the unendurable literary world.” Herman Melville’s needing to earn a living.

Akin to those silences are what Olsen calls “hidden silences: work aborted, deferred, denied,” censorship silences, self-censorship, “the knife of the perfectionist,” problems of focus or will-power, silences created by self abuse. Ernest Hemmingway is her example for this type. She borrows his own quote from “The Snows of Kilmanjaro”:

“He had destroyed his talent himself—by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.”

She then talks about silences caused by long foreground periods. Walt Whitman is a good example here and writers who didn’t even start up until their forties, fifties, sixties (Laura Ingalls Wilder). Some writers had so many life demands, they needed “the sudden lifting of responsibility” or the “immobilization of a long illness” to carve out the time to write.

Rainer Maria Rilke was so possessive of his time, his need for “a great isolation,” that he refused to help support his wife and daughter at all, let alone feed the dog. (He didn’t even attend his daughter’s wedding). I’ve heard Mary Oliver suggest as much in an essay, that’s all is fair in love and war and writing. Emily Dickinson, in her own way, withdrew from the world.

I’m just gonna say I can’t live like that. I mean, I can hermit up as much as the next monk and I feel no great rush to publish, but I can’t refuse time to people. And honestly, I don’t feel I have to. Maybe this is because I was an administrative assistant for over ten years. I learned how to multi-task. Maybe because I’m obsessed with the idea of lost time I’ve learned how to hoard it.

I’m actually multi-tasking the writing of this blog today as we speak.

I’m pretty good at “time management.” That said, I have failed to carve out the time to write the novel and the short stories. But I’ve always considered this more of a challenge of will power and work-life balance; but hey, that excuse could just as well be a rationalization.

I’m sure I could produce out more if I worked at it nine to five or even 9 to noon. But, like Joan Didion, I didn’t want to teach (or write screenplays or finagle inheritances). So then…life choices.

But I’m having the dog. Between the dog and the novel, the dogs gonna win that battle.

Olsen says, “Most writers must work regularly at something,” if not teaching than something out in the big world. But “substantial, creative word demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it.” And here she mentions Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, who produced quantity while holding down other jobs. She quotes from Franz Kafka’s diary to illustrate his struggles finding time to write.

From 1911, “I finish nothing.”

From 1917 “the strain of keeping down living forces.”

This is especially true, Olsen says, of women. Many women writers see decades between books, and not due to “lying fallow” in order to fertilize ideas. Olsen compiles a long list of the most successful women writers of the past century, (I’m assuming she means 1800s), who either had no children or had servants to help with the children. Then she lists accomplished 1900s women writers who also had “household help or other special circumstances.”

She then rightly poo-poos the belief some hold that women don’t need to create because they can “create babies.”

(For the love of..)

I need to stop now…and seethe.

Finding Poems by Themes

March 31, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry

Months ago I finished The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present edited by David Lehman. I’m not going to review the book. I’m just going to post a photo of my dog-eared copy.

But this anthology did drive home to me the idea for me that anthologies are often good for surprising reasons. For example, the Seriously Funny anthology of humorous poems was full of some very unfunny poems. But there it had some of the best music poems I’d ever read in there, poems not found in the Everyman’s Library Music’s Spell anthology.

And likewise there were some surprisingly stellar love poems in the Erotic anthology. Not the same thing and I don’t know why this is that anthologies may have a kind of subconscious ordering principle.

My only complaint about Lehman’s Erotic anthology were his claims to not be able to include all the poems he wanted and then devote a third of the book to contributors’ sometimes very long comments regarding their favorite erotic texts. Although these comments led me to some interesting things, it made me question the point of even having author bios in anthologies anyway. Because like…the Internet. Save the room for more poems and if readers want to look up author bios, provide them on a link or let users do their own Google search.

Speaking of the Internet, Twitter has gone through many instabilities since I’ve been using it but I still maintain it’s the best spot to mingle with strangers. That isn’t always a pleasant adventure and there’s been a lot of melodrama on Twitter in all the usual places, but once in a while something quite amazing and miraculous happens there. Like good people sharing good poems.

Joseph Fasano has an account where he posts a thematic poem daily and people crowd-source response poems on the same theme. It can be quite moving, like today’s thread on Soulmates. Themes can be on topics like coping (a day or so ago) or joy or alienation or whatever. And it’s a brilliant way to start compiling lists of poems around topics of interest.

Many, many people post their favorite poems of the day on Twitter and once you start following a few readers, poems will start falling into your lap in the most amazing way. One thing I’ve noticed is that most of the poems people are gravitating to, collecting and sharing tend to be significantly emotional. And this makes me think that as a collective of humans who read poems, we’re ready for that again after the long trek we just made with “modernism” and “post-modernism” and the experiments of “contemporary” poems and I hope we start naming our eras with less dated word choices please.