Category: Poetic Realities (Page 1 of 10)

Tech Fails and The Malevolent Provocateur

November 20, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

I was in a team meeting a few months ago and my boss noticed, apropos of nothing, that my name, Mary McCray, has, (eerily and evenly), two Ms, two As, two Rs, two Ys and two Cs. Like my whole name is a duplication of the letters M, A, R, Y and C.

And then he searched for annograms of my name and the one that best described this strange situation was “Marcy Marcy.” He jokingly found said this was probably messing up the matrix.

I said that sounds bad but just add it to the pile of all other things.

Sigh.

Breaking the Spiritual Matrix

I’ve been sitting on this post for months. Months! It felt too depressing to post. Not that I’m above (or below) posting gloomy. When the time calls for. Because I like a good grouse as much as anyone. But this one felt really complain-y. And how useful was that?

It’s basically about all the tech fails happening all around us (and what this means for creative people). And I’m not just talking about new tech problems, like A.I. or the occasional A.I. “hallucinations” although those are kind of batty when they happen. Asking A.I. to explain who Mary McCray is has been both fascinating and disturbing. For one thing, A.I. thinks more highly of me than I think is true. I had a book club meeting and we’re all writers so we talked about that and I’m convinced A.I. is trying to ingratiate itself by blowing smoke up our asses. And then just the wrongness. For example, A.I. had me co-writing a very famous song. And aside from helping my brother get out of a lyrical dead-end once every few years, I’ve never written a song in my life.

But I’m not talking about all that. I’m talking about tech things that have been working forever and suddenly they are not working…and nobody knows why or how to fix them anymore because systems and technology have become too complicated to unravel and fix. So the problems are left just languishing out there in the open like abandoned motels on the side of the road.

Wholesale things on websites, like links and redirects not working. Email confirmations not working. Phone apps not working. Virus scanners getting confused. Phone trees breaking down. My text app can’t handle group threads anymore. And it’s been broken for over a year. Business processes breaking the minds of the people and machines tasked with following them. It’s like we’re arriving at a tipping point where technology is doing more harm than good and people are dumping their “smart” appliances for “dumb” ones….just to be able to, for example, do their laundry.

The amount of phone apps we are required to have just to make hair and doctor’s appointments, get grocery store coupons. Not only are we having storage problems, but the elderly can’t fill out copious amounts of pre-visit online forms when they can’t understand the ten steps needed to access them.

A recent airline ticket QR code stopped working for me 30 minutes before a flight and the flight attendant has to print a ticket off for me. Like on that amazing technology of paper.

A doctor I’ve been trying to see finally cancelled my appointment this month because they can’t navigate my insurance situation. They tried for six months and finally we both gave up.

What a mess everything is.

And then there’s this thing they are calling a decline in our attention span. I call it becoming illiterate. Over the years, I’ve watched a very, very smart friend struggle with any kind of longform reading at work. When a long email comes to this person, they struggle with “too much information” and the bullying “wall of text.” It’s like all the microcontent we have consumed over the years has made my friend illiterate.

People are losing their jobs just as paywalls are going up everywhere for formerly free services.

Technology has suddenly become very political.

All of these are major tech fails. And I’m not the only person to notice. Everyone is noticing it.

Good ole Yankee ingenuity, our historical faith in labor-saving devices. Innovation and invention, fads, disruption and planned obsolescence, our obsession with the youth is really an obsession with the new. These are all American themes.

But for the last few decades, technology has been disrupting the wrong things. Why not disrupt health care and the fiasco of health insurance? Why hasn’t anybody taken that on? Imagine the countless amount of suffering that could have alleviated.

But hey, we can shop with our voices now and we don’t have to use our fingers! Next day shipping! Credit card information is saved for all future purchases on any website. We can send our friends money easily now!

Do you see a pattern here?

What is the utility or efficiency of having people forced to be ambidextrous between Mac and PC, Apple and Android? There is none. Why should developers have to design things that need everlasting updates. As we’ve seen with digital art, artists and writers can’t keep maintaining their pieces out from eventual technological obscurity.

You now need a gazillion programs to do your job (even toilets are getting complicated) and none of them sync seamlessly with any other. There’s always a glitch that requires manual intervention and workarounds. I have a whole separate tirade I could make about how work tools have mostly made work tasks more difficult and time consuming for us. We’re doing so much babysitting with the tools, we have less time and brain capacity left over to solve the real people problems our jobs are trying to manage.

TV apps have made TV watching too complicated. To reinstate my AppleTV account takes a phone with a QR code app (that never works), a URL to use on my phone or computer, then a verification number sent to my phone and then a password to get into my website account. So there are many walls I have to scale just to give AppleTV my money. And it’s been that way for years. They’re not trying to fix real problems.

Disruption a big word in technology. It’s a goal for designers and “visionaries” but it’s been a nightmare for real people, especially older people. One of my parents has cognitive issues switching from one streaming TV app to the other (let alone dealing with their four separate remotes) because each one functions differently. As technology continues to make our lives more complicated by the day we’re starting to see that cognitive breakdown creep into younger and younger minds, like my friend above with the reading issues.

If you can’t get your washer and dryer to run because the internet is down, that’s a tech fail. If technology puts people out of work and makes them go hungry, that’s the biggest tech fail there ever was. And the biggest irony is that layoffs are beginning first with the very technology employees who have been designing our human obsolescence.

Benevolent vs Malevolent Provocateurs

I want to talk about the idea of disruption because I hear a lot about it. And not just in technology. It’s a big word for writers and artists, too. It’s just not called “disruption.” But it’s been on most writers agenda since modernism. Shake it up. Helping people is never on the agenda. Not really. Not truthfully. It’s the drive to be known as the person who shook it up.

Figure out a way to disrupt the canon, a way to challenge allegedly complacent people. The most respectable artists have been considered provocateurs. And it’s been so culturally and socially admired, everyone wants to do it now.

And it’s just not scalable, socially or morally.

I was at a party a few months ago and there was a libertarian there who we all like and who is a very smart and funny person. He was talking about trolling his co-workers on Facebook and he said, “I just want to fuck with people.” And I wondered, to what end? To get them to “take themselves less seriously,” he said, very seriously.

I recently read an essay about John Adams and how he predicted that conflict that would keep America on track (conflict, adversity) and not community and stability. This was because, he believed, it is simple human nature to want to be in conflict. People naturally are needy for recognition, wealth, and to feel they are better than their neighbors. They will conflict to attain.

So I try to understand capitalism’s insatiable need for a constant newness and the tech sector’s constant drive toward disruption and society’s decades-long-march toward the pinnacles of every conceivable thing, from singing contests to baking bread to winning a dog on a reality show.

My party friend just wants to fuck with people. But to what purpose? Later in the night he admitted he left a job because he felt he was being, in so many words, fucked with.

So rule number one is if you’re going to be one of those people who fucks with others, you better be amiable when being fucked with. But that never seems to be the case. Rarely are the shit-starters fit enough to have shit started upon them.

And I keep coming back to the impulse to do it. To what purpose. Can you articulate how society will be improved based upon your fuckery? And it better be good, because everyone and his dog are doing it.

If the answer is “I don’t know” or “I don’t care, I just like to fuck with shit,” that’s the definition of malevolent provocateuring. If you just want to cause people to feel like shit because you are annoyed about something (like political correctness) or the opinions of somebody else, that’s not good enough. It’s just “shit rolls downhill.”

If you can articulate an outcome that (1) is not all about you and (2) is actually an improvement to a problem of the human condition, then that is benevolent provocateuring.

To what purpose is your fuckery?

There’s so much of it everywhere you look that to truly be unique these days you need to go completely the other way. That’s where the real risk and adventure now exists, to go up against those who constantly feel the need to go up against everything else because they feel bad and cannot regulate their feelings.

Mostly I feel disruption is just malevolent manipulation, to confound for the sake of confounding. The world shits upon me so I shit upon the world. I have been disrupted and therefore so shall you be.

I’m telling you, you can’t stand out in all this shit. The only resort to distinction now is the impulse toward continuity, consistency, kindness and peace.

I know what you’re thinking: this is why we can’t have shitty things.

So what does this mean for literature?

Utility in Art. That’s a strange concept.

W. H. Auden once said, “poetry makes nothing happen.” Maybe he’s right; but until the end of days we’ll never know for sure.

For a long time we’ve been experimenting with disruptions. I like experimenting too. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It should still exist. But there’s no law that says art can’t be useful: emotionally, philosophically, spiritually and practically. It has the potential to improve your life. It can do anything. And it can do anything because it’s an easy and open vessel. You can put helpfulness into it just as easily as you can put spite and rage…and fuckery.

For decades we have been asking readers to put up with more and more disruption. For what gain? Look deeply into your own heart.

In a world of the manipulation and disruption and planned obsolescence, utility seems completely revolutionary.

Revenge Art

October 2, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

Many writers engage in revenge works, usually tell-alls about enemies, colleagues or lovers. the most famous example probably being Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist after his wife, actress Claire Bloom’s own revenge memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House. Poet Robert Lowell was also not above using dirty laundry for selfish reasons. And pop culture is overloaded with “he said/she said” books. (I’m reading two now.)

Short of physical violence, revenge art could be the worst format for revenge (or the best, depending upon your point of view) in that it has some staying power. It doesn’t dissipate as easily as other more transient kinds of retribution that you might prefer soon evaporate after your regrets start to kick in.

I’ve actually been waiting a long time to write about revenge, having had it perpetrated upon me once or twice over the years (and probably far back into my past lives). I’ve been waiting for the Into to Anthro podcast to get to their Revenge episode because it’s a very interesting one, delving into the psychology of wanting and enacting revenge on someone you feel has hurt you. Turns out just thinking about revenge activates the same parts of our brain as gambling does, and like gambling the anticipation is thrilling, but the execution or “winnings’ are inevitably an emotional let down.

I’ve thought about revenge a bit over the last few years and the idea that it’s best served cold. Ever since my mother sent me a box of childhood things. In fact, that very box illuminated the best revenge ever enacted upon me, one served so freezer-burned it felt more funny than upsetting. But I’ll get to that story in a minute.

I want to first continue by saying I’m not talking about the idea of justice, the nice word society gives to its revenge, the social deterrent we use to keep criminal behavior at bay. I’m talking about interpersonal revenge. Anything from the neighborly feuds of the Hatfields & the McCoys to revenge in-coming from a once-intimate partner or friend. The tragedy about this kind of revenge, unlike society’s revenge which at least does lip-service to forensics, is that it is often, more than not, founded on mistakes and misunderstandings.

This is why, (if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times), we are our own worst enemy. Because we have serious blind spots and we strike out too often and too soon. Usually this is because when we’re in pain our brains shut down. Anne Power describes this very well in her Ted Talk, how we snap into flight or fight during times of suffering. All behavior makes sense in context, she says, but we’re never in any position to investigate the context when we feel we’re under attack.

Probably hundreds of tales have been told about the many misunderstandings that stimulate acts of revenge. My first exposure to this kind of tragic revenge was when my friend LeAnne, who sat next to me in French class, invited me to start seeing foreign films with her at the Tivoli Theater, an art house in St. Louis. We were probably still in high school or just out of high school when we went to my first foreign film, the French movie Jean de Florette (1986) and its sequel, Manon of the Spring (also 1986). It was a beautiful (and painful) illustration of tragic revenge that I never forgot.

Because the effects of tragic revenge can be devastating in their mistakenness, the risks of being wrong are pretty high. And again, few of us have access to the context Anne Powers describes. If someone attacks you who doesn’t even know you, how can you uncover that context?

So revenge is very human, mostly only human actually. But that doesn’t make it any less dreadful that we are so quickly willing to weld the sword into our own blind spots.

So back to my example of brilliant revenge. When I was a child, I was a bit of a lamenter. I once literally started a picket line in the living room of my grandparents house in Oregon over having to eat fish every night for dinner.

Well, one day when I was seven, my parents told me we would be moving from “Albaqeqe” to a place called Creve Coeur, which sounded very French and exotic to me when I was seven. My parents said it would be a very green place and, enticed by this, I was an early enthusiast of the project. Soon, however, I realized what leaving “Albaqeqe,” (like Pontrhydyfen, it’s an impossible city to spell), would mean for me socially.

Here is an early expression of that emotional trajectory.
Click to enlarge.

(I had such big ambitions for my literary output. But I was misspelling my own name so…I hope I wasn’t too optimistic about winning a Pulitzer Prize. By the way, Candy died under my parent’s bed in Albuquerque a year or so before we moved and my parents couldn’t bring themselves to tell me or my two older brothers for three weeks during which time my parents stalled us by saying Candy was at the vet. She was actually immediately and quietly buried by my parents in our backyard on Claudine Street without any ceremony. But she lives in immortality as my very amazing porn name ((first dog, first street)) of Candy Claudine. So there’s that.)

I also want to say I am not living in “Albaqeqe” again due to some lifelong effort to get back here. Girl Scouts honor. By the time I got to Junior High I forgot all about ever returning and it was Monsieur Bang Bang who wanted to move here to study archaeology back in 2010 and who then become ensnared in “The Land of Entrapment” (as we say).

Anyway…on to St. Louis where I was placed in remedial classes immediately because I was behind in reading and math was a foreign language. I was allowed to leave science class twice a week to visit the Fern Ridge reading specialist who implored my father to stop reading to me (I was eight years old by this time) so that I would start reading on my own, after which, very similarly to Candy-gate, my parents couldn’t come right out and tell me this but instead told me they would rather watch PBS’ miniseries I Claudius instead of finishing the book Heidi with me, thereby generating in my tender heart a lifelong hatred of I Claudius.

But rather than enact revenge on my parents for all those things, I started reading instead. Like pretty voraciously. In grade school we received a catalog called the Scholastic Book Club. That reading specialist advised my parents to let me read as much as I wanted and so I started collecting books about dogs, haunted houses and a magazine called Dynamite. There was also a magazine called Bananas but that was for older kids. I purchased so many books from that catalog, I always received the free poster and so my bedroom walls in St. Louis were at first covered by posters of puppies and kittens (until those were replaced by Cher albums and posters of shirtless boys). One season I bought so many books I struggled to get the stack home on the school bus.

And I was happy in reading but still pretty upset about being in St. Louis and so I decided to write a letter to the advice column “Good Vibrations” in Dynamite magazine, a column run by Ms. Kernberg. (In my memory, she was a man; but her real name is Pamela Kernberg.) I wrote out my complaints against my parents in that letter, folded it up, added a 15-cent stamp and then gave it to my mother to post.

In hindsight, maybe this is where my own revenge plot went awry.

I awaited Kernbergs response for a year and it never showed up in Dynamite Magazine. I was very depressed about this. It triggered my feelings of invisibility. You could say I never got over having that letter passed-over, literally being rejected by Ms. Kernberg.

Fast forward 40 years and my mother is downsizing in Brunswick, Ohio. She has sent me and my brothers a box of our childhood papers, things she had been saving all these years like badly-formed clay pots, report cards, crayon drawings, all the things. The box took me six months to go through due to being so uncomfortable acknowledging my little wiseacre self. (Worse than invisible, I was annoying.)

But the box was also a gift because inside it, (and through a struggle over my very idea of myself), I found comedy gold, an ability to see that little shit as an idiot, but also very, very funny. Which was gone a long way toward healing from all those childhood slights, from both others and also from myself. (I find if you can’t practice forgiving yourself, you are probably not very good at forgiving anybody else.)

But here’s the thing. Tucked inside all that childhood paraphernalia was that damn letter to Ms. Kernberg! Unsent and opened!! Not only had my mother not sent the letter, she ripped it open, read it and kept it for me to find 40 years later. Okay, probably unintentionally. Maybe she kept it because she thought it was ridiculous. This was maybe unintentional revenge. But knowing my mother…it was perfectly cold revenge.

Soon after finding it, I called her to congratulate her and we laughed about it. She had no memory at all of the letter. Maybe this is because there’s been so much other drama ever since.

I was not upset by my mother’s revenge. Only impressed at the time span of its execution. And my great hubris in thinking my mother would be a secretary to my anti-parent missives to strangers. Besides, I’ve had other revenge that has hurt me far worse. Was it just? I never thought so, but I just can’t seem to drum up the energy or enthusiasm to retaliate.

But beyond my energy deficits, since young adulthood (maybe even since childhood) I have been practicing compartmentalizing my feelings, separating them from my perceived antagonists so as to, yes, protect myself with boundaries but also to keep my feelings honored and valued, separated from the drama of the other person, all in order to allow my feelings to keep-on-keepin’-on…because they are a gift. Your feelings are a gift. Some people never get them. In their whole lives. And they’re desperate for them. So if you can separate your feelings for someone apart from what you think they may have done to hurt you, then you won’t lose everything.

I don’t do it perfectly, of course, which is why it takes practice. Like everyone else, first I have to calm down.

Which brings us back to art and writing, which is a great space to practice this compartmentalizing. Practicing art, I would argue, is better than revenge, better for your own soul. And probably more fruitful and healing besides, that which gives and receives, instead of more and more and more suffering, the mastery of grace.

Going through the covers of Dynamite Magazine this week, I discovered some interesting things:

: Very popular with kids, he was on a lot of Dynamite covers

: Lovely cover

: We were very invested in the love life of Fonzie

: Must-see TV

: Can you believe we said things like this back then?

: Back when someone famous had my name

: Peak Travolta IMHO

: Well, look at this

: Another lovely cover

: I should send this to my friend in San Diego. Found out recently this was her teen crush.

: Awww!

: Never saw this as a subscriber; spent about 15 years looking for it.

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/

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.

What Is Poetry: Is a Poem a Container?

March 19, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn and Face the Strange Changes

February 20, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel the same way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book I Can’t Read

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

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

Black History Month Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 12, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry

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

Is anything “largely” interior?

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

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

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

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

Where do we end and the rest of it begin?

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

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

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

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

Cher v. Poetry

November 22, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry

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

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

Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the poem:

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

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

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

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

October 11, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry

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

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

Impulsively, conceptually, though, there may be similarities.

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

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

On a Clear Day You Can See Jupiter

Mary McCray

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

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

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

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

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

More conversation between O’Hara and his painters: