Category: Poetry Technology (Page 3 of 9)

52 Haiku, Week 32

October 3, 2019 / Big Bang Poetry

This week I dug out tree wells. A tree guy came over (he's also a painter and editor of a lit mag) and helped look at all the trees in the yard. He told us how dire things are for ABQ trees due to climate change, how the bugs are gaining ground and killing all the trees. All of them!

The Prompt: Where You Are

This week's prompt:

"Wherever you are is the place you need to be."
– Various people, source unknown

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing:

When all the world lies
across the glittering sea,
sparrows in the tree

The Reflection

Daunting task dealing with climate issues, ecology (and relationships). But you have to start where you are and not regret being somewhere else.

Now it's your turn.

My First Twitter Poem & Other E-Lit Projects

May 3, 2019 / Big Bang Poetry

The Digital Lit Class

I took a class last semester called Digital Storytelling. I've been interested and blogging about Electronic Lit for a few years now since I took that MOOC at Davidson College.

For the class we were asked to set up a blog and so I created one to review Electric Lit, https://digital-lit-reviews.blogspot.com that tracked my progress in the class. I was able to read a few new pieces that I really liked, such as:

Witch Court Reporter by poet Richard Osmond. This is a Twitter feed that reposts news items from old European witch trials. The process of remediation (taking content from one media into another) really changes the meaning of the little blurbs.
The Dionaea House by Eric Heisserer. This is a great haunted house story told through blogs and comment boards. You can see how the chaos of all the voices on all the blogs assembles the story.
The Sick Land, a science fiction horror story by Jon Hill, also told through a single blog. Still good for the use of one blog to present a story.
https://twitter.com/oscarwilde – Oscar Wilde on Twitter. Another example of re-mediating Wilde's quotes for Twitter. This inspired the project I eventually did.

The List

I've updated my master reading list: https://www.marymccray.com/elit-reading-list.html

The Podcast

My teacher and I also did a Podcast together about creating Digital Lit, thinking maybe we'd start a real serial podcast about writing.

About My Twitter Poem

So then we were asked to create our own project. I spent weeks working on mine. I blogged about the whole process in my class blog.

You can read about the project planning of it here: https://digital-lit-reviews.blogspot.com/2019/04/project-planning-twitter-poem.html

I finished the poem over a month ago and I noticed Twitter has already deleted some of the posts from my TrollGuy character, even though the insults were just nonsensical. Luckily I archived it in full already. But what a bummer.

The Jist of It: This is a collage poem about media history, trolling culture and pundit's soft-alarm-isms. Trolling is mostly between the authors William Blake, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane, an idea seeded in my head from a fellow student's tweet quoted from the fake Oscar Wilde site: https://twitter.com/oscarwilde. That blew my mind and I created accounts for the four dead poets. It wasn't easy in the post-Trump land of Twitter. Read more about that in the project planning link above.

Ways to Read It

There are various ways to approach digital lit pieces:

1. Interactively on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BellsTroll

Pros: You can play all the fun videos, animated gifs, click on the links and discover the hidden comment threads.

Cons: You might miss the hidden comment threads and all that multimedia in your haste to read it. Clues for hidden conversations are under these symbols at the bottom of each tweet:

Sometimes there are many more comments than one. Also, click anything that says “more replies.”

2. The archived, static version on my website: https://www.marymccray.com/bell-trolls.html

Pros: You won't miss any of the comment threads or profiles. And you'll see the comments Twitter has removed already.

Cons: You will miss all the fun videos and links. Boo!

3. The most comprehensive way would be to read the static poem (https://www.marymccray.com/bell-trolls.html) and then try to find the interactions in the live version (https://twitter.com/BellsTroll).

Poems in Pop Culture: More Movies About Writers

April 10, 2019 / Big Bang Poetry

Here's a new batch of movies about writers I've previewed for Big Bang Poetry.

Colette (2018)

This is a movie about France's most celebrated writer, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, and how she climbs out from under her famous Claudine books which appeared under the pseudonym of her husband. This might remind you of the recent movie Big Eyes about Margaret and Walter Keane and a similar husband's swindle on his wife's intellectual capital, but in this case we're talking about a bigger allegorical story of female emancipation in writing, sex and self-sufficiency. The movie stars Keira Knightley and Dominic West as the power-writing couple and also includes Eleanor Tomlinson playing a Southern-speaking American. The movie is, in many ways, about sexual exploration and there are sex scenes between West and Tomlinson, Knightly and Tomlinson and Knightly and Denise Gough who plays Colette's longtime lover Mathilde de Morny.

But there's also plenty of writing and watching Colette struggling with writing, being forced to write, thinking over what she'll write, editing her writing with the help of her husband who taught her everything he knew. Like Cher claiming there would be no Cher without Sonny, Colette appreciated the support her husband provided as long as she could, until he got greedy. The movie's main focus is on the Claudine years and Colette's time as a stage performer. You also see how these writers dealt with the test of massive fame and commodification, how writing collaborations worked for them. The movie also goes into marketing and the legalities of publishing at the time.

I wish the movie (already two hours) could have addressed her later years, when most of her solo pieces were composed and her fame was at its peak, if only to see reference to one of my biggest guilty pleasures, Gigi.

Tom and Viv (1994)

Tom and Viv is about another husband and wife collaboration team with Willen Defoe as the poet T. S. Eliot and Miranda Richardson starring his wife Vivienne. Unfortunately this movie is the dullest of the three. The young Willem does an excellent job playing the dull-sack Elliot, down to his droning boringness and weary incantations and Richardson does the best she can with the material of a stereotypical angry madwoman. But the movie is too long (again, two hours) and the the payoff is too little. Besides that, whole swaths of history were ignored completely. It's acknowledged that Vivienne helped Eliot write "The Waste Land" but the entire character of Ezra Pound was written out (gone!) to instead imply a strong writing relationship with Bertrand Russel.

And I just read a book about the subject, the literary year of 1922 when "The Waste Land" was written. The books, The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein, is a mini-biography of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, all struggling with the recent publications of Proust in English and James Joyce's Ulysses. The book goes into detail about Ezra Pound's contributions to Eliot's poem (Eliot himself confirmed it) and so although Ezra Pound is an unsavory character seen retrospectively, you can't erase him from the T.S. Eliot story.

You also can't go into detail about the health issues and mental problems of Vivenne (she was diagnosed with "moral insanity" but was was most likely bipolar) and completely not address the mental breakdowns and recurring health issues of Tom Eliot. What the hell? Not even mentioned that it was at a mental health facility where Eliot finished the bulk of "The Waste Land" or that he suffered from recurring depression after that. There's references to Tom's anglophila, his birthplace St. Louis, and scenes of him writing at a typewriter, but not that many. Here's a shot of the two collaborating over "The Waste Land."

There is one funny line where Vivienne says, "Imagine Tom's poetry as a smashed vase" in an uncomfortable scene where Vivenne tries to explain Tom's poem to her parents. Haven't we all been there? There's another scene where Tom and Viv are proofing the typesetting for "The Waste Land" and they slightly touch on Eliot's theory that poetry should be an escape from emotion not an expression of emotion.

At the end of the movie Monsieur Big Bang expressed fatigue with seeing smart women depicted as mad women. I think this is actually one of the movie's points (as we end up feeling more sympathy to the rattled Vivienne than we do the emotionally impotent Eliot) but the movie takes too long to get to that end and withholds two much evidence that would have balanced out their relationship.

The Broken Tower (2011)

A good counterpoint to Tom and Viv is this James Franco movie. Franco gets a lot of crap for his affectations around poetry but he seems to know what he's doing. He both directs and stars in this movie about the life of Hart Crane, who is often seen as America's counterpoint to T.S. Eliot. Where Eliot saw modernity as profoundly disturbing, Crane found it inspiring. They both wrote very dense, difficult poems. But Franco takes the fragmentary nature of Crane's poems and tries to map them to an experimental film of fragments. He works with word associations in the various poems and tries similar techniques in this black and white film. It's not a comprehensive biography if that's what you're looking for; it's more alluding to his life story with chaotic camerawork and impressions of scenes, plenty of life gaps and moments of introspection.

In fact, Crane is never seen writing so much as thinking about writing, as the cover suggests. Or talking about writing as this memorable scene below conveys, where Crane tells a friend he wants to get "jazz and buildings into poetry," to "Whitmanize T.S. Eliot." And it's awesome to think of the convergence of those three poets: Crane, Eliot and Whitman.

The movie also shows Crane's strained relationship with his father, a wealthy candy-maker and his struggles for money, including attempts to work a desk job.

We liked the movie so much we watched the DVD extras where Franco interviews Hart Crane scholars to talk about ways to make the poems come alive in film, including the cognitive leaps.

More Adventures in E Lit

October 25, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry

So last May I took a four week, online class called Reading Literature in the Digital Age on the Future Learn platform. It was taught by Philipp Schweighauser at the University of Basel. It was great, except that Schweighauser was doing a Simon Schama impersonation in every video.

The class was about different reading strategies people employ when reading academically or surfing on the web or in social settings. I learned more about deep reading, distant reading and hyper reading. And I’m a practitioner of all of it, for better or worse.

In fact, I've been noticing reading trends particularly around work groups for almost 30 years. When I started working in offices, desktop computers were rare and windows wasn’t even widely available yet. This was before email and the end of paper memorandums delivered into in-boxes actually sitting on corners of desks. I remember hand delivering stacks of memos.

My job now depends on a light understanding of a plethora of web and project management tools. And instead of seeing an increase in customer service with CRMs, better decision making with data-gathering tools, or quicker decision making with mobile access, I've seen a steady decline in productivity, efficiency and customer service and a steady increase in decision paralysis as each year goes by.

This is primarily because tools (and the frantic drive to develop the next hip one) have become a distraction from the work itself and, more specifically, a distraction from deep thinking and solving problems. We are now so pressed for time due to these "time-saving" tools that we’re forced into a reading survivor mode: skimming, winging-it, the bullshitting that has become prevalent in offices everywhere, the bullshitting that signals immediately: I haven't read it. Add to that the attention deficit introduced when spreading our eyeballs over various online media sites and indulging in fun online things which require even more skim-reading. We're now inundated with noise and a barge of "you should read this."

And it’s causing already bureaucratic organizations to crack from the lack of deep consideration over real business problems. Hyper-reading seems to me both the cause and the symptom of our online agonies. Here's an interview with Schweighauser about the class.

XKCD published this cartoon last year about the Digital Resource Lifespan:

Visit the hosted cartoon at https://xkcd.com/1909/ and roll over the graphic for some funny.

I keep coming back to this graphic and sending it around because it's all about intellectual perishability. The Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, once warned us that decades of intellectual property would someday perish because it's stuck on outmoded formats. Electronic Lit is particularly vulnerable and perishable.

The quote above says it all: “It’s unsettling to realize how quickly digital resources can disappear without ongoing work to maintain them.”

Digital is more labor intensive and perishable than books are for this very reason. And as corporations constantly ask us to switch to new media, we spend money re-buying the same things we already have. And why? As a cross-over example from my other blog interest in Cher, one early Cher album from 1965 has since possibly seen six formats: mono lp, stereo lp, 8-track tape, cassette tape, compact disc and mp3. I have a box of my mother's old 78-records but I can't play them. I have many odd boxes of various types of computer storage systems: 8-inch floppy discs, 3 1/2-inch floppy discs, backup zip cartridges, writable CDs, SD cards, external hard drives, memory sticks. I even have some of my mother's recipes printed on the back of old fortran punch cards my Dad used to bring home from work. Read about the history of removable computer storage.

I also find it interesting that retail stores are now finding “the digital space so crowded” they’re going back to printed catalogs.

It's good we're not killing trees anymore, no doubt. But how to invent a permanent device that beats it for durability; it's hard.

eLit, Marie Osmond, Rupert Holmes and Barry Manilow

March 22, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry

So there’s the quiet, formal, contemplative haiku and then there’s the rambunctious, genre-bending, boundary-pushing area of experimental and eLit poetry. On experimental poetries, I found some interesting things:

Monsieur Big Bang recently sent me this link to Marie Osmond from the show Ripley’s Believe it or Not. She’s in a yellow robe doing a dramatic reading of Dada poems, specifically reading Hugo Ball’s sound poem “Karawane.” All I can say is “Wow Marie, we hardly knew ye.”

My friend Maryanne sent me this link to a whole carousel of poetry readings on The New York Times “Read T a Poem” page. It’s got a a very clunky user interface. Here’s another list that includes some, but not all the readers, which include Amy Adams, Brian Hutchison, Jim Parsons, Andrew Rannells, Matt Bomer, Michael Benjamin Washington, Lauren Ridloff, Joe Mantello, Charlie Carver and more.

I have yet to get Dreaming Method’s last project running on any of my computers but they’ve just announced a new eLit project called Thanner Kuhai:

“A metaphorical and poetic journey about finding hope against all odds, Thanner Kuhai transports the reader/player into an immersive cave environment where language becomes intertwined with natural surfaces in a glimmering subterranean world. Navigate a labyrinthine network of flooded tunnels and passageways teeming with strange life and shadows of words. Submerge deeper. Or seek escape to the surface.”

And I know I’ve been insisting here that lyrics and poetry have more in common than not, (since Bob-Dylan-Nobel-Prize-gate last year), and I recently had a very unfortunate hard drive accident, (coupled with a miraculous file recovery), that scared me into backing up all my old files. As I recreate a lot of them into newer formats, I’m finding that (a) I had no idea how lame my early ideas were and (b) I had no idea how appallingly shrill and cocky I sounded in old college essays. It’s been painful. I now wonder if this hard drive accident was the universe kindly trying to delete my old self on my behalf.

And lo and behold, I see I felt the same way about what was and was not poetry back when I was in graduate school at Sarah Lawrence. In one paper, our professor, poet David Rivard, asked us to write about our favorite poems and the majority of mine were not poems. They were a hodge-podge of poems, song lyrics and found quotes.

I even had this to say before I launched into my list:

“Since we have consistently failed in poetry to at least come up with a working definition of what it is, no one’s going to tell me what it isn’t.”

Holy crap I was smugly confident! That was a real circle snap. And the whole essay is like that. Painful.

That said, I’m happy to see I included Joni Mitchell’s “Last Time I Saw Richard” (which I once memorized and would read aloud as a poem) and I often think about this prose poem I made from a Grary Shandling joke:

And honestly,
that’s a problem that’s plagued me
throughout my life.
In fact,
I did not know that there was a picture
on the other side
of the drive-in screen.
I thought all the cars were wrong
who were on the other side.
It was a very philosophical approach.
I thought they were wrong,
I was so convinced of it.
And I never went around to look.

And then there was the Rupert Holmes song “Studio Musician” on the list, a song I once loved from Barry Manilow’s 1977 live album. Barry Manilow even adds his jingle for State Farm at the end of it, reminding us he was a studio musician of sorts, a jingle writer.

All the discomfort of encountering my less-than-charming former self was somewhat alleviated by being reminded of this very lovely thing.

Conspicuous Consumption Poetry

March 22, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry

For Christmas I got a subscription to Birchbox, which is basically a monthly package of of beauty product samples for items you otherwise couldn't afford. I get overly excited when the box comes. I'm even charmed by the boxes themselves.

Anyway, one of the products that came this month had a poem printed on it. It’s a limp plimper, (don’t ask me; I just blindly use this stuff), and the packaging contains a haiku:

Sink some ships with those
Dangerously plumped up lips
Can you say luscious?

It’s a pretty rickety haiku with questionable punctuation but maintains a perfectly good syllable count.

It’s also a haiku that worries me about its possible dangers…with the actual word danger in it! So this would make it both a poem and marketing fail.

Your Education in the History of American Poetry

February 7, 2018 / Big Bang Poetry

What a year so far. I came back online January 2nd to a tonnage of things to finish. ArtBrawl is in full swing, the Difficult Book Club is still kickin' it. Work has been crazy busy at CNM. Family trips are happening. I'm already exhausted in month two.

In fact, the group I started last year, ArtBrawl, has grown by a few folks and last year we designed a poster that we unveiled at our local Women’s March last month. The posters are free to download in many sizes in red or blue. You can visit artbrawl.org to snag some!

What a cool flag shelf I found today (see above) from the site rebloggy while looking for an image about American poetry. The quote on the page says, "(To all my American book friends) Let's all take a minute to appreciate that we live in a country where we have the freedom to read whatever we want. Because not everybody gets to do that." Awesome image and very well said.

If one of your resolutions this year is to be more informed about American poetry history, (or even political poetry history), you can take the whole history online for free. How awesome is that? And from good universities, too. Over the last three years I’ve taken as many MOOCs, or massive open online classes, as I could find, (no international poetry classes yet but stay tuned). I’ve come up with the following itinerary for an imaginary degree in American Poetry History from these online sources. And it’s kind of like an American history degree, too…as told with poetry.

The first thing you need to do is find out when the classes are open. Some are archived and self-paced, some you take with cohorts, and some open sporadically. Some even offer "official" certificates. I’m not sure what those are worth; some certificates are free and some want chump change and I honestly can't think of an academic market where they'd be valuable in. (EdX charges $99 for certificate and Coursera charges $49). I took them all for free.

In-progress classes can be stressful with due dates and discussions in forums with other people. Archived ones are usually just watching the videos and reading poems on your own time. On the other hand, sometimes the archives have fallen into disrepair and the videos and links are broken. But just a few broken things here or there. In any case, you’re never required to do more than you want, which in some cases could just be listening to all the lectures and reading poems.

Courses are offered on various learning platforms:

EdX: Harvard (https://courses.edx.org) – This is the best platform and they offer an annotation tool, (which doesn’t work on iPads), class videos, field trip videos, A-list guests like famous artists, former presidents and senators, discussion boards if the course is in-progress. It’s hit or miss when you can get into the archived classes, but keep trying. They’re worth it.

University of Pennsylvania (https://www.coursera.org/) – Offers the most famous poetry MOOC with Al Filreis and provides videos of his class sessions with very bright, young students, audio lectures, forum discussions and required papers. The class is not archived but its offered every September.

University of IL (https://www.coursera.org/) – This school offers quizzes and discussions in forums, (but they forums are clunky and in my session nobody participated). The videos are not quite lectures but professors reading from academic papers. It sounds dry (and it is) but it’s quality stuff.

EdX: Davidson (https://courses.edx.org) —This was the most interactive platform, with videos and links to online content, interactive feedback and data gathering where you’re part of the study!

I went through college and never had such good training on American poetry history. Usually, my classes as University of Missouri focused on smaller surveys of American fiction or the British Romantic poets and that was it for poetry. Thousands of students are attending these MOOCs so I wonder why colleges don’t offer similar courses for students who are obviously interested in them.

Keep in mind these courses are, for archived classes, self-paced so the weeks mentioned below are simply guides, how the professors organized the classes. You can take double the time or half the time if you want.

The Imaginary Degree in American Poetry History

The Poetry of New England (Colonial poetry)
Covers the influence of religion, the wilderness, and other concerns of Puritans.
Harvard via EdX (4 weeks)
Nature and Nation – Nation Building
Covers Emerson, Poe, The Fireside poets, and the struggle around nationhood, with controversy between intellectual British dependence versus American independence.
Harvard via EdX (5 weeks)
Civil War Poetry
Harvard via EdX (3 weeks)
Walt Whitman
Harvard via EdX (3 weeks)
Emily Dickinson
Harvard via EdX (4 weeks)
Modern Poetry (The Modernists, 20th Century)
This course covers the geographical landscape of modernism, featuring New York City, London, and Chicago and focusing on how science and technology began to be an influence; an overview of the canon. A good introduction.
Harvard via EdX (8 weeks)
ModPo (Modern and Contemporary Poetry)
Time this one for completing September-December. This is a challenging and mind-bending course, non-lecture style. Students do some lifting here. There’s also no archived vision. It’s truly a massive and international group of students. And this course traces how modernism has led to the contemporary era.
University of Pennsylvania via Coursera (10 weeks)
Modern American Poetry
This amazing course upends the modernist canon, exploring early feminist and political poets, American Indian, Asian and Harlem Renaissance poets who were pushed aside by the apolitical, white male canon. You also delve into 1930s social poets and even neglected “canon” types like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane. Also, lots of academic voices represented. On the downside, it was challenging to concentrate on teachers literally droning through their academic papers. It was disappointing that University of Illinois thought an academic essay equals an online class. They could have easily posted links to the papers as homework. Also, forum comments depended on having copies of the poems to reference providing zero links to these poems and you never knew if the poems you found online were accurate versions. Imagine a poetry lit class with no poems? You spend a good few hours tracking down the poems referenced. All that said, this class was still worth it. It opened my eyes to whole forgotten eras and poets.
University of Illinois via Coursera (4 weeks)
At this point you may be asking yourself, why would I take three modernist poetry classes? Because the modernists are still a massive major influence on what poets are doing today and it was a massive break from the traditions that preceded it. It’s fascinating to see how each school tries to conceptualize the 20thy century of poetry. You might want to spread out these modernist classes. You could do #6 before #1 like I did and then #7 and 8 interspersed elsewhere.
Electronic Literature
You should finish with this course, a look at the possible future of literature, a truly contemporary set of works. The teacher is very charismatic and helps make electronic poetry very accessible and inspiring.
Davidson College via EdX (6 weeks)

Apparently University of Illinois has a class coming in Contemporary poetry. Stay tuned for that. I’m also signed up for “Reading Literature in the Digital Age” this spring with the University of Basel in Switzerland (6 weeks).

You may come across some annoying technical issues with these platforms. Coursera crashed twice on my iPad. My Udemy classes crash a lot too. Often the transcripts don’t match the video, which is tragic for poetry discussions with words like iambic and trochee. Nobody seems to proof them or take into consideration accessibility issues. At University of Illinois, this was stupefying since all the lectures were basically teachers reading essays. They could have simply uploaded their essays as video transcript text. In some cases with U of I, the assignment pages were duplicated incorrectly and there was no way to alert anybody.

Just remember, these are free classes but they’re also challenging. Only a true poetry nerd will enjoy them.

The Machine That Writes Haiku

November 29, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry

This year in the New York Times Book Review I read about a book that combines my interests in haiku and electronic poetry. It's called Comes the Fiery Night by David H. Cope. The author compiled 2,000 haiku (yes, two thousand), some of which were written by human haiku masters, (Issa, Basho, Buson), and some which were composed by a machine.

The challenge, according to Cope, was to figure out which haiku had meaning and which were "worth while." In the preface, he directed you to look for humor, pith, happiness, sadness, and history. He also warned you that his computer made typographical mistakes.

So I looked for all that and also decided to look for connective tissue between the three lines, an overarching story or lesson across three lines (preferable a Buddhist or Zen lesson), cohesion in grammar, tenses, repetition or sense, what might seem too abstract for ancient haiku writers, indefinite pronouns, and common subjects of haiku (like nature). I felt I had a pretty strong rubric going for me. Although some days of reading were easier than others, I must say I felt pretty confident that I could track the real McCoys.

I went the extra electronic step and purchased the book for my Kindle. This made the process extra challenging because Cope's eBook kept crashing my Kindle after poem 200. So I stopped after getting 500 done and emailed the author with my guesses. Cope won't give you the exact answers, but he will tell you how many you got right or wrong.

His response:

"Of the 221 identifications of the sources as human you got 21 correct. Given you only used 500 that's pretty good even though to you it might look very small. It's tough to win this game."

I got 21 out of 221 right! Can you hear my heart breaking? That's a pretty intense brain whopping I just got from a machine. If it's any consolation, the proceeds of the book go to Greenpeace, saving the environment and not poetry machines.

More about David Cope.

Poetry on the Street

November 29, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry

My boss at CNM went to Washington state this summer and came back with some great poetry stories. She met two street vendor poets with portable typewriters. You paid them what you wanted to. Then you gave them a subject prompt. You could wait or come back in ten minutes and you would get a one-of-a-kind new poem along with a dramatic reading. She picked the subject of “native plants.” This was the poem she received:

My boss also happened upon a flower sculpture in Spokane that you can interact with and receive a poem from a database. It was called the Hello Flower Project.

In Albuquerque and Santa Fe, old cigarette machines have been converted into five-dollar art machines. My desk is full of these $5 art objects. Below is a picture of my favorite two pieces together:

But I also found evidence of poetry vending machines made from old cigarette machines! Has anyone seen one of these in Vancouver or Philadelphia or in your town? If so, please send me a vending poem! I will return the favor with something versical and lamented!

In other interesting poetry news…

– A writer is creating found poems from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I hope this isn’t Plan B for when actually reading the book seems too hard.

– The Mall of America in Minnesota has a poet in residence named Brian Sonia-Wallace.

– Lisa Ann Markuson is writing haikus for all the U.S. Senators (#PoemsForSenators). To read them visit Twitter.

– And My Poetic Side has produced "Behind Bars: 61 Poets Who Went To Jail."

Sometimes It’s Poetry, Sometimes It’s Not

October 12, 2017 / Big Bang Poetry

And then it sort of is.

Many, many years ago my parents gave me a notebook that had been my grandfather’s. It was full of pages of handwritten verses. My parents assumed these were poems and since I liked poetry, (and my brothers got the horse saddles and cowboy hats), they gave me the notebook. The notebook sat in a box for a decade or so before I decided to transcribe the verses. As I was typing them out, it occurred to me they might not be poems, or original poems anyway. My grandfather started his career as a forest ranger at Jicarilla, an Apache Indian reservation in northern New Mexico. He spent a lot of time on a horse out in the middle of nowhere. He had left his girlfriend, my grandmother, back in Roy, New Mexico. He had no cellphone, transistor radio or 78-record turntable to pass the time. I figured he was probably kind of stir crazy and writing down some poems or songs he liked to pass the time.

This was 1926.

So I Googled a line or two. And bingo: they were all old songs (and a few odd pages from a Spanish class). I was able to purchase all the recordings from iTunes, all but one song which apparently hasn’t been recorded often, if at all. I picked either artists my grandfather might have known or, failing to find that, versions I liked. When I couldn’t decide, I added both versions. Then I sorted them into a mix I called the Burt Ladd Mix 1926 (or BLadd Mix) and gave it to my father for Father’s Day present in 2015.

I thought it would make a good playlist on YouTube and I’ve finally put it up. Some of the mariachi songs aren't the same versions I found on iTunes. Some of these old cowboy and mariachi songs are pretty famous, others more obscure. He probably became familiar with them from local traveling bands (Bob Wills started out in Roy, New Mexico) and from local parties and dances.

The play list.

Other poetry projects and experiments on my YT channel.