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Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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Online Poetry (Books v. Bytes)

October 4, 2016 / / 0 Comments

EpoetrySo I finally finished my year-long dive into open online poetry classes.

The HarvardX Poetry in America classes were an amazing survey of U.S. poetry history. The series was so generous is scope: a variety of videos, talks and locations, ways to read difficult poems, links to the poems and they even tried to build a tool that allowed you to do explication exercises online. Unfortunately this tool never worked with an iPad. And who wants to watch poetry videos sitting upright? Not me.

The Poetry of Early New England class was about the Puritan poets mostly. I worried, from my college lit experiences, that this would be a very dry experience. But I really enjoyed Elisa New's perspectives on this group, their biases and challenges.

Nature and Nation, 1700-1850 covers poets before and after the Revolutionary War, nation building and identity forming, including Emerson and other transcendentalists, the fireside poets and Edgar Allan Poe.

The Walt Whitman class was the first one I took on the EdX platform. While I was commuting to ICANN in Los Angeles back in 1999 I had already taken the CD class from Modern Scholar on Whitman and this really helped me break into his poems for the first time. But the HarvardX class approached the subject from different angles.

I followed that with the Emily Dickinson class. The only other ED instruction I've ever had was from the ModPo MOOC that got me started on this whole crazy, online poetry journey. I thought Elisa New's instruction was a bit more accessible than Al Filreis. It seems like a personality issue. Filreis' classes are very exciting but I learned more from the straight-shooting Professor New.

The Civil War and Its Aftermath. I was never able to take this class. It's been consistently closed.

Most of the classes were around 4 or 5 weeks, but the Modernism class was 7 weeks! Brutal! And this is the only class that competes directly with Al Filreis' ModPo MOOC but I would actually recommend taking them both. Filreis and New both choose different material to study and have different tactics for helping you get through some difficult stuff. Also, Harvard's class stops short of anything contemporary.

Click on some of those links and you'll see some of these classes are archived but closed. I could never figure out why some courses were closed even though they were archived already and some were open. Access seems hit and miss with the HarvardX classes.

After I finished the HarvardX stuff, I took the 6 week Davidson College class on Electronic Literature. And this class blew my freaking mind. I had to slow down the experience because my mind was smoking too much. I got headaches trying to wrap my head around this stuff. And before taking this class I had never considered having done any E-Lit myself; but then I remembered some of the pieces we did for Ape Culture, specifically our Choose Your Own Celebrity Adventures (1998-2002) and the Michael Jackson Fan Hatemail Generator we created in 2002.

The E-Lit class asks you to explore the idea of what a book or poem really is and how writers have always been design reading experiences. And what exactly happens when you change your reading platform. I collected some amazing links from Professor Mark Sample and this class. But it's no substitute for actually taking it, which I encourage you to do because it's currently open enrollment.

E-Lit Databases and Anthologies

Recommended Authors

I'm still working my way through some of these. Many require pesky plugins.

Poetry

Interactive Stories

  • The Baron, by Victor Gijsbers (2006) – we did a walk-through of this story in class and it was alarming in its effectiveness to take you somewhere you'd never thought you'd go. It's helpful to take the walk-throughs in the class to learn how to interact with these stories.

We also learned about Lit Bots

and Twines

Around this time I found a good related article from my marketing life, "User Memory Design: How To Design For Experiences That Last" and I keep wondering, should reading experiences be designed? Should memory be manipulated?

Are Books Dead?

Don't believe it. One of the most awesome aspects of the E-Lit course were the first few lectures on the technology of physical books. Some more book talk:

English Teacher Re-Titles Classic Poems As Clickbait In Last-Ditch Effort To Trick Students Into Learning

Why Do Teens Prefer Printed Books to eBooks?

The PEW demographic study of book readers.

Happy studying!

Poetry Card Week 3 (Spain and Italy)

October 4, 2016 / / 0 Comments

LorcaIf we're gonna get thru these damn cards we gotta hustle. I tried to step it up this week and do two cards. 

Life is no dream! Beware and beware and beware!
We tumble downstairs to eat the damp of the earth
or we climb to the snowy divide with the choir of dead dahlias.
But neither dream nor forgetfulness, is:
brute flesh is. Kisses that tether our mouths
in a mesh of raw veins.

Lovely. This is from “Unsleeping City” by Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), translated by Ben Belitt. Lorca is Andalusian (Southern Spain). The Poet in New York pieces, like this one, are from his year-long visit to New York City in 1929. It was his first time out of Spain and he wasn't so fond of it. The poems were published after his death. He is considered the most revered poet in Spain and he was murdered by fascists.

DanteHere's another card:

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

That's it. That's the full quote. It's from what is often referred to as "Dante's Inferno."  It's technically from “The Inferno” portion of The Divine Comedy by Italian poet Dante Allighieri (1265-1321), translated by John D. Sinclair.

Dante's life details are very sketchy but we do know he was forced into exile toward the end of his life due to pissing off Pope Boniface VIII.

Sheesh Boniface. By the way, Georgetown is also offering online classes on Dante's The Divine Comedy (in parts 1, 2 and 3).

Week three stats:

1 white French male
1 white American colonialist female
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Italian male
1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1800s poet
1 1900s poet

Problems of Translation: A Slate Lexicon Valley Podcast

September 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

AkLast year I convinced Monsieur Big Bang that we should be listening to Great Courses on the way into work. He wasn't keen on this nerdy idea but we got wrapped up in etymology classes, one of which lead us to the entertaining and informative Slate podcast called Lexicon Valley and we've been working through something like 99 podcast episodes that have been airing since 2012.

Last week, we came upon the 2015 "The Many Lives of Anna Karenina with Masha Gessen" episode which is a great, succinct outlining of the issues surrounding creating translations using Anna Karenina as an example, how different translators are making different word choices based on meaning and tone.

The official show blurb:

Last November saw the publication of two new translations—by Marian Schwartz with Yale University Press and Rosamund Bartlett with Oxford University Press—of Leo Tolstoy’s epic love story Anna Karenina. But why does a novel that already has at least six or seven English-language editions need yet another update? Journalist and author Masha Gessen discusses the difficulty of translating a literary masterpiece and argues the more the better.

You can access it online at Podtail or via iTunes.

Poetry Card Week 2

September 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

AnnebradstreetI'm still working through my deck of Poet's Corner cards that I found in my parent's house. Card number 2:

In silent night when rest I took,
For sorry near I did not look,
U waken’d was with thundering noise
And piteous shrieks of dreadfull voice.
That fearful sound of “Fire! And “Fire!”
Let no man know is my Desire.

This excerpt is from “Upon the Burning of Our House” (1666) by America's number one Puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672). This year I took a course in Puritain poetry from HarvardX. I took all their classes. More on that later. One thing I learned was that Puritan poets weren't only writing about their Puritan hangups. They weren't even all Puritan. But they all had a pretty tough time of it there in New England with disease, bad weather, angry indigenous Americans and those creepy, scary woods everywhere. Imagine showing a Puritan the Blair Witch movies. They would have lost their minds. Anyway, Bradstreet was the wife and daughter of two governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and her poems, the card says, were “steeped in ‘the Puritan darkness." She wrote 400 pages of poetry, (you go, girl!), and not all of them were “starkly religious.” She is "considered the first poet of consequence in the American colonies.”  Her poems show a “suppressed emotional life" and, sadly, only one of her books has survived (The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America), the one that was "published in London in 1650 and posthumously in Boston in 1678."

Week two stats:

1 white French male
1 white female American colonialist
1 1800s poet
1 1600s poet

More about the poetry cards.

Grumpy Poets Throughout History

September 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Grumpy-catJust like grumpy cats, some poets have been grousing about the dearth of good poetry for eons, as evidenced below:

In the summer 2016 issue of the poetry journal Rattle, there's an interview with Alan Fox:

Rattle: What impact has the Internet had on poetry?

Alan Fox: I think you’ll get very different answers from different poets…I just had a conversation with a poet I can’t name, who was very angry because they felt that the internet was flooded with lots of mediocre poetry. Now that anyone can put a badge on their shirt that says “poet” and communicate with other poets and have all this great access. The world, the media, the “readers” are overwhelmed with bad work, and thus can’t find or recognize where the “good” work is. That is a paranoia I don’t share. It’s an argument I’ve heard, over and over, that bad poetry somehow diminishes our joy and plight. That if the “bad” poets are allowed to publish, it destroys connoisseurship. I don’t see that to be the case. I think that every great artist, like every great art critic, will die ignorant of most of the good art of their time. That’s been true of virtually every generation. I mean, why else does it seem that half the work that ultimately “comes to define a generation” is discovered posthumously?”

Now I read that at the very same time I was reading the book Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry (1912-1922) by Ellen Williams (1977) while researching local Santa Fe poet Alice Corbin Henderson (who was the assistant editor during that time). From the book:

William Marion Reedy acknowledged a renaissance in writing Harriet Monroe on June 1, 1915, and remarked that he felt Poetry was responsible for it…Reedy visited the annual banquet of the Poetry Society of American in New York, and the sleekness and propriety of the assembled poets made him feel grubby…He felt irritated by the sheer volume of verse poured out: "Never before were there so many pleasant, well-phrased, melodious poems written as there are today, and at no other time has there been such a dearth of really distinguishable poetry.”

Alan Fox is right. This was the era of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, among others. Nothing distinguishable as it turns out.

  

Learn About Your State’s Art History

September 7, 2016 / / 0 Comments

BookOkay so New Mexico has a particularly incredible art history. But I'll bet every state in America (or province of the world) has an interesting art story, too.

While working on a novel about landscape, I decided to quit my sporadic library education on New Mexico art history and actually take a class here at CNM. I was on a quest to learn about the ways other artists describe the landscapes here.

Grabbing library books was great but taking a class can give you a more comprehensive overview and lead you to some art subjects you might not normally investigate. A broad history could even bring in international elements of the story, which my class did. Not only did we touch on prehistoric and modern Indian art but colonial and modern Hispanic art tracing its roots back to the Islamic Moors in Spain, as well as immigrant European influences.

So much was mind blowing in this class.

We watch a Hung Liu Video from a Kansas City museum, not this one but a similar one. In the video we learned:

  • About being both careful and careless at the same time.
  • That gravity can be a secret collaborator.
  • About using intuition with color.
  • And how a good brush stroke is such a satisfying thing, not least of all a physically recorded moment of your life.

You can see how some of these ideas might benefit a writer.

We also watched a video about making manuscripts by hand, an amazing video if you love books as objects.

PoemMy main focus in taking the class was to learn about modern New Mexico art, but I ended up really getting into colonial and territorial Spanish pieces and ended up doing my class paper on a tinsmith named Higinio V. Gonzales. I picked him because he was also a local poet and a local museum exhibited not only his tin pieces but one of his poems painted out as an object of art. Turns out he has an interesting poetic legacy in territorial New Mexico as well, having published poems about how the state should be named, poems about relationships and local Las Vegas, NM, politics, and one reminiscent and far predating in structure the Beach Boy's "California Girls."

His lifespan was also incredible in how he brushed against many iconic historic New Mexico figures. He was a teacher, an artist, a writer, and served in the military during the Civil War. To read more, visit:

AmI also veered off at one point reading about painter Agnes Martin, who left the art world and came to New Mexico to lead a monastic life of painting.  Agnes wrote poems, too, but I haven't been able to find very many of them.

In the class also fell in love with straw applique, colcha embroidery and bultos carvings (along with retablos and reredos paintings), all colonial Hispanic carved Catholic pieces made predominantly in New Mexico in the 17th century for homes and local missions. Coincidentally around this time I came across Dana Gioia’s poem about a bulto,“The Angel with the Broken Wing" which was published in Poetry magazine.

And you may think none of this ties back to landscape painting, which set me off on this class journey in the first place. But it does. All these pieces were devised locally in response to the landscape, the distance of the New Mexican community from either Spain, Mexico City or the United States and the shortage of gold, silver and other materials with which to create art objects. These forms wouldn't exist without the harshness of the landscape and its remoteness from civilization at the time.

Tin frame made from railroad delivered tin cans:

Frame2

Bultos (or Santos), Retablos, and Reredos (for Church altars):

  BultoRetablos Reredos

Conspicuous Poetry Consumption: Poem Cards

September 7, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Poet-cardsI was on vacation in Pennsylvania last month helping my parents clean out stuff. I found a bunch of books I loved as a kid and this stack of poetry-related cards, Poet’s Corner Knowledge Cards published by Pomegranate Publications. And you know I love conspicuous poetry products!

The Cards2front of the card is just mystery poetry text without attribution. This is the first one I pulled:

“It’s time. Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!
The land rots; we shall sail into the night;
if now the sky and sea are black as ink
our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.

Only when we drink poison are we well—
we want, this fire so burns our brain tissues,
to drown in the abyss—heaven or hell,
who cares? Through the unknown,
                we’ll find the new.”

The back of card shows the source of the quote, which is “The Voyage” from 1957, translated by Robert Lowell, followed by the name of the poet, Charles Baudelaire with his birth and death year and a thickly justified paragraph called a Life Sketch, which compares the ever expanding Les Fleurs du Mal with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But rather than poems of rejoice, Baudelaire's were poems of revulsion with life. The card also notes how Baudelaire is a great French literary figure who has served as a mentor to many modern poets.

So conceivably, you could learn about a new poet each day for 48 days. I'll go through the cards every few weeks here and we'll keep track of the demos.

Week one: White French Male, 1821-1867

Pomegranate Press has lots of cards for sale including some esoteric decks like Famous Animals and another called Canadian Literature and even a deck of One Letter Words (which could be useful for something I suppose): http://www.pomegranate.com/knowledgecards.html.

However, the poetry deck only seems to be available now on Amazon. 

 

The Cocktail of Poetry Memoirs

August 4, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Face TruthNever before have I read two memoirs that seemed to go so well together, two books that tell the same story with different voices and different perspectives.

The book Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy came out in 1994. As a young girl, poet Lucy Grealy had a large portion of her jaw removed due to Ewing’s sarcoma. Her autobiography covers her childhood hardships, college experiences as Sarah Lawrence College, her beginnings as a poet and her time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she lived with poet Ann Patchett. Grealy's book experienced great success in the 1990s. Unfortunately, various reconstructive surgeries led to addictions which led to Grealy's death by overdose in 2002.

The book Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett came out in 2004, two years after Grealy's death, and looks at the challenges and qualities of their friendship from Patchett's point of view.

Read the Grealy book first, then dive into Patchett's take. Or for more information on how the two books play together, read a review by Joyce Carol Oats from The New York Times Review of Books.

 

Thinking About Starting a Poetry Podcast?

August 4, 2016 / / 0 Comments

PodcastIt seems so tempting, right?

Every time I encounter a cool do-it-yourself project someone else has done, I feel an almost irresistible urge to want to do my own version of that project. Take for example the board game Monsieur Big Bang game me for my birthday last week, The Collector Game. It was created by a hobby board-game maker using the tool BoardGameDesign.com. More fun than the actual game is the idea of designing my own game! All my trivial hobbies could be brought to bear on the designs for various board games!

Total nerd-out!

I’m also taking an online Electronic Literature class and every example sparks the same bubble-cluster of ideas for programmed lit pieces. The list of things I want to try has gotten a bit overwhelming, frankly, especially for potentially time-consuming projects.

Podcast envy is yet another consuming type of endeavor that always sounds so appealing. Like, wouldn't it be lots of fun to start a restaurant?

For the last few years I’ve been dipping my toes into the podcast subscription world and I have a library of political podcasts, poetry podcasts, the Serial podcast was infamous last year and I too was engrossed in that first crime solving season. Lexicon Valley is also a favorite word-nerd podcast that has been very educational and entertaining.

I even finished a brief how-to-podcast class this summer from Treehouse and I learned Podcasts are not impossibly hard to produce. Theoretically anyone can do it. Technically I could do it. But the big challenge about producing a podcast isn’t the technological barriers, it’s the mental ones. It's hugely taxing and overwhelming to produce the content week after week, month after month. Planning, editing and promoting podcasts takes more time than you’d imagine, which is why the majority of podcasts don’t last longer than three months!

But here are some tips from the class if you'd still like to try launching a poetry podcast:

  1. Plan out your topics and guests three to six months (maybe even a year if this is feasible) in advance.
  2. Invest in affordable yet professional equipment. You don’t have to be a corporate entertainment company to sound great. And a great sounding conversation is addictive. Note how deliciously good NPR shows sound.
  3. Learn how to edit audio files. A lot of mistakes can be corrected with editing.
  4. Assign mandatory podcast work hours for each week so you don't fall behind and give up.
  5. Test your recording with your guest at the start of each session: check sound levels, check for background noises. Listeners will bail out of a podcast that has low or difficult sound.

I was trying to access The Missouri Review's Soundbooth podcast a few weeks ago. All the latest episodes are not dowloading to my iphone for some reason and when I opened an older episode from 2015, the sound of the guest was so low and hard to hear I gave up in less than two minutes.

Most people listen to podcasts while they're multitasking: driving, walking, cooking, getting ready in the morning. A good, loud sound recording is the bare minimum.

You can then promote your podcasts on your website, iTunes or SoundCloud.

Lifehacker can tell you step-by-step how to start your own Podcast show.  

Cory Booker Quotes Maya Angelou Last Night at DNC

July 26, 2016 / / 0 Comments

BookerClosing his rousing Democratic National Convention speech last night, Cory Booker very movingly quoted the Maya Angelou poem "Still I Rise." Here is the poem in full.

 

 

 

 

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

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