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Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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Frustrations of Genres / Poetry News

May 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

WhyThe Problem Children of Poetry

I'm in kind of void of postings because I'm on the cusp of a review of New Mexico poetry anthologies, a new new poll and a new list. None of those are ready yet so I suppose this is a good time to talk about the frustration of genres.

My first book of poems struggled for over 20 years to find publication. Although I would read the poems in workshops and at conferences and receive unbelievably positive feedback, something was wrong.

I say that because the level of positive response only confused me in light of the fact that I couldn't get this book any traction. A former editor of Graywolf Press even raved to my face about the poems at a Colrain conference eons ago. But contests and publishers were not interested. Twenty years of contest fees add up to that fact.

Was it the way I read them? I suck at readings so that definitely was not the case.

Meanwhile, a few years ago Graywolf itself published a book of science poems by Tracy K. Smith called Life on Mars, a book that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. My book was titled almost the same thing in one of its incarnations. In fact my 1997 thesis at Sarah Lawrence might be named something like that.

But my poems are different thank Smiths, our Mars subject aside. My poems are about the idea of U.S. manifest destiny as it pertains to our dream of colonizing Mars. Sounds like science fiction doesn't it and what literary publisher would like to publish anything slightly tainted with the stamp of SciFi. Answer: none.

Science fiction publishers didn’t appreciate the book either. Because it wasn't science fiction.

Thank God, technology in my lifetime has allowed me to pull my own project to fruition (self-publish) and move on with my life.

I'm only reminded of all this because last week USA Today published a story about how Elon Musk plans Seattle office for Mars colonization.  The poems in Why Photographer’s Commit  Suicide are based on Michael Collins’ book about similar plans to colonize Mars.

I now worry that my second book will suffer the same tragic fate. It’s another mashup book only this time its a mashup of Buddhism and cowboy stories.  Cowboy stories. Oh dear. Sounds like cowboy poetry. Another literary poetry problem child. Such a throwback. Although they're not cowboy poems!

WfPoetry in the News

Philip Levine who explored the working lives of American people. (The Independent)

Should the poet laureate have to write about the royal birth? (The Guardian)

William Faulkner Makes Us Wonder: What's So Great About Poetry, Anyhow? (NPR)

Palm Tree and the Poetry of M.S. Merwin (The New Yorker)

Yeats’ 150th Birthday Parties (The Guardian)

British punk poet Dr. John Cooper Clarke hits U.S. at last (SF Examiner)

Arthur Sze Finalist for Pulitzer Prize (Albuquerque Journal)

Documents confirm fascists murdered Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (World Socialist Web Site)

From the archive, 27 April 1915: Editorial: A Poet’s Death; The death of Rupert Brooke leaves us with a miserable sense of waste and futility, yet it is impossible to withhold even the most precious personalities (The Guardian)

Alissa Quart, The Money Poet (The New Yorker)

    

Poetry in O, The Star, NPR

April 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

OAmerican Poets magazine has a Walt Whitman essay by Mark Doty and in their annual report, they discuss a poetry reading they hosted recently called Poetry and the Creative Mind which they say tracks the influence of poetry on readers from other disciplines. I hope we get a report on that someday. I think it melds well with the Poetry on Mars project here on BBP, to get poetry into the hands of researchers in order to provide practical subject-based backup, a kind of laser-like focus on a topic, or further testimonial evidence to a study.

I went to Red River a few weeks ago and left all my books at home. I was forced to visit the bookstore of a mega-chain in order to find some reading material for the weekend. If you’ve been in a Target you know that they have at least 2 aisles of books. Let me just say Walmart has a lousy book section. There was less than a quarter of an aisle of reading material in there! But then I guess plebs aren’t getting under paid to read.

The April issue of O Magazine features National Poetry Month. The article is called "Why Poetry Matters." Former us poet laureate Natasha Trethewey opens up the discussion with this content: “In an era of sensory overload, there is stillness and clarity to be found in verse.” She goes on to elaborate how in poetry she found a “place to place grief.” Poetry, she says, also provides us with community, it shows us to ourselves, it acts as refuge, and serves to continue a cultural legacy.

Laura Kasischke, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award says poetry can be “understood in parts of our brain that appreciate sounds, or smell.” This section also included prompts from The Poet Tarot Deck (from two sylvias press).  What Oprah magazine article would be complete without product promo? I’m snide but you know I’m going to buy this as soon as I can scrape up fifty dollars.

There are also six short book reviews and reviews of two poet memoirs.

A friend of mine recently purchased for me a gift subscription to the tabloid magazine The Star. Inside there’s that good ole National Amateur Poetry Competition advertisement. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this sucker.

By the way, here is a handy list of writing contests to avoid: https://winningwriters.com/the-best-free-literary-contests/contests-to-avoid (their own site’s contests might be best avoided as well).

News and articles

From my colleges

Here is a CNM article on slam poet champion, writer, TEDx presenter, teacher, dedicated activist, mother, CNM tutor, and now Albuquerque’s newest poet laureate, Jessica Helen Lopez.

A University of Missouri-St. Louis blog post: Bilingual poet’s second collection shifts to second language

National Poetry Month

“Read This Poem” project to usher in National Poetry Month  (SF Gate)

President Obama on why poetry matters (Yahoo!)

Poet booths in subways: Bespoke Poetry Hits The Subways With Peanuts-Inspired "The Poet Is In" (The Gothamist)

People

Gary Snyder (NPR)

James Merrill (Bend Bulletin)

Patti Smith Punk Poet Laureate (The Guardian)

Other

Video poetry: Red Riding Hood Revisisted: https://vimeo.com/3514904

     

Meet Poet Sherman Alexie

April 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

AlexieI haven’t made a post recently on poetry I've been reading. This is because I’ve been mired in New Mexico poetry anthologies. Report coming soon!  

I visited the local CNM library in search of New Mexico poets. Didn’t find any. But I did find many Sherman Alexie works. Alexie is not a New Mexican poet but he is an American Indian poet from the Spokane tribe located in Washington state. Although Spokane is very different from the tribes of southwestern New Mexico, he does provide both profound and humorous insight into the American Indian Experience. I started with the oft recommended children’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. As described, it was excellent and a perfect place to start with Alexie if you’re a confused gringo. Truly, if you’re looking for Indian perspectives you have millions of alternatives. Natalie Diaz is a very hot Mohave poet right now. Joy Harjo is a perennial favorite of mine. But just check out this Wikipedia list.

I’m becoming really attached to Alexie in fact and the well-rounded way he talks about race reminds me of Richard Wright (just perused Richard Wright’s collection of haiku at the library). Like Wright, Alexie knows how to balance the complexities of race by using both good and bad characters from all sides. Good white people and bully white people. Good Indians and bully Indians.  And the badness that ensues when trying and failing to be good.

Similar Alexie stories occur in poems, short stories and the novels, like Grandma’s stolen powwow regalia which shows up in An Absolutely True Diary and in short stories from the collection Ten Little Indians. An Indian mother singing Donna Fargo’s "Happiest Girl in the USA" is another story that shows up in different fiction and poems.

The poems in One Stick Song (2000) are also a good introduction to Alexie with poems like "Unauthorized Biography of Me," "An Incomplete List of People I Wish Were Indian," "The Mice War," "Sex in Motel Rooms," "Powwow Love Songs." In his stories and poems, Alexie can describe both Rez life and city life. What I like about his poems, they’re all different in tone and format.  

The Business of Fancydancing,  (1992), contains poems that are a little rougher. But worth reading are "War All the Time," " Misdemeanors," "Missing," "The Reservation Cab Driver," and "Giving Blood." Alexi is good at setting the scene and giving you a tight kick in the pants.

Diary Ten One

   

Poetry as Usability

April 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Useful

For work I’ve been reading both marketing and usability studies and essays on user interface design. A common idea across all of these areas is the trend toward creating more scannable content. This is primarily because users come to software and Internet pages to accomplish tasks, not to be entertained or enlightened.

Speed readers grab what they need and go! Designers use bolding and other tricks to help people scan a page. I see myself doing it when I come across a list of marketing tips. I scan for the main points and read further where I need to.

I can feel the knuckles crunching on the hands of writing academics, their blood pressure rising to a steam. Is quality reading losing the battle? Reading poetry takes attention. It’s the antithesis of scanning. It’s slow reading.

Monsieur Big Bang and I are also listening to The History of the English Language podcast with Kevin Stroud.  In one episode he describes Old English Scops (or poets) who were once happily employed traveling to villages providing poem-casts of the latest news. Back then, poets were charged with keeping the news flowing in a time when nobody could read or write. Rhyming provided ways of understanding and memorizing that news. Truly, poets were the social media of their day. We’re fine with that right? Well then…check your self-serving diatribes about social media at the door.

Communication efficiency in the old days was good if it served poets. Is language efficiency bad now because poets are left out?  Culture changes and therefore communication changes.  Society is doing what it needs to do. This doesn’t mean that poetry should be eradiated from communication. It just means we won’t use it the way we previously did. Poems are not for distributing the news anymore. They’re for meditative moments, considered protests and language inquiry. Poems are not scannable; but wait, here comes the next experimental poem exploring scannability! Wait for it!

     

Hard Times for Poets: Quotes and Stories to Keep You Going

April 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

FauklknerSome quotes to keep you hanging in there as a writer when you feel like giving up!

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

“Fall down seven times, get up eight!” –  Japanese Proverb

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away many small stones.” –  Confucius again!

 

 

And some more ridiculous reviews:

 “The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.”

–  Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker on Absolom, Absolum! by William Faulkner, 1936

 “…a book of the season only…”

–  New York Herald Tribune  

“The Great Gatsby falls into the class of negligible novels”
–  Springfield Republican on The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

“Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.” 

– La Figaro on Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857

 

From Bill Henderson's Rotten Reviews

   

Poetry Magazine, Poetry in Mainstream News (April)

April 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

4-2015-cover-360

I've been subscribing to Poetry magazine this year. I can't say I'm completely enjoying my first few issues but April 2015 has much to recommend in it. The issue is dedicated to hip hop poetry and I enjoyed almost every poem.  Nate Marshall lists a 7-point blueprint for BreakBeat writing and Kenneth Goldsmith's conceptual manifesto ends the issue. Good fodder for discussion on what poetry is supposed to do. There are some truths in there, some narcissisms and quite a few contradictions.

I'm busy working on my NaPoWriMo pieces. Met a few new poets over there. Hello Poetry has gotten into NaPoWriMo in 2015.

 

 

Poetry In Mainstream News

Cat Poetry

Charles Bukowski’s Unpublished Cat Literature Can Be Yours In October (Flavorwire)

People

“I Am Not a Nature Poet”: Why Robert Frost Is So Misunderstood (Flavorwire)

2I love it when my blog obsessions overlap. In 1975 Brit Pop Star David Essex appeared on Cher's solo TV show (YouTube). Now he's released a book of poetry, Travelling Tinker Man & Other Rhymes. (The Independent)'

Charles Simic Displays a Poet’s Voice and His Passions (The New York Times review)

Tomas Tranströmer died last month at the age of 83

Poetry Drama

Stepson of poet Anne Cluysenaar receives life sentence for her murder (The Guardian)

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti laments changing San Francisco (PBS NewsHour)

The new Maya Angelou stamp quotes Joan Walsh Anglund by mistake (People Magazine)

Making Poetry Vibrant (and Not Complaining)

Miami poet R.M. Drake reinvigorates enthusiasm for poetry through Instagram (Miami Herald)

No One Cares About Poetry? Right. Check Out China's Vibrant Scene (1,200 years later, is Chinese poetry entering a new golden age?) (PRI)

'Sidewalk Poetry' Project To Take Literature To Cambridge Streets—Literally (The Artery)

Gentleman Poet’s Hunt & Light Kickstarts New Poetry Book (Dan's Papers)

Remembering Peggy Freydberg, a 107-Year-Old Poet Whose Career Was Just Getting Started (Vanity Fair)

Take a Poet to Lunch in April (My San Antonio)

     

The Biology of Narcissism and Mindfulness and What It Means For Poets

March 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Kristin-Neff1

Poetry writing is a field where everyone is on a mad mission to distinguish themselves from everybody else. The popular complaint among poets is that everybody writes but nobody reads. It’s true that reading someone else’s writing is a compassionate act and not too many writers are on a mission of compassion. They're on a mission of self-esteem. It's exhausting and Kristin Neff is a scientist who has given a Ted Talk on compassion versus self-esteem. She talks about how the self-esteem movement has contributed to the narcissism epidemic and how this contributes to bullying in various populations and the great American fear of being average.

You see the self-esteem drama everywhere: on TV advertising, interacting with drivers on the street, in awful news stories. I see it in MFA ads for poetry programs. In fact, there's a new game in town: tapping into a student's ego to lure them into the program. In Poets & Writers issue January/February 2015 there's an add full of published books with a blank space reading, “The Place for our Next Book is Here” (meaning you!) and in APR's last issue there is an ad stating “Before you write your success story, you have to find your voice.” It's all about your success story! Wow.

These are topics I cover in Writing in the Age of Narcissism. For years, advertising has been banking on our narcissistic tendencies, our self-obsession and our desire for fame and to consider ourselves above average. 

View the Ted Talk: The Space Between Self Esteem and Self Compassion: Kristin Neff at TEDx Centennial Park Women

More quotes on the topic:

And I'm not the only poet talking about this. Bianca Stone (daughter of Ruth Stone) says, “I’ve always been drawn to science, especially neuroscience. I feel that poets look at the world so differently because of something to do with the way their brains are wired." Bianca Stone, Poets & Writers, January/February 2015

In his essay "Casting Stones" on the Mary Kay Letourneau story called Charles D’Ambrosio talks about the “reflective rush to judge” and “threadbare or disingenuous language which failed to allow for the possibility that [the case] was both simpler and more complex than they were prepared to understand or admit…My felling was, first you sympathize, then you judge – that’s a complex human response. You sympathize first, and until that happens, you don’t understand anything.” Quoted in Poets & Writers, November/December 2014

Read more quotes about writing and narcissism here: http://www.marymccray.com/writing-in-the-age-of-narcissism.html#writers 

Inspired by this, I've decided to embrace my average-ness. I’m an average working writer. And that’s okay. In fact, that’s pretty respectable.

   

It’s That Time of Year: World Poetry Day, National Poetry Month

March 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Napowrimo

It's spring and poems are in the air!

The Poetry Month poster for 2015 is out from the Academy of American Poets. I've already hung mine (which I received as a member but you can request a free one here) on my office wall and have already received comments about it from artists in the office who walk by and recognize the work of Roz Chast. She illustrated a Mark Strand poem. 

Which reminds me that April is also the month for the NaPoWriMo 30 poems in 30 days challenge. This will be my third year participating in this very exhausting gauntlet of poetry writing.

Every year I say I'm going to use the site's prompts and every year I'm itching to work on some other idea. I was going to try to do 30 "addresses" inspired by Kenneth Koch's book New Addresses which I read last year on my eReader.

But since I've been working at CNM and studying both user architecture and design and mindfulness and its cognitive science, I've decided on doing a project that melds both the Wikipedia list of cognitive biases and mindfulness practices. The project is called "31 Poems of Suffering."

Poems will be posted, as usual, daily on Hello Poetry. You can view poems from past year's challenges here, too: http://hellopoetry.com/mary-mccray/

 

News about World Poetry Day: http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/21/living/feat-world-poetry-day/ (CNN)

   

Quote Deck, Good Finds

March 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

EliotGood Quote-age

I did enjoy my subscription to Poetry London over the last few years. I liked it for its many reviews placing large amounts of international poets—insiders and outsiders—on my radar. But it has been expensive getting the magazine stateside and so for now I’ve switched to a virginal subscription to Poetry Magazine and the tiny journal of short fiction called One Story. Tough times, tough choices.

My first issue of Poetry (February) included a pretty amazing experimental poem by Elizabeth Willis called “Steady Digression to a Fixed Point” with some skillful verbal weaving that actually takes us somewhere.

There’s also a snippet of the Amiri Baraka poem “Tender Arrival” that I wanted to share:

“What do you call that the anarchist of comfort asks,
Food, we say, making it up as we chew. Yesterday we explained
language.“

Lists of Poems

Over the last few weeks I’ve received two emails from Poets.org/The Academy of American Poets that were very interesting, one for St. Patrick’s Day and the the start of spring and another for Women’s History Month. The emails include a list of relevant poems along with links to audio poems and video.

The poetry list for spring and St. Patrick’s Day:

The list for Woman’s History Month:

Visit their links above to view the poems and sign up for their emails to get these email lists.

Lists of Review Outlets

Poets & Writers Magazine has a database of book review outlets: https://www.pw.org/review_outlets

News Links, March 22

As a teen I was very inspired by Mark Twain’s home in Connecticut and his typewriter in Hannibal, Missouri. Since then I’ve always looked forward to visiting writer’s homes. Poet’s don’t get as many museums turned out of their homes, however. But now we have one more:

And because I’ve had family in Anchorage and Santa Fe…

Poetry Apps

Last week I found an app called “The Waste Land” from Touch Press Limited costing a pricey $13.99. If you’re a big fan of this poem however I’d say the cost might be worth it. The app boasts having a performance of the poem by Fiona Shaw, audio readings by many people from Ted Hughes to Viggo Mortensen to Jeremy Irons and lots of references, allusions, and notes on structure. There are also 35 perspectives on the poem and the original manuscript with Ezra Pound’s editing. Find out more: http://thewasteland.touchpress.com/

  

Poetry News – 14 March 2015

March 14, 2015 / / 0 Comments
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