poetry

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To forget oneself is to be enlightened by the myriad dharmas

7 April 2009 in ideas, ixd, lit | No comments

Last night I read the New Yorker profile of Matthew and Michael Dickman, poets from Portland, Oregon who happen to be identical twins. (Here’s the abstract). In their work, they have very different voices, but there’s a strange sort of twin telepathy that seems to exist within it. They also edit each other’s work, providing insight and feedback to each other about works in progress.

During one editing session, one of the Dickmans recalls an interview with former American poet laureate Mark Strand in which Strand cautions against relying on “clusters of words” that pop into your head ... This sounded to me like a good rule of thumb for writing. (It also added fuel to the fire of my dislike of Twitter and Twitter-like tools that encourage people to offer half-cocked, cliche-ridden mini-opinions about everything.) I plundered the Internet in search of the interview.

Turns out that he was referring to a 2003 piece in Post Road Magazine. It was conducted by writer Michael O’Keefe. The relevant bit is the last passage from Strand, but the context is helpful:

Mark Strand: Nobody wants to arrive because that’s the end. One wants to have openings constantly before him so there are places to go.
Michael O’Keefe: Do you believe that sometimes words can get in the way when you write?
MS: Words do get in the way when you have heard them used in a particular manner before. When you write all you’ve got are words but they both get in the way and serve as a salvation.
MO: Do you avoid using any kind of combinations of words that you could remember easily?
MS: Yeah, I mistrust them because it means that they existed in that way before. The idea is to use a modifier-noun combination that may never have been used before. Otherwise you may be just quoting others or quoting yourself. The excitement comes when you have done something that was unthinkable before.

Amen, brother. Mistrust ease. Seek the unthinkable.

In my digging, I also found some excellent Strand resources, including a nice interview in a 1975 issue of Ploughshares and a very helpful page at the Library of Congress that eventually led to my discovery of the above interview.

Kindle on the iPhone / Buy futures in poetry

5 March 2009 in lit, tech | 2 comments

Emerson - Self-Reliance - Kindle - iPhone

If I were a derivatives man, I’d go to the Chicago Board of Trade and buy up some poetry futures. Sell frozen orange juice and pork bellies; buy poetry. Why? Because it is the perfect product for small screen reading. People are reading more and more stuff on smaller and smaller screens, everyone knows this, duh. War and Peace is available for the Kindle, but who wants to wrestle that monster through a keyhole? Anyway, last night, I downloaded the awkwardly named Kindle for the iPhone. I had tried to become a Kindle user (of the device — confusing, yes?). I failed at this, but I had some Kindle-ized books left over — Leaves of Grass and the Modern Library’s Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson — and I downloaded those. I didn’t really expect much.

Twice today, I found myself reading through sections of Leaves of Grass: “A PROMISE to California, / Also to the great Pastoral Plains, and for Oregon: / Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain, to teach robust American love.” Good reading as I watched the lunch crowd at Mixt Greens. The entire Leaves of Grass is available on Bartleby, by the way. Then, as I was waiting for a conference call to start, I read Emerson’s poem “Self-Reliance.” Hard to conduct a conference call with a mind thus expanded by poetry, but I think I can get used to it. Poetry on the iPhone! It makes a lot of sense, and Amazon did a nice job with the interface. Simple, to the point, no BS, just like reading should be.

My heart wanted to stab things but didn’t have arms

6 January 2009 in lit, politics | No comments

(The title is from a poet named Tao Lin in a collection called this emotion was a little e-book).

The Internet is like a small town, especially when there’s something to disagree about. Recently, some of my favorite Internet citizens got into it over Obama’s decision to have poetry at his inauguration.

I’ve always liked George Packer, the New Yorker’s man on the ground in the early days of Iraq. I devoured his book about the first year of the occupation, The Assassins’ Gate. It tells the stories of a few Iraqis who put their necks on the line to support us when we arrived in 2003, and it comes to mind whenever a conversation turns to the need to find a way out of Iraq. I also read his blog, Interesting Times. He’s the kind of journalist who always does his homework, which made it all the more puzzling when he somewhat flippantly criticized Barack Obama’s decision to ask Elizabeth Alexander to read a poem at his inauguration:

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings ... [Ed.: Ouch.] ... Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.

Ouch. A blanket dismissal? The activity of “a few people?” I started writing a response to this, but Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic beat me to it. His blog rules. He called out Packer for being prematurely judgmental, and suggested that perhaps hip-hop lyrics were suitably rhythmic and emotive for the occasion. Yes.

Lo and behold, Packer just posted what amounts to an apology, and he does so in the best way, comparing the current poetry scene to the NBA in the 1970s:

Contemporary American poetry has too many mansions to be summed up under a throwaway phrase like “private activity.” Its multitude of schools and forms is like the N.B.A. in the nineteen-seventies, when there was no dominant team but a confused contest of warring tribes. And I should have read more of Alexander’s work than appears on her Web site, and more carefully, before expressing skepticism that she’ll be equal to the occasion on January 20th.

So, the real question is: Who will be the David Stern of 21st century American poetry? Chris Fischbach, I’m looking at you.