Good Friend, Awesome Writer

In thinking over the past year, I found myself remembering (and missing) a Zoetrope friend who was very supportive during my time of angst at the beginning of the year. Her kind and honest attention may have kept me from sliding into a deep depression. We drifted out of touch, and so I checked back in with her a few days ago to see how she's been doing. Evidently, very well. She has a flash fiction piece at hackwriters.com, with more on the way elsewhere. It's good to see a good person and talented writer get the recognition she deserves. Plus, she's taken one of my most favorite photos: I love the blue in this, and there's something Hopperesque about it that I really like.

The Trouble with Billy Collins

I loved reading Elizabeth Lund eviscerate Billy Collins in the Xian Science Monitor. Headed by

The trouble with this book

Popular poet Billy Collins fails to deliver in his seventh collection of verse.

She details

lines instead come across as self-observed and obvious...The poems feel undeveloped, and the language is often disappointing...There's little spark or imagination...Perhaps to compensate for lack of inspiration, Collins returns to well-trodden ground or overanalyzes.

She quotes from Collins himself, and then uses his own words to damn him

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

While Collins points a finger at other poets here - there are more people who write verse than read it these days - his message may apply to himself as well. Cranking out book after book, trying to keep an audience happy, can lead to unsatisfying results.

Booyah!

Sestina started

Well, please disregard my post about choosing the heteronyms. Last night I put on a music mix and went to bed. It's been so long since I've done that. I kept drifting in and out of sleep, and sometime between 4 and 5 am I woke up with the line

A stately ship shudders in cold waters

in my head (which I like, because "waters" can be both noun or verb) and I wrote it down and three-and-two-thirds stanzas after that. So now I'm in the thick of things, with only one heteronym in sight. In case you're wondering, my end words are

• waters
  
• lights
  
• now
  
• bars
  
• above
  
• lives (the heteronym)

I'm not sure of its quality yet. Some of it I think is better than average, but I feel I'm at a point now where it will either dribble away into mediocrity or leap into more significance.

Not exactly Xmasy, I guess, but it works for me.

The results are in

from the Shrine of Blind-Winger Jones Xmas competition.

Check out the results and remember, the opinions expressed by Scrooge are not necessarily those of the poet. I'm just the vessel.

I seek more advice

I finished Why it Won't be a Good Idea to Welcome the Alien Spaceship and am now focusing on the writing of my annual sestina. For the past year I have toyed with the idea of writing a heteronymic sestina. Not to be confused with the heteronyms of Pessoa, I've narrowed down my choices to ten end words. Can you help me narrow down my choice to six?

• minute - unit time, or small
  
• evening - time of day, or process of balancing
  
• number - numeral, or feeling less
  
• refuse - trash, or to not comply
  
• tear - on the cheek, or in paper
  
• wind - breeze, or to energize a watch
  
• wound - a break in skin, or wrapped around
  
• dove - a bird, or past of dive
  
• raven - a bird, or to devour (dove and raven would go together, I think)
  
• desert - a lot of sand, or to leave

It would be a beautiful thing for anyone to spend any time or attention on this.

He knows just how naughty you've been

Poetry Personified

Usually I don't seek advice. Usually I do what I damn well please. Well, that's not true. I accept critique in my critique group. I'm responsive to my daughter's needs. I think. Anyway, there is a "poem of personification" contest going on at my favorite online critique board, and I'd like to know which one of mine you think I should submit. They are

• My Pillow Woke Me Up
  
• The Banana and the Donut
  
• Have You Seen This Dog?
  
• Scene from an Efficient Restaurant
  
• Iron Horse
  
• Bogey

I guess it looks like a lot, but they should read quick. It would be incredibly nice for anyone to give this any time and attention.

Shelburne Falls Set List 12/16

• Bogey


• Paige Turner


• Hate Mate


• Sage


• Scrooge the Day After
  

You can read more detail about it at my other blog under the "Long Night" entry.

George, you sly dog

Dalya Alberge reports that Adele Davidson, Professor of English at Kenyon College in Ohio, has found poetry by George Herbert, the 17th-century priest, contains innumerable acrostics and anagrams, discoverable by reading the first letter of each line down the left-hand column of text.

Evidently, many of the acrostics are arcane and scrambled, so they have been virtually unnoticed for over 375 years, though John Dryden is said to have referred to them.

What's my take on it? Apart from its aesthetic value, writing to conform to an acrostic can help to break writer's block. It's another way of screwing around with words, which, for me, is what poetry is all about.

Not a slam on slam

Beth Quimby writes about high school kids finding reason to rhyme (or not) in their school library slam. Although I personally don't usually get into slam as either a writer or listener, there are exceptions, and this event sounds like it was an effective way for kids to enjoy at least one form of poetry.

Ken Lamb, a junior, performed his poem about his fears of the ocean.

"I think it should be drained," he said. "It is huge and deep and the Bermuda Triangle does not help, in my opinion."

Louis Grassi, a senior, opened his "The Day I Saw a Social Worker," with some pacing.

"I walk, rushing, up the stairs, frantic. Dusty air littering my lungs. Passing through the hallways, my pores engorged with guilt," he recited.

Between the humor and rich alliteration, consonance and assonance, it sounds like they did pretty well.

Google's Quote of the Day

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are.
- Henry Fielding

Which reminds me, I have a book called "The Failures of Criticism" by Henri Peyre which I read about twenty years ago, which details the failings of critics. Something to remember when receiving an obtuse review in a critique group.

Of course, there are some writers who have also been imagined to have a greater profundity than they have had, so I suppose it evens out.

from the Rant-is-not-Poetry Department

Shirley Dent writes Why polemics are killing poetry:

There is no poetry that is as guilty of deliberately shrinking our perception of the world and providing a snug elastoplast that makes living with it easier than the poetry of polemics.

Examples of atrocious poems are given from the Poets Against the War website, followed by an example of a good anti-war poem: Wilfrid Owen's Strange Meeeting

Before there were Bushisms

John Nichols writes about Eugene McCarthy's Lyrical Politics, including some quotes and a poem. I remember that time: a time when McCarthy offered hope against the failing (in many ways: politically; health-wise; etc.) Lyndon Johnson (and better rhyming than "Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?!")

Even the poets are restless now. They're not content to go along with Shelley and be the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They want to be acknowledged just a little bit.

Eugene McCarthy March, 1968

"We proved something in that 1968 campaign," McCarthy explained to me a few years ago..."We showed that you could challenge the two political parties and all the powerful institutions in that country, and we did so with some success. (The backers of that 1968 campaign believed), when few others did, that we could take on all the institutions of politics - the parties, the media, the pollsters, the military-industrial complex. You had to have something of the poet in you to believe that."

From the lips of poets

A website launched last week in Britain aims to bring the voices of poets to a listening world, writes Warwick McFadyen.

The Poetry Archive (poetryarchive.org) was launched last week by Britain's Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, who is one of its directors. The archive's aim is to record and store the voices of poets reading their works. Many poets have recorded their works down the decades, but the archive is an attempt to create a central database of significant poets of the English-speaking world.

Tennyson was recorded in 1890 using wax cylinders. The Poet Laureate had written The Charge of the Light Brigade immediately after news of the cavalry disaster reached Britain, but such was the poem's popularity almost 40 years later he was still reciting it.

The Tennyson work is not the earliest recording in the archive. Robert Browning takes that honour. In 1889, Browning was at a dinner party where he was asked to recite a poem into a phonograph. The poet chose his How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. But perhaps because of his age (he was approaching 80 and in fact died that year), he forgets it, starts again, then gives up. He does say, however, that the phonograph was a "wonderful invention".

Les Murray, although a self-confessed Luddite, is well represented on the archive. He says the project is "terribly valuable because there's no other reading of a poem that's so authentic as that of the poet's. There's no substitute for the poet's voice, and down the centuries they'll be able to hear it."

Murray knows first-hand of the benefits of reading his poems. "People have often told me, 'I really haven't known how to read your poetry until I heard it and then suddenly it fell into place'."

The two other Australians on the archive are Alison Croggon and Peter Goldsworthy. To Croggon, "I hope it proves as popular as it deserves: the point of it is that poets' readings can actually be very illuminating, because a poet will read to his or her inner rhythms in ways that, say, an actor will not be privy to. And poets tend not to 'act' their poems, being more interested in the language itself, and 'acting' a poem - i.e. imposing upon it a sense of false expressiveness - can be fairly disastrous for the poem itself.

"Poetry is an oral art, or so I believe, and it's too easy to forget that it is; good readings restore a sense of the oral pleasures of complex and feeling language."

As with an archaeologist embarking on a dig. Motion holds a fervent prayer. "My earnest wish is that someone will come staggering out of the mists and say, 'I've had this recording of Thomas Hardy in my attic all these years and haven't known what to do with it'."

Motion does. He would launch it into space, with the roar of a cannon.

MiraLux

Allegra Mira (originally from Boston) was charming; Thomas Lux (born in Northampton, raised in Easthampton) was witty and whimsical. It was a very pleasant evening, made more enjoyable by running into a couple of Arms Library poet friends at the Haymarket, and also chatting with others at the Forbes Library. Oh, and it was good to pick up a copy of Lux's The Blind Swimmer, published by Gary Metras at Adastra Press. This contains selected poems from 1970-1975 not included in his New and Selected published by Houghton Mifflin. Good times.

What a Week I'm Having

First, on Saturday, it was the Equinox reading salon in Shelburne Falls, MA, where I heard several fine pieces read by their authors, and read a couple myself. Then it was down to Peaberry's in Simsbury, CT, for the open mike, where I heard several fine musical performances and I read my newly-published sestina. Sunday, it was two events in Northampton: a Slate Roof Publishing Collective reading at Half Moon Books, where four of the Slate Roof poets read their engaging poems (and where I busted my budget on several old books: Swinburne, Herbert Read, Philip Booth, William Logan and more); immediately followed by our literary critique group at Packard's, where I heard some engaging work, and got some advice on how to tweak the ending of

Long Distance Town

where the final lines will read

with the concrete poured from tumbling thoughts;
polished as worry stones, sections of road
dashedly bump and buckle on the way out.

when I can have some time to post it.

Monday, it was Northampton again for the poetry discussion group, where we read and critiqued Carl Phillip's poetry, during which I gained a better appreciation for his technique. And last night I was able to hear him first hand at Smith College. He reads rather slowly, with many pauses, giving his work a meditative feel. It occured to me that he is an example of poetry being the silence between the words, and his use of abstract thought gives one much to reflect on during those pauses. By the end, however, it occured to me that he seems to write pretty much in the same tone poem after poem, so that it had a monotonal effect not unlike listening to a self-hypnosis tape. In his book Coin of the Realm, he suggests that people resist abstraction because they are unwilling to think athletically. I have some sympathy for that take on things, and I can appreciate that the use of abstraction is a valid technical choice. Then it becomes a matter of taste. No, "taste" implies good or bad, so let me use the word "preference." It comes down to whether the reader prefers the access of emotion through abstraction, or not. If someone readily associates emotional responses through intellectual contructs (as opposed to say, images) then they will get more out of that kind of poetry than those who do not. I sometimes wonder if the current fetish for imagery will someday seem as old-fashioned as the earlier fetish for heavy alliteration in English poetry (most recently celebrated, then denounced, and now starting to be celebrated again, in Swinburne.) At that point, it may then be the skillful use of abstraction, much like Phillips is currently doing, which may become more in fashion.

Tonight, it's Northampton again to hear Thomas Lux and Allegra Mira in the Calvin Coolidge Room at the Forbes Library. And I've got stuff for the rest of the week, but I'll leave it there for now.

The Equinox Salon Reading

I read two poems which have been published this year:

a sestina published by The Equinox, fall edition

and a poem published in The Berkshire Review