Michele Glazer’s new book On Tact, & the Made Up World comes out in less than a month from University of Iowa Press.

And also speaker. And also screamer. I saw this “band” over a year ago, and they kicked my face in. I write aggressively, with muscular language some would say, but these fellas are intense. I mean, do you bring a washer and an axe handle/bat with you everywhere?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4K-PDg4WAQ

The charm for me here is that aggressiveness. They’re bluegrass and metal at the same time. Minimalist yet thick. It’s got all the angst one could want in the lyrics, and dude performs amazingly, almost uncomfortably in the moment of the lyrics.

It’s an exciting challenge to work with slam poets on their pieces. It’s freeing to forget about the line. I get to consider sound and emotion and pacing when I would usually be in there with a safety pin and tweezers trying to do something sneaky with enjambment or connotation.

Cheers Listener. Come back to Spokane.

For the most part, we’re supposed to write what we know, but does it matter how we know it? As a rule, I think most writers stick closer to experience and supplement it with research. I most often write from a memory or an interesting observation. Research less so, and I think I could use it more.

Poets seem to pull from their cannon more than prose writers. We write about Icarus and Lot’s wife and the like so much it feels like a rite of passage. Louise Glück’s Averno and James Wright’s “Saint Judas” come through this kind of research. That’s right kids, allusions fall into this category, too. But let’s not hate on Eliot again. Read more »

Back in the day I got all gushy about the axis between visual art and poetry. Well, in the Wall Street Journal, Judith Dobrzynski wrote about Charles Demuth’s homage to William Carlos William’s poem, “The Great Figure.” The article itself mostly describes the painting in a where’s waldo/photo hunt sort of way, but I’m thankful to find this kind of cross-genre, pseudo collaboration.

It’s like the reciprocation for all those ekphrastic poems. There’s a collection of Ekphrastic poems called, Elastic Ekphrastic if anyone’s interested. It makes sense to me that ekphrastic poetry has such a long tradition and has a fairly consistent popularity, much like writing in a form. Also, I keep finding that many of the images in contemporary poetry are visual. Visual first. As if sight is #1 in the battle of the senses. With digital cameras, and super-awesome lenses of fanciness, and authors who are collaborating to include photographs in their books (Mary Oliver and her partner for example, if I remember right). Photography is the new painting, yo.

This is one of the excuses I give people when they ask why I don’t submit my work. (Usually I’m the victim of  some kind of finger wag/downward glance/breathy sigh as accompaniment.) I feel as if my poems never land at a place where I can say, Well, how ‘bout that?

And I think most of my colleagues go through this with me:

1. write something
2. work it into something decent
3. believe the writing is pretty damn decent
4. come back to it some time later (a week/month/year+) and call it crap

Read more »

I find that I’m writing more and more with a first person who is me. And it scares the crap out of me. So I’ve been looking into the “I,” then trying to look through it—pretend it isn’t there. Sometimes, I hide the “I” in a “you,” but that feels like cheating. Cate Marvin’s explains slanting the “I” in poetry and comes to say:

I am also somewhat pleased to discover I’ve tricked someone into believing the world of my poems is “true”; the sensation is akin, to paraphrase W. H. Auden, to feeling as if I’ve picked the reader’s pocket.

Tricky indeed. Where is this balance of drawing the reader into an experience had by a live body, a body they later learn is not solid and breathing? How do you fictionalize yourself in your writing?

Have you heard of this fancy new (old– it’s from 1962) thing called the interrobang? It’s an exclamation superimposed on a question mark. It does the function of this: ?! And I use “?!” all the time. When I found out that it exists, I felt like: Where have you been?! … Dammit. Basically, the argument is to use it when you want to make sure that the tone of a sentence is  clear, just in case the reader doesn’t get it. If it would’ve really caught on, it would’ve been the first new punctuation mark in two centuries. Folks started to get excited. Seemed good enough to me, and I was on board with that kind of argument until I found out about the irony mark, which looks like this:

؟

Yeah, irony mark. It was proposed by a French poet in the late 1800′s so that writers could use it to flag down readers who might miss out on all the amazing irony and sarcasm in a sentence. This is the point at which I was gravely disappointed. If you ever need this mark for fear that your reader’s won’t get it, rewrite the damn sentence. Rewrite something.

Then, at the end of my Wikipedia adventure, it got absurd. There’s all kinds of wacky crap out there–mostly used and loved by a fella, Hervé Bazin. Fun fact about Bazin: Paul Valéry told him to knock it off with poetry and move on to prose. And Bazin has all kinds of fun punctuation in his 1966 book, Plumons l’Oiseau (Pluck the Bird).  In the book you’ve got the doubt point (), certitude point (), acclamation point (), authority point (), indignation point (), andlove point ().

To which I say, “Really?!  Isn’t all this a bit ridiculous? How lazy does the writing have to be to really need these?” Then Wikipedia made me feel better saying, “at the age of 20, he [Bazin] broke up with his family.”

I’ve become recently obsessed with this concept of unresponsive dialogue, she said.

I did not let the cat out. I am worried about the cat—that tail like a flag waving all the time—it gets around my neck, he said.

I’ve been awake for thirty-six hours pondering it in poetry, she said, it may be that it kneads at my chest like the cat’s paws.

But my neck, he screamed.

I have a neck too, and it connects where my lungs are to this mouth that I’ve allowed the cat’s tail to tap against, she said.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1e5Jeh2Fk0&feature=PlayList&p=8D2C9DC86A7A82BD&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=2

Poppa Pound says, Make it new. Poetry professors say, Steal. So how do you reconcile these? I say, Memorize poems.

Ok, I’m fully aware that folks don’t always get excited to memorize and recite poems, but stick with me on this. It’s better than the vegetable argument of, They taste bad, but they’re good for you. I think memorizing poems lets you have/steal the cake and make it new.

Because this is what I think memorization does: it encourages another writer’s voice/tone/syntax, whatever, something about their sensibility, to echo in your head, to sit back as this constantly open book. The more you memorize, obviously, the bigger the book, and the more echoes bounce around unconsciously. Chances are, after bouncing around against our own writerly sensibilities, those lines we memorize might stick and viola! the Tried and True becomes part of you.

And for the love of everything alliterated, you wouldn’t want to have echoes of poetry you hate. Read more »