httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyuxUkla2gU

I would venture a hypothesis that def jam is often the first love/appreciation that folks have for poetry.

Gregory Cowles on Paper Cuts (a cool blog by the New York Times) : “Does Poetry Matter?”

For Biespiel, poetry doesn’t matter because poets aren’t political enough. For Wallace, poetry doesn’t matter because poets have neglected the common reader. But both take it as a given that poetry doesn’t matter.

I’m incredibly interested in book-length poems, perhaps because they feel/are rare. Only four of the books on my shelf are definitely book-length collections:

Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares
Brian Henry’s Quarantine
Rusty Morrison’s The True Keeps Calm Biding it’s Story
Rachel Zucker’s The Last Clear Narrative

And I want more. (So, please give me titles and authors of those you’ve read that qualify.) I read Quarantine all in one sitting and felt as if my head exploded at the end. Actually, all of these books were incredibly powerful to me, so much so that I thought I would try to write a book-length poem even though I usually labor to get 15 lines. It was like writing short shorts for a long time and then suddenly saying, “Nah, how ‘bout a novel?” Read more »

5. My pen pal in 6^th grade was not very attractive.

4. I have this romantic (lowercase r) notion about handwritten things, how precious and intimate they are, and I sometimes put all this extra pressure on the content of my letters, until they sprawl out into jokes about everything I’ve written. Arrows and pictures, this emoticon, :D. Then I think, Maybe it’s a hybrid. It’s definitely not a hybrid.

3. We all like to blame the government for things, so I’m blaming the price of stamps.

2. I saw and episode about Graphology, that makes me psychoanalyze myself when I write. Are those g’s too looped at the bottom? How about the slant? Too far left? Oh my God, I’m reaching back into my past for money? Who AM I?

1. Facebook.

Q:   Why are you studying poetry?

A:   Because I love it.

Q:   What do you love about it?

A:   Partly because it’s an axis between visual art and language art.

Q:   Can you explain that?

Sure. We meet and greet poems as they appear on the page. Bam. Handshake with the shape of the poem. I think the shape of a poem has a connotation, and emotional suggestion, similar to how a painting or drawing does. So I come to a page that has skinny, skinny lines, maybe there’s some white space between the lines (like W. S. Merwin), and I feel light, airy, a bit playful, and confident. If I come to a page that has really long lines, and they’re all long, maybe really close to the end of the page (Robert Gregory), I feel a bit intimidated, thick. I feel submissive. For short poems like much of Charles Simic’s work, I get a sense of punch with a sense of relief. Prose blocks seem mysterious to me, like they’re hiding something. When it’s open field (Thalias Moss calls hers Limited Fork poetics), I feel something like freedom, something like anxiety, but mostly intrigued. Read more »

I went to a panel at AWP (yeah, I’m here too) about humor in poetry, and these are the highlights:

1. Poets take themselves too seriously, perhaps because we think nobody else takes us seriously.
2. Comedy is serious business. It’s a definite way to subvert social structures.
3. There are psychological categories of humor. One of them is sex. Neato.
4. The biggest risk of using humor in poetry is not being funny. So please don’t over-try.
5. Poets are the kind of people who, when sung the lyrics to the song in crucifixion scene of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, will join in at the whistle during the chorus.
6. There ARE funny women poets.

And here are some things that I just learned via the miracle of the interweb:

Billy Collins and Tony Hoagland are the first two recipients of the Mark Twain Poetry Award, which recognizes a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry and dishes out $25,000.

SPONDEE

I scanned some quotes–poetry scansion ya’ll. George Carlin is often trochaic. Mitch Hedberg’s signature refusal of contractions makes it harder to scan, but he’s iambic. Wanda Sykes is about half and half iambs and anapests. Eddie Izzard is into spondees. Go figure. This all makes maybe too much sense.

In an article on Poets.org, Matthew Rohrer defends humor and puts pressure on how we appraise poetry. I especially agree with him when he says that he’s suspicious of people who refuse to incorporate the whole of their personality in poetry, but I wonder if some poets just don’t have a prominent sense of humor. Poets seem to have a harder time shuffling comedy into their art than fiction, I think because poetry has been so difficult, so serious in the canon. And yet Shakespeare was mentioned in the panel at least 3 times. So why are we having such a hard time convincing ourselves that the comedic is a legitimate avenue for poetry to saunter through?

Publishers Weekly recently had an excellent article that discusses the purpose of poetry reviews. As a writer and reader of reviews, and just as a poet, I agree with Craig Teicher. Poetry reviews are a way for writers and readers to navigate the hugeness of what’s being published right now.

The most valuable thing about a review of a book of poetry is its potential to deepen the reader’s experience of the work under consideration,” he says. “The thoughts and insights of a perceptive, educated, interested writer who has spent a significant amount of time with the poetry can be of great help to someone who is new to the poems.

Check it out, ya’ll. It’s worth your weekend time.

Back in November of 2007, Christian Bök introduced The Xenotext Experiment, “a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics.” Basically, Bök wants to write a long anomalous poem, cipher it into an organism’s DNA, track its progress, and write a book. An article from Shotgun Review gives more of the particulars, but if you have time, it would be worth checking out Bök’s whole pitch.

What makes his experiment different from others that have ciphered data or text into organisms (Pak Wong ciphered the lyrics to “It’s a Small World After All” into a bacterium, which I find hilarious) is that Bök’s organism would produce a protein based on the DNA. The organism would write a “response” poem in that protein. In this way, Bök hopes to show that organisms can be more than storage vessels for poems, they can be writing machines.

Aside from drawing science and art together, from finally making that love sonnet profess your “eternal” affection, this experiment excites me because it raises many questions about the future of poetry. What is the axis of poetry and technology? How will we deal with authorship of the protein-generated poems? Is it even ethical to make an organism a poem or a writer of poems? Will writers use organisms in the future to make their writing “better” or “newer?” Will we be able to, or even want to, cipher a poem into a person’s DNA? If so, would be be able to carry our favorite poetry within our own DNA, making us biological libraries? Can poetry be the cultural code that these experiments want to preserve through the apocalypse?

I bet you didn’t know that tomorrow is World Poetry Day. I didn’t know, and I’m a poet.

We’ve had much discussion here on Bark about lifting poetry’s profile in America. And wouldn’t you know it, I can’t find a scrap of American news on the internet about exhibits, readings, or poetical celebrations to be held tomorrow. Instead, I get a sarcastically funny Vanity Fair article about Tiger Woods, the sexting poet from the beat-generation.

And I get articles with obvious typo’s:  ”In 19999, the UNESCO designated March 21 as World Poetry Day.”

So, come on, America. If Mongolia, the UK, and Trinidad and Tobago can get their love on for poetry, so can we. And doesn’t an exhibition named “Writers- Intellective Gentiles” boost your confidence?

Dealing with writer’s block is essentially problem solving. The problem is simple: I’m not writing. The solution seems difficult, but I don’t think it has to be. Dennis Cass wrote an article in Poets & Writers about fixation in relation to writer’s block.  He says that we become fixated on our solution to not being able to write.  We try over and over to get into writing the same way. Somebody once told me that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. So, let’s avoid insanity.

I’m trying to convince myself that there’s no such thing as writer’s block, and it’s a tough sell because I’ve stared at the blinking cursor on a blank page as much as the next guy.

And when I say, “stare at the cursor,” I mean, worry.

1. I worry about what the product will be.
2. I worry about being brilliant.
3. I worry about writing the poem after the poem I’m trying to write.
4. I worry about all the other random crap in my life.
5. I worry my poems into extinction before they really exist.

The next time you have writer’s block, try this: Stop worrying. Don’t worry, just write.