Our last meeting

Is anyone interested in a new time for our poetry lab? We have another person who’d like to attend but can’t because of scheduling. Meg and Derek often can’t make our current time. Can we follow up on this in our comments section below?

I promised Matt some people to read in and around the Mackey area of the poetic terrain. I’d say Charles Olson is a good place to look. Olson’s work is huge and troubling to me sometimes. But I’d say that the selected poems is good, as is the selected prose. I’d especially recommend reading “Call Me Ishmael,” Olson’s attempt to make a historical-poetical theory of America. Robert Duncan is very definitely someone to look at in the Mackey area. Duncan’s later poems are probably where to go for Mackey impacts, especially Bending the Bow onward. Duncan’s The H.D. Book (pdf of The H.D. Book) is another good place to look. It’s a long and rambling book about H.D., ostensibly, that is really a reconsideration of what Modernism was for Anglophone poetry.
        And you definitely have to check out Kamau Brathwaite and William Carlos Williams. For Brathwaite, I think that X/Self is a very good book to look at. It’s a conversation between him and Mackey, and you can really get a good sense of Brathwaite’s poetry in it. That's a really nice thing, the prose in that book. I’d also say to look at Ancestors and The Arrivants.
        For WCW, you probably learn more about Mackey around Asphodel, that Greeny Flower, but I think it’d be really good to check out Spring and All. And Kora in Hell and In the American Grain, odd-interesting essays on American figures.

I’d also like to draw your attention to the Poetry Symposium this week on campus. Here’s the schedule. There are some good people speaking at this, really interesting scholars of some of the sorts of poetry we look at from time to time. If you have an interest in situating yourself within the broader realm of poetic practice, it might be good to check out one or two of these panels.
        The keynotes is 7:30pm in Gerber Lounge on the 3rd floor of EPB. His title is “When Context Is All: The Specificity of Popular Poetry.” The agenda of Nelson might be familiar. His Repression and Recovery was a project aimed at recovering poets who were ignored by earlier critics who thought those poets were bad or mediocre. That’s the most brazen shorthand for his project. I don’t always agree with what he’s up to, because I’m leary of some of the rocks he slings at aesthetics while he goes about praising his lesser-known or unknown poets. He’s worth attending to.

I promised Kassia some poetry that her dream project reminds me of. There’s something dreamlike in Hannah Weiner’s attempt to record the strange experiences she had. That’s in her book Country Girl. I have just started, but still recommend, Patrick Durgin’s introduction to Weiner’s early work. Patrick went to school here for a while, and I got to know him (briefly) and his work, and I have learned it’s a Good Thing to follow up wherever I encounter his name.

And finally, finally, the STAR POWER: here’s a link to an article on Barack Obama’s early poetry. And yes indeedy-do, it includes a couple of them poem things. w00t!

friiiday

soooo, uh, what's our topic for this week? the music thing? i think so.
i'll go with that if i don't find out different. :/

Crime-Fighting Poet

Here’s an odd little story from the London Times. If you don’t want to click the link, I’ll post the crime-fighting poem too. (The police replaced the accused person’s name with XXXXX.)

“Street poet names race murder suspect on city’s lampposts
undefined”

An anonymous poet has given vital clues to detectives investigating the murder of a father of two.

Paul Kelly, 32, was stabbed to death in the early hours of New Year’s Day outside a pub in Bath. Police believe that as many as 20 people may have witnessed his stabbing, which followed an altercation inside the Longacre Tavern.

Dozens of copies of the poem, titled Running from Paul Kelly, have appeared in the past week on lampposts and bus stops near the scene of the murder.

[...]

Poetic justice?

“Now I will show how a few words can be made
As sharp and deadly as any bwoy’s blade
How running away will not you save
The truth is there like an open grave
A defenceless man is dead and his blood’s gone cold
But the story of his end is going to be told
You can run and run till your shoes wear thin
And hope that you’re safe, ’cos of the colour of your skin
Paul Kelly lies dead, and who held the knife?
It was you, XXXXX, we all saw take his life.
“The New Year was but a short hour old
When you and your mates were: Oh, so bold.
You put us to shame,
But we did the same.
It was black on white, so it must be right
It was you who said: “He had it coming that night.”
Then you ran away and we turned our backs.
You said we would be next if we breathed a word
We took in your threats that now sound absurd
So we closed our eyes And took in your lies
“Now your filth lies burning inside us like poison and guile.
But soon all the s***’s gonna come out, so prepare for a trial.
So where will you run when, at last, you face a brave man?
You gonna run once more through the streets, all a quiver?
Will wash yourself down in the deep, deep river?
“Yow, young XXXX, where you threw the knife,
Listen to what I say and take good heed:
You can wipe your bloody hands in the grass, till they bleed . . .
But you will never, never get them clean.

Anonymous

America, My Love (my serial poem continues)

I. 2 February 2007

There are many things I would say
to you but do not. That’s for sure.
And there are things I would not say
again to you and do. There’s a distance
between us. But not the distance
between me and every other.
You are every other no longer.
You are yourself naturally,
and you warm me, for sure.
You are yourself naturally, and
you are with me, and are yourself
with me, and I with you as myself.
And speaking therefore to the distance
between us, direct address is odd.

In fearing speaking directly
to the other and speaking therefore
to you, I include the other
in our private exchange.
That doesn’t keep us warm at night.
Nor do dreams of ducklings. But those
dreams are sweet though times they lack
warmth, are cold sometimes as death.
But I confuse memory and hope.
Confusion is my present now.
Confusion is I that include.
But it is made of the distance
and is made of ducklings.

I would have it otherwise, So gentle
you may not be my beloved
or may also be her if you are other.
In either case, there is an America.
I do dream many things, for sure.

There is America, my sky in fearing, for sure.
She stands as the distance,
and that’s an odd thing there!
She is made of gold wires and is
America, my newfound rope of sand.
She stands tall as the distance
from her ass to the ground
with the augmentation of the Indies
from her butt to the blue sky.
Or perhaps not quite so high.
She stands or lies in relation to me
for it is I who speak. And there she is
looking awkward while I do speak
thusly to you on her behalf,
the distinction betwixt we fixed above.

Must memory be cast aside for hope?
Manifestly no, but the one does run
from the other. The memory that stings.
So there is control, and there is release,
and that makes us happy. Still, afterward,
There is little distance and often
laughter.

II. 16 February 2007

Shoulder queer disposition
like a flag rifling bargain bins
once again O hot mama I open
my mouth to you!
Jet a door and stomp a floor
let’s get it on baby
the things you say about you
lordy lordy just ain’t true.
You fear snakes, while I fear them too.
Yet love is there in those scales
and the heavy laying in the sun they do.

III. 22 March 2007
I went out for a quick smoke. A man walked by
with a sandwich board of an aborted baby,
a baby seven weeks old, the same age.

A little flayed monkey. My insides cold and tight.
I float a bit, bobbing; head heavy and buoyant.
Distant voices of people come and go.
My experience pulsates.
I am bereft.
The ripping of this one from me.

Writing so much of it, so honestly, so artfully,
pushes me from myself. For the feeling
has no words or few words, never enough words.
No name but a change in everything so that
the world leaves me or I leave it
just a little to the left and behind.

Nothing is real.

pretty. dumb.

So, I tried to alter one of my poems by burning the edges of the paper. Turns out, the crayon I used to color over my words with is highly flammable. One decent "RULES" poem literally up in smoke. Set off my smoke alarm and everything!

I won't be there Friday, unless you all want to come into Bruegger's Riverside for the meeting (you don't, trust me), but I'll have some poems none-the-less.

late night/early morning

oh my god, i just wrote my poem at 2.30 am and it is RIDICULOUS.
haha, i can't wait to show it off and NOT tell the story behind it.

just thought i'd say that.

Spam Poetry

From the Chicago Sun-Times article: “Thomas relies on something far less social or real -- spam. Since about 2002, the Rogers Park resident has written whimsical poems using only the subject lines of the thousands of unwanted e-mails she gets. She posts them on her www.spam-poetry.com Web site.”

This is a poem included in the newspaper article:

“it counts”
3 Chicks in one night
(25 mg did the trick.)
3 hand made silk ties
3 dollars, each
4 out of 5 doctors recommend
5 financial tips for grads
6 times the action
7 minutes in heaven!
15 minutes of waiting and then
36 hours of pleasure!
Numbers never lie my friend
Numbers never lie

It might be fun to do some of these sometimes. It also might be worth considering how doing this changes our perspective on spam. Does this sort of play make us more or less of a consumer? If a different sort of consumer, then what’s the change?

Books for Art

Hey, I just bought a couple of books to use for painting up to make humuments. They are, drum roll, Ask the Cards a Question by Marcia Muller and The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider. I’m leaving them in the Official Poetry Lab Mailbox. Feel free to tear out any pages you like.

Meeting, 3/2/07

We met at Java Juice to discuss our poems based upon essays we have either read or have written.
Bret brought a new take on his 'visual poetry,' by utilizing the entire page in his poem about creation and shape, based upon a paper he had written about art.
Matt brought in an extension of his serial poem and asked his roomate to collaborate on the poem with him, providing an interesting new voice to his piece.
Kassia brought in a piece based on her experience visiting Hiroshima.
A new poet, Mike, has also joined our ragtag band of degenerates and offered some helpful insights into improving our work.

Below is Bret's offering.

obliged to collapse

idle hearts
defining a generation
downside upside down
jivin all-
heads
their
in
up
in
their
heads
-all thrivin
strivin through the blockage
situated by- the man

but these backward thoughts never surprise
these obstacles placed
in the middle of the kitchen
what a mess to clean-
what a mess god made-
of everything-
of nothing…

nightmarish impediments
yield specks of light
(human sensations
defined by an unremitting
sacred contusion)
shift- with every beating-
expose weaknesses-
hearts tuned into god through the internet
digital demarcation-
digital demise-
dying on crosses in the middle of a war zone…

is this the conclusion of a generation
or a sedition no one knows

movements overt
with covert findings
tearing at the
vain of human destiny
specks of light
smite the ash
thrash the innocent
obliged to collapse