The poetry buddy system project (12.20.19)

Greetings everyone.

I hope you’re all done shopping for the holidays, if that’s the sort of thing you do this time of the year, and that you’re looking forward to being among family and friends over the coming week or ten days.  Ann, Murphy and I are heading off to Charleston for several days and nights.

This has been a great year of poetry for me personally and, I hope, for each of you as well.  We’ve tried our hands at a variety of styles and subjects, read publicly in theater mode, made booklets, some of us have published books (congratulations, Doug!), and become a genuine community of voices.  One thing I hope each of you can ascertain is whether you’re writing better poetry, as that’s what W@1 is all about.

As a reminder to all, we will skip next Wednesday.  At least, I will skip next Wednesday.  And meet again on Wednesday, January 2.

Yesterday, I proposed a new project for the new year: lyrical conversations, or, if you will, “buddy writing,” or “paired poetry,” or “dyadic dactylics.”  That is, over the holidays and into the winter-spring seasons, we are pairing off in order to start poetic conversations.  I have no models for this approach to share with you other than personal experience, which itself is limited.  So this will be highly exploratory and even experimental.  Here’s the idea:

• Pair off with another W@1 writer.  See “assignments” below, but you can pair off with more than one other writer, or even form a small coterie of three.  (Margaret, Janet and June are doing this, for instance, with the idea of exploring feminist themes.)  I am going to insist on one rule, however, which is that you establish at least ONE one-to-one relationship with another writer.  So, if you do form a larger group of writers, you should still pair off into a writing dyad (like a duo but not necessarily with harmony in mind) WITH SOMEONE IN THE GROUP WHO IS NOT PART OF YOUR LARGER COTERIE.
Write or start a poem that you will share with that writing “buddy.”  This is where things become exploratory.  You can explore a theme (like feminism, nature, love, political address, death, the quotidian, etc.) or a form (sonnet, ballad, limerick, haiku, villanelle, etc.) or a mode (lyric, narrative) or a style (imagistic, bombastic, abstract, musical, noir, plein air, etc.).  Or you can start with the proverbial blank page and just see what emerges in a protracted exchange.
This last suggestion is what the project is really about: A PROTRACTED EXCHANGE.
You can alternate writing lines of a poem, though be aware that this approach might become something more like a parlor game than an exchange of lyrical ideas.
What you should refrain from doing is to critique each other’s work, unless of course you do so in a poem.  Rather, you should use each other’s work as a sounding board or launch pad for creating your own poem.

You likely still have some questions about this project, which I will try to anticipate:

Q.   I’m not really interested in doing this project.

A.   Fair enough.  If this is the case, please let me know separately and I will remove you from the queue.

Q.   Can I choose the person I want to work with?

A.   Yes, and no.  Yes, you can “fall in with” anybody whose work already piques your interest, someone with whom you believe you’re likely to engage well & imaginatively.  But this choice will be additive.  Below, I provide some pairings.  I made them absolutely by chance by writing your name on a card, then Frisbee-ing the cards across the room.  Cards that landed closest together became the pairs you see below.  Totally arbitrary (unless some hidden force guided my Frisbee tosses)!  Because we have an odd number presently in the group, some doubling up is necessary.  IF YOU OBJECT TO A PAIRING, OR TO BEING PART OF MORE THAN ONE PAIRING, LET ME KNOW AND I’LL MAKE CHANGES.

Q.   Is this to be a limited exchange of a poem and a response?

A.   No.  Think of this project as an ongoing conversation between you and your lyrical “interlocutor.”  think of it as a “correspondence in verse,” or better, a lyrical conversation.

Q.   How do I know when we’re finished?

A.   There is no end-point to this project.  What I am hoping is that this project will extend itself over the winter and into spring (even beyond, if you and your partner are into it).  The objective is exploration, so destination is accordingly de-emphasized.  We will check in on the progress of the exchange from time to time over the coming months.

Q.   Will we continue to work on other projects in the meantime?

A.   Yes.  Topics to be determined.

Do let me know if you don’t want to participate.  There will be plenty of other projects over the coming months!

-C

"Writing" concrete poetry (12.19.18)

It just goes to show, poetry beats bad weather!  Curt, Bennett, June, John, Doug and Delaney all read and recited wonderfully last night.  There was passion, clarity, projection, confidence, and, as always, high quality poetry.  I thought the second half was every bit as engaging, and was pleased to see how many in the audience stayed for the conversation.  You all gave valuable insight into what makes you tick as writers of poetry.

So, now it’s on to the end of the year and a look ahead to 2019 . . . let’s begin with next week’s project: concrete poetry.  I have some thoughts about it, of course.

The first is to ask the inevitable question, Is concrete poetry poetry?  I think of poetry in kinship with music and thus a medium of sound.  But because poetry involves language, words which bear meaning for us, this sound component becomes complicated; in fact, poetry-as-sound cannot be merely poetry as sound. If I extend the thought, there can be no such thing as the pure verbal icon, for once a word is introduced into the equation, the verbal artifact refers.  What do I mean by this?  Its words point to something—an object, an idea, a feeling, or as W. C. Williams expressed it, a thing—that inevitably lies outside the artifact itself.  The language refers you elsewhere.

But I am wandering off topic here.  Concrete poetry is not the same thing, exactly, as concreteness in or of a poem.  You are familiar with the notion of the concrete image or “concrete language” in a poem.  This kind of concreteness has to do with clarity of expression and reference.  Concrete poetry is a formal idea, just as the sonnet is a formal idea, or the rhymed couplet, or the Alexandrine line.  Concrete poetry makes the materiality of words evident in the most technical sense.  (A sidebar here: poetry qua poetry is the business of making the materiality of language evident, of lifting language out of the quotidian and into the world of artifact, of making words sensual.)  

Concrete poetry treats language with a machine-like precision; it treats words as malleable material that can be shaped: chopped up, literally bent, jammed together, misplaced in a Cubist sense, enlarged, shrunk, condensed, expanded, given a font treatment of one kind or another, and so on.  Obviously, there is a strong visual component to this, made possible by print technology and, in the past generation or two, even more possible by digital print technology.  This link takes you to three examples in Spanish.  You’ll be able to make out words, but will be less likely to “see through” them to their referents. 

“Swan” is a poem by John Hollander (d. 2013), the Yale poet and scholar.  He published Types of Shape in 1969, which contains the above concrete poem, which Hollander referred to as “graphemic” poetry.  Now you might reasonably ask the question, “Why go to so much trouble?  Why not simply write the poem more straightforwardly and let he reader imagine the image?”  And one answer to your question might be, “Why NOT go to such trouble?  Isn’t that what art is all about, going to the trouble?”  Or you might rejoin with, “Isn’t ALL poetry concrete in this way?  What is a line, after all, but a visual formal decision made by the author, a visual marker for the reader?” 

But there is a second kind of concrete poetry that bears thinking about here: soundscape poetry.  Hip-hop falls into this category.  Tom Waits’ songs often toy with being soundscape poems.  Soundscape poetry deals in . . . sound, yes . . . but also in the tactile aspect of sending and receiving a sound—how it forms on the tongue or flows from the lungs or bursts forth from the lips and then goes into an ear. What could be more concrete than the air pressure of a spoken word/syllable/phoneme vibrating the eardrum?  Try intoning this poem aloud to get a sense of concrete sound . . .

Metamorphosis of the Tea Merchant’s Son

Honk¶ clatter. Wheeze-n-cough. Click, chirp, buzz, hum. ZZZT. La-ti-DA-so-fa-la-LA. Rattle-slap-ding. Ding. Ding. Whoosh! Wint. Scrape-to-shfff. Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank/dink/rheum. Click, dink, honk→scrape. Whoosh! Wint. Da-dum-da-dee. Da-dee-da-dum. Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Fft. Fft. Hump. Hump. Tweet-few-tweet. Whomp.Whoosh! Honk. La-ti-DA-so-fa-la-LA. Rattle-slap-ding. Ding. Ding. Tweet-few-tweet. Dink/rheum. ZZZT. Ding. Ding. Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Fft. Bong-ng-ng-ng. Bong-ng-ng-ng. Bong-ng-ng-ng. ZZZT. Honk. ZZZT

---

¶ Komposition 8, 1923, Vasily Kandinsky. Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

For Wednesday, then.  Let’s concentrate on concrete poetry.  NOT, mind you, on concreteness in poems, but on the formal idea itself.  Make a poem that looks like something on the page, or, alternatively, make a poem that emphasizes sound above sense.  P.S.: I’ll explain the secret to “Metamorphosis of the Tea Merchant’s Son” on Wednesday.

Clark