Signing off . . . (12.31.20)

My laptop's clock says it's twenty minutes until midnight.  Like most people, especially like my W@1 and Program for Jazz cohort, I can't say I'm unhappy to see 2020 in the rearview mirror.  Like them, I fear, neither do I believe there's not ten more miles of bad road ahead.  How's that for a string of negatives?!  How appropriate to 2020!  

In fact, I can't recall another time in my life--not even Y2K--when I and everyone I know, and the whole civilized world for that matter, held our collective breaths for what's to come.  Not the way we are tonight.  What a way to live!

But we can consider the good of 2020 at least.  There were heroes or at least leaders who led: Dr. Fauci, Stacey Abrams, Jacinda Ardern (PM of New Zealand, in case you were distracted by You Know Who), all those essential workers who showed up and worked without complaint or crowing, and, collectively, the Black Lives Matter movement.  I'm guessing there were, still are, people down the ranks in federal and state government who belong in this hero/good leader group whose names we'll never know.  Certainly there are in almost every state's election administration.

Consider that more than 150 million people voted in the national election.  An election, it bears repeating for the rest of my born days, that was secure, trustworthy, and relatively error-free.  In spite of the conspiracy mongering.  Imagine the books they're going to write about the election of 2020!

Closer to home, with 8 minutes left to the year, let me say what a good, good year it has been for poetry, not just for me but for my friends at Wednesdays@One.  We lost one beloved member, Delany Watson, in June, but we made poems, poems and more poems all the year long.  I marveled at how much every writer grew as a writer of poetry even though we met for most of 2020 via video conference.  Not a week went by but that a different member of the cohort stepped up with a new and surprising poem, a genuine work of art.  I grew, too!  I can feel that growth in confidence, in imaginativeness, in understanding of the art, in vision, in ability.  I thank my poetry family for that. Oh, yes, I do.

Two minutes to midnight.  That's enough for one year.

The serendipity of error (12.26.20)

Over coffee this morning, I began thinking about mistakes, fortuitous ones in particular.  We've discussed happy error before in our W@1 salons, how poems sometimes emerge from a misspelling, a typo, a mis-used part of speech, an unintentional locution or expression, a mixed metaphor.  The list of errors can go on and on, at least in my own experience.

Once many years ago I mis-typed a subordinating "that," in a line of poetry, leaving the "t" off.  Rereading the draft afterward, I saw something in the odd "hat" inserted at the beginning of what was intended as a subordinate clause.  The error introduced new (if slightly nonsensical) meaning to an otherwise standard construction.  Art invaded grammar.  For more than five years after that serendipitous error, "hat" served as a kind of totem of the imagination, popping up in poem after poem until it became too programmatic itself, like standardized grammar, and I dropped it.

If you were to read these poems today, you likely wouldn't get the connection between "that" and "hat."  The meaning is more or less hermetic, idiosyncratic, personal, which is to say, obscure.  Maybe even a failure of imagination and feeling.  That would be one way of looking at it.  Another might be through the lens of Derrida (yes, I know how this sounds): a that/hat relational notion, a presence expressing an absence and vice versa, a "this/not this" binary code, a sliding signifier, a packed gesture.  But I get the connection.  I cannot deploy the word "hat" today in a poem without also deploying the relative pronoun (and the demonstrative!).  There.  That.

And because I get the connection, the connection bears big meaning.  Which is?  Well, the title of this post, for one thing.  Poems proceed by accident sometimes.  If we're lucky, by happy accident.  For another, Hats-as-Thats exists in a Dr. Seussian world . . . which is where poetry thrives, right?  

Not every error leads you to new ideas or fresh takes on the art you practice.  Not every "experiment" delivers new insight or knowledge.  Not every mistake is an experiment; it's often just a screw-up.  And not every time do I recognize a meaning-making error.  Happy accidents have a great capacity for going unnoticed, by their authors especially.  By this author especially.  

So the serendipity of error, fortuitous error, depends on my ability to see it.  If I do, a door is opened to me in a poem to avenues of art I hadn't anticipated when setting out to write the poem.  Then all I have to do is accept it for what it is, an open door, and step through.  But that's another problem for another post.

Uncomfortable reading (12.21.20)

I mentioned in my previous post something about reading poetry that's outside your comfort zone, even if you don't especially like reading it.  For reading such poetry inevitably expands your understanding of poetry (not to mention other peoples' experiences, takes and cultural backgrounds).

Each week New York Times Magazine publishes one poem, squeezed between "The Thread" and "Talk" features, maybe as a kind of balancing measure, emotionally speaking.  The editor, always a poet of national reputation, changes from time to time--over the past year, Naomi Shihab Nye has done the selecting; before her I believe it was our new Laureate, Louise Gluck; and before her, Terrence Hayes--and this week's Magazine introduces Reginald Dwight Batts as the poetry editor.  He selected a poem by Afaa Michael Weaver, titled "American Income." 

In keeping with the editorial custom, Batts writes a short backgrounder on the poet along with a thumbnail analysis of the poem, partly to help the average NYT reader get a better handle on the material, partly I suppose, to justify his selection.  Here is the poem:

American Income

The survey says all groups can make more money

if they lose weight except black men . . . men of other colors

and women of all colors have more gold, but black men

are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales,

meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering

of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the

ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life

beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands

working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands

now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon

waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone

up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise

up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite

gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love

anymore, gone down inside Earth somewhere where

women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever

these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts

torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing

until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold

of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway

to Jerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling

keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.

There is no other piece of writing in the weekly Magazine that asks to be read and then re-read and possibly read yet again--which is why you won't see more than one poem in the Magazine each week, and why I am surprised (and slightly gratified) that the Times even bothers.  This poem is typical, for me.  It doesn't give itself up to a first reading, let alone a skim-over.  Its style and subject matter are well outside my comfort zone for poetry.  It is filled with allusions, turns of phrase, syntactical locutions, images, jump-cuts . . . all of which block my mind from the easy read it wants.  It calls upon me to slow down, reread, stop, ponder, wonder about, return, repeat.  It makes me ask, What are you talking about, Mr. Weaver?  and Who are you talking to?

In "American Income" I encounter a cultural point of view that is so not mine as to be opaque, obstinate in its refusal to be "read through" to some paraphrase that an aging white American male can formulate.  Which is why I've read the poem three times now, and typed it into this post as a kind of fourth reading, and why I will read it twice, three times more, I suppose.  Now that I'm invested in the language of the poem, I want to become equally invested in the voice, the situation of it, its "aboutness."  I want to paraphrase it to the extent that I can explain to somebody (me included) who might ask, What's it about?

Does that kill the poem?  Wrong question.  

The question should be, Does that rereading and paraphrasing help me understand a kind of poetry that I do not write, and likely cannot write?  Does it buy me some deeper insight into the possibilities of poetry, so that when I come to write my next poem, I'll write from a deeper understanding of what poetry is and what can be done with it (by me)?  So that I'll recognize more readily that the poem I just wrote is just good enough, and that that's not good enough?

Good enough? Settling for a draft when we should keep pushing (12.19.20)

Have you ever experienced this?  

You write a quick draft of a poem, maybe at a single sitting, and applaud yourself for the effort.  Your poem is ready to share.  One draft and it's a winner . . . Let's get it published!

But before too long--maybe you're waiting to fall off to sleep later that same day--it starts to nag you.  I could have expressed that image at little more tautly.  I might have over-written that narrative passage.  The closing could be, just maybe, a bit "graspy."  Hmmmm . . . that was a weak verb choice in the fifth line . . .

Lying there in the dark, you think maybe you declared victory and walked away from the hard work too soon.  Maybe you settled for a draft that looks GOOD ENOUGH.  

But if you go back to drafting, maybe you'll kill the idea right out of the poem.  Maybe you'll make a mess out of what seemed good enough in the first place.

Or maybe you'll see that the poem you drafted is just a vague imitation of itself, or of the original impulse you had when you started making language and lines.  Nobody wants to admit that!

What do you do when you're certainty begins to slip about the poem you've written?  Your response to this problem is what separates the artist from the sheep, to mix a metaphor.  The sheep hopes nobody else will notice.  The artist gets back to work.

Of course, this all supposes that you have that capacity to see your own work objectively in the first place.  If you don't, then acquire it.  How?  Workshops can help because they are (usually) designed to provide objective points of view of your work.  That is, so long as they aren't too programmatic, ideological, or otherwise bent to some single perspective, agenda or belief about poetry.  A trusted reader of your work--your personal editor, so to speak--is another way to garner external points of view of your work.  But in this case, "trusted" must mean somebody who has the interest, the analytical capability, and the ruthlessness to critique your work that you should be looking for.  "Trusted" means that you trust this reader to give an honest assessment.  

Still another way to become a more objective observer of your own work is to read.  And read widely.  Read poems that are outside your comfort zone, that you may not even enjoy reading.  Make a study of every poem you read.  How did this poem come to be?  How did the writer get from line 1 to line x?  What other options might this writer have chosen for that expression or this image?  What is this poem doing to me as I read it?

Finally, ask what your own relationship to your poem (to your writing) might be.  Are you making art or are you making nice?  Well?

An anthology of poems in lockdown . . . it's inevitable, I guess (12.16.20)

 This in today's NYT, by Dwight Garner: A Raging Pandemic Inspires Poetry with Little Bite.  I won't be running off to Flyleaf to pick a copy of this!

We should all talk someday about the role of the critic in our daily reading lives--serving or disserving?  But I think I thank Mr. Garner for warning me off of a likely bad purchase.

"What moves you most in a work of literature?" (11.30.20)

Evidently, I spend a lot of time reading the Sunday New York Times each week.  I am looking forward to, though doubting it will come about actually, a year of Sunday reading that is not merely about tribal politics and a rundown of the week's smelliest tweets.

The title of this blog I quote from this week's Book Review, the regular "By the Book" interview, this week with poet Claudia Rankine.  This is one of the questions the interviewer puts to Ms Rankine.  Her response is enlightening (reassuring? confirming and validating?) for us writers of poetry: "When I'm held by the beauty of the language, first and foremost, as opposed to simply being carried along by the plot."

Now, she may be speaking of reading novels and other forms of prose literature, which is the interviewer's focus, but Ms Rankine's remark comes from poetry.  To the extent that a poem is a work of art, it is NOT a plotline or an essay or a history (this last including all those forms of history: memoir, autobiography, biography, events current or distant).  It is language given shape, and in that, artistic meaning.

If you've not yet read any of Claudia Rankine's poetry, you should probably do so, just to make deeper sense out of the last bit of the paragraph above.  Artistic meaning.  Her poems are at once direct and emotional, but incredibly dense, layered, voiced.  They usually are not "linear": this happened, then this, next this, finally this.  I am still trying to understand (i.e., interiorize) most of the poems I've read by her.  Race is probably one barrier to my understanding.  Another is artistry, or that tendency in works of art to resist interpretation, re-statement, paraphrasing.

"What's it mean, what's it about?" applied to a poem doesn't yield a paraphrase or a discussion of referents.  Not first and foremost.  The only answer is "itself."

And "itself" is shaped language.  First and foremost, as Rankine says, of course, though she never says clearly what secondary or ancillary aspects of works of literature move her.  She implies these are indeed such things as plotline (being carried away by a story, a narrative, characters and relations among them), theme or subject matter (e.g., "whiteness," biography, voice and point of view).  But the language first and foremost.  

That's how a poet would understand the act of reading, right, as complement to the act of writing?

Poetry writing and solitude (11.29.20)

Just reading in this morning's NYT an editor's pick story about a couple living in the woods in the mountains of North Carolina, 18 miles from Hot Springs, the nearest town.  The story is about choosing the eremetic life, that is, the life of a hermit, again, a life of spiritual and actual solitude.  Obviously, in this time of mandated social distancing, the Times's editors felt this would be something readers would find readable . . . and I did.  

Maybe you will, too, given your love of poetry and poetry writing.  Writing, as we all know, is a solitary thing, even when done in the context of workshops, salons and other groups like Wednesdays@One.  What we haven't talked about so much is the spiritual inward-turning aspect of the art we practice, how much like prayer and meditation it can be.  Not talking about it is probably wise.  We might murder to dissect.  

But it's always good to know that we come together each week as members of a community devoted to one of the most introspective of the literary arts.

And by the way, you will be interested to know that W@1 has been convening now for over three years.  We began our little experiment this month in 2017.

American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, by Robert Bly (11.29.20)

I mentioned this book during last week's salon and thought a link to where you can pick up a copy might be of interest.  So, here it is American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, on Amazon.  There's something ironic about ordering a book of this title & subject from the global ameba-cite, but if you follow the irony, maybe that's instructive in and of itself.

Anyway, it's now a venerably older book on contemporary American poets and poetry, published in 1990.  Bly gathers together under this title a lifetime of writing about King Culture and the resistance to it.  One half of the book is devoted to his many essays on the art and its place in American society & culture.  The "old King" is his term for "the conservative mind-set inherited from Eliot and Pound and the triumphant flatness inherited from Descartes and Locke."  By 1990, this "inheritance," and the rejection of it, was a subject of retrospective, career-lookback books like American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.  So just remember if you get a copy, that was 30 years ago!

The other half of the book is a selection of essays Bly had written by 1990 about various poets whose work either represented the essential wildness of his title (true American poetry) or the inheritance from the old King.

Well, I've forgotten the discussion last week that led me to recommend this book.  But it can't hurt your general poetic education to pick up a copy and read it.

Apropos of Pronouns (11.27.20)

We talked last Wednesday about how some writers use pronouns in their poems to draw the reader in, to establish some space between artifact and consumer, or even to ignore the reader altogether.  One of our writers shared a poem that began by distancing itself from the reader (3rd person plural), then inviting the reader into the group (1st person plural), and ending by turning to face the reader directly (2nd person singular).  The writer couldn't have done that by mistake.  That was strategy.

I tried to make the point stick: when you write a poem, pay attention to what you're doing and have a reason for doing it, for the effect it's likely to have.  Of course, I am not about to discount the vast and revealing world of unintended effects, out of which so much good poetry comes.  But I wanted to exhort my fellow writers not to get caught up in the beauty of their own flow--that is, to be aware of audience (even if that audience is no more than you yourself at a later reading of your own work!).

And then today I come across David Orr's review of That Was Now, This Is Then, a new book of poems by Vijay Seshadri, in today's New York Times.  Orr doesn't focus so much on the grammar of what Seshadri is doing, his deployment of pronouns, but he does describe how this poet involves the reader "directly in whatever the poem is up to.  Often this is a subtle matter of convincing readers that they're part of a 'we'." 

So, I invite my fellow writers at W@1--and you, reader--to think about the pronouns you use in your poems and the effect these may have on your readers (again, even if that reader turns out later to be only yourself).  I also invite you as readers to pay close attention to how poets use pronouns in their poems.  These are potent rhetorical tools in the hands of experienced writers (poets, speechwriters, sales writers, writers with an axe to grind, etc.).  And to do so especially when a writer uses that all-inclusive "we," the most dangerous, conniving pronoun in the toolbox.  Make sure that you want to be a part of "whatever the poem is up to" each time you encounter a "we." 

What is a public park? (11.12.20)

Our new project has to do with public space.  I challenged W@1 to find lesser known, out of the way public parks around town and to write poems in honor of them.  The idea came to me because of Alice Ingram Park, a tiny gem of a public space about half a block from where I live.  It is situated on the corner of Elliott Road and Franklin Street, in front of the neighborhood fire station.  I've skirted or walked through this park dozens of times on my way up Franklin Street or across Franklin to Whole Foods Market.  For a public space, it certainly has a private, almost spiritual feel.

I know nothing at all about its namesake, Alice Ingram, but I'll take a stab and guess that she was a gardener, and had lots to do with the Chapel Hill Garden Club.  It was the Garden Club that funded the creation of the Park, in 1990.  A brass plaque affixed to a brick knee wall says the Park was dedicated in 1998.  I reached out to the current President of the Chapel Hill Garden Club for more information, who put me in touch with Bitty Holton, a long-time club member.  Ms Holton has no idea, either, about Alice Ingram.

The intersection there is busy and noisy, as Franklin Street leads west to NC 15-501 and I-40, east to downtown and campus.  Across the street are Village Gate Plaza and just up from that, Eastgate Shopping Plaza.  Besides the fire station, nearby are three banks, a nursing home, and law office.  There's also a mysterious business named "Japan Tobacco Co., Inc." as well as a dentist.  I imagine people walking the streets of Tokyo and Yokahama yellowing their teeth with fine imported North Carolina tobacco.

In the midst of all this commerce and traffic is little Alice Ingram Park.  Go ahead and map it.  It's there.  I've searched online for information about the park and its namesake but haven't found much.  Other than that name on the brass plaque, it's all a bit of a mystery.

Shade is provided courtesy of a large willow oak, a tree that I thought might be an American elm but which my wife says is something else, and four redbuds.  A cement walkway runs diagonally through the center, from the corner southwest to the knee wall just in front of the fire station.  Another path curves around the inside edge, from Elliott Road to Franklin Street and the city bus stop.  Someone etched a hop-scotch into the concrete of that one while it was still wet.  I've hopped it many times.  But I've never seen anyone else do that.  

The park has a single trash can that says linger . . . but recycle.  Recently, I noted it was lined with a fresh plastic trash bag.  Good to know the city still drops by to check on things.  My wife reminds me that there used to be a little pond as well, but that was filled in long ago.  She speculates that homeless people were bathing in it.  More likely, it just became a nuisance and expensive to keep clean and in good repair.  In fact, the park could use a makeover: new beds of flowers, some tree trimming, some brick work.

You can sit there, too, and people sometimes do.  There's no bench, but the brick knee wall is often occupied by somebody who's come there to wait for a bus on a hot, sunny day.  Noisy as traffic can be at this intersection, Alice Ingram Park somehow retains a cloistered feel, maybe because of its ample shade and border of redbuds, holly bush, and wrought iron fence.  It is a bowl, sloping slightly down from the edges toward the center, offering even more of a sense of privacy and remove.  (Actually, the bowlish design is common around this part of Chapel Hill, which rises as you go up Elliott Road to Coker Hills.  Thunderstorms almost always wash downhill toward East Franklin Street.  At the bottom of the bowl is a big drain, like in a sink.  The bowl is designed to capture runoff when it gets too much for the surrounding street sewers to handle.  The single drain slowly disperses water under Franklin Street, likely toward Booker Creek.)

Why would I suggest a project like this?  I mean, besides having something for W@1 writers to write about?  This little park's attraction for me, for one thing.  I'd like to think that the writers of W@1 also have their own private-public-sacred spaces.  Poetry often wants the out of the way, the overlooked, the neglected for subject matter.  (Looking at you, Emily Dickinson!)  But I thought it'd be a good idea for our writers to consider community as a subject to write about or out of, to examine what it means to have a physical space set aside for citizens.  In this year of social distancing, political unrest, and cultural upheaval, pondering community through a poem might be a useful project to undertake.

Not at all sure what this project will net, but we all might at least learn of some new parks around town that we hadn't visited before.

Disturbed . . . and writing poems (10.30.20)

This is not a blog for Halloween, despite the blue moon we're expecting tomorrow evening!

I was reading here a review of a new retrospective collection (Vol. 1) of the music of Joni Mitchell.  Recalling her earliest life as a song writer, she says, 

“I think I started writing to develop my own private world . . . and also because I was disturbed.”

I want to say, "Well, heck yeah!"  Especially of that latter statement, because I was disturbed.  But what a curious way to describe the creative urge.

Now, Mitchell was speaking at least partly of being abandoned by the father of her first child, which she gave away at adoption when starting out in cold, cold Canada.  (He packed off to California, where "everything is warmer.")  But it got me thinking about how much writing gets done out of some form of disturbance or other.

I'm not going into any essay about poetry and madness.  That's for somebody else to ponder.  What I have in mind is a much less debilitating kind of "disturbed-ness," albeit a kind that certainly interrupts your day without warning. For me, and I think for my friends at Wednesdays@One, and for just about every writer of poetry I've ever encountered, something happens to get me to take a note, write out a line, begin a poem, stay engaged through a first draft.  It might be a memory.  It might be a recognition or an epiphany.  It might be an overheard remark or a rhythm in someone's speech.  

Once, I discovered a black, black house fly on a windowsill.  It was winter and a foot of snow had fallen overnight.  The sill had recently been painted a brilliant white so the fly stood out from this background of whiteness in three glorious dimensions.  It had died there in all that whiteness, just inside a single pane of glass that didn't do much at all to keep out the cold, perfectly balanced and triangular.  It cast a voluptuously small shadow in the sunlight.  It so disturbed my morning's routine that the image imprinted itself, apparently permanently so, if this blog note is any indicator.  And it demanded a poem, which I wrote some weeks later, made of wide, prosy lines and fashioned into three slab-like stanzas of equal length.

Someday I'll explore how that poem's blocky but regular shape reflects the encounter with death it describes, or rather, tries to counterweigh it.  But for here, let it suffice to say I wrote because I was disturbed by that image of black on white and the thought of a mighty event--a creature's death--happening there on the windowsill.  Out of which, a poem must be made.

It's the business of an artist, poets included, to be continually open to disturbance.  I think the rest of the world depends on artists being so.  And there lies one of the commitments we make to art: to be disturbed, and then to make art.

Diane di Prima, 1934 - 2020

So . . . how can Diane di Prima be such a household name in my house and be totally absent from my library?  How can I have most of William Bronk's books on my shelves but nothing by her?  I can't even find an anthology in my collection with poems by Diane di Prima in it!

This says something about me, of course, i.e., the big holes in my reading of American poetry.  It also says something about American publishing of the past sixty or seventy years.  Plenty of Ginsberg out there in the mainline presses.  Not much readily available by or about Ms di Prima, though.

Anyway, Diane di Prima, 1934 - 2020.

The LA Times obituary

Topic sentences . . . (10.13.20)

First things first.  Pretty cool news about Louise Gluck, ay?  I wonder what winning a Nobel does for your artistic psyche?  I'd think it would offer more burden than anything else.  Apparently, Sartre did, too.

-----------

Recently, we discussed a poem in a Wednesdays@One salon where everyone felt the author had lost the thread of the making.  A pattern seemed to be laid down early in the poem which then was abandoned, or in this case simply neglected.  Or maybe just never recognized.  The poem wandered away into thickets of pretty words, and never found its way back.  The author initially tried to justify the errancies, but ultimately was as unconvinced by the poem as the rest of us.

Now, I've said before that poems begin in sound.  Much of their power resides in the spoken word, in rhythm and pitch, in the acoustics of art.  Meaning arises from there, often.  But there is "sound," and then there is sound.  "Sound" is noise.  Almost everything following the opening stanza of this W@1 author's poem veered toward noise.  Sound is form and intention, however illogical or chaotic it may seem at first hearing.  Prettiness usually falls into the "sound" category, art into the sound category.

Before I lose the thread myself, here is our project for next week . . . 

Scroll down to find an assortment of stanzas and/or passages from poems I chose at random from my own library.  Select one of the passages and follow its lead to write a new poem.  Study the passage.  Read it through several times.  Then read it aloud.  Try memorizing it and then reciting it into a mirror.  If you keep a poetry notebook or a journal, write it out there and then break it down, analyze it.  Consider its "statement" and its potential context(s).  Can it be paraphrased, that is, if someone asked, could you say, "This passage is about/describes, introduces, takes us to . . . "?  Ponder its grammar and construction (lineation, syntax, punctuation, subordinations, verbs and tenses).  Note its figures -- metaphors and similes, analogies, personifications, slangs, heightened speech, alliteration, rhyme.  Hear its tones, such as irony, guile, clarity, simplicity, evenness, flourish, grandness or sublime-ness, colloquialism and other folksiness.  Is it a cry?  A shout?  A whisper?  A plea?  Is its language aggressive or dismissive or "healing" or admonitory or analytical or questioning or something else?  Does the passage suggest a rhetorical approach, in addition to the poetic; that is, does it suggest an opinion, a preferred point of view; is it attempting to teach you or convince you?

What I'm asking is that you internalize the piece of poetry you select, in part to make it your own, in part to get a sense of its poetic possibilities -- that is, of your poetic options.  So read through them all and then, if one strikes you as something you can work with, go for it.  But don't just start writing!  Do what I describe in the paragraph above.  Each segment comes from the beginning of a poem that some poet has already written and published.  I've chosen relatively obscure poems to discourage you from looking up the completed original.  You are to make your own original, using this beginning as your "topic sentence."

Which brings me back to the title of this post and that poem we discussed recently.  I believe the author of that errant poem failed to recognize the path suggested by the first stanza he'd/she'd composed.  A common error, by the way, even among the professionals.  I don't think this was intentional.  I do believe that had the author paused once in a while to re-read that opening stanza and consider its form, "statement," lyrical quality, specificity (or gauziness), diction, word choice and order, figures, concreteness, etc., that a different and more coherent poem would have emerged.  This might have taken more effort, more thought and feeling, and more time.  The writer's process might have been more recursive and tentative.  But I think the result might have been superior.  

So what I'm suggesting here is a writing technique, which is to treat an opening stanza or paragraph of a poem like the topic sentence of a prose paragraph.  I recall helping my Freshman Comp students devise topic sentences for their 500-word essays and for individual paragraphs, then advising them to write the topic sentence onto a piece paper and to tape that piece of paper somewhere above their writing desk, right where they could look at it again and again as they developed their material.  I suggested series of questions they could put to themselves as they worked: 

• Does the paragraph or essay in some way develop the thought of that topic sentence?
• Does the material in the paragraph/essay explain, question, illustrate the thought expressed in the topic sentence?
• Is the tone of the paragraph's/essay's language consistent with the tone of the topic sentence, or is it implied by the topic sentence?

Not all poems can be written like they are five-paragraph / three-subtopic expository essays.  Often enough, I've decided that the opening stanza of a poem I've been working on doesn't work in that position, and so the poem doesn't work either.  But almost always, when I write a poem, there is one stanza or set of lines that contains the DNA of the poem, that functions as the coordinate I need for making the particular map that is that poem.  As I compose, I continually return to that segment as a way of checking the compass, of making sure I haven't wandered away from what it promises.

This technique doesn't always work, that is, doesn't always result in a good poem, at least not at first writing.  But sometimes, if I come back to that passage months or years later, it still serves as a guideline or a pointer, saying, "go that way," which I can see more clearly.  And I'm not saying the poets who wrote the poems from which the passages below come followed this technique.  Everybody deploys different techniques at different instances for different purposes.  But try writing a poem with one of these passages as your opening "gambit"; get to know the possibilities the gambit offers.  Tape that passage, if you like, above your writing desk.  Keep referring back to it as you write.  Let the passage lead you -- don't try to force it into something else you'd like to write.

Then, next week, show us what you've composed.  Have fun!  The openers follow.

--------------

Wind rocks the car.

We sit parked by the river,

silence between our teeth.

--------------

The leaves, though little time they have to live,

Were never so unfallen as today,

And seem to yield us through a rustled sieve

The very light from which time fell away.

--------------

It is all a rhythm,

from the shutting 

door, to the window

opening,

the seasons, the sun's

light, the moon,

the oceans, the 

growing of things . . .

---------------

America, I know I could do better by you,

though I stoop conscientiously three times a day

to pick up my dog's waste from the grass

with black biodegradable bags. And lest you suspect

that this is more pretension than allegiance, know

my dog was the one at the shelter no one else

would take.

---------------

The garden admires you.

For your sake it smears itself with green pigment,

the ecstatic reds of the roses

so that you will come to it with your lovers.

---------------

O tulip, tulip you bloom all day and later sway

a deep-wasted limbo above the dinner table,

waiting for a coin to drop into your well,

for the stars to pin your stem to their lapel.

---------------

I take off my shirt, I show you

I shaved the hair out under my arms

I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair

on my legs with a knife, getting white

---------------

I move the curtain back,

and something has gone wrong.

I am in a smoky place,

an Algerian cafe.

Why am I surprised to be surprised about being published in Oddball Magazine? (10.3.20)

I discovered that a poem of mine, "Affliction," was published in Oddball Magazine at the end of July.  It should be embarrassing to admit that someone my age googles his own name, but there's a lesson here . . . oily as it feels to look for yourself online, it's probably a wise thing to do if you're a writer who actively submits material to various outlets.  Since nobody at Oddball informed me that they'd accepted a poem of mine, and since I'd forgotten I'd sent them poems (in January), I was surprised to see they'd actually published the poem.  Oddball Magazine.  Maybe I should be surprised I'm surprised.

Well, I am gratified that one of those poems found a home!  Oddball seeks work from writers and visual artists with the idea of matching individual pieces--a poem to a painting, a piece of fiction to a photograph.  My poem is paired with a slightly disturbing photo of people wearing gas masks.  Hmmm.  The name is Oddball, after all.

Anyway, go take a look.  And if you like the magazine, try submitting something yourself.  Or maybe supporting them with a subscription.  Imagine letting that slip out at your next virtual reading . . . how you gave money to Oddball.

The Urban Eclogue, or, Poems in Praise of Pavement (9.30.20)

We haven't discussed the eclogue in all our time together at Wednesdays@One, though many of poems that you've submitted over the years have touched on or gestured toward the genre.  What's an eclogue?

Robert Fagles defines it literally in the introduction to his translation of The Aeneid: "a word that means something like 'Selections'."  An eclogue is a "taste of life" that you might be more or less familiar with, but have perhaps not experienced directly.

But more to the point of this project (writing poems with the title "Pavement"), Fagles goes on to describe the eclogue as "a genre of poetry that used the Homeric hexameter for very un-Homeric themes: the singing contests, love affairs, and rivalries of shepherds and herdsmen who relieved the boredom of their lonely rural life by competing in song accompanied by pipes and pursuing their love affairs and rivalries far from the city and the farmlands, in the hills with their sheep, goats, and cattle."

Before I go farther . . . the project.  Write a poem with the title "Pavement."  Your poem can be literally about pavement; it can be about pavement in relation to earth or soil, that is, wilderness; it can be about pavement in relation to cultivated earth or soil, that is, farmland (and all the things that go with farmland: farms and farming, farmers, crops, animals and husbandry, farm customs, tilling, planting and harvests, weather, etc.).  It can be about one way of life as opposed to or in complement to another way of life.  Or, as I say, it can simply be about . . . pavement.

I mentioned during our salon today that I need your help writing a jazz poem on this subject.  If each of you comes up with a take on "pavement" as a theme or a rhetorical device in a poem, I hope to grab from you some insights, language, rhythms, tones, etc. that I can make my own poem from, something that my band can then work on as a jazz piece.  

But I have another use in mind as well.  I am working on what you might call a group of "urban eclogues," poems that very loosely follow Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar.  But instead of setting them in the countryside, among shepherds and their flocks, as Spenser did, I place them in New York City, where my "shepherds" are city denizens of all sorts and settings are street scenes and cares are cosmopolitan, urban, "concrete."  So your poems titled "Pavement" will help with this project, too.  But see below for more background on the eclogue and some of its basic elements (which I'm trying to preserve or at least suggest in my urban version).

I've joked before, probably even during one of our salons, that I prefer pavement.  Ha. Ha.  I mean this as a lifestyle choice and as a philosophy.  I prefer the community that pavement implies (town vs. country, for instance).  I prefer the stability of pavement, rather like the firm footing (literally and figuratively) that paved surfaces promise.  "Pavement" implies to me order, governance; safety and security; achievement, public expression; humanity and community; mutuality and responsibility (as in the give and take of living among others); norms.  "Pavement" implies to me structures, such as buildings and bridges, thoroughfares and boulevards, promenades and city parks, cities in other words.  "Pavement," as I use the term when I say "I prefer pavement," implies the social life, law, commonality, and from there, tolerance and forbearance, interdependence.

For you it might mean something like this, or something more like scourge, inhumanity, technology run amok, hubris, the unnatural, even the death of nature.  That's okay for your poem.  I'm after your take on whatever the word "pavement" conjures for you intellectually and emotionally.

I'll close with a few of the elements of an eclogue, which may or may not be helpful as you think about your poem, so feel free to ignore these things.

• The pastoral, or rural life as more natural and more humane than city life
• Shepherds (that is, not aristocrats or intellectuals or the hoity-toity) in their element: tending fields and flocks, lounging in the great outdoors, suffering wants and ills, defending against dangers of all kind--but readily recognizable dangers, like marauding wolves
• Love complaints, love rivalries, love songs and ballads (eclogues often embed songs, ballads and the like)
• Contests, friendly or otherwise, between shepherds or country wanderers, on various subjects, such as country vs. city, competing prowess, lovelorn-ness, rivalries in love, or fortune good and bad
• Dialogue between or among characters that are often realized as types (the wastrel, the frugal shepherd, the wise old man, the impatient young man, the cheat, the puritan, the fool, the faker--note that I haven't mentioned women in this list; women in pastoral writing, eclogues especially, are depicted as objects of desire, the things shepherds lust after and compete for . . . so, what's changed, eh?)

The eclogue, as I mention above, is a slice-of-life depiction of the rural, its customs and cares, its foibles and nobility.  

If you want to learn more about eclogues and pastoral poetry, just google the terms.  There's plenty out there.

If This Is Love . . . Program for Jazz's Inaugural Album!

Friends!

Program for Jazz, the spoken word jazz band I write for & perform with, will soon release our first album!  We are sooooo excited about this milestone in the band's history . . . and we think you will be too.  We spent most of the summer inside our own little creative bubble rehearsing material for the album, then masked up and went into Bunker Sound Studios to record and mix.  Our producer-engineer, Steven Raets, has done a marvelous job of capturing the band's special sound.  Here we are in studio . . .

and the band with Steven . . .

The timeline for release isn't definite, but we hope to have it out in time to make your holiday shopping list.  The album's title, "If This Is Love," isn't quite set in stone yet either, but we'll make that decision soon. 

We're still working on one or two permissions to use and reproduce lyrics/poems that aren't our own and that are under copyright.  Once that's in the bag, I'll reproduce all the album's poems and lyrics here.

Until then, we'll keep plugging away at finishing the fine carpentry on the album and organizing a release campaign.  

We.  Are.  So.  Pumped!

New look for Adelaide Literary Magazine

 ALM has upgraded its online presence and look.  Take a look!

Adelaide Literary Magazine

While I'm thinking about it, visit Katherine James Books to order your copy(ies) of Doug Stuber's Heron Clan series.  The latest is a huge international undertaking.  Where does this man find the energy?

Heron Clan at KJB

Reading Dostoyevsky for the Poetry (9.1.20)

Confession: I opened a copy of Crime and Punishment for the first time this past month.  Part of the pandemic reading program, maybe--get to those books that have rested untouched on your shelves for 30 years.  I majored in Modern American Poetry, after all.  Why would I spend time reading a fat Russian novel of the 19th Century?  As it turns out, for the poetry.

The copy I've moved around with me for all these years isn't mine, actually, but my sister's.  I must have borrowed it intending to read the novel which then got lost among the other books of my library.  Her name is elegantly autographed on the title page and, given the book's brittle, yellowed pages, it clearly is a text from some course at university (we attended the same school, three years apart) in the late 1960s.  

What strikes me about this copy as I plow through it are the occasional marginal notes in my sister's unmistakable hand: blue ballpoint ink, a cursive that only a professional elementary school teacher would have developed.  Those notes are frequent in the first dozen pages before tapering off to stray marginal ticks, an underlined phrase here and there, then nothing for over a hundred pages.  Then suddenly a rush of underlines and comments on the the translation's text in the margins.  The notes have that cadence of pedagogy you'll probably recognize in many of your own college textbooks, reflecting a remark or some idea your professor (or TA?) told you to be on the lookout for as you read the next few chapters of the assignment.

But what really intrigues me are the 150-page gaps throughout.  Was my sister skipping whole chapters (no doubt like I did, like some of my own students did), kind of reading her own Cliff Notes text of the novel?  Maybe.  But what if she was in fact reacting to the novel's meta-text at those points where her marginal notes appear?  By meta-text I mean of course that aspect of any writing, especially artistic writing, that reveals itself as artifice: the style, tone, voice, syntax, narrative structure, cadence and figure of creation.  

What if she'd become caught up in--implicated in--the story Dostoyevsky tells and only occasionally became aware that she was actually reading and that the text was performing?  Isn't this when you, too, underline a word or phrase of a text, or record a thought in the margin of something you're reading?  You become aware of a repetition, a certain flow of language, a performance. Now, all creative texts perform continuously; they are performative.  We note their performance more readily at certain junctures than at others, say, in purple patches, or especially lyrical passages, or in unusually constructed forms of expression.  We are awakened to what we're actually about: reading texts.

I think this is the "poetry" of any writing, that portion where the text draws attention to itself, to what it is and to what we are as its reader.  Poetry is the one verbal art almost completely devoted to its status as pure text.  The story it tells is the story of its own writing, which is retold with every new reading.

Of course, poems can be about something besides themselves, and that is in fact how most people read and write poems, as other ways of stating something about the world.  My friends at Wednesdays@One usually react to the poems we share on this level alone, at least initially: How true that expression is!  How accurate!  How real!  But we don't (can't) discuss poems very long before their textuality asserts itself.  We begin to note rhymes and rhythms, images and lines, locutions and hyperbole, ellipses and "loaded" expressions.  We begin to see where a poem succeeds and fails, on its own terms and also on the terms of convention.  We start to unpack the poem.  

That's when we really start to get down to the work of Wednesdays@One.

Discipline and indiscipline in poetry writing (8.26.20)

Just this past week I had a conversation about craft with a fellow writer of poetry.  We talked about style, tone and voice; about the work of drafting and revising; about converting experience from raw thought and feeling into cooked art, through the medium of language.  We talked about mistakes and the problem of recognizing when a poem is finished and "good," and, in this context, about intention and outcome.

The subject of discipline came up several times, explicitly and implicitly--discipline and its mirror opposite, indiscipline.  That idea has stuck with me.

Discipline is the same in any human endeavor, be it poetry writing or dribbling a basketball.  Skill comes from it.  Mastery never comes without it.  No matter how talented or precocious you are--and there have been many, many precocious poets (Rimbaud, Paul Muldoon)--discipline determines how good you really become, how you improve, even if you start out writing from a higher plane of capability than most.

What's discipline exactly?  There's nothing exact about it.  Discipline is as various and personal as every writer, like voice and style.  Your discipline may be my deathly writing process.  Mine may be your stone wall beyond which you can never go.  Another's may be our slippery slope to mediocrity.

If you scroll through the many entries of this ongoing blog, you'll find I am sure that discipline is a frequent subject by some other name.  I've written about the importance of making a commitment to writing poetry.  I've written about the need, or at least benefits, of making poems internally consistent.  I've written also about revising a poem especially when you think that first draft is the one.  I've done a series on the "habits" of writing poetry.

One thing poetry writing discipline is is simply getting down to the task of it, sitting down at your desk and doing the work.  If you want to write poetry, then get busy writing poems.  

But I think I am talking now about a different sort of discipline.  It's the discipline of keeping your poem aloft while gravity constantly pulls its parts and pieces down around your feet.  (I like this metaphor because I once taught myself how to juggle!)  How does one do that?

Discipline means understanding, eventually, what your poem tries to be, then channeling everything in that direction: diction, image, tone, voice, line, figure of speech, detail, point of view, persona.  Discipline can also mean not overdoing these things, concentrating too much on mechanics and technique so that your poem starts to feel bolted together rather than something grown organically from an idea and a feeling.  

Above all, discipline means recognition: seeing in your draft that this line contradicts the sense of the earlier line; that this image isn't quite appropriate to the feeling, or is cliched; that the flow you achieve in the draft makes for pretty sound, but not much else; that a reader who is not you might not hear or see or feel what you do when you reread this passage or that sequence of words. Discipline means recognizing that your poem has achieved its becoming, it has become, and it is finished, and any further editing will only detract.

This kind of discipline is hard; it's the hardest work of writing poetry and the part that most weekend poets abandon with abandon.  If what you want is to be a weekend poet, more power to you, so long as you don't believe that you're writing real poetry, that is, making art.

I can always tell when I'm writing in an undisciplined way--I'm paying close attention to everything but the verbal icon at hand, or to its possibilities and limitations, at least.  A voice inside my head tells me this is good stuff, that's a neat way of putting it, this obscure reference is okay because it's the only one in the draft, that lazy locution is acceptable (because I am too lazy to think up a better one), this draft is good enough, or, worst of all, THIS IS HOW I FEEL.  I am a poet.  I get to break all the rules, or, the rules don't apply.  It's how I feel.

I don't have to show such work to too many people to confirm what I think is true about my draft.  It's clear in their reactions: either they find the poem "perfect," "beautiful," "n'ere so well express'd" without having taken more than a few seconds to scan it; or they say something like, "Well, I never understood this stuff anyway."  Of course, I knew this before I handed the draft to these readers.

Is there some conclusion here?  Not really.  Well, maybe.  Discipline is not peculiar to poetry or even to art.  But it is vital.  Indiscipline is fatal.

Inter-art collaborations (8.15.20)

If you've never collaborated with an artist who works with forms outside your own (say, painting, dance, music, sculpture), you're missing joy and discovery.  I highly recommend giving it a try.  In fact, let's do a project!

A friend and long-time inter-art collaborator, Barbara Nathanson, sent me an email with a link to an interview she gave recently about her art and career.  The interviewer asks about her process, and in answering, Barbara explains:

"I like to work with the serendipity of chance. It keeps presenting new imagery to work with and an excitement of discovery. I layer a texture mix, let it dry, paint it, sand it, add another layer of texture mix, dry, paint, repeat until the imagery/surface “becomes” what it is meant to become."

This statement virtually jumped off the page at me!  Accounting for the analogy of layering textures as a repeating process, I can say that Barbara describes my own writing process perfectly.  So often in Wednesdays@One commentary, I and my fellow poetry writers confirm how a poem builds "until the imagery/surface 'becomes' what it is meant to become."  Only, we don't put "becomes" inside quotation marks--we accept that poems will become what they become, that our skills and talents as writers of them lie mainly in our ability to nudge and prod, shape and direct, but otherwise get out of the way of that becoming.  Our creativity has as much to do with "letting" the poem become as it has to do with "making" the poem.

All of this "letting," of course, says something about our relationship to art, and particularly to poetry.  We are as much midwife as progenitor.  (What should go without saying here--but I'll say it anyway--is that the more experience we garner as midwives, the better we understand the tradition of midwifery and its history, the better midwives we are.)

Barbara and I worked together from about 1993 until 2003-4 on a poetry-to-painting project that resulted in more than 150 poems and dozens of paintings.  Here's how it worked.  It began with a shoebox full of old plastic microfiches used to catalog a bookstore's inventory. (A bookstore in downtown L.A. was converting its inventory to electronic digital files from thousands of these microfiches.)  Barbara, ever the enterprising worker of materials, wanted to repurpose some of these cards as an art installation for an upcoming show and asked me to create a "found poem" from some of the contents, that she might post as part of the installation.  

Well, I failed miserably, after a weekend of trying to come up with something I'd feel comfortable sharing with an art public.  I'd gleaned over 150 "lines" of text from these microfiches that just read like a list of words, hardly like lines of a poem.  Sleeping on it, I realized however that what I'd actually created was not a poem of 150+ lines, but a list of 150+ titles of possible poems, poems to be written . . . somehow, someday.  With apologies, I admitted my failure to Barbara but proposed a new project--to begin making poems from some of those titles, poems from which she might find inspiration for new paintings. 

Lucky for me, Barbara a) had already given up on the first idea of an installation, and b) was intrigued by the idea of a longer-term collaboration.  And so I got busy.  And so Barbara got busy.  And so a long and fruitful collaboration was born.  I don't know whether Barbara maintains any of the original collaboration on her website (check it out under the link provided to right, in the "Take a Look" section of this blog), but you'll at least get an idea of the style and breadth of her art.

All of which leads me to a new project for W@1: collaborations.  This project likely will take a while, so let's put a deadline on it of December 15, 2020 (in time to produce holiday gifts?).  Find an art and an artist with whom you'd like to work and who'd like taking on a small art-to-art project.  Propose a way of working together, such as exchanging existing work and responding to it via your particular art; prompting each other with a theme or an image; or some other approach.

The catch is this: your collaboration must produce something new on both sides.  So, for example, you can't just go out to some friend's web site, find a painting, then write an ekphrastic piece about it.  No, no, no, no, no!  Both you and your collaborator must produce something new from the collaboration.  (This is why we're giving ourselves the rest of the summer and all of fall to complete this project.)  

You might have a collaborator in mind already and might be able to get a jump on things, and might even produce something by next week!  But my suggestion is this . . . give it some thought.  Take your time.  Invite some back and forth between you and your collaborator--collaborate!--see what happens.  Sometimes, Barbara's painting would respond to a single image, even a musical phrase in a poem I'd sent to her.  Sometimes, after seeing a painting, I'd write a different poem influenced by color or line or image or material.  A color might evoke a memory or a feeling or a sensual experience that would serve as the starting point for a poem, and the finished product would appear to have nothing to do with the painting at all.  My poems were not "about" her paintings, nor were her paintings "about" my poems.

In an area like RTP, you shouldn't have any trouble finding an artist with whom you can work.  Have fun!

About a poem titled "White Poem" (7.29.20)

At today's Wednesdays@One salon (electronic), things didn't seem to go well when my poem, "White Poem," came up for reading and discussion.  I contributed to the not going well as much as anybody, so let me use my blog tonight to get more deeply into the discussion.  But first, the poem . . .

White Poem

A meta-poem is a poem about tis own poem-ness, about itself.

How you experience such a poem is a matter of conjecture.

According to one theory, you're having lunch at the counter

For whites only and one of them takes the empty stool next to you.

According to another theory, you shave in the mirror early

One morning after a night of terror, and it stares back at you.

You can probably experience this poem with less uncertainty,

As it appears to point to something other than itself.

But conjecture, as you can see, often takes a grain of salt,

Which you normally find in the shaker on the whites only counter.

You can sprinkle it onto the fried egg Delores just served up,

Or you can put it in your pocket and go out again tonight.

-------

I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago for our group's project on couplets and have labored over it since.  I hadn't intended for it to become what it became, became in part, anyway.  I set out to make a poem of couplets, nothing more, without regard to content or subject matter of any particular kind.  Content would flow from whatever thoughts, feelings and rhythms arose from making couplets--letting a first line be a guide to a second in each pairing, and one "coupleted" idea generate another.  The process led it where it led.  As the author, I could have interrupted this process at any point--something I sometimes do--turned the poem down another channel of thought and feeling, or stopped it altogether and begun again with a different intent, maybe even a different process (such as selecting the theme, then setting it to verse).

But I chose to stay with this process and this poem to see where it might lead me, feeling this was the more organic approach to let the poem develop as it "wanted," like a discovery engine.  And the engine took the poem, me, and my W@1 cohort partly to Jim Crow racism and how a white male writes a poem (that is, makes art) within that cruel history.

(Right there, have I used a qualifying term, the word cruel, as if I can identify with the many objects of Jim Crow cruelty?  Or have I tried to pre-empt at least in my own mind any objection that of course I cannot possibly identify?  That I cannot because I am a product of a privileged class of Americans, and necessarily blinded, always and ever blinded?)

And so this poem dwells on what it means to make art in a fraught world, what it means for a white male writer to make art in a world fraught with racism.  All the world is fraught, all possible worlds are fraught, fraughtness being one definition of "world," and the world is ever fraught.  Fraught by what are, in this time and place that is meaningful enough to build a poem from, race and racism.  The poem, rather than call out racism or cry out against it (Seriously, what am I going to write, racism is bad?), wants to break open if it can the assumptions that art can be created under the circumstances of racism, so-called white art at any rate, that a poet like I can write from his privileged and blinkered point of view of the subject, or should even attempt to, and whether the attempt is valuable to anyone.  At least I think this is where the poem goes, wants to say.

The first reaction today was that the poem pushes some boundaries and transgresses one in particular, with the phrase "one of them" in the fourth line.  I say "reaction" because, to be fair to all participating, all of our responses on a given Wednesday are reactive.  Our format doesn't give us time to dwell on a poem's various facets, features, fidelities, failures.  The critique of being over the line was positioned as the phrase's potential for offending people of color.  The leveler of the critique, I think, really meant that the phrase is privileged or worse, racist, and I wish those characterizations had come out, for honesty's sake.  This reader suggested that the phrase be changed to something like "a Black person."

In another certain kind of context, this critique would be spot on, and I would have immediately seen the error not just in thinking but in feeling.  There lies one of my objections to the critique (which, had I been myself more prepared to talk about the poem, I might have expressed more honestly and forthrightly).  To object to such a phrase, in and of itself, on race grounds is to commit a very un-nuanced reading of the poem in hand.  Worse yet, it is to import a context to the poem that clearly is not there.  This is a reading that surprised and disappointed me, given that many in our group are not just practiced writers of poetry who should understand the role of context in art, but also people with advanced degrees in the art form or at least in literature, who really should be expected to read for nuance, even if ultimately it's not there or has been left hanging.  There are reactions, and there are knee-jerk reactions.

(It's entirely possible that a lack of nuance or a faulty execution of it is one major fault of this poem, which is why I shared it with the group, to help determine whether the poem got to where I thought it had.)

For another objection, the phrase "a Black person" narrows the poem's scope to mere social comment--not necessarily a bad poetic objective, but not the one of this poem.  It would mean a different poem.  This poem almost studiously avoids social comment of that kind.  My objection came across a bit more strident than I intended at the time because I overreacted to a solution built on a misreading of the poem, a "downward" but not also an "upward" reading.  What's this mean?  I get to that below.

The poem, as I say above, wants to be about the conditionality or provisionality or contingency of "writing white" in a fraught world (thus the title).  "White" carries of course racial and political meaning in the context of this poem; but it also has some bearing on the very idea of art.  "Writing white" has artistic implications in the sense that such writing is ever (or thought ever to be) safe, unassailable, pre-emptive . . . but is empty.  If you write white, you write from privilege; and I argue--and I hope the poem argues--that if you are white, that is of privilege, you write white.  How can you not?  And therefore, how can you say anything about anything that is not infused with that whiteness?  Even when you write racism is bad, you write from privilege, and you write safely, unassailably, and pre-emptively.  But you write emptily.

Another critique in this discussion went something like this: Why do you take us back there?  The critique refers to the image of the whites only counter and the allusion to night-riders.  Those things, after all belong to another time.  To which I reply, Yes!  To a whites only time!  But those images and allusions do not belong to another racism.  They belong to the racism we still practice today, of the knee in the neck, the red-lined neighborhood, the token hire.  So why then doesn't the poem introduce those more current expressions of racism?  Why does it "take us back there"?  Because to me, these more "contemporary" expressions of racism are equivalent to saying racism is bad.  Why would I say or write something that rolls across every screen you own every hour of every day of every year?  The poem takes us back there because we never left.

But shouldn't I just say that, then, and let the poem be: we never stopped being a racist country.  Why don't I just say racism is bad, if that's what I really mean?  Well, that is not what I mean, and I hope not what the poem means.  That is what I have struggled to not make the poem mean!

Which leads me back to the loaded phrase "one of them."  To object to this phrase as if it were the only words of the line it appears in, indeed of the poem, is to load it with only the fraughtness of our current moment, familiar and disheartening as it is.  I understand, I think, the urge to load up on the fraught (in this case, racist) world--it's done every day everywhere.  But that's only reading down the poem.  The pronoun, "them," also looks back up the poem to another more present antecedent: the meta-poem of the opening line.  The connection being drawn here--and it occurred to me literally as I turned from the fist couplet to write the second and set the table for the rest of the poem--is between making art and living in the fraught world.  How does one do it?  How does one justify it?  How does one make it meaningful?  

And this is the meta condition of this poem, how it is about itself and about something else at the same time.  In one drafting session, I recognized the fraught possibilities of the very phrase "one of them," and considered revising it to something like "and it takes the empty stool next to you."  This change made the reference more explicit, easier to trace, more certain and less dependent (on context, on my reader's sensibility and historical knowledge), but does it improve the poem or your experience of it?  Maybe so, if what you're after is a White Poem, if that's where you feel comfortable.  I don't.

Re-imagining the ancients (7.27.20)

Contemporary American poets don't write about classical subjects that often.  After all, that's not American.  From time to time, a poet will issue a new translation of The Iliad (Robert Pinsky and Caroline Alexander, for instance), or the Aeneid (Robert Fagles, who was not a poet but a scholar) or even The Divine Comedy (John Ciardi).  But by and large, since at least W.C. Williams, we have stuck to American subjects and voices.

But that doesn't mean we can't take on antiquity, nor that we shouldn't.  

You'll be relieved to know that I'm not going to ask you to translate any of those pieces!  You can try that if you like.  But I do think we all might benefit from stepping back from our daily cares--our viruses and injustices and politics and economics--to explore the ancient world in a poem.  Or to be more precise, to engage with a classical personage. 

Here are some guidelines:

• No fictional characters, like Achilles or Athena.  Instead find yourself a figure with some historical record, however slight or compromised, someone we know lived.  And though you could engage with a fellow poet, you could also take on some other personage like Julius Caesar, or Averroes.  Imagine writing a poem in conversation with or about a moment in the life of Sinnecharib, the Abyssinian king (d. 681 BC), or perhaps even more intriguing, his wife, Naqi-a?   Was she queen, partner, spouse, all of these?
• The classical period only.  This means figures of ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, Alexandria, Peking, Japan, Mayan culture, even Saxons and Celts, Vikings and Visigoths, ancient Palestine.  You might have some interest in ancient Eskimos or Ethiopians, but make it "ancient," by which I mean, before Europe and the Ottoman Empire and colonialism.
• You can write a poem that is an address to this person, that seeks to explode some myth about the biography, that invents something about him or her, puts the ancient into a different context (even anachronistically, if you wish).  You should try to be faithful to something about the person, to recognize that he or she existed.  What I ask you to avoid is writing simple, straight biography: Xerxes lived here and did this, etc.  That's just googling.  Engage.

How about a poem to Ghengis Khan or Buddha or Sappho?  How about a poem in conversation with Aristophanes, Homer, Virgil?  Or maybe a poem of Xerxes, the Venerable Bede, John the Baptist, Pontius Pilot, Mary Magdalene, Ruth (was she real?).  Forget Plutarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer.  Nor does your subject have to be famous; just documented in some way, so that we know the person existed.

For instance, how much do we really know about Jesus?  This means, no poems about Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, but maybe a poem about Jesus the dissident?  On this particular subject, you might find Browning's poem "A Death in the Desert" instructive.  It's long, as Browning poems often are, especially the dramatic monologues, but this one speaks exactly to what this project addresses--trying to peel back the myths that surround some of our most cherished stories.

Tennyson wrote an almost good poem about Ulysses in his dotage.

Okay, your objective is hopeless.  You'll never reveal the real person.  You weren't there!  But that's not the point of the project.  The project is for you to engage with your subject differently than the party line.  I've included below some examples of poets engaging in more or less this way, just to get you started.  Some deal with recognizable public figures, some with obscure ones.  All speak imaginatively to or of their subjects.

The Cucumbers of Praxcilla of Sicyon

                                                                --Jack Gilbert

Coupla thoughts about couplets (7.3.20)

One poetic form we haven't discussed much is the couplet, that two-line wonder that Alexander Pope mastered like no other serious writer writing in the English language.  Couplets are simultaneously fluid and constricting, easy and hard to write.  How can this be?

For the difficulty/constraining part, how much can you really say in two lines, in Western Culture anyway?  As soon as you begin the first line, the need to resolve it looms there at the end of the second.  Talk about creative pressure!  It's no wonder that Pope, for one, extended the form into epic proportions.  Still, even in those long narrative works, like The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, Pope had to satisfy the doublet format, but over and over while advancing a narrative.  And undoubtedly that's what couplets are meant to do, move a poem forward audibly and rhythmically, with pace.

Just as in a sonnet, a couplet contains a volta, or a turn.  It's just that it comes fast and frequent, leaving you little time or space to build a proposition or to illustrate the general point you plan to make after the turn.  This is why the couplet form is aphoristic (go back to our project on aphorism in the blog post for 9.26.18 for more background), tending toward structures of statement/observation, set-up/deliver, point/counterpoint and so on.  The couplet has long been associated with "wit," which over literary history has been defined as ingenuity, imagination, "genuis" (meaning uniqueness and essence, not brains), cleverness, quickness of mind.  Wit has long been associated with satire and irony.  In our time, wit has taken on "funny" as one of its main definitions.  Mostly though, throughout literary history wit has meant "aptness," or as Pope said, often thought but n'er so well express'd.  

And that's what the couplet goes after: apt expression.  What contributes to this, or rather, what's the vehicle for aptness in a traditional couplet?  The rhyme: a-a, b-b, c-c, d-d on through the alphabet if necessary.  The rhyming words set up and then resolve a situation or proposition, a problem.  They create an opening and then closure, and thereby create and satisfy expectation in rapid sequence.  You might say, the rhyming couplet runs on tension, tension being a staple of poetry, drama, fiction--all kinds of writing with emotional impact.

Modern and post-modern poetry still deploy the couplet.  Leaf through any lit mag or anthology of recent verse and you'll eventually come across the form.  I think it was much more in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s than it is today, but you can still find it being published.

The form varies from the Popian to the post-Modern:

A fool might once alone himself expose,

Now one in verse makes many more in prose.

This very quotable pair from Pope's early "An Essay on Criticism," makes the somewhat simple point that verse amplifies the voice, and the more complex point that writing bad verse, or writing bad thinking in verse, amplifies one's vices as well as one's voice.  What makes it quotable, of course, is the couplet's brevity, its quick setup and delivery, and its rhyme, and for Pope, the more exact the rhyme, the better.  Here are some more examples from Pope:

Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,

And rise to faults true critics dare not mend;

                                                             --An Essay on Criticism

I yearn for the stuffy dinner party sometime where I can lay that one on the table!

Men, some to business, some to pleasure take;

But every woman is at heart a rake;

No room here to go into the argument Pope is forwarding in these lines from "Epistle II: To a Lady," so suffice it to say he's comparing the sexes, and acknowledging that woman is the stronger, craftier, more purposeful and resolute of the two.

And this pair of lines, from the opening of "The Rape of the Lock," is one of my favorites for its delicacy of voice, almost too delicate by half:

Say what strange motive, Goddess, could compel

A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?

Compare that to the opening invocation of the Muse in The Iliad!  

But couplets haven't always been ne'r so well express'd as Pope wrote them and, like all the forms we've practiced here at W@1, the couplet has been thoroughly modernized and adapted not just to modern English, but our contemporary Western sensibilities.  Some of them, anyway.  And like all those forms, the more contemporary--you might say post-Modern--treatment of them is gestural at best, a kind of nod that only the initiated will understand.  Take a look at some "couplets" from C. K. Williams, for example, who spent most of his career extending couplets, tercets and quatrains into wide, un-metered lines that never fit the width of the books they appeared in, always needed to be wrapped under themselves like lengths of something or other packed into too-short boxes.  Take a look at this series of "couplets":

I always knew him as "Bobby the poet," though whether he ever was one or not,

someone who lives in words, making a world from their music, might be a question.

In those strange years of hippiedom and "people-power," saying you were an artist

made you one, but at least Bobby acted the way people think poets are supposed to.

He dressed plainly, but with flair, spoke little, yet listened with genuine attention,

and a kind of preoccupied, tremulous seriousness always seemed to absorb him.

This is the opening to Williams' poem "The Poet," collected in his book Repair.  It goes on for another 29 "stanzas," all of which are produced from lines almost identical in length--and every single couplet overflows the page by from one to three words, never more.  No couplet maintains what you might call a metrical beat, though rhythm abounds, the rhythm of daily, sometimes ruminative speech, for Williams' style usually swings from the conversational to the ruminative to the narrative of character analysis, and then deeply philosophical.  The lines can come off as flacid, intense, lyrical and flowing, transactional (as in a conversation), and even Frostian.  All within one or two series of couplets.  In other words, these lines are proto-prose.

Still, they are lines of poetry, formed into couplets or at least "doublets."  A return is entered at the end of each first and second line, with an extra return at the end of every second line.  This means decision.  The writer has chosen to put the return there, and then an extra space at even intervals, creating what looks like long, languid couplets.  (Some might describe the style as enervated or the effect as enervating.)  For a writer, this process establishes a kind of rhythm, subtle as it is, that may be intellectual or rhetorical more than metrical; it is evenly repetitive; and it therefore must create expectation, both for the writer and the reader.  Which is exactly what couplets do.

I found this sequence of two-liners in a poem by David Young, titled "The Accident" (I didn't have to look far or for very long among my bookshelves, either!):

The poem walks through a drizzle

wearing overalls. It loads

big Nouns in a pickup truck

climbs in the cab, guns the

motor and is off, knuckles white,

peering at silence        among trees

past smoking fields        blue meadows

over bridges of electric air

to unmarked crossings where the long 

trains of the past come through

with the momentum of all their stations

and the truck must be hit

exploding in every direction

while the poem somehow survives

in the circle of wreckage and rain

where the X has begun to spin.

Isn't this a wonderful little lyric?  You'll recall from conversations last year, maybe, that William Carlos Williams wrote often in three-line stanzas meant to capture American cadences of speech.  Well, here the cadence is in two lines.  Do we call them couplets?  Pope might not.  But again, as with C. K. Williams' poem above, the poet had to decide when to end one line and go to the next, and at some point decided to put in a second return after every second line.  This, along with the shortness of the lines, creates a forward-downward flow that pulls you through the poem, first to last, dropping you inside that image of an X spinning.  This decision process no doubt influenced his choice of words ending each line of the poem: will they each be concrete nouns, adverbs, verbs, or maybe he'll let an article ("the") carry the line over.  All writerly choices to be sifted, weighed and committed to.

The writing of couplets forces those choices in unique ways, for when you try this--and you will, soon--you'll experience a small sensation of open-close, open-close, open-close, perhaps like your heart beating, even if your thought or narrative carries you right past the couplet's end.  Sooner rather than later, this sensation will come to feel like an insistence--if things are going right--and then you'll be in it, a poem of couplets.

Let's rap! (6.27.20)

The trepidations are beginning to leak in

To my inbox from people who say they're needin' 

Some kind of serious detox

For the poetry rap project objectif we've got, 

You know what I'm saying, I'm saying these big lots

Of rhythm & rhyme 

Jammed together in 5/4 time

Like jazz like hazardous material

For the lungs & the tongue 

That don't wanna be spoken so much as sung . . .

Sometimes, people, I just can't help myself!  Even when it's probably wiser to . . . Looking ahead 20 years, and assuming I'm still around, what today's blog might sound like to my nanogenetic self . . .  BUT!

Or as Elizabeth Warren might say, Nevertheless, I persist.

Look, people, we spend a lot of time and energy trying to make poetry for the ages the same way it's been made for ages, since Homer, in fact, and that's all well and good, at least for us in Western Civilization.  But sometimes it starts to feel . . . er . . . a little too Western?  As in one of those extended learning courses in Western Civilization that universities like UNC cook up for retirees (for a fee) so we can all feel educated and . . . civilized?

Occasionally, it's nice to eat dessert first, have a bowl of cereal for supper, drain a glass of wine for breakfast.  Sometimes, it's good to dance naked in front of the mirror.  SOMETIMES we need to stretch our ideas about what kind of poetry we can write, even if we don't ordinarily think of it as poetry.

Here's my two cents: the rhapsodes of ancient Greece were the original 50 Cent, Lil Nas, Queen Latifah and Nicki Minaj.  Then Homer came along, whoever he was, IF he was actually one poet, and codified the rhapsodes' raps into formal poetry.  The Troubadours wandering Italy and France resurrected rap, maybe in the form of villenelles (which at one time were really quite various in style and length), which in turn rejuvenated poetry until somebody reduced their songs to a single form--like the villenelle--and called it poetry.  Walt Whitman came along to toss out the stuffy sterile imitative stuff of American anglicized poetry and . . . well, you know what he did!  Then the Beats had to follow suit a hundred years later because poetry had slipped back into the merely academic again, or so they argued.  In the 1970s, partly out of cultural resistance, partly out of political will, came hip-hop, then rap . . . and voila! poetry reborn, saved from itself.

Here's a secret I would like to share with you: you don't have to be Eminem to write rap poetry.  And so I invite you to give it a try.  First, a few simple observations or rules, if you will--and yes, rap adheres to three but pretty strict rules--and then a few examples, brief plus extended, so you get the idea.

Rule 1: theme

If you're going to write a rap poem, settle on a simple theme.  The rap you're probably thinking of, that most offends you, is about night clubs, grinding, raw sexism, bad attitudes, selfishness, guns and cussing.  It's in your face.  That's not necessarily the only vehicle for rap, though.  You can write rappily about anything--what you like for breakfast (see "Ham & Eggs" below), about community, about writing poetry, about Donald Trump, about Queens Latifah and/or Elizabeth, about your dog or your cat, about your cluttered garage, about your favorite pair of pants.  The point is, choose a theme.  Next, brainstorm it--what is it, what does it sound like/look like/taste like/feel like, where do you find it, where don't you find it, what do you really know about it, etc., etc.?  How do you feel about it?  Themes in rap poems are often very personal, almost confessional (though they aren't always that way.)  A rap can address a reader or a historical person directly.

Rule 2: flow

This is the key to rap, and therefore to rap poetry.  What is flow?  Here's what it is not: flow is not meter, as in a popular song or a ballad or a traditional lyric.  In fact, flow is not even "rhythm" as we traditional writers of poetry think of rhythm, such as cadence.  Flow is not a regular rhyme pattern, as in a-b-a-b or a-a / b-b or as in a sonnet.  So what is flow?  Flow is unlineated and unpatterned in the usual sense.  Flow is a falling-driving rhythm that ignores line breaks (even if there are line breaks in the poem).  Flow can be written as prose, in fact, because it doesn't depend on line endings and beginnings.  If you look at the rap poem I wrote at the top of this blog you'll see the pace wants to be quick, the movement continually "forward," and the beat or rhythm always falling-driving from first to last.  This is because flow is sequential: a sequence of words that sound similar even if they don't actually rhyme (they may may have the same number of syllables with stressed syllables in the same place in each word or set of words in the sequence).  Hint: use words of two syllables or more or word clusters in which the first syllable is stressed.  Repetition ad nauseum is one way to get to rap's flow.  Reading it aloud should leave you breathless.

Rule 3: rhyme

A rap poem feeds on rhyme, but it doesn't rhyme in strict time (see Rule 2 above) or pattern.  A rap rhyme can be exact, off, near, slant, and gestural all within the space of a single image or sequence of words.  A rap poem will use masculine rhymes (rhyming words of one syllable) often extended to a series, one after the other.  A rap poem will deploy feminine rhyme (rhyming words of multi-syllables: Stella and her umbrella met a helluva fella).  Most of all, and most fun of all, a rap poem will go for partial rhyme or "part-rhymes," that is, choosing words in a series that may incorporate rhyming syllables at the same position in each word.

So there are your rules.  For me, flow is the most important.  No flow no go in yo po . . . etry.  Here are some examples.  Try reading them out loud a couple of times, looking for the pacing and tempo that best suits what the poems are attempting.

Internal to Internal

(This is a poem that I wrote and perform with my band)

We go out (yeah yeah)

And we come back (yeah yeah)

After awhile (yeah yeah, yeah yeah)

It's a wonder 

That we recognize each other,

You and I, internal to internal/

[Bridge]

On a case by case basis

We can make an oasis

Of each other, brother to sister

Sister to brother

But what we need is a bridge

To build a bridge with the courage

To abridge the spaces

Between us, I mean us

Because we need us

(Can you believe this?)

And be fly together

Like birds of a feather

No matter the weather

So if not now, if not right now then when?

Don't tell me never

Don't say to me whenever, whatever

We go out . . . etc.

. . . and my wife, Ann, who gave me the idea to challenge you all with this project, wrote this little rap about our dog . . .

Murphy's Rap

I have a little poodle

a really cool funny little dude

he loves to make art with his food

he runs around in circles

playing keepaway with dad

he always wins un-huh that's what I said

guard dog at the window

barking at all

you don't know that I'm not tall

I weigh 8 pounds 

and have 6 teeth in my head

but walk on by

I really don't mind

'cause after all I'm just saying hi

Rap poems and songs copped from the web . . .

It Pays Big

(a primer on how to write rap poems)

First press play, then we’ll play.
It’s the same old game, just cut, next frame.
Shakespeare first, then Molière.
Tragedy to comedy, an act so raw to me.
Start your flow, it’s your show,
‘else it’s paycheck, rain check, your own shipwreck,
Hands on deck, it’s mic check, say,
‘This is me for you to see, a gift, just pay your fee.’

And I’ll remember your face,
But I’m not coming home,
‘Cause I’m stuck in this place
Where it pays big to roam.

Break stage right, missed that flight,
Now it’s airport naps, short break, next port.
Who are you? Just ask the mirror.
Stake it out and fake ‘em out, next city break it out.
Time for rest, did your best.
Now you move it, groove it, fast, prove it.
She cries out, listen, hear her
Celebrate, initiate, live once, appreciate.

And I’ll remember your face,
But I’m not coming home,
‘Cause I’m stuck in this place
Where it pays big to roam


DOPE RAPPER

Am the microphone wrecker wacky mc’s thrasher
Call me punchline call me dope rapper
Lyrical tyrant punchline merchant
Don’t come close I got a wackiness repellant
Am the soldier in the ant the giga in the byte
Flows so sick you never ever bite
Don’t poke your eyes you might cry twice
Once bitten you gonna be shy twice
With your lame ass flow you don’t even cause a ripple
My rhyme so sweet it could make a girl tickle
Am the eagle you are a worm better wiggle
Blow the beagle am the boss man simple


ON KEY

I may sing off key but I rap on key
Rhyme so loaded am the rap donkey
Am like the rap tree you just a rap monkey
I got this locked down am the lock and the key
You cant get out you are under lock and key
With rhymes this good you cant get past me
Am a baller like Messi you no play pass me
Am on your tv and radio them too dey play me


THE A

Am the A in your apple
The whip on your back when you shit for temple
The itch on your head when you scratch your temple
Fall back watch me am the thrill in the movie
The movie in the ROM the kinda flows I drop make them shake their bumbum
Spitting rhymes like a well chewed bubble gum I make your liver pool but am sweet like tomtom
And I break rules like diego maradonna ready to blow with ma lyrical bazooka
Am the hay maker I make the sun shine and I aint bragging its just a punchline
Am so coded I got my own tune 99.9 I got the beat I got the tune
Am the generator men y’all the fume I smell good even with no perfume
Talk is cheap so I bought silence you wanna rant I give y’all the license
I make some sense even even when am talking nonsense cos my nonsense even get one sense
Some people no go grab cos them no get sense
The sense I make is not too common no be big deal cos now my rap is common
Am not a flash in a pan cos am known from Lagos all the way to japan
I got a master and I got a plan so you see I got a master plan
I know my master plans and his plans I don master am not stopping now cos now am going faster
Am repping Jehovah my one and only master


Ham & Eggs
By A Tribe Called Quest

I don't eat no ham n' eggs, cuz they're high in cholesterol
Ay yo, Phife do you eat em? (No, Tip do you eat em?)
Uh uh, not at all (Again)
I don't eat no ham n' eggs, cuz they're high in cholesterol
Jarobi, do you eat em? (Nope, Shah, do you eat em?) Nope
Not at all

A tisket, a tasket, what's in mama's basket?
Some veggie links and some fish that stinks
Why, just the other day, I went to Grandma's house
Smelled like she conjured up a mouse
Eggs was fryin', ham was smellin'
In ten minutes, she started yellin' (Come and get it!)
And the gettin's were good
I said, "I shouldn't eat it", she said, "I think you should"
But I can't, I'm plagued by vegetarians
No cats and dogs, I'm not a veterinarian
Strictly collard greens and the occasional steak
Goes on my plate
Asparagus tips look yummy, yummy, yummy
Candied yams inside my tummy
A collage of good eats, some snacks or nice treats
Apple sauce and some nice red beets
This is what we snack on when we're questin'
(No second guessin')

I don't eat no ham n' eggs, cuz they're high in cholesterol
Ay yo, Phife do you eat em? (No, Tip do you eat em?)
Uh uh, not at all (Again)
I don't eat no ham n' eggs, cuz they're high in cholesterol
Jarobi, do you eat em? (Nope, Shah, do you eat em?) Nope
Not at all

Now drop the beat, so I can talk about my favorite tastings
The food that is the everlasting
See I'm not fasting
I'm gobbling, like a dog on turkey
Beef jerky, Slim Jims, I eat sometimes
I like lemons and limes
"And if not that, I get the Roti and the Soursop"
Sit back, relax, listen to some hip-hop
Gum drops and gummy bears tease my eyes
A sight for sore ones and some bore pies
And other goodies that are filled with goop
With fried apple roots
Delectable delights, control my appetites
Mines is for me, right, but I know what I like
Chicken for lunch, chicken for my dinner
Chicken, chicken, chicken, I'm a finger lickin' winner
When breakfast time comes, I don't recognize
Pig in the pan or a pair of bogey chides
Mixed with stewed tomatoes, home fried potatoes
Or anything with flair, cook it, I'm in there
Pay attention to the Tribe as we impose
This is how it goes

I don't eat no ham n' eggs, cuz they're high in cholesterol
Ay yo, Phife do you eat em? (No, Tip do you eat em?)
Uh uh, not at all (Again)
I don't eat no ham n' eggs, cuz they're high in cholesterol
Jarobi, do you eat em? (Nope, Shah, do you eat em?) Nope
Not at all


Remember the Name
By Ed Sheeran, with Eminen & 50 Cent

Yeah, I was born a misfit
Grew up 10 miles from the town of Ipswich
Wanted to make it big, I wished it to existence
I never was a sick kid, always dismissed quick
"Stick to singing, stop rappin' like it's Christmas"
And if you're talkin' money, then my conversation's shiftin'
My dreams are bigger than just bein' on the rich list
Might be insanity, but people call it "gifted"
My face is goin' numb from the shit this stuff is mixed with
Watch how the lyrics in the songs might get twisted
My wife wears red, but looks better without the lipstick
I'm a private guy and you know nothin' 'bout my business
And if I had my 15 minutes, I must have missed 'em
20 years old is when I came in the game
And now it's eight years on and you remember the name
And if you thought I was good, well, then I'm better today
But it's ironic how you people thought I'd never be great
I like my shows open-air, Tokyo to Delaware
Put your phones in the air if you wanna be rocked
You know I want way more than I already got
Give me a song with Eminem and 50 Cent in the club

You know it ain't my time to call it a day
I wanna crack on and I wanna be paid
But it's 'bout time you remember the name
Ayy, ayy
You know it ain't my time to call it a day
I wanna crack on and I wanna be paid
But it's 'bout time you remember the name
Ayy, ayy

I can still remember (What?) tryna shop a deal (Uh-huh)
From Taco Bell to TRL
I climbed the Billboard charts to the top until
As fate would have it (Yeah), became an addict
Funny 'cause I had pop appeal
But they said time would tell (What?) if I'd prevail (Huh?)
And all I did was (What?) put nine-inch nails (Where?)
In my eyelids now (What?)
I'm seein' diamond sales like I'm in Zales (Yeah)
Without a doubt, by any means
If rap was skinny jeans, I couldn't do anything in 'em
I'd be splitting seams of denim when I'm spitting schemes
Which really means, no "if," "ands," or "buts" are squeezin' in between
You sleep on me 'cause you're only fuckin' with me in your dreams
Not even when I'm on my deathbed
Man, I feel like Ed, it isn't time to drop the mic yet
So why would I quit?
The thought that I would stop when I'm dead
Just popped in my head
I said it, then forgot what I said

You know it ain't my time to call it a day
I wanna crack on and I wanna be paid
But it's 'bout time you remember the name
Ayy, ayy
You know it ain't my time to call it a day
I wanna crack on and I wanna be paid
But it's 'bout time you remember the name
Ayy, ayy

Ain't nobody cold as me, I dress so fresh, so clean
You can find me in my whip, rockin' my Fendi drip
Man, you know just what I mean
Shinin', wrist with the rocks on it, Buscemis with locks on it
Everything my voice on, this shit knock, don't it?
Balenciaga saga, I'm in Bergdorf ballin'
It's just another episode, my hoes, I spoil 'em
She like the fly shit and I like to buy shit
Shit, I'm gettin' stupid money, what else we gon' do with money?
Bitch, we be ballin' out, the king bring you 50 bottles
Tonight, we gon' blow a check, worry 'bout your shit tomorrow
The turn up be so real, we 'bout to be super lit
Boy, I'm kickin' straight facts, that's just how we do this shit
Tomorrow, we hangin' over 'til we start feelin' sober
Then it's time to start it over, here we go again

You know it ain't my time to call it a day
I wanna crack on and I wanna be paid
But it's 'bout time you remember the name
Ayy, ayy
You know it ain't my time to call it a day
I wanna crack on and I wanna be paid
But it's 'bout time you remember the name
Ayy, ayy