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!