http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/
Alexis Orgera lives in Florida. She is the author of How Like Foreign Objects, available from H_ngm_n BKS, and two chapbooks: Illuminatrix (Forklift, Ink) and Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! (Blue Hour Press). She also writes at The Blog Poetic.
Wolf in a Cage by Josh Grigsby
“One major lesson I had to learn was to become empty and dumb and trusting enough to write every day. For this I needed, at times, blind patience, no theories about art.” –Larry Levis
Thinking about the intangibles of writing is like walking around, drunk, in a pitch-black room the size of an airplane hangar, with ghosts, with disembodied voices, with naked doppelgangers, choking on the fear of bumping into something much larger, much hairier than yourself.
I believe that’s why we talk about craft, the building blocks of a piece of art—light, shadow, line break, sentence. These are necessary to the physical architecture of the thing, certainly, and they’re quantifiable. Humans, we, desire formula and quantitative resources, names and registers. These are easier than dark, open spaces.
But what about the intangibles, the anti-craft, anti-move, anti-self-consciousness of making? What about the inexplicable creates lasting art, something more than pop culture referentiality, more than tricks-of-a-trade? What a friend of mine calls irreducibility?
Many poets and artists have tried to define the “it” factor. Many, to my eye, have succeeded in some way but never in a flesh-and-blood way. Never in a follow-these-eight-easy-steps way. For that, I’m glad.
Garcia Lorca had his duende, hovering at the lip of the wound; Ginsberg said, “the only poetic tradition is the voice out of the burning bush.” Keats sought the capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I could go on forever, maybe.
There’s an interview with Aline Kominsky-Crumb in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of The Believer. In it, Kominsky-Crumb describes a similar abstract quality to her comic-making:
“I’m so emotionally charged when I’m doing that, I can’t really control what comes out. It just comes out in a very direct form. In a way, I’m lucky that I can access that. In another way it’s horrible because I can’t refine it or improve it and make it look more, like, acceptable.”
Craft is a given, right? You love an art form so you study it; you dissect its structure. You practice, you imitate. You count syllables, maybe. You look at possible moves, maybe. Sometimes you go to school to understand and synthesize the great traditions in the company of other humans so you don’t have to read poems to your dog all the time. Sometimes you benefit from school. Sometimes you are ruined and reborn [see the Kominsky-Crumb interview for more on that].
But then what? Inevitably, you ask yourself, why does this poem make my heart sing? Why do I feel like I could jump off a building after I read this book? Or, like Dickinson, why does this thing make me feel physically like the top of my head has been taken off?
Taylor Kitsch of Friday Night Lights
1. It’s Friday night. Remember when that meant something? We’d get dressed up in our tutus and paint little pink circles on our cheeks and pirouette the night away. Our thirties are different, are dark around the edges, are full of tennis matches and distracting tv shows that we don’t even watch on televisions anymore. Speaking of we, I remember loving The Virgin Suicides, particularly for Eugenides’ use of that wily, sometimes achingly beautiful first person plural.
2. Friday Night Lights is actually a pretty good show.
3. Here’s another group effort prompt for those of you who also don’t leave the house many Friday nights, smoking your cigarettes and drinking your delicious quiet with a straw. Let’s write a story this time. Keep your contribution to a few sentences, por favor.
We are goober. We are brontosaurus. In the back of a car, we are dumb luck.
Heather Christle said something interesting last night in the Q & A session after her great reading. I don’t have the exact quote, and she was joking, but when Jeremiah asked how an online reading differed from F & B (Flesh and Blood), Heather said something about this HTMLGiant live stream marking the end of flesh and blood readings. I felt simultaneously a little apocalyptic and a little excited that I could wear my pajamas to any reading ever. Will face-to -ace readings change? Will they stream? Will they go hybrid?
Very Short List just sent me a link to a site that chronicals reusable cover art in historical novels. I am strangely and inexplicably fascinated by the recycling. I think it’s John Berger in Ways of Seeing who talks about how reproductions have changed the way we see art. Repetition as its own artform. I’m sure a boatload of folks have made that observation, come to think of it.
What about the book called Kleopatra and the one called Scheherazade with the same black-veiled woman on the cover?
Well, that was fun. I think we ought to do that more often. Here is the resulting poem from my first Group Effort post. Thanks to everyone who participated!
BLUE PILL NICE DISCOUNT
Click here: maybe you want to learn me better—
or let the rootkits buck wild. Either way, it’s goodto spill from an envelope and feel
the drywall crack. New phones, new plans,first monthly fee waived…and then, suddenly,
in darkness I ask for help (good sir, I am the Princeof a small country in Nigira). You have not selected
any categories of interest yet:a straightforward and serious talk about………….
from a spokesman who’s not wearing any pants.Yes, I am interested in more comfortable pants:
Important tax return documents enclosed!No sweat. Call me when you get back.
We can get some food or something.My employer was killed in a starship accident
arranged by rebel forces. I am a piece of water in a tank.
Today at work I got a fun email: “Blue Pill Nice Discount. Click Here.” Then a student said to me, “I need to watch more tv. All my good lines come from tv shows.” I feel like this is a sign.
Let’s use what we got and write a group poem. Whaddya say? I have the title and the first line. You supply subsequent lines—one per person, por favor.
BLUE PILL NICE DISCOUNT
Click here.
Monsieur Ponge avec une cigarette
My week, but maybe you’ll relate.
Assigning Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is really the best thing you can do for anybody.
“Fox and Whale, Priest and Angel,” by Russell Banks is travel writing, but it’s also about vision. So is nearly every travel piece I love. They all find the spark in a landscape and look into it and worship it—especially if the spark has been induced by altitude sickness (Banks) or nostalgia and maybe mushrooms (Jason Wilson, “Whistling at the Northern Lights”).
I learned this week that CK Williams does a better job of translating Francis Ponge than the translations I’m reading in Models of the Universe when a student brought me Francis Ponge: Selected Poems. That Ponge is masterful at conflating disparate objects. That you can make opening a door sexy if you’re Francis Ponge. I learned the definition of peduncle from the not-so-good translation of Ponge’s poem, “The Candle.” I learned that Ponge wasn’t interested in titles so much. And that maybe I’m having a love affair with the prose poem.
I read and discussed poems from Kathleen Ossip’s The Search Engine with a very cool student. I learned that the only thing more depressing than a Plath poem, is a cento of lines by Plath and Sexton. I remembered how much I love Plath. Thanks, Ms. Ossip. And thanks for these lines, among others:
I’m eating bread and water
alone, naked as the day
I was born. Hey, Ma,
I say, though she’s not
around, you won’t believe this.
Physicists say that in
addition to a yes and a
no, the universe contains a maybe.
Off in the distance, under the stars,
she moves like a platypus,
neither here nor there.
I read In The Year of Long Division by Dawn Raffel because Alec Niedenthal told me to. He and I will argue about this book soon enough. I’ll report back. But I learned that I like my dialogue to say something. And I remembered how important titles are.
Other very important things I learned this week: I love copyediting; I want a pet crow; I can’t stop thinking about the first season of Friday Night Lights; and I’m pretty sure I believe in magic.
Coldfront has posted their Year in Review 2009 ranking all things poetical, or not. Best ranking categories: Best Opening and Closing Lines in a Collection. Best Cover. And Dean Young’s 31 Poems (Forklift, Ink) got a nod in the Best Selected/Collected category (the book DOES rock) and the Best Physical Artifact category (while looking like a million bucks).
“Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except on posters and page four of the newspapers. In the genre which we call prose there is verse of every conceivable rhythm, some of it admirable. But in reality there is no prose, there is the alphabet, and then there are verse forms, more or less rigid, more or less diffuse. In every attempt at style there is versification.”
–Mallarmé, “Réponses à des enquetes”
Prose-as-verse. Yes? No?
Is all poetry poetry? (I’m not asking about bad vs. good.) And are verse and poetry the same thing?
1. The Kansas City Public Library’s parking garage. Library patrons voted on which titles got used in the facade. Reminds me of Frank Gehry’s Binocular Building in Venice, Ca. Don’t you think it’d be nice to live inside a cartoon? We could draw ourselves into any scene; and every building could double as an object of desire. If your house could be any book, what would it be?
2. For all of the dorky grammarians out there. (I include myself in that group.) Learn Your Damn Homophones.
3. Last night I watched a great Swedish movie called Let the Right One In. It’s likely the most poetic vampire movie you’ll ever watch.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp4g9p_rgo
4. (because the Rule of Three[s] is bullshit) A tiny lil poem from Mary Ruefle, in her book Indeed I Was Pleased with the World. I love it, and I’m very interested in the tense changes.
Bring me a coffee mug from a house
where no one has died. Bring me
an eggbeater, the scissors,
and a very ripe plum.
I am going to make you a toy.
When you play with it,
in my heart I open my sad eyes
and stare.