2007 PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINATIONS
MiPOesias Magazine (web)
Guest edited by Evie Shockley
SWIMCHANT OF NIGGER MER-FOLK (AN AQUABOOGIE SET IN LAPIS)
By Douglas KearneyOCHO #12
Guest Edited by Grace Cavalieri
Foxhole
By David WagonerOCHO #12
Guest Edited by Grace Cavalieri
Graduating Towards Forgiveness
By Herbert Woodward MartinMiPOesias Magazine (Print)
Edited by Amy King
Killer of Ferdinand Magellan
By Barbara Jane ReyesOCHO #10
Edited by Didi Menendez
How To Write A Poem: Theory #62
by Emma TrellesMiPOesias Magazine (Print)
Edited by Amy King
Stars
by Campbell McGrath
33 Rules of Poetry for Poets 23 and Under
I gotta say, I love me a good list, especially the ones where I whole-heartedly agree on some points and seriously disagree on some others. With that said, take a peek at Kent Johnson’s “33 Rules of Poetry for Poets 23 and Under.”
I will say that I don’t agree with point #3 since it leads us down that old tired road of Europe as the epicenter of culture.
I definitely agree with points #1(and I am still working on it in my own practice) and #12 (I was even singing it in the car the other day!).
And point #13 may be one of the (not so) secrets to how I acclimated pretty quickly into poetry circles. I confess to never have even heard of Roland Barthes or of his wrestling essay but it looks like he definitely understands pro wrestling and how its suspension of disbelief in an arena setting is pure pageant.
33 RULES OF POETRY FOR POETS 23 AND UNDER
—after Nicanor Parra
1. Study grammar. Only by knowing grammar, knowing clearly the parts of speech and sensing their mysterious ways in sentence parts, will you be able to write interesting poetry. For poetry is all about grammar’s interesting ways.
2. Don’t suck up to other poets. Well, OK, you will do so, of course, like all poets do, but when you do, feel it in your bones. Take this self-knowledge and turn it into a weapon you wield without mercy.
3. Read the old Greeks and Romans in the original. Studying Greek or Latin is one of the best ways of becoming a man or woman of grammar. Well, Duh, as they say here in Freeport at Tony’s Oyster Bar.
4. Ask yourself constantly: What is the fashion? Once you answer, consider that noun, participial, infinitive, or prepositional phrase (the answer will mutate over time) your mortal enemy.
5. Ask yourself constantly: What is the worth of poetry? When you answer, “It is nothing,†you have climbed the first step. Prepare, without presumption, to take the next one.
6. Don’t drink and drive. Better yet, just don’t drink.
7. At the second step, should you reach it, don’t look down: You might get dizzy from the height and fall into an alcoholic heap. Trust me.
8. Read Constantine Cavafy’s great poem, “The First Step.†Meditate upon it.
9. Don’t worry if you have social anxiety at poetry events. Most everyone else will be as secretly anxious as you are.
10. Read Ed Dorn carefully, starting with Abhorrences, working your way back.
11. Remember that the greater part of it is merely show and acquired manners. Poets can be mean and they will try to kill you.
12. Ponder Bob Dylan’s classic line: “I ain’t gonna live on Maggie’s farm no more.â€
13. After reading Roland Barthes’s famous essay on it, watch professional wrestling at least once a month. Reflect on how the spectacle corresponds, profoundly, to the poetry field.14. Go on your nerve, and whenever you feel you shouldn’t, do.
15. Don’t smoke cigarettes, even if you think it makes you look cool to others (or to yourself).
16. Go by the musical phrase and not the metronome. But when convenient, or just because it’s beautiful, go by the metronome.
17. Don’t let anyone tell you MFA programs are bad. MFA programs are really great—you can get a stipend and live poor and happy for two or three years.
18. Make sure you act like an insufferable ass in your MFA program. Never suck up to other poets. Traditional or avant-garde . . .
19. If you don’t know another language, make it your mission, as I suggested earlier, to learn one. Translation is the very soil of poetry. Its mystery.
20. The Web is a wonderful development. Don’t make yourself a slave to its “cool†corporation of the moment.
21. Whenever you are in doubt about being a poet, instead of, say, being an architect or a physicist, or something of the superior sort, remind yourself of Leibniz’s immortal question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?†(Keep this question in your pocket against your heart. Because no one can ever answer it, it is the key to your purpose.)
22. Write political poems. But remember: The politics you are likely protesting are present, structurally, inside poetry, its texts and institutions. Write political poems with a vengeance.
23. Read Wittgenstein. Don’t ever feign you understand him. He didn’t understand himself! Steal from his genius ammo dump.
24. When someone tells you there are two kinds of poetry, one of them bad, one of them good, chuckle gently.25. Don’t ever use a Power Point® at a Conference on Innovative Poetry. Power Points make you look like a tool!
26. Remember what I said (sorry to be so pedantic!) about grammar. If you can’t confidently analyze a sentence, forget about poetry. Poetry is the art of language, right? Well, if poets cannot be the experts on grammar, then something is wrong. A generalized disregard of linguistics and grammar, by the way, is one of the main reasons the so-called post-avant is in crisis. I’m dead serious.27. If you feel you have wasted your young life so far writing poetry, that writing poetry was a fool’s, a loser’s pursuit, and you sense despair and absolute darkness before you, well, you are surely on the second step. There is no shame in turning back and leaving it all behind. Turn back without regret. On the other hand, if you are crazed and brave and you put your queer shoulder to the wheel, much wonder, blessedness, and inexpressible sorrow awaits.
28. Travel. Go to Asia, South America, Africa, Micronesia, North Dakota.29. Read Eliot Weinberger, starting with both What I Heard about Iraq and Karmic Traces, working your way back.
30. Read Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese and One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese. If someone tells you there are two kinds of poetry, chuckle gently.31. Look in the mirror and be honest. You are going to die. But right now you’re alive… Look really hard. This is fucking astonishing. Why is there something rather than nothing?
32. Determine, as of now, that should you have children sometime, your devotion to poetry will somehow enrich their lives and not be a cause for their suffering. Listen to me and don’t take this as melodramatic, middle-aged fluff. Quite a few kids have died for lack of what a poet found there.33. On the third step, should you get there, its blank humming sound, realize this is almost surely the last step. Pump your legs up and down. Victory will be (as they used to say in the days of Deep Image and Language, back when poetry was innocent yet) dark, opaque, and strange.
Kent Johnson, Originally published at Almost Island
Amiri Baraka in Berkeley
A little over two years ago, I got to hear Amiri Baraka deliver a full poetry set (complete with a moderated Q&A) at Bar13. It was my first introduction to his work and I walked away affected by poetry that was the wave and the undertow, a response to a political situation that both sheds light to a past injustice and to an uncertain future.
The next time I hear Amiri read was at City Lights, a reading that focused on his short story collection and a Q&A that focused on global politics, politically appropriate language, upcoming elections and the intensely personal side of being Amiri Baraka. Notice none of these questions dealt with Amiri as an eminent literary figure in American letters. (Note: I was one of the people asking questions of American politics instead of taking the opportunity to learn what it means to be a respected author.)
Now I come back from hearing Amiri at a couple of readings and feel a greater appreciation for his contribution to not only American letters but to African-American lit, Jazz lit, Black Arts lit, Hip-Hop lit, Pan-African lit, Pan-American lit and Orality; to name just a few areas of study where Amiri’s work would be a key point of focus. Maybe this is coming from the fact that I’ve heard his work in UC Berkeley, surrounded by students and faculty deeply interested in learning something from Baraka. I am happy to say that the audiences here learned a lot about poetry history and revolutionary art. A nice broad range of topics Amiri was able to seamlessly bridge. I say Happy because it still gnaws at me how much the City Lights reading gravitated so much on Amiri the political figure (which is a big part of his art) and paid almost no attention to Amiri the writer (which is his art).
It was also good hearing him read at different times with different audiences around different settings and seeing if there would be any change in the choice of poems and the presentation. While the set-list may have changed, the delivery remained consistent. A blend of jazz and poetics that relied so heavily on each other as to be almost the inhale and exhale, the wave and the undertow. Out of all his poems, my favorites may have been the ones filled with the pop of a mad pianist hunting for the perfect melody. Poems like the Lo-Ku series set to the Bud Powell, Jungle Jim Flunks His Screen Test set to the rhythm of what I call Snaps and some other folks call the Dozens, Monk Poems set to (who else?) Thelonious, Readiness set to “Johnny Come Lately” by Billy Strayhorn and Eulogy for Pedro Pietri that I will guess was set to the rhythms of Tito Puente.
The poem that Amiri kept returning to was Race & Class, a poem that followed the form he kept returning to, this conversation with someone either ahead or behind him on the road to self-examination and ultimately self-preservation in the struggle for Pan-African unity. This technique lets the reader in on some public knowledge of the Black experience and then lets them in on the greater knowledge, that spoken in living rooms and bars, the things marginalized folk say about the oppressor or wish they could say to the oppressor’s face. A truth Amiri brings to his poetry focused on the public, the out in the open, a poet who has no time for people how only write for himself or herself.
In an effort to make up for my silly question at City Lights, I was able to ask him at one reading, “What is your proudest literary achievement?â€
Answer: Staying alive. And then he said, he thinks his last work was his best work.
At the same reading I was able to get a book signed and I thanked him for being such a major influence.
A: Do you write?
O: Yeah.
A: Poet?
A: Where’s your book?
O: Right here!
And just like that I was able to give him a copy of Anywhere Avenue. Score!
At another reading I asked him about his memories about the Nuyorican movement which led to a long recollection of the work and words of Miguel Algarin. Praise for the writing of Miguel Piñero and a story involving Piñero’s last birthday party where the First Lady of Nicaragua was dancing up a storm and a group of local kids gathered to meet Mikey, not Mikey the Poet but Mikey’s TV character- Calderon the Drug Lord from Miami Vice. The highest praise (complete with voice, singing and strut imitation) went to the poems of Pedro Pietri, and that led into the Pietri tribute and Amiri covering one of Pietri’s Telephone Booth poems.
I could go on and on but instead I am going to recommend that you all read Conversations With Amiri Baraka, where you get to trace a piece Amiri’s growth, not only as a scholar and an activist but also as a writer which is where it should always begin and end when talking about Amiri Baraka.
More on the web:
Amiri Baraka’s homepage
Barb’s thought on Amiri’s work. Part 1
Poetry As Insurgent Art
Got to see Lawrence Ferlinghetti read at City Lights tonight from his new book. Barb and I thought we would beat the crowd and get their almost an hour early but it didn’t quite work out that way as their was already a crowd by the door when we arrive and as we make it inside the man by the door says, “Two more and then no one else gets in.â€
Inside the first floor of City Lights is completely packed as we all wait for Ferlinghetti to read and at 7 on the dot the man walks in to spontaneous applause. No intro needed, indeed.
Ferlinghetti’s reading was straight and to the point as he read passages from Poetry As Insurgent Art which, he states early on, is not a book of poetry but more a book about poetry.
From the book’s press release: “After a lifetime, this (r)evolutionary little book is still a work-in-progress, the poet’s ars poetica, to which at 88 he is constantly adding.â€
It’s a great thing to see a poet of such distinction readily admitting that poetry is still a mystery that he hasn’t quite figured out. It’s certainly more refreshing than the inverse statement.
Some lines I jotted down during the reading:
What times are these? Silence and horrors.
Create works for apocalyptic times.
Write living newspapers.
The lisp of leaves.
A lyric poet must rise above sounds found in the alphabet soup of language poetry.
Do you have the mad sound?
Compose on the tongue.
A poem should not have to be explained.
Imagine Shelley at a workshop?
Catch its song.
Liberate.
After the reading, Ferlinghetti opened it up to Q&A, which he set off by remarking on his reading at Berkeley the week before and where he was surprised by the lack of questioning he received from (his word) intellectuals who never even asked his what “insurgent art†was. I’m not sure the questions from the City Lights audience were anymore probing. On one hand, I applaud Ferlinghetti’s openness and how he invited the audience to really take his work to task but on the flip side, who is really going to take him to task? And in City Lights? C’mon now.
I did get a chance to ask him about this line he read, â€paper may burn but words will escape.†Which had me wondering if the future of poetry as insurgent art rests in live readings as opposed to in the pages of books. Ferlinghetti believed it did reside in the spoken word (the actual act, not the much maligned term) and spreading out into the open the “oral message.â€
And then maybe three questions later, when asked about taking critical advice, Ferlinghetti referred to his taking cues by “reading great writers.†A contradiction to the previous message about oral messages? Not for me, as I believe that the orature should inform the literature and vice-versa.
And if one can find that balance between literature and orature then one might avoid Ferlinghetti’s critique, “Contemporary poetry is prose in the topography of poetry.â€
Ainadamar
Golijov’s ‘Ainadamar’ brings Spanish poet to life
The Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s was one of the few times that liberal intellectuals took up arms and stormed the battlefield. Artists like Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and even Dorothy Parker joined the futile struggle to keep Francisco Franco from taking power and beginning what turned into decades of dictatorship.
One of the great tragedies of the conflict was the 1936 execution of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico GarcÃa Lorca by the Falangists (one of the many factions involved in the war). Brookline-based composer Osvaldo Golijov has captured Garcia Lorca’s story in his opera “Ainadamar,†which had its premiere at Tanglewood in 2005.
Opera Boston, conducted by Gil Rose, will present a markedly revised version at the Cutler Majestic Theatre Friday, Sunday and Tuesday. Anticipation for the production, which stars Golijov’s frequent collaborator, soprano Dawn Upshaw, and is directed by Peter Sellars,is so high that all three performances are sold out.
(More here: http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/arts_culture/view.bg?articleid=1038707)