fallen verses

So, by now, I imagine most poets on the internet have heard of Issue 1 from forgodot.com*. I don’t care at all about any ethical issues with their use of peoples names and false attributions of poetic texts. Do. Not. Care. I think we, as people not just poets, place way too much stock in the notion of creation anyway. Nothing new under the sun in sex or poetry.

What interests me is the system by which the poems were created: the Erica T Carter algorithm. The poem below was “written” using that algorithm and, frankly, I would be happy to call it mine. Perhaps it is mine: I set the machine in motion to produce the result. Perhaps it is Jim Carpenter’s since he created the machine. Who knows. Who cares. As artists our job is to create, but that creation is not ex nihilo, it is a process all its own whereby our experiences, be they real, dream, borrowed, are filtered and twisted and looked at through broken glass until art is expressed.

The problem is not that forgodot used people’s names without permission, or even that they attributed falsely the generated texts to writers, or whether Issue 1 is just flarf. The problem is that these programs clearly show that poetry is not, in some aspects, a human act. The relation of words on the page is something can be generated by a program. It is nonsense but, let’s be honest, much avant-garde work may also be nonsense. The problem is that this shows our viewpoint of poetry is that it is solely the relationship of words to other words.

Poetry is not just the relationship of words to each other. That is verbal music, no more. Poetry is the relation of ideas to words to emotions. It is an evocative art rather than a representational one. That is why Erica T Carter and Issue 1 is ultimately irrelevant**, there is no evocation. Just words.

A crescent of negotiations

Her viridian crescents chuckle and crawl
Catching for a child

Clip any case to care about the
cochineal of contempt
How long should
I be a creed above her
coming crucifix?
Is this cashmere then, this cherubic consciousness,?
I am close

“I plan prints,” I
call
Between this prank
and that prank

What did I cite, covering, coming
above my crystals?
The hand next
I am costly
This time I
confer her

I am needed by an exclaim
There is my wizard-finger, there is another,
and there the wings of cobalt
blue she nurtures
I give her a way
But what if I should
wade sometimes, sometimes, yellow and wrong?

*IF you somehow have not, some links: Harriet 1 and 2, Silliman, Wet Asphalt, SeeqPod.

**IRRELEVANT as Art, I mean. It is interesting in other ways. Particularly the sociological sphere of poetry.

For the most part, I don’t care to talk politics. For me, it’s simple: which side is least insidiously trying to push a religious agenda? That’s my main issue. But, with this election, there are just some things you have to shake your head at and wonder, “just how true is this damn news story anyway?”

Unleashed, Palin Makes a Pit Bull Look Tame

Oh. Wow. Negative campaign much?

Tonight, just a short while ago in fact, I finished watching the fourth season of Boston Legal on dvd. I enjoy the show for many reasons, not the least of which is that it glamorizes intelligent people rather than the mindless drudges of most reality television clogging the airwaves these days. It ended with a measure of finality I don’t recall the previous three seasons endings and I wondered if that was it for the show. I don’t watch live television so I don’t know, maybe that was the end. But as the credits finished and it cycled back to the dvd menu, the absolute silence left in its wake struck me, and the walls of my apartment seemed to recede.

There was no next episode to switch to. Nothing that naturally followed to fill the place watching that show filled. To be honest, the few thoughts I had seemed unappealing. And then I thought of that classic song referenced in the post title. “Big Yellow Taxi,” originally written and performed by Joni Mitchell* nearly forty years ago, and it still very much speaks to our lives. Even setting aside the environmental awareness in the song that coincides with the increasing awareness and concerns over the coming ecological disaster of over-industrialization and poor resource management,  you have those wonderful lines that, I’m sure, have been spoken before: “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone…”

I think about that often, how it seems to be spaces, the holes things leave behind, that gets attention, rather than what we have, be it material or not. The illusion of safety shattered by the fiery ruin of two buildings**, the illusion of democratic government revealed to most people as a lie during the 2000 elections. I doubt anyone can seriously hold the idea of politicians as a class of people with integrity.

That seems to be the attention getter- the lack. It’s world hunger, it’s power and water shortages. Granted, sometimes too much is a problem (greenhouse gas emissions), but a lack seems to be something of which we are viscerally aware, and overabundance seems so much more abstract.

I have a book, picked up as humor quite some time ago, Seduction by the Stars: An Astrological Guide to Love, Lust, and Intimate Relationships***, that has a section for each astrological sign prefaced with a generally humorous note about that sign. The Sagittarius section (which I fall into) begins with this:

Without the negative, we would have no capacity to differentiate the positive, so that the negative is a necessary precondition to the existence of the positive and our perception of it. So it follows absolutely that one is compelled to take a positive view of the negative. Ipso facto, the negative is positive due to its positive effect in allowing us to discriminate the positive from the negative. Therefore, the negative is positive. So stop whining, shut up and think positive.

Reluctant as I am to admit this, I do think that view is reasonably accurate. And I don’t think it’s a rare view at all. Don’t twelve-step cults begin with the first step of admitting you have a problem? After all, you can’t recover if there is nothing to recover from.

But it just seems so tragic, that we need this sort of contrast. Like eyes left in darkness or light for too long, we adjust until wherever we are seems normal. And it isn’t until the lights are turned out that we notice how dark it can be. Wouldn’t it be better if we could learn to appreciate light before it’s gone? Somehow, I think we, as a species, cannot. And because of that, it will have to get very dark indeed, before we find light again.

*Interestingly, and perhaps indicative of age more than anything else, my first thought of this song is Amy Grant’s version, then the Counting Crows version. I was not really aware it was Joni Mitchell until I looked it up for this post. I’m sure I knew it, but I didn’t know it.

**A terrible tragedy and the waste of so many lives both in the event and the aftermath. Venturing off topic, I can only say that it would be nice if people as groups, especially governments, could act better than children in a schoolyard scuffle. The costs are so much higher.

***I don’t believe there is truth in Astrology, only vagueness. However, the book was amusing.

I don’t often read news sites anymore. The tedium of natural disaster, international incident, atrocity, fluff… why even bother? Most news stories are mad-libs with the names and places changing while the details remain the same. Today, however, I took a look.

Student auctions virginity, sparks online debate

from Reuters.

Predictably, they go into how some people are calling this prostitution and fearing for the moral decay and downfall of civilization and how terrible all of this is.

Well, it is prostitution. That is a matter of definition.

And I won’t go into the moral decay issue because anything I would say on that subject would be hugely inflammatory!.

I don’t consider sex a bad thing, and if one adult wants to exchange money for it, I don’t see any problem with that either. What struck me about this article is not the events, that is kinda whatever, but this:

The woman, who has earned a bachelor degree in women’s studies and now wants to start a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, is hoping the bidding will hit $1 million.

ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

!!!!!

Okay, there is historical precedent for the sale of virginity and a certain premium applied to that (it is a scarce resource), but, come on, is it that worth it? One million dollars….

Quite a large number of people find this site by searching for “How to break up with your girlfriend.” I doubt everyone is looking for this, and the search term, “creative ways to break up with your girlfriend” was a definitive answer (that people are looking for a how-to). I have broken up with a few girlfriends and I have some thoughts on both “how to” and “creative ways” which I will happily, if perplexedly, share.

Also, I know that a large percentage of my readers who read this site because I post interesting things are women. Please, feel free to comment and help these guys who are desperately searching for help.

Certain truths

There are some things you should keep in mind when breaking up with your girlfriend.

1. Breaking up is hard to do. Cliche as it is, it’s true. Presumably for a relationship to have gotten to the stage where there is some question about method of break-up, it was serious enough that you probably care about her and she you. It’s emotionally painful, even if it is the right thing, to hurt someone.
2. You will be the shithead. There is no way around this one. You’re intentionally hurting someone, even if it is the right thing to do. Deal.

Those truths being understood, there are more-shitheady ways, and less-shitheady ways.

Tom’s “preferred” method

I prefer a face-to-face in-person talk if that is possible. In a public but not exposed location. No one wants to break down into tears in front of a crowd of strangers, but privacy could be detrimental (to your health). The least bad way for this to go is for you to say something along the lines of:

I think you’re really amazing. But I think we are looking for different things right now and it isn’t fair to either of us to stay in this relationship.

Bonus points if you mean it. Alternatively, this may be okay:

I think you’re really amazing, I do. But I just don’t love you. And you deserve to be with someone who will.

Liberal use of “I’m sorry” may help in avoiding bloodshed.

But what about honesty?

Ordinarily, I’m a big proponent of honesty. And that’s the great thing: one of the two above statements should be true! You’d have to be a right shithead for the both of them to be lies. I would say that the above are being honest in the nicest way possible. I mean, really, if the goal is to create a better world, shouldn’t we want to be nice to people we have shared meals/shared movies/shared beds with? If honesty and/or niceness aren’t that big a deal for you, there are… other… options.

Other options

Note: these would fall into the category of really bad ideas. But Schadenfreude might make them funny.

Facebook
If you and your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend have disclosed your relationship to the jackals on facebook, you have some interesting opportunities. Between the wall and all those nifty sketching and word-game plugins, you should have methods of communication galore! Step one: write something mean. “I think you’re ugly,” as an example, would get the point across. Perhaps, “I’d rather fuck a dead fish.” Play, have fun. Violate the terms of service and get banned. It’s up to you. But write the terrible thing, then set your status to single and start sending messages (to other women. Extra points for “mistakenly” sending one to your ex with someone else’s name. Maybe her best-friend or her sister’s name. Maybe her mom’s name. Depending on the age group–by which I mean avoid anything illegal–maybe her daughter’s name.)

Youtube
Ah, Youtube, font of endless clips of illegally copied media and generally terrible videos. It truly is a democratization of media and you can abuse that. One idea is to make a video, dedicated to her, wherein you have one of her favorite songs playing and you start by extolling the wonderful times you had. But, it’s not all flowers and candles. She has flaws (and obivously you do) and you should talk about them. At Length. Bonus points for making out with another woman (see above list) at the end.

The Classic “Walk-In”
An oldie, but a goodie. Best suited for breaking-up with someone who has a key to your place (but be ready to change the locks!). At some time you know she is going to be coming over, by prior knowledge or by arranging it, make sure you’re in flagrante delicto with another woman (again, see above list) when she comes in. For the younger crowd, making out would work just as well, I think. The wonderful thing about this method is that there are two options. Either she leaves and you’re broken up, or she joins! And hey, option 2 means she’s a keeper!

Break-up Poetry
Most people consider poetry an excellent vehicle during the “wooing” phase of a relationship, but we’re all about breaking the rules, aren’t we? This technique requires an embarrassingly large delivery of roses to really work. So embarrassingly large that she immediately reads the card out loud (or someone else steals the card and reads it, even better!) before she knows what it says. As far as what should be written, I don’t think there’s any real need to worry about longer forms, this is one you want to keep short.
Consider limericks!

There is this boy from Kentucky
Who thinks he’s so very lucky-
he screws you all night
and your sister all day-
the luckiest boy in Kentucky.

Or Haiku! (haiku-like, anyway)

sweet jasmine-breeze- kissing you in the twilight- I’d rather die
oil-slick halibut- dead and slimy are better- than you in the sack

The point is, it’s more about the content than the form. Feel free to ignore “the rules” of poetry in this situation. Embrace off-rhyme and sing-songy rhythm. Even if it isn’t great verse, she’ll be surprised that you wrote something from the heart.

Email
For the most part, email and text messaging don’t offer the same opportunities to create a killing machine motivated by vengeance and embarrassment aimed at destroying your car, then your social life, and then killing you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun with them. Corporate mailing lists offer worlds of opportunity. You’ll probably get fired and there may be issues with privacy laws and there is the possibility of being sued for some form of harassment. That’s what the economics crowd call “opportunity costs.” Remember: “CC:” is your friend.

To clarify, I find some humor in everything between “Other Options” and here, but they are BAD BAD BAD ideas only meant to cause pain and humiliation. No one deserves that. No one. I mean that: NO ONE. The best revenge is living well. The best break-up is one where both people are if not happy, then content and hopeful for the future.

“What makes me fall in love with your WoW blog” by Larísa

Recently I’ve been thinking about why I like some WoW blogs more than others. There are blogs where I eagerly lick every single word that comes out. They’re so excellent that I always feel I’d wanted a little bit more. And then there are other blogs, some of them actually very well established, with hundreds or thousands of daily visitors, who leave me absolutely indifferent.
You could say it’s just a matter of taste, a gut feeling or something like that, but I’d like to explore it a little bit more. What exactly is it that makes me fall in love with a blog? What do some blogs have that other lacks?
* * *
After some pondering I realized that I should go further back in history to find the answers. – all the way back to the old Greece. I think the well known authors and philosophers from that era would have become excellent bloggers. They really knew how to catch an audience.
According to the classic rhetoric you should use your Ethos, Pathos and Logos, which is exactly what many of the best bloggers do, whether they think about it or not.

Go. Read. Probably ignore the links because they won’t mean anything to you (which is okay).

Back? No. Alright.

Okay… I think Larisa raises some really interesting points about breaking down stylistic elements of communication. The examples meant quite a bit to me, because I read those blogs every time they post, but for the rest of you, I hope the ideas made sense even without the highlighting.

I think those classical elements (ethos, pathos, logos) are pretty much inherent in human communication whether it’s formally assembled or purely random conversation. I also think the -os that is dominant is going to strongly alter the way the communication is presented. Not that there are hard and fast rules involved, but the more logos-directed, the more likely you are to find more structured, ordered types of communication.

Really, lists and thesis-oriented paragraphs favor communication with discrete and/or sequential data. Mostly informative.

Getting into pathos and ethos, there is a breakdown of the form into something more free-flowing (ah, no hating! sweeping generalisations!) where disparate elements can go together. There is no need to contain and, for that matter, you can conflate and mix metaphors all you like when you don’t need to prove anything!

Blogging fits an interesting niche, I think. As a method of communication, it serves well enough in any mode. (though I think there are limitations to the medium, but that’s another topic) Poetry, as a method of communication, I don’t think fairs all that well with logos. We tap into pathos, perhaps ethos. A lot of poetry is about bypassing reason. In a way, you could call poetry a form of propaganda. Political poetry (most especially from the “wrong side”) could easily be considered propagandistic. And anyone who know any literary criticism should be able to BS about the propagandistic nature of poetry about love, or nature (and how the poem/poet reinforces stereotypes/the patriarchy/heteronormativity/[insert -ism here].)

Is that all poetry should do? Should verse be instructional in a factual sense? There are some poems that present factual information. I think those are mostly side effects of the trope of the poem rather than the point. Would an instruction manual in verse be poetry or just a collection of really bad rhymes?

As part of a much larger question of what is poetry, and what is art, and what is artistic prose that is poem-like, we can consider the nature of poetic communication. I’m fine with keeping poetry in the realms of the emotive rather than the intellectual, but that excludes poetry that plays with language without meaning… it’s a fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy line.

I’ve stayed up rather late tonight. It’s okay, I suppose, because I don’t have to work tomorrow (yay!), so sleeping past 8 am won’t get me into any trouble.

I was… am… up late because I was reading. Looking for Alaska by John Green. Despite the fact that it was “young adult” fiction it was really good. I’d suggest it wends its way onto everyone’s reading lists.

And, as books are wont to do, it left me thinking. Yes, it was about high-school students. Yes, they smoked illegally and drank Strawberry Hill citrus wine and those are things I never do*. But those are just details. It ends up a story about human interaction.

As we get older we back away from experience, I think. Some of it is repetition: been there, done that, got the t-shirt and all. Some of it we judge before we experience it based on previous experiences. We shape ourselves by the experiences we have and our responses to those experiences. Who we are then influences what happens in the future and how we react. We fall into this endless cycle of experience and response that leaves us absolutely certain of who we are.  After all, we have crafted a world based on and reinforcing that notion that the “Me of this moment” is the “Me that must be.”

I don’t think that’s true, though. I believe we all have a vast capacity to choose who we are and who we are to become. In people not yet jaded by experience, they have no choice but to explore those questions. Sometimes the answers are surprisingly good, sometimes horrendously bad. But the ignorance, the naïveté of youth allows those questions to be answered in unexpected ways. It’s being able to play the “what-if?” game without a hint of irony because those ifs are all possible, and not crossed off the board based on predetermined definitions of identity.

We can only be who we are, no more, no less. But I think most of us don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do. I challenge the world: next time you are confronted with an option and you are going to dismiss a choice because it’s silly or “not me,” look carefully at it. Ask yourself if maybe you’re wrong. Try to see the world through your eyes as if it was newly formed and a world of possibilities was laid out before waiting to come into being. Because they are.

*I’ve never smoked illegally**, though I have drank Strawberry Hill. I don’t at all recall how it tasted.

**Dammit, I have. On the plus side, I don’t believe my parents read this. Not that they’d really care about a couple of cigars over a decade ago. It clearly has not become a habit.

Brotherhood 2.0

That is the idea that a blog should be sending.  I’d say that Seth Godin is right: when we have options, we will choose the best, the expert.  The Jack-of-all-trades is only useful if it’s all we’ve got.

There has been some discussion about Read Write Poem via email amongst it’s contributorial staff about possibly adding something in.  I don’t mean to say much about it as I don’t know that the final determination will be and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.  As a site, we have (mostly they have) put together a really fantastic resource on the art of poetry and of being a poet.  The arts of poetry and poeming (if that isn’t a word, it is now).  It may take nearly a dozen of us, but we’re an expert over there.  The challenge is to be an expert in what you can be an expert in, and not spread yourself into too many areas and becoming a generalist.

Most blogs suffer from the generalist problem (even mine).  It’s a difficult line to straddle between focus and interest.  Most of us blog about whatever we want: what’s going on in our lives, the experiences we have and think the rest of you should know about, ideas and insanities, the minutia of life.  The reason we can do this is that we are not a wikipedia article.  We are people and while our relationship may be very one-sided, this medium is still two people connecting.  People are not singular, expert entities, with only one topic.  We are like ogres, we have layers*.  People who are that focused, sure we head their way when we have a question, but we don’t hang about with them and converse.  They are useful to us and otherwise ignored.

So how do we weigh that against Seth’s comment?  Be an expert in the one area you cannot be contradicted in: the art of being you.

*I’ve only seen the first Shrek, and that is the only thing I remember from the movie.  But it’s a funny thought-ogres.

During a conversation with a friend the other day (who, sadly, is not a blogger – no link-love) my desire to teach poetry was briefly discussed. Due to my desire to avoid interaction with children, this absolutely means I must have a PhD and teach at the collegiate level and I remarked that I would prefer to teach at the graduate level because that means I would be working with people who might actually care. She suggested this would require me to be a published poet and I should get to work on that. I don’t mean to go into a discussion of whether I am, in fact, good enough to do any of those things, but rather, focus on the culture of poetry, they “why” of poetry.

As I imagine most of you do, I read daily- many, many books of poetry as well as many fine blogs showcasing poetry. In addition to the purely enjoyable experience of language, it is the conversation of ideas that I truly love. I’m not just a poet, but also a philosopher. I voraciously consume information in this media-rich world: science, culture, news, law, technology… all of it is interesting. Again, not just the simple experience, but the interplay of ideas driving the ephemera of expression. I would say that I have a love of ideas and most especially the ideas of poetry. The relation of images, narrative, language- the evocative and illustrative nature of a communication that transcends prose; the attempts to discuss experientially. The act of poetry reminds of a scene near the end of “Pushing Tin,” where Billy Bob Thornton takes John Cusack to be blown like dolls in the wake of a landing jet to experience something that words cannot convey. This, to me, is the essence of what poetry does with words.

I write to participate in that conversation of ideas. I grant that I don’t write things that will drastically change the world and, honestly, if I can touch just one person and bring something of interest to their day (as cliche as that may sound), then I consider that a success, perhaps a small one, but a success nonetheless. This is why I want to teach poetry to people who care about it, to bring this conversation to more people, to people that may not have realized it’s out here to be a part of. And to do that, I must be published.

I’ve never seriously considered seeking publication. Among other reasons, I’ve never been at all certain that my work is good enough, not necessarily just to published somewhere, but in terms of my own satisfaction with the permanence of a poem, with having something fixed, immutable, and out of my control. Faced now with this notion that publication is required, I have a bit of a dilemma. In order to publish (admittedly, this is a bit of a simplification) I have to treat poems as commodities, keeping them secret, set aside, portioning them out to people in the hopes of seeing them in print. I don’t have the freedom to put the poems out there, out here, and let the ideas freely spread. Most publications would consider poems posted here to be published. I disagree with the rational behind that sort of viewpoint.

The argument that people would not buy journals if they could read poems for free isn’t a very good argument. It is an extreme minority of poets that make a living as poets and not as teachers, performers, or vice presidents of insurance companies. Couple that to the fact that most journals pay poorly, if at all, and the journals, the magazines, are clearly the ones trying to get benefit for nothing. Authors are getting nothing but “publication credit” and two contributor copies. But what, it might be asked, about name recognition. Surely putting your name in front of the audience counts for something? Historically, yes. There would have been no other way to get to the audience but through periodicals. And yet media has come a long way from that point. Communication is not limited to the print / mail paradigm, yet that is the paradigm that the poetry journal is based on. Along with the many other benefits the internet provides, it allows communities to be built as if place had no effect. In both providing universally (or nearly so) available content and content that is available asynchronously, the entirety of communication, the entirety of marketing, has been changed to reflect this new method of interaction. “Publication credit,” it seems, has not. By their count, I would have self-published 97* poems or poem-groups in 2007 on this blog. I somehow doubt that would carry much weight on a CV.

Some journals, many of which are online, do not consider a personal blog to be “publishing.” I consider this a much more reasonable viewpoint: a greater acceptance of the shift in community from the face-to-face interactions to what I might flippantly call facebook-to-facebook interactions. In the same manner someone printing broadsheets for friends or a workshop would not be considered publishing, neither should personal blogs because they serve the same function-a direct communication with peers, friends and colleagues. And, much as the poet gets marketing value from being published, so too are journals getting marketing value from poets talking about journals. Marketing gurus Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod spend a lot of their time talking about how traditional marketing, the producer telling the story, has fallen in the face of the internet. It has been replaced, in much the same way content production has been, by conversations between people. As Seth Godin would say, something being “remarkable” enough to talk about; something becoming a “social object,” in Hugh Macleod’s lingo. There is something to be said for the cachet of the elite garnered from the poetry journal but what is it effective for? Is it effective for the poet? I would suggest no, econonomically or in the realm of ideas. Readership of poetry is abysmally low in any form of print, most journals don’t even market to a general audience, but only through other journals. At my local Borders, they carry Poetry, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, and The Columbia Review. The last two, I’m certain, because they are relatively local. My local Barnes & Noble does not carry any. Any poem I hypothetically had printed in something like the Beloit Poetry Journal or AGNI would be read by the bare handful of people living in my area that happened to have subscriptions, or to the bare handful of people who read this blog that may happen to have subscriptions to poetry journals. It would not realistically get my name out there very well; there would be no “social” to the “object.”

Meanwhile, slaving away with no desire but to communicate, I’ve had about 3000 page views since this blog opened at the end of July (not counting the nearly 500 just searching for the quote from “Across the Universe”). Not many views. It’s probably a much smaller number that had any real interest. It’s probably a drastically smaller number that care or read more than once. But unlike print, it isn’t just about how many people subscribe, it’s how many people fit into that “social” sphere.** While print journal subscriptions generally shrink, all I have to do to get more, and more involved, readers is to be more remarkable. Provide a better product for the people who are looking for it. More and better poems, more and better commentary, more and better involvement. More and better ideas in the conversation. I cannot help but think this is the better view. Don’t misunderstand, I read a few journals myself and I hardly ever read anything of length online; there is something to be said for the tactile involvement of a book, the texture of the paper under the texture of the poem. That is a level of involvement that I think will keep print around for a very long time.

The dilemma is not just whether I should be published or not. It is a fundamental question of how I should treat poetry, how I should be involved in Poetry, and, by extension, how we should all be involved with Poetry and it with us. There is no simple answer and I don’t know which way I’ll end up going: selling out for the CV or not. For the time being, I’ll be holding off on posting much poetry here, my own anyway.

* Yes, I had to count.
** For more on this thought, I suggest reading Hugh MacLeod’s how big is your audience? [revisited]
Silly PostScript: This was about three hours in the writing and there may be typos or poorly worded sections that I missed.  If you see any of them, let me know.