fallen verses

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So, internet-land, thus far our communications have been text-based, and it has been good. But there is so much more available and limiting ourselves to typing is just not taking advantage of all the modern adaptations available on this Web 2.0 deal.

This video includes two sestinas: Sestina for No One and Sestina that I wrote a while ago, but since I have a prompt up over at Read Write Poem about sestinas, I thought I would kick off this vlogging experiment with a reading of those two.

Internet-land, what I would like to know is if you like this idea of both seeing and hearing me. Questions, comments, suggestions, and proposals of marriage all welcome!

(from here via notcot)

Make it big, and it’s art. Make it big, and public, and it’s art people talk about.

I wonder if the problem with poetry is that it’s too quiet now. The maddest among us don’t howl so much as froth. I certainly mumble in the background somewhere about the ephemeral. Maybe it just isn’t enough of a spectacle without obscenity trials?

Dana has had some thoughts about “public poetry” and swimwear in the winter is attention getting. But maybe too small*. Maybe.

Maybe we need to think bigger. Stop thinking about what I can do, and think, “what can we get a thousand people to do.” What makes it big.  Something to think about anyway.

*For the record, on attractive women, I do generally have the opinion that the smaller the swimwear, the better. Tongue-in-cheek sexism aside, it’s not the quantity of fabric, that makes the swimsuit (either much or little) but how it looks altogether.

This isn’t a poem, you know.
This is a splash of colour
(black)
on scraps of dirty paper
(suddenly valueless, green, 155.956 × 66.294 mm
when we give up the ridiculous imperial measurements
distributed with foreign government and unrepresented
taxation, which, it seems, we also need to
give up)
saying "thanks for being around.

"Thanks for being
constant as the cloud of
crows at stirling castle
or the voice in Ted Haggard’s head
(he calls it "God," but whatever).
Thanks for lasting
the same 65 million
as dinosaur bones
and not being calcified.

"Thanks for being
the bass line when I
was playing lead
and embellishing the melody
when I couldn’t strum
anything other than
c – c – c – c."

This isn’t a poem, you know.
This is my map of you
and where your bones move
softly through your muscles
and skin into my skin
and muscles and bones
so we vibrate at the same pitch
which is the pitch of grass
growing in a summer afternoon
reaching for the sun.
Shhhhh… Listen closely.

A response to Nathan’s Collaborative prompt #59 where poets donated titles and those titles have been used as the basis for the text of other poems. I didn’t use them all, I slashed them to pieces and added in more words, but I think that’s the joy of these prompts that we start with complete (or nearly) texts and disassemble and re-create in the writing process.  Definitely, if you have not, check out the other responses to this prompt over at Read Write Poem.

…is the middle ground. Extremes (and complexities) of emotional response are pretty much our stock-in-trade. It might well be the ethos of the middle-brow suburban working stiff to parrot the old-media-spawned desirability of a ‘balanced’ perspective but the unbalanced, unpopular, subversive, perverse, creepy, critical, curious, unconventional and not-always-well-intentioned are just a few of the acceptable positions for genuinely creative and/or inquisitive minds”

-Hazel Dooney

While I assume most people who read these missives I send into the aether are well aware, I just want to put it out there again. Poetry Daily. Today’s is “User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation” by Paul Guest, and I found this snippet amusing:

When not an outright impossibility
or form of neurological science fiction,
sexual congress will either be with
tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,
performing an act of sadistic charity…

I’m in ISSUE 2!!!!! Page 382!

(via Harriet)

Incidentally, since the contents of my site are licensed under a creative commons license, it was totally cool of them to use it. I’m not going to be uppity like some people were (about Issue 1, anyway).

link (via Poetry Hut Blog)

Maybe I’m the only one who isn’t familiar with Lewis Hyde, maybe not. I don’t recall having ever heard of him or his book The Gift. If that NYTimes piece is indicative of his views, I probably should look into it.

Intellectual property is a murky idea. How do you really “own” and idea? How can you hold it in your hand? Or lock it away in a safe? Really, the only way you can own an idea is to never express it. That only prevents people from hearing your idea, not from coming up with it on their own. And, I suppose in fairness, generally ideas are not what is copyrighted, but the expression thereof.

Now, increasingly in this wikied and hyperlinked world, it is so clear the debts we owe to other authors, other artists, both contemporary and historical. To think that we, without respect of the contributions of others to our thoughts, ideas, and expressions, should own them seems, I don’t know if arrogant is the right word, but something along those lines.

Perhaps it’s a warranted desire, though. Perhaps.

I mean, we all understand the reasons for property rights (I hope). And they remain valid for, say, sculptors or painters. What real difference is there between those and poetry or songwriting other than medium? There isn’t. Ultimately it comes down to being non-tangible. There is, fundamentally, an unlimited ability to split it among “consumers;” unlike some of my other favorite things (viz. chocolate. that there is a limited supply of chocolate is a tragedy).

How do you reconcile these two ideas: infinite supply (or, at least, supply limited only by difficulty in sharing which increasingly approaches zero) and wanting to control and live doing creative work?

I’m not sure where that balance point is. On the one hand is the hobbyist artist (as I think many of us are) and the other is the professional artist. I don’t know if both can be the beneficiary of a intellectual property theory. As Lessig claims, restrictive copyright laws prevent creative arts that involve using other works, or reduces them all to using old works. That really hits contemporary creative conversations. On the other end, paid work gets more difficult to accomplish in the face of it being unprotected.

It’s tough when both sides have effective arguments and are largely irreconcilable.

Complain loudly enough, and the mountain will move for you (via Poetry Hut Blog).

Or, if not mountains, you can squelch free speech and artistic expression that does not match with your iron-age belief system. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems the “moderate christians” should be with the people standing up against this. If that group wants to play in the modern world, they need to invigorate the Jesus 3.0. The 1.0 guy has been dead for a long time, the 2.0 guy is a bigot and needs to shut up. Jesus 3.0 is the opportunity to look for the positive things faith can add to the world (if you believe there are any), rather than the fear and intolerance bandied about by the vocally religious.

Just when you think the world maybe has a chance, you keep seeing stuff like this. Makes me sad.

This is me not working on my NaNoWriMo project. Video from here about this. Usual caveat that if you see a gray bar, click it.

It didn’t take too much of that talk for me to understand it and realize I’ve been doing it wrong in a lot of my creative endeavors recently. In writing, or in my oft-neglected visual media, I get very goal-focused. I spend too much time thinking about the end product and I miss out on a lot of the things that makes creativity and art so wonderful which is the surprise that comes of it.

I haven’t been participating in many of the read write prompts for a while, but Nathan’s prompt and Dana’s Read Write Word were excellent prompts for me and, I think, are some of the better pieces I’ve written recently. Why? Why were those good but the image prompts escaping me? Why is Read Write Word 2 not as inspiring?

I think it has to do with being in that second form of play: building. The original prompts had so much to start with it was very neat to me to start pulling them apart and putting them back together. The first Wordle had thirty words, which I used only a portion of. The other prompts become more like the first type of play, the exploration. With so few options at our disposal, it becomes more about how many things can be done with a paper clip. And that is a situation where having knowledge gets in the way. If you don’t know what a paper-clip is, there’s no preconception, there’s nothing telling you can’t be… um… something else. Once you know, just by looking at it you wouldn’t see it as an element of wire sculpture, but once you’re holding them and molding them and twisting them together, you can build the new ideas that you would never have thought of.

Which is not to say that any type of creativity is better than any other. Seems to me they all fit different style and suit different purposes. But as a creative individual (or someone pretentious enough to cal myself one) all of these things are aspects. Some aspects may be strengths and things I should develop. Some things are weaknesses and should be avoided or worked on.

This NaNoWriMo experience is teaching me many things. I do not work as well from a blank page as I do from a full one, even if the full one is full of random nonsense things. When I was younger I used to draw (poorly). Then, I was more of a LEGO kid. It suited me better having chaos as a starting point than openness, I guess. Anyway, what are your thoughts on playing as artists and wordsmiths? How do we take those styles of play and put them into our writing practices?