fallen verses

(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.

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…

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.

Laughing in the Wind
after Rosetti

Still no one has seen the wind.
In these sepia photos the night
sky is the color of espresso.
Spring rains can be warm and gentle.
No one has really seen those either.

Still, no one has seen the wind.
Science, however, turns with the answer:
smoke. A trick that works in tunnels
but autumn remains stubbornly
unconvinced. Fire is too terrible.

Unless it is the incandescent burn
of passionate eyes. There is
velocity when falling,
even when falling in love.

The wind itself remains silent.
The wind itself explores all surfaces.
Realize, however, that the wind
is, itself, something to be explored.
Like silence. Like love.

Dana challenged us with a collection of words. Since I am never one to ignore a dropped gauntlet (er.. except the 30-40 prompts I didn’t do), I used that list as the basis. It took a few iterations before I found something that started working for me, and that is what remains above.

I didn’t use it, but in the wordle image the phrase “science turning tricksy” stood out to me. But it’s tricky like a mischevous god not tricksy like a con man. At least not true science, but you know what they say about true scotsmen.

Actually, being a pretty damn strict materialist / rationalist, I have enormous respect for science and the paradigm it works under. I don’t think it’s tricksy at all. I think Art is tricksy as all get out. And that is o.k. too.

via Poetry Hut Blog

Burger King Launches Canadian Online Poetry Contest (link)

…

Haiku is an ancient form of Japanese poetry consisting of a set number of syllables per line: five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third. The website includes haiku samples and an easy-to-use haiku-writing application….

/boggle

I think this calls for bullet points:

• “Ancient” is a very fluffy word in this context. Language is so fluffy to begin with but then we take words that have meanings and we stretch those meanings and stretch them and stretch them and soon, they have holes big enough in their ears you could mini-putt through them! So, while this is true, it is only true in some meanings of the word. Regardless, I don’t think I would call the 17th century ancient.
• Syllables: well, Japanese does not have syllables, so it is, in fact, impossible for Japanese poetry to have a form based on them. Japanese is measured in on (which are moras), which are not syllables!!!!!
• Per line? Well, the line issue. The glaring 5-7-5 of grade school prosody. Haiku (as an independent form) were not three line poems. Often, they were written in one line. Or, when mixed with visual arts in haiga, were formed according to how they best fit with the image (something the poets at Postal Poetry are working with).
• 5-7-5… well, remember, not syllables in Japanese, but on. Haiku are not 5-7-5, not really. They employ (in their most formal sense) a kireji (cutting word) after the fifth or twelfth on. The kireji serving as a point of separation similar to colon, semicolon, dash, ellipses, something of that nature. A little math and you can see how 12/5 or 5/12 gets thought of as (5+7)/5 or 5/(7+5) to get the tripartite form we use in western haiku.
• “easy-to-use haiku-writing application”  ????? write text, count, edit text, recount. Notepad does this!!!!

Feel free to ignore the man behind the curtain wearing the gold paper crown.

And feel free to ignore whoever wrote that idiotic trade-journal article. I mean, fuck, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, WIKIPEDIA it! How about, mr. fast-food-writer-man*, you write about the new innovation in fryers and leave the poem-talk to people that know more about poetry than your average 4th grader!

*I say man, of course, meaning the non-gender specific referent for person while still conveying “The Man.” mr. fast-food-writer-person just wouldn’t have had the same edge to it.

A Pin Worked Loose

Tatterdemalion slink into depleted villas,
each step chasing memories deeper into
these antiquated courtyards.

Here are artifacts which nobody recognizes.
They remain untouched. Visitors, focused inward,
do not notice them. They tarnish, fade, rust.

Outside, civil guards scream obscenities.
Someone has posted Lorca’s broadsides
believing both duende and Andalusia are omnipresent.

Somewhere else, meditation resurfaces a lost “I.”
In that same place a girl is born. An old woman dies.
Later, the process is repeated. And again. And again.

In an open notebook are words brilliant but forgettable-
tenuously held together scraps called verses.
The page is a pin worked loose- the center holds,
but a breeze carries the frayed edges out of sight.

It seems such a waste to let those words stand alone on this page. Especially when so many of them will be repeated from piece to piece, each a playful rehuffling of context and content.

Tatterdemalion is a word I have only encountered previously in a Terry Brooks novel: Knight of the Word. It was a magic creature, animated by the spirit of a dead child, built of scraps. Similar to its real definition in an essence. Tatters, the ends, fading, decay. I also think it echoes the essence of this excercise. We all started with scraps and are putting them together.

Most of my poetry is written in a first-person perspective. I edited to remove the “I” from this poem. It seemed, to me, the “I” was too strong an identity for the poem to hold. The “I” was too complete. So I deleted it.

I’m curious to see so many other takes on this arrangement of words. See both what words get used most often and how their meanings change from place to place.

Additional information: I wrote the majority of this poem while listening to James Blunt’s album Back to Bedlam. Judge as you will.

Check out everyone else’s responses at Read Write Poem while you’re at it!

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.

Poetry Thursday is gone, :( . The traveling edition of it has run out of steam, :( . But, we cannot have Thursdays without Poetry (actually, I’m fairly sure most of us poets cannot have any day without poetry!) so Tiel and Mike have taken over the reigns of Poetry as it is incarnated on Thursday, with their new site: Totally Optional Prompts. The premise: each week, they will post a writing prompt (much as Poetry Thursday did) which the following Thursday you may or may not follow it as you post something Poetry related on your blog. For their part, they will provide a post where people can put Links! to their blogs to share these posts with other poets and poetry lovers. And all, specifically, on Thursdays! I’m not so keen on their icon, so I’ll not be posting that, but please do check them out. I don’t anticipate having internet access for the rest of the week, so I’m posting a bit early and won’t have my link on their Thursday post unless I do end up having access. We’ll see. I wrote this piece inspired by the prompt for this week:

Salt, Girl

I chase you into the cabin,
trailing sand showers in our wake,
and the echo of surfboards.
In the purple of twilight
your sarong is tinted
as I coil it on the floor.
In front of the fireplace,
the sea water dries quickly
and I taste the salt
as I kiss your breasts.
While I lie awake through dawn
and I hear the waves gently rocking,
I still taste the salt
and remember the sweetness.

As a note, I always welcome constructive feedback, even though I’d likely ignore it. :)

Edit (Saturday 10-13-2007):
All right. Because I never checked the lobby of the hotel for wifi access, I’ve been cut off since I got here Tuesday night. Now, about 24 hours before I leave, I see someone on the ‘net in the lobby sans broadband phone card. I drag the laptop down here, and after screwing around with some networking settings, got connected, and put the permalink to this post over at TOP. More delicious posts here.