Final project proposal

On Veracross you'll find the chapbook assignment I used last time for this class.  It lays out all the expectations and grading criteria clearly.  If you want to create that kind of final project, it's all there.

However, there are many other ways to 'publish' poetry and if you want to try a different approach for your final project, I'd like you to write up a proposal.  In addition to the project, you'll need to make a 2-4 minute presentation of your project and one or more poems to the class during the final exam period in the lecture hall.

It should include the following:

• What form(s) will your project take?-  chapbook, commercially published book, set of smaller booklets, video(s), spoken word or other approaches.  You could publish by performing in different places or creating poems about a particular place or experience and sharing them in the SPA community. If you're participating in the gender anthology, for example you could take on a leadership role there, or you could just submit a poem or two and focus your energy elsewhere.  

• What direction will your poems take?-  How will you both develop your voice and extend into different areas?  You might develop an idea, your voice or a particular approach.  It might be sonnets.  Extending an idea across several poems, or writing a long poem across several ideas would be another approach. Visual approaches are another possibility

a couple examples of visualized language

Check out both of the Ira Glass statements about creativity  HERE and HERE

Poetry Reading?

Check out the Jamie DeWolf show at the U of M Bell Museum theater on the 18th  22nd if you still haven't seen any spoken word poetry.  A great venue, too.  

poem videos

Here's my poem video:
                I've posted the poem below as well.

HERE is a classic Dylan cue card music video from '65 w/ Allan Ginsberg in the background.

And HERE is a great spoken word about being pretty. 

A few reminders for yours:

1.  Use a tripod.  The Blair Witch Project moment is over.
2.  Consider lighting carefully. Natural light is best; augmented indoor light is good.
3.  Frame more tightly than you think you need to.
4.  Shoot much more video than you think you'll need.  Typically you'll get only 1 good minute for every 10 minutes shot- if you're lucky.
5. Consider open source video for remixing such as this- https://archive.org/  or this- http://vimeo.com/creativecommons
6. creative commons open source music here- https://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos

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Coffee Word.

My friend Linda says

sometimes she wants to go to bed

Just so she can get up

For that first cup of coffee.

And my first cups were

milky lattes in the open cafes

of Aix-en-Provence

until money got low and

bitter espresso

was all I could afford.

Like Prufrock

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”

Dark thick brews with Sunday news

Of third world lives and book reviews

Coffee’s casual rituals

Its pauses habitual for

Warm buzz and words

printed or spoken in

Dim crowded rooms or in

weak November sun.

                                                                                            

Girls Club

Ok, not really.  It was just a better title than "poems based on experiences around gender."  This doesn't need to be exclusive, as Claire's POD demonstrated today.    Share your poems HERE and we'll go from there. 

Five Weeks-

So, I know 2nd quarter just started, but it's a 7 week quarter and only 5 remain.  Plus, three of them are short weeks meaning we have 11 class periods left.  Today's conversations felt productive, and I heard lots of good ideas for video poem projects and final publication formats.  I've double checked the deadlines on the assignment page of this blog, and they still make sense to me.  I've highlighted them, please pay attention to them.  We'll be producing the videos Nov. 18-22 w/ the macbook cart.  You'll any images, videos & audio files ready to go then.  Editing takes time.  Next week will be work time, except for memorized poem presentations in small groups.

I will also ask for a final project proposal at the end of next week.  If you already have a pretty good idea already, include it on the HW for the weekend which is a video project proposal.

Video proposal write up guide HERE   And LOOK HERE for a great model by a poet who will be at the 11/23 Indigenous poets reading.  

A poem based on a photo from our gallery visit

The Gallery

On Halloween day my class comes here to look back at

Lined faces of dated grief

Stare out from

large glossy portraits

on the white gallery wall.

 In this school of young privilege

Even I choose

One image of a faceless gesture

a disembodied arm extended in

ExplanationRationalizationSupplication

The faces too hard to look at

Too many people suffering too many places

Witnessed by a photograph of

ANA MARIE BARNAVALLE’s mascaraed face

made up for some an event

a life in absentia

her name printed on the picture

Picture pinned to her mother’s floral print jacket

The bright clothes of old women who grieve

The dark clothes of my students dressing for Halloween

Who I’ve asked to pay attention to their own attention

Another meta moment of our increasing italicized lives

women who grieve their lost men

lost sons or husbands

and this particular daughter

who looks out through dark, knowing eyes

30,000 desparacitos

drugged, imprisioned, killed, dropped from planes.

Really?  That’s a new one

I think, retreating to hipster irony

Henry Kissinger had secretly given

American approval

to Argentina's new military rulers.

Says Wikipedia

But of course he had

The old bastard always riding well above

 war crime tribunals

The responsible disembodied hand testifies to the

stoic portrait of the long dead woman

while her mother takes down notes

a faceless recording angel

the women who listen and grieve

who always listen and grieve

the men (and women) they’ve lost

at the hands of other men

Poetry reading OR journal blog due 10/31

If you haven't gone to a reading yet, find a poetry journal that interests you.  Here are a few listings, but I'd suggest you find something at a school you're interested or on a subtopic that interests you.

NYPL Best of the Web

Most beautiful online lit mags

Pushcart Prize best poetry journals (not all are online)

And some online randomness that looks intriging

Louis Jenkins

Louis Jenkins' surprisingly simple prose poems push the boundaries of our poetic expectations.  Read and watch these examples and write a blog post commenting on some aspect of his work across several poems. Consider voice, theme, imagery, language, character, narrative or setting as possible starting points.  Be sure to use examples in your post.

LouisJenkins.com

Poetry Foundation with the poem 'Football'

'The Afterlife'

'The Fishing Lure'

'Some things to think about' video of Mr. Jenkins reading his work.

'North of the Cities' read by actor/playwright Mark Rylance as his Tony award acceptance speech.

'Nice Fish' scene from the Guthrie production of his work last year. 

Change

All those things that have gone from your life, moon boots, TV
trays, and the Soviet Union, that seem to have vanished, are
really only changed, dinosaurs did not disappear from the earth
but evolved into birds and crock pots became bread makers.
Everything around you changes. It seems at times (only for a
moment) that your wife, the woman you love, might actually be
your first wife in another form. It's a thought not to be pursued.
... Nothing is the same as it used to be. Except you, of course,
You haven't changed ... well, slowed down a bit, perhaps. It's
more difficult nowadays to deal with the speed of change, dis-
turbing to suddenly find yourself brushing your teeth with what
appears to be a flashlight. But essentially you are the same as
ever, constant in your instability.

The State of the Economy

There might be some change on top of the dresser at the
back, and we should check the washer and the dryer. Check
under the floor mats of the car. The couch cushions. I have
some books and CDs I could sell, and there are a couple big
bags of aluminum cans in the basement, only trouble is that
there isn't enough gas in the car to get around the block. I'm
expecting a check sometime next week, which, if we are careful,
will get us through to payday. In the meantime with your one—
dollar rebate check and a few coins we have enough to walk to
the store and buy a quart of milk and a newspaper. On second
thought, forget the newspaper.

Gravity

It turns out that the drain pipe from the sink is attached to
nothing and water just runs right onto the ground in the
crawl space underneath the house and then trickles out
into the stream that passes through the backyard. It turns
out that the house is not really attached to the ground but
sits atop a few loose concrete blocks all held in place by
gravity, which, as I understand it, means "seriousness." Well,
this is serious enough. If you look into it further you will
discover that the water is not attached to anything either
and that perhaps the rocks and the trees are not all that
firmly in place. The world is a stage. But don't try to move
anything. You might hurt yourself, besides that's a job for
the stagehands and union rules are strict. You are merely a
player about to deliver a soliloquy on the septic system to a
couple dozen popple trees and a patch of pale blue sky.

The Speaker

The speaker points out that we don't really have much of
a grasp of things, not only the big things, the important
questions, but the small everyday things. "How many steps
up to your front door? What kind of tree grows in your
backyard? What is the name of your district representative?
What is your wife's shoe size? Can you tell me the color of your
sweetheart's eyes? Do you remember where you parked
the car?" The evidence is overwhelming. Most of us never
truly experience life. "We drift through life in a daydream,
missing the true richness and joy that life has to offer." When
the speaker has finished we gather around to sing a few
inspirational songs. You and I stand at the back of the group

and hum along since we have forgotten most of the words 

Poetry contests

Here are some young poet contests for submitting & hopefully publishing your work-  Please let me know if you decide to submit work to any of these.

• Kenyon-  1 poem by Dec. 1
• Bennington- 3 poems by Nov. 1
• St. Mary's College of CA   by Dec. 1
• Scholastic Art and Writing by Dec 16
• Poetry Society of America by Dec. 21
• American Library of Poetry by March 30
• TeenInk  rolling submissions
• and here's a link with many other writing competitions.  If you hear about others, please let me know and I'll post them.  

Nu Griot Reading

The Saint Paul Almanac is pleased to announce the first in its 2013–2014 season of acclaimed Lowertown Reading Jams, which celebrate the rich literary history of Minnesota's capital city and the widely popular genre of spoken word.
The "NU GRIOT's Gumbo Revolution" Lowertown Reading Jam will be presented on Wednesday, October 23, 2013, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar, 308 Prince Street in Saint Paul. This presentation of the popular and eclectic series is hosted by Ellena Schoop.
All ages, no cover, donations accepted. Food and beverages for sale.

a powerful spoken word

poem of the day

More Chris Martin, perhaps from Cold Play...

I'm so glad you all had the chance to hear Chris this morning read and talk about his work and poems.  I only wish you all could have had both periods as I did.  Because I had that luxury, I've combined my notes from both periods and include it here as some inspiration.  I hope you'll begin playing with line, image and sound as he does in your work over the long MEA weekend.  If nothing else, do take his (and my) advice and use a notebook (or your phone) to capture those moments that you can later assemble into poetry.  

Big ideas-

·         “Plagiarism is necessary.”  In fact these people are your ‘company’, your crew, perhaps, the voices in your head, your inspiration.  Join the conversation w/ them consciously, explicitly. 

The epigraph for American Music, “The world’s furious song flows through my mask” acknowledges this.  American Music is the attempt to expressly acknowledge his company.

·         “I’m obsessed with line breaks”  “Lineation is the way poetry gets to be exponential.  It can stay open.  The sense of the line stands alone.”  “Prose is passive” and by implication poetry is active b/c you have to chose line breaks. He invented the “staggered tercet’ w/o end stops that he uses throughout the book.  This form requires three uneven length lines, making not the metric foot but rather a visual unit the measure of a line.  Ultimately, for him there’s no such thing as ‘free verse’ as every form has some kind of line pattern.  Poets choose constraints.

·         Line :: page as poem :: voice.  Poems consist of two worlds, the meanings of the lines on the page and then the meanings of the poem/words in a voice. 

·         The word ‘poem’ comes from the Greek word, ‘to make,’ ‘stanza’ comes from the Italian word for ‘room,’ and ‘verse’ comes from the Latin verb ‘to turn’ or turn around, (specifically turning over the soil when plowing a field).  So, the poet is an architect constructing rooms in which you turn around. Or, writing is the ‘dancing you do in this house you make of a poem.”

·         “Poems are about becoming” “It’s abhorrent to me to know what a thing will become.”  Echoes the famous line, “No surprise for the writer ; No surprise for the reader.”  All the energy comes in that search for meaning.  ¾ of the way through a poem you become your own reader and discover the poem in the midst of writing it and you see/learn how to end it. 

Misc thoughts-

·         What’s your ‘shadow vocation’- the mythic thing you do in your shadow life?

·         “I missed questions”. 

·         Use anagrams (visual word play) to move from one line to the next. 

Favorite lines-

·         ‘anthropomorphic scorn’

·         ‘a twitter of teenagers’ (written in 2007, long before Twitter existed)

·         “Everyone’s a nature poet who observes and writes the world. My nature happened to be the subway.”

·         All the stories in his poems are literally true. 

·         “Poetry is an explicitly social art”  The poem “

Poem ideas/inspirations-

·         Keep a notebook & use it every day.

·         Sanskrit poets used to give each other last lines in writing competitions, and challenge each other to write poems to them.

·         Snap poem-  a poem of images (perhaps using real images) constructed from a day and assembled into a narrative (rather like our lives).   Narrative/coherence is always an illusion we construct associatively from the fragments of attention and memory.  “It’s sort of like watching Youtube”

more martin poems

Here and here and here are a few more Chris Martin poems. Here are a few in audio files.   Please post your response before class on Tuesday. 

Chris Martin's American Music

‘we are never / Quiet, never quite / Free from the hallucinations / Of meaning’

It’s all pattern recognition.  Our minds constantly scan our portals on the world, eyes, ears, etc., looking first for threats or sex or donuts, and not too long afterwards  for meaning.  How does this word, this action, this object, this person fit or not fit with existing patterns in my head?  Chris Martin’s poems seem to both provoke or replicate our restless, drifting minds- what Zen calls the monkey mind .

At the semantic level, his short lines provoke us by setting a direction and changing it at the line break.  For example he exploits our interest in sex with lines like,

“I thought it terribly

important to bed

A woman of learning

To feel The Sonnets”

Or

“a nearly,  

chinless woman flashes me

Her smile only to withdraw it”.

This biological imperative gets named specifically in “Fertility for Dummies” when he notes,  ‘my biology attends / To the shapes my looking / Constructs and I am here / To appreciate the manner in which / A smoking woman / Wades through asphalt.”  I appreciate his… well, appreciation for our romantic attentions, but in “The True Meaning of Pictures” he goes beyond  sex as distraction and presents romantic love as the only solution to the ‘fantastic terror of existence.’  As Andrew Marvell  similarly noted in “Dover Beach” “Ah, love, let us be true / to one another”,  Martin concludes more broadly that ‘Our feelings instruct/ Us and yet / It’s the only thing/ To be done, Right?’

Yet more often, it seems Martin refutes this search for meaning, playing with our need for pattern, for narrative.  There’s a fatigue built into these poems.  For a maybe 10 stanzas, I connect the dots like the poem is a word game that, unlike crossword puzzles, I might enjoy.  Yet the poems resist my search for resolution.  In “American Music” he starts with a bald man at an adjacent table, drifts into the contrast between emotion and the marketplace, and then lands in Bhutan.  As we move into modernism, we’ll see more poems that resist narrative or perhaps any meaning.

The (post)modern sense of alienation  that results from a lack of agreed upon meanings, shows up In “Jokes for Strangers” as the ‘twenty first century’ ‘airshaft’ and even the ‘empty drawer’ which feel like metaphors for all of us ‘composing jokes for strangers.’   This seems confirmed as an ‘urban mirage’ which evokes a Matrix-like sense of futile, hallucinatory lives. 

“True Meaning of Pictures” promises meaning but offers instead the central image of each of us ‘moonlighting as both / Actor and director in a film” in which “you get so fucking lost / In the production that it’s days / Later, piss running down your leg / That you remember to call cut”.  That pretty much sounds like each of us at the end of first quarter, no? 

Poetry App

Poems on your phone!  Here's an app from the best poetry organization in the country.  Check it out!

A list poem

How to ride a motorcycle

First, let a small nephew or neighbor,

preferably a boy around five or six,

sit in the seat.  Watch his face and know

your eyes will be that wide
when the ground moves beneath you.  

On the road, learn to scoot through others’ blindspots

To stay back from sand blown or gravel bounced

from semis on the freeway

To avoid Buicks and Oldsmobiles and school buses

Driven by old men with side sunglasses who stop without reason

Pay particular attention to the head turn

or subtle start of abrupt, unsignaled lane changes.

Don’t imagine front tires exploding

and the garage sale road rash and much much worse

or deer bounding from ditches.        

And certainly don’t remember your physician assistant neighbor’s

emergency room cautionary tales,

or the word ‘donor mobile’

or the arguments with your wife about helmets

or  the rear wheel spinning in spring sand, the rear end swerving just before you found yourself floating above the horizontal bike sliding across the double yellow line on that curve.

Focus on the engine’s steady thrum instead of the irregular ticking sound

on the sudden appearance of horizons from hilltops

on the coolness in dips or river bottoms

on the physics of friction holding tires to tar

(and on sand or water or oil that reduce friction).

Marvel at the easy lean that bends the bike into an arc,

at sunsets reflected in small square mirrors

at the two finger downward salute of grizzled leathered riders

at clutches of  Harleys outside bars named for numbered highways

in the looks from the land bound while you come nearabout to flying.

First visiting poet

Although she visibly cringed each time I repeated the phrase "Minnesota's poet laureate," Joyce Sutphen's conversations with both classes yesterday demonstrated how her words earned that recognition.  In her Minnesota way, she first acknowledged a former student now colleague, Matt Rasmusson whose first book of poetry was nominated for a National Book Award yesterday.  I'll start by noting a few of her thoughts to help us remember them:

Poetry is 'language condensed'
"Write what matters"
Good poems "leave room to respond"
"Think of the poet as a potter who learns forms and and skills."
'Ekphrastic' meaning 'talking image' is a poem about a picture.

She also talked about her poetic voice in the way we have been and identified her voice as: terse, narrative, elegiac memoir that focuses on topics of love, loss, relationships and philosophy.  I particularly appreciated the way she showed how the rhythms of sonnets appear in her poems as looser versions of rhyme and meter.  For example, she executes Alexander Pope's line "The sound must seem an echo to the sense" in these opening lines-

The Problem Was

The problem was a different sense of form.

He was all couplets, heroic and closed;

I always wanted to carry on, one line

into the next, never reaching an end,

or, if I did, imagining it might be

the possible beginning to a different train

of thought, which might lead to the exact

opposite of what I was saying now. 

Joyce Sutphen

I'm excited to announce our first visiting poet will be Joyce Sutphen on Thursday September 19th.

Read her bio and poems here and here and here, and an interview w/ more poems here.

Then, write a 250+ word journal response that connects particular images or topics or approaches in her work with quotes that show this.  This should be something that prepares you to ask a specific, well prepared question in class.   This is due on Tuesday, Sept. 17th.  We'll discuss her work with writing groups and the whole class in preparation for her visit.  See my response to this poem below.

Death Inc.

Without his scythe and crooked knife  
he’s simply an ordinary guy.

You see him at the bus stop,
and he’s reading a folded newspaper,

or he’s in the car next to you 
on the freeway—first he passes

you, and then you pass him.
It goes on like that for a long time,

but though you glance over at him,
he never looks back at you,

which (it turns out) is a good thing.
All the while you’ve been 

waiting for the carriage to stop
(kindly) at your door—the carriage

that would take you past the schoolyard
and the fields, accompanied by 

the gentle clip-clop of horse’s hooves,
but suddenly you realize he might be

driving an eighteen wheeler, high on
meth, tires screeching. Yes— it could

happen like that, but it’s just 
as likely he might be the shadow

of a tree you planted years ago
falling across the green lawn.

In this poem Sutphen addresses the topic of death as in several other poems but handles it somewhat more playfully.  She also alludes to Emily Dickinson's famous poem "Because I could not stop for Death" (Gwynn 159).  As in the poem "Death Becomes Me," the poem makes death familiar and close, something more mundane than menacing.  In that poem the speaker traces the effects of age on her own body attributing them to the presence of death.  The poem above also notes death's proximity, but adds a comic element to Death's juxtaposing the classic image with robe and scythe with some random guy reading a paper at a bus stop.  Clearly, those guys with the black socks and bald spots reading the sports section aren't very threatening. Her next image of death as the person you notice but never quite acknowledge in a car pacing you on the freeway moves toward something equally familar but a bit more awkward. Having familiarized death with the two images, the poem continues using the 2nd person pronoun 'you' that places the reader near these representatives of death, but shifts to images of carriage, schoolyard, fields and horses that connect this poem with Dickinson's similar visitation.  For an English teacher (and perhaps some of you) "Death Becomes Me" is quite familiar, and her playful allusion fits and extends the light but accepting voice of that poem. My favorite image here, however is the next one that juxtaposes the high literary reference with a much lower contemporary one of semi drivers on meth- a guy I might have seen on my commute today, really.  She ends acknowledging such a death isn't likely, and returns to a more traditional shadow image at the end, but also makes it the shadow of a tree in your front yard. Compared to the more reflective quality of most of her poems, I found myself enjoying this playfulness.  Now, if I could just understand the title.  I don't quite see how a corporate version death fits here.  Any ideas?

Sound Cloud & Coursera

Have you heard of MOOCs?  Massive Open Online Courses offered by the best universities in the world for free.  Yep.  Colleges are actually pretty nervous.  They attract millions for each class with free online lectures, chat rooms, peer marked papers, and all while in your pj's at home, but they also have a huge attrition rate.  Completion rates range from 1% to 5% typically.  Maybe some days even pj's are too much? Anyway, THIS University of Pennsylvania class begins Monday, and I'm going to take it.  I invite you to do the same, and I imagine the assignments will work for both.

Next, here's a link for the Sound Cloud project, a Poetry Foundation website that crowdsources poetry reading so anyone can listen to a poem online.  As part of your poem of the day assignment, I'd like you to record your poem here for class and posterity.  Start looking for poems you like, or considering questions you might like to ask to find poems you might like.  There are many online poem sites, of course, and the school library has a decent collection.  I'd also recommend neighborhood libraries or the Common Good Books poetry collection (you'd have to buy it then, I imagine).

While I have your attention, I'd also encourage you to create a blog on blogger.  Use your new gmail account and create with whatever privacy settings you prefer (although I'll need to be able to read and comment on it).  Then send the url to me @ jwensman@gmail.com so I can link it to this one.