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!