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?