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”
