September 29th is 100 Thousand Poets for Change Day 2012. 

You can join other poets around the USA and across the planet in a demonstration and celebration of poetry used to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

100 Thousand Poets for Change will organize “participants” by local region, city, or state, and find individuals in each area who would like to organize their local event.

If you would like to organize an event in your community, visit http://www.100TPC.org to learn more and to see all the great events that took place last year.

If you are an organizer for your community this means that first you will consider a location for the event and begin to contact people in your area who want to participate in the event. Participation means contacting the media, posting the event on the web, in calendars, newspapers, etc., reading poems, performing in general, supplying cupcakes and beer (it’s up to you), demonstrating, putting up an information table, inviting guest speakers, musicians, etc., organizing an art exhibit, and documenting the event (this is important, too), and cleaning up, of course.

Each local organization determines what it wants to focus on, something broad like, peace, sustainability, justice, equality, or more specific causes like Health Care, or Freedom of Speech, or local environmental or social concerns that need attention in your particular area right now, etc.

On YouTube  http://www.youtube.com/user/100TPC

On Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/events/189035231173286/

Blog http://100tpcmedia.org/100TPC2012/

Here's wishing you a few wild nights at this unofficial end of summer.

Wild nights - Wild nights! (269)
By Emily Dickinson

 

Wild nights - Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile - the winds -

To a Heart in port -

Done with the Compass -

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -

Ah - the Sea!

Might I but moor - tonight -

In thee!


In an explication of the poem, Lilia Melani says: 

"Wild nights! Wild nights!" is a poem of unrestrained sexual passion and rapture. When the 1891 edition of Dickinson's poems was being prepared, Colonel Higginson wrote to his co-editor Mrs. Todd,

One poem only I dread a little to print--that wonderful 'Wild Nights,'--lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there. Has Miss Lavinia [Emily Dickinson's sister] any shrinking about it? You will understand & pardon my solicitude. Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed it is not to be omitted.

His comments reflect both the sexual narrowness of his times and the Myth of Emily Dickinson, Virgin Recluse.

I was reading one of the many summer reading articles that appear every year - What to Read at the Beach, or: Get Your Red-Hot Summer Trash Right Here! on NYTimes.com and wondered if there are any poetry titles that you would take to the beach.

The summer book list is often filled with guilty pleasures - books that we want to read but are more fiction than literature - and for some authors, making a beach book list might be an insult.

I have reread Moby-Dick several times over a summer, but I don't think it makes the beach list for many people, even though it has lots of ocean in it.

The idea of poetry beach reading came up last month in a conversation I had with poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She had given me an advance copy of her newest collection of poems, The Place I Call Home to take on a trip to Aruba.

I said, "This isn't really beach reading" but Maria insisted it was, and that I could read it "right through, like a novel."

I tend to read books of poetry poem by poem, not in order, and sometimes choosing ones to read by titles. Reading the book all the way through seems to me like eating a whole bag of chips. "I eat a whole bag of chips," Maria told me.

So, I did. I read her book cover to cover in one beach day. And it worked. I suspect that I was the only person reading a book of poetry on that beach.

How do you read books of poetry?

Are there any books of poetry that you would put on a summer reading list or take to the pool or beach?

A man risked his life to write the words. Unfortunately, instead of the intended "I Love You Sweetheart" he left the message "I love Your Sweatheart" which became the title of Thomas Lux's poem (from New and Selected Poems of Thomas Lux: 1975-1995).

A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway.

And yet, to Lux, the painted, mistaken message is a message of love.

Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed

The stupid things we do for love. Hanging above the highway spraypainting our love poem. They may be all the more cherished for the bravery that stupidity sometimes requires. Perhaps, the sweat of one heart is what made the act all the sweeter. Maybe it is just poor spelling. Maybe the intended never saw the message. Or laughed at it and did not laugh with him.

Write a poem about how stupid we can be when we are in love. Stupid love.

Submissions for this August prompt are due by September 2.

The official list of poets for the 2012 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, October 11-14, has been released.

Taalam Acey
Cynthia Arrieu-King
Amiri Baraka
Ras Baraka
Brian Barker
Nicky Beer
Dan Bellm
Richard Blanco
Eavan Boland
Henri Cole
Eduardo C. Corral
Emari DiGiorgio
Sharon Dolin
Nikky Finney
Emily Fragos
Terrance Hayes
Juan Felipe
Herrera Lamar Hill
Mark Hillringhouse
Jane Hirshfield
Fanny Howe
Adele Kenny
Kurtis Lamkin
Dorianne Laux
Paul LeGault
 Philip Levine
Ada Limón
Timothy Liu
Thomas Lux
Salgado Maranhão
Rachel McKibbens
Taylor Mali
Joseph Millar
John Murillo
Idra Novey
Michael O'Hara
Gregory Orr
Gregory Pardlo
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Baraka Sele
Narubi Selah
Joan Siegel
Patricia Smith
Arthur Sze
Larissa Szporluk
Natasha Trethewey
C.K. Williams
Raúl Zurita

Information on poets is also on their blog at http://blog.grdodge.org/category/poetry

For tickets and information visit www.dodgepoetry.org

Erica Wright is the author of Instructions for Killing the Jackal (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and the chapbook Silt (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). She is the Poetry Editor at Guernica magazine and teaches creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College.

I saw a poem by her featured on the Black Lawrence Press blog. In a short interview there, she was asked about her writing process.

 "Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing is my go-to craft book. Hugo talks about triggering and generating subjects, and I trust him. The trigger is merely a way to get into a poem, and I don’t worry too much about finding the perfect entry point."

Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, originally published in 1979, remains one of the most popular books on writing poetry. In the book, Hugo discusses the imaginary and the real, and the private and the public in poetry.

In the excerpt from his book below, Hugo says that the private poet uses words that have meanings that will differ for the reader. When we try to write imaginatively, we are often trapped by the many "knowns" (associations and facts) that we hold in writing about the real world and people in it.

Your hometown often provides so many knowns  that the imagination cannot free itself to seek the unknowns...  If you have no emotional investment in the town, though you have taken immediate emotional possession of it for the duration of the poem, it may be easier to invest the feeling in the words.

Try this for an exercise: take someone you emotionally trust, a friend or a lover, to a town you like the locals of but know little about, and show your companion around the town in the poem.

In this case I imagined the town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn't you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse forty years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn't. It is narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish, and hateful to assume emotional ownership of a town or a word. It is also essential...

Please don't take this too seriously, but for purposes of discussion we can consider two kinds of poets, public and private. Let's use as examples Auden and Hopkins. The distinction (not a valid one, I know, but good enough for us right now) doesn't lie in the subject matter. That is, a public poet doesn't necessarily write on public themes and the private poet on private or personal ones. The distinction lies in the relation of the poet to the language. With the public poet the intellectual and emotional contents of the words are the same for the reader as for the writer. With the private poet, and most good poets of the last century or so have been private poets, the words, at least certain key words, mean something to the poet they don't mean to the reader.

So, we might be able to write more imaginatively by moving away from the real and the known and accessing some of the private.

Here is a poem by Erica Wright that I think does that.

If You Have Two Lovers and One Is Imaginary

Twice I missed blood on the tile.

It dried into the universe,

and this is how God makes

black holes. By missing

the details while he watches

someone dry off, cup himself.

His hands are romance novels,

and I’m embarrassed.

Everyone must imagine them

on their bare stomachs and lower.

He drips sweat onto the pine

before it’s sanded and stained.

He calls his mother.

Once, before I dreamed him up,

there were nights of gunshots

out back. He wanted to leave

before dawn, but there was no way.

Even the buses had given up.

by Erica Wright, from Instructions for Killing the Jackal

For this month's prompt, try Richard Hugo's exercise: Take someone you emotionally trust (friend or a lover) to a town you like the locals of but know little about, and show your companion around the town in the poem. You can add into that mix, if you wish,  what Wright is doing too - that person you show around the town can be imaginary.

Deadline for submissions: July 29



Erica Wright's blog is at EricaWright.typepad.com

 

The One Day Poem Pavilion is a very cool art and poetry project. Using a complex array of perforations, light passing through the pavilion’s surface produces shifting patterns, which transform into the legible text of a poem.

The results of an extensive exploration with shadows, the One Day Poem Pavilion demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow.

Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem.

The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice. The time-based nature of the poem–and the visitor’s time-based encounters with it–allow viewers to have different experiences either seeing a stanza of the poem or getting the whole poem. All of these possible experiences are equally valuable and have meanings unique to the individual. This technique has the potential for producing particular effects and meanings within an architectural environment. Without the use of a source of power other than the sun, this project uses light and shadow to push the boundaries of communication and experiential delight.

VIEW A TIME LAPSE to see the full effect

How did the rose
Ever open its heart

And give to this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all
Remain
Too
Frightened


Hafiz



Hafiz of Shiraz is a somewhat controversial figure. He was widely regarded as an infidel in his day. Today he is recognized in the East not only for the excellence of his poetry, but also as a Sufi illuminate. His major work, The Diwan, is found beside the Koran in the homes of the devout. In the West, Hafiz--a contemporary of Dante--is admired for his love-poetry; Goethe, among others, acknowledged his influence.

MYTH, MOUNTAIN and IMAGINATION in WALES

A Getaway for Poets and Writers in Wales

August 18-24, 2012

Get away from the grind to write and be inspired. Join poet and teacher Peter Murphy for a week of writing, relaxing and exploring this spectacular, lesser known Celtic gem.

Make progress on your book or poetry while immersed in the breathtaking landscape which inspired the legend of King Arthur. Take advantage of plentiful writing time, workshops, organic meals & relaxing by the lake.

All genres & levels.

more info at http://wales.murphywriting.com

There will be some server outages Thursday night through Saturday 6/9 that will prevent access to the main poetsonline.org website. A good excuse for you to write on paper.

Today, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced the appointment of Natasha Trethewey as the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. In a statement announcing the appointment, Dr. Billington said:

Natasha Trethewey is an outstanding poet/historian in the mold of Robert Penn Warren, our first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She received a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts.

She is the author of three collections of poetry: Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove). This was followed by Bellocq's Ophelia a (Graywolf, 2002), and Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.

Her fourth collection of poetry, Thrall, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September 2012. She is also the author of a book of creative non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Georgia, 2010).

During the 2005-2006 academic year she was Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and in 2009 she was the James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. She is currently the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

A guide that compiles online resources related to Natasha Trethewey's life and work has been made available online: Library of Congress Resource Guide on New U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey




MORE

• Academy of American Poets  Biography of Natasha Trethewey and several poems.
• Blue Flower Arts  Biography
• Emory University Faculty Page  Biography and links to several radio interviews and videos of Trethewey reading her poetry.
• The New Georgia Encyclopedia 
• Online NewsHour: Poetry Series  full-text of three poems, and several videos featuring Trethewey reading her poetry and discussing her work.
• Poetry Foundation Biography and several poems, audio recordings, and a review of Native Guard.

I started thinking about poetic odes last month and started writing notes for this prompt. I figured I would use some classics like "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley or "Ode on a Nightingale" by John Keats. I also know there are many modern odes that address less lofty objects (like "Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy" by Donald Justice.

But it's not that modern poets do not take on big topics for their odes. "Praise Song for the Day" by Elizabeth Alexander was her poem read at Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration.

You can find many sample odes online as models.

The ode form goes back to Ancient Greeks. "Ode" comes from the Greek aeidein, meaning to sing or chant. Odes were originally accompanied by music and dance, and later reserved by the Romantic poets to convey their strongest sentiments. This type of lyrical verse is classically structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Originally, it was an elaborately structured poem that was written to praise or glorify an event or individual, or to describe nature intellectually as well as emotionally.

There are a number of ode forms including the Pindaric, Horatian,Irregular and English. The formal opening (strophe) is a complex metrical structure, and it is followed by an antistrophe, which mirrors the opening, and an epode, the final closing section of a different length and composed with a different metrical structure.

The William Wordsworth poem "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" is a very good example of an English language Pindaric ode. The earliest odes in the English language, using the word in its strict form, were written by Edmund Spenser.

But don't be frightened by the ode.

Laura Shovan, poets and teacher, does workshops for students in upper elementary through high school and uses odes as a prompt. Voices Fly is an anthology of student poetry (poems and prompts from the Maryland State Arts Council  Artist-in-Residence program), and one chapter is her lesson on simple odes. She focuses on the use of simile, hyperbole and sensory detail and the concept of tone as it works in a simple ode. She has students read and discuss Gary Soto’s “Ode to Pablo’s Tennis Shoes.”

I like to pick up something random in the classroom. It might be a blackboard eraser, a paperclip, or a tissue. Together, the class brainstorms all of the things we can do with that object. We exaggerate -- a good time to introduce hyperbole -- in order to highlight the object’s value. With the eraser, all of our mistakes can disappear. The paperclip is like a secretary for our school work, keeping it organized and making us efficient. The tissue comforts us when we are sick, dries our tears when we are sad.

The key in an ode, as the children quickly pick up, is that we are making a persuasive argument. The words, similes and descriptions we use – the tone of the poem – needs to convince the reader that these sneakers are the best sneakers in the universe. Through tone, simple odes remind readers to stop and pay attention to everyday objects that deserve praise.

That prompt would work fine for this month. But, a more typical classroom example might be to use an ode by John Keats.

Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, only published 54 poems, but took on the challenges of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, while adding his own poetics to each.

Keats' English odes are often listed as odes of perfect definition - "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "To Autumn."

Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem I remember from high school. It was in the anthology and my teacher loved it. I don't know if I got much meaning from it then, but some of the lines definitely stayed in my head. The other poem I recall by him from my younger days is "To Autumn" (You might want to listen to "To Autumn" being read.)

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

It is possible that more has been written on "Ode on a Grecian Urn," per line, than any other Romantic lyric, and it is perhaps the best-known and most-often-read poem in nineteenth-century literature.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

       A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

       Of deities or mortals, or of both,

               In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

       What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

               What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

         Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

         That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

                A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

         To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

         And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea shore,

         Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

                Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

         Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

                Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

         Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

         Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

         When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

The theme that art redeems experience is key to "Ode on a Grecian Urn" where it is explored not from the perspective of a natural and fleeting experience (like a nightingale's song) but through a work of art depicting a human pageant.

For this month's prompt on odes, we ask you to follow a few "rules" that will make your poem "semi-formal." Those Keats odes are a high bar to hit - and probably far too formal for the taste of many readers. Like the Irregular ode, your own ode form can vary, but you should retain the tone and thematic elements of the classical ode: in praise of an event, person or nature intellectually and emotionally; a serious tone (even if the subject seems less than serious).

Submissions for this prompt are due by June 30, 2012.

More varied examples:
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket by Robert Lowell
Ode on Periods by Bernadette Mayer
America by Robert Creeley

Tracy K. Smith is the author of three books of poetry. The Body's Question (2003) won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet and  Duende (2007) was the winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award.

Her newest book is Life on Mars which won the 2012 Pulizer Prize for Poetry. Smith teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

She says that she "wrote the bulk of the book in the wake of my father’s death, and while I was pregnant with my daughter. So those unknowns felt very present and very urgent for me. I needed to figure out where I believed my father had gone and what he had become a part of, and so approaching the page really became a matter of attempting to describe or create a version of that world that would allow me to move through my private grief to something else. But even beyond my own private experience, I think it’s quite natural to use versions of what we know or have experienced as the framework for imagining what we cannot know, and what we have not yet experienced. That’s why metaphor exists. 

The title of Smith's collection comes from the David Bowie song, "Life On Mars?"

One poem in the collection, "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?," mentions Bowie directly.

Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel
The way you’d think he feels.
Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.

I’ve lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I’ll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He’s got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions

When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said:
                                                    Go ahead.

In an interview on Studio360, Smith admits to a fascination with Bowie's Ziggy Stardust because Bowie seemed to embody “the imagination as something that is capable of creating a whole new world and a whole new sense of self.” And the view back down at earth was equally as captivating: “I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that’s as out there as alien life.”

The themes of space and distance was further fueled by Smith’s father who worked on the Hubble telescope. When he died in 2008, Smith tells Studio360 host Kurt Andersen, she looked at the Hubble’s images of deep space with new curiosity. “I always felt there was this kernel of connectedness that he and I shared,” she says, “even though we veered in very separate directions.” Other poems in the collection consider his death, as well as black holes, metaphysics, and the afterlife."



            Listen to the Studio360 interview

Not so much "greeting cards" but The Poetry Foundation collected some poems about moms that  are "tender, to funny, to mournful — explore what it means to be a mom and affirm the special bond between mother and child.


Here's one older poem that I remember reading as a young boy.

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Barack Obama at Harvard

New York magazine has a story with the trashy title "Barack Obama’s Old Girlfriends Get Dishy" that turns out to be about poetry. They pulled from a Vanity Fair article, which in turn is an excerpt from a forthcoming Obama biography which includes some observations from a few Obama girlfriends.

Everything you put to paper matters when you become the President.

The letter quoted below was sent to Alex McNear, an Occidental College student in the eighties who must have had some interest in postmodern literary criticism. Though this is no Obama love letter (I hope), I know I wrote a few literary letters myself as an undergrad and had a back and forth with a girl-friend about T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (never did get my annontated copy back).

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements — Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.
Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter — life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

New York also did a little analysis and grading of young Barack's take on Eliot.

Philip Levine, the 18th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, will connect with high schools and public libraries via video conference to read and discuss three of his poems: "Our Valley," "The Simple Truth," and "What Work Is." The reading and discussion will be followed by an extended question and answer period with video conference participants.

Event Date: Friday, May 4, 3 p.m. Eastern Time

Viewing the Event: This event will be streamed live on the Web. A link to the live video feed will be available from the Poetry and Literature Center home page – http://www.loc.gov/poetry/

 

PHILIP LEVINE was born in Detroit in 1928, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and educated at Wayne University (now Wayne State), the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University. He is the author of twenty collections of poetry, and his honors include the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and two National Book Critic Circle Awards.

• View Web Guide on Philip Levine
• Public Readings by Philip Levine
• Podcast of Philip Levine (Poet & Poem Series)
• Webcast of 2007 Philip Levine reading at the Library of Congress

 

“Cut out all these exclamation points.
An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

PUNCTUATION: Some poets use it. Some don't.

Of course, there are many poems where punctuation is most definitely necessary, but there are also cases where it is not. Are there any "rules" for its usage?

When lines are short - three words or less - punctuation (commas and periods) can look silly.

Fitzgerald may not have been a fan of the exclamation point, but the New York School of poets took a liking to it.

Walt Whitman liked... the ellipsis.  Emily Dickinson was fond of using -  the dash. A.R. Ammons did things with: the colon.  E.E. Cummings, besides his experiments with Upper and lOWER case, liked to make use of (parentheses).

Much of this has been studied and I'm sure there are more than a few graduate theses out there on related topics.

From the Poets.org Guide to Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems (pdf download)

A typical manuscript for a poem might include several undated versions, with varying capitalization throughout, sometimes a "C" or an "S" that seems to be somewhere between lowercase and capital, and no degree of logic in the capitalization. While important subject words and the symbols that correspond to them are often capitalized, often (but not always) a metrically stressed word will be capitalized as well, even if it has little or no relevance in comparison to the rest of the words in the poem. Early editors removed all capitals but the first of the line, or tried to apply editorial logic to their usage. For example, poem 632 is now commonly punctuated as follows:

The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –

The Brain is deeper than the sea –
For – hold them – Blue to Blue –
The one the other will absorb –
As Sponges – Buckets – do –

The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound –

E. E. Dickinson and E.E. Cummings may have more in common in this regard than you would expect. Cummings made his use of punctuation so much of a style that it may seem to be  parody at times.

This poem about a grasshopper has just about everything happening in it.

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
   who

a)s w(e loo)k

upnowgath

  PPEGORHRASS

        eringint(o-

  aThe):l

         eA

           !p:

S                                      a

                 (r

rIvInG               .gRrEaPsPhOs)

                                   to

rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly

,grasshopper;

He uses the words, punctuation, and space to create a "concrete" visual image of a grasshopper jumping. The word and letter jumble makes more sense as we dig deeper and yet some of it is for pure visual rather than reader effect.

I have used some of his poems with children who like finding the hidden poem. They find the jumping-all-about grasshopper r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who as we look up now gathering to leap leaps arriving...

They realize the poem is not just meant to be "read."

And then, there's the ampersand.  &  Not really punctuation, but an abbreviation of a sort. As I have written on another blog:.

The ampersand is a curious thing in our language that dates back to the 1st century A.D.

Originally, it was a ligature of the letters E and T.

What's a ligature? In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components.

Suffice it to say, the ampersand is the most common one we use in English.

"Et" is Latin for "and" - as in et cetera, which is such a mouthful that we feel the need to shorten even that to etc. It can actually be further shortened as &c.

The & picked up traction in poetry with the Beats and the Black Mountain poets. (Ginsberg: "blond & naked angel") and E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, John Berryman, Nick Flynn and Nikky Finney. There was an article about its use in a recent Poets & Writers Magazine (note the & there too).

So here is our writing prompt(s) - more challenging than it might sound at first. Write a poem that deliberately makes use of punctuation to create its effect on the reader.  If that seems too much the "writing exercise," try writing about punctuation.

Submission deadline: Sunday, May 27  see our submission guidelines before sending poems

Today is national Poem In Your Pocket Day. April 26, 2012 is the day during National Poetry Month to select a poem you love and carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends.

You can also share your poem selection on Twitter by using the hashtag #pocketpoem.

The hope is that poems from pockets will be unfolded throughout the day with events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores.  Along with your library, bookstore, or shelf at home, you can find the perfect poem for your pocket by browsing the Poets.org website. You can also download pocket-sized Poem PDFs to print and share.

My poem will be in my pocket but on my phone. I have several mobile poetry archives (including the app from poets.org) so I actually have thousands of poems, as well as poet biographies and historical essays at my fingertips, anytime and anywhere.

Share a poem today!

Happy birthday, Ted Kooser! I read that today was his birthday and was pleased to read a few quotes about his approach to being a poet. 

"I had a wonderfully happy childhood."
"All this business about artists having to have terrible childhoods doesn't play with me."

I started writing poetry, like him, as a teenager.

"I was desperately interested in being interesting. Poetry seemed a way of being different."

"I believe that writers write for perceived communities, and that if you are a lifelong professor of English, it's quite likely that you will write poems that your colleagues would like; that is, poems that will engage that community. I worked every day with people who didn't read poetry, who hadn't read it since they were in high school, and I wanted to write for them."

He's more disciplined about writing than I am - when he was a part time poet and full time worker, he would get up at 4:30, made a pot of coffee, and write until 7, put on his suit and tie and go to work. Result? 7 books by the time he retired.

He resigned himself to being a relatively unknown poet, but he continued to write every morning. Then, in 2004, he got a phone call informing him that he had been chosen as Poet Laureate of the United States.

"I was so staggered I could barely respond. The next day, I backed the car out of the garage and tore the rear view mirror off the driver's side."

As the Poet Laureate, he started a free weekly column for newspapers called "American Life in Poetry" that is still running.

Many of his poems have appeared on The Writers Almanac site.  I like this one that fits in nicely with this post.

Walking to Work

Today, it's the obsidian
ice on the sidewalk
with its milk white bubbles
popping under my shoes
that pleases me, and upon it
a lump of old snow
with a trail like a comet,
that somebody,
probably falling in love,
has kicked
all the way to the corner.

from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press)