Now Culture

Our First Poetry of 2011

2011-01-03T21:26:00.001-08:00

Come take a gander at the poetry of Danny P. Barbare, Rick Mullin, John Sibley Williams, Robert Wexelblatt and Christopher Crawford.

http://nowculture.com/2011

Dodge Leaves the Hinterlands

2010-10-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins: the change of venue, you might say, reflects the venue of contemporary poetry. I think most poets have gotten over the obsession with landscape that dominated the 19th century. Poetry has moved into a more interior psychological space. And it's not being written on a bench in the English countryside but in an apartment somewhere in the middle of an urban setting.

Clement Price: Waterloo was a lovely setting, but it was white-audience-based. Here I think there will be people of color, working-class people, people closer to the margins of society. And that's a good thing.

Joe Weil: Americans should not be allowed to cloister their goodies away from the poor.

All I can say is WOW. I live a handful of miles from Waterloo, NJ, and I can promise you that this place is not cloistered, not free from poverty. It is lovely, yes. It is rural, yes. But it is no longer exclusively white and it has never been wealthy.

And listen to Billy Collins telling us where poetry is being written, telling us that an urban apartment is more psychological than a park bench... huh?

Who are these people who can't celebrate one place without denigrating another?

Any cloistering from poverty is due to the exorbitant fees one must pay to attend Dodge, not the location.

Chess game between Don and Zoe

2010-10-02T20:16:00.000-07:00

Another game of poetry chess... Don begins as he always does, with the king's pawn. Zoe replies with the Sicilian defense.

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What is Surrealism?

2010-08-04T17:06:00.000-07:00

All submissions through October 31 must answer this question. Any medium, any format, any genre.

http://nowculture.com/guidelines.htm

Chess Between Poets: Zoe and Greg

2010-07-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

An ongoing game of chess between poets Zoe and Greg.

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Chess: Contributor vs. Editor

2010-06-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

A game of chess between Greg Grummer and Don Zirilli. We were writing poems for every move, which I hope you will read some day.

The game was agreed to be a draw, because after he takes my pawn I can tuck my King in the corner and force myself to be stalemated.

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chess between poets

2010-05-19T21:35:00.000-07:00

This game of chess was played on a poetry forum by Don and Pam, who wrote poems for every move of the game.

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Mentions of nowcu and other lovely linkers

2010-03-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

Illumination: The Fyrefly Jar Weblog (Feb 14) http://fyreflyjar.blogspot.com/

HTMLGIANT - Brian Foley (Feb 15) http://htmlgiant.com/author/brianfoley/

In the Bookslut blog (Feb 18) http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2010_02.php

Cleveland Poetics Blog (Feb 26) http://clevelandpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/02/theory-famous-drinkers-writing.html

Flor Del Concreto (In Print section) http://flordelconcreto.blogspot.com/

Now Culture listings and mentions:

Ambulacra: http://farewellnavigator.blogspot.com/

Boston Review: http://v2.bostonreview.net/about/literary_links/

CutBank Reviews: http://cutbankpoetry.blogspot.com/

Drunken Boat: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db11/links.php

Duotrope: http://www.duotrope.com/market_3366.aspx

Every Writer's Resource: http://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/2009/now-culture/

(and "Literary Magazines on Twiter" http://www.everywritersresource.com/listcomments/2009/literary-magazines-on-twitter/ )

Eyeball Hatred: http://claytonbanes.blogspot.com/

Fairview Free Public Library: http://fairview.bccls.org/links.html

The Flea: http://www.the-flea.com/Friends.html

Frederick Glaysher's literary links: http://www.fglaysher.com/LitLinks.htm

Dan Hoy: http://www.sinlechuga.com/poemlist.html

Tim Keane: http://www.timkeane.com/id38.html

Rose Kelleher, Bundle O'Tinder: http://waywiser-press.com/kelleher.html

LitLine: http://litline.org/links/onlinejournals.html

Long Shot: http://www.longshot.org/links.htm

Karyna McGlynn: http://www.karynamcglynn.com/Read%20Work%20Online.html

Our Stories: http://ourstoriesblog.blogspot.com/

Peony Moon: http://peonymoon.wordpress.com/

Poems That Go: http://www.poemsthatgo.com/links.htm

Matthew Rohrer: http://www.versedaily.org/2008/aboutmatthewrohrershj.shtml

Selby's List: http://www.selbyslist.com/

Slope: http://www.slope.org/archive/nine/links.html

Song of a Reformed Headhunter: http://jeeleong.blogspot.com/

3:AM Magazine: http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/oct/interview_ernie_hilbert.html

Tiha Tiha: http://pipl.com/directory/name/Tiha/Tiha

Triggerfish Critical Review: http://www.triggerfishcriticalreview.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93&Itemid=13

Matthew Vollmer: http://www.faculty.english.vt.edu/vollmer/readstuff.html

Zeroland: http://www.zeroland.co.nz/art_ezines_2.html

Rear Window - another movie essay for my niece

2009-11-08T09:14:00.000-08:00

Movie making is problem solving. There is no such thing as a perfect idea. Every idea has its problems, and it’s the director's job to solve those problems. This movie is a great example of a problematic idea. The premise of this movie is an invalid sitting in his apartment spying on his neighbors through his rear windows. He suspects one of them of committing a murder. Yes, murder is exciting! But we don't get to see the murder. We're not even sure there is a murder. We are, as an audience, limited to the cramped perspective of the protagonist. Let's list the pros and cons of this idea:

PROS

it builds suspense, because we don't know what's going on until the end of the movie.

it makes us identify with the main character, and therefore we care more about him. When he is in danger, or hurt, we feel it more.

CONS

all the action takes place in one room! with some views into the courtyard.

no variety of scenery to keep the viewer interested.

harder to show what's going on.

By watching this movie, you'll see the ways that the director overcame these difficulties and took full advantage of the benefits.

scene 1

The music during the opening credits is upbeat and exciting. It doesn't match the idea of an invalid confined to his room. And that's exactly why it's important. This invalid doesn't want to be an invalid. He is a photojournalist. He is an adventurer. He's been forced to stay in due to a recent accident. As a matter of fact, the whole reason he got into the accident is because he is adventurous. But you don't have to be adventurous to understand this character. The important part is that his dreams and desires are exciting. The mind, our thoughts, our fantasies, can have its own adventures. It's this adventurous mind that creates all the action of this movie.

So notice, we're not looking into a lonely room, we're looking out of the room, at the window, and the blinds roll up like curtains. And yes, they are like curtains, because we don't see anyone drawing them up. They really do seem to be going up of their own accord.

And look what a vivid world they open on! Birds flying around! And what a complicated world, a world full of more windows. Each window represents another perspective. Each window sees the world in a different way. Notice how the music shifts from one window to the next. Music is a powerful tool for the movie maker.

And now here's a classic example of how camera work can show you an idea. The camera pulls back into the room, but notice the main character is sleeping. Not only that, he is facing away from the window. Visually, this gives us the idea that he's not seeing this world, but instead, he is dreaming this world. This is a good example of foreshadowing, because later we'll see how much he thinks about this world out there, how much he theorizes about it and tries to explain it. But is he really understanding it? He's so quick to judge everybody and everything. Maybe instead of understanding this world, he is putting his own ideas into it. This is not only an important theme, it is crucial to the plot.

Quickly and silently, we are introduced to some of the characters of this world, which I'm going to start calling Windowland. Here they are, in order:

Songwriter

Fire escape couple

Miss Torso (she'll get this name later)

But that's not all he does. A picture is worth a thousand words, and the director conveys a lot of information in these few moments. For example, we get a look at the alley. This alley will become very important. It is a glimpse at the world beyond the courtyard. It becomes a connection point, a gateway, between Windowland and the rest of the world. Something else is established as well: the heat. The hazy heat of summer is very important to this movie for a number of reasons:

its languorous quality well befits a world of dreams and desires.

it is the heat that causes most people to keep their blinds up and their windows open, which is essential to the plot.

Combined with future shots of a thermometer, we get the feeling of a fever, in which one has dreams and hallucinations.

the heat is sometimes difficult to tolerate. It can cause tempers to flare. It might even lead to murder.

Once again we pull back through the main character's head, but this time we keep going. We see he has a broken leg, the reason he's stuck here, then we pull over to a broken camera, which gives us a clue to how he got hurt and what his job is, and then over to his photographs, the end result of his job. Notice the theme of destruction continues with pictures of exploding cars. It's often a powerful effect in a movie to continue a visual theme through various means. Not only do we know how the main character (Jeffrey) got into his current state, we also get more foreshadowing of the violence to come.

Notice the mix of subtlety and force here. We get only hints of something, but we get them over and over again in different ways. This can create a powerful feeling in your audience even if they don't realize where it's coming from.

Now, the next picture we see is a negative. Notice how this is also like a kind of destruction. The image is destroyed through inversion. But then we see the positive version. Not only that, we see it on a magazine cover, repeated many times over. In this way destruction leads to creation. This is a powerful theme in literature and religion and myth. But let's get back to the movie. The thing about a good movie is that it will interest people so much that they will find many themes in it, themes the director may never have considered. The director's job is simply to make the movie good and interesting to begin with.

The scene fades to black. It is these fades that I will be using to mark scene changes.

scene 2

Jeffrey is on the phone to a friend. This phone call tells us some background about Jeffrey, but also tells us that next week his cast is coming off. He's very happy at the thought, but really it will be a kind of loss. This will be the end of Windowland as he rushes off to his next adventure. But not just Windowland, as we'll see later.

This is also the first scene in which we see Thorwald (he'll get this name later). Notice how subtly he is shown to us. No hint of his future importance. It's important to surprise your audience! Look at my examples of foreshadowing above. They do give the audience an idea of what to expect, but nothing specific. If you can create a feeling or a mood in the audience instead of any kind of foreknowledge, then you're doing well by them.

Now we see Jeffrey trying to scratch an itch he can't get to. This seemingly silly little escapade does some important things. It foreshadows how helpless he is. It shows how he uses tools to solve his problems. It references the dreams and desires of his Windowland.

Thorwald is in his flower garden. His attention to this flower garden will become very important to the plot. Once again, we get a subtle look at it, but one that establishes the idea for us.

Stella, his nurse, enters. She accuses Jeffrey of being a "peeping Tom." This accusation is important, because there are ethical issues to this movie and to the idea of peeking at other people's business. She also predicts that trouble is going to come of this. But it's all done in a whimsical matter. Sometimes using a joke is a great way to get an idea across subtly without the audience realizing it's being given a clue. And speaking of jokes, they joke about how Jeffrey loves his Windowland people "like a father." This reinforces the idea that he is being creative, that he is pushing his own agenda on the world out there. He is NOT and NEVER merely an observer!

Stella massages Jeffrey. Here we are given a demonstration of his physical helplessness. This entire adventure will be a mental and emotional one for him. This is certainly important to the theme, but also to the plot, and to the suspense of that plot. A helpless hero! How will he prevail? Get your audience asking questions like that and you've hooked them!

They discuss Lisa. This is now the second presage of Lisa before her actual appearance. First she was on the magazine cover. Now she is the object of conversation. Notice Stella's next accusation. Her first is that he is a "peeping Tom." The next accusation is that he thinks too much. This encapsulates him perfectly. He stares out his window and he analyzes what's there. But she's talking about his relationship to Lisa. When you can get characters talking about one thing when they're really talking about something else, you can liven up your story. The thing is, these issues of peeping and overthinking really will affect his relationship to Lisa, as we will see.

It is at this point, while they are talking about one relationship, that we will see a new couple in Windowland. Keep an eye out for these: connections between Windowland people and the main characters. It's human nature for us to connect to what we are observing. Does that put into question our ability to observe? Yes, but it can also make us more intense, more compassionate observers.

This new couple is being shown their apartment. After the landlord leaves, they go back outside and enter again, this time he carries her over the threshold. The reality of their entrance is replaced by a fantasy. Obviously, this is the couple creating their own fantasy, but it also evokes the possibility that Jeffrey might be imposing his fantasies on the people around him. Like I said, this is important to the plot as well as the theme.

And then, just as interestingly, the couple close their blinds. The suggestion here is that some things really are too private, and that's a good thing. It's good to close the blinds sometimes. There will be a constant shifting in this movie between private and public, with intense private moments, entirely public and communal moments, and everything in between. When you do that as a director, create a struggle of some sort and then keep shifting the balance, you can create a kind of symphony, a rhythm that will keep your audience awake and interested through the entire movie.

Here we get Stella's third accusation: "Window shopper." In other words, a shopper who doesn't really buy anything, doesn't even enter the store. This evokes Jeffrey's isolation. Not only is that an important theme, it also helps the plot because it makes us question his judgment yet again. Could his theorizing just be an attempt to reach into a world he is isolated from?

scene 3

It's night-time. Jeffrey's face is illuminated by Windowland, as though it is feeding him dreams. We see a shadow creep up his body. But notice, the shadow is on his dark side! Who can create a shadow from darkness? Once again, we are subtly forced to question what is real and what is a dream. It also suggests that this figure might really be from Windowland even though it appears to be inside the room. But who is this dream?

It's Lisa. We finally see her, and her face fills the screen. The scene gets choppy here with close-ups of the two. When they kiss, it is in slow motion. Is he really awake or still dreaming? She asks him how she is. It's good to have dialogue that shows the character of the person speaking it. In this case, we have someone who is caring and compassionate, but that devoted concern of hers will get her into trouble later (and move the plot along)!

Now notice his question. He asks who she is. Clearly, he's joking, but this only reinforces the notion that she is a dream. There's a lot I could write about how she introduces herself, turning on a light for each of her names, but let's just say that this simple visual trick is very catchy. By now, the audience is quite sure how important this character is. Let's skip to what she does next: she brings in food (and a waiter!) from a restaurant. In other words, she brings the outside world in to him. This idea will become much more important later.

A dramatic change of camera occurs. They are now backgrounded by Windowland, which has turned red! This world of dreams and desire will be crucial to their relationship. And now in their conversation we get their main conflict: he wants to go out on adventures while she wants him to stay in the city and be her husband. She suggests that he be a portrait photographer or a fashion photographer. Now notice that she is projecting her fantasies onto him! And just as she is doing this, he notices Miss Lonelyhearts back in Windowland. And what is she doing? Making a fantasy! She is having a fantasy date, preparing her makeup, setting the table. The climactic moment of this fantasy is when she makes a toast and Jeffrey toasts back to her. Each one is having his/her own fantasy and here they are colliding, or rather, clinking.

But once Miss Lonelyhearts gives up her fantasy and collapses, crying, Jeffrey feels no sorrow. All he can do is sarcastically compare her to Lisa. But Lisa challenges him. He is just pretending to know what she's like, just like he pretends to know what the people in Windowland are like. This is one of several examples of Windowland people being used like icons or myths, to instruct, to learn from, to compare one's self to. This is the function of characters in literature and movies. Our next fable is Miss Torso who is "juggling wolves." Jeffrey compares her to Lisa as well.

Then we see the closed blinds of the new couple. Jeffrey can't get into their world. This makes them seem particularly virtuous, and safe. But also shows how Jeffrey can't get into a normal, married life. He seems barred from that kind of happiness.
This safety is replaced by the volatile world of Thorwald. Keep in mind that strong contrasts create interest. From the closed-off loving couple, we get a couple in trouble. They are fighting, yelling at each other, hurting each other. She overhears him making a phone call, and laughs at him. The phone is very important to this movie. It is a way for an invalid to reach out of his apartment. It’s a way for Thorwald to reach out of his loveless marriage. It’s a way to organize a murder, and a way to catch a murderer.

Now we go back to the songwriter. By the way, this director likes to appear in his movies, and this is where he appears in this movie. Looking at the songwriter's bookshelf as he plays. This is a simple, placid scene. Sometimes it's good to calm a scene down a bit before it ends, so it doesn't interfere with the next scene.
But also, as the scene ends, we get Jeffrey's accusation at Lisa. "Perfect, as always," he says. She is too perfect. She is, in other words, a dream.

scene 4

The unsolvable argument between Jeffrey and Lisa continues. He mentions living out of one suitcase. This verbal statement will later be answered by Lisa with a visual statement. He mentions wearing a raincoat in Brazil. This image will be echoed by Thorwald in the next scene. This is a very effective technique for a movie, a dialogue between words and images, but we’ll get to that later. At the end of the argument, Lisa pretends to break up with him. Pretending is an important theme of the movie, and it closely ties to the plot. As a moviemaker, you want to stress those themes that also relate to the action. It’s good for the action and it’s good for the themes.

Jeffrey turns back to the window. There’s something disturbing about how dark it is. Windowland is closed. The blinds are down. There is nothing to see, nothing to peek into. That’s when the ultimate action of the movie occurs, in blindness. We hear a scream and a crash. Jeffrey looks helplessly at the closed windows. What follows is a succession of short scenes, as though Jeffrey cannot escape this night, as though he is trying to wake up from a bad dream.

scene 5

Jeffrey wakes up to rain. Notice how the impact of the rain is underscored by the couple out on the fire escape. Now they must scramble to move inside. At the same time, it provides some physical comedy. Isn’t it interesting how the mind can hold opposing ideas? Here, at a moment of great tension and worry, we have a comedic scene. This is an important principle, much like cooking where you balance the sweet with the salty. If, as a moviemaker, you stay too long with one mood and never counter it, the movie can feel oppressive, difficult to watch. You’ll find this phenomenon in many supposedly “artistic” movies.

Now we see Thorwald in a raincoat. He is carrying a heavy briefcase. Jeffrey looks at his watch, and so do we. It’s 1:55 AM. This will establish the passage of time, but it also shows us something about Jeffrey. He is now very interested in Thorwald and what he does. Interested enough to time him. This is a visual way for the director to establish Thorwald as the main suspect.

scene 6

We cut to the same watch saying 2:35 AM. This is not very subtle, but it does show that 40 minutes have passed. Thorwald is back carrying his briefcase. Maybe I’m just imagining this, but the case seems lighter now.

Just then, some noise comes from the songwriter’s apartment. Notice that the songwriter is the closest neighbor to Jeffrey, physically, and he will distract Jeffrey throughout the movie. In this scene, the songwriter is drunk and unhappy. He throws his music sheets in a gesture of despair. Jeffrey laughs at his pain. This is the second time that Jeffrey has shown a lack of compassion for the people in Windowland. The struggle to be connected to others, to care, to understand, is one of the most important themes a moviemaker or any artist can portray. In this case, Jeffrey’s inability to care provides an opportunity for character development as well as plot development.

character development

Let me just take a moment to talk about “character development.” You have to be very careful with this idea. It’s very hard to convince the audience that someone has completely changed during the course of a two-hour movie. It does happen occasionally, but there’s something else you can do, like Hitchcock does in this movie. You can simply show the character another way, a better way of being. You can force the character to try it. At the end of the movie, we don’t have any evidence that the character changed, but we are still satisfied, because we know he’s been given that opportunity.

After Jeffrey’s distraction, he sees Thorwald leaving again with his case.

scene 7

Jeffrey wakes from sleep again. Notice that this builds up the sense of sleepiness and dreaminess to this movie. He looks for Thorwald, but now Thorwald’s blinds are closed. He sees Miss Torso with one of her “wolves.” She sends him on his way and is alone. This will echo with something Miss Lonelyhearts does later. These Windowland people not only resonate with Jeffrey’s life, they resonate with each other. It’s another hint at the connections among all people.

Thorwald is back again with his case. Jeffrey falls asleep and Miss Torso shuts off her light. Notice how an internal event, falling asleep, is juxtaposed with an external event, turning off a light. An important theme of this movie is the connection between the internal and external worlds.

scene 8

Jeffrey is sleeping. Morning has finally arrived. The remarkable thing about this scene is that Jeffrey never wakes up. This is the only significant event that we see without Jeffrey seeing it. Since it happens without Jeffrey’s mind imposing meanings on it, does that make it more real or less real? We think it’s more real, but it feels less real. A powerful thing that you can do as a moviemaker is to make your audience’s thoughts conflict with their feelings. What Jeffrey misses is that Thorwald is leaving the apartment with a woman. This missed fact will come back to haunt him. If he had seen it, he would never have pursued Thorwald as a suspect. But remember what we’ve learned from example: the people in Windowland sometimes pretend and create their own false realities.

persistence of vision

Persistence of vision is an optical effect that makes film possible in the first place. A movie isn’t really moving, after all. It’s like a flipbook, one image after another, but our mind pastes it all together and completes the illusion of motion. There are other ways you can take advantage of this ability of the mind. Notice how this scene starts with Jeffrey sleeping and ends with Jeffrey sleeping. Your mind is convinced that he is sleeping through the entire scene, even though we don’t see him for the entire scene. A movie can’t possibly fill in all the gaps, or explain everything, but it doesn’t have to. It can use this quality of the mind to let the mind fill in the gaps. But you need the right kind of correspondences to trigger this mental action. That’s something best learned by... watching movies. Just keep it in the back of your mind. If there’s something you think you can’t shoot for your movie, make it happen off-screen. If you show a door and then show a room, the audience will assume that the room is behind that door. You can save a lot of money with this technique!

scene 9

We see another character, a sculptress. A guy carrying water asks her what she’s working on. She says it’s called “hunger.” Notice that both people have different approaches to the same problem: he sees thirst and he brings water. She sees hunger and makes art about it. She’s trying to understand it instead of fix it. Her sculpture has a big hole in it. Hunger, and all kinds of desire, are a result of something missing within us.

Miss Torso is dancing again. The fire escape couple lets down their dog. Jeffrey is being massaged again, but now he has something to talk about. He’s not so helpless anymore. He has an adventure.

Thorwald’s shades are up again. He is looking out of his own window. Jeffrey worries about being seen. This is an important idea, that Jeffrey, too, has a window. That he, too, can be spied on. The director introduces this idea early, before it’s important to the plot. Another example of foreshadowing. But look what else it does: it focuses our attention on what Thorwald really is looking at: the dog. The dog is digging in his garden. This, too, will become important later. This sort of misdirection is an important tool for the movie maker.

Now Thorwald is cleaning the case he used last night. What was in that case that he’s forced to clean it? The nurse brings him Binoculars. Visual aids like this one become an important symbol, a way of emphasizing how absorbed he is by Windowland. He sees that Thorwald is putting jewelry into the case. We eventually find out that it is costume jewelry. In other words, it is pretend jewelry.

The next thing Jeffrey grabs is his camera, because he has a huge lens that is even more powerful than his binoculars. This camera makes him seem like a moviemaker himself. Again, we have this theme of Jeffrey imposing his ideas on Windowland. Many of the times we see this camera, we see Windowland reflected in the lens. It’s almost as if Windowland only exists inside the camera, or the mind of Jeffrey.

The next thing Jeffrey sees is Thorwald wrapping knives in paper. Knives are a very dramatic image. Let’s think about what this scene accomplishes. It is this scene in which Jeffrey is completely convinced that Thorwald has killed his wife. As an audience, we don’t have to be sure that this is true, but we have to be sure that Jeffrey believes it, because Jeffrey will cling to this idea for the rest of the movie, and convince others of it. The director makes us sure through a variety of techniques in this scene. In addition to the evidence he shows, he also shows us how Jeffrey is now aware that he can be seen. He backs up away from the window. He is now fully a participant, no longer a casual observer.

scene 10

The scene opens on a thermometer. 80 degrees. Not subtle, but it does remind us of the heat. We see the songwriter cleaning up the mess he made. Notice how this corresponds to Thorwald cleaning up. The fire escape lady calls for her dog. This will set up a later time when she is searching for her dog. Also, look how music connects the Windowland people. The opera-like singing, which I think is coming from the songwriter’s apartment, blends into the lady whistling for her dog, which then fades to the sculptress whistling while she works. Again, we see the closed blind of the newlyweds. They are out of Jeffrey’s reach and out of our reach. This reminder of a happy, private couple then moves over to Jeffrey and Lisa in an embrace.
Once again, Lisa wants more than she can have. Jeffrey’s mind is on Windowland. She wants his mind as well as his body. Notice that when Jeffrey says that something is wrong, Lisa says there’s “something wrong with me.” She is trying to put herself into his thoughts, his concerns. Later, this will become a very dangerous thing for her to do.

conflict

Movies often will have a main conflict and smaller conflicts that relate to the main conflict. One of the smaller conflicts of this movie is that Jeffrey must convince Lisa of the murder. To make that conflict more exciting it must be made difficult. So in this scene, Lisa puts up strong arguments against the murder. He can’t convince her with words, but then she sees something. It is the visual demonstration that convinces her. She sees that he is tying ropes around a trunk.

more on misdirection

With a murder mystery, it’s important to properly confuse the audience. In this case, the very evidence that convinces Lisa is false. The trunk is simply holding his wife’s clothes and effects. But that doesn’t mean that something murderous hasn’t happened! Notice in this movie the twisted path to truth. Truth is gotten to through a variety of misunderstandings and misinterpretations, but also through instinct. In this movie, the instinct is correct even though attempts to support the instinct with evidence fail.

The scene ends with Lisa convinced. Jeffrey now has his first believer. Notice how much this is like religious faith. Lisa says, “Tell me everything you saw and what you think it means.” The first part is the religious vision, and the second part is the interpretation, like what a preacher does. But there is also a love story here. Lisa wants to connect to Jeffrey. At first she tries to compete with Windowland for his attention, but then realizes that she can do better by sharing his interest in it... and more as we’ll see in the next scene.

scene 11

There’s the phone again. It rings. The surprising part is that Lisa is on the phone. She is in Windowland! To connect to Jeffrey, she has actually entered the world of his vision, his dreams. And see what she is doing. She is telling him Thorwald’s name, just like in the beginning she told him her name. Is she a dream, or does this make Thorwald as real as they are? Either way, they all seem to be in the same boat now.

scene 12

Jeffrey’s on the phone again, this time to Doyle, a detective he knows. It is this call to a detective that convinces his second believer, Stella. Notice how Lisa is convinced by images and Stella is convinced by an authority figure (a detective, in this case). If it’s important enough to call a detective then it must be real. These really are different paths to faith.

Interestingly, in this scene, so soon after the murder is established, the blind goes up on the newlywed’s apartment. The husband hangs out the window. He is soon called back in, but we have the first crack in their fortress of privacy. Eventually, they will succumb to the call of the public realm.

The trunk, this false piece of evidence (called a red herring or a MacGuffin), is about to be taken away. Just like Lisa, Stella plunges into Windowland as soon as she is convinced, but to no avail. She doesn’t see what delivery company took the trunk away.

scene 13

Now Jeffrey faces a true skeptic, his hardest sell: Doyle, the detective. They both face Windowland, along with us, the audience. Doyle says he will investigate but he is utterly unconvinced.

The dog is digging in the garden again and Thorwald gently shoos him away. This very calm and gentle act contrasts very strongly with what will happen later. It is an extremely subtle form of foreshadowing, so much so that a second viewing of the movie makes this scene very disturbing, even though you barely notice the first time you see it.

scene 14

Another conversation with Doyle. This time, he presents the evidence that we have seen, but Jeffrey has not. This establishes Doyle as the representative of “reality,” of the larger world that doesn’t believe in Windowland. Thorwald was seen putting his wife on a train. Therefore, his wife can’t be dead. The way Jeffrey argues with this logic shows that Jeffrey is emotionally attached to his idea. He wants it to be true. Notice how Doyle sees Miss Torso. For him, Windowland is just shallow entertainment. The scene ends with a kicker. The detective produces a postcard from the wife who is supposedly dead. This physical piece of evidence is harder for Jeffrey to contradict. He begins to doubt his own belief. At the same time, he reaches for his itch again. His belief “scratches his itch.” He can’t simply discard it.

scene 15

Often in a movie, you will create a false climax. In this scene, Jeffrey has been faced with the notion that his belief his wrong. In order to emphasize this, the people in Windowland have a series of happy endings, but these endings will all turn out to be wrong. Miss Lonelyhearts is getting ready for a date. The songwriter has women over to his apartment. Miss Torso is dancing with a big studly fellow. Thorwald seems to be packing up for his own happy ending.

Interestingly, it’s Lisa who now tries to restore his faith! She does this by explaining how women behave. This is called deductive reasoning. She already knows how women behave, so she knows that this woman would not have left her purse behind. This sort of logic is like Jeffrey’s instinct, it is inadmissible in court. But Jeffrey and Lisa embrace, because they are still held together in their belief.

To underscore their renewed togetherness, Lisa shows Jeffrey her “purse.” But it’s not really a purse (more pretending). This is her “one suitcase” that was discussed at the beginning of the movie! It is her attempt at compromise, to fit into his world but still be herself.

Lisa likes the songwriter’s song. Notice how she is more emotionally connected to Windowland than Jeffrey is. In fact, by the end of the movie, someone will be singing “Lisa” to the tune of this song! But notice also how Jeffrey is fighting her attempts to make their relationship work. When she suggests that she can be a Girl Friday, Jeffrey mentions that the Girl Friday never marries the guy at the end. This is a very hurtful thing to say. Jeffrey’s inability to connect is not just in Windowland, it’s in all aspects of his life.

Doyle enters the room. Notice how Lisa went to get brandy before Doyle arrived. Doyle is “crashing” the party. He doesn’t really belong. Lisa accommodates him and gives him her own glass, but he never fits in. This is where Doyle tells us that the trunk only has clothes in it. The powerful visual evidence was false. Doyle tries to stay in this party, but he knows it’s a lost cause. As soon as he delivers the news, the two of them turn away from him and go to the window. He will never be a part of their world. Notice how this is emphasized by the party going on in the songwriter’s apartment. Their little brandy party is like an extension of this larger party. Doyle isn’t invited to either! Notice how Doyle spills his drink. This is a visual symbol of his inability to fit in. It is also foreshadowing the fact that he is wrong. You will often hear that film is a visual medium. That’s why seemingly trivial images like this are so important.

And just at this moment, when their belief has been shattered again, we see Miss Lonelyhearts and her fake happy ending. She brings a man home to her apartment, but the man is not caring, not loving. Miss Lonelyhearts pulls down the blinds, but the blinds don’t hide anything. This symbolizes her inability to shut herself off from the world. This inability will eventually save her. For now, it allows us to see her happy ending fall apart. She ends up alone again.

Seeing this very private tragedy makes Lisa question the ethics of what they’re doing, peeking into other people’s lives. Doyle, as well as representing “reality,” also represents “privacy.” He stresses the importance of privacy in a free society. Mere suspicion is not enough to allow detectives to burst into your apartment looking for clues. Freedom depends on our privacy, much like Jeffrey’s need to go off on his private adventures all over the world.

In a visually powerful gesture of defeat, Lisa pulls down Jeffrey’s blinds. She will now attempt to create a private world for Jeffrey, without Windowland.

scene 16

Windowland has other ideas, however. Lisa enters this scene in the gown that she carries out of the last scene (remember persistence of vision). This is a nightgown, something for sleeping, something very personal and private. But the privacy is almost immediately shattered by a scream from Windowland. Lisa opens the blinds. The lady on the fire escape is crying.

It’s as if Windowland has a life of its own and can’t simply be ignored. This is shown to us visually, because for the first time, we see Jeffrey and Lisa through their own window. We are peeping at them! This illustrates an important principle of moviemaking:

make your own patterns and then break them

The pattern of this movie has been to show things from the perspective of Jeffrey and his private world. Because this pattern is so well-established, any break from this pattern is very dramatic to the audience. This same shot would not be dramatic in another movie. But in this movie, we get a very strong signal. It says, pay attention!

Before I said there were intensely private and intensely public moments. Notice how quickly we move from the former to the latter. Everyone in Windowland is now focused on the dog. They are all seeing the same thing and feeling the same way about it. Even while the lady accuses everyone of being selfish, this is their least selfish moment. And speaking of breaking patterns, we now get our first and only close-ups of Miss Torso and Miss Lonelyhearts. The director is really hammering home the importance of this scene. This is no false climax, and the director is making sure you know that. Even when not in close-up, the angles are different in this scene.

Finally, we once again see the failure of Jeffrey to empathize. He is smiling. Instead of thinking about the tragedy of the dog’s death, he is happy because his belief is back. Why is it back? Because not everybody was together in that moment. Thorwald wasn’t looking out his window. Thorwald killed the dog. Thorwald killed his wife. And now, if it hasn’t happened already, the audience is becoming a believer.

scene 17

It’s morning. We have a beautiful, almost distracting, natural light, giving us a sense that something has changed forever. The three believers are all together: Jeffrey, Lisa and Stella. They pursue the clue of the dog (that’s all the dog is to Jeffrey, a clue). He compares a picture to reality. Notice how this resonates with the larger themes of internal vs. external, dream vs. reality. Another visual symbol.

The killer is packing. This gives a sense of urgency. It’s good when you can come up with a plot point that puts a time limit on your characters. That will add excitement to the story.

And now we get another new angle, an overhead view of the three believers. The overhead goes in close to a note that Jeffrey is writing, “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER?” This new angle adds emphasis to another important shift in the movie. Here is where Jeffrey actually reaches out into Windowland. Once he does this, he sets into motion the final culmination of the plot. Once he does this, he can’t turn back.

scene 18

Coming back to this movie, I was surprised how much happens in this one scene. This might be a clue as to how a suspense movie works. You “suspend” as much of the action for as long as you can, but you can’t let your movie get boring in the meantime. The way Hitchcock prevents boredom is by making it a movie about ideas. The ideas struggle with each other: Thorwald killed his wife! No, he didn’t! The characters struggle with their relationships. By this scene, our expectations are up to a fever pitch and Hitchcock almost has to condense a lot of action into this scene because we are ready for lots of action at this point. We want resolution of all this tension built up, especially since Jeffrey has now sent a note out to this dream world. He is finally making a real connection to it. To put it another way, the dominoes have finally been all set up, so when they start falling it will be spectacular but it will happen fast.

The scene opens on Jeffrey and Stella looking out the window. Lisa is missing, but you don’t realize this at first because the camera is in so tightly on them. This is a good trick, one to remember! Then we see Lisa in the alley. This is when Lisa takes a starring role in Windowland. It’s like a movie within a movie. She is now a star in Jeffrey’s eyes, but at the price of endangering herself. She drops off Jeffrey’s note. Thorwald almost catches her. This is a foreshadowing of her next encounter with Thorwald, when she won’t be so lucky.

Stella grabs the camera from Jeffrey. Like Lisa, she is more emotionally connected to Windowland than Jeffrey. She notices that Miss Lonelyhearts has some sleeping pills and might be considering suicide. We’ll come back to her later. Notice how often Hitchcock uses a one-two punch. He’ll show us something briefly to get it in our heads, then come back to it later. This is a good way to give something more reality, more legitimacy. We’ve seen it once already, so it seems real, not something made up on the spot to move the plot along (even though that’s exactly what it is)!

So, now when Jeffrey watches Thorwald, he’s watching him react to Jeffrey’s own message. The connection to Windowland is now a two-way connection. And when Lisa comes in the room, the first thing she wants to know is what’s Thorwald’s reaction. Look how Jeffrey beams at her. He’s smitten with her now that she is the star of his Windowland movie and cares about it as much as he does.

The temptation to interfere with Windowland intensifies. Jeffrey actually calls Thorwald. He lures him out of his apartment, under a false pretense, another example of pretending. Stella and Lisa enter Windowland in a visually dramatic way, by climbing into it. They unbury whatever’s in the flower garden, but this is another false lead. Remember, keep your audience confused! But in another example of faith being more powerful than evidence, Lisa climbs the fire escape and goes into Thorwald’s apartment! Through the window! Now the window becomes a literal entrance into someone else’s life.

Notice how Jeffrey whispers to her to try to get her to stop. Here we have his helplessness in its most dramatic form. He is helpless to help Lisa. His inability to connect with Windowland is now very dramatic and has consequences. Stella is back in the apartment and once again sees Miss Lonelyhearts with the pills. She tells Jeffrey to call the police. This call will end up saving Lisa’s life, because by the time he gets through, it’s Lisa who is in danger, because Thorwald has returned. This is the most painful and disturbing part of the movie. Thorwald is attacking Lisa and Jeffrey can do nothing about it, even when she calls out his name. He continues whispering.

Finally, the police come. They will arrest Lisa for breaking in, but they also save her from the killer. At this point, we get a very important moment of signaling. Lisa shows Jeffrey the wedding ring, which is now on her hand. This shows Jeffrey that she has real evidence. But Thorwald also sees it! So now, Thorwald knows she has evidence, but he also knows that somebody is watching from across the way. The connection to Windowland is complete, because now Windowland knows about Jeffrey. There’s only one more step and that comes next.

Thorwald comes into the apartment! Windowland has arrived! One of the things that makes this scene so much more interesting than a run-of-the-mill suspense movie is that Jeffrey is just as menacing to Thorwald as Thorwald is to Jeffrey. It becomes apparent to us that Thorwald is the star of his own movie, and Jeffrey is a hidden nemesis that has been haunting him. Thorwald is terribly afraid in this scene, just as Jeffrey is. And Thorwald’s final act is a desperate one. He throws Jeffrey out the window.

And there you have it. The final step. The final connection. Jeffrey enters Windowland! This is the character development I was talking about before. It’s literally forced on him! We can hope now that he will become a more compassionate person.

scene 19

This scene is a classic example of denouement or falling action. The climax is over, and now we ease the audience out of the movie with a quiet scene suggesting a future for the characters. The scene opens on the thermometer. 70 degrees. The heat wave is over. The fever is over. The dream is over. We now see the real happy endings for the people in Windowland. The songwriter’s song has been published! He is playing his record for Miss Lonelyhearts, the very song that stopped her from committing suicide. Miss Torso has her true love return from the war. He’s not some dreamy hunk, but that makes him seem more real and we are “convinced” that there is a real love between them. The sculptress sleeps, giving us the impression that her sculpture is finished. The newlyweds are now arguing before an open window. They have now entered the public world with everyone else.

Jeffrey is sleeping. He misses his own denouement! Gee, maybe this whole movie was just his dream. We now see two casts. His limbo continues. Lisa puts down her adventure book and picks up Harper’s Bazaar. This is our last image of pretending. We hope that these two will stay together, but it won’t be easy.

I hope you’ve seen how limiting yourself in a movie creates challenges, but also creates possibilities. It can focus your movie in very intense ways.

Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-29T20:02:00.000-07:00

If you have to ask...

I can't recommend this movie to you. You might hate this movie. You might find this movie slow. I hear some critics couldn't find a story in this movie.

All I can tell you is that this movie is about being a boy. It reminded me of what being a boy is like. It taught me stuff about being a boy that I had never realized before... hard stuff to learn. It showed me all those ways that I still am a boy, and how that hurts me, and also how that makes me someone to love.

Yes, it does all that. And here's what it doesn't do: it doesn't make you forget your troubles. It doesn't escape you anywhere. It doesn't provide entertainment for your children. It doesn't make you believe in happy endings. It doesn't make you laugh at big fuzzy muppets.

This movie helped me figure out stuff I hadn't quite pieced together yet. I have to tell you, not many movies do that for me.

Hemingway's shortest story

2009-09-01T20:54:00.000-07:00

Hemingway's shortest story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." According to Wired magazine, Hemingway called it his best work.

Now Culture is looking for Twitpoems

2009-08-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

Now Culture lit mag (nowculture.com) is looking for Twitpoems, Twitterpoems, micropoetry and haiku. Tweet your submissions to #nowculture

Use / for a line break

Use // for breaks between verses

Now Culture has published work by Cole Swensen, Dara Wier, Joshua Beckman, Larissa Szporluk, Karen Volkman, Franz Wright, Barry Yourgrau, Matthew Zapruder and Tomaž Šalamun.

omg we suck

2009-08-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

omg i just saw a movie where like julia child is all, like, writing a book, you know? and it's like YEARS of her life, this one opus magnus...

omg it makes her a culinary goddess

but then there's this other half of the movie, haunted by a blogger who, basically just reads the book, albeit as an "active" reader, and writes diary entries whining about it. She gets HALF the movie. HALF of it.

Wherefore blog? Are we condemned to be parasitic flies upon the hide of true accomplishment?

omg we suck

What to Send Me

2009-08-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

Speaking for myself as one of the two editors of Now Culture:

Watch Chocolat and Babette's Feast.

Send me your Babette's Feast, not your Chocolat.

Watch Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice.

Send me your Sophie's Choice, not your Schindler's List.

Watch Pretty Woman and Cabaret.

Send me your Cabaret, not your Pretty Woman.

Watch Moulin Rouge and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Send me your Hedwig, not your Moulin Rouge.

Watch City Lights and .... um .... I dunno, but if you have a City Lights sitting around, SEND IT TO ME.

A Tale of Two Cover Letters

2009-07-31T22:20:00.000-07:00

It's supposed to be about the poems and only the poems.

I know that.

But reality seeps in. It begins with logistics. We just don't have the resources to make submissions anonymous. That takes a lot of work and organization, and even if somebody volunteers to be an intern for us, can I trust that person with our submissions, our mail?

So that means that I check the mail for submissions. I know who is submitting. Usually that's just a name that means nothing to me. But I also see a cover letter. Sometimes I purposely rush past it to the poems, other times I get drawn in. So let's talk about the last two cover letters I got.

The first was from somebody I rejected a week ago. I told him to wait 6 months before submitting again. A week is not 6 months. He's in my spam filter now.

The second one charmed me. This is a very subtle thing, mind you. It was just a straightforward cover letter, but there was a certain humility to it, a certain attitude of someone still willing to learn something, no attempt to convince me of anything. I admit it, I'm going to look at her poems more carefully than I might otherwise. As to whether a particular poem gets published or not, it probably won't make the difference, but I will spend more time reading the poems and responding to them.

Don't you think the Web is the new rag paper?

2009-07-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

Unless you are a poetry lover, you’ve likely never heard of a chapbook.

Almanacs, history, myths, stories and folk songs were all preserved in small, crudely made chapbooks.

Those familiar with the term probably have romanticized visions of a duty-bound, literate few from the middle ages peddling their rag paper wares from village to village.

The peddlers weren’t just hucksters. They were disseminating information. They were bettering the lives of people, and not just the upper crust who could afford to have book collections of their own, but also the common man.

In an era when paper was expensive, chapbooks were sold for a penny or ha’penny. They were cheap and they were necessary.

“These old Chap books [sic], sold by the Chapmen, have given us most of our old nursery rhymes, English ballads, folklore and old legends,” states the article “Chapbooks and the Nursery Rhyme.” at rhymes.org.uk.

“If you want to buy, I’m your chap,” the chapmen would yell as they went from door-to-door.
Also referred to as “merriments,” they were pocket-sized and cheap.

“The Nursery Rhyme began to be printed in England as early as 1570! Chapbooks were also popular with people who could not read as they contained pictures,” writes rhymes.org.uk. “The content and material of the Chapbooks expanded in the 1700s to include children’s stories like Robinson Crusoe and various versions of Perrault’s Fairy Tales.”

The popularity of chapbooks dwindled in the nineteenth century in the face of competition from newspapers.

Chapbooks are still preserving culture. They are still on the side of the underdog. In today’s world, the paupers are the poets and poetry lovers (both in reality and for the sake of this analogy).

Low-cost, low-production chapbooks are one of the few avenues available to the art with the lowest returns—poetry.

Because they are cheap, publishers are more willing to take a chance and produce a book that isn’t expected to sell in high quantities.

You probably know where I am heading with this. Yes, a chapbook of my poems was recently published.

It’s called “Twitter Poems and Other Small Gems.” It was published by another poetry blog—World Class Poetry Blog—and that seems apropos.

Bloggers work in the true spirit of the chapbook. Don't you think the Web is the new rag paper? The book, by the way, is available free at genemyers.com.

Sir Paul

2009-07-21T18:42:00.000-07:00

I'm no musicologist, but I know what I like. Last weekend, I saw Sir Paul McCartney in Citifield. Let me mention that any time I see a live performance (which is rarely), I am influenced by this book:

The author talks a lot about how performance is art, how each performance of a song is a different song. Paul is no Dylan in that sense. He is more "faithful" to his material than I would like. But I wonder if he has a choice?

It reminds me of watching a murder mystery on TV. I'm bored with it, but I still want to find out who killed whom. By the time I'm 15 minutes in, I've lost all desire for the show to be artistic or daring. No, I just want the closure.

I think Sir Paul's fans want closure. Let me give you an example. Sir Paul puts down his guitar after rocking the stadium. He walks over to the piano. He tells us that he wrote this song for Linda. He proceeds to sing "My Love." I proceed to cry through much of the song.

That's the kind of formulaic but powerful experience that so many of his fans were having, each one keyed into different formulae. The na na na of Hey Jude no longer worked for me, but I'm sure it did for others. The fireworks of "Live and Let Die" DID work for me, even though I hate fireworks.

From my own experience, I see two ways that art can create a powerful emotion. The first is by giving you something familiar, creating an almost Pavlovian response. The second is by giving you something unfamiliar, forcing the mind to put together the pieces in order to create a meaning out of it. When the first fails, it's cliche. When the second fails, it's gibberish, or a mere exercise.

Well, Paul largely succeeded on the first track. He was (almost) never just going through the motions. He genuinely enjoys making music (or fooled me into thinking so). He stunned me with an (again, faithful) guitar solo for Foxy Lady. He dared to play the Harrison tune that rivals any of his (Something), turning it into a tribute to George that had me teary-eyed yet again.

So, yes, this was less about living art than it was about an icon allowing us to worship him. But that's harder than it looks. It requires a certain amount of humility, a lack of smugness, a zeal to at least approach the level of energy that made you famous in the first place.

Why is Paul an icon for me? Largely because of his influence on my poetry. I learned Surrealism from "wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door" and "four of fish and finger pies" (even if some of that Surrealism accrued "across the water" from England to the U.S.). He taught me about pacing a metaphor: the way you say your heart is like a wheel, and give everyone a little while to wonder about it...

and only then do you say, "let me roll it to you."

What is American haiku?

2009-07-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

My idea of American haiku comes from a Norton anthology, as well
as the practices of modern American haiku writers. The 5/7/5 doesn't
translate into English because of the differences in the languages. Take
that away and you get haiku like this:

snowflakes
astrologer
stargazing - Arizona Zipper

or this:

Filling
the puddle: moon -- Marlene Mountain

The image of nature also comes into question. Loosen that and you get
haiku like this:

The park bench seats two summer dreams -- Gary Hotham

or this:

my dead brother..
hearing his laugh
in my laughter -- Nicholas Virgilio

What do they all have in common? Is there an essence left? What it
boils down to is minimalist lines, plain language and some sort of
revelation about the moment. I think Basho, Buson and Issa would
approve. They also walked the line between tradition and breaking
tradition.

Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually. --Issa

Defending Michael Loughran from Tony Hoagland

2009-07-15T18:33:00.000-07:00

I've never heard of Michael Loughran before, but Tony Hoagland quoted his poem in its entirety and then proceeded to say that it's incoherent. I need to defend this poem!

Okay, deep breath... let's start over...

First, I will quote the poem just like Tony does, it must be fair use at this point (it first appeared in American Letters and Commentary and can be found online):

Pastiche with Occasional Botany and Art

When humans avoid low temperatures
love exists,

which accounts for Miro’s
Flame in Space and Nude Woman:

it resembles a cat ingesting a raindrop
version of itself. In good health, corn plants

can transpire two quarts of water
in a day, whereas the succulents traffic

water to their fleshy parts
through wide root networks,

hoarding it there, sportingly. Conversely,
bamboo commits suicide every 33 to 66 years.

"Nowadays," said Miro at 67,
"I rarely start a picture from a hallucination."

Melvin Calvin discovered one single organ
can perform a large number of functions:

the human heart is known to migrate swiftly
and without warning, like a glove tossed from

the height of a tall statue.

And now, here's what Tony had to say (in American Poetry Review July/August 2009):

"Pastiche" keeps the reader off balance with its askew sequence of gestures, but to no real end. Aside from a hinted-at topic of "love," the poem possesses no center; it creates no coherent "thinking," thus it builds no internal pressure; thus it achieves no meaningful closure. It throws boomerangs that never come back. With its interesting mixture of "materials," and its structure of implied analogy, it promises relations, but doesn't deliver; therefore, it remains cryptic and silly.

Blammo. Dismiss poem and move on. He's making a larger point about Dean Young and his followers, a point that doesn't really require the demolition of this poem, but the fact that he does demolish it in quite this way puts his judgement into doubt, imho, and makes me question any conclusions he draws about anything.

Plus, I'm tired of people saying poems are meaningless just because THEY don't understand them. A little humility, people! What struck me is that the poem felt coherent to me right away. Explaining it requires a few reads, but it felt right on the first read, and that's what matters. Seriously, that's why we read poems, for a feeling (yes that feeling can vary a great deal), not because it fits into our pet theory of what poetry should be. (Mind you, I love pet theories, but we're talking about abuse vs. use.)

Let's begin my process of catching thoughts up to feelings and Defending The Poem is looking at the painting he references:

This painting is integral to the first five and a half lines. The metaphor here involves keeping water at a high enough temperature not to be ice. That metaphor is made explicit in the first two lines, the painting is connected to it in the next two lines, and finally the painting is beautifully described on a purely visual level while simultaneously expanding the metaphor, i.e., in its liquid state, water acts as a mirror, but is also ingestible... it reflects us and also becomes part of us. Indeed, Tony, he is "hinting at" love. Not only that, he's creating a breathtaking metaphor for it.

For the next 5ish lines he talks about how two varieties of plants process water. Ideas of "types of people" are suggested, but not overbearingly. More important are the ideas he brings up, ideas of transpiring (i.e. going through or using), storing and how storing can also be sharing (in a way, if the network is wide enough). The corn and the succulents verge on becoming characters themselves, each having the "personality" that Tony must think is missing from this poem.

The next personality is the bamboo, and the years Michael provides really do represent a rough range for the lifespan of the bamboo. Because it flowers once and then dies, it does seem like a suicide. 33 evokes a sacrificial suicide. 66 evokes retirement, passage into seniority. Surely, a very human theme of "love" is not yet lost here.

After that, we get a quote from Miro, firmly roping the painting back into the poem (though I also find visual resonance between the painting and vegetative imagery, notice the yellow and green of bamboo...). Whether true or not, Miro is made to seem like he is talking about his painting, how it started as a hallucination, though he rarely does so now. Could his loss of hallucination be a kind of suicide? Surely, Tony can see a "connection" between 66 and 67?

Finally, the last 5 lines are about the heart. Love poem.... heart... get it? For me the "swift migration" and "tossed from/the height" resemble someone jumping into a river (suicide) and being rushed downstream... but even if you think that's a stretch, surely the theme of love has been examined from start to finish.

The poem may not have the closure that Tony wants, or the feeling Tony wants, but it can hardly be dismissed as nonsense.

Are we all so blinded by our search for schools and theories that we lose our vision into the single poem? Perhaps this can serve as a cautionary tale.

Greg Grummer... the movie

2009-07-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Remember movies? In those heady days before YouTube? We don't either. But at Now Culture we like to recreate memories we never had, and so, apparently, does Greg Grummer.

http://nowculture.com/nc6/grummer1.htm

If you scribble any notes in the theatrical darkness, you can transcribe them into comments below.

Free poetry by putting it on your cell phone!

2009-07-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

Twitter needn't be inane or just about self-promotion. The great potential of Twitter is that we have once again invented another way of interacting with each other. What's greater than that is that people are using Twitter to bring poetry into their lives in a whole new way.

One PR problem that poetry faces in this country is that it isn't a part of people's everyday lives. The only time poetry is brought to them is when it is on an English class syllabus. Twitter changes that! Poetry can now come to people on their cell phones. What's even better than all of that?

Haiku is actually an ideal form for Twitter and other microblogging venues for two reasons--it's compactness and its clear language. To the everyday person who hasn't seen a poem since they read Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" since high school, haiku looks like it's meeting them halfway. ("At least it doesn't rhyme!")

So they are willing to meet it in the middle. Hence the invention of the "Twaiku" (haiku + Twitter) and a resurgence in the interest of haiku itself.

It is at this crossroad that I am excited to have one of the first (or the very first?) chapbooks published of Twitter haiku. Put out by World Class Poetry Blog (one of the most popular poetry blogs on the Web), "Twitter Haiku & Other Small Gems" is an investigation of the kind of art that people can share on Twitter for free.

It doesn't have to be just about networking or marketing, Twitter can also be a poetic experience. "Twitter Haiku & Other Small Gems" can be downloaded for free at genemyers.com

http://twitter.com/myersgene

Gene's upcoming chapbook

2009-07-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

Coming this week…

“Twitter Haiku & Other Small Gems”

a chapbook of Gene's stuff by...

WorldClassPoetryBlog.com

It will be free and downloadable!

Maybe I'm Amazed

2009-06-28T17:59:00.001-07:00

Maybe I'm amazed at the way you maintain an ambiguity about a state of awe. Maybe I'm amazed at how tenaciously you do so, even to the point where you say or at least suggest that maybe you're a man. Even your manhood is in question.

Maybe I'm afraid of the way you don't seem to know what you're doing, but you do it anyway. Maybe I'm amazed at the way your seeming contradiction melts away, because of course awe is ambiguous, of course it is a blazing uncertainty that we face.

Maybe I'm afraid of the influence you've had on my poetry. Maybe I'm afraid that you were my introduction to Surrealism, the songs you wrote with that other fella back when I was being born.

Maybe I'm an editor who's in the middle of something that he doesn't really understand, a collection of short poems from various authors, the cracked-open miracle of the haiku moment, now facing all you've done with three words. Maybe I'm afraid of the way I need you.

Maybe some people think you're indecisive, noncommital, but you've shown the world otherwise. It's your willingness to face the MAYBE of amazement that takes you so far into it.

James Wright's Northern Italy By Sander Zulauf

2009-06-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

After Baptism there is the new life. After the harsh industrialized landscapes of steel mills and slag heaps, after the impoverished and brutalized lives lived in his native Ohio, after the bitterness of the Minnesota winters, after the wreckage of his marriage to Liberty Kardules and the loss of his sons, after the loss of his position at the University of Minnesota, there was the refuge offered James Wright by Robert and Carol Bly, there was a position at Hunter College, and there was Annie, and James’s new life began with her and took on a whole new dimension when they journeyed together to Italy.

http://www.ohioana-authors.org/wright/italy.php

Defend Marriage!

2009-06-17T16:13:00.000-07:00

The institution of marriage is under attack. This upsets me, because I am a participant in it. Marriage is sacred to me, it's a huge part of my life and my happiness. I can't stand the idea of it being sullied and degraded.

But that's exactly what's happening. Legislators and activist judges all over this country are changing the laws in order to compromise the institution of marriage, on the federal and state level.

These radicals are taking something that's supposed to be about love and using it as a tool to promote bigotry. They're using it as the front line against the rights of homosexuals, adding the defensive, whimpering, spiteful words "between a man and a woman" to something that is supposed to be about union, about people.

You've been warned. Keep an eye out for "propositions" in your state, and keep an eye on what your legislators are propping up and what your judges are striking down.

Let's leave marriage out of it. I adore my marriage. I hate having this shadow over it.

Either/Or?

2009-06-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

Either/Or?

Poetry has come to mean less about what it is by definition than the intensity of feeling it generates in an audience—it is a use of language heightened through a variety of tools to achieve an intensity of feeling, initially generated or germinated in the poet, then hopefully translated broadly to an audience of readers or listeners. The introduction of prose techniques (arhythmic, non-rhyming, non-linebreaking) as devices to interrupt the poem has broadened what a poem can be definitionally and how and what kind of work it can do. Line breaks used to mean the end of a measure and often that measure was punctuated with a stop or a rhyme, however beginning with the first introduction of irregularities in rhythm, enjambment, blank verse, and the introduction of low subjects and diction that were not “poetic,” the poem began it's morphing and edging toward prose and a fusion of poetry and prose. Perhaps this has always been so and what we are witnessing in english and actually in other languages throughout the world utilizing the hybridization of poetry with prose is only the latest swing of the pendulum toward freedom and away from restriction and the next wave or swing will be back toward more restrictions. Perhaps. But I don't think so, rather what has happened is that the field has been widened, and the result has become broader variety with more room for subtle effects.

I believe what caused the Baudelaire to move in the direction of “little” prose poems was to break free of the prison of the line imposed by the Parnassians, and for G.M. Hopkins to move intuitively toward a dense Anglo Saxon alliterative poetry which he renamed “sprung rhythm” might have been a Welsh influence or it might have been a personal, individual desire for a denser line, something idiosyncratically his—the music he heard in his head. For Whitman it was a desire to find a looser more expansive line to match the expansive landscape and emulate more truly the language of the common man. For William Carlos Williams, it was the desire, like Wordsworth's, for a non-poetic diction, a desire for an American idiom, to write poetry in a language less artificial and more like the spoken which was being heard and written after the turn of the century. It was prose technique that helped the Beats interject some popular appeal back into poetry after much of the obfuscation and intellectualization of the Modernists and the narrow formal and critical restrictions of the New Critics.

As music is an art, a diversion, a way to break the silence, one can use silence and syncopation to break, change, or mix up the wall of sound some of us find ourselves in—silence is almost as important as the kinds of sounds being utilized because it creates tempo. Prose and poetry work both ways and the combination or fusion can create tensions. You say, "'Free verse' becomes an excuse to write poorly-thought-out fragments of prose....Poetry is prose interrupted. Use the break to wake your reader. If you must lull, do it with rocking, not the River Lethe of prose.” This sounds as if you are villifying prose, as if the two were at odds. If the goal is intensity of feeling, then utilizing both when the subject makes demands on the form isn't necessarily a pitting of one against the other or advocation of one and denial of the other. Both can serve as a counterpoint, pause, or or lack of rest, balanced against the other in alternation or to create individual voices through various forms of fusion as poetic technique in prose, or prose techniques in poetry. Why not? Prose metaphorically can be looked at as a figure for time with no break or it can be looked at as a break from the steady, regular rhythm or pulse which can amount to the same thing. Prose poetry could be the kind of line break you're searching for, or a newer syncopation akin jazz in music? George Gershwin was a prose poet—so was Copeland--they introduced the popular music of jazz into classical forms of the Symphony and Opera, similar to the way Liszt and Bartok used folk music for thematic material. It isn't about death, or even necessarily always accident or entropy, but reinvigoration, variation, or other determined purposes which draw many poets toward the introduction of prose techniques into their writing. In my case, as a truck driver, it is finding a rhythm and voice which can articulate the rhythms of the road, heavy labor and low station—I don't write many sonnets in my line of work. It's not that I can't or couldn't but that form doesn't lend itself easily or naturally to my subject matters most of the time. One of the complaints of formalists is that there is no accountability to checklist a work against whether or not it's working, has arrived, is achieving as a poem, as an artifact. It is not about prose or poetry, but the harder path of balance, harmony, intensity and internal consistency of structure or form within the rules a given piece chooses to ally and order itself by to best intensify the subject.

One always dreams of and seeks a perfect marriage. Poetry is about duality. This can include unbroken lines in poetry, or broken lines within prose, and still be authentic rather than fake, pretense, or mere laziness. Freedom (like grace) always involves risk. Abuses will always occur coincidentally and be inherent with any freedom, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still exercise it. It may appear to an untrained observer like irresponsible throwing off of restraint but one knows soon enough the difference between someone highly gifted and skilled making what they do look effortless—this liberty that implies diligence must be the very much like the quality of joy—grace and genius—rare, sudden and inexplicable.

The Significance of Linebreaks

2009-06-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

When Tristram Shandy laments his inability to write his own life, he is exhibiting awe at the unbroken line.

This line we call "prose" is relentless. As it courses through a description of an event, it easily flows on far longer than the event itself ever did, thus Tristram's quandary. Instead of catching his life up to the present moment, he fell further behind because his life unavoidably unrolled at a faster pace than its far end could be rolled into words.

How different the haiku, in which seventeen syllables (or whatever they are) free a moment from relentless time. In other words, it breaks the line.

======> <=======

The line break is so much more powerful than a pause for breath. It is a break from prose, and break after break creates a pulse, suggests a cycle instead of a progression.

I would say the most common problem among free versers isn't abuse of this power, but neglect of same. "Free verse" becomes an excuse to write poorly-thought-out fragments of prose.

Don't do it. Break the line. Force yourself into the cycle, the pulse. You gotta make your own kinda music, sing your own special song. Your voice is the breathing, the beating, the breaking, of lines.

======> <=======

Poetry is prose interrupted. Use the break to wake your reader. If you must lull, do it with rocking, not the River Lethe of prose. Line breaks keep you aware of yourself and the reader aware of himself, and he of you and you of him.

Like it or not, line breaks make your poem a song. Even on the page, it is a rhythmic performance, a spell you cast. So much free-verse workshopping seems to forget that, and steers the poet toward better and better prose .... away from poetry.

Let the line breaks break you out of your prison of self, or mind, or whatever it is that relentlessly fits the gear of your spirit into the gear of time.

Prose is time, poetry is ritual time.

What is it about compact poetry?

2009-06-07T04:57:00.000-07:00

What is it about compact poetry that makes it special? Makes it seem more charged?

For me, compact poems are all essence. Sometimes, a small poem can be a good sign that the poet put the pen down before the spirit left him.

I'm happy to say that the next issue of Now Culture will focus on small poems and we have work from Gary Hotham. He's a great example of an artist that respects the tradition of haiku, but also moves it forward.

Do you know his work?

Here are two classics by Gary Hotham:

tonight’s hotel room --
the stain on the rug
nothing to worry about

*

early in the night—
the stars we can see
the space for more

CURRENT WORK BY HOTHAM, WHICH FURTHER PUSHES THE ENVELOPE, WILL APPEAR SOON AT NOWCULTURE.COM

The Poetry Twit

2009-06-02T04:21:00.000-07:00

I think many are missing the point when it comes to the potential of Twitter. It needn't be inane or self-promotion. The great potential of Twitter is that we have once again invented another way of interacting with each other.

It’s great that there’s so much fervor built upon words. Throw in the democratization that this DIY tool makes possible and it seems downright noble. People are sharing ideas, information, getting news blasts from newspapers.

It may be the latest technological fad, but it's also one more example of technology breaking down barriers and putting us all on a level playing field. I think this is missed when people talk about Twitter...

So, I've started this Web site:

http://poetrytwit.wordpress.com/

No Things Without Ideas

2009-05-28T21:06:00.000-07:00

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Stevens goes beyond a simple declaration of "We should get to Things!" So many of his poems are concerned with the question of how we can get to Things in the first place. Because, you see, there is a Mind in the way. It is disingenuous to ignore the Mind for the Thing.

Top 100 Poetry Blogs

2009-05-28T05:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to poet Diane Lockward for pointing this out!

http://www.universityreviewsonline.com/2005/10/top-100-poetry-blogs.html

Stevens vs. Williams Ideas that split poetry

2009-05-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch
By Wallace Stevens

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just abover her head there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection C.

The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

[EDITOR STEPS IN, "DING! DING! ROUND TWO] (Williams gets ready pounce)

A Sort of a Song
By William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
– through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Variations in translations with a Basho haiku...

2009-05-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

Basho frog haiku (vers. 1)

An old pond —

The sound

Of a diving frog.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Basho frog haiku (vers. 2)

Into the ancient pond

A frog jumps

Water’s sound!

Translated by D.T. Suzuki

Basho frog haiku (vers. 3)

Old pond — frogs jumped in — sound of water.

Translated by Lafcadio Hearn

Exploring the origins of free verse and the prose poem: a partial summary and dateline of influences

2009-05-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

Exploring the Origins of Free Verse and the Prose Poem, a Partial Summary and Dateline of Influences

Dave Mehler

Don, as you know I'm not a scholar, nor should I pretend to be and feel the need to underscore this is an informal conversation. I'll be back later to address your latest comments, but first I wanted to offer you this which I've been working on for the last few weeks. When you invited me to begin this conversation on the blog at “Now Culture” I started doing some research on the origins of free verse. I already knew something about prose poetry, and that it predated vers libre, but not so much about specifically how or why free verse developed. I agree with you that the prose poem has its genesis and roots in a tradition. In order to establish some groundwork pertaining to some beginnings of that tradition, here are some of the influential publications, scattered quotes by practitioners, dates, and some interpretive guessing along the way by me, which may seem arbitrary rather than exhaustive (because I am not a scholar). This is meant to offer a sketch of some of the dynamics at play historically. I would recommend reading Stephen Dobyns' book Best Words, Best Order, and especially his essay in that book, “Notes on Free Verse.” Here's some of what I found out and pulled together.

Free verse, as we know it today, arose out of primarily two geographic locations independently but at about the same time from what were two totally different reasons, in the mid to late nineteenth centuries—one was Paris, France, and the other was Walt Whitman's America. In France, it developed around a group of poets through what became the French Symbolist movement, while for Whitman it seems to have been from a search for a specifically American voice and sensibility that grew out of an exuberance, influenced by Transcendentalism of Emerson, a search for a more expansive and optimistic way to speak about a relatively new nation and a wild landscape still being explored. In Paris it was a convergence of many cultural forces and was an outgrowth of Romanticism and rebellion against the Academy (Parnassus) and neoclassical sensibility. What Baudelaire in Paris and Whitman in America agreed upon was the need in poetry for a movement toward individualism but their motivations were different—for Baudelaire it was subversion against a class and culture, while for Whitman it seems to have been optimism and celebration.

Around Baudelaire was the richness of an established culture in transition and he was influenced by the currents in music and painting, Wagner, the Impressionist painters, the philosophy of Swedenborg and Von Hartmann, the poetry and poetics of Edgar Allan Poe (the craftmanship, innovation and dark psychology) and what was happening in French poetry at the time, a gradual (or relatively quick) shift away from rigidity and rules associated with the alexandrine line beginning with vers librere (liberated verse), which began 200 years before in isolated instances to full blown vers libre in the 19th. Even vers libre is not the same as “free verse” that we think of in english now in post post modern times—it did away with the basis of the line on syllable count but retained rhyme and use of stress within the line. It was an attempt to align poetry with music, and the indirect way that music can affect the emotions. It was a movement toward the sub or unconscious, dreams, deeper correspondences, and movement away from narrative or linear, logical or chronological association and progression, which grew into Surrealism. Mallarme provided a salon setting for discussion and promotion of these ideas by having meetings in his home every Tuesday night between 1885 and 1895. In reaction to Romanticism it was a focus on the object and image against the lyrical “I” of the speaker which later grew into Imagism.

The prose poem predated vers libre (and free verse) and free verse may have been an outgrowth or moderation of the prose poem, but ironically free verse, especially in the U.S. through it's predominance over the last 75 years has marginalized and pushed and kept the prose poem to the sidelines (until the 1960's). For the prose poem's sake as a subversive hybrid this is not entirely a bad thing.

The poetry and wisdom literature of the Old Testament (2-4,000 BC), parables in the gospels and prophetic apocalyptic books in the Old and New testaments forshadowed free verse and prose poetry through it's lack of using devices such as meter and rhyme but incorporating others such as parallelism, repetition, figurative and rhetorical devices which influenced Western poets through the ages.

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) Japanese poet combines prose with haiku and travelogue, in the form: haibun.

“There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition”--William Wordsworth, “Preface to The Lyrical Ballads” (1802), speaking out against poetic diction, not meter, but laying groundwork for ordinary language and speech in poetry.

“If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” --John Keats, from a letter, February 27th 1818, from Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush.

“The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material, as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form.” --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from “Shakespeare's Judgement Equal to His Genius” (1808, published 1836)

Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841)-- Gaspard de la Nuit was published in Belgium in 1842, was translated widely, influencing Baudelaire. Bertrand, in his preface to his book is not self-conscious in his use or creation of a hybrid form or poetics, while admitting he was attempting to create a “new genre of prose,” focused backwards on writing about Renaissance Flanders.

Baudelaire began Paris Spleen (Spleen de Paris) which he titled alternately Little Prose Poems (Petits Poemes en prose) in 1855 and was first published in full in 1869. In a letter to a friend he wrote, “Who among us has not, in his ambitious moments, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without meter or rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the jolts of consciousness.” Baudelaire is identified by many critics, Eliot included, as the progenitor of Modern poetry, and the self-conscious originator of the prose poem form writing about his own modern Europe.

Arthur Rimbaud writes Illuminations in 1873, published in 1886 in “La Vogue,” edited by Kahn.

Gustav Kahn (b. 1859) claimed to be the earliest writer of the vers libre (this has been disputed), and explained his methods and the history of the movement in a preface to his Premiers Poemes (1897). “For a long time I had been seeking to discover in myself a personal rhythm capable of communicating my lyric impulses with the cadence and music which I judged indispensable to them.” (from the Preface)

'De Nouveaux Rythmes': The Free Verse of Laforgue's 'Solo De Lune' by Anne Holmes, from “French Studies: A Quarterly Review” (Vol. 62, Num. 2, April 2008, pp. 162-172). This article considers Laforgue's 'Solo de lune' in the light of the Symbolists' claim that their free verse was inspired by music. After referring to the views of two contemporary poets on the subject (that Laforgue's free verse was psychologically rather than musically determined) and outlining Laforgue's position with regard to music and his counter-claim, his practice is examined in two areas: first, 'Solo de lune"s double narrative and consequently contrapuntal structure, alternating free verse with an approximate 'quatrain populaire'; second, the use of other musical features which work against the random nature of free verse (parallelism, modulation, innovative phonetic repetition). The article argues that Laforgue's musical aspirations influence both the structure and the detail of the text. Finally, Laforgue's interest in connecting the three art forms — music, Impressionist painting, and liberated verse — and his awareness of a parallel modernity, are briefly illustrated.” quoted from the abstract: (http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/french_studies_a_quarterly_review/v062/62.2.holmes.html ) Jules Laforgue (1860-1887)--”Influenced by Walt Whitman, Laforgue was one of the first French poets to write in free verse. Philosophically, he was an ardent disciple of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. His poetry would be one of the major influences on the young T. S. Eliot (cf. Prufrock and other observations) and Ezra Pound. Louis Untermeyer wrote, 'Prufrock, published in 1917, was immediately hailed as a new manner in English literature and belittled as an echo of Laforgue and the French symbolists to whom Eliot was indebted.'” excerpted from wikipedia:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Laforgue )

Jules Laforgue's translations from Walt Whitman appeared in “La Vogue,” June 1886.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writes “The Poet,” between 1841 and 1843, published in Essays, in 1844. It is not about "men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in meter, but of the true poet...Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung...Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."
from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass ) : “Leaves of Grass has its genesis in an essay called The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1845, which expressed the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country's virtues and vices. Whitman, reading the essay, consciously set out to answer Emerson's call as he began work on the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman, however, downplayed Emerson's influence, stating, 'I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.' ...The first edition was very small, collecting only twelve unnamed poems in 95 pages...Whitman once said he intended the book to be small enough to be carried in a pocket. 'That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.'...There have been held to be either six or nine editions of Leaves of Grass, the count depending on how a given scholar distinguishes between issues and editions. Scholars who hold that an edition is an entirely new set of type will count the 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871-72, and 1881. Others add in the 1876, 1888-89, and 1891-92 (the "deathbed edition"). Whitman continually revised his masterwork, adding, shifting, and occasionally removing poems...By the time this last edition was completed, Leaves of Grass had grown from a small book of 12 poems to a hefty tome of almost 400 poems.”
“In my opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry...The Muse of the Prairies, of California, Canada, Texas and of the peaks of Colorado...soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose...Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations—many rare combinations.” Walt Whitman, from “Notes Left Over,” from “Ventures on an Old Theme,” (1892) Collected Prose.

Emily Dickinson (1831-1886) writes metrically regular, slant-rhyming verse based loosely on the iambic tetrameter of hymnal writers but with idiosyncratic use of punctuation and syntax looking forward to the Moderns who reached her creative peak in 1862, writing 366 poems in that year alone.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in North Wales, was asked by his religious superior to write a poem to commemorate the foundering of a German ship in a storm, so in 1875 he was moved to take up poetry once more (after forsaking it when he took the vows of Jesuit priesthood) to write, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” In 1877 he composed most of his most famous sonnets in what he called “sprung rhythm,” but which was really an intuitive return (and reinvention) to the older poetics of Anglo Saxon/Old English alliterative and accentual syllabics of Beowulf, which he couldn't have seen. He was searching for an idiom to match the voice and music he heard in his head that was both more prosaic and more musical (living) than the dead-end of Victorian verse of his contemporaries after 300 year tyranny of metrical and rhyming regularity instituted by Edmund Spenser.

Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev, publishes Poems in Prose written between 1878-82.

Stuart Merrill's anthology of French prose poetry in English translation, Pastels in Prose appears in 1890 published in New York and influences the British Decadent, Oscar Wilde who published Poems in Prose (1894).

Ernest Dowson, another British Decadent and friend of Wilde's publishes Decorations in Prose (1899).

James Joyce, in 1902 made claims to Yeats in a Dublin restaurant to have “thrown over metrical form” in prose sketches he called “epiphanies,” and which he never published separately but later incorporated into novels.

Gertrude Stein, American expatriate in Paris abandons conventional narrative (“Picasso”;1902;1909), creates impersonal portraiture, uses abstraction and repetition which builds through incremental addition of detail to get at essentials of character, uses the paragraph as a compositional unit, redefines poetic language through the removal of nouns as an attempt to get at a language that signifies meaning after years of poetic language becoming derivative and meaningless( Tender Buttons 1913; 1914). Attempts to categorize her writing range from Cubist, Surrealist or Symbolist. She is often quoted, “What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose.”

Ezra Pound writes in 1917, “I think there is a 'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms.”

In 1917, T.S. Eliot wrote the essay, “The Borderline of Prose,” in which he reviewed the prose poems of Robert Aldington, a British Decadent which he saw as “charlatanism” in contrast to the more favorable work and experiments of the French poets Baudelaire (Paris Spleen) and Rimbaud (Illuminations). In 1921, from another essay, “Prose and Verse,” he took to task the term “prose poem” by writing, “The distinction between 'prose' and 'verse' is clear; the distinction between 'poetry' and 'prose' is very obscure....I object to the term 'prose poetry' because it seems to apply a sharp distinction between 'poetry' and 'prose' I do not admit, and if it does not imply this distinction, the term is meaningless and otiose, as there can be no combination of what is not distinguished,“ from “Prose and Verse” (1921). He preferred to call prose poems “short prose.” It is surmised by Michel Delville that Eliot's criticism of the form in these essays was directly responsible for slowing the progress and acceptance of the form in English—certainly in redirecting the form back and away from versions of the Decadents to varieties and uses it has hybridized into today as it was begun to be repracticed in the States, in the 60's.

In 1917, T.S. Eliot also wrote in his essay, “Reflections on Vers Libre,” “...the ghost of simple metre should lurk behind the auras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only true freedom when it appears against the background of artificial limitation.” (This is an advocation of vers librere, liberated verse or loosening of some but not all restraints)

“Rhythm and its specialized form meter, depend upon repetition, and expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where it fails, all rhythmical and metric effects spring from anticipation...the mind after reading a line or two of verse, or half a sentence of prose, prepares itself ahead for any one of a number of possible sequences, at the same time negatively incapacitating itself for others. The effect produced by what actually follows depends very closely upon this unconscious preparation and consists largely of the further twist which it gives to expectancy.” I.A Richards, from “Rhythm and Meter” (1924)

Edward Estlin Cummings (ee cummings 1894-1962), is notable for his large body of work, range of influence and the melding of tradition and form with wild ranging experiments with syntax, typography, playfulness and lyric sensibility and sound. Many of his poems are variations on the sonnet, and as a painter, he paid particular attention to the look of the poem on the page, and often the look seemed at odds with readability or meaning, if read aloud became clear. “While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the romantic tradition, Cummings's work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings )

“William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence in Williams' writing, and in 1913 arranged for the London publication of Williams's second collection, The Tempers. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. His influence as a poet spread slowly during the twenties and thirties, overshadowed, he felt, by the immense popularity of Eliot's "The Waste Land"; however, his work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor. His major works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), the five-volume epic Paterson (1963, 1992), and Imaginations (1970). Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in 1963.” (excerpted from the bio on Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/119 )

Here are some excerpts from Williams writing, “We have had a choice either to stay within the rules of English prosody, an area formed and limited by the English character and marked by tremendous masterwork, or to break out, as Whitman did, more or less unequipped to do more. Either to return to rules, more or less arbitrary in their delimitations, or to go ahead; to invent other forms by using a new measure...It is the refusal of English (especially American English) to conform to standard prosody which has given rise to free verse...The crux of the question is measure. In free verse the measure has been loosened to give more play to vocabulary and syntax—hence, to the mind in its excursions. The bracket of the customary foot has been expanded so that more syllables, words or phrases can be admitted into its confines. The new unit thus created may be called the 'variable foot'...it rejects the standard of the conventionally fixed foot and suggests that measure varies with the idiom by which it is employed and the tonality of the individual poem. Thus, as in speech, the prosodic pattern is evaluated by criteria of effectiveness and expressiveness rather than mechanical syllable counts.” --William Carlos Williams from “Notes on Free Verse,” Best Words, Best Order, Stephen Dobyns

Michael Benedikt in his groundbreaking and international collection of prose poetry, The Prose Poem, an International Anthology (outlined in 1964, but not published until 1976—and now long out of print) writes in his introduction, “The central figure in this historical puzzle (the isolation of American poetry from international currents) is certainly T.S. Eliot. What makes this singling out of Eliot so necessary is that he is the virtual beginning, with his incomparably influential writings, of the fundamentally English-based, anti-internationalist critical approach which dominated in America until the early 1960's. For, despite his recognition of the contribution of the French, Eliot's interests essentially lay elsewhere than in international directions. In his most influential essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” (1919), Eliot asserted: “Every nation, every race has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind.” For Eliot, an American emigre to England, it seemed that the American “turn of mind” and the English must be virtually identical. For forty years, Eliot's critical assumptions lasted as axioms, particularly among the leading group of the so-called New Critics in the U.S.--one wing of which called themselves, significantly, The Fugitives. They were fleeing cosmopolitan forces; prescriptive and rigid, self-professedly neoclassical in direction and generally recommending traditional or British literary links, their critical perspectives filled the best-known literary and scholarly quarterlies until late in the 1950's. By that decade, Randall Jarrell, a poet-critic who was more adventurous than many of his critical contemporaries, could rightfully, if uneasily refer to the entire period as “The Age of Criticism.” In effect American poetry was in a kind of psychic slavery to overweening English influences (particularly neoclassicist English 'restraint'), from which it should have been free, at least in theory, for roughly two hundred years—and certainly since the time of Whitman.”

Steven Monte considers John Ashbery's publication of the long prose poems, Three Poems (1972) a crucial influential step for the prose poem in the U.S.

David Lehman in his introduction to his anthology of prose poems, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), states that a turning point for the prose poem's acknowledgement and validity by the academy as a form or genre in the U.S. was Charles Simic's publication of The World Doesn't End and the winning of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1991. Mark Strand's The Monument (1978), was chosen to receive the prize by two judges on the Pulitzer committee but because Louis Simpson, the third judge so vehemently rejected the book as a candidate (because it was prose not verse), it did not win the prize in 1978.

With the advent of the cultural revolution (social, political, sexual) and the Beats in the 50's and 60's in the US reacting against the poetry of Modernism, the academy of the New Critics, many poets working in fixed forms and meter begin experimenting in open forms and free verse: most notably Robert Lowell, James Wright, Robert Bly, Donald Justice. At the same time translations of Eastern writing from China and Japan beginning with Pound begin to take hold and become influential, particularly on the West Coast—as seen in the work and translation of Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and others. In the midwest practitioners such as Robert Bly were turning their eyes internationally and toward the prose poem in their own writing. I believe the translations of Chinese poetry proved an influential factor toward the trend toward the confessional lyric which predominates American poetry from the 60's to the present, though I'm not sure I could prove that.

Ant War

2009-05-19T19:26:00.001-07:00

One morning my wife noticed a line of ants going across our walkway. Not a migration. Movement was going in both directions. Many were perfectly still, or seemed so. No, this wasn't a migration. This was a war.

Photos courtesy of my wife.

Free Verse and Prose Poetry Eat Each Other

2009-05-18T21:33:00.000-07:00

"I'd be interested in hearing why you would make the claim this is free verse--(one definition of prose poetry, perhaps the main one, is that prose poetry is free verse without linebreaks), but what you meant was that it should or could have linebreaks, right?" -Dave Mehler

The poetry of a prose poem comes from pretending that it's prose.

The poetry of free verse comes from pretending that it's poetry.

Each one plays off of a different tradition. The poetry is in the play.

That's what most poetry is these days. There are very few people writing poems like Rose Kelleher's, where there is still that potent interaction between form and content. The interaction now is mostly with contexts and expectations.

Prose Poetry and Free Verse Eat Each Other

2009-05-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

In Dave's blog entry here:

http://nowculture.blogspot.com/2009/05/some-essential-principles-surrounding.html

He asks for clarification of one of my comments about a prose poem, in which I said it was just free verse without linebreaks.

I'd be interested in hearing why you would make the claim this is free verse--(one definition of prose poetry, perhaps the main one, is that prose poetry is free verse without linebreaks), but what you meant was that it should or could have linebreaks, right?

It's a sword that cuts both ways. My original comment played off the cliche that such-and-such poem is "prose with linbreaks." But that is the danger of free verse.

I think a lot of free verse and prose poetry is interchangeable: add or remove linebreaks to taste. But the damning question is different for each.

Of prose poetry, the devil asks, "Why aren't you just a short piece of prose?"

Of free verse, the devil asks, "Why have lines if the lines aren't metrical?"

I distrust any general answer to these questions. Each poem must forge its own answer. Many of them don't, and suffer under pretension, i.e., they pretend they're poetry. Free verse pretends to be poetry by breaking itself into lines. Prose poems pretend to be poetry by calling themselves poems.

So, Dave, you think it's a stylistic choice? If that's the only distinction, then it's hardly a distinction at all. I wonder if there's not more at work here. I think a prose poem might be interacting with the presumption that it is prose. It plays off the prose tradition. Free verse, on the other hand, is interacting with the presumption that it is a poem. It plays off the poetic tradition.

In both cases, the poetry is in the play.

Dylan Thomas' In My Craft or Sullen Art

2009-05-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

Don and I seem to be on a kick--writing poems about writing poems. And really what better way is there to speak about poetry? After all, it is the only way to say the unsayable--to reach the unreachable.

Below is a famous Dylan Thomas poem. I always thought of Thomas as sullen under a raging moon....

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labor by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Prose poem bibliography of American anthologies

2009-05-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre--Michel Delville [academic treatment].

Invisible Fences--Steven Monte

The Prose Poem: An International Anthology--ed by Michael Benedikt [Definitive, groundbreaking, but hard to find--excellent intro (1976)]

Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem--ed by Stuart Friebert and David Young [this is a good one]

No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets--ed by Ray Gonzalez [another good one]

Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to the Present--ed. by David Lehman--this may be the most common and currently definitive--excellent introduction]

The Best of: The Prose Poem: An International Journal--ed by Peter Johnson [this is actually an anthology of a journal that existed for about 8 years (92-2000). Extensive bibliography—very valuable resource]

The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry--ed by Robert Alexander, Mark Vinz and C.W Truesdale

All of these books have interesting essays on what prose poetry is or does worth the price of the book.

There are also books which don't make pretenses to being poetry, perhaps to avoid stigma and thereby be more commercially viable--and they seem to have been more successful by virtue of being reprinted and having more than one collection:

Flash Fiction--ed Robert Shapard

Sudden Fiction--Robert Shapard, James Thomas

Sudden Fiction Cont.-- "

Sudden Fiction International-- "

Some of the stories in these books could be prose poems if they were found in a prose poem collection, but are considered prose because of their context. Lydia Davis writes prose poems but probably considers them prose or prose fragments--or short short stories--I've never heard her talk about her work and what it is. Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End was revolutionary for the prose poem because the book took the Pulitzer in 1991 which was an amazing validation after years of academics pretending the form didn't exist.

Some essential principles surrounding the prose poem and the choice to write in it

2009-05-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

Some essential principles surrounding the prose poem and the choice to write in it

by Dave Mehler

Furthering the dialog with Don Zirilli about prose poetry and free verse:

“I hardly know of any poet who's understood what it's all about and who's known how to sacrifice his ambitions as an author to the prose poem's formal constitution. Dimension counts for nothing in the beauty of a work, its situation and its style are everything. The prose poem must have despite the rules which style it, a free and vital way of expressing itself.” Max Jacob from his Preface to The Dice Cup (1916)

As Jacob points out, essentially choosing to write in the prose poem format is a stylistic choice, not a formal choice, or a choice of lack of form versus form. Structurally, it is a choice of the paragraph over the line as as unit. It is a choice, for any variety of possible reasons, against being restricted by the line, linebreak, enjambment and this is ultimately a stylistic choice.

Secondly, “In any case, in the sixteenth century meter became less rigid...[in the 19th century] Meter was no longer thought to have a primary function apart from content. What developed instead was the theory that content chose meter, that certain meters were appropriate for certain subjects and that to write an elegy in dactylic hexameter, for instance, would be scandalous. This idea is important to the development of free verse. It ties form directly to content, and it allows form to be controlled by the needs of content. It can be argued that when the first metrical substitution was made, free verse became inevitable.” from the essay, “Notes on Free Verse,” Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry, Stephen Dobyns. I think we take this principle for granted now that stylistically form should reinforce or mirror content, but it wasn't always so. Beginning with Romanticism (Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Whitman), as the number of subjects opened up from merely epic, ballad, ode, elegy and sonnets about religion, love and death, by the nineteenth century and on into the 20th poets began to encompass the more mundane; the personal lyric, meditation and reflection, the prose poem became more of a possibility as a stylistic choice and poetic extreme for satire, fable/parable or common, low experience after the leveling of the class system.

Lastly the printing press, and the shift from a primarily auditory and rhythmic reception of the poem to it's look on the page was another hugely influential movement for poetry toward prose and away from the use of rhythm and rhyme as the predominant stylistic tools. Not only were rhythm and rhyme not needed as a mnemonic tool but by de-emphasizing these as the major tools it was discovered that greater subtlety through a variety of other poetic tools became possible via a written text versus a heard only text. Regular rhythm, order, symmetry and repetition set up expectations and anticipation and added texture to a poem, but by startling, defeating expectation, and adding surprise to the mix added tension and becoming one of the key elements of free verse and the prose poem.

Now in the 21 century, one of the biggest challenges a poet faces is whether to write structurally for the look on the page or for how it should be read aloud. Poetry is more commonly read than heard these days—that is apart from popular music, so the central question is whether to cater to the ear or the eye. With a movement away from formal verse or closed forms to open forms, few poets now do both. The formal poem looks on the page more similarly the way it should be read, and ironically, so does a prose poem, than does free verse. To quote Dobyns from his essay, “Notes on Free Verse,” again “We have four types of meter: quantitative, syllabic, accentual and accentual-syllabic. It is not necessary for a poem to employ traditional meters, but it must have a rhythm; otherwise it moves into the province of prose. Why a poem requires rhythm is a much larger question. Most simply it can be said that rhythm is a texturing of language, but it is also argued that rhythm imitates and echoes the rhythms of the heart and lungs, creating a physiological link between the reader and poem. For now let us define a poem as a rhythmically ordered noise of indeterminate duration; it is a rhythmically sculptured sound. Furthermore, this aural quality directly influences the poem's meaning. The fact that the poem is a sound—that it is meant to be heard—gives rhythm an importance that it doesn't have in prose.” But, what if poems aren't heard, or necessarily meant to be read aloud? What if they are meant to be seen, or are by default, seen only?

In close, Don, let's take a look at this prose poem by Marie Howe that I posted earlier:

Part of Eve's Discussion, by Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.

You said: “The Marie Howe example is free verse without linebreaks, which of course raises the question, why does free vers have linebreaks? I'm not sure.”

I'd be interested in hearing why you would make the claim this is free verse--(one definition of prose poetry, perhaps the main one, is that prose poetry is free verse without linebreaks), but what you meant was that it should or could have linebreaks, right? Let's look at why it might be a prose poem, and why I think it works better in paragraph form, or how the form mirrors the content in this case. Howe is talking about the Fall, the biblical notion of falling from a state of perfection to a lesser state, fractured, tainted, a seemingly chaotic state. This is her metaphor and her allusion established by the title. Through the introduction of the car anachronistically spinning on ice she manages to encompass or imply the passage of time from the state of perfection to the biting of the apple and loss of innocence and bliss and her “discussion,” or looking ahead, to bring it full circle to the our's, and the speaker's present. The poem is in one long rambling digressive and seemingly nonsyntactic sentence—it may be (I'm not sure) grammatical but strikes one as not due to the discursive nature. By choosing to do away with the line as a unit in the context of a poem, stylistically, it reinforces the breakdown of order, offers it post-modern feel of disorientation, extemporaneous speech, and elements of digression and anachronism introduce chaos as much as the bite into any forbidden fruit. Lastly the number of these stylistic effects, as much as any content in such a brief space and the intertextuality of the biblical metaphor make it as much or more poem than prose—a hybrid. Being a hybrid, a paragraph, is its own metaphor like rebar reinforcing the theme. Now, I'm curious—why break this into lines?

The Folding Chair

2009-05-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

Fat people.

Old people.

People with canes.

All of them sitting in the same chairs, chairs that had to be light and foldable so they can be deployed at will.

It occurred to me that a poem is a folding chair, something seemingly flimsy, but someday someone is going to fall back on it with all his weight, and expect it to hold him up.

RECALL

2009-05-11T22:04:00.001-07:00

The poets had all moved out to the garden, continuing their talk.

Toasts were raised. Shadows were lengthened. James was trying

To make his feelings clear when the birds came back.

The biggest mistake in history just might be yours!

2009-05-10T19:19:00.000-07:00

Many centuries ago, in 2737 BC, Chinese emperor Shen Nung was boiling water outside. Leaves from a nearby tree fell into his pot. When he tasted it, he was having the very first cup of tea.

In the 1870s at a soap factory, a worker was out to lunch--both literally and figuratively. He left a machine running. When he returned, his soap mixture had hardened. He may not have been a model worker at the factory, but when he poured his mixture into molds and began selling it as a bar of soap named Ivory, he became filthy rich.

One day in 1930, Ruth Wakefield ran out of baker's chocolate. She made do with the semi-sweet chocolate that she had on hand. But the results were unexpected. When she broke it into pieces and threw them into the mix, she was aiming to make a chocolate flavored cookie. Instead, the chocolate stayed in chunks. She inadvertently baked the first chocolate chip cookies.

In 1886 while working on a formula meant to perk up tired people, (he also hoped to sell his tonic to people with sore teeth) John Pemberton accidentally added carbonated water instead of plain water to his recipe. He tasted it and knew the beverage would have appeal. Boy did it ever! We now know it as Coca-Cola.

At the 1904 World's Fair, waffle maker Ernest Hamwi noticed a fellow vendor's booth ran out of dishes to serve ice cream. He decided to lend a hand and rolled one of his waffles into a cone.

Just a year later, student Frank Epperson was mixing soda-water powder and water. When he accidentally left the mixture outside overnight with the stirring stick still in it, he invented the first popsicle.

One morning, Iroquois Chief Woksis threw his tomahawk into a tree. When he pulled it from the bark he noticed sap dripping onto the ground. Too bad Ernest Hamwi wasn't sitting nearby at his waffle booth when the syrup was discovered.

In 1928, forgetful pharmacist Alexander Fleming left bacteria samples on his windowsill too long. When he returned, examination revealed a dish covered with bacteria except in one spot where there was mold. The mold produced a substance that inhibited bacterial growth. He called that substance penicillin.

Other massively helpful inventions that were initially mistakes include stainless steel, paper towels and Post-it Notes.

"Unless you somehow manage not to do anything ever again, you will mess up, somehow, somewhere. I promise," writes Martha Brockenbrough in her MSN.com column, The Greatest Mistakes of All Time. "If you have the right frame of mind, though, that mistake could turn out to be one of the most valuable, most important, most memorable, or most delicious accidents in history."

Might the next historically big blunder be yours?

Why not? Try switching out ingredients from your family's favorite recipes with random ingredients from the pantry. Or maybe you have something lying around that sounds exotic? What science projects might benefit from being left around the house just a little while longer?

Your big break just might come one day while you are out to lunch.

In the words of Thomas Edison, "Genius? Nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! ... I've failed my way to success."

The Poet

2009-05-08T22:47:00.000-07:00

Mitch’s friend Bob felt sorry for him at the bar, even a little embarrassed for him when he spent $40 on a massage from a 20-year-old. It didn’t get any better when Bob questioned him. Mitch said it was the first time he was touched by a woman in over a year. So Bob did his best to project over the music and keep Mitch company while he bought waitresses in tight shorts $30 shots.

At last call Bob and Mitch went out into the cold and said goodbye as each turned to his own pickup truck. It was an unlucky night for Bob.

When Mitch pulled into his driveway the lights were on and his wife was waiting. He walked in, took off his shoes, and sat on the couch. Using just the right amount of pressure Susan rubbed his back, like she did every night for the last 20 years. She then made him some tea and handed him his pen. No one ever met Susan.

Do people ask for miracles these days?

2009-05-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

"When was the last time you asked for a miracle?" I asked friends and family a couple of weeks ago.

I was curious how they'd respond.

Putting religious interpretations of miracles aside as well as scientific, historical or cultural vantage points, I was more curious about people's expectations.

What does modern man, scratch that, post-post-modern man expect from his world? Past the Age of Reason, past the Enlightenment, have we become disenchanted thanks to our focus on facts?

In general, I think the answer is yes. To me, it seems that beyond the half-hearted attempt of Santa Claus, we have painted ourselves into a corner.

What corner? The idea that anything could happen to me in this great big, mysterious world is what excited me as a child.

That excitement translated into dreams and those dreams nourished a desire to be the first one out the door every day. Every plane that hung from the sky, every car that whizzed by populated my world with possibilities.

Outside of the realm of religion, the purpose of miracles has a lot to do with our expectations. Does it sound over the top if I say that I expect my life to be miraculous?

Out of the dozen or so people that I surveyed, only three had given any thought to asking for a miracle as an adult. What do we lose in our rational preference for proof?

If you don't ask, you don't get, as the saying goes.

Years ago, in my previous career, a co-worker who was more successful at what he did than I was, walked me through an intriguing exercise. It went something like this:

"Picture yourself down the road, years from now," he said. "Let's say you're 30. How much money do you want to be making by then?"

I replied, "$30,000."

"OK, now that you have that in your head," he said, "you'll figure it out."

I thought it was an absurdly brief and arbitrary exercise. I picked that number to be my future salary because it sounded like a lot of money at the time. As it turned out, the goal wasn't a hard one to achieve.

My friend's method worked. It sounded like a shot in the dark to me at the time. How would I go from making $24,000 to $30,000 in just a few years, especially since I found my way into that company as a temp?

The path forward was unknown to me. Without the aid of facts, it was a leap. But it was a leap that I believed was possible. And what if I chose to be a realist?

The odds that a temp, who knew nothing about the field in which he landed, would be able to almost double his salary in such a short time seemed low. (I actually overshot my goal by a lot!)

A realist might have assessed himself at the bottom of the totem-pole and thought lower expectations would be prudent.

"If it is something you can receive by asking is it a miracle?" my mother-in-law, Ann asked.

That is the key point here. Many times, what you believe determines the outcome.

"Are hoping and asking the same?" Ann continued. "Is a miracle bigger than a hope?"

Are people's hopes big enough these days?

My dad once offered advice that would fit well here.

"There are many reasons why you can't do things in life, but if you can think of one reason why you can, go for it," he said.

Shooting down the possibility of miracles in your life takes away that reason. This is the corner we should avoid painting ourselves into.

When was the last time you asked for a miracle? Is there one that you wish were possible?

For more of The Joy of Life, visit genemyers.com.

The Free Verse Tradition

2009-05-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

I want to have some kind of dialogue with Dave Mehler about prose poetry, specifically in relation to free verse, because I find the two oddly overlapping. For technical reasons, Lew Turco thinks that free verse should be called prose poetry, since "free verse" is an oxymoron. But instead of a terminological discussion, I'd rather have an historical one, because of something Eliot said:

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;

What is the Tradition under which a free verse poet labors? Is it Eliot himself, and his friend, Pound? Here's a little more Eliot had to say:

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition.

I fear that so many of us freeversists are doing exactly this: following a "tradition" that is too new to give life to us. We are like the heavy metal bands who imitate Led Zeppelin while disregarding the Blues tradition they so wisely stole from.

Speaking of the lowly rock musician, imagine for a moment his creative process. He has a feeling which he must translate into music and verse.

What are we translating our feelings into? We're free, after all. Free of scales and keys and rhymes and rhythms.

Well... freedom won't do! That's why we see rules in poetry workshops, a remarkable array of rules that have been cribbed together from composition classes and storytelling and the maxims of Ezra Pound. These rules are clung to, because that's what people do, isn't it? My experience in life has taught me that humanity abhors freedom... fears it. When we are thrust into a new realm, the first thing we want to know is What are the laws here?. We think of what freedom did to Lebanon, what it did to Iraq, and we tremble.

But the Poet has no use for rules. It's Tradition that he needs. I wish I could pedantically lay it out for you, but I myself am malnourished. I need to seek the Tradition I would participate in and deviate from. To repeat:

It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.

That is the work for our hardworking poets to do, not straining over rewrites in which we impose Rules. We need to go to the soil of Tradition from which those Rules sprang up as a meager crop of weeds. At best, those weeds will guide you into a solid mediocrity.

The same goes for prose poetry. As Dave points out, it's older than free verse, but as I point out, it's still a babe. In fact, the short story itself is mostly a 19th century creation.

I suddenly find myself comforted by this thought, that here in this Late Period of Decadence, we are in fact faced with some new genres ripe for innovation.

Innovation and Tradition? Aren't they incompatible? Read the rest of Eliot's essay.

Okay, hopefully this post lays some groundwork for me to compare prose poetry and free verse. Talk at you later.

Poetry Tweets

2009-04-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've found Twitter very inspiring for two simple reasons: 1) You HAVE TO keep doing it. If your Tweets aren't current, they're not Tweets, and 2) They need to be short...Who can't think of a couple of short lines to write? So, I have taken to Tweeting poems like this one--it is untitled:

He tasted the river
She brought to him.

He was surrounded.

Why I love prose poetry...

2009-04-27T21:25:00.000-07:00

I can never get enough of prose poetry. They subtly show people powerful moments–like deep spirituality packaged in every day moments…at their best, they are like the flashes of revelation that we sometimes have in conversations.

They have this potential because they are less intimidating, because less emphasis is placed on form…because less emphasis is placed on form, the poems are focused more by their intentions.

Because they are less self aware, they can blend in with everyday circumstances more easily. Why prose poetry?

So the spirituality that one can only get from a poetry has a better chance of seeing daylight…To be part of the conversation, instead of above it. Less self-aware means more communal.

Why don't we read and write more prose poems?

2009-04-04T21:06:00.000-07:00

Why don't we read and write more prose poems?

The Prose Poem, by Louis Jenkins

The prose poem is not a real poem, of course. One of the major differences is that the prose poet is simply too lazy or too stupid to break the poem into lines. But all writing, even the prose poem, involves a certain amount of skill, just the way throwing a wad of paper, say, into a wastebasket at a distance of twenty feet, requires a certain skill, a skill that, though it may improve hand-eye coordination, does not lead necessarily to an ability to play basketball. Still, it takes practice and thus gives one a way to pass the time, chucking one paper after another at the basket, while the teacher drones on about the poetry of Tennyson.

More than most poetry, the prose poem eschews definition and any kind of rules--this is an aspect of the form that is inherent in it since its inception. You will say it must be brief, and then someone will write a long one--you will say it can't be broken into lines, and then someone will write one broken into lines. Part of the reason for this is the self-conscious rebelliousness of the form--it is a fusion of prose and poetry, which some will argue makes it neither, or others will say, as a hybrid, makes it both. In any case many of the examples of the form have the sole purpose of being a tweak on the nose, by their form or content or both. They are serious, or they are funny, they are satires, parables, absurdist, fables, or surreal, word and or linguistic play, serious jokes, tragicomedies, micro narratives that are deadly serious, or entirely tongue in cheek. Sometimes, especially in the fables or the micro narratives, the story overarches the heightened nature of the language, and in others the language and poetic figure is more important than the plot or narrative elements. Brevity, and thus compression, is a key element. Another is resonance through subtext and irony. One of the tests of the form is, like all poetic forms, the question of whether the piece could be written any other way and succeed or be as effective. Does the form reinforce the content and the content reinforce the form regarding use of line, sentence, syntax, word choice, rhythm, pacing, etc. The problem with the form, is that it could be nearly anything, so long as it follows the rules, and the rules are malleable like liquid--as simple or complex as language itself. When setting out to write in the form, it is often easiest to pull it off, like the sudden appearance of joy, when it is entirely accidental, and comes by dire need of encapsulating the inspiration at hand and a glove appears ex-nihilo to fit around it, but on the other hand certain practitioners seem to make a habit of writing in it due to some peculiar training or quality of their minds, or because they have chewed off and made their own one particular way or aspect of the form. The line between fables, parables, flash and sudden fiction, even lined poetry and the "prose poem" is very thin and tenuous. In order to know and feel comfortable about what a prose poem is, one must have a feeling and comfort in their own minds as to what a poem, and prose, are—Gertrude Stein said, “what is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose." While one's conclusions can be qualifiably subjective, when the reader finds themselves in the hands of a master reading a masterwork one knows in their gut a prose poem, a successful hybrid, one that couldn't or shouldn't have been written otherwise, and that this could be the wave of the future, or recent past, especially for peculiarly American poetry, an american voice or idiom. Here is my selection of some successful examples—success felt in the gut. There are thousands more available in various anthologies and individual volumes amongst various poets' and fiction writers' work, whether self-consciously attempting the form or not.

Part of Eve's Discussion, by Marie Howe
http://sundancekid.livejournal.com/597613.html
Red Blossoms, by Nin Andrews [I couldn't find a link online, but it's a vital example in my mind of a certain kind]
Avalanches, by Vern Rutsala
http://books.google.com/books?id=fl3hnSq2KmYC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=vern+rutsala+avalanches&source=bl&ots=tC_jZqr__J&sig=qGNgsi8jz4irffB0BS4u59uTfkU&hl=en&ei=ttjPSdSAG4GItgf2mbHtCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA15,M1
Regret for a Spider Web, by James Wright [I couldn't find an online link--sorry]
Honey, by James Wright
http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2005/07/james-wrights-honey.html
Homage to Buck Cline, by David Bottoms
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175603
My mother was a braid of black smoke, by Charles Simic
http://www.amazon.com/World-Doesnt-End-Charles-Simic/dp/0156983508#reader
I was stolen by the gypsies, by Charles Simic
http://jkkelleywritenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/charles-simic-world-doesnt-end.html
The Magic Study of Happiness, by Charles Simic
http://books.google.com/books?id=P_wcLQ-hKOYC&pg=PA175&lpg=PA175&dq=charles+simic+the+magic+study+of+happiness&source=bl&ots=Fcubu3fZFs&sig=20DaAdr0ReZlb8uSS7o_9LvoHrs&hl=en&ei=2dLXSa7sDoTCtweHqcTgDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7
The Canoeing Trip, by Russell Edson
http://carolinekelley.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/the-canoeing-trip/
The New Father, by Russell Edson
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2003/09/16
Boring Friends, by Lydia Davis
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2001/10/25davisweek4.html
A Mown Lawn, by Lydia Davis
http://www.blueflowerarts.com/ldavis_audio2.html
Subtotals, by Gregory Burnham
http://www.hcc.cc.il.us/online/engl111/subtotals.htm
Instructions on How to Cry, by Julio Cortazar
http://juliangarcia.blogspot.com/2008/01/instructions-on-how-to-cry.html
The Beggar Woman of Naples, by Max Jacob
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=8612

Flying Blind

2009-04-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

Now Culture's new featured artist, Abe Rill, brings up important questions about the nature of inspiration. What does it mean for a blind person to draw something?

Read here to skim the surface of the metaphysical implications, but what about a more scientific approach? In 2005, just such an approach was attempted, by comparing brain scans of Abe Rill with a seeing artist, both in a relaxed state and as they were drawing. The results are inconclusive, but highly provocative.

Abe Rill's brain in a relaxed state:

Matt Groening's brain in a relaxed state:

Abe Rill's brain while drawing:

Matt Groening's brain while drawing:

As you can see the brains of both artists "fire up" during moments of creativity, but notice how Groening's brain fires most intensely in the frontal lobes and particularly on the right side. Rill's brain activity is diffused throughout the entire brain.

It's important to note that Rill was born blind. He has never seen anything, at least, not with his eyes. So, what is it that his brain is seeing? Clearly, from these scans, it must be something fundamentally different than other artists.

To put it another way, what is it that Abe thinks he has done?

The world may never know.

Poet Jane Hirshfield on the Dodge Poetry Festival...

2009-03-27T06:41:00.000-07:00

Mourning the loss of the Dodge Poetry Festival as we knew and loved it, Jane Hirshfield wanted me to share this e-mail on the blog. While the future of the festival (beyond the 2010 festival, which was canceled) isn't clear at this moment...One thing is for sure: We already long for what Jim Haba gave us. It was a fantastic, singular event every time!
Gene

Dear Gene,

Thank you so much for taking up the banner on this. As someone who's done Dodge three times, I was devastated when I heard it had been canceled. It just seemed terrible that the body of knowledge and excitement that go into this festival could be lost--for American poetry, a huge blow. I myself attribute what I think has been a large resurgence in interest in poetry in more recent years to the Bill Moyers public television specials about the Dodge.

I've also participated in the Skagit River Poetry Festival, which was started in Washington State by Jim Haba's sister, Kathy Shoop, and happens in the town of La Conner, much as I imagine a Montclair event might work. In my mind, I've always called it "Dodge West." It's got a smaller number of attendees, but is very viable as a festival, and includes many elements of the Dodge--high school student participation in a big way, musicians.

Jim used to come out and act as MC while his sister was in charge, and the mix of major poets (drawn from the same pool as main stage Dodge poets) and local, less known but very fine poets, also echoed the Dodge.

That festival amply demonstrates that it's possible to change and retrench perhaps without losing everything, and certainly without losing the huge spirit that makes the Dodge what it has been. And it's continued into a second generation of leadership, as Kathy no longer runs it, but I was up there last May, and it was as fine and strong as ever (though I did miss having Jim there, to be sure, doing everything from adjusting microphone heights to his usual inimitable introductions).

So-- thank you for trying to help find a way to prevent this all from being one more splinter in the general shattering all around us.

Jane

Poetry festival in trouble!

2009-03-19T23:11:00.000-07:00

The bi-annual Dodge Poetry Festival started in 1986 thanks to funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

The first festival drew less than 5,000 people. As word spread that number grew to about 20,000.

In January, the Dodge Foundation announced that it would not provide funding for the next festival, which would have taken place in 2010.

Poet and Dodge Foundation director Jim Haba was at the helm every time. He crafted each festival to be both “a work of art” and “a good party.”

The biggest names in poetry took part: Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Coleman Barks and Gwendolyn Brooks, just to name a few.

Just like any good party, there was food, music and great conversation. Poetry fans got the inside scoop on what it’s like to create poems, how to read poetry and the lives of poets from the poets themselves.

There were numerous venues where poetry lovers could share their own poems, take workshops or listen to music throughout the day.

But the highlight of each day happened in the main tent—a tent that could accommodate 2,000 people. Under its big top, the most amazing, logic-defying feats were pulled off with ease.

Only in this tent would it make sense for the penultimate hip hop group The Roots to be the warm-up act for a 96-year-old man who had no props, but the podium and his cane.

That man was poet Stanley Kunitz and he brought the house down that night with a poem about Halley’s Comet.

Not only did the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation cut funding for the next festival, it was also reported that Haba resigned.

Many fear this could be the end of America’s largest poetry festival.

In an effort to show people what they might be missing, (I say might because the township of Montclair has approached the Dodge Foundation with an offer to host the event) I am writing a series of columns that will feature interviews with some of the poets who came to Haba’s parties.

Coleman Barks is a poet and translator. His translations of Jalal al-Din Rumi—a 13th century Sufi poet–are the best selling poetry books in America.

Thanks to the Dodge Poetry Festival, I had a chance to speak with Barks about how poetry can make life more spiritual.

Gene: Your translations [of Rumi] remind me of Buddhist writings.

Coleman: There was a strong Buddhist influence in Afghanistan in the 13th century. Rumi’s father’s school has lotus motifs on the columns, which means that they were big into meditation. Coming down the Silk Road, Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity met and produced this very beautiful, flexible form that Rumi worships within. He did not divide people up into religious groups. He sees everyone as being part of a single family.

Gene: Have you been to Afghanistan?

Coleman: I have. In March of 2005 the State Department sent me over there.

Gene: What was that like?

Coleman: It was exciting! I didn’t know where I was—meaning that I just didn’t acknowledge that there was danger. But there was. Everywhere that I went there was an SUV with automatic weapons in front and an SUV with automatic weapons behind and I was in the middle. It was amazing. I found myself in the Afghan Ministry of Culture reading a poem of Rumi’s and everybody in the room – all of the cabinet ministers – were saying the poem in Farsi as I said it in English. They knew that poem so well. It was a magnificent cultural experience. I’ve never been in a culture that honors poetry like the Persian-speaking world does. It feels like home to me, or it feels like the Dodge Poetry Festival!

Gene: Why is it that Americans don’t have this appreciation for poetry?

Coleman: We haven’t found the use for it that they have. It comes up in conversation. They have chunks of it memorized. That’s an unusual thing for the United States… For grown men to recite poetry to each other.

Gene: In a culture where poetry is pervasive, how does that change the culture?

Coleman: It gives them a soul place that they can meet…That is a meeting place that we don’t have.

Gene: What do you think Americans are looking for when they pick up a book of Rumi?

Coleman: I don’t know why Rumi has been so popular over the last 10 years. My translations alone have sold over 500,000 copies, which is amazing in the poetry world. As for why that has been happening, there is some kind of place where we have been lonesome for a certain kind of human being. He’s an aesthetic and he is wise and he has a kind of gentleness… those qualities come through and I think that that nourishes the psyche.

Gene: What do you think people look for when they pick up your poetry?

Coleman: Gee, I don’t know. I had a humbling realization once, numerically. Rumi sells 100 copies a day. My poems sell 12 copies a month, worldwide.

Gene: It seems like, in a lot of your poems, people are not alone. There is always more than one person in the poems. Does that go back to waking up on the cot by yourself in school? [Referring to a poem in which a young Barks wakes up alone having slept longer than his classmates]

Coleman: That kind of emptiness that I felt in kindergarten was profound. I think that friendship is a beautiful thing, but the deepest truth is that we are alone. And that aloneness is absolute.

Gene: That reminds me of a Rumi poem that you translated.[You thought union was a way / you could decide to go. / But the world of the soul follows / things rejected and almost forgotten.]

Coleman: The mystics say that love has to fail… [Rumi’s friend] has to leave Rumi alone so that he knows that the friendship is not the deepest knowing. It’s one of the great human enigmas that somehow on the other side of our love there is something that is even deeper than that.

Gene: How important is spirituality in your everyday life?

Coleman: It’s the whole thing. I love that old story about a theologically inclined bunch of fish who schooled together and discussed the possibility of the existence of the ocean as they swam in it. They divided up into study groups as they tried to figure it out… I’ve felt that mystery my whole life.

Gene: What draws you to a poem?

Coleman: I guess it’s an image that comes to me first. The first poem that I was drawn to write was about an image of laying back in a river, so that your ears are under water and your eyes are out of water. You have an underwater world that you can listen to and an out of the water world that you can see. The underwater world seems to be further away. You can hear around the bend. You can hear a motorboat coming. That way of being in two places at once is an image of how it feels to be me. I feel like my ears are underwater most of the time!

Music has a stranglehold on me

2009-03-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

Music has always played a large role in my life. My mom jokes that before I could talk, I could spell thanks to the 70s hit "Saturday Night" by the Bay City Rollers - "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y... NIGHT!"

I bonded with my babysitters over Beatles records. My wife is a musician, and her long blonde hair reminds me of my first memory of music. (Readers be warned: This will sound like I am ripping off Paul Simon lyrics. But this is actually my memory.)

I was in my crib. "It was late in the evening. There was a radio coming from the room next door" and I heard my mom laughing. "I couldn't have been no more than 1 or 2..." as the song goes.

I remember wanting to be at the party in the other room and I must have tried to say so, because a lady with long, blonde hair came into my room and picked me up.

I have loved music and women with long, blonde hair ever since. I have a huge music collection and go to many shows where thousands like me line up to be part of the excitement.

From King David to the longhaired kids stocking the shelves at Sam Goody, why do people find music so intoxicating?

In a phone interview May Pang, ex-girlfriend of John Lennon, said she thinks music's appeal is that "it's universal." One listen to the Beatles as a kid, and Pang, too, was hooked.

After hearing the Beatles on the radio, "I wanted to be involved in music," she said. She was such a fan that she took a job at Apple Corp. in Manhattan just because it was the Beatles' company. As music buffs know, she became very close to Lennon in the early 70s.

During their time together Lennon wrote "Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)" and "#9 Dream" for Pang. She saw firsthand how much of a music fan Lennon was. She tells of the excitement in his face when song ideas came to him. He'd rush for a pad and pen to preserve the ideas, and he reacted the same way to songs on the radio. The way music touched her soul as a kid was the same way that it touched Lennon's soul.

The effect of music on a soul seems like an intangible. But the results of music are easy to see. The vibrations emanating from instruments may be invisible, but watch the bystanders. Pitches in harmony with one another make a kid smile and sing, while discord is quick to bring a frown.

Even more than an intangible with a measurable effect, music is beauty, beauty that motivates people to rise to the occasion as they tap a foot or sing along to show that they can also be part of the magic.

A song's rhythm has its own flow of time that, for its duration, allows people to forget about time - even the most aggressive multitasker doesn't listen to songs on fast forward to get to the end quicker. That is because the point of music is to enjoy the passing of time for what it is. It is
movement for its own sake.

Lastly, music makes life viewable from a distance and good songwriters let people know that they are not alone. Leading rock biographer Mark Bego notes that certain artists, like Joni Mitchell, excel at this.

As Mitchell's "For Free," a song about Mitchell watching a street musician, spins in my CD player, I can only imagine that music charms her in the same way.

Helping Charlie Chaplin Help My Niece

2009-03-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

The following is something I wrote for my niece, to use a classic movie as an example of how to make a movie.

Notes on City Lights

This movie is a romantic comedy by Charlie Chaplin. Please watch it once before you read these notes. Then come back and read this, and maybe watch it again.

**

Now that you've seen the movie, we're going to look at it again to see what it can tell us about making movies.

PLOT

First, let's talk about the plot. Like all romantic comedies, it's about two people falling in love. And like most romantic comedies, it has this basic plot:

1.boy gets girl
2.boy loses girl
3.boy gets girl back.

In a good plot, all the parts are related. In this case, there's a problem with how the boy gets the girl, and that's why he loses the girl. But then, the way he loses the girl helps the girl, and that will lead to him getting her back.

THEME

Second, let's talk about themes. A “theme” is a moral or message. A movie can have many themes, and some are more important than others. I think the biggest theme of this movie is this:

THEME: Love is about helping others, putting others before yourself.

Because the plot is about falling in love, that connects it closely to the theme.

CHARACTER

Third, there's character. The movie usually has to show you three things about each major character:

1.Who they are.
2.What situation they're in.
3.How you feel about them.

SCENES

Most movies can be divided into scenes. In a good movie, every scene helps the plot and the theme. In a comedy, they also have to be funny!

I count about 22 scenes in this movie. Let's take a look at them.

SCENE 1: The unveiling of the statue.

The joke of the scene is that these people are trying to impress everyone with their beautiful statue, but meanwhile there's a tramp sleeping on the statue. But what about plot and theme?

Plot: the character of the tramp is introduced. Because he's at the center of this big joke, you realize that he must be important to the movie.

Character: you know that he's homeless, because he's sleeping in a public place. You like him because he is funny. Most people get defensive when they are caught in an embarrassing situation. They might even lie. For example, he could have pretended he was there to clean the statue, or he could have just run away immediately. He doesn't care too much about what people think of him, and that makes you like him as a character.

Theme: the lonelier the characters are, the more important it is that they find love. The tramp is extremely isolated. He is up on a pedestal, away from everyone. Remember, a movie is a visual medium, so it is important to SHOW things. That's why it's useful to look at a silent movie!

SCENE 2: Taunted by children.

Theme: here we show that the tramp has no dignity. Adults should not be mocked by children. What we will learn later, is that love gives him dignity. Selflessness gives him dignity. “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

Character: Where does he not have dignity? His cane and clothes. See how easily they are pulled off of him! But these are superficial things. He doesn't care about superficial things. He cares about people.

SCENE 3: Looking at the statue.

Plot: By staring at a statue of a woman, the tramp shows us a new kind of loneliness. He wants a woman in his life. But again, he is isolated. He is behind glass.

SCENE 4: Boy meets girl.

The tramp meets the flower girl. The tramp buys a flower from her. Then he finds out she is blind.

Symbol: A symbol is a thing that represents something else, like a flag. The reason a symbol is important to movies is that it's visual. It's a thing. You can see it! In this movie, flowers are a symbol for love.

Symbols help with themes. By watching carefully at what happens to flowers in this movie, you will learn something about the theme of love.

Minor Themes: The major theme is love. But there are minor themes that help us to understand the major theme. Two minor themes that are very important to this scene are:

1.Blindness
2.Knowledge

Let's talk about knowledge first. Notice that he starts to buy the flower before he knows that she is blind. Often in this movie, characters will act on things without knowing something about it. This lack of knowledge will show their true intentions and their true character. In this case, we know that he was going to buy the flower (probably with his last coin) out of charity, not because he pities her blindness.

Her blindness also keeps her from knowing him. She hears a car door so she thinks he is a rich man who owns a car. But unlike him, she doesn't find out the truth. Will her feelings change when she finds out about him? This will be a very important question through the whole movie until the very end.

Plot: Notice when she is putting the flower into his label. They have to get very close for her to do this, and she has to touch him for a long time. For the first time, it feels like these two characters might fall in love. At the end of the movie, she will touch him again. Touching is how she sees and how she learns things (how she gets knowledge). This touching is a visual cue. It shows the viewer that these two people should be together. In real life, it takes a long time to get to know somebody and love somebody, but movies don’t have that much time. So they need visual cues to make things happen quicker.

SCENE 5: Girl’s home.

A couple is heading out on a date outside the girl’s window. She hears them and waves to them.

Plot: This scene seems to have nothing to do with the plot, but actually it shows that the girl wants to go out on dates, too. Just like the tramp is shown to be lonely, the girl is shown to be lonely, too.

SCENE 6: Attempted suicide.

A rich man is trying to kill himself. The tramp saves his life.

Character: This scene introduces the other main character in this movie, the rich man. We learn that he is very emotional and impulsive. We also learn something about the tramp, that he is willing to risk his own life to save someone else.

Theme: Notice how careful the tramp is about his flower. Remember, this is a symbol of love. He never shows any concern about his clothes or any other belongings, but this flower is very important to him. When he is sniffing the flower at the beginning of the scene, he is thinking about his love for the girl.

Plot: This scene establishes a friendship between the tramp and the rich man that is very important to the plot, as you’ll see later. As I said before, there is very little time in a movie, so sometimes you need something either very dramatic (like a life-or-death situation) or symbolic (like putting a flower into a lapel) to move the plot forward.

SCENE 7: The rich man’s house.

The tramp goes home with the rich man and finds out that his wife has left him.

Character: now we know why the rich man is so miserable.

Plot: by taking the tramp to his home, he shows that he is very serious about the new friendship. He tries to kill himself again, emphasizing how sad he is, but the scene also shows us his gun, which will become important later.

Theme: the rich man is also lonely, just like the other characters. He found his love, but then he lost it. Why does love work sometimes, but not other times? The movie does have an answer for this question, which we’ll find out later.

SCENE 8: Having fun at the dance hall.

The rich man and the tramp go out to forget their troubles.

Plot: the plan to have fun has the opposite effect: by seeing all the couples dancing, we realize again how lonely these two are.

Theme: the scene shows that simply going out to have fun doesn’t cure loneliness, and doesn’t bring love into your life. This movie wants to teach you how to find love. One important way of teaching you how to do something is to show you how NOT to do it.

Character: by now it’s clear that the rich man wants to solve his loneliness by getting drunk and having fun. The rich man is a failure in this movie. He is an example of what NOT to do.

SCENE 9: Coming home the next morning.

The tramp drives the rich man back to his house, buys all the flowers from the flower girl and drives her home.

Theme: driving is a symbol for how you live your life. The rich man is out of control. Eventually, he has to let the tramp drive for him.

Character: the tramp makes the most of whatever life gives him, but not for his own gain. He gets money from the rich man, but it’s only to buy flowers from the flower girl. He then gives those flowers to the rich man, because it was his money to begin with. You'll see what these flowers mean to the rich man in the next scene.

Plot: by buying her flowers and driving her home, the tramp is now becoming a big part of the flower girl’s life. This is part 1 of the standard plot: boy gets girl. But remember I said there was a problem with how the boy gets the girl! The problem is that it’s dishonest. He’s pretending to be a rich man.

SCENE 10: Back to the girl’s home.

The tramp has taken the girl home and peeks in on her.

Plot: this idea of the tramp eavesdropping will become important later. Sometimes it’s good to repeat an image in a movie, so that you prepare the audience for it. When the tramp peeks in for a more important reason, it will seem more natural.

But there’s another very important thing going on here. In most love stories, you will see one person peeking at a private moment that the other person is having. This is another shortcut that movies make. In real life, it takes a long time to get to know someone well and learn some of their secrets. A movie has to show this quickly.

And one more thing is happening here! The movie shows us that the flower girl is happy and hopeful. She is falling in love with the tramp! As I said, the problem is that she doesn’t know he’s a tramp.

Ending a Scene: Every scene has its own beginning and ending. If you notice, this scene ends with a joke. The tramp knocks down the barrel he’s standing on and soaks the neighbor with water. You should always think about how each scene ends. What feeling or mood does it have (this one ends funny)? Does it end slowly or quickly (this is a quick ending)? Then you think about how your next scene should begin.

SCENE 11: Waking up sober.

The rich man is finally sober. He doesn’t remember or recognize the tramp.

Plot: this is going to be a big problem for the tramp. He will continue to need money for the flower girl, but it will be difficult to get that money from this man.

Theme: the rich man is totally different when he’s sober. The theme here is that in order to have true love, you need to be your own honest self all the time. You can’t keep changing. Also, notice that he doesn’t appreciate the flowers. The rich man can’t cure his loneliness because he doesn’t realize that love is the cure.

Character: the tramp drives a car to pick up a cigarette butt! This shows us that money and fancy stuff won’t ever stop the tramp from being himself. He is always true to himself and that’s why he will have love in the end.

SCENE 12: The girl at home.

The flower girl talks about her new love to her grandma.

Plot: now we definitely know she’s in love.

Character: read carefully what she says. She doesn’t talk about what she would do with his wealth. She says there's more to him than that. This shows us that she doesn't care about his money.

Theme: the question is, how can she love a man who is lying to her, or does she just love the lie? Remember, because she is blind she has to touch people. Maybe this touching allows her to know the true person that the tramp is, and maybe that’s what she loves.

SCENE 13: Party at the rich man’s home.

The rich man is drunk again, so he recognizes the tramp and brings him home for a party.

Plot: it’s important to realize that money can’t cure loneliness. We already know that about the rich man, but we need to learn it about the tramp, too. This scene shows that he is out of place in this world. In this case, the shortcut is swallowing a whistle. It makes him annoying to everyone else. It almost seems like he’s speaking a different language. Eventually, the whistle attracts dogs. Notice that he fits in better with the dogs than he does with the rich people. Finally, he brings the dogs into the house. This is another visual cue. The strangeness and chaos of all those dogs in the rich man’s house shows how difficult it is for there to be a friendship between rich and poor. The rich man isn’t like the tramp: he’s not true to himself. Two people who are true to themselves could be friends no matter what.

SCENE 14: Morning in the rich man’s bed.

Again, the rich man wakes up sober and doesn’t recognize the tramp. He kicks him out and leaves for Europe.

Plot: by leaving for Europe, it becomes very clear that the tramp will not be able to use the rich man for help. The Europe sticker is a visual cue. It’s usually a good idea to show things visually and not just put it in the dialog.

SCENE 15: Returning to the girl’s home.

The tramp sees that the flower girl is not in her usual location, so he goes to her home and eavesdrops, finding out that she has a fever. He gets a job to help take care of her.

Plot: this fever is very important to the plot. It accomplishes several things:

1.the tramp will now take care of her. Nurturing is a quick way to show love.
2.the tramp needs to make his own money to help her.
3.the grandmother is forced to work so it is very easy for the tramp to visit her without revealing to the grandmother that he is a tramp.
4.the grandmother cannot sell enough flowers, which leads to the next scene.

SCENE 16: Eviction notice.

The grandmother reads an eviction notice. They must leave by the next day if they don’t pay the rent. She doesn’t tell the girl and hides the notice in a book.

Theme: the girl feels her grandmother’s tears. This shows how the girl is able to know about people’s true feelings through her touch. (Plot) This ability will become crucial to resolving the main question of the movie: does she love the tramp for who he really is?

SCENE 17: Lunch date.

The tramp uses his lunch hour to visit the girl. He tells her about a surgery that will cure her blindness. He finds the eviction note and promises to pay it, only to be fired for staying out too long at lunch!

Plot: the girl says, “I’ll be able to see you.” This reveals how step 1, “boy gets girl,” will lead to step 2, “boy loses girl.” The tramp's kindness to her is constant and unfailing. Because he wants to help her more than anything else in the world, he will cure her blindness whatever it takes. But that means that she will see him, and know that he’s a tramp, not a rich man.

As the tramp leaves, he snaps his fingers in a defiant gesture. “It's nothing!” He will come back to this gesture again, even when he realizes just how big this “nothing” is.

Theme: he lets her unthread his clothes. Again, it is shown that he doesn’t care about his clothes or belongings.

SCENE 18: The boxing match.

The tramp agrees to box in a fixed match so he will get half the prize money, but his partner has to flee the police, so he’s stuck fighting a real match, which he loses.

Plot: notice how the problem is shown in this scene. First, we see the black boxer. We see how big and powerful he is. Second, we see the black boxer lose his fight. So, the winner is even more big and powerful. Third, the tramp’s opponent knocks out the winner with a single punch! Again, a movie doesn’t have a lot of time, so it’s good to use tricks like this to show how big a problem is.

SCENE 19: The burglary.

The rich man is back from Europe! He takes the tramp home while his house his being burgled. The tramp is accused of the burglary, but escapes.

Plot: here is where the gun makes its return appearance. If the gun hadn’t been seen before, it would seem contrived in this scene. That’s why it’s important to introduce plot elements before they’re used.

It’s also important to note that by keeping the money, the tramp is putting himself in more danger. But he keeps it anyway, for the sake of the girl.

Theme: the theme of knowledge is important for this scene. Everyone assumes the tramp is a robber because he is poor. They are not seeing his true self. In this movie, love isn’t just about curing loneliness. Love is about seeing people truly, seeing who they truly are. This is what all love is about, not just romantic love. That’s why this movie is so much more than just a romance.

SCENE 20: Saving the girl, losing the girl.

The tramp gives the girl the money she needs for rent, plus enough for an operation. He tells her he’ll be away for “a while.”

Plot: finally, we get to 2, boy loses girl. He leaves voluntarily because he knows that sight will allow her to see him as a tramp. He might also suspect that he is going to jail. Even so, he snaps his fingers again and says “It's nothing.” He can see nothing but his love for her.

Theme: The most important thing about love isn’t getting together. It’s helping someone else.

SCENE 21: The tramp gets arrested.

The tramp gets arrested and goes to jail.

Theme: In real life, you can love someone for years and never have to sacrifice yourself for that person, even though you would. But in a movie, you have to show the love by showing the sacrifice. The tramp’s time in jail is his sacrifice.

SCENE 22: The tramp finds the girl again.

The tramp serves his time in jail. He accidentally finds the flower shop that the flower girl now owns. She realizes that he is the man who saved her.

Theme: the scene starts with the tramp being humiliated by the same kids. By repeating an image from the beginning of the movie, we get the idea that the tramp has come full circle. It’s a very sad feeling. Often, a comedy will hit its lowest point right before the happy ending.

When I first saw this movie, I was bowled over by the ending. I thought I was just watching a silly comedy, but then at the end I felt like cheering and crying at the same time. I was amazed at how powerful the ending was, but now I think I understand why. The ending brings together everything I’ve been talking about. The whole movie set up this ending. Let’s take a close look at it:

He finds a flower in the gutter and picks it up. The flower is from the Flower Shop.

Plot: It shows us that she is so successful now that she’s literally overflowing with flowers.

Theme: We see a beautiful thing (flower) in an ugly setting (gutter). The flower doesn’t become ugly just because it’s in an ugly place. In the same way, the tramp isn’t ugly just because he’s poor and lives on the streets.

Character: The tramp picks up the flower. This shows us how he cares for things. In real life, it doesn’t matter what you do to a flower in the gutter, but in a movie it means a lot.

Plot: he bends over to pick up the flower. This makes him vulnerable. The girl finds it funny and charming. This helps us realize that the girl can see now.

The girl gives the tramp a flower and a coin.

Mirroring. I’ve shown you a lot of ways this movie uses repetition. I like to call it “mirroring” because, like a mirror, it puts attention on something. And sometimes, like a mirror, it reverses the image! In the beginning, he was buying a flower from her. But now, she is giving him a flower and money as well. She is showing the same kind of charity that he was showing her. She doesn’t know yet that he is the man who saved her. This lack of knowledge shows her good character. She is always helping and giving, not just to the people she loves. This is how two people find true love for each other, by having love for everyone. It’s her own love that saves her. It’s his own love that saves him.

Knowledge. Finally, she learns his secret, through touching. Having vision doesn’t change her ability to know through touching. Like the tramp, she is always true to herself. She doesn’t change! The movie doesn’t actually show the two of them getting married, but we know they will, because she has proven that she knows the true man, not the rich man he was pretending to be. The movie ends with this dialogue:

Tramp: “You can see now.”

Girl: “Yes, I can see now.”

The movie ends suddenly. When you end a movie suddenly, you’re telling the viewers that they know all they need to know.

So all we need to know is that she can see now. She has found him. She knows him and has always known him. This is love, true love. Number 3: boy gets girl back.

And this is the difference between a good movie and a great movie. A great movie uses every part, every scene, to move along the plot and to reinforce the themes. A great movie uses visual cues and symbols. A great movie repeats images. A great movie sets up important events in earlier scenes. A great movie is like a row of dominoes falling. A not-so-great movie just seems like dominoes being spilled on the table.

Reality On Reality

2009-03-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate.

-Ernest Fenellosa

The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.

-Marcel Proust

The main criterion for inclusion is someone whose ingrained ideas have been challenged, changed, and widened in the encounter with intractable reality.

-Who’s a Sorealist?

In the space of a couple days, I was confronted with the above three quotes, all from completely independent sources:

1. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, edited by Ezra Pound, became a Modernist/Imagist manifesto with a huge influence on what people consider poetry today, which I just happened to buy because I had a gift certificate to use.

2. An article called Poetry & Mysticism by Doreen Gildroy in the latest edition of American Poetry Review, which just happened to come in the mail.

3. The home page of the Sorealism web site, which just happened to be pointed out to me by my co-editor Gene.

All three quotes are concerned with reality. In no case was I reading these sources because I was concerned with reality. The only unified cause I could give would be a concern with poetry and art. Yet here I was, confronted thrice with reality. On the other hand, it is reality in relation to an ars poetica. Let's go down the list again.

1. This is the hidden agenda of Imagism. "Petals on a wet, black bough" are not described vividly or precisely. Their value is not as a mere image but as the experience of an image and a "relation" to another image, faces in a crowd. The reason for striking, "floating" images is to provide highly distinct points and therefore highly distinct gaps which the reader then bridges all the more readily.

2. Proust is discussing the roles we play in life and, more directly, the routines that these roles employ. He thinks that writing should reach for the "real" life we have forgotten how to live, in which we are merely ourselves (or I might say in which we are not so encumbered by our "selves," but I'm getting at the same idea).

3. One of the purposes of this quote, which follows a specific evocation of Dali and Lorca, is to distinguish Sorealism from Surrealism. They're basically trying to say that reality is trippy enough. Surrealists can be drawn into the trap of escaping reality instead of plunging into it.

It was a thrill for me to see the Proust quote, used in an essay about strategies for contemporary poets, merge so nicely with evocations of such arch Modernist institutions as Imagism and Surrealism.

And this merger happened not in any book, but in this strange and frightening thing known as my reality (which is not yet for sale at Amazon).

Montclair works to save popular poetry festival

2009-03-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

By Peggy McGlone/The Star-Ledger
Sunday March 01, 2009, 9:41 AM

Montclair has made a serious bid to partner with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to save the biennial Dodge Poetry Festival, a four-day event that attracts high- profile poets and tens of thousands of poetry lovers.

Montclair Township manager Joseph Hartnett wants to present the 2010 festival in Montclair's central business district, which includes several performance spaces and church halls as well as restau rants and parking.

"We can save this festival," said Hartnett, who will give the Dodge team a tour of the downtown next week. "The Dodge is a festival of national if not international re nown. We consider ourselves among the premier arts communities in New Jersey ... and we want to build on that."

In January, the foundation announced it would not present the 2010 festival because the recent market meltdown caused its net assets to drop by one-third, to about $210 million.

Dodge president and CEO David Grant said Montclair is one of several potential partners who have offered to help revive it.

"There have been a number of people who have reached out and said 'Let's talk,' including Mont clair," said Grant, who declined to provide details about the other offers. "What it has done for us is given us a cautious optimism that we can bring the festival back in some form in 2010."

The poetry festival was held 12 times between 1986 and last year, attracting more than 140,000 visitors from 42 states. Waterloo Village in Byram Township played host to all but the 2004 festival, which was hosted by Duke Farms in Hillsborough. Each event at tracted thousands of high school students and their teachers, who were admitted for free.

One of the largest gatherings of its kind, the event draws powerhouse writers, including U.S. Poet Laureates Billy Collins, Robert Hass and Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Muldoon and Maxine Kumin. PBS produced five television specials hosted by Bill Moyers that were seen by millions of viewers.

Given the economic climate, Dodge decided it could not afford the festival's $1.3 million price tag. Last year, the foundation spent $15 million on grants and programs.

Grant said presenting a large public event was a burden to the foundation.

Hartnett said that's where Montclair can help.

"We can relieve them from the stress of creating the infrastructure," said Hartnett, noting that the town hosts an annual First Night event, the New Year's Eve celebration of arts and culture that brings people on foot to various downtown venues. "We know how to do these things."

The rest of the story is here:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/03/montclair_works_to_save_popula.html

The Poetry of Tim Keane

2009-03-06T09:29:00.000-08:00

We've published three poems of Tim Keane's. They start out exploring Blue and just get Bluesier from there. There's something for everyone, from Cezanne to Dietrich to Liebovitz. Let us know what you think!

The Blue Vase

The Blue Angel

Penelope Tuesdae

Tim Keane

What a lucky man he was...?

2009-03-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

Dec. 5, 1660, a ship sank in the Straits of Dover. Lucky man Hugh Williams was the sole survivor.

Dec. 5, 1767, another shipwreck in the same place caused 127 people to lose their lives. Once again, only Hugh Williams lived to tell the tale.

On Aug. 8, 1820, a picnic boat capsized on the Thames. According to historic records, all passengers but Hugh Williams drowned.

July 10, 1940: a German mine destroys a British ship. Two men survived: Hugh Williams and his nephew, Hugh Williams.

Why are coincidences so gripping? Is it just because they fill our pool of party trivia?

Is it that we are so compelled to find the causes of events in our surroundings that stories of synchronicity short-circuit our wiring?

The usefulness of such stories is obvious for anyone who is looking for evidence of a cosmic plan in action—a plan that might stack the odds in humanity’s favor as we tumble through space.

Certainly anyone named Hugh Williams would welcome the above as an indication that the old man in the sky has got his back.

But before waxing poetic about sentimental, fortuitous and life-saving coincidences, the sobering thoughts of Robert Novella from the Web site Quackwatch should be brought to mind.

“Coincidences occur in everyone's life. Some are trivial, like being dealt a flush in poker, but others really grab our attention, like thinking of a friend you have not seen in years only to have them call on the phone moments later,” writes Novella. “What most people do not know or do not want to believe is that coincidences, even remarkable ones, are not all that surprising. In fact most are inevitable occurrences with no special significance at all.”

Novella points to many reasons why people “misinterpret coincidences,” like a poor grasp of probability when it comes to large numbers or the tendency to remember only positive correlations – in layman’s terms this means that we are more likely to remember the time we got a phone call from a friend that we were just thinking about than the numerous times we thought of them and got no such call.

Novella cautions against humanity’s mystical leanings and urges readers to put “focus where it belongs, on science.”

Maybe. Or can coincidences point the way to a different kind of truth—one that reveals science to be just a collection of beliefs?

Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) thought even the empirical sciences were built upon a questionable foundation.

A fundamental flaw exists in scientific method, according to Hume. The tried and true approach of testing beliefs by correlating a cause with an effect is unreliable.

"From the mere repetition of any past impression, even to infinity, there will never arise any new original idea, such as that of a necessary connection," he posited.

Hume argues that since the connection between cause and effect cannot actually be witnessed in many cases, like the earth's pull on the moon or gravity causing an apple to fall to the ground, how is habitual man to know if he is trading in one superstitious way of thinking for another?

Along these lines Jan-Erik Jones in “Star Wars and Philosophy,” writes, "we have no knowledge of causation, just a habit of certain kinds of events to be followed by other kinds of events."

Determining the relationship between cause and effect is an invaluable tool in our search for meaning.

But it can also be the comfort food of reason—a crutch that is leaned on and not questioned enough.

Meanwhile, aren't coincidences miraculous?

Your Formatting Better Be Important

2009-03-04T06:45:00.000-08:00

Editors these days have many ways to share submissions with each other in order to make it easier to collaborate. The more formatting you have -- e.g., indentations and even italics, bold and underline -- the harder you make it for us. We might be pasting your poem onto a private discussion forum and have to simulate your formatting with bbcode or somesuch. This is not going to make us happy, and risks losing some of your formatting. And, as if that weren't enough, your formatting makes it harder to publish your work in final form.

So... all I'm saying is... it had better be important.

Where you can submit online:

2009-02-28T06:33:00.000-08:00

Diane Lockward, a New Jersey poet, has a useful and fun blog for online poets--Blogalicious.

On this post, she went through the trouble of listing po mags that accept online submissions. I am surprised at how many mags are so behind the times and not making better use of technology. At Now Culture, we PREFER online submissions. They are much easier to track and then, in turn, get back to the author faster! Thanks Diane!

Journals that accept e-mail online

The first poem I wrote....

2009-02-25T14:51:00.000-08:00

The machinery of the universe
is humming⎯
The night sky hints
blueprints.

“The machinery of the universe...” was written when I was a teenager in high school. I was lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling -- the lights were off -- and it just popped into my head. I jumped up, turned my lamp on and grabbed some paper. When I finished I put the paper into a binder and slid it under my bed. It stayed there for years along with hundreds of horrible poems that followed. The first time it saw the light of day was when my community college accepted it for the literary magazine. They used it for the back cover.

My dad is an engineer. So is his brother and cousin (all of whom I am very close to). My cousin and close friend Rob is also an engineer. It seems like this first poem was a subconscious attempt to bridge artsy me to practical them.

In 1991 I went through a series of surgeries. It was a year of pain and rehab. Fourth of July that year found me in a hospital bed at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. My Uncle George (my dad’s cousin, one of the engineers mentioned above) came to visit me at the hospital. I shared this poem with him and he wrote it on a scrap of paper and put it in his wallet. That meant a lot to me. It also showed me that the poem was successful in its intentions.

Flash fiction or prose poetry...It's all the same?

2009-02-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I was asked this question by Double Room, a publication that specializes in prose poetry...

"In considering similarities/differences between prose poems and flash fictions, Andrew Michael Roberts discusses James Tate’s Memoir of the Hawk: “The book’s cover advertises the contents as poems, yet the line breaks are arbitrary, and many of the pieces are so narrative that one might consider them short fictions. Who’s to say?”

Actually, Michael Roberts got it wrong. The line breaks in James Tate's recent prose poems are not arbitrary. A little research will show that the poems appeared with the same line breaks in poetry journals as they did in his books. And in a talk at the New School in Manhattan, Tate admitted to controlling the line breaks in his prose poems because he liked the way they looked. In a review of Tate, Charles Simic said that Tate was breaking down the barriers of just what is poetry. That could be the case. But it also seems a little like Tate is having his cake and eating it too. Maybe that is the truest sign that my favorite underdog is now on top.

The lines are, in fact, getting quite blurred. I almost think that the only telling difference between prose poetry and flash fiction is who wrote the piece. If James Tate wrote it, it is poetry. If Barry Yourgrau wrote it, it's flash fiction.

Will more poets blog more than journalists?

2009-02-22T19:56:00.000-08:00

As a journalist, I have to admit that I used to have a prejudice against bloggers. At a time when the economy has most journalism enterprises up against the ropes, I tended to see bloggers as novices offering copy that is no more trustworthy than gossips and gadflies.

The sideways glance that I reserved for conversations about bloggers was similar to the glance used after an exchange like this:

"Honey, I just brought home KFC."

"Really? Oh Good! I'll just throw out the bird in the oven!"

And yet, here I am blogging.

What changed?

When it comes down to it, isn't more dialogue better, even if it comes from the town gadfly? The truth is, with 50,000 new blogs popping up each day, there are plenty of skilled writers to choose from. Some bloggers are adept at capitalizing on the advantages that the format offers.

I've become curious. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting thoughts on poetry in a venue best suited to conversation, blogging. The feature that I look forward to the most is the feedback button which will follow every post. One thing that blogs do well is let readers be part of the dialogue. I can't wait to hear what you have to say!

Hopefully, poets are not as behind the times as journalists!

Tell us what you think of Anthony Madrid

2009-02-20T09:43:00.000-08:00

We published Anthony Madrid today. Please use the comments feature to let us know what you think! You can also e-mail us at nowculture at gmail dot com.

Leadbelly as Leadbelly

2009-02-17T19:31:00.000-08:00

I'm almost finished with this Leadbelly biography. The title is very appropriate, because once Leadbelly went to New York with the Lomaxes, his legend was part of his life. I found a video on YouTube that illustrates this. It's from a "March of Time" newsreel where Leadbelly and John Lomax re-enact the events of their meeting and continued association. This is not just mythmaking in action, it also illustrates how Leadbelly had to play Leadbelly as part of his struggle to get work as a musician.

And just for the sake of pure pleasure, the most beautiful song in the world. He didn't write it, exactly, but he made it. This version shows you how he interacted with his audiences. This was just a few months before he died.

Writing for an Audience, Or Not

2009-02-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

I got some very thoughtful comments about writing for an audience in my post about writing for Boomers. I'd like to use them to guide me further into this topic. First, the protestations:

Louis said, “My view is that one should never write for an audience. It's a self-defeating purpose. The very act of writing, even the way it's executed -- in isolation, with ultimately no social interaction at all -- indicates its introspective zoology. Write for noone but the writer, and what's written.”

Tara said, “I don't think it's helpful to think about an audience for poetry, young or old, when you write.”

I can't agree with Louis's ultimatum that writing involves “ultimately no social interaction at all.” I admit that it's a very strange, staggered interaction, but it is still an interaction. For example, when you participates in a writers' group, it begins to affect your writing. It adds a sort of urgency to it. You begin imagining the objections people will have. It suddenly strikes you that a particular image will relate to a traumatic event in Dave's life. Or more generally, when you use a disturbing image you picture actual people being disturbed by it and you wonder, “is it worth it?” And most basically of all, you are forced to face the question, “will anyone understand this?” In that basic sense, participation in writers' groups changed my poetry forever.

It's one thing to say “don't write for an audience,” but are you willing to commit to “don't attend writers' groups?” Such groups made me realize that I was developing my own private symbolism, and that the further I developed it, the slimmer the chances that anyone would understand what I was reading. I have no compunction against narrowing my audience to a specialized, discerning lot, but to not consider them at all?

This brings me to the writing process, and Peter's comment, which is itself an entire debate (and a poem), but which I will unfairly and minutely excerpt for my own insidious purposes:

Peter said, “...writing differs from conversation or from speaking to an assembled company, precisely in that it is performed in their absence. Oh, and you can cross things out and change them.

...

Absence is the place for writing, presence for speaking.”

I understand this last statement viscerally. Absence is indeed an important part of writing. In fact, I find that writing often feels like listening, or piecing together something that already exists somewhere. This is where I converge with Louis's notion of writing for “what's written.” However, as I get older as a writer, I feel more apt to question my rather religious notion of simply recreating something that already exists out there. This already-existing-perfection is starting to feel malleable to me, more like a template than a finished product... or an algorithm... or a protein that could evolve in any number of ways, depending on the environment in which it lands. And audience is part of that environment. It always has been, even when I didn't realize it. Therefore, I can change that audience, just like I can change the subject matter or mood or anything else, and get a different poem.

The audience of a poem is similar to (and entangled with) the style* of a poem. For example, if I am writing something in the style of a technical manual it assumes something about who's reading it. The same is true for a theatrical soliloquy or a muttered confession.

*I don't really have an adequate word here. Other candidates were “genre,” “voice,” and “context.” Look at the examples for an idea of what I mean.

Where do I begin with Mr. Pound?

2009-02-16T07:54:00.000-08:00

Damn critical editions! I just got The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa, and I don't know where to begin. I have three options:

1. The version that Pound edited, the one most people are familiar with.

2. An "original" version somehow constructed by the editors of this edition.

3. An essay by one of the editors, Haun Saussy, providing background about both, I suppose.

If I follow the book's structure, I'll be reading #3 first, then Pound's version, and finally the original version.

But I can't help but think if I read the "original" version first, it will give me a different perspective from everyone else who's read this essay, one without Pound's fingerprints. Or is this just a silly pretension on my part?

Any opinions out there? You don't have to be Pound experts. You don't have to have read this particular work. Feel free to expound generally about the value of skipping introductions.

Judging Poems vs. Picking Poems

2009-02-15T18:58:00.000-08:00

I'm not one of those who think that it is impossible to judge how good a poem is. I just think it's really hard to do with any precision, and can never escape subjectivity. After all, a poem is a communication between human beings. It evokes irrational, subjective things like feelings. Not only that, it is read within the context of a larger culture, with its own symbolism and values. And just to make it even more interesting, there is the tradition of poetry itself (really multiple traditions), existing within the larger tradition of "literature."

But I don't believe criticism (by which I mean the judging of a poem) is a wild goose chase. Instead, it's an art form in itself, an intellectual pursuit that fascinates me to no end.

However, the editor of a literary magazine is not practicing "criticism" when s/he is rejecting a poem. The heart of criticism is in the explanation itself, not the final verdict. An editor will go mad if s/he thinks his/her decision is the definitive judgment of a poem. It is closer to the decision a collage artist makes when picking one clipping over another. Not entirely the same thing, though: these are not "found poems," but rather finished poems, crafted by another artist for precisely the purpose to which the editor will put it. The editor's job is therefore a hybrid between artist and critic. Like an artist, an editor is making something pretty. Like a critic, an editor must study the finished work that is presented to him/her, and make some decisions about its worth... but only within the scope of his/her own magazine.

Seriously, those of us who say "not right for our magazine" really mean it. The poem didn't grab us, or if it did it didn't hold on long enough. Yes, we could have been having a bad day, but think about all the poems we read. How are you going to write something that stands out from the pack without being gratuitously weird (and even gratuitous weirdness is a cliche now)? I think the answer has something to do with what I said at the beginning about a human communication... Usually, that requires a voice.

For a definition of voice, read a bunch of books... or write a bunch of poems.

Is the Age of Poetry Retirement Age?

2009-02-11T15:14:00.000-08:00

Today I was told that baby boomers are getting old and old people are more spiritual. The thought occurred to me, will this mean a growing market for poetry? And, more interestingly, what sort of poetry will capture this new market?

I live for poetry, but that doesn't mean I write poetry for myself. I live in hope of that connection that occurs between poem and reader, or between (among?) writer and poem and reader. So, constantly I question who I'm writing for. I still don't know. When I write, I imagine someone reading it, but whom do I imagine? I can't see his face. I can't see what she does when she puts the book down.

Often, when I write a poem, I feel like I'm creating a perfect balance of elements, and only when that balance is achieved does the poem stand on its own and I'm ready to release it... but does the poem balance on other surfaces... at other angles? How indelicate should that balance be? How far does the poem need to be able to go? How many people need to be amused by it? What is the required top-of-my-head-count?

I think it would be a good exercise to imagine a specific audience, like a retiring boomer, when writing a poem. How can my poem let him in? Where is it turning her off? Maybe it could even be more than an exercise. It could be a way of moving forward. I love making statements like this, statements in service to the reader, but generally I tend to be the slave of the poem itself, and can consider nothing else when I'm writing. Is there a balance to be struck here?