Recently in Creative Thought Category
Performing the Academy:
Is what Harold Bloom said about poetry slams being full of Òrant and nonsenseÓ true, or can the academy and the slam community come together? In the first of a series, Jeremy Richards talks with Susan Somers-Willett about slam, and how she manages to straddle both sides of the page / stage divide.
... if I had a rating system in place, [2River] would get the five stars or the thumbs up or the 3 snaps.
via didi menendez at Other Spectacular Magazines
Black Mountain Breakdown:
Poems new and old from Ed Dorn, who was always identified with an experimental college in North Carolina.
"Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we're just f-ing smarter."
Knowledge@ Wharton has a very interesting interview with NEA chairman Dana Gioia, who describes himself as "the only person in history who went to business school to be a poet." Gioia, who was once vice ... via Critical Mass
Often a comment on a blog needs foregrounding. Oliver, commenting on From Spam to Poem, tells about Daphne Gottlieb's poem "Frequently Asked Questions". It's not a spam poem. Instead, the lines are actual questions from the FAQ for the Emma Goldman love doll. I'm not sure about the quality of Emma, but the poem is actually quite good. It's another illustration of how language in one context can be used in another for an entirely different purpose.
What's going on in the poet's mind when he's daydreaming? I work for a living. I fly a lot. I go into the office and plug in my laptop and hook up to the network my employer provides and to the Internet. I make a few telephone calls. I look at my weekly calendar (handwritten, no Palm Pilots here!). I make a few calls, a few plans, a few decisions. I work my way down a list of things to do, either mentally or on paper, tallying the day, ticking off my chores. I pack up, ride the elevator to the garage or outside the building to a cab. I move on.
I wouldn't say I'm experiencing much, or even thinking, for that matter. I am fulfilling a routine, maybe. I am sleeping without dreaming.
Occasionally, I wake up and look around me. Today it happened on the Delta Shuttle, Washington to New York. It was full of people just like me. I willed myself to start dreaming, that is, taking in everything in my metallic environment I could take in, including images from my own depths. Headlines, overhead bins, headrests, heads . . . I wonder if other people do this? I wonder if I am ever the object of somebody else's day dream?
Soon enough, it started to come, that familiar flood of words and images and sensations that I need as a poet, that makes for the poet in me. I pull an orange (!) journal out of my briefcase, a retractable pencil, and start capturing bits and pieces . . .
"A binder clip was traveling to Poukeepsie."
----------
"The fresh things became stuck in committee."
----------
"The French action is precise and airless."
----------
"Everyone's bending over in his hair cream."
----------
"A blast of cold air will remake them."
----------
"Protesting, the models wear last year's fashions to bed."
----------
"Until such time as we have run out of until."
----------
"Another question you mean it like that."
----------
"I am sorry, sir, but you're flying the Delta Shuttle and your choice is cheese and crackers."
----------
"We have been vectored and no one even took a vote."
----------
"A basic slip of the lung was all."
----------
"Dog eared and stained and then landed safely."
My wife reminds me that I once had the capacity to sit around and do nothing for hours. She says this like a eulogy. She is only partly wrong. I used not to fear the consequences of it.
Damn! It occurs to me today that "Daddy" may be my dad and that I may be Sophocles. Still thinking.
I let my mind wander into this territory every so often . . . as a poet and as an American, from what literary line am I descended? I have no doubt that the lineage can be traced to Europe, then Rome, then Greece. That is, I am a Westerner. The fact that I studied English and American lit in college and all thru grad & post grad ought to tell me that I am misinformed by the American view of the modernist movement, i.e., Pound, Eliot, and their board of erudite directors--everybody appearing in those standard university anthologies of the late sixties and all through the seventies.
Truth is more like this: my taste was poisoned by New Critics, particularly a couple of them at Indiana University, who taught me dissection, Blake style. The antidote was one Professor Richard Klawitter: long hair, smiling eyes, Oshkosh. He taught me to hear, hear the living thing. Then Aristotle taught me this: it's all just material (potential) shaped by the human self (to being) . . . and I am back where I started: the self influenced by whom, by what?
I dearly love the forms. That makes me a child of Emily Dickinson? Great slabs of talk-talk absolutely knock me out. And that makes me a Whitman baby. Neither, or at least, academically broad and therefore irrelevant. Here are, I think, some relatives, distant or close: Auden, Ashbery, Roethke, Williams, James Tate. All male, all white, most of 'em dead. Hmm. And that makes me a historical imperative.
So, if anyone's listening, whose child are u?
