Etheridge Knight

Our latest installment of well-known American poets: Etheridge Knight. One of the things that I'm noticing about these folks is they are interested in the contemporary moment as it relates to some aspect of the broader culture. It all goes along with the Rushdie quote in the blog header. Poetry--at least to many of the dead poets we've encountered--has a role in the social framework. It is at least conscious of the social framework, conscious that whatever personal revelations and epiphanies the poem reaches happen in the context of the larger world, with its swirling madness and intractable conundrums. Let me ask you this: do many of the poems you read/write at ASFA take that notion to heart? (Here's a hint: No.) Why not?

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On Certainty

"In your schooldays most of you who read this book made acquaintance with the noble building of Euclid's geometry, and you remember--perhaps with more respect than love--the magnificent structure, on the lofty staircase of which you were chased about for uncounted hours by conscientious teachers. By reason of your past experience, you would certainly regard everyone with disdain who should pronounce even the most out-of-the-way proposition of this science to be untrue. But perhaps this feeling of certainty would leave you immediately if someone were to ask you: "What, then, do you mean by the assertion that these propositions are true?" Let us proceed to give this question a little consideration."

--Albert Einstein from "Physical Meaning of Geometrical Propositions" in Relativity: The Special and the General Theory.

Yes. Let's.

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Lordy, Lordy, Here Comes Gertie

Last week's Dead Poet o' the Week was Gertrude Stein. If Robert Frost is the king of Poems That Make Sense, then Stein's the, uh, reigning sovereign of Poems That Don't Make Sense. As the Academy of American Poets site states: "Her writing, characterized by its use of words for their associations and sounds rather than their meanings, received considerable interest from other artists and writers, but did not find a wide audience."

Yup, that pretty much covers it when it comes to Poems That Don't Make Sense.

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Another Open Invitation: Prompts

To repeat: you can add poems to your folder at any time, remembering (of course) that all your critique poems must come from the folder and be re-seen. Here are a few prompts you can use if you want. Keep in mind that you don't have to add poems, and if you do, you don't have to use these prompts. They're just here if you need them.

1. Read this. Write a poem about it.

2. Write a poem about this.

3. Write a sestina using the following endwords: peace, music, clash, opposing, crimson, rejoicing. (Fun fact: Ezra Pound has already done this assignment. "A" for the day, Ezra! But don't read it, lest it impede you from "mak[ing] it new"...)

4. Wall Street is crashing! Run for your lives! But before you do that, write a poem about money.

5. Write a poem in rhyming couplets. Resist narrative at all costs. Include something that looks like this.

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Uncle Walt

Little late in posting this. I figure I'll slap up a few links re: the poets we discover on Monday mornings. First up was the Good Gray Poet, Walt Whitman. Famous for more than just that crazy-cool beard, Whitman is if not the father of free verse, then he's certainly the stepfather of it. Long lines that echo prose rhythms, all about the American body politic. All America, all the time with this guy. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Woo-hoo! (We did win the Olympics, right?)

Anne "Don't Call Me Sylvia" Sexton

Next up in our little game of poet-roulette was Anne Sexton, she of Confessional fame. I think it's important for you to get a sense of Ye Olde Confessional Poets because many of the tenets of Confessionalism are de rigeur in contemporary Poems That Make Sense. Certainly de rigeur for the ASFA Poem That Makes Sense. There's often a You and an I in the poem. It's a personal expression of Self, with allusions to an actual lived life. Hence, there's at least the veneer of autobiography. All of this stuff is taken for granted these days--almost to the point where it's a cliche that poetry is, by definition, "emo"--but there was a time when such things (supposedly) weren't in the purview of poetry. Interesting that Sexton's paired with Whitman, who also introduced "non-poetic" subjects and forms -- namely common people and language -- that otherwise hadn't been "allowed" in poems. In both cases, "real" things that "regular" people care about get to be in poems, and that can't be bad right? Anything less would be, well, unAmerican...

U-S-A! U-S-A!

PS...The thing that separates a legit "Confessional" poem from a cliche "emo" poem is, primarily, a heightened attention to craft (form, line, rhythm, sound, etc).

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An Open Invitation: Prompts

To repeat: you can add poems to your folder at any time, remembering (of course) that all your critique poems must come from the folder and be re-seen. Here are a few prompts you can use if you want. Keep in mind that you don't have to add poems, and if you do, you don't have to use these prompts. They're just here if you need them.

1. Write a poem to, for, or about any one (1) of the following:

• Sarah Palin
• Morgan Tsvangirai
• Tzipi Livni
• Werner Herzog
• Dara Torres
• Ban Ki-moon
• Wangari Maathai
• Jon Voight
• Benazir Bhutto
• Sid Vicious

2. Open to a random page of the dictionary. Read all the definitions on that page and pick your favorite word. Use it as the first word of a poem. Try to pick a word that has more than one meaning and, if you can, play with that ambiguity in fruitful ways. Or not.

3. Write about this!

More where this came from periodically...

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A Word about Critique

This week we crank it up -- madcap critique fun. In your written critiques, I expect you to address the major areas we have touched on so far: intention, sound, and meaning. Always seek to answer the following three sets of larger questions:

• What is the poem trying to do? Where is it achieving that intention? Where could it do more to achieve it? Is there a latent intention that could be teased out of the poem?
• How is the poem working on the level of the syllable? word? phrase? line? Does the poem's form fit its function?
• How does the poem communicate -- is it logical/literal (makes sense) or intuitive/figurative (doesn't make sense) or somewhere in between? Where do you need more of one or the other communication style (i.e., more logic or more leaping)? Here focus on metaphors, images, symbols, connotations, allusions...those sorts of things.

Your written critique needs to convey a thorough consideration of these basic elements of the poem. The standard is to make comments on the line-level where appropriate and to provide an end note of a few fairly detailed paragraphs. You can't go wrong taking a paragraph to address each of the three areas above.

Those will be our areas of focus in oral critique as well. Remember, poets, it's your job to make sure we answer any additional concerns/questions you have when we turn it over to you at the tail end of your critique.

REMEMBER TONE. Your word choices matter. "Annoying" is a case in point -- it tends to crop up here and there. I find it particularly annoying. Avoid it and any other word that conveys a similar adversarial tone.

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And Betty When You Call Me You Can Call Me Al

"Einstein was neither a competent experimenter nor a high-powered mathematician. His intuition about scientific concepts was unequaled, and when logic was on his side he would stick his neck far out, even when his conclusions ran counter to the received wisdom. A reinterpretation of the photoelectric effect was his first spectacular contribution, proving that light can behave as if it consists of particles, not waves."

--from Nigel Calder's introduction to Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein.

Your Mission: Sonnets!

Read this. Also this, this, and this. We'll talk about all of it on Thursday. And you may even have to write one or something. So, you know, get ready.

da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH...

(What rhymes with "DUH"?)

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Conferences

So I'm reading Group A's poems and I'm thinking: okay, two poems, no sweat. But as I've read and re-read the poems, I'm having two competing thoughts.

1. Man, this is cool. Lots of stuff to consider because this whole "re-seeing" thing really did interesting things to the poems. Can't wait to talk about them.

2. Wait...how exactly are we going to do that?

Seems like it'd be simple but now I think it's opened things up exponentially--in a good (if logistically challenging) way. I think we're going to have to build this airplane at 40,000 feet, and here's how I propose we start. I'm going to present you with the following questions:

• What do you think these two poems are up to? Is it the same thing or two different things? If they're different, which one is more interesting to you now? If they're the same, which one achieves your intention most fully?
• I'm noticing that, without exception, both poems have strengths. So what are they? Do the poems share strengths? What are their different strengths? Are those different strengths mutually exclusive?
• Pick a favorite line/phrase/image from each poem.
• Pick a least favorite line/phrase/image from each poem.
• Consider sounds on the micro-level (syllables, alliteration) and macro-level (phrases/lines, rhythms/rhymes).
• Consider meaning on the literal level (sense, logic) and the figurative level (metaphor, symbol, conceptual leaps).

At the end of all that, we'll make a tentative call on which one you want to use as your baseline for revision, then we'll read it line-by-line, both of us posing/answering questions as they arise.

Most important thing to keep in mind: this is an interactive process. It's on you as much as it is on me. More, in fact. It's your poem(s). I just work here.

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And the Winner Is...

Kim Addonizio! Yee haw. I'll do a little investigating and order one of her books for us.

As for the other poet, I'm still dithering. (Is that a word? Yes!) I like to zag when folks think I'll zig. I'm half-a-mind to pick Jackie Gilbert, just cuz he got the second highest number of votes. I'll think about it some more and let you know.

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