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  1. #31
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    ABOUT ME

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    MIKE CHASAR
    SALEM, OREGON, UNITED STATES
    Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War
    VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE

    Praise for Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America

    "Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

    "Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

    "As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasar shows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

    "This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry



    "The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer



    "[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History



    "[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  2. #32
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    Poet in the Crack of Liberty: My Life with Christopher, 1988
    BY CA CONRAD
    CA Conrad
    If you steal my idea I swear to God, well, I’ll be mad at you. It’s a moneymaking machine this idea, and
    I came up with it when I dated an actor named Christopher. He was very New England-handsome and therefore able to find work dressed as a hot revolutionary war soldier for tourists at Independence Hall. I loved seeing him in his uniform, my sexy Philadelphia hero in his tri-cornered hat, knickers, and of course his gun I loved his gun. He would be cleaning it in the park and I would watch from behind a tree hoping to keep my gun-cleaning voyeurism a secret, but he always caught me. “There’s something wrong with you” he said. “Yes and I LOVE IT” I said.
    He liked that I always wanted to see the Liberty Bell. He liked it because he never met anyone who loves it as much as I do. It’s one of my favorite things on Earth and I think he secretly wanted to like something, anything, as much as I do the Liberty Bell. He squeezed my shoulder lovingly in his vicarious bell love. I asked, “can you draw the bell’s crack in the air?” “Yeah, sure” he said. “Okay then, do it.” “There” he said, “like that.” “Not even close” I said, “if you mean to actually know how such a consequential crack exists in the world you need to give it the dignity of seriously studying its character as only the character of such a crack can possess.” “I don’t know why I put up with you,” he said. “We’re talking about the crack of Liberty Christopher stay focused please you have the attention span of a goldfish sometimes.”
    Practicing the crack in the air that day is when the million-dollar idea came to me. The crack, it’s the crack of the bell that matters. If you draw the Liberty Bell’s crack on paper without the bell it’s a waterway map, a chocolate stream with chocolate frogs and salamanders. “I KNOW WHAT TO DO” I said, “I’ll create chocolate treats in the shape of the crack, sell them on a stick, a chocolate crack on a stick! I’ll sell them outside the Liberty Bell on a table and call out CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACK ON A STICK, GET YOUR CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACK ON A STICK, like the poet Gil Ott when he first moved to Philadelphia taking his magazine PAPER AIR out to the corner yelling PAPER AIR PAPER AIR GET YOURS NOW. And then one day a wealthy candy factory owner will be in town with his children and they’ll love my chocolate cracks and he’ll take me on board. And then we’ll have different kinds of chocolate cracks, ones with crushed nuts sprinkled on the crack, or peanut butter injected cracks, cinnamon dusted cracks, delicious DELICIOUS CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACKS! It will make millions,” I said excitedly! “Well what do you think of my new idea?” He shrugged and said “I like how crazy your ideas are, but it’s not a good one this one.” “I don’t know why I put up with you,” I said.
    Philadelphia is where you move to when you love the Liberty Bell. It’s the reason I’m here and only the National Park security guards have seen it more than I have. You would think after years of seeing me standing at the velvet ropes to gaze at the bell’s crack that we would be on familiar terms but the guards always act like I’m Al-Qaeda. “He’s on his way in again,” they say into their radios as though I can’t hear them. The bell needs more than Taser guns, rubber bullets and paranoia to protect it; it needs liberty in the best sense of the definition. Liberty is a serious word, born from too many examples of tyranny, “The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.” If we U. S. Americans are going to actually enjoy the freedom we boast to the world about having, then we should be giving the bell a place of openness.
    I’ve most definitely seen the bell more times than anyone alive who is not being paid to be there everyday, and there is a performance idea I’m getting down onto paper, one where I fill the crack of the bell with rich dark chocolate, then eat it out from the bottom up, give it a good tongue licking to get every delicious bit of chocolate. Then I would walk around to the tourists and hand out leaflets on safe sex. This could be a terrific project. Or maybe the other project would be about what happens when I submit the paperwork for the proposal, the project about the project. The project about the official National Park Headquarters reacting to the proposed project I already know they won’t let me do. Write the president, that’s what I’ll do, I mean if it’s okay to drop bombs on unsuspecting families in Afghanistan and Pakistan, what in the hell could be the problem with allowing me to eat out the Liberty Bell of its chocolate filled crack? To be “free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.” It’s important that I’m ready to answer the National Park Headquarters when they ask if my project is a way of life, a behavior, or a political view. I’m not sure which it is, but I’ll be ready for them!
    When I stand in front of the bell I have so many ideas. It’s like a magic idea factory. For instance one day I was standing near tourists with their tiny American flags posing for pictures with the bell when I thought, HEY I want to work in a laboratory doing research on high-powered soul-matter transference lampshades. Not lampshades that cure cancer or AIDS but lampshades that extract some of the creative powers from artists to perforate the armor of those believing themselves undeserving of the Muse’s unction. The light through the lampshade that can sell everyone to themselves, light where we finally get it, we get it that it’s of magnificent importance to be creative each day with something we want to do. Cancer and AIDS are going to sever us from this world no matter what, it’s the way we spend these remaining days, it’s the only thing I want to matter to us. When I look at the Liberty Bell this is one of the things I like to think about, lampshade laboratories of the future of wild unleashing.
    Christopher HATED that he was a faggot. I understand that, I mean why on Earth would anyone choose to be queer, it’s very hard. With most families in the world it’s very hard. With most governments it’s very hard. With all monotheistic religions it’s a terrible sin. You deserve whatever you get if you choose to be gay, you’re just asking for trouble. But as far as I know no one chooses it. It’s something to learn to enjoy in our own way and feel beautiful and loved whenever and however we can. I love being loved, don’t you? Of course you do, and we all want to thrive in that love and we should do so whenever possible! When we were together I was the only one with the patience for Christopher’s hard shell and it’s because I got it, that disappointment in yourself that the family who loved you flipped the switch off when you told them you’re a faggot, and it was never going to switch back on again. There are a few faggots and dykes who are lucky enough to have understanding families, but for the rest of us we tenderly fill those dark spaces in one another the best we can.
    I decided to make his brooding cold sadness sexy, as much as for me as for him, and it was a dark and lovely task I made for myself. After sex he was always perkier and jovial, and that satisfied me very much knowing I was doing something good for the world. He was always going to New York to try out for plays, and once for a musical. He never got called back, and I knew he was secretly upset that he might be a failure at the only thing he really wanted to do. One day I brought us lunch while he was cleaning his gun and he didn’t look up, his brow furrowed with anger. “Hey hot stuff” I said, “what’s the matter?” “What’s the matter is you pissed off the Benjamin Franklin impersonator again, why can’t you leave that guy alone!” “Look,” I said, “all I did was point out that he was getting Franklin wrong.” Christopher looked up, “yeah well he’s a mean old bastard and he’s giving me shit because he sees us hanging out together and now refers to you as my girlfriend.” “I don’t care what he calls me” I said, “he has no fucking clue how to play the role of Benjamin Franklin, I mean just because he looks like him and dresses like him doesn’t mean he GETS Franklin!” “But nobody cares” he said, “people come from Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Ares, and they want their picture taken with him, that’s it, that’s all they want and he doesn’t need to do anything else.” “Well,” I said, “all I told him was that Franklin wasn’t a goofy buffoon the way he portrays him, Franklin was a GENIUS, and a Lady’s man, he liked beer, he LOVED LIFE, c’mon, he invented the swim flippers as a teenager, he invented the glass harmonica which is the most extraordinary sounding musical instrument ever invented, AND he charmed the French and that’s not easy to do no matter what century you’re talking about!” “Would you please leave the old man alone, when he gets on your bad side he makes your life fucking miserable and I don’t like being in his gun sites frankly.” “Well I think it’s a disgrace,” I said, “to take the only decent founding father we have and turn him into a bumbling goofball, but I’ll stop it, for you I’ll stop it, I’m sorry.” “Thank you, please leave him alone, he hates you.” “Well the real Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t hate me, he would like me very much, and you, he would like us both, and give us some beer and ask us to get naked for a proper ménage a trois the way they taught him in Paris.” Finally Christopher smiled, “I’m not sure why,” he said, “but I do love you.” “Well you better,” I said, “I’m your boyfriend, I’m the man you’re supposed to love and you know what I think is that our odious Benjamin Franklin fake wants to fuck you.” “STOP IT, no he does not!” “Oh yeah, yeah he does.” “Do you think I should fuck him?” “I think you should fuck him, OH YES, his asshole needs to be loosened up Christopher my man, that opening is as small as a sesame seed.”
    Most bells are in buildings, you go to the buildings to see the famous church or playhouse and the bell there is the bell that is there, nothing more, and no one cares about the bell. The Liberty Bell is one of the only bells with a building no one goes to see. Who goes to see the Liberty Bell’s building? It was built to house the bell, nothing more and we don’t care about the building we don’t even remember it. It’s the bell, it’s all about the Liberty Bell and you know as well as I do that when you go to see it you’re going through security, having your bag checked, being frisked, waiting in line, and walking the long corridor of short films and giant placards filled with historical trivia because it’s for the crack. You’re there for the finale at the end of the frisking, and that finale is called the crack. No one ever goes to the Liberty Bell to avoid seeing the crack. Millions of people come to Philadelphia each year to see the bell and I bet you not one of them ever averted their eyes from its delicious crack! Not one of them I tell you! Who would do that? Why would you look away from it, you WANT to see it, you know you do, c’mon now! It’s a beautiful crack, look at it with me a second, okay a few minutes more. See in there, it’s a portal into another dimension if we stare long enough. If we were allowed to get closer, touch it, we might just discover it’s an oracle, a sleeping oracle that’s been waiting for us to waken its divinatory powers.
    Early one morning after park rangers finished a tour of the bell twenty-six-year-old Mitchell Guilliatt jumped over the velvet ropes and hit it five times with a hammer. Ringing out to the four directions and with one more for the spirit head. JUST BEAUTIFUL I remember thinking that day, wishing I had been there to witness this prophetic act of ringing out liberty. Tourists being interviewed said they were stunned, “I WAS STUNNED I WAS SO STUNNED OH MY GOD” they said. “SHUT UP” I thought, “you are going to remember Mitchell Guilliatt for the rest of your lives, and you HEARD the ringing, you got to HEAR it and you have Mitchell to thank!” He was tackled by security as he yelled out, “I didn’t do anything violent!” I believe this former high school football captain, I really do. I was the only one in Philadelphia who believed him and I was defending him everywhere I went. I was on the verge of making tee shirts with his picture and the words “MITCHELL GUILLIATT WOKE THE ORACLE,” but when I realized I would be the only one to ever wear the shirt I scrapped the whole idea. It’s lonely being the only person in the world on one side of an argument, but I didn’t mind. I held my own at Dirty Frank’s Bar and wherever I met those calling out for justice to have poor Mitchell locked away forever. My good friend Frank Sherlock didn’t agree with me, but I think he liked that I was willing to champion the drifter from Nebraska with a mighty hammer. The federal magistrate charged Mitchell with “causing damage to an archaeological resource.” Resource is a word derived from Old French, meaning, “rise again, recover.” Awaken the oracle, AWAKEN THE ORACLE! For weeks we peered through the glass to see if we could see his hammer marks. We never were sure I mean it’s a broken old bell.
    Christopher called very excited and told me to meet him by the Commodore Barry statue behind Independence Hall........
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 07-26-2015 at 09:13 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  3. #33
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    Susan M. Schultz

    Most Beautiful Words:

    Linh Dinh’s Poetics of Disgust

    This article first appeared in Issue 8 (September 2004) of The Paper, U.K., edited by David Kennedy. It is is 3,400 words or about 8 printed pages long


    When I think about the Vietnam war, I remember Hamburger Hill, so called because American soldiers were ground up there in the late 1960s; the battle for Hamburger Hill was one I watched on television as a child. The American guide to Hamburger Hill was CBS newsman, Ed Bradley, best known these days for his recent interview of Michael Jackson. To think about Hamburger Hill not as a battle or as a place (which doubtless has another, Vietnamese, name), rather as the name for a battle, is to think about how language is often used in contemporary poetry to describe suffering.
    Linh Dinh by Brian Doan
    Linh Dinh, photo by Brian Doan

    A mainland Chinese poet, new to the United States and to the English language, once told a class of mine how much he had “suffered” in China. I was less astonished by his suffering than by the fact that he could say it; how many of us can say or write “I suffer” and not have our sincerity turned inside out, its fraudulence presumed? “Hamburger Hill” seems at first a playful, ironic name, referring as much to the product of McDonald’s back home as to the GI’s killed or wounded in that place. As a moment of poetry by an unknown GI, it tells us much about that war, the ways pain was inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike, and the way in which people tried to distance themselves from the war and its political implications. Its real force is this last, an irony that distances us from horror, even if the words themselves refer to it.

    But think literally about the name and it ushers up an emotion more like disgust. Men ground up like meat is an image that seeps out of the irony of the term “Hamburger Hill.” Linh Dinh, a poet who comes out of that war, even if his poems do not all address its history, takes the name and renders it as image. His work is like Emily Dickinson’s, as read by Camille Paglia. Rather than domesticate Dickinson’s work for the undergraduate audience, as I am sometimes wont to do (“she thinks about sadness and dying, just like the rest of us”), Paglia reads Dickinson’s images literally. If Dickinson writes about sticking a needle in her eye, goes Paglia’s reading, by golly she means it. There are problems with such readings, to be sure, but what Paglia gets at, and what Linh Dinh does as a poet, is to illustrate how we understand suffering through disgust, rather than through gentler manifestations of feeling, like “grief” or like “compassion” or even “anger.” Disgust, as the BBC reports (January 2004), “evolved to protect us from the risk of disease,” and arose, one scientist claims, “to protect people from rotting meat.”

    The disgust that is found in poems cannot claim to have that evolutionary value, the ability to protect us from disease. What, then, can it accomplish? As I read Linh Dinh I see manifestations of disgust in his poetry as paradoxical expressions of suffering: violence, poverty, degradation, and (in the reader) an odd empathy for those caught up in it. When the reader encounters an image that disgusts her, disgust becomes more than a child-like reaction to feces or vomit or blood, more an odd expression of empathy with one who suffers. Empathy as disgust (or is it the other way around?) may seem quite a stretch, but so is much of Dinh’s work. Better put: empathy after disgust, as empathy fills the void disgust leaves behind. If the poem forces us to confront rotting meat, then after an interval, we empathize with the character forced to eat it. The “mudman in earth cafeteria” of one poem does not feel disgust at eating “stinky food,” but the reader feels her emotions aroused by his predicament. It is not direct sympathy that I’m getting at here, the desire to put one’s arm around the mudman, but the kind of empathy that turns away from violence and toward something else. Dinh does not, perhaps, often get to that “something else,” but his poetry provides us with the example of a poetry of witness that comes as close to shattering the language-barrier as possible (disgust being that feeling before language). It’s a poetry of witness that makes the reader a witness, rather than a spectator of witness. And it is one, my friend Deborah Meadows reminds me, that does not depend on arbitrary notions of identity and aesthetics for its power.

    Dinh’s disgust is autobiographical in content, if not written in memoir form. Born in 1963, Dinh left Vietnam when he was twelve years old and spent many years in Philadelphia, a city which (despite its name, “brotherly love”) was rife with violence. Responding to Frank Sherlock’s question about the violence in his poems, Dinh responded:
    I see violence as a common misfortune and, by extension, fate. It’s what awaits each one of us just around the corner. One cannot think seriously about life without contemplating the destruction of the body. Born in Vietnam, I was baptized early into this awareness. As an adult in Philadelphia, I had many opportunities to gather my bloody evidences.
    (Philly Sound Feature, issue #2, 12/ 31/ 03).
    Dinh is capable of a nearly scientific view of violence. Poems like “Motate” (fusion of “mutate” and “rotate”; “motet” and “potentate”?) track the violent act with the specificity of super slow motion:
    General emission from all orifices.
    Blink left eye, then right eye,
    then left eye, then right eye.
    With index finger, jab at right temple.
    Then wheeze quietly as the bullet enters.
    (All Around 5)
    This is objectivist description, as most of Dinh’s poems are not. In others, Dinh combines violence and, say, food with a literalism (not to be confused with objectivity) that can turn the stomach. Charles Reznikoff’s poems are effective insofar as they present a clean surface, even as that surface moves us to see clearly injustices we cannot, by poem’s end, abide. Dinh’s poems, by way of contrast, are effective on a more visceral level; his images are always precise, like Reznikoff’s, but they are not clean; there is always interference in a Dinh poem, which contributes to its unfolding impact on the reader. Disgust breeds ambivalence, and ambivalence is an unclean emotion. Consider how this speaker regards his spoon: “After each meal, I lick my plastic spoon in a gesture of solidarity with an inanimate object. Did you know that I was once fucked with my own spoon? This very spoon. And then, later, with half a razor” (10). Clearly, the tools of hygiene and health have blood on them; to lick the spoon that raped you sounds like a cliché, but horrifies. Another poet of violence, Chris Abani, has a poem about a teenage boy tortured by the Nigerian authorities by having his penis nailed to a table until he died. That horrific image gains power by its very claim to truth; this happened, and the boy suffered horribly. Dinh’s images are not so “true”; rather, he (like the Vietnamese poets he has translated) uses surrealism as his own tool to oblige the reader to see horror. It’s as if Artaud had been raised in a war zone.

    “Earth Cafeteria” undermines every American truism from “organic food” to “ethnic cuisine” and “patriotism” as it explores violence through eating. In Vietnam, as one of Dinh’s favorite
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  4. #34
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    Tuesday, July 28, 2015
    The Kalevala

    AG: Does anybody know the Finnish epic, “The Kalevala”. Has anybody ever read any of that? – I’d like to read a few pages of that. It’s an epic poem which was originally in oral form, and (was) written down in the nineteenth-century by a Swedish scholar, Elias Lönnrot, and translated (fantastically) by Francis Peabody Magoun and published by (the) Harvard University Press. It’s called “(The) Kalevala” – K-A-L-E-V-A-L-A, and in the chapter, or poem, three, that I’m going to read from, this old bard, who has had lots of discipline and lots of experience and is an old dog, finally (old dog, incidentally, is one of the characteristics of tantric mind) – old dog, like an old dog that no longer jumps up (and) barks excitedly when it hears an egg drop.


    So, Väinämöinen the old dog bard, meets Joukahainen, a young punk bard coming up the road, and their chariots pass (but) can’t pass each other in the road because there’s a too-narrow road, and so comes “a contest of bards” between the older and the younger. They’ve heard of each other, but finally they’re meeting (at least Joukahainen has heard of Väinämöinen

    "..Steadfast old Väinämöinen lives his days/ on those clearings of Väinämöinen's district, on the heaths of Kalevala district./ He keeps singing these songs, keeps singing, goes on practicing his art,/ Day after day he sang, night after night, he recited/ recollections of ancient time those profound origin songs/ which not all children sing not all men understand/ in this dreadful time in this fleeting age/ Far away the news is heard the tidings spread quickly/ of Väinämöinen's singing, of the man's skill./ The tidings spread quickly to the south, the news reached the north country./ Joukahainen was a young, a scrawny, Lappish lad./ Once he was gadding about; he heard that remarkable charms,/ magic songs, were being rattled off, better ones intoned/ on those burned-over tracks of Väinämöinen's district on the heaths of Kalevala District/ - better than what he himself knew, had learned from his father/. That he took greatly amiss, constantly envied/ Väinämöinen being a singer better than himself.."

    So there are a few verses where he sets out to meet the older guy:

    "..Steadfast old Väinämöinen, eternal sage,/ was driving on his way, covering ground/ on those clearings of Väinämöinen's district, the heaths of Kalevala District./ Young Joukahainen came along, he was driving on the road in the opposite direction./ Shaft caught in shaft, trace got tangled in trace,/ hames became fast in hames, shaft-bow in butt of shaft-bow./ Therefore they then stop, stop deliberate;/ water poured from shaft-bow, vapor steamed from the shafts."

    As you'll notice, the formulaic aspect of this is - you make a statement and you modify it, make a statement and you modify it - two halves, one line.

    "..Old Väinämöinen asked: "Of what clan are you/ to come along foolishly, recklessly onward./ You break the bent-wood hames, the sapling shaft-bows./ you splinter my sleigh to pieces, my poor sleigh to bits."/ Then young Joukahainen/ uttered a word, spoke thus: "I am young Joukahainen/ but name your own clan;/ of what clan are you, of what crew, miserable creature?"/ . Then steadfast old Väinämöinen now told his name./ Then he managed to say: If you are young Joukahainen,/ pull over to the side. You are younger than I"

    "Then young Joukahainen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "A man's youth is small matter, his youth, his age./ Whichever of two men is better in knowledge, the stronger in memory,/ let him indeed stay on the road, let the other get off the road./ If you are old Väinämöinen, eternal singer,/ let us begin to sing, start to recite magic./ one man to test the other, one to defeat the other"/. Steadfast old Väinämöinen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ - "What can I really do as a singer, as an expert!/ I have always lived my life just on these clearings,/ on the edges of the home field, again and again have listened to the cuckoo by the house./ But, be this as it may, speak, so that I may hear with my ears:/ what do you know about most about, understand beyond other people?"/ Young Joukahainen said: "I indeed know something!/ This I know clearly, understand precisely: "A smoke hole is near a ceiling, a flame is near a fireplace./ It is pleasant for a seal to live, for a pike, dog of the water, to roll about;/ it eats the salmon around it, the whitefish beside it./ A whitefish has smooth fields, the salmon a level ceiling./ A pike spawns in the chill of night, the slobberer in bitter cold weather./ Autumns the timid, obstinate perch, swims deep./ summers it spawns on dry land, flaps about on shores./ "If this may be not enough, I have still another bit of knowledge,/ understand a certain thing:/ "The North ploughs with a reindeer,/ the South with a mare, remotest Lapland with an elk./ I know the trees of Pisa's Hill, the tall evergreens on Goblin's Crag,/ tall are the trees on Pisa's Hill, the evergreens on Goblin's Crag/. There are three strong rapids, three great lakes,/ three high mountains under the vault of this sky./ In Hame is Halla-whirlpool, in Karelia Loon Rapids./ none exceed the Vuoksi rapids (which) surpass those of Imatra" . Old Väinämöinen said: "A child's knowledge, a woman's power of memory! / It is neither that of a bearded man nor indeed of a married man./ Speak of profound origins, of unique matters."/ Young Joukahainen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "I know the origin of the tomtit, I know the tom-tit is a bird,/ the hissing adder a snake, the roach a fish of the water/, I know iron is brittle, black soil sour,/ boiling-hot water painful, being burned by fire bad./ Water is the oldest of ointments, foam of a rapids oldest of magic nostrums,/ the Creator himself is the oldest of magicians, God the oldest of healers./ The source of water is from a mountain, the source of fire is from the heavens/, the origin of iron is from rust, the basis of copper is a crag./ A wet tussock is the oldest land, the willow the first tree,/ the foot of a tall evergreen the first habitation, a flat stone the first wretched cooking vessel."/ Steadfast old Väinämöinen uttered these words:/ "Do you remember anything more or has your foolish talk now come to an end?"./ Young Joukahainen spoke: "I remember a little more. /I remember indeed that time when I was plowing the sea,/ hoeing out the hollows of the sea, digging deep spots for fish,/ deepening the deep places in the water, putting the lily ponds in place./ overturning hills, heaping up blocks of stone./ I was already the sixth man, seventh person/, when they were creating this Earth, fashioning the sky/, erecting the pillars of the sky, bringing the rainbow,/ guiding the moon, helping the sun,/ arranging the Great Bear, studding the heavens with stars"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "You are certainly lying about this./ No one saw you when they were ploughing the sea,/ hoeing out the hollows of the sea, digging deep spots for fish,/ deepening the deep places in the water, putting the lily ponds in place./ overturning hills, heaping up blocks of stone,/ Nor were you probably seen, /probably neither seen nor heard,/ when the earth was being created, the sky fashioned,/ the pillars of the sky erected, the rainbow brought,/ the moon guided, the sun helped,/ the Great Bear arranged, the heavens studded with stars."/ Young Joukahainen then uttered these words: "If I do not happen to have intelligence, I will ask for intelligence from my sword./ O old Väinämöinen, big-mouthed singer!/ Proceed to measure off our swords, set out to fight a duel"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "I don't think I'm very much afraid/ of those sword of yours, your intelligence, your ice-picks, your thoughts./ But be that as it may, I will not proceed to measure swords/ with you, wretch,/ with you, miserable fellow"./ Then young Joukahainen screwed up his mouth, twisted his head around,/ clawed at his black beard. He uttered these words:/ "Whoever does not proceed to measure swords nor set out to fight a duel,/ him I will sing into a swine, change into a pig with lowered snout./ Such men I enchant, one thus, the other so. /strike dead onto a dunghill, jam into the corner of a cattle shed"./ Old Väinämöinen got angry, then got angry and felt shamed./ He began to sing, got to reciting,/ the magic songs are not children's songs, not children's songs, women's jokes;/ they are a bearded man's which not all children sing,/ nor half the boys indeed, nor one bachelor in three/ in this dreadful time, in this fleeting final age"./ Old Väinämöinen sang. Lakes splashed over, Earth shook/, copper mountains trembled, solid slabs of rock split,/ the crags flew apart, stones on the shore cracked./ He bewitched young Joukahainen. He sang sprouts onto his shaft-bow,/ a willow bush onto his hames, sallows onto the ends of his traces./ He bewitched the lovely basket sleigh. he sang it into a pond as fallen trees./ He sang the whip with the beaded lash into shore reed of the sea./ He sang the horse with the blaze to the bank of the rapid as a rock./ He sang the gold-hilted sword to the sky as flashes of lightning;/ then he sang the ornamented shaft of the crossbow into a rainbow over the waters/ then his feathered arrows into speeding hawks, / then the dog with the undershot jaw, it he sang onto the ground as rocks./ He sang the cap off the man's head into the peak of a cloudbank./ he sang the mittens off his hands into pond lilies./then his blue broadcloth coat to the heavens as a cloud patch/ the soft woolen belt from his waist into stars throughou the heavens/ He bewitched Joukahainen himself,/ sang him into a fen up to his loins,/ into a grassy meadow up to his groin, into a heath up to his arm-pits./ Now young Joukahainen indeed knew and realized./ he knew that he had got on the way, got on the route to a contest,/ a contest in magic singing with old Väinämöinen. /He keeps trying to get a foot free; he could not lift his foot./ However, he tried the other; here his shoe was of stone./ The young Joukahainen indeed becomes anguished,/gets into a more precarious situation. He uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "O wise Väinämöinen, eternal sage!/ Reverse your magic charm, revoke your enchantment,/ Free me from this predicament, get me out of this situation./ I will indeed make the best payment, pay the most substantial ransom"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "Well, what will you give me/ if I reverse my magic charm, revoke my enchantment,/ free you from this predicament, get you out of this situation?"/ Joukahainen spoke, "I have two vessels, two lovely boats. /One is swift in race the other transports much. Take either of these. / Old Väinämöinen spoke, "I do not really care about your vessels. I will not select any of your boats./ These I too have with every rower hauled up, every cove piled full,/ one steady in a high wind, the other that goes into a head wind".. He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in./ Young Joukahainen said, "I have two stallions, two lovely steeds./ One is better for racing, the other lively in the traces. Take either of these"./ Old Väinämöinen said, "I don't care about your horses. Don't bother me about white fetlocked horses./ These too I have, with every stall hitched full, every stable full,/ with fat as clear as water on their backbones, a pound of fat on their cruppers"./ He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in./ Young Joukahainen said, "Old Väinämöinen, reverse your magic words, revoke your enchantment./ I'll give you a high-peaked hat full of gold pieces, a felt hat full of silver pieces got by my father in the war, brought in from battle"./ Old Väinämöinen said, "I don't care about your silver pieces. I have no need, wretch, for your gold pieces./ These too I have with every storehouse crammed, every little box fully stocked./ They are gold pieces as old as the moon, silver pieces the age of the sun". /He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in. /Young Joukahainen said, "O old Väinämöinen , free me from this predicament, release me from this situation. /I'll give you my windrose back home, surrender my fields of sandy soil to free my own head, to random myself". / Old Väinämöinen spoke, "I don't want your wind rose, useless person, nor your fields of sandy soil./ These too I have, filled in every direction, windrose in every clearing./ My own are better fields, my own windrose finer"./ He bewitched young Joukahainen, kept bewitching him further down./ The young Joukahainen at last, however, grew desperate when he was up to his chin in the mud, up to his beard in a bad place./up to his mouth in a fen, in mossy places, up to his teeth behind a rotten tree-trunk. /Young Joukahainen said, "O wise Väinämöinen, eternal sage, now sing your song backward./ Grant me yet my feeble life. Set me free from here./ The current is already dragging at my feet, the sand scratching my eyes./ If you will reverse your magic words, leave off your magic spell, I'll give you my sister, Aino, to rinse out the wooden firkins, to wash the blankets,/ to weave fine stuff, to bake sweet bread."/ Then Väinämöinen was exceedingly delighted when he got Joukahainen's girl to provide for his old age./ He sits down on a song stone, sits himself on a song rock./ He sang once, he sang twice, he sang a third time too./ Young Joukahainen got free, got his chin free of the mud,/ his beard from a bad place, his horse from being a rock in the rapids,/ his sleigh on the shore from being a rotten tree-trunk in the water, his whip from being a shore reed./ He climbed slowly into his basket sleigh, He set out in a sorry state of mind with heavy heart to his dear mother's, to his esteemed parents."

    Student: When was that written?

    AG: Well, the oral tradition is old, maybe two, three, four, centuries.. It was written down mid nineteenth-century, not long ago, (17), perhaps (18)47. Lönnrot went around to Lapland and other places on field trips collecting these tales and has composed them into an epic. Here's Lönnrot out on his field trip looking for epics (from an 1847 illustration)........

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sorry about the wall of text but was presented exactly as it was posted....-Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 07-28-2015 at 08:33 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    INTERVIEW
    Touchstones
    Tavi Gevinson on riot grrrl, Patti Smith, and writing poetry out of necessity.

    BY RUTH GRAHAM
    Touchstones

    Tavi Gevinson has ideas about poetry, but then again, she has ideas about most things.
    Gevinson is known, and in certain quarters almost worshipped, for her sophistication
    in an ever-expanding series of cultural fields. She was a renowned fashion blogger at
    age 12, and at 15, she founded the influential online magazine Rookie, which has a
    readership far beyond its supposed audience of teen girls. Last fall, a few months
    after she graduated from high school in her suburban Chicago hometown, she starred
    in a revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth on Broadway, in a performance
    the New York Times called “astonishingly assured.”

    Rookie has frequently featured poetry on its site. Now, Gevinson has curated a special
    section of poems, art, and essays in the July/August issue of Poetry, with most
    contributions from “self-proclaimed angsty teens,” as she writes in her introduction.
    She spoke with the Poetry Foundation recently about Bob Dylan, getting over embarrassment,
    and the 19th-century poem that got her through her first real breakup last year. The
    following interview was edited and condensed.

    In your introduction, you write about “the fear so many of us have of writing and reading poetry, which is really a fear of seeming like an “angsty teen.” Why do you think so many of us have this idea of poetry as somehow embarrassing?

    Certain other mediums or other kinds of writing maybe leave a bit more room to cloak what you’re feeling or thinking or trying to say in irony or detachment. But something about a poem—you’re already saying you’re trying. There’s no way to distance yourself from it because you’re already putting effort into the layout. I remember once in school, one of the definitions we got of a poem was that the writer has a lot more control over how what they’re saying is read. ... I think people in general are conditioned to find something embarrassing about making an effort in regard to wanting [their] own emotions to be understood.

    I wonder if part of it is a fear of either liking or creating bad poetry.

    Yeah, that goes for all creativity, I guess, and something about poetry is maybe a little more embarrassing. I feel like maybe as you get older, it becomes more and more clear that what you’re experiencing has been experienced many times, and the feelings that you’re feeling are chemical reactions that have run through billions of other bodies. And when you’re a teenager, you don’t really understand that. Like Joan Didion—although she says this happens at like age 21 or 22, but I think it’s very teenager as well—she says there’s this conviction that this has never happened to anyone else before. So when you’re younger, you feel that way, and you put it down on paper, and then you get older, and you realize your experience wasn’t that unique. You get embarrassed.

    I mean, you are the only person who has ever been you or who has experienced what you’ve experienced. That’s the next level of perspective that I think is actually a lot more true. But when you reach the one just before it, when you’re like “Oh, I’m not special,” it becomes really embarrassing that you may have ever thought you were.

    Why do you think so many people seem to have their most meaningful interactions with poetry during their teen years?

    The only adults I know who write—and in a way, read—poetry are poets. It kind of narrows down to the people where that is actually their style of writing and their medium. When you’re a teenager, it’s easier to dabble more. ... Also, in a way, you’re protected. When I think about the poetry I wrote in high school, I felt protected because I felt like I was taking on a tone and an understood amount of drama as opposed to when I was just trying to write a personal essay, and it was straightforward. To use certain writing devices that I had used in poetry seemed melodramatic.

    Poetry can feel so vital at that age, but can’t it also feel intimidating?

    It probably says a lot about where I’m from that for me it was something that felt raw as opposed to, like, I was discovering the literary canon. My high school had a really great spoken word program. ... I remember the guy who led that program showing us Lil Wayne lyrics. That was more my experience with it.

    That it might feel old or stuffy or hard to access—yeah, some poets, but that’s the same as some filmmakers or some writers. That just exists everywhere. I think an easy in for me, I was getting into riot grrrl when I was in high school, and I had ways of getting my hands on old riot grrrl zines. Some of them I guess were lyrics, but I liked that it was this very raw expression I classified as poetry.

    I got really into Bob Dylan when I was, I guess, in middle school; he was the first thing I felt like was mine. I loved his music, and then I read Tarantula and kind of knew that it was bullshit but also was into it. Even now, I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s poetry, and it’s interesting to me what ends up accompanied by music and what ends up just itself. In terms of accessibility, I think that songwriters have always been my gateway.

    Who are your favorite poets these days?

    Margaret Atwood I love, E.E. Cummings I started to really like in high school. Also Jenny Zhang—she wrote an essay for this [Poetry] section, but her poetry I really like as well. We’re working on the fourth Rookie book right now, and there’s a section that’s poetry that a handful of readers sent in. There are so many good ones. There’s one by this girl named Stephanie—I don’t think she included her last name—but it’s just two lines: “We walked to the edge of the world and I pushed you off” or something.

    Once I wrote that intro, then I felt like I had to clarify that I’m not just saying, “Oh, these things are great because they’re just so raw.” I don’t like being given work and being told to like it just because it’s earnest or sincere. I think those are really admirable qualities, but that’s not what sets my favorite work apart from the stuff I don’t like. It’s also that I feel that someone is skilled or insightful or what have you. Even in talking so much about the importance of being like an angsty teen, I also feel like everything that’s in this package is also just really good.

    When I was in high school, a lot of my peers were really into writing poetry, but it seemed like relatively few were into reading it. Is that still true? Do you think it’s necessarily a problem?

    I think with everything, it’s good to have knowledge of what people have done before you and the ways other people have approached the medium and what the standards are. That’s what allows you to break the rules and everything. But I also feel like if young people are, like, feeling like that’s what they want to do, then that’s good, and they’ll get educated at some point. …

    There were a lot of classics I read in high school, but for whatever reason, because of my time and place and when I was brought into the world and the things that shaped me, newer works or more unconventional works resonated with me and shaped my brain more than a lot of books where I was able to go, “OK, I get why this is important, I get why this got us from point A to B.” But they weren’t the things that were teaching me how to live. And you can’t really decide what will resonate with you.

    When I think about my touchstones that totally shaped the way I view myself and life and growing up and my work, it’s like, I Love Dick, Ghost World, The Virgin Suicides, Franny and Zooey, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. And you kind of can’t decide what those things will be. There’s an interview with Miranda July where they ask which books she’s embarrassed not to have read. And she’s just like, we don’t have time. There are way more books, and there’s much more artwork in general than we can ever hope to take in in our short lives. It’s just kind of about whatever finds you at the right time.

    So, I think it’s great to have context when you’re writing something, but I also feel like whenever I wrote poetry when I was a teenager, it was out of necessity. I wasn’t thinking about poetry as something that had a history I was responsible for.

    What are some of your early memories of falling in love with a poem or a poet?

    A year ago, about when I graduated from high school, there were a few that really saved me. I was going through a really insane transition. I wrote out in watercolor Emily Brontë’s “Remembrance.” I had it on my wall at the foot of my bed, so if I started to feel totally consumed by what was happening—just graduating, ending my first-ever relationship, moving to New York and starting a Broadway play—I would look at this poem. There’s one part where she says something like “Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain.” I’m a very nostalgic person, and it helps to look at that and be like high school’s over, this relationship is over.

    Similarly, there’s W.H. Auden’s “O let not Time deceive you / You cann...............
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Robert, thank you for your two above posts. They were very interesting to read.
    Indifferent alike to praise or blame
    Give heed, O Muse, but to the voice Divine
    Fearing not injury, nor seeking fame,
    Nor casting pearls to swine.
    (A.Pushkin)

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    “pixel poetry: a meritocracy” by colin ward
    May 1, 2015
    Colin Ward

    PIXEL POETRY: A MERITOCRACY

    The Only Things Worse Than Generals Are Generalities.

    In serving the online literary community as critic, columnist, moderator, administrator, contest facilitator, technician, consultant, designer, and programmer for the last quarter century, I’ve been struck by the differences between its communities and products and those of the offline or “real” world.

    When internauts speak of “online” poetry they really mean “online workshoppers’” poetry, not what is found on blogs, vanity sites and personal webzines. For example, the loveable, irrepressible Bill Knott may be the Walt Whitman of our time, promoting, selling and giving away his work. Because he does much of this on the internet, offliners might consider him an online poet. No one who has been plugged in for more than a decade would agree. Similarly, every word that Shakespeare ever wrote can be found on various sites but he’s hardly an “internet poet.” Magazines archiving older issues online don’t make for “online poetry” in any but the most literal sense. Conversely, if Usenet star poet Robert J. Maughan scratched some verse onto birch bark 200 miles from the nearest computer and published it in The New Yorker it would still be an online poem. What distinguishes pixel from page poetry isn’t where it is written, revised, reviewed or published, but whether or not the poet’s technical and critical skills reflect time spent in an online workshop.

    At the risk of oversimplification, page poetry is about poets, pixel poetry is about poems. To an offliner, a poem may be a poet’s greeting or business card, a piece in a self-portrait jigsaw puzzle or an invitation to psychoanalysis. “Pragmatic” and “professional” describe what we find in poetry books and magazines. The careerist track of aspiring academics is the most salient example. In this publish-or-perish environment, people more interested in and better suited to teaching poetry than writing it are driven to use up print publishing resources. This impetus, along with other commercial motivations, is unique to the print world. One obvious ramification is that the once common practice of publishing poems anonymously or pseudonymously is unthinkable to today’s print poets.

    In contrast, the pixel poet is both a “purist” and an “amateur” who, for better or worse, views each poem as a isolated specimen. Unless part of a series, each poem will serve as its own context. As for the author’s role in this exploratory surgery, well, the biologist rarely speculates about the Creator. Think New Criticism, minus the crazy parts.

    When offliners think of workshops they imagine face-to-face (F2F) settings, either writers groups or MFA-style peer gatherings. Academic workshoppers tend to share similarities including occupation (student?), esthetic, education, locale and age. In either model the circumstances can make objectivity and candor difficult. Critics need distance, including physical space. The same verse submitted to an online critical forum may be examined by readers from all continents, ages, occupations, styles and knowledge levels. If posted to an expert venue, a poem might attract the attention of some of the greatest critiquers alive: Peter John Ross, James Wilks, Rachel Lindley, Stephen Bunch, the Roberts (Schechter, Mackenzie and Evans), Richard Epstein, Hannah Craig or John Boddie, to name only a few. There is, quite literally, a world of difference between F2F and online workshops. This diversity and sophistication avoids the homogeneity that F2F workshops can spawn. It also explains why the word “peer” is less frequently used to describe online workshops.

    What traits do online workshoppers have in common? The pixel poet must have an abiding interest in improving, obviously, but also in the elements, rather than just the products, of the craft. This is not the place for those who neither know nor care to know that “Prufrock” is metrical. This is not the place for “substance over form” advocates blurbing profound prose with linebreaks. This is not the place for, as Leonard Cohen would say, “other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.” This is a meritocracy of poems, and no one is better than their current effort. If Shakespeare himself posted a clunker to one of the expert-only venues he might be confronted with comments like:

    “You use words like a magpie uses wedding rings.”
    —Gerard Ian Lewis

    “Please tell me there were no dice involved in choosing your words.”
    —Manny Delsanto

    As you can imagine, the online workshop breeds humility and respect for the art form.

    The rules are simple: Critique as much and as thoroughly as you can and thank those who grace you with their thoughts. Newcomers to internet workshopping are urged to start on one of the “friendlies.” Of these, let me recommend:

    The Waters

    The Critical Poet

    Desert Moon Review
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 08-03-2015 at 10:00 PM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    POETRY NEWS
    Why writers won’t surrender to the electronic paper trail
    BY HARRIET STAFF

    Besides reading James Somers’ essay in The Atlantic, you can play back and review the entire process of writing it here. Long before word processors overwrote each step on the way to a final product, T.S. Eliot’s meticulous “versioning” of “The Waste Land” allowed scholars to peer into the writer’s process when all of the drafts, notes, and excised portions were published after his death. Had only the finished copy survived, the influence of Ezra Pound would never have been apparent.
    Some of Eliot’s typescripts had marks all over them, marks which were known to be the notes of Ezra Pound, Eliot’s champion in the U.S. and a well-known literary critic. He had made massive changes to the original manuscript. Example: that famous opener, “April is the cruellest month,” used to be buried under a section some hundred lines long before Pound cut the whole thing. All told his edits shrunk the poem in half. As a result it became more cryptic, rhymed less, and in some ways mutated into a bleaker, more biting critique of the modern world.
    Which is to say that Pound completely transformed “The Waste Land.” And the scary thing is that we might have never known—we might have lost our whole rich picture of the poem’s creation—had Eliot not been such a bureaucrat, typing up and shuffling around so many snapshots of his work in progress.
    Software like the kind Somers used to record his progress on these paragraphs exists. We have the technology to rebuild a poem—that is, if authors were willing to use it. Having that capability probably felt intuitive to the software developers who built programs like Etherpad and other text versioning tools. Writing code still requires drafts and revisions. In their case, however, the programmers need to be able to find their way back if something goes wrong or doesn’t work as intended.
    That’s because code is so fragile, and simple changes can propagate in complex and unpredictable ways. So it would be stupid not to keep old versions —i.e., versions that worked—close at hand.
    Writing is different. A writer explores, and as he explores, he purposely forgets the way he came…
    …No need, then, to drop so many breadcrumbs along the way. Especially when such a trail could do more harm than good. Readers could use it to find places where you massaged the facts; they’d be able to see you struggle with simple structural problems; they’d watch, horrified, as you replaced an audacious idea, or character, or construction, with a commonplace.

    -----------------------------------
    Eliot was great but Pound made him into the giant he is today. Millions that admire him as the best poet never even know this fact..
    Now, where is my Ezra Pound? I am sure I must have quite foolishly misplaced him...
    My ACHERON poem needs him badly!!! -Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 08-11-2015 at 06:23 PM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Interview with Robert Fanning
    Published May 11, 2015

    Robert Fanning, professor of creative writing at Central Michigan University, shares his manuscripts in process as well as the methods and sources of inspiration he used to draft them. His advice for burgeoning writers, poets in particular, is not the standard cookie-cutter words of wisdom you've heard elsewhere, and his refreshing approach to publishing will help you rethink Submission Sundays. And if you need a new playlist for writing, we have it.



    I've heard a couple of indie publishers say that they can always spot an MFA manuscript that's been submitted without reading the bio of the author—and they weren't being complimentary. "The style is always the same." I'd love to hear you address how teachers can create an environment where individual styles can flourish.

    I’ve heard that many times. Some of that has to do with editors having to read, yourself included, hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts. That’s a danger, I think, in teaching, that if your students might admire your work they might try to emulate it. I do not see that emulation happening in my classroom. I see a lot of diversity formally and thematically. I think it takes a lot of investment on the teacher’s part. You have to listen to your students and get a feel for what they are doing, their quirks, or where they are doing something different, and then try to feed that. I try to send them to the shelf that has the books that they need. I had a student a few years ago who was writing work that was wildly different from anything I’ve ever written, and I knew that, so I had to do my own research to find for him who his poets needed to be. I think that’s very important: learning to listen to students in order to see what they are trying to do that’s individual or unique, and trying to help foster that.

    You have your own forms and structures that you use in your own writing. And you might start with one structure on the page and then realize that’s not what the poem needs. It needs a different structure: same words, different structure. You’ve discovered those structures, discovered what works for you. You’re working with such profound triggers. I’m thinking about Hugo’s Triggering Town here. Do you think that some of what we are doing as teachers is not only helping them find what to read, and helping them to find forms that fit their own work, but also to help them discover and work with and not fear their own triggers?

    Absolutely. And to listen to themselves, and to go into their own lives. I would have been a very different teacher had I started teaching right when I came out of my MFA program. Which I didn’t. I went out away from the academy for many years. Returning later was liberating to me as an instructor, because I'm further down the road as a writer. I’m a much different poet; I’m trying new things all the time. So I’m in a particularly good place for working with young poets, I think, because once I’ve done something, I don’t trust it anymore, and I want to do something new. I don’t want to do the same thing again and again. I want each book to be a little different.

    Congratulations. That seems to be working. (laughter)

    Seems to be. To me, that’s a very good thing. I’m in a very edgy place, where I’m very open to what my students are doing. I don’t create any barriers between myself and my students. I prefer to have them call me by my first name. I write along with them. I think that’s important—for them to see me write and to read some stuff that really sucks, just to let them know we are really peers in this endeavor. Maybe poets who’ve published ten books and won loads of prizes, perhaps in some cases they set themselves above their students, maybe not even consciously. Then the students unconsciously place themselves in a position where they feel they must revere this iconic poet. And maybe that's where a cycle of aesthetic mimicking enters the scene. None of that is my style. We're all on a different journey as poets; I want to foster many styles by honoring what my students are drawn toward, if possible.

    Do you think that maybe some of the workshop “feel”—or maybe the sense that we can tell where someone studied based on their writing—is worshipful emulation? Because there’s not the peer feeling?

    Perhaps. I do tell my students when they are applying to MFA programs to look at who teaches there, to read their work, to see if they admire the work, to see if they feel they can learn from that person.

    But it’s important for teaching poets to give students as many models as they can, and be willing to give students a wide variety of models. Recently, I conducted an independent study with a student on avant-garde writing since 1970, and I researched right along with him, because it’s an area I’d neglected and I’d not read enough of. So I’m always learning with my students. That increases the excitement of it all for me. I arrange my syllabus so I’m going to learn from it. I read right along with my students. In my graduate classes, I’ll read some journals and find poets who have written some compelling new books, maybe a recent prize winner, and I won’t even read the books before the semester. I read them right along with the students so we can have a meaningful, edgy, unrehearsed conversation about what’s going on in each poet's work.

    So we are professional writers. We got our jobs in large part because we’re writers, and we’ve published, and we’ve done writerly things. But once we have those jobs, we are urged to become professional teachers. So some of what you just said strikes home with me because there might be this line between the two. We might become such good teachers that we are not authentic in our writing practice anymore, and we can’t bring that authentic writing practice to our students. Instead, we teach them things that anyone could teach them, if we are practicing our pedagogy and doing what all the teaching workshops would have us do. So there’s that line. And the magic moments we have with students are when the sides merge: when we are helping them from our authentic writing practice, but we just also happen to be teaching them something.

    That’s what most of us hope for.

    How do you manage that line?

    It depends on the level. I teach undergraduate through graduate classes. In my intro and intermediate courses, I have a body of things I feel I want them to learn and know. There are things that I did not learn at their age. I want their tool kit to be completely full. I want them to have a really strong sense of form, and rhyme, and meter, as many craft elements as possible to build upon. I try to be a professional teacher, whatever that means, but I don't think I'm any good at that, frankly. To me teaching is a deep and mutual engagement; it's a conversation, and it’s very human. I don’t think students are as willing to open up and trust this wild process of writing and self-examination, if you’re up there being Mister Professor-Man, spewing facts. They’ll start looking out the window, just as I would have. Being able to teach poetry is an absolute privilege, and yes, I prepare to teach; I spend hours and hours and hours preparing, but I don’t lecture, per se. One, I’m not very good at it. And two, then it takes the learning away from me, too. I think that we, as teachers, also learn in those moments that are off the cuff. When that magic is happening in the room, it’s because it’s human, and it’s in the moment.

    I love that idea of co-learning. It's not what you said, but it's what you meant.

    So when we talk about the models that you use, the texts that you use, in your teaching, what is something you continually return to? I know you want to stay fresh and always bring in new things, but what are some things you constantly reach back to use?

    I have certain texts I constantly come back to in my undergraduate classes. I like the Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry. I like the way it’s designed, as a bunch of mini-anthologies designed chronologically and by form. I like The Poet's Companion by Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio. Also, Steve Kowit's In the Palm of Your Hand, and other such How-To Manuals that have good, solid advice and poems in them.

    My intermediate class is really built around forms and modes. I arrange it so I can "drop poems in" from class to class, that are really good examples of whatever I’m teaching. So if we’re talking about internal rhyme, I have my go-to poets I’ve used for a long time, but then there will be a poet I read yesterday in a journal or a new book, and I realize I can drop that in right here. I build these little modules, but I’m constantly looking for new models as well. Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” is always a great poem for teaching scansion, because its meter is both simple and surprising. It’s a particularly amazing poem to scan. Yeats is good to scan, and Kim Addonizio is great to scan. I look at Plath for image and metaphor, Yusef Komunyakaa, Phillip Levine, Dorianne Laux, Matthew Olzmann, Vievee Francis, francine j. harris, John Rybicki, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Peter Markus, whatever I'm into that day, week, or month. It’s changing all the time, but I keep a keen awareness of diversity too.

    I want a myriad of voices in the room. Poetry is so eclectic and diverse now that it’s quite easy. There are so many good models now, such a wide array of voices, styles and modes. But that’s the hardest thing for me as a teacher—I want to cram the class with so many poems, and it’s really hard. I will have reached a really zen moment in teaching when I can take one poem to class. Instead, I drag my Santa sack of parcels and poems to throw around the room, and that’s too much. It’s overwhelming. I tell students constantly that you can learn so much just from slow, focused reading of just one poem. Just reading it over and over and over. But I love too many poems to bring in just one!

    It’s another one of those lines. So many of our students have never really been exposed to poetry. And so when you’re trying to teach a craft class, you want to expose students to forms and drop in examples of all the forms, but then you also think this might be the only opportunity to expose them to all the poetry that turns us on to what we do. Where do you see that line, and how do you manage that?

    That’s my hardest line. Teaching is a great sharing process to me. I'm like a tour guide in this incredible country of poetry, but we have limited time. It remains my biggest challenge as a teacher: to try to slow down and really focus on one or two poems. And I think I’ve gotten better at it, but I’ll still have on the syllabus: read these 20 poems, instead of focusing on one poem. It is absolutely the hardest thing for me, because there are so many amazing poets and poems I want my students to experience.

    Do you think any forms are dead? Or do you think all forms still have some life in them?

    fanning-sleep-poetryNo, and we're reminded of that all the time, as contemporary poets find new approaches to age-old forms, as well as creating new ones. I try to approach it as, first of all, why do this? Why write a sonnet? Are we doing this just to mimic? To try to shove a poem into a box, follow a lot of rules? So we have a conversation about that, organically. Why write a sonnet? What particular advantages does it have for the content you’re bringing forth? A sestina? A pantoum? These forms exist for a reason. They are built to enhance a poem's content. So we examine that.

    In studying visual art, a common pedagogical model is to begin with still lives. And I think that’s a great model. When my wife taught sculpture, she spent the first part of the semester just teaching her students how to look, how to see. As poets, that's a good place to begin to, even before we get deep into form. We need to see what we’re looking at before we start to make; we need to have a solid foundation of knowing how to render an image, and to see. Later, when it comes to form: the more organic conversation, then, is about what form even is and how it benefits us as poets. I always work really hard to help my students understand that form is extremely liberating. That’s a hard thing to grasp when you’re 19 years old and resistant to structure, as I was. You don’t want somebody putting a frame around all this passion you have, all this angst. You don’t want somebody to box it all in. So I’ll tell my students: you hate sestinas? Then write a sestina about how much you hate sestinas.

    Some students stick with free verse, but not without first writing in various forms, and realizing that free verse is its own challenging form, too, really. Regardless, form is then a tool they possess, and they can use it later, if they choose to—and I believe one's free verse benefits a great deal from wrestling with the armatures of form.

    What’s the most important thing students get out of a CW program? And what was the most important thing you got from your own MFA program, and how is that different from what you want our own students to get?

    Beyond the mentorship, the reading, the study, I want my students to feel that poetry is deeply meaningful and a sacred way of engaging with the self and the world, and it can sustain you through life’s trials and give meaning to your life. That's the most important thing, frankly, and I want them to take that with them. At this stage of my life, I realize poetry is something that has been there all the time for me. It’s gotten me through a lot of life challenges. It has helped me make sense of things that didn't make sense, and opened worlds up to me. I want my students to leave with that golden key. Whether they publish anything, whether they write a great book, all of that’s great, and certainly I want them to learn a lot about the craft. But the core thing I want them to remember is that poetry is a sacred act. It is a conversation with the world within the self and the self within the world. Yes: I want my students to have a deep knowledge of the craft, the forms, and history, to have a good sense of the movements and trends that inform what’s being done currently; that's important. I want them to have a sense of where they might be at the moment and where they might fit in to all of it. At that age, you’re just really starting to shape your aesthetic, as I was. I noticed that my aesthetic started to shift over time, so I let them know that, too. Find your aesthetic but be open to it changing.

    Part of what we bring to our students is the best of what we got as students, and/or what we felt we were missing. I gained so much from my experience at Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program. That’s a brilliant, amazing program. It’s so focused on relationships. They have an individual conference system where you meet with your mentor often. There’s a lot of one-on-one mentorship. So I built that system into my teaching, too. Sarah Lawrence's program felt fairly open, which was a good thing, for me, but can be dangerous because it requires self-discipline, which is good practice for the writing life. I quickly realized I’d have to do a lot of work on my own to make the program what I wanted. So I went into the library; I started at A and wanted to work my way through to Z and read as many poetry books as I could in those two years. So that is something I bring to my teaching, too. I tell my students, don’t wait for me to tell you what to read. You go find the poets you love, too. Then, read everything they’ve written. I bring a big focus on reading and personal exploration in the art.



    Try on as many voices as you can, as many modes as you can. Don’t think of yourself as a certain kind of poet, too early on, if ever.


    Earlier, we discussed triggers, and not fearing them. Some students, when they are new to it, think every poem has to be original, and new and different from any they’ve already written. Some students fear repeating themselves. We have to guide them and say, well obviously this is what you need to talk about. This is your thing; don’t be afraid of it. So we talk to them about triggers, but also about influence and how we bring our influences into our writing. That can be part of our shift in aesthetic. Do you have those conversations with them?

    To speak to the repetitive issue: I think that’s an important thing. It’s tough because, yes, they could be writing the same poem over and over again. On the one hand, I’ll tell them: follow these obsessions as far as you can. If for whatever reason you’re writing these really sad poems about a partner or your father, they need to come out, and you need to work them through. But you get to the point at which you realize you’re sitting down to write another sad father poem, reflexively. And when you know that, maybe you really have to start to make a shift. It’s hard, because it's also important to follow those obsessions to a seeming conclusion. Even in my work, themes keep emerging and emerging over years. That is going to happen organically. On one hand, I’m telling students to follow it through, but on the other hand, also practice writing poems th
    ----------------------------------------------------------

    We have a couple teachers here that may find this article/interview interesting aside from its primary poetic evaluations.
    Far too little individuality is allow or nurtured in the one size has to fit all public schools today. -Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 08-12-2015 at 11:10 PM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    The hard part about making a movie from life
    is that life was barely plausible enough
    to be a movie in the first place.

    He barely survived his, a monument
    to the human ability
    to endure.

    For 50 years, her turbulent personal
    made her a staple of tabloids.
    And last year she revealed
    she’d had a double mastectomy.
    Now she’s a dervish of manic energy
    with large eyes, full lips,
    and cheekbones of suffering.

    So much, so overwhelming, so negative,
    she says. Who was this little troublemaker
    who didn’t think he was worth anything
    to get me through all the things that keep me
    up at night, sitting with the sound
    in my boots, working.

    She lights up, she recalls,
    It’s easy to fudge things.
    It’s hard to be devoted.

    [NOTE: Found/blackout poem crafted from a TIME article titled
    “The Lady and the Scamp. Angelina Jolie Finds Her Equal,” as
    written by Lev Grossman about how the actress came to choose
    and tell the story of Unbroken.]
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Amy King

    Amy King Raised in Baltimore and Georgia, Amy King earned a BS in English and women’s studies from Towson University, an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, and an MA in poetics from SUNY Buffalo. Her writing, which shows elements of Language poetry, has been influenced by her work with Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe in Buffalo, although she is also drawn to confessional and New York School poets. She has cited César Vallejo, Gertrude Stein, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and John Ashbery as her current influences. While applying pressure to the boundaries of “queer” poetry, King also finds inspiration in pop culture, science, social taxonomies, and other questions of gender, ontology, and culture.

    King's forthcoming book, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. John Ashbery described her poems in I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press, 2011) as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” The book was named one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011. King is also the author of the poetry collections Slaves to do These Things (Blazevox, 2009), I’m the Man Who Loves You (Blazevox, 2007), and Antidotes for an Alibi (Blazevox, 2005). Her chapbooks include Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press, 2007), The Good Campaign (2006), The Citizen’s Dilemma (2003), and The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press, 2002). Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and her essays have appeared in Boston Review, Poetry, and The Rumpus.

    In 2015, King received the WNBA Award from the Women’s National Book Association, joining the ranks of Ann Patchett, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rachel Carson, and Pearl S. Buck. She was also honored by the Feminist Press as one of the “40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism” awardees, and she received the 2012 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

    King serves on the executive board of VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts and is. She also moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and for many years she moderated the Poetics List, sponsored by the Electronic Poetry Center. She also founded and curated the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry, from 2006 to 2010.

    King coedited, Poets for Living Waters
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Sweeping Hearts
    Writing poems inspired by Native American music and poetry.

    BY ELIZABETH RABY
    Sweeping Hearts
    Having students write poems while listening to a cassette tape of "Earth Spirit" by R. Carlos Nakai, a Navajo-Ute who plays the Native American flute, has been a remarkably successful exercise with young people from grades two through twelve. Inspired in part by the Native American poets at the 1988 and 1992 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festivals at Hopewell, New Jersey, and in part by Margot Fortunato Gait's article, "The Story in History," in the September-October 1992 issue of Teachers & Writers, I use the tape as a way to bring a Native American presence to the classrooms I visit as a poet-in-die-schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

    Following Gait's example, I draw both a pyramid and a circle on the chalkboard. Gait says that the European conception of the universe is structured like a pyramid, by which things are ranked "according to their smartness or complexity or similarity to us." On this pyramid, humans are outranked only by the angels and then by God. Students have little difficulty assigning things to a place in this hierarchy. I suggest that dirt may rank near the bottom, hence our tendency to feel justified in treating dirt "like dirt." Students find it easy to think of examples of what we have done to dirt.

    We next consider the Native American paradigm of being: a circle that includes, in no hierarchical order, humans and dirt, thunder and bears. I read aloud Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," a fine example of the circularity and the respect for the things of this world that such a vision engenders:

    Can’t know except in moments
    Steadily growing, and in languages
    That aren’t always sound but other
    Circles of motion.
    Like eagle that Sunday morning
    Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
    In wind, swept our hearts clean
    With sacred wings.
    We see you, see ourselves and know
    That we must take the utmost care
    And kindness in all things.
    Breathe in, knowing we are made of
    All this, and breathe, knowing
    We are truly blessed because we
    Were born, and die soon within a
    True circle of motion,
    Like eagle rounding out the morning
    Inside us.
    We pray that it will be done
    In beauty.
    In beauty.
    With this poem still echoing in our minds, I tell the class that we will write while listening to a tape of Native American flute music. After making sure that everyone has paper and a sharpened pencil, I explain that while the tape plays I will read three poems aloud, and that afterward there should be no talking for a few minutes. The only sound will be the sound of the flute. I invite the students to go wherever the flute takes them, to hear whatever message it brings them, to follow whatever story it tells—to write down whatever comes to them.

    The first poem I read is "Spring Night in Lo-Yang—Hearing a Flute" by Li Po, which I tell the students was written more than a thousand years ago:

    In what house, the jade flute that sends these dark notes drifting, scattering on (he spring wind that fills Lo-Yang? Tonight if we should hear the willow-breaking song, who could help but long for the gardens of home?
    —Translated by Burton Watson

    Then I read Joy Harjo's "Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On":

    This morning when I looked out the roof window
    before dawn and a few stars were still caught
    in the fragile weft of ebony night
    I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
    a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
    and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
    in this city far from the hammock of my mother's belly.
    It works, of course, and deer came into this room
    and wondered at finding themselves
    in a house near downtown Denver.
    Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
    to get them back, to get us all back,
    because it's too early to call Louis
    and nearly too late to go home.

    Finally, I read "An Evening at Windy Point for Christopher Jay" by the Hopi poet, Ramson Lomatewama. It begins with the sound of a Japanese bamboo flute (suizen):

    The sound of suizen
    lingers over a valley of sand.
    Desert shadows grow in silence.
    The man, sitting at the edge,
    brings music to Windy Point.
    Below,
    juniper and pinon trees listen.
    Smooth bamboo songs
    touch the face of summer.
    There are no monastery walls here,
    Only the music,
    the man,
    the spirit.

    The haunting sound of the flute and the softly spoken poems have never failed to achieve a strange combination of attention and peace-fulness in the classroom. Very young children may miss an occasional word or reference, they never miss the beauty of the language or the spirit of the poems. Usually there is so much noise in our lives—perhaps without realizing it we all hunger for the calm this music inspires. Students often ask that it be played as the background to other writing exercises. The music establishes a mood they like to extend, which makes it especially good for the first day of a writing workshop.

    The music evokes strong emotions in the students, makes them wish for a more perfect world, and gives many of them a chance to express their anguish and anger about the state of the environment. They take bits and pieces from the poems I read aloud and combine them with their own personal histories and the mood the music creates. Here are some examples:

    Watching Wondering
    I wake and hear the sweet music of the flute
    I follow it
    Watching
    Wondering
    Beauty fills the air
    Each step I take
    Watching
    Wondering
    Suddenly the music gets louder
    I spot a giant fall of water
    Watching
    Wondering
    The lion was next to the lamb
    There meadows and lakes are plenty
    Watching
    Wondering
    I sit under a tree thinking
    Has God called me home?
    Watching
    Wondering.
    I close my eyes and fall asleep
    Watching and
    Wondering no more.
    —Carolyn Bahnck, Fifth grade



    Mother Earth

    As the woman fell to the hot sand,
    She started to think about the child she once had,
    About the husband she once had not so long ago,
    And about the tribe she once had that she would roam the land, sea,
    and sky with.
    As she sat there too dried out to drop a single tear for her tribe and
    her family,
    She looked around at her only friends, the sun, the sky, the land, the
    plants.
    And pleaded for forgiveness, and a child to look after.
    Then something strange happened,
    She felt a sharp pain, then the cry of a newborn baby
    And she no more felt lonely but happy.
    Then she looked around and silently said
    Thank you to her friends,
    She noticed that everything started to bloom and come to life,
    And then a second baby was born,
    But it was not a real person, it was an animal.
    Then a bright light came down to her and told her, "You have been
    given the greatest
    gift of all time, the gift to create life for all
    kinds of living creatures."
    Then she closed her eyes and started to think
    of all her friends, opened her eyes and saw her
    friends and family looking at her,
    And from that day on she knew the earth
    would have life on the land that she, once, roamed by herself.
    —Melissa Janis, fifth grade


    Before, Before

    I am the blue-green grass,
    I bend into the water,
    the quickly moving water is
    angry,
    angry with the vengeance of the
    water-god,
    He rushes by angrily,
    He is mad at the people,
    the people in the village,
    they are hurting him with their
    chemicals,
    I have seen better days,
    when the water-god was happy
    gurgling and laughing,
    before the people,
    when animals came to drink,
    before the hunters,
    Before, Before.
    —Tania Philkill, sixth grade



    The flute calls to me.
    Its sounds rush through my body
    As an eagle's feather
    Falls at my feet.
    A wolf calls
    From the hills
    Joining the sweet sound
    Of the music.

    The fresh, warm air
    From the desert
    Fills my lungs, as the flute
    Seems to cease, but starts again.

    This is a song of pureness and love.

    The flute calls to me
    Its sounds rush through my body
    As I awake
    From this dream of time.
    —Elisa Keller, seventh grade



    The flute sounds like a boy lying on his bed.
    Looking at stars through his window.
    Trying to express his feelings by playing.
    He is sad, very hurt.
    He is thinking, wondering where everyone is.
    He is lonely, just him and his soul.
    He is calling for help, trying to see,
    He is thinking, wondering if anyone's out there.
    Feeling the way he feels.
    —Danielle Scheel, seventh grade



    Gone, but Still Alive

    The medicine man comes through
    the opening in my teepee,
    I lie under furs of animals
    I trapped last winter.
    I lie now shivering from the disease.
    It is now part of me.
    It grows with me, is me,
    and I am it.
    We are one.
    The medicine man is becoming unclear,
    as he kneels beside the fire
    to make my healing potion.
    The medicine man starts dancing.
    I can feel his presence beside me.
    By my head, my side, my feet,
    yet I cannot see him.
    He is becoming more and more unclear.
    My shivering ceases.
    All is black.
    The medicine man is on earth,
    but I am now in the sky.
    My soul is alive,
    soaring above the medicine man.
    I am well, I am free!
    —Katie Cleary, eighth grade




    The
    soft wind
    wakes up the
    sleeping trees.
    The cool green forest
    is awakening to the radiant
    dawn. The sun's golden rays
    shine through the well-nourished
    trees. The healthy animals scatter around
    the forest bottom. The huge mountains stand
    high above the never-ending sapphire sky. The forest
    creatures scatter back to their homes. The sun goes down
    like a ball of fire. The darkness of the sky blankets the
    sleeping forest.
    —Brooke Holland, eighth grade


    As the culminating activity for a unit on history, social studies, or environmental science, writing poems while listening to "Earth Spirit" can help students organize new facts, reflect on their meaning, and make them their own. I have often asked students to think of one single thing, a fact or an idea that they remember from a recently completed unit, and to write a poem about what that fact or idea means to them. In this case, a judicious selection of poems read aloud at the beginning of the session, combined with the music, is all that is needed to get the poems started.




    Elizabeth Raby, "Sweeping Hearts: Writing Poems Inspired by Native American Music and Poetry" from Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments. Copyright © 1995 by Elizabeth Raby. Reprinted by permission of Teachers & Writers Collaborative.
    Originally Published: August 11, 2015
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Counter-Clockwise: Editorial Manifesto

    Clockwise Cat exists as a triumph over tyranny: The tyranny of time, the tyranny of linguistic convention, the tyranny of hierarchy and political oppression.

    Time in this context is construed as that which constrains and constricts us – the elements that inhibit our imaginations and attempt to confine us in conformist cages. Indeed, these conformist cages are layered like Russian dolls – we break out of one cage only to find we are confined by a still-bigger one. Time is a human construct that was subliminally conceived to delude us into thinking that work, not leisure and creativity, was the “aim” of life. Thus, the tyranny of time is the tyranny of work. We must work because that is the system that power has built. Clockwise Cat, however, hisses at and pisses on the idea that life is about work.

    Cats, of course, defy time, and fully apprehend leisure and pleasure. Their purrs are vibrations of the universe reminding us to pace ourselves and enjoy existence. Their fur is like cosmic velvet to the touch, its plush texture calming our agitations. Cats sleep the majority of their day because, well, why not? Sleep is the mystical space between life and death, a delirious oblivion where angels and demons tangle in holy visions, which provides refuge and refreshment.

    Cats prove that time doesn’t really exist.

    (Granted, the universe operates on a sort of “time” paradigm, but humans have seized upon this elusive idea and ruthlessly pounded out the cosmic core of it. We must aim to re-capture the mystical nexus of time, and not attempt to “tame” it. Time is undomesticated, not doomed for imprisonment in clock-cages.)



    Linguistic convention is anything language-wise that complacently perpetuates the status quo. Language is a living entity, and should be employed vigorously and imaginatively, in order to keep it flowing forward rather than stagnating like mosquito-ridden puddles. Indeed, linguistic convention acts as a mosquito to language, sucking it dry of life, bleeding it of its very essence. Language must be free and feral, allowing for radical reinvention, or it crumbles under its own dead weight. Those poets and writers such as the Symbolists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Magic Realists, Beats, the post-modern experimentalists, the Avant Garde-ists, the Gonzo Journalists – hell, even Dickinson and Shakespeare, – hell, even Eliot – were and are intuitively cognizant of the urgency of injecting outlandish innovation into language to keep it fresh and real.

    You could say that ALL poets defy linguistic convention in some way, and that may be true to a point. But I say, it’s the ones who instinctively and deliberately subvert convention and create a wild, authentic, individualistic, iconoclastic idiom who are the true language-guerillas. e.e. cummings, anyone?
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...ndation.org%29


    ESSAY
    “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
    The famous poem was nearly not published.

    BY THE EDITORS
    “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
    This month marks the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published when Eliot was just 26 years old. Had it not been for the intervention of Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, the seminal poem that helped usher in American Modernism might not have been published at all.

    Eliot originally wrote parts of the monologue of a troubled, middle-aged man in 1910 and soon combined these pieces to form the long, complicated poem readers know now. Then he put it in a drawer for four years and focused on his graduate study in philosophy.

    In the spring of 1914, Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s college friend, passed “Prufrock” along to Harold Monro, editor of Poetry and Drama. He reportedly remarked that the poem is “absolutely insane” and turned it down.

    In September 1914, Eliot first met Pound in London, who was then the acting foreign correspondent of Poetry. Eliot showed him “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Pound was elated. “Prufrock,” wrote Pound to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, is “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” adding exuberantly in all caps, “PRAY GOD IT BE NOT BE A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.”

    The following slideshow features three of Pound’s letters to Monroe, proclaiming Eliot’s talent and urging her to publish “Prufrock.” (“I hope you’ll get it in soon,” he wrote.) She found room in the June 1915 issue. Though Monroe’s responses to Pound are not available, his letters hint at her apprehension. “In being the first American magazine to print Eliot you have scored again, though you may not yet think so,” Pound wrote shortly after “Prufrock” appeared in print, still compelled to convince her of its value.


    View slideshow of letters from Pound to Monroe

    For more background, watch Eliot scholar and editor Christopher Ricks the Prufrock centenary at Harvard University.

    Letters by Ezra Pound, from New Directions Publishing Company acting as agent, copyright 2015 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Company. Photos courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.


    Originally Published: June 8, 2015
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    INTERVIEW
    Living Tradition
    Clare Cavanagh talks about the joys and challenges of translation.

    BY ALEX DUEBEN
    Living Tradition
    Image courtesy of Clare Cavanagh.
    Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Clare Cavanagh had no exposure to the Polish language. In graduate school, she says, she decided to take a class in Polish only because “it was a department requirement.” There, her career as one of the premier Polish-to-English translators began. Earlier this year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Nobel Prize–winner Wisława Szymborska, who passed away in 2012. Cavanagh, who translated Szymborska’s poetry for more than three decades, edited the volume. She spoke with the Poetry Foundation recently about the benefits of lengthy collaborations and how manners were instrumental to Szymborska’s work. The following interview was condensed and edited.


    How did you get started as a translator? I’m assuming you didn’t wake one day and decide you wanted to translate Polish and Russian poetry.

    [laughs] Russian was my first Slavic language, and I dabbled in translation when I was an undergraduate. I started Polish in graduate school only because I had a departmental requirement; my teacher happened to be the person who became my co-translator and my really dear friend, Stanislaw Baranczak. I had only one year of Polish at the time, and we just discovered that we liked translating together. If I hadn’t had Stanislaw holding my hand and saying “Go for it,” I don’t think I would have started.

    What was it exactly that interested you?

    I went to graduate school knowing I wanted to work on poetry. I knew poetry was going to be my thing, and I wanted to work on Mandelstam. The professor at the time, who taught Russian poetry and will remain nameless, almost convinced me to switch to novels; he was so dreadful. We used to pinch each other to stay awake in his seminars. [laughs] Stanislaw was just the opposite. He was fabulous, and he was so excited that I wanted to do poetry. I was his first American student after he came to the States. He spent extra time talking about Polish poetry with me in his office outside class. He himself was a poet and lived in this poetic world and knew the people. It changed my whole perception of literature. Suddenly, I was seeing things from the inside. It was addictive.

    Is it necessary to understand not just the language but also the period and what’s going on around the work to translate effectively?

    Knowing the language definitely helps, though lots of translators work from cribs or collaborate with someone else. Stanislaw and I, in our case, both knew English, and we both knew Polish, just to different degrees. I think the only way you get ready is by doing it and then doing it again and then doing it again. And getting a lot of feedback along the way, which I got because I was working in a partnership with someone who was an extremely experienced translator going into Polish. You learn it only by doing it. If you really had to know everything about the milieu, how would you ever even dare? And what would you do with people who have been dead for a couple thousand years?

    It turned out that I loved working on this living tradition and watching things unfold. From watching struggles and listening to people, I know the period in a way I never would have otherwise. Who hates whom, who loves whom, who’s influenced by whom, who’s pretending not to be influenced by whom. Mandelstam had a high school teacher who was a minor symbolist poet, and he said that from going to this high school teacher’s house, he learned that the tradition was one, long, extended family argument. Once you dip into that, you start seeing it everywhere. You start seeing literary tradition in a different light. It was really exciting. Now Szymborska’s gone and Stanislaw’s gone and Milosz is gone, so it’s not the same world, but at least I was in it for a while.

    When did you first encounter Wisława Szymborska’s work?

    It was in a class with Stanislaw. I first read her in a bilingual edition back in 1981 or 1982, and then I kept reading her. Stanislaw and I first started working on the poet Ryszard Krynicki, a dear friend of the Baranczaks whom I’ve gotten to know. He’s a poet of the same generation. Somebody asked Stanislaw to translate some of Ryszard’s poems, and Stanislaw asked me to help. I was his research assistant then. Then we did an anthology. This would have been 1985 or 1986, and [Szymborska] had a collection called The People on the Bridge; we started translating and just couldn’t stop.

    What about her work really interested you?

    I think she probably has the best sense of humor of any poet I’ve read. [laughs] This isn’t an official critical category, but she has enormous charm as a poet. It’s easy to get drawn in. I always get frustrated when people say she’s plainspoken or straightforward. She’s not. There’s all this stuff just beneath the surface—or sometimes right there on the surface. It looks immediately accessible, but the further you go in, the more you see.

    Did you get to meet her and spend time with her over the years?

    I met her for the first time at the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm, actually, which was a terrifying way to meet someone for the first time who doesn’t speak English. I kept thinking, My God, it’s like meeting Emily Dickinson, but she speaks only Polish. I was terrified of making mistakes in Polish. But she, bless her heart, turned out to be embarrassed that she didn’t know English. And then we got to be friends. She was a very kind person, but she also liked me. I made the cut. Part of it was because I was friends with the Baranczaks, but part of it was because we just hit it off. She had to be extremely protective of her time. She had a very close-knit group of friends. I know friends who went to some events after her death, and they were shocked at this wide range of friends from all regions who were not even remotely literary. She was immensely protective, not just of her time but of herself. I went to Poland once or twice a year, and she always made time for me—except once. Her assistant told me, “She’d love to see you but she’s in the country writing poems, and she can’t stop right now.” Given that she wrote so few poems for a long life, I thought it best to leave her alone. The last time I saw her was the May before she died.

    I’m curious about some choices you made in assembling the book. For example, you chose not to translate Szymborska’s earliest work. In the afterword, you sound very protective of her.

    It’s the difference of working on someone you know. In that case, I knew how she would react. Most poets when they’re doing their collected poems, they do a lot of screening. W.H. Auden is a famous example. They cut things they wish they’d never written. She didn’t get a chance. Marina Tsvetaeva said there are poets with history and poets without history. She meant poets who from the first poem sound like themselves versus the poets who have to grow into themselves. Szymborska was someone who you could see where she started finding herself. She laid out all the road markers by looking over these various selected poems so carefully and deciding what not to publish. I wanted to respect that, trying to imagine what she would have wanted it to be. That’s what happens when you know the person.

    She reprinted two or three of her socialist realist poems afterward, and really most of them have only historical interest. It’s good to give people an example of what socialist realist poetry looks like, but I wasn’t going to put 40 or 50 of those in the volume. She also wrote a lot of comic poetry, but she never put that in the various selected poems. I’m sure lots of other poets write limericks on the sidelines too.

    She wrote so few poems, relatively speaking. Was she writing constantly but happy with only a few of the poems?

    A good friend of mine who was also a good friend of hers and who knew her for a very long time said that she threw out 90 percent of what she wrote. I think part of it is privacy again. She didn’t want the poem out there unless it was absolutely as good as she could get it. Otherwise, it was like going out in public with your buttons done wrong. It’s bad manners. She loved Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Manners,” which she knew in Polish translation. The thing is that you observe good form; you don’t impose your messes on other people. She just didn’t want them out there. There were some poems that I think were very close to being done that she had in draft form, and I’m still of two minds about them, but I can’t do anything about it now.

    You made a comment in the book’s afterward that one of her poems was untranslatable. What does that mean, exactly?

    It’s the form, the language, and the puns in this case. I remember working on that poem because it was rhyme and meter, plus untranslatable puns about a walk in the woods. They were all forestry-related puns; you couldn’t invent a non-forestry pun. She had a fabulous rhyme; it was gotyk-niebotyk, which means “Gothic” and “skyscraper.” She was using it to describe a pine tree. It works great, and I worked and worked, and it sounded worse and worse, and I told her that. She said, “Oh forget it; you can’t translate that one.” Then she said the Dutch translator had wasted six months before he gave up.

    I was trained by Stanislaw that you have to maintain the form. Acting as though that’s the first thing to go means that you’re no longer treating it like a poem. He was phenomenally gifted at it, but he hated the idea that a poem was its literal meaning and the form was just something thrown in for decoration. If she rhymed, we had to rhyme. He got me stuck in that mode. I can recognize that there are other forms of translation, but I can’t do that. I have to work my damnedest to keep the form. It’s also thinking about what Stanislaw would let me get away with. I’ve internalized his voice from working with him for so long.

    After working with her for so long, I would imagine that it’s hard to think about what’s next.

    I figured out after she died—which I refused to believe for a long time—that I’ve been working on Szymborska pretty much half my life. [laughs] It felt really strange. The book is out, which makes me happy, but it’s strange to develop such an odd skill set in which you say, I can see what she’s doing here, or I know what’s she’s thinking, this is her kind of simile. Now I have no place to put that. I’ve been working on a biography of Czeslaw Milosz for a long time. I’m still translating Adam Zagajewski. I went back to Ryszard Krynicki, the poet Stanislaw and I started with. I’m doing a volume of his poetry for New Directions. So I’ll translate other people. I’ve been working on Zagajewski for a really long time too. I’m so glad he’s still sending me things. I have that same sense of working with someone for decades and saying, “Wow, look what he did with this.” I love working on poets where you live with them, get to be friends with them over years and years.

    From my admittedly limited reading, there seems to be a lot of Western European and American notions of poetry and language and politics that don’t match up with Polish or Russian models.

    It’s true. There’s a lot of exchange back and forth too, which is also fun and surprising and, again, something I see when I’m in my scholarly mode. I shocked the Poles by pointing out that something they had assumed Milosz had gotten from a Polish thinker he’d actually gotten from reading Faulkner. There’s all this strange back and forth that’s really fun to trace, but the whole idea of what the poet is and what a poem has historically been is radically different. Although the normalization in Poland certainly has changed some, and I can’t really speak so much to what’s happening in Russia right now with poetry. Certainly you don’t have—not just in American literary culture but in the culture generally—a canon of poets who if you don’t know, you’re not a good American. It would be an embarrassment to admit that you’ve never read Pushkin or Akhmatova or Mandelstam. They’re your tradition. They’re part of what constitutes your identity. There are negative sides to that too, but we don’t have that even remotely.

    The thing which partly has given Russian and Polish and Eastern European poetry such prestige over the past few decades is the idea that you could actually be oppressed for your poetry or suppressed for your poetry. Mandelstam has a hyperbole about it—only in Russia do they care enough about poets to kill them. A mixed blessing, to say the least.

    Originally Published: August 18, 2015
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



    Poetry fans join in with a nationwide celebration in Lindley
    13:20, 14 OCTOBER 2014
    BY EMMA DAVISON

    The event at Lindley Library marked National Poetry Day

    Poet Doris Corti with Janice Kilroy, customer service officer from Lindley Library, at celebration of National Poetry Day
    Poetry fans have helped mark a national celebration of the creative writing form.

    The event at Lindley Library was organised as part of National Poetry Day.

    It is the nation’s biggest celebration of poetry and is held every year on the first Thursday in October.

    To mark the occasion a group of poetry enthusiasts gathered in the Lidget Street library. They were joined by Lindley poet Doris Corti, who has won awards and seen her work published nationally.

    Earlier this year the 85-year-old won top prize in the Open Poetry Competition of the National Association of Writers’ Groups for her poem A Skylark’s Song.

    Doris led the event with readings from her new book Avenue of Days. Participants also gave readings and shared poems.

    Librarian Judith Robinson said: “The event was well received and well attended. It was a lovely way to celebrate National Poetry Day”.
    Just a reminder , my father's side was Brit and Irish. Writing and whiskey drinking came natural to me.
    No longer can drink the whiskey but my pen hand still works. Make that keyboard hands.-- Robert J. Lindley
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 08-22-2015 at 09:24 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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