A poem that stays on my computer I can still love, has taught me something, can still be relevant to my writing life. However, an essay that stays on my computer waiting for her dance card to be filled feels entirely different.
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies. ~ Boris Pasternak
in the mail Saturday. It was in the quiet of the afternoon that I read it through completely the first time. I will have more to say about it later this week, but I was so impressed by it I could not out it down.
.
.
.
.
.
. 
.
I was listening to an NPR story this morning (big surprise) about a visual artist and I was struck with an idea for a new poetry project.
It struck me that everyone's handwriting could be seen as an artistic expression. While we have a generally recognized alphabet that makes up our language, each of us has a personalized rendition of each letter. While our handwriting may follow a generally recognized formula we, like any artist have our own flair that distinguishes our writing.
In this age when letter writing is almost a lost art, and we see written communications mostly in printed text format, I thought it would be interesting to collect a number of samples of handwriting from different individuals and treat them as though they were each individual pieces of artwork. I would then select four or five of these and write a poetic expression of what the artwork speaks to me. I don't mean the words but rather the lines on the page. This would not be really any different then writing a poem inspired by a painting or a picture.
Anyway, if anyone is interested it contributing a few paragraphs of handwriting sample for the cause, e-mail me at poet@michaelawells.com
Thursday night I was fortunate enough to be in the audience at a Kansas City reading by Aimee Neshukumatathil. Aimee read from her book Miracle Fruit, her latest book titled At the Drive-In Volcano and from a newer, yet to be published manuscript.
Aimee's writer voice is not the particularly powerful voice that I usually am drawn to. Nor did she quite seem to meet the template for an academic poet. She is perhaps more in the style of Naomi Nye… a gentle voice, a voice of knowledge, a voice that is zealous and vibrant, a layered mingling of her pedigree and contemporary American culture. Among my favorites from the reading, Corpse Flower, Swear Words, and Fishbone.
She’s a very relaxed reader who commands the audience attention with a balance of humor and casual storytelling in addition to her poetry. Her tone of voice when reading is a pleasant and reassuring one.
I enjoyed reading through Miracle Fruit last night and today. Her poetry is tight and neat and relies upon a wide range of knowledge of the plant and animal kingdom as well as ethnic and cultural insight.
I've not really had any experience with collaborative poetry in the context of shared writing. I always consider poetry to generally be a collaborative between the poet and the reader, but that's another whole matter.
I suppose it requires a special temperament for two artists, both poets, to work together to produce something that is a joint creation. C.D. Wright in a symposium I attended earlier this month, spoke of collaborating with photographers on work. That seems to me to be a particularly beneficial arrangement given the tenets under which both art forms develop.
Mutating the Signature (great name by the way) is a relatively new blog of two poets who have been actually collaborating for a while now. The poets Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore have certainly put an interesting light upon such work.
Nathan for example has explained a part of the benefit of this shared creative process this way,'"Collaborative poetry offers a respite from the struggles of solitary work. My poor, overworked ego is given a break as process and product are shared, voices are melded. It’s a fantastic feeling to be partner to the creation of a voice that’s greater than your own.'" I think any of us who've written for a while are certainly aware just how solitary the work can become.
Dana seems to derive an energy from seeing the twists and turns that can develop when two are working to meld their voices. She is quoted on their site as explaining it like this... '"The surprise of the poems we’ve written. Oh, the unforeseen turns the writing takes. Going in and not knowing where you’ll come out, or when or how. The way we each respond to the words and phrases the other person contributes. How a piece that in one moment seems like it’s headed nowhere fast can, in a word or two, find its way somewhere startling, strange and gorgeous.'"
As I've stated, I've not really worked except in the simplest terms, like at a workshop of people joining to create a poem, and that was more for fun and hardly a serious collaborative venture. I'm curious about the experiences of others, be they positive or negative. Any takers is this discussion? What's it like and perhaps you can share a bit about any rules or secrets of making it work that you'd like to share?
I'm excitedly awaiting the KC visit of Aimee who will read from her book At the Drive-In Volcano. She's part of a ethnic poetry series that earlier brought Victoria Chang to KC. These are two poets that I've followed via the Internet (good Lord, sounds like I'm a stalker) for a while now so getting to see them both read in person is a treat.
Park University and the Missouri Arts Council have made this series possible so they deserve some credit for promoting these poets here locally.
This was produced on Wordie. I found it via Christine Klocek-Lim's site. I put four of my poems selected at random and dropped them into the gadget for generating “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
Pretty cool.
Besides getting up this morning and writing, I went this afternoon to the Writers Place for the 4th Annual Writers Place - New Years Day Celebration Reading. It's a 12 hour Poetry Reading Marathon that Sharon Eiker organized based on the annual Bowery Poetry Club event in New York. So from a creativity standpoint I feel like the year has gotten off to a good start.
I thought now might be a good time to roll out some resources for those writers looking for good start to the year.
There's a few things to get you thinking if your having trouble getting the new year started.
Best wishes to everyone in 2009!
Here we have to the left, Polyhymnia the Muse of lyric poetry pictured. I fully understand the mythological creation of the muse of various entities but I am altogether amused by our common day practice of viewing our muse in perhaps an erotic representation. Almost a pornographic implant in the mind as if this is the necessary level in which one must go to the be creative. An arousal if you will. And maybe arousing that something within is what is necessary to move into a creatively fertile mode. Sure, it's fun on some level to suppose that our muse sits at the edge of our desk, long legs exposed, in some flauntingly evil way to attract our attention and impose upon us some grand element of creative juice that sparks our creative libido.[Insert apologies to my female readers who surely have a different image in mind. Or maybe not.]
Our typical vision of the muse calls upon us to look to an external source. I suppose we've all had examples of persons or even inanimate objects that have provided us with a spark of imagination that was the breakthrough of some piece of art. But I feel like deep down inside each of us, that's where the muse really is.
I know that all around us are beautiful, startling, magnificent, frightening, majestic, myopic, shocking and luminescent things that give us pause and allows us to think beyond the moment. But I suspect it is the inner muse within our own minds and not some mythology that takes those things we see and experience and goes outside the box and makes of them something new and allows us to give birth to that which is uniquely ours in a collaborative conception with our inner muse.
