Grief, delight and rage...

“Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.” ~ Paul Engle

Believing

" A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden

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My NaPoWriMo is moving along. Successfully producing one new poetry draft a day for each day of the month.

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Poetry, Baseball, San Francisco.... does it get any better than this? (click here)

"One of the great things about baseball is it brings together imagination and reality," said Jeff Brain, a poet who participated in the event.

The child that is or isn't in us....

"A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly." -- Pablo Neruda

National Poetry Month begins....

"A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself" ~ E. M. Forster

Here we are, the first of April...

This month brings us the beginning of Baseball season, National Poetry Month, the time cycle of eternal beginnings. There is so much I like about this month... the month T.S. Eliot referred to as the cruelest of months. Perhaps the fact that my taxes are done and the refund in the bank helps.

To celebrate poetry all month long, I am doing the following....

• participating in NaPoEriMo
• posting a poetry related quote each day of the month
• producing a limited edition broadside of one of my poems (100 in all) that I will distribute to anyone as long as they last.

I rather like Forster's quote above. I think people are often looking beyond poems to make something of them they are not. I say, let the poem be itself.

The End of Periods

In terms of my own poetry, I tend to move in and out of the usage of punctuation I suppose based more on mood than anything. Exactly why, I could not say and this bothers me. Sometimes in the process of rewrites I’ll add it and at other times I’ll take it away. There seems to be no real rhyme (no pun intended) or reason for my adherence or departure from punctuation. It bothers me not that I punctuate or not punctuate. What disturbs me is that if asked, I could not justify my decision. Line breaks, stanzas, etc. I’ll be able to give you a reason.

Some time in the 1960’s W.S. Merwin, whose work I greatly admire, moved away from punctuation. Merwin writes that, “By the end of the poems in The Moving Target I had relinquished punctuation along with several other structural conventions, a move that evolved from my growing sense that punctuation alluded to and assumed an allegiance to the rational protocol of written language, and of prose in particular. I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page. Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in.”

I find a great deal of favor with Merwin’s justification, at least the idea of separating my poetry from prose. Yet, I am from the school that believes seeing the poem on the page can be an essential part of enjoying it as well. The spacing, open or closed on the page, the length of lines can so often speed up or slow down the reader to give the poet some control over tone. I don’t deny that punctuation can add to that process as well. Perhaps this is one reason that I have trouble making the break altogether.

I do find some comfort in knowing that Merwin’s change seemed to be an evolutionary transformation and did not just occur over night.

What constitutes poetry anyway...

"A Poetries Symposium" April 5-7 at the University of Iowa hopes to expand the public understanding of what constitutes poetry.

"Poetries" will encourage participants to think of poetry as a wide range of cultural and language phenomena, not just the masterpieces one might study in English class. Poetic texts exist in unexpected places:

• like greeting cards
• scrapbooks,
• on posters
• or in messages read at weddings

" Such poetry has value, even if it wouldn't make a poetry anthology or a discussion of great art," said Mike Chasar, a UI graduate student in English and co-organizer of the event.

More information and event schedule here

Small Knots

Some time back, on one of my Wednesday Poet Series features, I highlighted a North Western poet by the name of Kelli Russell Agodon. This past week, I’ve been reading her book Small Knots published in 2004 by Cherry Grove Collections out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry is intricately layered and stirring.

A few of my favorites from the book are:

Fifty-Six Knots, which touches me with iconic references to the Rosary and the way she has woven the lives of women together, and counting, and Hail Marys bleeding from the walls. Collection plates filling with broken rosaries and the suffered woman in the corner who unties each knot, allowing the beads to fall, baptizing the marble floors…. can you not hear that sound?

If you look closely at the poem on the page, it is constructed of 4 sever line stanzas. Each has a center justified fourth line creating a pattern as though it were strung together. Genius!

Vacationing With Sylvia Plath: Each of four stanzas begins by asking, Maybe if….
A poet’s contemplation that asks aloud and sort of comes back to me as an internalized echo. If the clouds didn’t look like tombstones… if the ocean didn’t seem so final… if I had a chocolate bar between breakdowns… these all grow in crescendo and the final stanza so strong that I won’t repeat it. You need to read it yourself.

It’s Easy to wake up in someone’s poem… (I love titles that become the first line)
Couplets that capture snippets of life around us. Real people you feel you must know being pulled into the page, their lives blots if ink… and in the same way you see how people awake one morning and presto! They become poems.

These are just three… The book is a real treat to read. Kelli is not so mundane as to write simply assessable work, but something that is just over the line and will likely appeal as well to those who like something just a bit more conceptual without going overboard.

Words That Raise The Dead: An Interview with Poet Martín Espada

Lisa Alvarado interviews Martín Espada. [Click here] I heard Espada read and lecture in Kansas City about a year ago. He is extremely authoritative when it comes to Pablo Neruda.

I offer this one up to Ted Kooser to think about for a while

“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.” ~ Socrates

New Blog Project

I've started a new blog project to list the poets I am reading periodically and note observations about the work. You'll find the link on the side bar as well as here.

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Yesterday, I caught this really interesting podcast on NPR that deals with the question of Creativity, Learned or Innate?

[photo: a shot I took of one of the Seven views of Grand Canyon - sculptures]