2007 August : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for August, 2007

I’ve been thinking about the issue of texture. There has to be a word—I’m using “texture” for lack of a better one—that describes how words in a poem interact, how they produce sensation. There was a group of poems in the Kenneth Rexroth issue of The Chicago Review that grabbed my attention; they were by a poet unknown to me, Emily Wilson, and I enjoyed what she was doing immensely. Am I breaking any rules by reproducing one of them?

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

08.23.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

On Promoting Poetry

A few confessions apropos of much of the discussion about how to promote poetry:
1. I promote poetry. I say, “Y’all need to read poems, they are great.” I say, “Y’all need to read Terrance Hayes, he is really a smart poet.” I say, “Girls are still into guys who can find a poem and give it to them.” I say, “Do you want me to write a poem about you?” They always say, “Yes, yes, yes!”.
2. I like reading novels. They are full of stories. They transport me into a narrative world. I like Seinfeld, too, and I find that show funny mostly because it has stories. I like television. It makes me think. But mostly, it is the mythic story-box. Americans love stories. Even bad predictable stories. If you asked me whether I liked The Simpsons, I would say no, not really. But sometimes I am idling in front of the television and once I have made it through eight minutes of the show I want to see the rest. I like Girlfriends. Truth is I tell people who send me novel manuscripts to read, “I will probably get into your story even if it is bad. I am a hopeless gossip, and I like to know what happens even if what happens is really daft.” Novels and books of poetry are different from each other.
…and there is more….

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

08.23.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Patricia Smith

Poetry, the Conqueror of Pimples and All Prepubescent Profundities!

JAMAICA--KK%20in%20the%20pool%20at%20Jake%27s.jpg
Suddenly, the air is charged.
My 12-year-old is banging around the apartment, trying on first-day-at-school outfits, cooing at her image when the ensembles work and screaming like a banshee when they don’t. She has copied the official 7th-grade school supply list over two or three times, which I guess was somehow preferable to simply printing it out from the computer.
Armed with the list, we headed for Staples, and she trounced the aisles looking for a mirror (so she could see how she looked holding various folders) and gushing over her very first Texas Instruments fancy-pants, bell-and-whistles calculator. I have never seen anyone so excited about the beginning of school.
Poised on the edge of the emotional maelstrom known as middle school (hello pimples, gossip and–omigod–boys), she is dancing toward the chaos with both eyes open, singing even. (If you have not heard the entire score of “High School Musical 2″ screeched by a tuneless preteen, you have not lived. And you will no longer want to.)
I can’t stop looking at her. Amazing. And I can’t help but think back to when I was 12, penning anguished little poems in my wire-bound notebook, thinking there wasn’t anyone but me writing, no one but me needing to write. I hadn’t read any poems in school (we’re talking about the Chicago public school system, where even math was an elective), and certainly didn’t know that there were people who made a living writing poetry, and that was an option available to me.
My granddaughter, however, is a different breed.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

08.22.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Ange Mlinko

Comment allez-vous

My post of the day is a reply to Kwame in the comment box of his post “Rebels.” Among other things, I compare Kenny to Alfred Barr!

08.22.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Michael Marcinkowski

What are some creative ways to promote poetry?

In the Spring issue of American Poet (put out by the Academy of American Poets) Lyn Hejinian gave an interesting answer to what is by now (especially around these offices) a rote question. She was asked, “What are some creative ways to promote poetry?” to which she responded:

Poetry doesn’t need promotion. People need time. A revolutionary way to promote poetry might be to criminalize capitalism’s theft of people’s time.

It’s an answer that brings to bear the issue of poetry’s place in our wider culture and one which raises lots of terrific questions. Should poetry be something that is sold to consumers just as any other product, or is it indeed something special, something that carves out space in our daily lives, apart from all the buying and selling that seems to occupy us today?

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

08.22.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

Kwame Dawes

CREATION REBEL

With anthems like this coming through the radio in the 1970s and 1980s it is hard not to develop a poetics of rebellion. This is Burning Spear in a song whose lyric, as strangely elliptical as it may seem, remains profoundly rooted in the fittingly contradictory idea of a creation rebel–one grounded in creation, in the fact of creation, in everything that creation suggests, and yet one who is shifting the norm and trying to evoke something new. His rebellion comes from the quest to sing his own sing in a world that will continue to disappoint. From the alienation of shouting out loud for bread and hearing no response, the artist must sing his song. It is a rebellion towards hopefulness. I understand this intimately, understand it as the instinct that I want in me–a creation rebel poet. Man, you have to love this reggae business!
CREATION REBEL
I travel all the whole of Rome
to find my bread,
to find my bread.
Call so loud,
search all around;
no one to hear my cry
but what am I to do?
I don’t know, that’s why
they call me, now, creation rebel don;
they call me, creation rebel don, rebel don.
Creation rebel they call me.
Creation rebel they call me.
They call me.
They call me.
They call me.
They call me.
One ting more for I to tell you,
for I to tell you,
for I, for I to tell you.
One ting more for I to tell you:
One shoe on my feet,
one pants to me waist,
one shirt on my back;
its gone, its gone,
what am I to do?
I don’t know.
That’s why
they call me,
creation rebel don,
that’s why they call me
creation rebel don, rebel don.
Rebels in the morning.
Rebels in the evening.
Rebels inivershally.
Rebels was from a dat time,
until this time
I made up my mind
to go on,
sing my song.
Maybe,
maybe,
I will find good round the other side;
and that’s why they call me,
creation rebel they call me;
they call me creation rebel;
is they who call me,
creation, creation rebel,
creation
they call me,
its they who call me.
Winston Rodney, The Burning Spear

08.22.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

Teacher

The funny thing is that had I gotten a better A Level grade for History than I did for English I would probably not be a poet. Everyone, including me, was sure that I would do better in History than English. I liked History, the journey into the past, the dates, the analytical. I got it. My History teacher was sure I would have a distinction and that was the expectation right until the afternoon I walked through the bougainvillea festooned garden path that led to the principal’s office of my high school. The secretary gave me the slip of paper with my grades, smiling. She knew I had done quite well—gotten all my subjects with good grades. But the English grade was the distinction. The History was a solid grade, but it was lower. Now, I regard this as something of a flaw in my character, one that I have come to accept and sometimes to turn into a strength: Things can change my mind. Until I saw the grades I was going to university to study History, and after a year I would transfer into the Law program and work my way towards my dream of great wealth, fame and power as a big time lawyer. My fall back plan was more History. I could teach History in high school or even at university. I had never had a History teacher that I did not like. Mr. Mills was a cool campaigner who opened up history to eleven and twelve year olds in remarkable ways. He spoke as if he had a mouthful of cotton, but he spoke with an easy facility with the material and he would even get passionate as he told stories. He had an afro, he was cool, and he taught history. Mrs. Sobers also taught history. You could sense beneath her petite, smiling veneer, a ramrod of rebellion, resistance and political consciousness. She taught us slavery and took us there. Once, our anger about the slavery system almost stirred a race war in class. This is an exaggeration, but in my imagination, something had shifted in me—people had histories, we came from somewhere and the world that stretched in the past was fascinating and limitless.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

08.22.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

Rebels

On the BBC World Service early this morning there was a cluster of talkers, apparently of some note (I don’t remember who they were—it was four-fifty in the morning, Two Notch Road was dark and steaming, and I was busy trying to wake up for the gym), lamenting that there are no rebels anymore. One musician admitted that there were no musicians that one could call rebels like Bob Dylan or Bob Marley. The commodifying of rebellion was killing all rebellion. The final comment was provocative—the true rebels are the men and women who are strapping bombs around their bodies and detonating them in large crowds—these rebels are conservative believers but people who are acting against the status quo. By the time I turned into the wide parking lot of the gym I began to wonder what was so appealing about being a rebel. Bob Marley and the Wailers singing:
I’m a rebel
Soul rebel
I’m a capturer
Soul adventurer…
kept running through my head.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

08.21.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Emily Warn

Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (1931-2007) via Peter O’Leary

Peter O’Leary sent this note today:
“The truly terrific Chicago poet Ralph J. Mills, Jr. passed away over the weekend. Here’s a link to his obituary in the Tribune today. And here’s a link to the small tribute page Tom Raworth has set up for Ralph on his website. (Tom lived in Chicago for a brief period, where he got to know Ralph.) Ralph – whom we published in LVNG several times – was a real inheritor of the Objectivist line & spirit.”
Also, here’s a link to Bookslut on Mills’ book Essays on Poetry.

08.21.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Ange Mlinko

Postcard

How did Yours Truly become a synonym for I? Yours Truly did not go on vacation. Yours Truly is the last blogger standing on Harriet during these dog days of the dog days d’Aug.
Yours Truly discovered that a perfectly banal stretch of road nearby, a road beleaguered with frequent back-ups and endless stoplights, clusters of strip malls, car dealerships, cabinetry and tile and “window treatment” stores; this road Yours Truly would do anything to avoid except that it’s got the only bookstore within miles (a Barnes and Noble with a decent poetry selection), an Old Navy and a Wal-mart (as depressing a shopping experience as Yours Truly has ever had, execrable labor practices aside); this road known as Route 6 actually expires in Provincetown, Mass.!
It’s as if I could just reel it in, that selfsame Route 6, and find myself at land’s end.
If you had started when I first advised you, you might have seen our tracks in the sand, still fresh, and reaching all the way from the Nauset Lights to Race Point, some thirty miles,—for at every step we made an impression on the Cape, though we were not aware of it, and though our account may have made no impression on your minds. But what is our account? In it there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth.
(Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod)
I so missed the beach this year that I planted a white rugosa so I could at least smell that familiar beach rose smell, and watch the tomatoey hips ripen over the weeks.
Much that is called “woods” was about half as high as this,—only patches of shrub-oak, bayberry, beach-plum, and wild roses, overrun with woodbine. When the roses were in bloom, these patches in the midst of the sand displayed such a profusion of blossoms, mingled with the aroma of the bayberry, that no Italian or other artificial rose-garden could equal them. They were perfectly Elysian, and realized my idea of an oasis in the desert.
Wish you were here, Yours Truly, The Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa.

08.20.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Archive for August, 2007

Ange Mlinko

Texture

Kwame Dawes

On Promoting Poetry

Patricia Smith

Poetry, the Conqueror of Pimples and All Prepubescent Profundities!

Ange Mlinko

Comment allez-vous

Michael Marcinkowski

What are some creative ways to promote poetry?

Kwame Dawes

CREATION REBEL

Kwame Dawes

Teacher

Kwame Dawes

Rebels

Emily Warn

Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (1931-2007) via Peter O’Leary

Ange Mlinko

Postcard

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

STAFF WRITERS

RECENT COMMENTS

RECENT POSTS

MONTHLY ARCHIVE

CATEGORY ARCHIVE

PREVIOUS WRITERS

SEARCH THE SITE

IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010

CHICAGO EVENTS

Archive for August, 2007

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

STAFF WRITERS

RECENT COMMENTS

RECENT POSTS

MONTHLY ARCHIVE

CATEGORY ARCHIVE

PREVIOUS WRITERS

SEARCH THE SITE

IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010

Follow The Poetry Foundation

CHICAGO EVENTS

NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP