“He’ll be coming in for a few days to work with our students in English class and doing a public performance. This grant is an extension of the support for our ongoing work of integrating arts in to many of our regular classes.”

“This grant is a fantastic opportunity to expand this program even more, and it is really fantastic to receive this kind of support from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m sure they have a high bar for identifying programs that are working. We feel very honored to get their continuing support.”

Find the entire article here.

While it remains true that degrees in the Humanities are hardly lucrative, Thompson does raise a good point as to the lack of information incoming students are given in regards to degree choice/post-graduate life, offering the following:

Better data wouldn’t cure education inflation, but it would be a good start. The government should require every college to post a standard fact sheet about its degrees, along the lines of Harvard University education economist Bridget Terry Long’s paper. The fact sheet could include total cost of attendance (median and average), loan default rate by degree, six-year graduation rate, employment rate and median salary twelve months after graduation, and alumni satisfaction rate.

Choosing a school will never be as easy as choosing a digital camera. And it shouldn’t be. But if we force schools to make their specs as transparent as a Best Buy product, students might make better decisions about where to go, how long to stay, and what to study. The purpose of all this schooling, after all, is not strictly to maximize net graduate earnings, but to give each student the sort of education that maximizes her own definition of success and achievement. As one great business and career guru once put it, “Gold that’s put to use more gold begets.”

Wait, nevermind. That was Shakespeare.

Zing!

Roger: “This is a book from 1867, and what’s unusual about it is that to our eye now it looks very much like ‘text-speak’ and I think this illustrates a really important part of the exhibition. What people also did was to invent new ways of communicating, of being creative with the language.”

As an example, Walshe points to the first few lines of the poem “An Essay to Miss Catherine Jay.” Though he admits to not being able to parse the meaning of UTK, the poem is fairly readable and straightforward to modern eyes.

‘An S A now I mean 2 write
2 U sweet K T J,
The girl without a || [parallel],
The belle of [U T K]‘

Rajend Mesthrie is a linguistics professor at the University of Cape Town who is interested in how creativity and slang play out in the development of languages and sees a direct lineage between yesterday’s slang and today’s common usage. Indeed, Walshe points out that there have been dictionaries of slang as far back as the 17th century, so those delinquent teenagers who text each other while refusing to get off your lawn aren’t up to anything new. English has evolved from many, many sources and the further it travels, the more likely it is to pick up the influence of other languages. While SMS-speak has a time and place (Mesthrie wouldn’t expect to see it in a paper from his students or from someone speaking to his grandmother), it may only be a matter of time before it’s rolling off everyone’s tongues, grandparents and professors alike.

Add to English words from former colonies like Jamaica, India and Nigeria and you have a growing, rich language — with nothing to worry about, because nothing needs fixing.

Roger: “For those people who try to ‘fix’ the language, and get very upset about fact that things are changing – this shows that that process has always gone on and will always evolve, will always keep changing and all you can do is capture it and maybe celebrate it.”

Furthermore, as the promise of so-called “language” and “post-avant” writing degenerates from a fresh approach into a redundant and prerequisite MFA house style, the evaluation of student work is dispensed with altogether. How can you evaluate what you can’t understand?

Houlihan believes that this a problem particular to the poetry MFA, although plenty of other creative fields enjoy placing the blame for their art’s increasing irrelevance at the feet of Too Much Theory. When theory overwhelms craft, Houlihan argues, there’s no place for criticism. Not only do students not have the chance to improve their poetry, they also learn that this is the proper way to teach and take it with them when they themselves become poetry professors. Surveyed students largely reported they felt unprepared to teach and saw little connection between being a good poet and a good educator.

As one student surveyed observed: “Our writing was not so much evaluated as commented upon, and teachers tended to reveal their criteria only in scattered, isolated terms, when reviewing single poems. Always there seemed to be a great deal of concern over not hurting our feelings, so it was rare for even the worst poem in class to not receive a few empty compliments.”

I believe that [Dana] Gioia had it right in 1991, and that it is even truer now: “By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art.” Without an education in craft, without a teacher’s attention to standards and an ability to use language purposefully, without “the hard work of evaluation,” the loss to poetry is twofold: to the art and to the criticism of the art that would enable it to evolve.

On a recent visit to Southern California, while discussing the major influences on her work, Utah Poet Laureate Katharine Coles (Fault), director of the Utah Symposium on Science and Literature, mentioned that her parents were scientists. Hours later, while Jessica Goodheart (Earthquake Season) was waiting to go on air to be interviewed by Suzanne Lummis on Pacifica Radio’s Poetry Cafe, SoCal, we exchanged quick notes on poets who survived at professions outside academe: Pound was an overseas editor of American literary magazines, Melville ended life as an NYC customs inspector, Wallace Stevens functioned as an insurance company’s lawyer, and William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician. Back in the day few creative women, we agreed, had the advantages of topflight executive privilege, healthy endowments, or marrying well, and those who didn’t teach school most likely worked as housewives, bookkeepers or secretaries—and in rare instances, did some modeling, like Anne Sexton. Today, the writer devoted to poetry rarely survives outside the world of comparative literature and associate writing programs—no matter the demographics.

Thus it was with wonder and surprise that I greeted an April 6th email trailing multiple congratulatory responses celebrating the announcement that Henry Morro, one of L.A.’s best un-fully-recognized poets, was finally taking the plunge most creative artists and writers would envy: a radical change in his working life. Before I could add my congratulations to the others he had received, I ran into Henry ten days later at Beyond Baroque. My husband poet Austin Straus (Intensifications) and I had met him in the late 80s, and had hosted him on our Saturday evening SoCal Pacifica Radio interview show The Poetry Connexion. During that time, Henry was active on the local scene and we had the pleasure of hearing him read his dark but lovely poems at several venues. But by the mid 90s, Henry seemed to withdraw, and had been quiet for quite a number of years. That night, I couldn’t help but ask Henry how he was going to manage it. His eyes sparkled and he shrugged. “The kids are grown and in college,” he smiled. Now, with the loving support of his wife Amy, he was quitting his job of seven years at a Fortune 500 company to pursue “the literary life.”

Later, thinking about Henry’s daring move, I recalled one enormous danger for the writer who must work—an all too familiar danger I had courted in my struggles to become a poet and writer. As a magazine editor and scriptwriter, I had met many a writing hopeful whose gift had been killed by demanding or dead-end jobs. On the other hand, when lecturing, I’m fond of telling seminar or workshop students “Poetry is the most faithful lover you will ever have—once you master it and find your voice, it will never desert you.”

I wish Henry Morro all the luck.

At Naropa, one of my colleagues is the sparkly-eyed Australian emigrée Lisa Birman.  Hope I got the accent on the right e.  The other day, facing an upcoming visit to my son’s school in Loveland, Colorado, I called her for help.  Ronaldo Wilson, bibliomancy, and analogies to contemporary architectural theory I can do; ages nine to eleven, with unlaced skater keds, not so much.

She suggested I use Joe Brainard’s “I remember” as the model for my visit to my son’s class, and I thought, how can I combine that with Edwin Torres’ recent Harriet post on letters, walls and childhood: his description of a teacher who created “a word-environment around the school. Poetry everywhere, words on paper, taped-up in corners, hallways, doors—to walk in one’s alphabet, to actually listen to the words you step through…”

In the end, we created a fake meadow in a corner of the library: complete with a candle, lit, to represent the sun; a chewed up wooden mammal; lemon balm and mint leaves from my garden; and a dried stalk I found in Denver, on the sidewalk outside the home of poet/weavers Eric Baus and Andrea Rexillus.  The s has slipped off from Baus; perhaps this can be one of the letters hanging from the ceiling, that the children lunged at like fruit.  That makes the children, and not what they’re reaching for, sound like rampant, excessive, and recently escaped mangoes or kumquats.

Upon Lisa’s suggestion – (I called her in a slight panic from outside the school) – the fourth graders did “I remembers” for an early memory, a memory of that morning or the previous night, the earth, and — because, as I told them, “poetry is not all fuzzy bunnies” — we did an “I remember” for something sad.  Something sad that happened to us, and something sad that had happened to the world.  We read Lorca.  I read them a paragraph from the essay on duende.  Not sure why.  It was in my bag with the twigs.  The last “I remember” was anything they wanted: sentences ranged on a continuum from cupcakes to the second world war.  We learned the art of opening a book at random, sensing towards it in the library, and making a sentence, or a poem, out of what we found there.

It was such a beautiful, joyous afternoon.  We veered back through the corridors, searching for objects and words that were both “magical and ordinary at the same time.”  I loved their creativity and physical freedom.  When we reached the doors of their home rooms, one of them said: “So.  This is poetry club, right?  When are you coming again?”  I explained that I was visiting their school for National Poetry Month and that this was a one off.  They said: “No! We want it every day.  Or at least once a week.” I said yes.  I said that if their teachers said yes, I’d return.

And this is the first section of the poem that the students of 4a and 4b made, as a group: selected at random and typed up, in the order that they came, with some sentences repeating where they shuffled back.  Also, the last four sentences are ones that I selected to end the poem, but perhaps the next step — at the next meeting of the newly inaugurated Garfield Elementary Poetry Club — would be to ask them — the poets — if they agree with the choice to end it, their poem, in this way.  Maybe they want to end with the rancid cupcake instead.

Garfield Elementary School: I Remember: [1]

I remember my great grandma was dying.

I remember that my aunt crawled out of bed in a T-shirt and tiny pink shorts.

I remember the almanac on the chair.

I remember my bed.  I remember the lightning.  I remember the book of time.

I remember my aunt getting in a car accident and getting killed.

I remember the child.

I remember the report.

I remember the plan.

I remember I was on the floor and he told me to get up off the floor and I did.

I remember the voyages and Sally and the world being trashed.

I remember we were going to stop at Starbucks this morning but we didn’t have time.

I remember the book of time.

I remember the north.

I remember the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. I remember all the people shouting in the war.  I remember when I read for the first time about the second world war.  I remember how they killed the human race and all the oxygen.

I remember the trees and the oxygen.

I remember reading a French book in bed during the thunder and lightning.

I remember waking up and playing my Japanese games on my  laptop.

I remember seeing the word: “elements.”

I remember seeing the words: “now you are the fastest piglet in the county.”

I remember the wolf pack taking breaths.

I remember the day I wasn’t able to see my brother.

I remember a really bad tasting chocolate cupcake.

I remember the child.  I remember the report. I remember the plan.

I remember the day.

I remember the night.

I remember what it felt like.

I remember.

The library I frequented when I was a little girl still looks much like it did in the 1970s and 80s. I’d like to revisit it someday, browsing the children’s stacks where I found and lost so many stories. I say lost because, though no one ever speaks of it (would it be unjust or disloyal to my favorite institution?), the books one borrows and returns are only half-remembered at best. Those children’s books are the foundation of my imagination, but they’ve taken on the hue of furtive dreams.

I’ve been giving this some thought because I recently stumbled on a repository of “juvenile” books in my university library, carved out of some surplus stacks in an unlikely spot—engineering books encircle it. Unlike the sunny central branch of the Houston public library, where I usually take my sons, this place is shadowy and labyrinthine. It’s here I find Randall Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet, appropriately enough. As an allegory of the poet’s genesis, it is too uncomfortably close to the bone. I read it, I return it to the shelf. I relegate it to one of the half-remembered, haunting books. The books I own I love, but they can’t be regretted.

Because these books lie in the shadows, they seem older than they are; more neglected; their shelf life is indefinite, and none feels like a new acquisition. Maybe this is why I sense I could find here some of those nameless books I devoured thirty years ago and more. I spend too much time scouring the shelves in my slow way, but the books I gather are not magical portals, just interesting older books I think my children would like. (Am I thus perpetuating the taste for lost things in them?) There are treasures here that bookstores—and, increasingly, public libraries—just can’t afford to keep around.

This is a story about language acquisition. Not at beginning stages, but later; and not in the classroom, but peripheral to it. I wrote much of my book Shoulder Season while listening to my kids acquire language, and inadvertently it became a subject of the poems. It’s only in retrospect that I realize how much of my own poetry obsessively recapitulates and recasts my earliest experience with language—especially language I didn’t understand. There had been four languages spoken almost daily in my presence, and two of them were opaque to me except for the nuances of prosody, tone, and body language. Rabelais’ Gargantua—born from the wrong orifice, the (labyrinthine) ear—is the patron saint of carnivalesque language, so no wonder he figures in this poem, which seems less now about my second baby than it does about some shady alter ego. (Incidentally, it’s also an Easter poem!)

All this to say—I wound, I wormed my way into this mazy section of children’s books to luxuriate in, what, nostalgia? Self-indulgence? No; the hope of joy, the satisfaction of delight. (But these are paltry rewards, aren’t they, in the face of budget “realities” that are shuttering public libraries, or slashing their acquisitions?) The bat-poet, in Jarrell’s allegory, actually leaves the comfort of the colony to discover the beauty of daytime—that is, enlightenment. Which brings me to what I really want to talk about, another kind of labyrinthine cave, “In Praise of Limestone” by W.H. Auden (per Martin’s call for more talk about poems). To be continued….

I have to admit my bias, but watching two of my former graduate students, Jessi MacEachern and Lise Gaston, grapple with poets Lisa Robertson and Steven Price respectively, makes me anticipate their own poetry even more than I already do having actually encountered it in progress. Here they are engaging with others’ work, and it seems to me, that in doing so, thinking through their own. Here is Gaston on Price’s wonderful Anatomy of Keys:

“XVI” is a dynamic list poem; one metaphor actively slips to the next, so the men who hang by the “shrouded hood” initiate the rope as “ripple of rumour through a crowd.” As a sonnet, the poem is both rippling and tight. Price keeps close to iambic meter while jamming in extra stresses for syntactical density.

And MacEachearn on Robertson:

Debbie: An Epic clamours with aesthetic excess. But the poems lure the mind beyond the flourish, for they are never merely language for language’s sake. Robertson exploits each angle of a poem’s frame, whether the epic or the lyric, not only utilizing its available strength but also inquiring into its weaknesses. The antique gestures subverted by Robertson prepare her poetic sphere for the tension between intellectualism and emotionalism. The poems simultaneously reel in the empathy of the reader and evoke his or her critical response.

Part of me that thinks the “buy in” to the poetry world should be a critical position, a critical text, before a poetic one. Or at least both? Why not? If poets aren’t reading and engaging critically with each other, why expect others to? Or, can one be a poet without being able to speak and write, of poetry? I know there are many who think these are two distinct arts; who view themselves as distinctly poets or distinctly critics, or poet critic. There are others who fold their critical thinking into their poetry.

On the other hand, I don’t want a rule. Who does? Just  a little more interaction, however it looks. Whatever it takes to engage. And part of that might be in the way we, as “established poets,” introduce new poets. Here is a snippet from a smart introduction to Mercedes Eng via Vancouver poet Clint Burnham:

Conceptual writing, flarf, and the like use quotation as a way to indulge in what Slavoj Žižek would call the idiocy of our enjoyment – the sublime obscenity of post-internet culture. But Eng’s program is a little different. She uses their method – sampling, quotation, pastiche, call it what you will – both to implicate the hegemonic discourse of neoliberal police militarism (racism at home is tied to racism as foreign policy) and to keep herself in that mix, part of the problem.

And an earlier post from Victoria writer Marilyn Bowering on Elizabeth Ross:

My former student Elizabeth Ross’s poems seem, to me, to inhabit a transition zone. They are often situated in ordinary domestic moments, but it’s as if there’s a little swinging door inside them and the reader finds herself stepping first to one side, then another as the poet switches views.

Each opportunity to hand off the torch, is a good one. These new poets offer us the opportunity to think about poetry’s reception. And these opportunities remind us of our own beginnings, force us to come to terms with the next generation, maybe even push us to rethink our own positions.

In the end it seems to me that opening the door to poetry is a matter of illuminating the ways in which poetry is read and grappled with as much as presenting poetry. Poetry does speak for itself, it’s true. But so does writing about it.

I am especially struck by this paragraph:

Third Woman Press began originally as an antidote to loneliness, when Alarcón — a specialist in feminist critical theory, cultural criticism, and studies of Chicana/Latinas and women of color — was doing graduate work in Bloomington, Indiana. Born in Mexico near the Texas border and reared in San Antonio, then Chicago, she says she realized that “there weren’t enough women of color or Latinas in Bloomington for me to have a conversation with.”

I read the above passage in response to Kathleen Rooney’s question: “are mission-driven presses that focus on producing and distributing work by members of under-represented groups necessary and desirable? Why or why not?”

These days, we think writers of color, women of color, are published more abundantly than in the past. I believe this is true, and my own experience as a author who is a woman of color tells me also this is true.

My first book was published by Marie Romero’s Arkipelago Books, a South of Market, San Francisco based, Filipina American owned, Filipino American focused press and bookstore. My first book had very limited circulation, and a very limited audience. My second book was published by a Susan Schultz’s Tinfish Press, founded “in order to facilitate conversations between experimental writing (written mostly outside of Hawai`i) and the important writing being done in Hawai`i.” My second book widened my circle, placed me in conversation with a lot more folks than I ever thought would discuss my work. My third book is published by Boa Editions, Ltd.; like my second book, it’s actually getting read and taught, and this is something that’s still taking a while to get used to for me.

Another thing I do know from experience is that for every one woman of color author who’s become widely published, read, taught, studied, there are so many other women of color writers that I do not see in print, or who appear to be having a very hard time finding book publication, or adequate distribution.

My short answer to Rooney is, yes, mission-driven presses are desirable and necessary, as I am interested in movements out of obscurity and out of the margins.

This is my longer answer, in response to this, Elisa Gabbert’s “Boys’ Club Manifesto” which Rooney cites: “I’ve had men, not just any men but my friends, tell me to my face that it’s easier for me to get published because I’m a woman and because I’m attractive. People will publish me in their magazines because they need token women, and people will ask me to read in their series so they can have a cute girl in the lineup.” And Kwame Dawes’s “if the poet were not black, they might never have gotten into the anthology, the course syllabi, the university position, the festival list, the reading series, etc.”

About people who actually think these things: F*** ‘em. I think this is the mean spirited behavior that proliferates in po-biz, when a jealous, entitled poet decides others are not deserving of publication or prizes, when this decision is based on what he does not have. I think that some mean spirited behavior is also straight up racist and sexist and it needs to be called out. People of color and women, and heaven forbid, women of color, are not barbarians at the gate. We do create challenging and admirable works of high literary merit, so get used to it.

In teaching moments, we can talk about historical disparity, under-represented communities typically viewed through manistream lenses and subsequently misrepresented, oftentimes to suit the viewer’s own needs or agenda. Also, we can talk about why the literature of these marginalized communities is to be read in multiple contexts. Why code switching? Why “vernacular” or “dialect?” Why these “unfamiliar” cultural and historical references? Why these poetic forms and traditions other than what we read in the Western canon, or why these altered deployments of canonical form? Why this more defiant political stance? Consider these an extension of: what is the speaker’s position? What are the writer’s concerns, motivations, agenda? We already ask these things when we read any piece of literature.

Indeed, I think if more editors at established publishing houses are asking these questions, then we’re experiencing progress. In the meantime, yes to more feminist presses, ethnic-specific presses, mission-driven presses, which are necessary to publish the work that will encourage more folks to ask these questions.

It’s not about identity politics quotas, or oppression olympics. It’s about opening closed minds, and widening our vision, expanding the conversation, bringing more folks into the conversation, and so creating “an antidote to loneliness.”

I think of what Virginia Tech did in the wake of the shooting some years ago. At the center of their effort to heal stood a poet, Nikki Giovanni. Someone at the university felt that a poet’s voice could some how give voice to the experience of the community—the university community. I am not entirely convinced that all universities would instinctively do the same thing. I think, for instance, of the use of poets during the presidential inaugurations.

This is a ritual that was not always enacted. Some presidents have done it and others have not. But the rationale for this act is rooted in the idea of the poet laureate, the individual being called upon to speak in verse on an occasion because that person, that poet, is indeed deemed as a voice that speaks on behalf of the community. The thing is, I am not convinced that many universities regard their poets in that light. Indeed, I have heard administrators speak of the way they view artists on campuses. They say that they don’t see them as artists first, but as faculty first. And by that they mean that their ambitions and their focus is on securing tenure and teaching.

When administrators begin to look at artists in that way, I suspect that something does happen to the artist. Of course, the administrator is struggling with something quite difficult. After all, the administrator is faced with the challenge of somehow assuring that the faculty member who happens to be an artist, manages to complete all the things necessary to make them of equal stature and place among their peers—namely the History, Chemistry, Pharmacy, and Criminal Justice professors. The artist thus represents the university in fairly conventional ways. If the artist wins accolades they accrue to the university and they are rewarded for this. If the artist puts together a good tenure and promotional file in which they manage to meet all the criteria for the position, they are rewarded with tenure and promoted.

In that sense, what many have started to call the most elaborate and generous patronage system for artists ever—namely the MFA programs—in a decidedly problematic one for the artist because the artist must pay a price to secure that patronage. Here, though, the expectation is not so much that the artist create work to please the patron—work that flatters the patron and that speaks for the patron; but that the artist somehow finds a way to somehow make the work of the patron easier by becoming someone other than the artist—at least in small gesture of compromise.

The problem, of course, may well be that the university, as a community, is not sure of what it is, really. And when it is assured of that, it may actually have difficulty justifying the presence of the artist in that context. Technically speaking the university might well be a place for the study of knowledge. When artists become a part of a university, their primary role is deemed as one of teaching, training others to do what they do.

The poet, for instance, is not employed to study poetry, per se, but to help others to write poetry. But the poet is expected to do more than that. The poet is also expected to produce poetry, and to produce enough of it to justify promotion based on a series of criteria. The poet who does not want to engage in such activities is unlikely to be welcomed into the hallowed space of the tenure track, but is often welcomed as a visiting writer, as visiting poet in residence—thus as someone who is not part of the academy, but who constitutes an interest and tangential force in the academy.

And yet, universities do understand the role of their intellectuals as going beyond their capacity to research well, and publish well, and teach well. They occasionally regard these intellectuals as leaders, as individuals who offer a moral and ethical compass for their students and ultimately for their university community. At commencements, the content of these speeches tends not to be “academic” in any way, but largely “inspirational”, engaged in some act of speaking to and for the community at large.

Is it possible for the artist to be more than the source of entertainment—that is a figure committed to satisfying the need for artistic consumption in the university community? Can that artist become more than that? Can that artist someone become a source of wisdom, guidance and intellectual and emotional sublimation for the community and still be a part of the academy? This has to be possible, but does it require that the poet, for instance, must write poems about university life to carry out the role, or is there a way for the poet, writing as poets do whatever they write, can start to see his role as a necessary part of the body politic of the university, and thus as somehow playing a more organic and necessary role in the life of that community?

I imagine that the example of Virginia Tech is a telling one, and I would argue that what is learnt there is that the poet somehow became understood to be a source of language—the right language—for the occasion. Someone felt that way. Some administrator felt that way. I just don’t think others have that understanding, and I believe that in many ways, this is why artists have a peculiar time on campuses.
Yet we must find a way to stay on campuses because we enjoy teaching, or because we enjoy the security of the position, or we have come to believe that what we do as writers deserves to be in the academy.

Some years ago, I conjured up a program called “Towards the Poetry Friendly School”. And by school I meant grade school. I arrived at multiple reasons why a poetry friendly school was a good thing for a school and for society as a whole. I then developed a long list of things that schools could do to be poetry friendly. At the heart of this idea was the notion, I believe, that the poet, by being a poet, gave something to the community of the school and was an important part of the life of that community. The poetry friendly principle, for instance, would always find a way to share a poem a day with the students. The poetry friendly principle would create poet laureates to write poems to the school and for the school. The poetry friendly principal would find a way to show that poetry enriched the lives of the school community and that everyone deserved to enjoy that enrichment during their school life.

Can this happen at a university? I suspect it can. I don’t see this as a push to get poets to write on certain subjects, but I do see it as institutions starting to think of the value of the poet as a necessary voice in a community.
I have placed a lot of the responsibility for this on the administration, but I suspect that the poet may have to rethink how he or she understands the idea of community and the concept of being an artist in what is called an academic institution.

I will end this with an admission. All my employment at universities has been as an academic. I have written, I have taught writing, and I have even worn the title poet in residence, but my journey through tenure and promotion has been as a academic faculty. In a strange way, I wanted it that way, because I enjoyed my scholarship, and I also felt that I would write anyway, and this circumstance gave me a certain freedom as a writer that I am opt sure I would have had with a creative writing appointment. But as a poet in the community of a university, I am starting to think more about what my role should be, about how I can conceive of the university as a community and about what my art does in that space.

I read today a disparaging statement that as an artist at a state institution I was depending on government handouts and subsidies to do my work. The writer then said that such subsidies should end. Finally the writer what Van Goff would have done with government subsidies like that. The comment was deeply sarcastic. No doubt there is a way in which the university is a patron for the artist. But the university has to start working out what it means do be such. And the artists have to start working out what it means for them to be patronized. The answer lies in the issue of how we value art in society.

Like I said, I am not sure I am settled on this question, but I am thinking about it a lot.

I.

II.

Omar Salinas USC Flor Y Canto 1973

III.

IV.

Raul Salinas, USC Flor y Canto 1973

V.

Ricardo Sanchez, USC Flor Y Canto 1973

VI.

I did not know this about Ai—that she felt this way, but then I only know of Ai what I have read in her poems. A student, in a dialog about the matter of race, quoted Ai for me. I found this fascinating. The problem with talking about race and writing is that the discussion becomes about race and writing. And soon, it becomes about race. This is a problem because it leads us to wonder whether race is that important at all. And as Ai points out in what is essentially a conflicted series of statements, race is important.

I have sometimes thought that when I am in discussions about race, race is not as important to me as I have to make it because I am in a discussion about it. And yet, the moment I think this, I realize that I may be being careless because those who want race to not be important are people who I ultimately suspect.

I have never quite understood the desire not to be known as some kind of hyphenated writer. This anxiety or impatience is the most common quarrel against race in writing among people of color. I hate, they say, to be known just as a black poet like that means something. Why can’t they just accept me as poet, period? Apparently being accepted as a poet period is attractive. I have tried to see the attraction, and frankly, I have not quite been able to embrace it.

What I do understand is that the quarrel is not entirely about not wanting to be just a black poet. The quarrel is about what “just a black poet” means to those who want this poet to be “just a black poet”. In a community where for centuries that limitation is inevitably pejorative and demeaning, where the idea that someone is “just a black poet” means that person is parochial, locked in a certain discourse and way of thinking that has no “universal” appeal, and is engaged in work that is lesser, I can understand the poet not wanting that label. The implication, you see, is that if the poet were not black, they might never have gotten into the anthology, the course syllabi, the university position, the festival list, the reading series, etc. The “black poet” is thus useful only for the liberal aims of diversity. And behind that is a notion that such a poet is just not as good as the other folks.

Now, I understand that bit. I understand it because I have had to call out a few friends of mine for their underlying implications in that regard. “Man, you really got into that journal? It is so hard for white male poets these days to get any of that kind of attention, you know?” Well meaning statement, yes, but ultimately, the underlying idea is that my race has gotten me in, not because there is intrinsic value in what comes with my race—value that goes beyond a quota effort, but because my race is something that will make the folks who have let me in look good.

Oh to be a black basketball player! When a black basketball player gets into the NBA, the expectation is that his or her blackness comes with some intrinsic value that will make the team better. This expectation may be racist, but it is one derived from a proper valuing of the tradition of strong black basketball players.

Already, in this blog, I have grown tired of the discussion because it is now a discussion about race and it is one that won’t go very far. You see, I have to believe that my blackness—and for me that means so many things that include my Ghanaianness, my Africanness, my Jamaicanness, my South Carolinaness, my love of reggae, my love of the black history, my fascination with Caliban, my fondness of Gerard Manley Hopkins (you see where this is going?)—is inextricably connected with what I produce as a poet, and that which I produce will not define blackness in any simple way for anyone.

As it happens, my “blackness” is going to disappoint a lot of people who think it is one thing. It is never one thing. It is a lot of thing. And what I like about my blackness is that it allows itself to be a lot of things and be black anyway—maybe because of it. This may confuse people—perhaps the same people that Ai is talking about when she talks of those who are threatened by multiracial people. But I struggle with some of that idea. After all, there are very few black folk in America (and the Caribbean, for that matter) who could seriously not be called multiracial. So if they are multiracial, then their decision to be called black (those that do) can only be racist when racism is a generic, no pejorative term to describe people who are thinking in terms of race.

But I know what Ai is doing. Ai knows that in America people became black for economic reasons. And those who benefitted from that genius act of blackness creation were not black folk. She knows that blackness in America is defined by the ideal of white supremacy. Hence that largely absurd notion of someone being black by dint of having on drop of black blood in him or her. Economically, in slave economies, this is a genius innovation. It increases the number of blacks and thus the normal of slaves and potential slaves. The added benefit is that it privileges and protects the idea of white separation and authority. Multiracialism, therefore, is a threat to that economic construct. Slavery has long been over and even much of the legacy of that system has also gone, but the construction persists and is embraced by black folks who soon saw the value in the numbers game, too.

But my blackness is about being able to talk about what this thing actually means in ways that can be moving and enlightening. Ai knows that the answer cannot be to deny race altogether. She knew this and she never lost sight of the importance of that. But she remained conflicted by the matter.

I am not even certain that anyone will dare to tackle this topic in the blog beyond what I have written. I can’t blame folks. It is a vexing issue, and one wonders whether anyone sees it as a genuine problem in the world of poetry. Well, I am being rhetorical there. Of course it is. Here is how race shapes how I program (and by “program” I mean edit, judge, curate, plan reading series, etc). I look at my list, and I say to myself, who can give me a perspective that none of these folks are not giving to me? I ask, who can add to this picture making by their voice, their discourse and their view of the world? Sometimes I think of a nationality, sometimes, a gender, sometimes a school of poetic expression, and sometimes, I think of race. It is about the work, of course, but the work is about what the work is about and sometimes the work is about the race of the worker. And that is fine, no?

Darren Wershler has coined a term, “conceptualism in the wild,” to describe practices which rage through the internet that are predicated upon earlier avant-garde tendencies without having the slightest knowledge of them. These most often involve memes. A typical “conceptualism in the wild” meme would be the series of re-subtitled Downfall Hitler Bunker videos, thousands of which have been created without any knowledge of the Situationist artist Rene Vienet’s 1974 re-subbed Japanese Porn film The Girls of Kamare or his 1973 détournement of a kung-fu flick Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Poetically, some of the most intriguing “conceptualism in the wild” language-based memes occurs in “badges” such as Advice Dog, Courage Wolf or Philosoraptor, where the interplay between text and image is nuanced and incredibly dumb at the same time, resulting in language more akin to Dada or Language Poetry than to anything found in popular culture. In order for these memes to achieve maximum effect, they must create disjunction between the text and image. Advice Dog, for example, shows a picture of an incredibly happy puppy, framed by language which is dark and ambiguous, such as the above image: DRINK BLEACH / LIVE FOREVER. While the idea of living forever appears to be in sync with the cheerful (but purposefully clumsy) rainbow and the optimistic dog, clearly drinking bleach is not the way to achieve this. It’s this number of conflicting emotions, visuals and imperatives which make for a “successful” badge meme.




I often have my students attempt to use meme generators to create their own series of badges as poetic exercises. It’s wildly challenging. Although automated and templated, achieving the balance between sense and absurdity is nuanced and complicated. At first, they’ll generally come up with memes that are too focused — perhaps giving an actual “message” or direct expression — and thus fail. Other times, students will try to make them “funny,” which also fails. It’s only after much critique and play, do they begin to understand how such language is constructed. In this way, it’s not much different than writing, say, haiku, where form and content must come together in ways are both ambiguous and self-evident at the same time. A good haiku always has that “ah ha!” moment, in which an innate understanding of the form is merged with proper content to create a “successful” poem.





In terms of Advice Dog, its success has been analyzed, achieving its best form in the intersection of obscenity and cuteness, resulting in





a mix of guilt and enjoyment mixed with corruption. Try it. It’s not easy to do.





But the takeaway for me is that in a culture hell-bent on black and white dichotomies, one-dimensional punch lines, clear winners and losers, and quantifiable ups and downs, it’s inspiring to see an entire cultural phenomena emerge based on subtle poetic ambiguity — while being entirely ignorant of its avant-garde pedigree.

Kathleen, I liked your post! And I agree the timely/timeless question is a bit of a false dichotomy. And, yes, most people I’ve asked are saying some version of “both.” Still, I think the question is worth asking, worth thinking about. I see a shift toward valuing “timeliness” or being more willing to talk about the pleasure of timeliness, of everydayness, not just the sublime. I’ve always been attracted to poems that describe everydayness, that feel as though they’re happening in real time, that are not recollected in tranquility. And, part of why I write is to fix myself in space and time. Recently, in order to push myself to be present, I started keeping daily blog where I record one-sentence descriptions. My rules are: no “I” and outside (the self, the apartment) whenever possible. Are these descriptions poetry? I’m not sure, but the practice is pushing me to exercise my powers of observation, my timely muscles.

I’m also rethinking the value of timelessness. Last year I asked a student, “but what do you want your poems to do??” and he said (evading my question), “well, of course I want my poems to be timeless…” and I blurted out, “like PLASTIC?” What would it mean to want a biodegradable poetry now that we know the horror of things that last and last and last?

Last Friday as I was waiting for my yeast to proof (I make challah every Friday and though I’m not religious love the way the ritual marks my week, marks time for my family), I heard Garrison Keillor on NPR’s “Sound Check” talking about his new book Good Poems: American Places. He said, “people don’t have time” and said he wanted to offer “poems people can get as they’re buttering their toast and yelling at their children… not everyone’s an English major.” Then he talked about Robert Frost (with reverence) and said that Frost’s poems are great because “they last.” And then he said that the poems in his new book are great because they are “about a here and a now.”

So, he too, wants poems that are timely and timeless even though or because people don’t have time. It’s all mixed up. By then the yeast had proofed, and I had added eggs, flour, oil, sugar, and salt. I continued thinking about this as I kneaded the dough for ten minutes, which feels like a long time when kneading dough. I wondered if poems are required to be timely in order to timeless? I wondered if these qualities are ineluctable. And then my time was up.

Next post: What Matt Rohrer thinks about this. Then, what Patricia Smith thinks about this.

It can be seen as obnoxious to write in a public forum about one’s yoga practice. I get it. I do. But I’m going to do it anyway, in the interest of doing some craft work about portmanteaux. Here goes:

On the first day of National Poetry Month, I went to a yoga class led by my favorite Shambhava yoga teacher here in Chicago and she taught us a new word: “thutt.”

Giving credit where it’s due, she told us she learned it by way of local Iyengar teacher Gabriel Halpern who mentioned it to help his students understand a muscle group at the intersection of the thigh and the butt.

The thrill of suddenly knowing that there is a word for that made me feel high. It’s so perfect and useful, like brunch, smog, spork, Spanglish, turducken, motel or carjack. In practical terms, it really did help me attain a better engagement for the posture (high lunge, if you’re curious).

But the real pleasure of “thutt” came from the from the sensation of having my active vocabulary not only expanded but concretely anchored to the world at a point that it hadn’t been before. And maybe because it was the first day of National Poetry Month, “thutt” made me think that the ecstasy I felt at hearing it probably has a lot to do with why some people are readers and writers—and particularly poets—and why other people aren’t. “Thutt” made me think (still in high lunge) of Auden, and how he says in “Writing” that “It is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of a human society which uses them for a thousand different purposes.”

I had to suppress those thoughts because I was starting to lose my balance, and because at the beginning of class we’d done a common meditation exercise: imagining a huge cardboard box and packing it with all the stuff we’d been thinking about before class and would start thinking about again after—our planning and scheming for the rest of the day, the week, the month, the year. So I packed the portmanteau into my box, and I pulled it out again after class, and now I am giving it to you: “thutt.”

Will my talking about yoga seem less obnoxious if I bring Shakespeare—himself a master of coinages—into it? There’s a part in Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Theseus says , “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, / Are of imagination all compact,” and explains that “The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; / And, as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”

And that function of poetry—giving embodiment to heretofore abstract concepts—is what gave me such a rush on learning the word “thutt.” In fact, there may even be a term for that sensation. If not, maybe one should be invented. Suggestions?

Also: What do other Harriet bloggers and poets make of Auden’s aphorism that: “In modern societies where language is continually being debased and reduced to nonspeech, the poet is in constant danger of having his ear corrupted, a danger to which the painter and the composer, whose media are their private property, are not exposed?” Does it trouble you that “however esoteric a poem may be, the fact that all its words have meanings which can be looked up in a dictionary makes it testify to the existence of other people?” Or do you like that?

If only that sweet-assed Amber T wasn’t such a reticent sort. She really needs to learn to speak up for herself, stop all that infernal mumbling into the back of her hand.

That said, Am, now that you’ve managed to call me out so gorgeously, so publicly, I think we need to make this contest of yours break some kind of record. I want so many submissions to pour in that the whole internet Web-thingie makes a loud popping sound, spurts smoke and begins to spew something unknowable. I wanna frighten Republicans.

Girl, I would be in it to win it, but this looks like a forum for the wee ones, not for those of us who remember Eisenhower, go-go boots and those swirly little things that kept the 45s on the spike of the phonograph. Or anyone who had a giddy little crush on your dad after “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” (No I did NOT see the original in the theater. Nope. Almost, but not.)

I mean, I checked out the website for the contest and it’s got that bright, hippy, skinny-jeaned, punch-and perky thang going on. Just scrolling through, my respiration sped up. Instinctively, I reached for my walker. Thankfully, it wasn’t there. Yet.

But, ah, the possibilities. The chance for your work to be seen by ONE MILLION PEOPLE. A chance to be Billy Collins, just once.

I’m on it, girl. Will spread the news. Will have millions of wordsmithies, maybe even myself, fine-tuning stanzas, punching that “send” key and thanking your sweet ass for the opportunity. (Now, Am, if you could just come out of your shell a little…)

So get on it, America! Pick. up. those. pens. Even if you knew Eisenhower personally.

Peak Shift refers to a generally elevated response to exaggerated stimuli among many animals. Ramachandran refers to a study in which seagull chicks were made to beg for food (just as they do from their mothers) simply by waving a beak-like stick in front of their nests. Later, the researchers pared down even further, simply waving a yellow strip of cardboard with a red dot on the end…They got the same response. More interesting, and crucially for Ramachandran’s law of Peak Shift, is that the gull chicks become super excited if you put three red dots on the cardboard strip. Something in the mental hardwiring of the chicks says, “red outline on lighter background means food.” The wiring does not normally need to be more specific than that. It is enough for survival. So, the chick brains make the leap to interpreting the advent of several red outlines as being several times better. They go nuts.

Apparently Ramachandran takes this as evidence for the natural appeal of abstract art. Sure, it completely ignores art history and the contexts in which art might be experienced, but hey! Not to mention the problem of debates and disagreements about aesthetics, which Ramachandran handles in a surprising, if strange way:

This raises the question, however, of disagreement in the appreciation of art. If we are analogous to chick gulls in our gut reaction to certain abstract forms, mustn’t it then be the case that everyone actually likes, in some deep way, the sculptures of (for instance) Henry Moore? Ramachandran goes for the surprising answer here. He supposes that maybe everyone does. They just don’t know it, or they suppress that root “liking” with their higher cognitive functions, adjusting what they “like” to specific cultural mores or other similar considerations.

Surely poet laureates should be seen as public poets, should be paid more, should live in Washington, and be asked to write poems about our world, now. It might seem whimsical to suggest that poems matter when walls of water drown cities, when gut-wrenching tumult afflicts the Middle East, and when one in four American children depends on food stamps – but isn’t the point of poetry to help us make sense of all this upheaval? To take emotions we fumble to describe, and bake them as cakes? To say what we can’t or won’t, and to force us to remember what matters?

…Perhaps we should ask for braver choices. We should seek out those who are evangelists for words, who can remind us about the urgency and importance of writing. Countless jobs are bureaucratic, timid, and silent; poet laureates should not be among them.

THOMAS JOHNSON: …Many people conceive of the conflict in Afghanistan as an insurgency-counterinsurgency. I conceive insurgency-counterinsurgency basically as an information war supported by military action or what people call military kinetics. So the message that this two sides are using to try to win the trust and confidence of the people — we like to say hearts and minds — but to win the hearts and minds of the people becomes an incredibly important weapon, if you will.

JEFFREY BROWN: And poetry is part of that?

THOMAS JOHNSON: Poetry is part of that. Afghanistan is basically an illiterate society. Before the war maybe 10 percent of the country was literate. The statistics now say maybe 23 percent, and parts of the south of Afghanistan, maybe 1 percent of the females are literate and maybe 5 percent of the males are literate. But Afghan history is very important from generation to generation, so the Afghans came up with a scheme to be able to transmit knowledge from father to son, from generation to generation, and poetry is a perfect means of doing that. The rhyme and rhythm makes it easy to memorize, much like advertisers do on Madison Avenue in the United States.

Recent coverage of the protests in Egypt and Tunisia has made some mention of poetry, but it’s been dwarfed by the emphasis on social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. As Johnson mentions, the tradition of poetry and song as political tools has been passed down through many Middle Eastern cultures for thousands of years, so even though poetry plays a much larger part in the “information war” in all of these conflicts than smartphones do, it doesn’t have the same novelty to hook Western reporters. But as these conflicts have also shown us, there is now a rapidly developing area where poetry and technology intersect.

JEFFREY BROWN: …Examples can be viewed on YouTube. Here a man sings a motivational chant for Taliban fighters glorifying the exploits of a warrior. Another chant tells of Malali, an Afghan woman war hero who fought against the British a century ago, encouraging people to join today’s war against foreigners. A third chant warns the death of a top Taliban commander killed by coalition forces in 2007.

So why, if it’s considered a known (even mundane) fact that poetry is the form of choice for spreading political messages, has it taken so long for the US to recognize that it’s ill-equipped for this style of conflict? Perhaps the media coverage itself is a good indicator; it wasn’t until the poetry was wrapped up in a story about something that played a major role in our own current cultural climate—gadgets, YouTube, Twitter, Bluetooth—that people began to take note of the importance of the underlying message. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the devaluing of poetry in one culture leads to the inability to recognize its significance in another.

THOMAS JOHNSON: Well, ideally you would think that we or our Afghan allies could put together information messages that are similar to what the Taliban are doing.

JEFFREY BROWN>: You mean counterpoetry?

THOMAS JOHNSON: Counternarratives, if you will. Counterpoetry. Exactly. And rather than some of the mundane information operations that I think we’re pursuing right now that don’t’ resonate with the people.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not to make light of it, but you’re suggesting we need better poetry or a better story?

THOMAS JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. This is a war of narratives. That’s an excellent way to put it. We’re in a battle over the story. So I think there’s much to be learned from the Taliban in how we approach conflicts like this in Afghanistan.

JEFFREY BROWN: And how far do you want to push this? Is the argument that unless we do a better job of countering the narrative through poetry and chant, we lose?

THOMAS JOHNSON: I think that if you buy this notion that this conflict is 95 percent information and 5 percent military actions, yeah, then I think that we cannot win this unless we have a story to be told.

Prince’s lawyers had told Deborah Batts, a federal judge sitting in Manhattan, that Cariou’s photographs of Rastafarians, taken over six years, were “mere compilations of facts … arranged with minimum creativity … [and were] therefore not protectable” by copyright law. Of the electric guitar he added to one of the photographs, Prince testified: “He plays the guitar now. It looks like he’s always played the guitar, that’s what my message was.” The lawyers claimed “fair use” of the images.

Really? Prince thinks his message is “it looks like he’s always played the guitar?” Not much of a message. Which is a shame, because perhaps it was due to such sloppy reasoning that the judge ruled against him:

The judge ruled that rather than simply adding elements to an original work, a new piece should create something “plainly different from the original purposes for which it was created”. He cited a landmark case in which the American artist Jeff Koons created an exaggerated sculpture based on a postcard of a couple with their arms full of puppies. Koons lost that case.

But doesn’t an “exaggerated sculpture” based on a postcard serve a “plainly different” purpose from the original? Sculptures and postcards are pretty dissimilar and all. In the same way, Prince’s versions of Cariou’s portraits clearly serve a different purpose from the originals. The originals are meant to document a people, and the reworkings are meant to manipulate the documentation of a people, thereby questioning the legitimacy of such a practice. In fact, one could argue that they serve completely opposite purposes. By virtue of sharing surface similarities, they could not be more different.

Last year, inspired by artist Nina Katchadourian, I tried my hand at book spine poetry and came away convinced that this was just the sort of thing that kids would take to. I shared my experience on the ALSC Blog and encouraged others to try it with their students or young patrons and send me photos. I posted a gallery of student poems on my blog, 100 Scope Notes.

Jonker will be putting up a new gallery all through the month of April with photos of student poems, but you shouldn’t feel shy about playing along at home with your own library. Jonker encourages aspiring book spine poets to take notes on particular titles or use the library catalog to find specific words your dream poem requires, but he also notes that, “The best part of this type of poetry is the fact that you don’t know where you’ll end up.” If the kids’ poems are any indication, simple works best in this format:

Allison
The Dreamer
Like Likes Like
The Angry Moon

So for a real challenge, try starting with something a little more complicated. Might we recommend some mIEKAL aND?

Voyage 1984 Greta Garbo Limbo Book
Like Likes Like
The Angry Moon

Poetry illuminates not just who lawyers are, but what they do. It provides not just a factual narrative but an overarching moral one as well. Such narratives, not facts, drive decisions.

But, who knows how the narrative strikes a juror in deliberations? In his book, “The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits,” Lewis Carroll nails it in a chapter titled “Fit the Sixth: The Barrister’s Dream”: “The jury had each formed a different view (Long before the indictment was read),/And they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew/One word that the others had said.”

Even more fundamentally, poetry asks what the law is. The answer from Robert Hass, in his poem “The Woods in New Jersey,” is that law is not a matter of surgical precision but of imprecise, all-too-human measurement and motive: “It’s made,/whatever we like to think, more of interests/than of reasons,/trees reaching each their own way/for the light, to make a sort of order unawares.” The poem is for former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who saw the law as being organic, growing in consensus to meet changing needs and developing issues.

This view of the law is not universally shared . . .

Emerson’s own presentation at E-Poetry will focus on her work with the Archaeological Media Lab, “a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using the tools, the software and platforms, from the past.” She notes that even work presented at the first conference only ten years ago would fall under the category of “early electronic literature” and rapidly evolving technologies quickly render works of literature themselves obsolete. In many cases, authors conceptually work with planned obsolescence in mind, but many others had every intention of seeing their work remain accessible to readers. Emerson uses the example of bP Nichol’s 1983-84 First Screening, written in Apple’s BASIC programming language for the Apple II in making a case for the AML.

First Screening is a series of poems whose meaning is actually activated through the writer/programmer’s invitation to the reader/view to type in commands; for example, in line 110 of the code for First Screening, Nichol writes: “REM   FOR THE CURIOUS VIEWER/READER THERE’S AN ‘OFF-SCREEN ROMANCE’ AT 1748. YOU JUST HAVE TO TUNE IN THE PROGRAMME.” Furthermore, even though First Screening has been preserved via emulator, hypercard and Quicktime movie on the Electronic Literature Directory, there is simply no substitute for the unique interface and physical structure of the Apple II computer; as Matthew Kirschenbaum points out in his groundbreaking 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, the Apple II computer has no hard drive; instead, “a program is loaded by inserting the disk in the external drive and booting the machine. In practical terms, this meant first retrieving the program by going to one’s collection of disks and rummaging through them…Consider the contrast in affordances to a file system mounted on a hard drive: here you located the program you wanted by reading a printed or handwritten label, browsing like you would record albums or manila file folders, not by clicking on an icon” (33). Everything about the Apple II system offers both writer and reader an utterly different set of experiences than when they read or write on, say, a MacBook or a PC or when they read/write a poem such as First Screening by way of Windows.

They pinned three of Williams’s poems to foam board and asked us to identify the major anatomic systems of “Daisy,” excise unhealthful growths from “The Storm,” and perform transplants on “May 1st Tomorrow.” Most of us used our tools—scalpels, clamps, forceps. One surgical team performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The team on the other end of my table told me they thought that “May 1st Tomorrow,” was really three patients: Siamese triplets with one heart. There are six iterations of the word “mind” in the poem, and one student had removed the sixth, which references “the male mind,” completely. “What do you want?” she said. “I’m a feminist poet.” She reported that they’d healed the patient.

A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion – 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances – she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.

To approach a proper consideration of sequencing, he first divides a manuscript into thirds: the opening, the mid-section, and the close. The process itself can take him months or years to work out, so to demystify it a bit, he’s helpfully introduced a few albums to get you in the sequencing frame of mind.

The analogy I prefer making here is to music, concert performances in particular but some albums as well. There’s a reason why Frank Zappa used to begin his concerts with a tune like “Zoot Allures,” or ELP in 1973 starting with their version of Copland’s “Hoedown,” or why FZ’s “Muffin Man” is such a powerful closer. What we’re talking about is sometimes referred to as dramatic flow; I dislike the term flow in poetry because it’s applied too generally, but in this case let’s make an exception and consider a musical example everybody’s familiar with: Sergeant Pepper. That album is a masterpiece of sequencing, from the first track to the last long note that ends “A Day In The Life.” Everything makes sense; after all, the album’s supposed to represent a literal bandstand group’s performance, so there’s the concert-sequence requirement to be considered, and that of course determines the sequence of the album…

Unlike some folks in poetry, I embrace the idea that as poets we can learn quite a lot from musicians and from music in general. Every once in awhile this debate flares, in which one side says poetry has to be kept pure from such other-disciplinary sources, and the other side says Go fuck yourselves. I’m in the latter camp, obviously, for the simple reason that I’d never want to deny the possibility of influence from any constructive source; besides, to claim there’s nothing to be learned strikes me as a perfect response from someone seeking to prove s/he is in fact tone-deaf.

North of Invention aims to initiate a new dialogue in North American poetics, addressing the hotly debated areas of “innovation” and “conceptual writing,” the history of sound poetry and contemporary performance, multilingualism and translation, and connections to activism.

“Fifty-thousand strong
we stand up and scream to save
sitting down to talk.”

On Montevidayo, former Wisconsin resident and Milwaukee poet Brenda Cardenas checks in from the protests, calling to mind the presence of other poets and activists whose historic efforts keep her and the other protesters going.

Carlos [Cortez] was there and is here. My grandpa was there and is here. Cesar Chavez, Joe Hill, and Mother Jones have been marching in Madison for weeks, sleeping on the marble floors of the Capitol and outside on its concrete steps when they were cast out… and they are here. Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Ronnie Gilbert, Leadbelly and Victor Jara, the Coal Miner’s Daughters have been harmonizing with our chants all over Wisconsin, and they are here. Sonia Sanchez, Thomas McGrath, and Federico Garcia Lorca, Mahmoud Darwish, Pablo Neruda and Anna Akhmatova have been whispering in our ears, and they are here. MLK, Fanny Lou Hammer, Anna Mae Pictou Acquash, and Corky Gonzalez have passed through Teamsters, custodians and sewer workers; labor leaders, teachers and firemen; nurses, policemen and anarchists; veterans, students, and EMT’s; business owners, lawyers, and sanitation workers; bus and taxi drivers; clerks, artists and actors; singing grannies and babies dressed in diapers that read, “I poop on your bill!”; Lesbians for Labor and ministers; United Farm Workers and snowplow drivers; rainbow coalitions and farmers. They are taxpayers, they are citizens of the world, they are the bread of the earth, and they are here. The 14 Senators who fled so that the truth would be exposed are currently harbored in Carlos’ and my second home… and they are here—shape-shifters shaking the earth beneath Walker’s feet. In his dreams, he is falling like a cracked wall, its chinks chiseled open by the workers who have learned over many years of labor how to wield their tools.