Let me explain. Every month or two, I go to a barbershop and have my hair and beard buzzed down to a stubble with an electric razor. Then I pretty much let it grow wildly for a month or two, until my beard starts to itch, and hairs poke into the corner of my mouth when I lick my lips.

When I first get a new haircut, my hair is too short; I look like an out of shape marine. When I am about to get a new haircut, at the end of the cycle, my hair is too long; I look unkempt and furry, like an overgrown Chia pet. But there is one week every month or two, in the middle of the cycle, where the hair on my head and my facial hair look good — a manageable light scruff — and this is the week I am attractive. Older women will ask if the chair next to me in a crowded coffee shop is free. People on the sidewalks of New York occasionally take note of me. Baristas plug in their smiles for me.

I know it would make sense to purchase an electric razor and keep the blade at a certain length and groom myself regularly, but that would be so vain; I am not a miniature golf course. I am more like the moon; I start as a sliver, and get bigger and bigger, in the night sky, a bright, furry face for people to avoid.

The Xenotext attempts to address such concerns about the untimeliness of art in an age, now anxious about the many potentials for our own anthropoid extinction. Even though poets may pay due homage to the “immortality” of art, no cultural artifact so far created (except perhaps for the Pioneer probes or the Voyager probes) has the power to endure for longer than a few million years—a mere scintilla of time, when measured against the cosmic scales of even one sidereal lifespan. All evidence of our sentience upon the planet (every artifact, every edifice), must eventually disintegrate, ground into an invisible stratum of dust within the tectonic grinders of the earth itself. Our species can, in fact, bequeath only three longterm legacies to some civilization that might visit our planet hundreds of millions of years from now: first, the background irradiance caused by our stockpiles of nuclear remains; second, the fossil record of mass extinctions caused by our ecocidal activity; and third, the global effect of climate changes caused by our advanced industry. I believe that poetry needs to address itself to the longterm timeline of our aesthetic evolution—to think beyond the formal limits of our extinction in order to offer the future a cultural heritage more noble than our crimes against the environment.

Kwame Dawes argues, however, that “the quest for timelessness is a vanity,” noting that it often results, not in great works, but in poems that seem “mediocre and ordinary”—and by making such a comment, he repeats the kind of sceptical critiques lodged by naysayers, who question the merits of a project like The Xenotext, objecting to the hubris of any desire to make a poem that might outlast its creator, forever. We forget, however, that we owe our entire cultural heritage (be it trivial or sublime) to the vanity of every defiant egotist, who has striven in the past to exceed the limits of the “timely.” We have, so far, found no way to transmit messages reliably across any time-span in excess of a few thousand millennia—except perhaps for the genetic code, which has preserved sequences of genes so crucial to the survival of every life-form on the planet that these genes have endured for eons, relatively unmodified. I think that, ultimately, poetry must make some effort to engage with the “untimeliness” of such a code, addressing life itself in its own language—especially in an era of biotech novelty. I am hoping that my poem might constitute such an “untimely” pursuit, speaking slightly out of sync with its current moment in history, while awaiting its intended audience, which has not yet evolved to read it….

The next step in this technology is the move to home use. People in the industry like to say that 3D printing is currently where the homebrew computer scene was in the early 80’s; full of hobbyists and hackers, but poised to become the next big thing. This is nowhere more evident than in Makerbot and RepRap, two of the more popular 3D-fab-at-home solutions. For under $1500, you can buy and install a system from either seller that allows you to make your own 3D printed objects at home. Even better, a library could purchase a 3D printer, and make it available for use for the public.

(Even EVEN better is that these machines can replicate themselves, so pretty soon even the most hardened Luddites in your writing group could be prototyping instead of typewriting).

Right now, the best poetry-objects out there are napkin rings that you can customize with your own poems. Surely you can do better than that.

Poetry magazine recently received this welcome dispatch from Chicago Review, with links to PDFs of knockouts from their latest number. From CR editor, V. Joshua Adams:

Readers of Harriet may be interested in two essays on contemporary poetry from the latest issue of Chicago Review (55:3—4). In “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry,” Peter O’Leary extols the virtues of a vatic approach in a poetry world “filled with allergies to the spirit.” His essay begins with a discussion of the noteworthy magazine apex of the M, and praises apocalyptic tendencies in the work of Joseph Donahue and Pam Rehm. Meanwhile, Keith Tuma’s “After the Bubble” takes aim at the silence of poets (of all kinds) on the relation between their world and that of the university. Tuma looks to Stephen Rodefer and Kent Johnson as two potential alternatives to a pervasive “aesthetic of courtesy” that prevents contemporary poetry from giving an accurate account of itself.

These essays are part of a feature of ten essays dedicated to the work of critic Robert von Hallberg. The introduction to the feature is available online, too.

The insights Galileo gleaned from analyzing Dante’s measurements in fact anticipated a vital principle of structural engineering. By asserting that you cannot create a giant Lucifer by super-sizing the model of a man — that increasing an object’s magnitude would create a whole new set of structural and material imperatives — Galileo was paving the way for the construction of everything from ocean liners to skyscrapers to Macy’s parade floats.

Read the whole shebang here.

Translating a haiku? Genzel can preprogram his computer to generate online lines of five, seven and five syllables.

A Shakespeare sonnet in iambic pentameter? The computer can read a pronunciation dictionary, Genzel says, “like you would use to learn another language.” Once it knows where the stress falls in a given word, it can correctly place that word in a metered sentence.

“The hardest thing to do is rhyme,” Genzel says, “because it connects to different places in a sentence,” and because two words that rhyme in English may not rhyme in another language.

In a recent article for The Fortnightly Review, Martin Sorrell identifies the passage that first set him “firmly on the path of imaginative translation,” demonstrating in two words, Dix nuits, the difficulties even human translators face in parsing the original author’s intent. The stanza is from Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre, as translated by Samuel Beckett.

Has Rimbaud, or his mad boat, really been keeping count of the nights? Ten, rather than six or seven or twelve or twenty? The answer, in terms of poetic language, is yes, it has to be “dix”, and that’s not because of the number, but the sound. The high front unrounded vowel [dis] is replicated in the noun [nųi]. It must surely be there as the shrill correlative of the boat’s distress, hurled about on crazed seas. (And is there a pre-echo here of the anguished last line of “Aube”, one of the Illuminations: “Au réveil il était midi”?). Beckett’s solution is “Nine nights”, and it’s a wonderful one. A shrill sound it may not be, but the rich rhyme [nain naits] recognises Rimbaud’s real meaning.

Along with this simplification, comes the numerical measuring of life. With cookie-cutter precision, the internet slices life’s organic shape into neat, quantifiable little squares. We have 140 characters or 530 friends––no more, no murkiness, no questions… We don’t experience the day as “20ºC, partially cloudy, with a 58% chance of precipitation, and a wind speed of 7.3 km/hr NW”. We’re pretty sure you don’t either.

So what does the personality of wind have to teach us about appreciating the qualitative things in life?

dreary weary, clouds be feary!

I gots my sun-come-back spray!

• location: San Francisco, San Francisco International Airport
• cloud cover: broken clouds
• temperature: 11 °C
• wind direction: 120°
• wind speed: 5km/hr

ancestry, health, 5th cousin, GWAS, chromosome, DNA, genotype, phenotype, Mendelian, haplogroup

If you feel that as a poet, you’re not qualified to comment on cutting-edge science, don’t worry. None of the judges are qualified to critique poetry so it will even out. “Poems will be evaluated based on creativity and overall appeal by a panel of judges with questionable taste, none of whom will have had previous experience judging poetry contests.” One can only hope that they have a genetic predisposition toward identifying good poetry.

Some of Eliot’s typescripts had marks all over them, marks which were known to be the notes of Ezra Pound, Eliot’s champion in the U.S. and a well-known literary critic. He had made massive changes to the original manuscript. Example: that famous opener, “April is the cruellest month,” used to be buried under a section some hundred lines long before Pound cut the whole thing. All told his edits shrunk the poem in half. As a result it became more cryptic, rhymed less, and in some ways mutated into a bleaker, more biting critique of the modern world.

Which is to say that Pound completely transformed “The Waste Land.” And the scary thing is that we might have never known—we might have lost our whole rich picture of the poem’s creation—had Eliot not been such a bureaucrat, typing up and shuffling around so many snapshots of his work in progress.

Software like the kind Somers used to record his progress on these paragraphs exists. We have the technology to rebuild a poem—that is, if authors were willing to use it. Having that capability probably felt intuitive to the software developers who built programs like Etherpad and other text versioning tools. Writing code still requires drafts and revisions. In their case, however, the programmers need to be able to find their way back if something goes wrong or doesn’t work as intended.

That’s because code is so fragile, and simple changes can propagate in complex and unpredictable ways. So it would be stupid not to keep old versions —i.e., versions that worked—close at hand.

Writing is different. A writer explores, and as he explores, he purposely forgets the way he came…

…No need, then, to drop so many breadcrumbs along the way. Especially when such a trail could do more harm than good. Readers could use it to find places where you massaged the facts; they’d be able to see you struggle with simple structural problems; they’d watch, horrified, as you replaced an audacious idea, or character, or construction, with a commonplace.

…it was set up by the National Science Foundation to give the Antarctic programs a way of explaining themselves to the world in a way that’s not strictly dry and scientific. I think what they sensed was they had a really wonderful set of programs down here, a lot of really wonderful science going down in a completely spectacular, almost otherworldly landscape. And that the world wasn’t necessarily hearing about these programs or even this part of the world or even necessarily gripping to the imagination, so they thought if they brought a whole different set of thinkers down here on a regular basis that slowly a more nuanced and richer understanding of the place and the people who were here might emerge from that.

Coles admits that while undergoing all the medical tests needed to make the trip, she wasn’t sure what she’d gotten herself into even after all of her preparations: “There was no way to prepare the imagination for this, but that was why I was coming.”

Many digital poets weave sound into their texts. In Dakota, a piece by the South Korean-based Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries, text flashes rapidly on the screen, accompanied by an Art Blakey soundtrack. The rapid-fire sequence of words together with the power of Blakey’s drumming combine to deprive the reader of a sense of control. The effect is unsettling, but it echoes the chaotic journey described in the poem.

Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries are one of those early hyperart adopters who generally work with third party source text, in this case, Ezra Pound. For Jim Nelson, however, the “digital” and “poetry” are inseparable, resulting in the Wall Street Journal calling his work as “alienating as modern art can get” and the occasional death threat.

The form that poetry takes isn’t the only area where new technologies are eliciting strong reactions. Even more practical applications like Google Translate have their naysayers, at least for now.

Some have suggested that the role of the poet will be subsumed, or at least altered, by technology. That may explain the uneasy reaction to Google’s attempt to extend its text translation system so that it can cope with verse. It is a formidable challenge, in part because the translations need to maintain both form and meaning.

I asked Robert Pinsky, the former US poet laureate, to look at the initial output from Google’s software. “These remind me that over the years people have sent me poems generated by computer programs,” he said. “It was amazing how much the computers seem to love cliches: the effect of naivety and conventionality. But maybe next week, or month, or year, something dazzling?”

Next time anyone accuses you otherwise, you can tell them you know exactly what it takes to make a miniature sculptural automaton of Paul Verlaine being visited by absinthe fairies and the Exorcist-worthy ghost of Arthur Rimbaud.

[MRI brain scans] scans firstly confirmed which regions of the brain  are associated with reading: as expected, the visual word form area,  which is known to enable people to link sounds with written symbols,  became active during reading, demonstrating that it plays an important  role. Unsurprisingly, those who were better readers had more activation  in this area when they were reading compared with the others. And when  volunteers listened to spoken sentences, all their brains showed similar  responses in the visual word form area.

But when the researchers showed  participants pictures of faces, the visual word form area of those who  could read was much less active than that of participants who could not  read. So, the researchers speculate, learning to read competes with face  recognition ability – in this part of the brain at least.

In the 1700s several poems appeared that passed on a scientific message. The best known is The Loves of the Plants, by Erasmus Darwin, who in 1791 set out in verse an account of the sexual habits of the vegetable world. He used heroic couplets, in which the rhyme pattern is AA, BB, CC and so on (for the sensitive plant, for example, he wrote that “Weak with nice sense the chaste Mimosa stands,/ From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands;/ Oft as light clouds o’erpass the summer glade,/ Alarm’d she trembles at the moving shade”). Byron, a rather better poet, liked the form ABABABCC and in his epic Don Juan even manages to squeeze in a mention of Newton (“And this is the sole mortal who could grapple/ Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.”)

Steve Jones goes on to argue that formal poetry is, more generally speaking, married to mathematics — even if it doesn’t explore Darwin or Newton.

Overblown as Erasmus Darwin’s verses might seem nowadays, the point of poetry was pattern; to use a strict structure of rhythm and rhyme as a framework for words of passion or pedantry that would become fixed in a reader’s brain. Robert Frost put it neatly when he wrote that “Poetry without rules is like tennis without a net”.

But if you want more, you can read up on Snyder’s analysis at Time’s “Tuned In” blog:

And so to accompany that hour of radio, we have this ambitious short film, largely wordless, but still featuring some key phrases like “Play Ball!” and “Light as a feather.” Directed by Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante, I think there are actually multiple ways you can interpret this slice of life, given the context of its making. The obvious reading, of course, is that we’re getting variations on different words – numerous ways of perceiving such terms as light, flighting, blowing, running, etc. But I’m inclined to go even further. Is this an attempt to capture the kinds of fleeting moments that transcend words? The images that are worth thousands of descriptors? Or is it a reminder of everything that is so beautiful, surprising and stunning in this world – this life – that first gave us the inkling to create a language, and the desire to share?

However, Harriet wanted to know how the Poetry app fares among the average user. Who’s using it, what do they use it for, and what do they think of it?

We took a web litmus test, and looks like a plethora of bloggers and Twitterbugs have already weighed in. Here’s the verdict from few Poetry app users:

In a post titled “Just What Poetry’s Spin Doctor Ordered,” blogger Mike Chasar breaks down the pros and cons of the app’s spin function. He suggests that while the quick categorization facilitates access, and that its very existence means that Poetry is now “middlebrow”:

The Poetry Foundation apparently knows, however, that author names and specific poem titles often pale in importance to subject matter, theme, or mood among a popular readership and so, in reaching out to that readership via the iPhone app, the Foundation has put on a distinctly popular face—a face that probably has Ezra Pound rolling (if not spinning) in his grave. (Try to imagine, for example, an anthology of Modernist poetry being structured around sections titled “Joy” and “Commitment”!) That is, after nearly a century of standing for modernist quality, taste and discrimination, Poetry has gone thoroughly middlebrow if not downright popular in its ambitions, and it’s not the world of the little magazine but digital communication technologies—such as the Poetry Tool on the Foundation’s web site and the iPhone app discussed here—that have taken it there.

The Rumpus poetry editor Brain Spears focused on the app’s technical aspects in his blog post. Overall, Spears finds it a fun and useful tool, but suggests there’s always room for improvement:

The failing of most poetry apps, at least from my perspective, is that they don’t expand much. Updates are sporadic, assuming they happen at all. What I hope happens with this app is that they continue to add content–new poems from the latest issues of Poetry in particular–and I wouldn’t mind if they threw in the occasional essay either, though that sort of content might require its own application.

Though a bunch of Tweets about the app were praiseworthy, this one from @pilliontopost tempted our palate: “Poetry foundation app proving to be the most addictive thing since decent raspberries.”

The poetry of William Wordsworth does not lend itself naturally to legal argument but it is featuring in a courtroom battle over polytunnels. In 1798, Wordsworth wrote Tintern Abbey, a poem that celebrates the beauty of untamed nature in the Wye Valley. Novelist and Farmers Weekly journalist Tim Relf discusses what would have happened had Wordsworth returned to find the valley as it is today.

Listen to the rest of Relf’s ode to Polytunnels at the BBC. Read “Tintern Abbey” here.

From the Guardian:

“Listening to the spoken word is one of the most profound sources of comfort. The sense of being looked after, nourished and replenished, is like being fed. The listener can relax and place their trust in the reader. The experience is quite unlike reading to oneself. Part of this, claims Davis, comes from “the slowness of the human voice”. When we are engaged at the pace of ordinary speech, we don’t skip on, we engage with the many levels of meaning in the story. It grows deeper and more real. From this, people start to talk freely about what a text has meant to them – and become liberated in their personal lives.”

The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, founded by New York poet Gary Glazner, is not built on the traditional, stand-at-the-podium-and-read poetry recital. Rather, it uses the simple rhymes typically learned in childhood or whimsical works created on the spot with audience participation. The facilitator moves among the seniors, holding their hands, touching their shoulders, gently prodding them to share their thoughts, reawakening long-ago memories.

“There was a guy in [one] group, his head was down, he wasn’t participating, and I said the Longfellow poem, ‘I shot an arrow in the air…’ ” Glazner says, recalling the initial workshop that spawned the project. “And his eyes suddenly popped open, and he said, ‘It fell to earth, I know not where.’ In that instant, he was back with us and was able to participate. It was very powerful” . . .

(Back in 2004, NPR reported on Glazner’s efforts in New Mexico. Listen here.)

For anyone interested, here is a list of organizations taking on volunteers:

• Louisiana’s St. Tammany Humane Society seeks trained and untrained volunteers to help clean and rehab oiled pelicans. Call Catherine Wilbert at 985-674-6898.

• The Sierra Club is mobilizing volunteers, and will connect you with opportunities to help. Click here for information on the Delta Area Sierra Club.

• Human hair from beauty salons, animal fur from groomers and pantyhose are needed by San Fransisco-based Matter of Trust to make homemade booms to sop up the oil. The fur is stuffed into pantyhose, which give shape to the booms. Volunteers are needed at warehouses in different sites across the country to gather for “Boom-B-Qs” to learn how to make the booms.

• The National Audubon Society is seeking volunteers wishing to clean up birds. Click here to register. The Audobon Society also seeks eBirders, people needed to survey local beaches and marshes for birds; your observations will help conservationists and researchers prioritize their efforts and asses the impacts of the spill.

• Another option for those wishing to help oiled birds, Pascagoula River Audubon Center, part of Audubon Mississippi, is organizing training on cleaning wildlife affected by the oil spill. Volunteers may register their contact information here.

• Tristate Bird Rescue & Research is also coordinating on-the-ground volunteer efforts.

• Save Our Seabirds is a Sarasota, Florida-based bird rescue group that is looking for volunteers and support as its response team prepares to help oiled wildlife. Please click here to fill out their online form or call 941-388-3010.

• The city of Biloxi, Mississippi is signing up volunteers at www.biloxi.ms.us/Volunteer.asp for when the oil reaches its shores.

If you have other suggestions or know of other literary organizations involved in the cleanup effort, please email harriet@poetryfoundation.org with details.

Astronomers have tracked down the astral subject of Walt Whitman’s poem “Year of Meteors (1859-1860)” after years of trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about:

In the July issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, Olson and colleagues reveal that the event was indeed a “meteor progression” – something that occurs when a large meteor grazes the Earth’s atmosphere and breaks into pieces that chase each other across the sky. “Meteor progressions are so rare that most modern astronomers have not even heard of them,” Olson says. “In all of history, we can list only four.”

The one described by Whitman, he adds, occurred on 20 July 1860 – a date that his team unearthed by searching the archives of newspapers and scientific journals . . .

(via HTMLgiant)

Went over to Green-Wood Cemetery this afternoon, in fact, to hear Allison read from the book to a crowd of nearly one hundred and lead a very sharp and decidedly un-academic question and answer session afterwards that delved into her process in putting together a book that necessarily moves back and forth through time while encountering a wide range of large subjects (life, death, war, the European settling of the northeast, the development and constant threats to the ecosystem supported by the 478-acre cemetery & its approximately 600,000 denizens, the blurring of the line between natural and unnatural, the reality of personal experience – Cobb’s consciousness – as the glue holding the writing together through what I take as a process that invented itself as it went along, and that’s just what’s obvious so far).

This event was a return of sorts for Cobb, who now lives in Portland, Oregon, as well as an opportunity to give a reading on the grounds of a site she so deeply investigated and clearly fell for – and for my part I felt honored to be in the cemetery’s chapel surrounded by that various audience. It wasn’t bad, either, to walk with my daughter around the chapel in which Cobb read and get to see robins and quaker parrots (there’s a flock of wild urban parrots nesting in the cemetery – they’ve been there for years – along with the multitudes of other avian life; between Green-Wood, Central Park, and Jamaica Bay there’s a hell of a lot of bird watching experience available here in our lovely despicable metropolis of unsortable dimension) landing and looking for grub on knolls covered with graves of Revolutionary and Civil War veterans and making it work. Here’s some material from the beginning of the book, which delves into the early history of the cemetery while rooted in our recent past as well, not to mention the ever-present construction, word by word, of a present:

“As first cemetery president, the soldier and engineer David Bates Douglass set about sculpting a garden landscape. A few decades earlier, Douglass had surveyed the wilds of the Michigan Territory with its governor Lewis Cass. In hopes of luring settlers, they reported that they found the Indians peaceful and the land promising.

Douglass brought order to Green-Wood. He had the trees thinned and the underbrush cleared to create the aspect of the glade rather than the thicket. A look coming into the light:

English hawthorn

Big-leaf magnolia

American elm

Italian cypress

Black locust

Scotch pine

ancient whisper for “spear” and “spire”

***

First snowfall.

I follow a path scraped down to stiff grass to the grave of JOSEPH O. BEHNKE. Beside ist sags a half-melted snowman, thorned branch sticking out of its back. 1958-2004. OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM II, CHARLIE BATTERY 1/258 FIELD ARTILLERY, 95^TH MILITARY POLICE BATTALION. LIVED FOR HIS FAMILY, DIED FOR GOD AND COUNTRY. A soldier carved into the stone kneels with his head down, rifle propped in one hand, helmet dangling from the other. The name MIRIAM P. is inscribed below, awaiting her dates.

word a lamp awaiting fire

In the late 1940s, grave owners at Green-Wood donated the wrought iron fences around their plots as scrap for bullets and ships. Today in many places only the gates remain, connecting nothing, an opening older than soil, an eye.

More than a dozen condolence notes appear on the Behnke tribute site at fallenheroesmemorial.com. Specialist Kovalik ends his note: I still feel a bit guilty though, and you know why, take care Behnke.

The first use of the word wood to mean “insane” appears in the year 725. They bee bitten by the wood dog the devil, and be fallen wood themselves.

Numb with cold, I turn from Behnke’s grave back toward the gate, head down against the wind. By the edge of Valley Winter, I notice a stone inscribed MARTHA, with a seal for the WOMENS OVERSEAS SERVICE LEAGUE, half sunk in dirt. I scrape off leaves and snow with a stick to uncover the last name, EFFIE. A fat white caterpillar ticked inside the I recoils from the stick. It moves more and more slowly until it freezes in the frigid air.

I shall appear blank

a gleaming creature”

(A few extra things: some of the above formatting is not accurate to the actual layout in the book; there are copious notes in the back of the book, which indicate without a lot of jargon the very broad range of sources used in Green-Wood, and I am finding them informative and non-intrusive without exception; several members of the Behnke family were at the reading today, which, without asking Cobb about it, I took to be an indication of the rigor and sensitivity she brought to this work; I included this passage because I heard Cobb read from it today and was particularly struck by it….the book seems to me to have a tonal range that can’t be adequately captured by a single excerpt, so I wouldn’t take this one as purely emblematic if I were you.)

When your meter muscles get regular and varied exercise you will find that it actually turns you on poetically. You will better be able to identify and distinguish your lyric G-spot and Poetic Ear muscles. As you perfect these exercises and strengthen the muscles you’ll begin to notice that you can isolate distinctly separate groups of metrical muscles in your poetic floor, including your dactylic, anapestic, trochaic, and iambic muscles. This kind of awareness enables you to isolate your poetic clitoris, for instance, and stimulate yourself poetically at any time. It’s an excellent trick for getting yourself “juiced up” for a hot inspirational experience or important occasional poem. You may even be able to train yourself to have amazing poetic orgasms in this manner. Meter exercises increase blood flow to the poetic region, which aids in the increased flow of inspiration and helps engorge the creative area. With increased blood supply and stronger muscles we prep ourselves for better, stronger and more amazing poetic orgasms. Our lyric G-spot is directly energized and stimulated.

Men – Every bit of the above applies to you, too. Having strong PM muscles aids in stronger lyric erections, lasting longer, increased poetic libido and they help massage the Inspirational Prostate, too.

If you aren’t familiar with the Poetic Meter muscles on your poetic floor, go to the page and write. Try stopping the language flow several times in a rhythmic manner. It’s your PM Muscles that are allowing you to do this! Women, you may want to have a “base” line for your PM muscle strength. Just put a finger or two into your poem, squeeze and feel how strong your PM muscles are now. Read your poem aloud to do this easily. Men, you can contract and relax your PM Muscles a few times with a hard pen. How far you can rhythmically “lift” your poetic line in this initial test is your base line.

Now let’s begin. Sit comfortably in a chair or on the floor. Sit up straight but with a relaxed attitude. You can take a large ear, roll it up, put it between your ideas and use it to apply slight pressure to your poetic floor if you’d like more contact. Listen in your body to do this.

Take a few slow, deep breaths to begin. Really relax. Breath fully into your belly.

On an in-breath, tighten your words. Hold for a moment.

Now, on the out-breath, relax them. Focus on the relaxing. This is very important. Let your words go to a completely relaxed state. Make sure you do this after every metrical foot.

As you begin to do this exercise stay with the breath. You can increase your speed and your breath will increase with you automatically.

Tighten and relax, tighten and relax.

Try to start with about 50 of these every day for a few days. Your muscles may hurt a little as in any new exercise but that’s how we know we’re doing the work. Work up to 200 repetitions a day. You may do several sets a day if you wish. Generally you will notice the difference within a few weeks. A set of 200 Meter Kegels takes about 15 – 20 minutes. They can be done ANYWHERE.

INQUIRY:
How do your Meter muscles feel? After the first day? After a week?
Do you notice any “poetic turn on”?
After about a month, can you begin to isolate the duple and triple, rising and falling, patterns and different muscle groups that comprise the poetic floor?
If you have readers, have those people noticed any change?

You can also do the “base line” test you might have done when you started to see if you notice a change. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t notice much of a change. This takes a little time, as any muscle conditioning does.

POETIC TANTRIC PRACTICE: 
Add visualization to your Meter Kegel exercises. It is a fine way to begin an introduction to poetry-writing practice or advance an already existing poetry-writing practice. Sit in a quiet place and begin your meter exercises. As you progress, hold a “picture” or thought in your mind that you have decided on before you began the meter exercise. It could be as simple as LOVE, or GRATITUDE, or the vision of HEALTH, or ENERGY moving up your spine or CHAKRAS, or of your LOVER or CHILD, or a beautiful FLOWER. As you pump your meter muscles, you will be pumping your energy. This will add strength to your poem.

Remember –
Only do what feels comfortable at any one moment. You can always come back to the meter exercise. Don’t continue if you feel like you’re not really listening. It will often take almost everyone that begins these meter exercises a little while to get into the flow. Be gentle with yourself. Have fun.

With grateful appreciation to the author of the original article

Dilated pupils follow the local smoke signals, trading the rainbow broke into tears for a deeper well from which to pay the bills. I see your indifference and raise you a practical salute. Isn’t judgment an overly natural phenomenon, a light matter in need of deeper perversion? There is the diner fantasy in which the body next door demands to be taught something. Proof of useful existence turning into a welcome ledge. I’m working through these recalcitrant responsibilities. I get sent some messages meant to protect our mutual mess. I feel like an amputated leg.

I’m skeptical of that place’s relationship to place, it’s projection of other memory. But is the will to force the issue anything more than necessary gambit to pass the time beneath a veneer of confidence? There is no bond of reality between money and enough. I gave up early on the search for the source, having taken halting steps along such recovery as to be depicted with stiffer hips than previous carnations endured. And yet it was not so wracked with difficulty, that disavowal of energies conjured from pictures of plagues. I had some images, their floating contours bred to provoke a system of scanning I’d later mean to acknowledge and lose.  That’s taking credit for waking up, and we don’t like that.

Three encourages bad decisions, hand drawn to simulate the time we stole at the well-lit end of the street. Someone gave me a hawk’s name, I forgot it, told someone else it had a name, though obviously without participating in the act, the hawk I mean, with regards to non-participation, a certain protest on my part, this forgetting, and I daily resist looking up its name on the web, so as to keep things unreal. And that’s what I get for attempting to separate nature from naming, another set of giggling decisions taunting us as we delve into the drop off service. You can certainly borrow the seat next to me, elevated as it may be, homogenous without shadowy distinction.

I take pleasure in the fact that our opinions have often the honor of coinciding with yours, and that we follow them, though far behind, proclaiming their ruddy virtues. On page four the king of the sea and his battle penguins ward off their colorful enemies, or so a scan re-reveals on a hunt for spoilers in the deep night. I can’t wait for you to operate. Tis not so necessary as it once was to fear and consider the present tense and plight of the cannibal, yet I cannot help but think these times infected by a deeper meanness than savagery. But, yeah, illusions are a dime a dozen and the twenty, that yuppie food stamp, will net the savvy shopper many minutes worth of illusory surfaces.

These liquid anti-oxidants for instance, that book of wisdom half a millennium old, the red velvet cupcakes tempting behind the counter. The signs for the washing of hands instill a deeper resentment towards dirt’s absence as I navigate the gaps between moments of silence. Wassup guys? How you doing? This is Wanda. Wiped out the mutant population with an utterance then vanished until redrawn this very evening. Spirituality, human emotion, the weight loss of history, and selved identity: these would be little remarkable in such a scheme if it didn’t produce cacophony. But it’s sad, I like to touch the parts – to be the last person to touch the part that’s coming off.

Thus, a few days ago, I paused, mid-sip, to read this: “Now he’s ditching the dung and the glitter, and going some place darker.”  And see this:

Then read this, which repeats the words but the words are a “connected complex,” so I won’t kill them down:

” -bit by bit – [he] jettisons the things that made him famous:the dung, the glitter, the multi-coloured, pasted-on genitalia and afro heads. Get up close to his earlier paintings – the surfaces encourage it, catching the light and writhing with life – and you lose yourself in the visual riffs, the art-nouveauish riots of plant life, the chains of dots and blobs, the beats and pulses and beads of colour. It’s like listening to multi-layered music on headphones, and being delayed by all the detail.”

And put my cup down.

Adrian Searle, in other words, on Chris Ofili‘s new show :

“[It's] a lesson in learning to be free. Not of the shadows cast by other artists, but of his own…..[S]ome artists grow scared of their shadows; they get so stuck with the thing they have become known for that they are paralysed, ­unable to find a way forward. Ofili, ­instead, has raced ahead. On Sunday he told me that he is letting his new work lead him where it will.”

How do you let go of the “dung and glitter” of your early work, whether that’s a “body” of work, like Ofili’s, or the first “finished” draft of a manuscript? When forming a sequence, a narrative, a long poem, how do you “ditch” what makes/made it palatable, in some sense — beautiful?/’writhing with life”? — and go, instead, for the dirty book?  The book that exceeds its contents: that is more than you?  That takes you “where it will”? That darkens, opposing lyric decisions and opportunities.

I began to consider a speck of glitter, a fleck of dirt.  How the “imperceptible” element, brought forward, becomes the site of species intensity; what brings it forward?  The insect in the sodden pasture, carrying a bit of mud on its back, its black and yellow wing, etc.  Shedding minerals as it flies, or is eaten.  Here I would quote Agamben if getting up from this desk to get the book didn’t make the floor creak and thus wake my son, in these tentative ten or fifteen minutes before he falls into a truly deep sleep.

Substitute Activity #173: Leaning in a doorway on Monday, at Naropa, I encountered the poet Amy Catanzano as she was leaving to teach a class.  Amy recently wrote an essay with Christian Bok and the Butthole Surfers in it, to give you an example of the kind of animal we are dealing with.  When I asked her about the dung and glitter, she said this.  She said it, and I asked her to write it down, which she did, then sent it to me, in this altered and intensified form:

“Bhanu, the password to the quantum supercomputerpoem will be NCC-1701

My forms, like their protagonists, are all rocketship these days. Yet I would rather consider progress as mutation rather than evolution, which is more inviting of non-linear time where the pre and the post accelerate into what Alfred Jarry calls The Imaginary Present, a second, symmetrical present that redefines duration as the “becoming of memory.”

In proposals such as string theory, time is a cubist face of space, a spacetime comprising a multiverse that interacts with forces such as quantum gravity, which I picture as the invisible background swell in a Chagall painting upon which objects are psychedelically unhitched…

Like a hand on the anywhere, in slight repose. Or, more threadbare: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” (oh, Thoreau!).

Seems the pre can include pre-science and also prescience—getting rid of the monolithic hyphen here—a more promising framework for the writing process and progress. Prescience, if plucked from containment within Aristotelian time, provokes alternate universes (which are questions?) of instinct, exchanges between imperceptibility and transparency. That is not to say I’m not all Scientific Method too, wanting to invent new tech for the poem, for you.

Which brings us to the latest reboot of Star Trek. Enterprise engineer Scotty, upon discovering how his future-self develops the Federation’s first Trans-Warp technology—which permits the transportation of people on/off starships traveling at warp speed—remarks, As One Might in a Poem, “It never occurred to me to think of space as the thing that was moving.” I feel this analogy is a good example of the glitter. Now, THE DUNG:

Like a deity this is, and most applauded. I predict a thorough vetting. I predict the top of a poem. I predict preparedness everyone. I predict prestigious prestigious—Like a deity make a power! Like a Titan fake a wake! Like that other face, in alpha-hide, only yours to make

LUCKILY, GLITTER IS INNUMERABLE

As innumerable as the more benevolent tender buttons in my heart. Shall “I become a transparent eye-ball” (Emerson)? Now that’s a stylistic hyphen. Emerson, again, just past the occasion of glittering—where form makes time: “Words are the finite organs of the infinite mind.”

And so now I am asking you.  What do you do with what is “pre” in your writing? How do you make an abiogenetic decision?  How do you let go of the motifs, styles and obsessions that have brought you this far?  For example, how do I let the “red” soak back into the garden?  I let the rosebush die.  I build a fire from the stalks and petals, on the ice.  Well, I don’t.  I notice that it is almost impossible to destroy a living, or near-living, rose.