Language Alters Imagery

While poets have always had a deep and intimate knowledge of language’s capabilities — formally and emotionally — the video above demonstrates that technology has made language act in ways that I don’t think we’ve conceived of before. In it, words aren’t used to express anything: they don’t sing, emote, or pull heartstrings. Instead, language is pure material: active and affective, more akin to clay or a sledgehammer than a transparent (or opaque) communicator (or miscommunicator).

Never before has language had so much materiality — fluidity, plasticity, malleability — begging to be actively managed by the writer. Before digital language, words were almost always found imprisoned on a page. How different it is today, when digitized language can be poured into any conceivable container: text typed into a Microsoft Word document can be parsed into a database, visually morphed in Photoshop, animated in Flash, pumped into online text-mangling engines, spammed to thousands of e-mail addresses, and imported into a sound-editing program and spit out as music — the possibilities are endless.

It’s just another reminder that, in the future, words very well might not only be written to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated, sometimes by humans, more often by machines, providing us with an extraordinary opportunity to reconsider what writing is and to define new roles for the writer. While traditional notions of writing are primarily focused on “originality” and “creativity,” the digital environment fosters new skill sets that include “manipulation” and “management” of the heaps of already existent and ever-increasing language. While the writer today is challenged by having to “go up” against a proliferation of words and compete for attention, she can use this proliferation in unexpected ways to create works that are as expressive and meaningful as works constructed in more traditional ways.

Check out the Nederlands Dans Theater 2 perform a dance version of Gertrude Stein’s poem “Shutters Shut.” It rules!

BOOK Southern Africa has posted videos from a reading last week organized by South African PEN and Poetry International Web South Africa. Part of a protest reading that took place in 33 countries around the world, South African writers shared their own prison writing alongside English and Afrikaans translations of Liu’s “Charter 08″ and “You Wait for me with Dust.”

The final item on the programme was the reading of Xiaobo’s poem, “You Wait for Me with Dust”. First it was read in the original Mandarin by an anonymous, masked reader. This was a haunting encounter for those who imagined the solitude from which it was written. It was followed in English, read by Liesl Jobson, and an Afrikaans translation by Johann de Lange was read by Karin Schimke.

The reading was a call for free speech as Liu remains in prison despite the international attention his Nobel Peace Prize drew last year. In solidarity, SA PEN’s newly formed Writers in Prison Committee announced that they would begin efforts to bring attention to imprisoned writers throughout Africa.

The Times-Picayune talks with Gian Smith who is featured reciting his poem “O Beautiful Storm” in a new promo for the HBO show Treme. Smith now hosts an open mic at The McKenna Museum of African American Art, but it was Katrina that first made him turn to poetry. In both the poem and his interview, he describes scraping the residue off the floor of his parents’ house that was once flooded with five feet of water. Though a symbol of Katrina’s lingering devastation, that residue also connected him permanently to a moment that is “something central to my life, and therefore it has value.”

Smith had been invited to perform his poems at an October Tulane symposium on Treme that was filmed for HBO’s website. His conflicting feelings about Katrina and what it meant to him, his family, and New Orleans residents resonated with the HBO team and spread to the show’s producers. They hadn’t necessarily been looking for a poem to capture the complicated emotions of Katrina’s survivors, but they couldn’t pass it up when they found it.

The third or fourth piece he wrote after his return, “O Beautiful Storm” was intended to express an “inner conflict” Smith holds about the storm and its aftermath.

“It’s something you really want to hate, but you just have an attraction to it,” he said. “That was kind of the purpose of the poem.

“To me, Katrina isn’t just about an act of nature that sweeps through and does a little damage. It’s so much more than that, because it took years and years of neglect, people putting off for tomorrow what we could’ve done as far as getting levees up to speed and that kind of thing. (It’s about) a whole culture of looking the other way and not dealing with problems.

“Regardless of who says what about New Orleans, we live in this culture because we have value for it. When something like (Katrina) happens, it becomes a part of us and we end of up celebrating it.”

Chicagoist talks to graphic artist Bud Rodecker about his typographic series Ode to Carl. The project grew out of his self-imposed mission to make one new piece of artwork daily. Though titled RicharDaily, the first series of daily art didn’t have nearly the connection to Chicago that the Sandburg graphics do. Writer Betsy Mikel notes that students in Chicago study Sandburg “ad nauseum” so it really takes something different to make the poem fresh in the jaded eyes of Chicago natives.

“Chicago has those amazing, short phrases that are so iconic,” Rodecker said. “They were just perfect for some imagery. There’s something about the way that he writes that’s very direct. It has the Chicago soul.” In playing with the words of Chicago, Rodecker said he was trying to create a visual expression that expresses the word of Sandburg in a new way and bring them to a different audience.

As he was working on Ode to Carl, Rodecker worked on simplifying his design to match the simple, direct language of the poem. “If there’s less on a page, everything that’s on that page better be perfect. I would start with the basic elements — circles, half circles, rectangles and triangles — and move them around until they came together.”

Poet Suheir Hammad who “blends the stories and sounds of her Palestinian-American heritage with the vibrant language of Brooklyn” performed at TEDWomen in Washington DC in December. Hammad addressed the crowd of “confused, aspiring pacifists” and spoke of how poetry prepares you to confront “man’s creative violence” in her poems “What I Will” and “break (clustered).”

Watch Darren Wershler deliver a lecture on Marshall McLuhan and contemporary poetry at McLuhan in Europe 2011. According to the author: “The text concerns both the importance of thinking about McLuhan in terms of poetics, and the implications that contemporary projects like Christian Bök’s Xenotext Experiment have for thinking about communications and media.”

Political theater now plays out on more venues than just the floor of the Capitol, but verse still thrives on all of them. Harry Reid has been catching some flack for citing Nevada’s annual Cowboy Poetry Festival as a reason to preserve the budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities. While said flack has more to do with his misspeaking on how the “tens of thousands of people” who attend each year “would not exist” without the festival (and you could probably find at least a couple among them who would agree), the goofiness of the situation hasn’t stopped Reid’s opponents from seizing an opportunity to accuse him of privileging poetry over a balanced budget.

What’s especially odd, however, is that at least one chose to issue his critique of supporting poetry in the form of poetry. When Arizona Representative Jeff Flake couldn’t cross chambers to address Reid directly, he naturally took to Twitter:

Way out on the prairie, to a rustler named Harry / Bein’ broke ain’t no reason to sweat …
Just sit in yer’ barn, spin a rhythmic yarn / And you’ll pay down the national debt!

Via The Hill’s Twitter Room. Yes, Twitter Room.

Missed connection: 2,095 pieces of “Skin” have been seeking each other since 2003. Each has a single word tattooed on its body thanks to the writer Shelley Jackson who asked each “word” to volunteer as part of a human story which was never published in any other format. According to The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal:

The pieces of it wandered the earth, occasionally finding each other (two got married) and undoubtedly drunkenly telling new stories about their participation at bars. One died.

Jackson recently called upon the volunteers to submit videos of their word and remixed it into a new story available on Berkeley’s NetArt, but the whole project is “ceaselessly remixing itself as its words wander around the world,” says Jackson.

Disappear – from the CD To Call Out in the Night by Pharmakon MTL from Ian Ferrier on Vimeo.

Art Threat talks with Montreal poet Ian Ferrier about his live improvisation with the band Pharmakon MTL and its use in the video above as part of the media artist pk langshaw’s d_verse project. Adding up the collaborators, that’s one poet, three musicians, one producer, two videographers, an artist and two dancers wearing sensors to trigger the movement of the type projected over their performance– plus a handful of others –all in the service of the text.

An incredible mix of spoken-word performance poetry and contemporary dance, Disappear is a multidisciplinary feat of beauty from the heart of Montreal’s poetry scene.

“All the music is improvised and the lyrics are mixes on a previous poem,” explains Ferrier over coffee at his Plateau apartment. “The piece is about how life is completely non-permanent: we decide and believe that we exist, we have lives, friends and rules in society, but people can be here one day and gone the next.”

Natasha Trethewey and Evelyne Trouillot will keynote this week’s conference From Natural Events to Social Disasters in the Circum-Caribbean hosted by the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at University of Texas, Austin. The conference will discuss the long-running injustices across the region that natural disasters of the past few years have suddenly exposed to a much wider audience. With a particular focus on cultural production, the conference asks not only about the consequences, but how one communicates them now that so much (often ill-informed) attention has resulted from these disasters.

From hurricanes to earthquakes to landslides, natural disasters have profoundly shaped the relationship between humans and the environment in the region. Not unlike the earthquakes that struck Nicaragua and Guatemala in the 1970s, the destruction brought to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 revealed historical and ongoing forms of social inequality, environmental hazards, and political crisis that plague the circum-Caribbean region. This conference brings together scholars from multiple disciplines, artists, and activists who have been immersed in disaster relief and solidarity efforts. Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti offer the most salient examples, and these two sites will serve as focal points for the conference.

Earlier this year, Trethewey released a memoir Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast about her family’s process to after the hurricane. In her Fresh Air interview, “she explains that both the identity and future of the Gulf region are directly linked to how the region’s past is remembered,” something that will likely be an important theme this week.

Via The Best American Poetry, John Ashbery reads his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Promontory” from Illuminations. Originally published in 1886, Norton will release Ashbery’s translation in May, though not with his above comments about scholars’ endless attempts to track Rimbaud through Scarborough just because he mentions it in the poem. “He could have just read about it like the rest of us have, at one point or another.”

(More of Ashbery’s Rimbaud translations will appear in the April issue of Poetry, along with an essay by M. Ashbery about his work)

The title of this video says it all: Michael McClure reads poetry to lions in this 1966 edition of Richard O. Moore’s USA Poetry Series. He describes the act of reading poetry to animals as an experiment, and he definitely succeeds in getting a response from his audience: check out the McClure vs. lion growling match at about 3:18. Also check out McClure’s new selected poems, just out from UC Press.

May your own attempts at love poetry never fall victim to a laugh track, and may your Valentine’s Day be full of Good Times.

It seems only fitting to honor a writing conference with writing formatted to that classic conference tool: the slideshow. Fortunately, when Natasa Bozic Grojic was putting together Stop Drilling, she didn’t resort to the static, dry PowerPoint (although that would have been an excellent way to illustrate the monotony of listening to your neighbor drill constantly for hours). According to a brief interview with The Carpetbag, taking Stop Drilling into Prezi was the result of the poem taking on a life of its own: “The poem got completely out of control. It rebelled on me and decided to turn itself into something completely different.”

Grojic has since experimented with a couple more Prezi poems, but there’s still a lot more room for poets who want to work with text and visualization. Way back in 2009, The Missouri Review spotlighted Prezi as a potential playground for concrete poetry but noted they had yet to come across any poems on the platform.

In the days that followed the January 2010 earthquake, Trouillot said she felt paralyzed with despair and could not write, but she eventually succumbed to pressures from outside and within to put her thoughts into words.

In this poem, translated from Creole, Trouillot starts with the line, “Please don’t ask me to talk about the earthquake,” but then she goes on to describe her feelings about the quake. When we asked her about the poem, she spoke of the overwhelming pressure she felt to express not just her own experience but that of the millions of Haitians whose voices are not usually heard.

Trevigliopoesia’s La Parola Immaginata is “a festival dedicated to poetical words and video images with the aim to reach a mix of art expressions through new strategies, conceptions and methods. Video poetry means poems connected with all kind of images. And videoportraits, videodocumentaries and animation about poets and poetry.” To kick off the call for entries, which is open now until October 2011, the festival has even produced its own video poem this year and posted the previous years’ winners going back to 2008 on its YouTube channel. Each video is poetic in its own right, even if you don’t speak Italian.

When The White House invited James Earl Jones to perform poetry for An Evening of Poetry, Music, and Spoken Word earlier this year, his first instinct was to go for either Dr. Seuss or Shakespeare. Knowing that he could never top Jesse Jackson’s rendition of Green Eggs and Ham, he settled for Othello.

Other clips from the same evening are available on The White House’s Music and The Arts channel and include a performance by Brave New Voices slam champion Jamaica Osorio, spoken word artist Maya del Valle, and Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman on the power of words.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz talks at TEDxPhilly about “how you can turn nerdy obsessions into things that can transform your life,” but not without working for it. Aptowicz spent eight years working in a cubicle (the same cubicle) and writing, publishing, and touring on the side before making the decision that she was going to live the life of the writer she thought of herself as.

I wish I could say I had a Norma Rae moment, that I stood on my office chair with a big sign that said “POETRY!” But I didn’t. I’m a working class girl so I handled it as we do. I thought of being a writer as a job, one that I have to apply for.

Aptowicz chose her project—The Mutter Museum of Philadelphia, famous for its collection of medical oddities— based on passion and spent a year getting rejections to pursue it. When she got her wish, she wondered if she’d gotten in over her head and contemplated a retreat to the safety of the cubicle:

This doesn’t mean you won’t have moments of panic. Mine came several weeks into the project. I’d spent weeks touring super hard and I did not want to miss my early morning appointment at the Thomas Jefferson Archival Library. I was exhausted, I was wearing my boyfriend’s clothes because all of my clothes smelled and I was surrounded by books filled with 1850s medical horror stories and I thought, “What have I done? Why did anyone think I could do this? Wasn’t it so much simpler just to have an office job?”

And it was then that Thomas Dent Mutter, that genius, that cad, spoke to me through 150 years of history. He wrote a speech in 1847 that I just happened to be transcribing in 2010 and in it he said, “The world is no place of rest. I repeat, it is no place of rest but for effort. Steady, continuous undeviating effort. Our work should never be done and it is the daydream of ignorance to look forward to that as a happy time, when we shall wish for nothing more, and have nothing more to accomplish.”

Minnesota Public Radio’s Bob Collins has an answer for last week’s very serious question: Does poetry matter? Collins cites Kwame Dawes and his travels to Haiti over the past year documenting the “human side” of the earthquake’s effects as irrefutable evidence in poetry’s favor.

The PBS NewsHour, in partnership with USA Today and The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, talked with Dawes on January 4th about his collaboration with photographer Andre Lambertson and composer Kevin Simmonds on a series of short videos in which the poet is the reporter. This isn’t Dawes’s first experience in combining poetry with journalism; he’s previously worked in Jamaica on HIV/AIDs, a subject that remains important in his Haiti efforts.

And one of the reasons they picked me was that they thought I could go in to do reporting because I knew Jamaica. But they were open to the idea that, if I wrote poems in response to what I heard and saw, they would be interested in seeing how it could be used.

And it worked out marvelously, because I write poems as a way to process and to work through the experience. And it also gives us an intimacy in the relationship with people.

So, when I was going to Haiti, the idea was really to report, to find out what was happening. But I knew that, somehow, I would have to find ways to respond to it in poetry. And that’s what happened.

Dawes’s approach, spread out over four trips of about a week each, relies on connecting with the people trying to rebuild their lives in the midst of the rubble, uncovering the stories of mothers, children and pastors living with HIV and comforting others while going hungry themselves.

You know, I’m not your standard, at least as far as I know, journalist. I don’t go to do sort of immediate news stories.

I really want to meet people. I want to find out how they’re living. And, really, what ends up happening is that I become very friendly. I become a friend. I become somebody who is just interested in their stories and their lives.

And I can’t — I cannot avoid a good story. You know, a good narrative tells me there’s a poem here or there’s an image that is going to emerge out of it. And I would listen to people’s stories and walk away. And, at night, I would be thinking about it, and maybe an image would come back to me, and I will find a way to turn that into poetry.

Thanks, Emerson.

Since 2008, comedian Chuck McCarthy has been providing the world with ideas for inventions he will never make. He reveals his poetic side in this video, though he doesn’t get much further with his poetry than he’s gotten with any of his inventions. Inspired by the classics (Poe, Frost…. Poe and Frost), his kitchen and The Sugar Hill Gang, Chuck delivers an interpretation of Baa, Baa, Black Sheep you won’t soon forget.