PoetryFoundation.org

Finding Poetry in Illness by Jennifer Nix

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:55:12 GMT

Get Well Soon Poems by The Editors

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:45:42 GMT

April /May 1965 by Paul Durica

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:03:08 GMT

Primary Sources by Jill McDonough

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:14:36 GMT

Spoken Miracle by Stephania Byrd interviewed by Julie R. Enszer

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:18:15 GMT

Work Poems by The Editors

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:02:58 GMT

Poems that Say Thank You by The Editors

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:21:35 GMT

Still Moving by Ron Mann interviewed by Daniel Nester

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:44:28 GMT

To say that Poetry in Motion, Ron Mann’s 1982 documentary, is the greatest poetry documentary of all time doesn’t really quite give the film its due. Thirty years on, the film still holds up as an anthology and time capsule, one that’s on a par with or even surpasses its print inspiration, Donald Allen’s New American Poetry: 1945-1960. It arrived in theaters and video stores at a time when poetry was reasserting itself as an oral and performance-based art, a synthesis of previous countercultural movements with free jazz, punk rock, and theater of cruelty cabaret.

You might guess that I am a fan. Right now on the floor of my office, I have spread out VHS, LaserDisc, and DVD copies of Poetry in Motion, along with two objects known as CD-ROMs.

Just 23 years old when he shot Poetry in Motion, Mann and a skeletal crewdocumented about 70 poets for a total of 45 hours, shooting in San Francisco, the Sierra Nevada foothills, and Toronto, as well as at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project during the 1982 New Year’s Day Marathon Reading. Twenty-four poets made the final cut, with 20 or more in the bonus materials.

Those 24 performers read like a who’s who of late 20th-century American countercultural poetry. There are the luminaries, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, Jim Carroll, and Gary Snyder among them. The musicians backing up poets were heavy hitters themselves: David Murray with Amiri Baraka, Jamaaladeen Tacuma with Jayne Cortez. Allen Ginsberg fronts Toronto new wave band the CeeDees, Kenward Elmslie croons with a boom box atop his lap, and Ntozake Shange, rocking a Prince T-shirt, performs “What Does It Mean that Black Folks Could Sing and Dance” with a dance troupe.

This list also includes Ed Sanders’s musical tie, sound poetry combo Four Horsemen’s barbaric yawp, John Giorno’s double-voice backing tape, Jim Carroll’s albino-like skin and shaky voice, and Nuyorican Poets Cafe co-founder Miguel Algarín singing over the final credits.

Mann’s second full-length film, Poetry in Motion, took on a life of its own after its theatrical release. According to Mann, it was the first film to be put into a bookstore, when in 1985 VHS copies were sold in Rizzoli’s in New York; and one of the first films to be digitized, a radical idea at the time, in QuickTime format at 10 frames per second, on CD-ROMs. It was also one of the first digital projects to use hypertext. The project also engendered the first CD-ROM sequel, when Poetry in Motion II was released in 1995, featuring bonus footage and 20 more poets’ performances and interviews. Not bad for a film shot on 16mm on a budget nearing $200,000.

One favorite scene in the Poetry in Motion II CD-ROM features Anne Waldman, who performs in the documentary and interviews Ted Berrigan and others. As she’s discussing her ideas about performance, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olsen, we hear her two-year-old son vocalizing from his high chair. He’s off-camera at first; then she places him on her lap to give him some hot tea.

“This is a kind of performance,” Waldman says of her child.

Mann still produces and directs documentaries, all with a focus on popular culture: 1999’s Grass covered U.S. marijuana laws, 1988’s Comic Book Confidential anticipated the resurgent interest in comics and graphic novels, and 2009’s Know Your Mushrooms covers, well, you might guess.

I spoke to Mann over the phone in his Toronto production offices last December. Over the course of our hour-plus conversation, we covered such topics as John Cage’s deadly fungi, John Giorno’s contribution to the film and the promotion of poetry in general, an encounter with Richard Linklater, getting shitfaced in Bukowski’s house, and the on-camera debut of a singer-songwriter by the name of Tom Waits.

A Taste of Poetry by Judy Rowe Michaels

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:12:31 GMT

I wrote this poem several years ago, starting from the little prose entry about my cat at play, which I’d jotted down with no specific expectations. It felt like snapping a casual picture. Seeing a poem take shape on the page a couple of days later took me by surprise, particularly its turn from cat to cancer. Not intentional. A little creepy, in fact, the cancer cat. And I would not have chosen to portray myself as a victim.

But the sequence—prose quickwrite into drafts of a poem—turned out to offer a helpful model for my students. I don’t show it to them until we’ve read some other poets’ work; I want mine to be just one more sample, not privileged by virtue of its being their teacher’s. I hasten to assure them that there is no single “right” way for a poem to take shape, any more than an essay or story has to start from an outline bristling with Roman numerals. I’ve had new poems grow line by line in my head while I was out jogging. When this happens, I have to say the lines again and again out loud, memorizing and revising till I can get back to the house and grab a pencil. I’ve written on napkins in cafés and while riding on a bus, surrounded by shrieking kids. The point is, students too often encounter finished poems, pristine on the pages of a textbook, looking as remote as crown jewels under glass and followed by study questions about the poet’s intended meaning. They need to see and to hear real, live people making poetry, crossing out words, messing with line breaks, discovering meaning but respecting mysteries, and, above all, surrendering to the unexpected. They need to find out for themselves the truth of Robert Frost’s “No surprise for the writer? No surprise for the reader.” The turns and leaps that a good poem usually takes on its journey as images morph from literal to figurative and one word leads to another through sound and association—not necessarily logic or conventional syntax—can help student writers trust their own imaginations, their own powers of associative thinking, and the discovery of idea through metaphor. Poet Billy Collins says in his introduction to 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, “Each poem can be a ride from a place we recognize to a place beyond definition—from a glass ashtray on a table to the mountain of ashes that is the past” (xxi). But too often in a classroom the Meaning of this ride—the single correct meaning—becomes the only thing that matters.

Learning Lab: Rae Armantrout: “Our Nature” by Stephen Burt

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:42:36 GMT

Look at an old picture of yourself—a candid group photo is best, but a posed head shot or even a painting will do. How would you have described yourself back then? Would you describe yourself the same way now? How much do you have in common with the person whose portrait you see? Did you want to stand out? Can you feel proud, special, melancholy, or just resigned when you realize how much you have grown up and changed? In “Our Nature,” Rae Armantrout pursues such questions in her characteristically terse, harsh style.

Poetry at the Threshold by Peter Gizzi Interviewed by Ben Lerner

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:02:56 GMT

Peter Gizzi’s poetry at once captures the flattening, the deadening, and the standardization of our televisual culture (“This is the snow channel / and it’s snowing”) and wakes us up, makes us “silly with clarity.” Through his poetry we become almost painfully attuned to the present, powerless to resist his injunction: “Be everywhere alive.” He can name with precision our medicated, mediated insensibility (consider the palindromic title of his earlier book Lonely Tylenol, a phrase condemned to eternally pace the room of itself), and then startle us out of anesthesia with the beauty of his singing.

Gizzi’s poems remind me that there is a tension at the heart of song, which has the power both to lull and to intensify, as do certain drugs. Scientists (and marketers) speak respectively of an “absolute threshold,” the lowest level at which a stimulus can be detected, and a “terminal threshold,” the maximum level at which we can experience sensation. Gizzi can move from the ghostly, flickering edge of perceptibility to focused intensity at disorienting, Dickinsonian speed. The nerves “sing, blaze, and flame their circuit.”

Threshold Songs, Gizzi’s fifth book, is occasioned by profound personal losses, and tracks the way absences become presences: “now that you’re here / and also gone / I am just learning / that threshold.” Indeed, the speaker in his poems is often posthumous, on the other side, even though the voice is coming to us live, lending the work an uncannily simultaneous sense of immediacy and delay: “The shadow cast a singer.”

This book offers no easy consolations, but it insists that—is an example of how—a poet’s total, tonal attention can disclose orders of sensation and meaning that, far from being palliative, give us the courage not just to face the day, as the saying goes, but to find “the twinge inside this fabulous cerulean.” “Don’t back away,” Gizzi writes in “Tiny Blast”: “Turtle into it / with your little force.”

Each “/” I’m deploying to quote Gizzi’s poetry is a visual reminder of the deep identity of poetry and threshold, a reminder that the right margin, the line break, establishes a little limit at which we hesitate, then cross. It’s the thresholds that make the song, that bind thinking and feeling so that patterns of sense and sound emerge. Gizzi’s beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion, and his influences range from Simonides to Schuyler, but those voices, those prosodies, aren’t ever decorative; Gizzi is gathering from the air a live tradition. Ultimately, the best account of what it’s like to read these poems is in these poems, as they enact, line by line, the animation they describe:

When a thought’s thingness
begins to move, to become
unmoored and you ride
the current with your head,
feel yourself lift off like
birdsong caught in the inner ear
even the curious seem animated
in their dusty shelves—
the song is alive.
That part of tradition.

Corned Beef and Cabbage by The Editors

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:27:34 GMT

Whether you’re homesick for your bonny isle or you’re only Irish one day a year, here are some poems to help you mark St. Patrick’s Day. Transport yourself to the homeland with a classic by Yeats, such as “Down By the Sally Gardens” or a Celtic revival poem by Eva Gore-Booth. Follow up with contemporary Irish verse, “Game Night,” by Conor O’Callaghan. You can’t go wrong with a poem that’s actually called “St. Patrick’s Day,” and we have three here for you to choose from, by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Eliza Cook, and Jean Blewett. If you’re celebrating with spirits, you might down another one by Yeats, “Drinking Song,” or try a shot of Hayden Carruth’s “Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey.” But don’t forget to come back in the morning for your penance: “Sober Song,” by Barton Sutter might help dry you out.

Escape Artists by Rachel Richardson

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:06:30 GMT

The institution looms huge and wide the first morning I approach it, in 2002—the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility in Jackson was one of the largest prisons in the U.S., with almost 6,000 inmates. The front wall spans a quarter of a mile, giving the place the appearance of a fortress: impenetrable, silent. My workshop partner warns me we’re being watched as we cross the parking lot and approach the entrance: don’t yell when you’re out here, and even if you’re late to workshop, never run. I keep my eyes forward and walk stiffly in step with him into the building. Inside the foyer, where visitors of all sorts wait for their names to be called, small gestures of warmth aim (and fail) to offset the stone walls and metal lockers: a sad-looking plant, a plastic-rimmed carpet, chairs bolted to the floor, and a glass cabinet showcasing prison-logo-emblazoned T-shirts for sale.

Upon entering the building, I immediately feel that sinister twisting of language—this is a “facility,” not a prison. The men here answer to numbers printed on their shirts. My partner and I have been cleared to conduct a poetry workshop, but we may not share books with the inmates. We read and memorized the code of conduct booklet, and now we slink into the prison, feeling we are about to commit punishable offenses.

Poet at the Poker Table by Joel Dias-Porter interviewed by Jeffrey McDaniel

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:05:42 GMT

As you cruise north on New Jersey’s Atlantic Avenue, through the drowsy, middle-class shore towns of Margate and Ventnor, the ice cream parlors and bike shops slowly give way to tattoo parlors, law offices, and pawnshops with “Money to Lend” signs. Imagine The Wire by the beach, and you have the idea. Then suddenly, the shops turn upscale, as if a developer flicked a switch and transformed urban blight into a Banana Republic outdoor mall, with glitzy neon casino hotels rising in the east.

Atlantic City, a place of intense juxtapositions, is where Joel Dias-Porter—aka DJ Renegade, 1990s National Poetry Slam phenom, unrecognized mentor, and old co-worker of mine at DC WritersCorps—has planted himself. In a way, it makes sense—Renegade himself has stark juxtapositions (a math whiz who writes poetry, a gambler who never drinks), and his path has always been different. In the early ’90s, he lived in a homeless shelter in Washington, DC so he wouldn’t need a day job and could go to the Library of Congress every day and focus exclusively on his poetry.

Poems While You Wait by Kathleen Rooney

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:34:03 GMT

It is ten o’clock on Sunday morning, and sunlight is streaming into the River East Art Center in Chicago, Illinois. Dave Landsberger, Eric Plattner, and I are surrounded by four elementary school girls ordering us to write them poems on the subjects of “cats,” “school,” “chocolate” and “sisters.”

We roll sheets of paper into our two manual typewriters—Smithy and Quiet Deluxe—and set to work. The girls clutch their dolls and hover close as we strike the keys. Not only have they never had anyone write a poem to their specifications before, they have also never seen machines like these; they are all under ten years old, and their timelines consist only of handwriting and then computers. What are these things? How do they work? Why are they so loud? You don’t plug them in?

Learning Lab: W.S. Graham: “Dear Bryan Wynter” by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:45:14 GMT

Lights and Shadows by Delaney Hall

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:01:24 GMT

New Impressions by Alice Gregory

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:57:44 GMT

I, Literary Tourist by Daniel Nester

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:25:55 GMT

“There is poetry here.”

This is the tagline for the Brook Farm Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in Lenox, Massachusetts, where my wife and I are checking in for the evening. The phrase is embossed in gold beneath the inn’s logo—two cattail spikes, bent toward the sun—on cups and saucers in the front room display case, on top of which sits a poem of the day on a reading stand.

How to Survive in the Age of Amazon by Janaka Stucky

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:26:20 GMT

If you’re reading this, you’re probably at least tangentially aware of what happens among readers, writers, publishers, and booksellers when someone says the word “Amazon.” People get emotional. Of course, Amazon’s Kindle has revolutionized the booming e-book market over the past few years, and you can obsessively check your sales against that crappy no-good Billy Collins any time you want, but now there’s also this new mobile app that allows would-be patrons to scan a book on the shelf of their local retailer to check its price against Amazon’s offering. Not only that, but Amazon initially gave customers who used this “service” a $5 discount off their next purchase for carrying out this free-market espionage in their competitors’ physical stores. Amazon’s announcement was followed almost immediately by anger, articulated most prominently in a strongly worded piece by Richard Russo in the New York Times. Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo fired back the next day in an almost comically inflammatory article, positing that “buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you.”

Really?