10.24.14

I struggle with the motivation to create content in a context where I think it doesn't matter. This is not to say "woe, no one reads my blog", rather, I feel stifled by the constant barrage of media I am exposed to for work and for other, and the type of media it creates and how we consume it.

It's true, I find most of my content to share via other sites. I don't have every book I would like to have. I get poems-of-the-day via email. I think these are excellent compromises between type of content and method of access. The web is pretty magical that way, assuming you don't live in a country that restricts your access to information.

I get tired of the soundbite and headline culture. I go to read an article online and realize that they've only written one paragraph of actual information, and the rest is clickbait, nonsense, or non-existent, since no one reads an entire article. I get tired of bad grammar and straw-men in commercials, people who get upset with you when you attempt to correct their spelling, grammar, etc (god help you if you tried to correct their factual arguments), and the replacement of reporters and anchors with pundits.

I know good, meaty, decent content exists, and the web or non-traditional media doesn't cheapen it by making it accessible. I get tired of trying to create content in constant barrage of messages that state it isn't important, won't be read, isn't in meme-form, doesn't matter. I know these messages aren't explicit, nor are they universal, but they are really hard to avoid, and produce a lot of melancholy and anxiety for me.

I know movements exist for "slow" everything, from food to fashion. Is there such a thing as slow media? Can a person be connected and informed, but still reject this culture of fast and shallow information?

By Nicholas Carr, an interesting article from the Atlantic looks at how our brains react to information, systems, and changes in our type of work. Since it's from 2008 you've probably already seen it. His premise:

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I can relate to this, as I imagine most people can in a way, and it's no surprise it affects how we consume content, what type, and how we synthesize it, if we do. This is obviously important for traditional learning environments like school, but its just as important for our private enjoyment and creative pursuits. Clearly it isn't all bad, media communication around the world aids in minority political groups getting their message out, getting help after a disaster, all that. But if we allow it to change how we take in and incorporate information, we may find ourselves feeling less creative, taking our pursuits to different depths than before, blah blah blah.


Some poetics happens on the border between these two extremes and takes advantage of the razor's effect. E-poetry can be interactive, allowing the reader to become "wreader" as they can add or change content, although I imagine that it would be hard to read at times if it as mobile and dynamic as the rest of the web. A friend of mine has an interactive poetry book, you can view it here if you like.


Of course, as the article states, every change in the way we learned or processed information changed the way we thought, a little. When books became a common way to store information, Plato railed against them, thinking men would no longer commit information to memory. Typewriters and computers had their part as well. So, in this vein, here is a poem by Yang Wanli, a Chinese poet from the 12th century (translated by Jonathan Chaves)





Don’t read books!
Don’t chant poems!
When you read books your eyeballs wither away
leaving the bare sockets.
When you chant poems your heart leaks out slowly
with each word.
People say reading books is enjoyable.
People say chanting poems is fun.
But if your lips constantly make a sound
like an insect chirping in autumn,
you will only turn into a haggard old man.
And even if you don’t turn into a haggard old man,
it’s annoying for others to have to hear you.

It’s so much better
to close your eyes, sit in your study,
lower the curtains, sweep the floor,
burn incense.
It’s beautiful to listen to the wind,
listen to the rain,
take a walk when you feel energetic,
and when you’re tired go to sleep.


I think Wanli has some good advice, in some respects. I will still read books though!

10.21.14

"I'm going out to fetch the little cow. I shan't be gone long...you come too?" This phrase is something my mother would say to me (in variations, it never seems to be the same, in addition to being not textually correct, but we'll ignore that in favor of a pleasant memory) as a query. While I doubt this phrase predated a poetic understanding in me, I imagine Frost is the first exposure for many children to poetry.

Here is the actual text of that poem, The Pasture:


I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.--You come too. 

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother, It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.--You come too. 


I can remember in grade school reading/listening to Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and catching the rhyme pattern. I felt like I had unlocked a great secret, and I didn't share it with my classmates. In middle school, in an advanced English class, we looked at the work again, and imagine my surprise that not only was my secret not a secret, but it was likely the most salient feature of the work. Frost is probably the first poet I can remember by name, although children are exposed to a variety of lects of poetry through nursery rhymes (and a variety of historical references, although they do not always know it). Some can remember their first exposure (Taylor Swift claims hers was Dr Seuss), others get lost amid all the other knowledge we gain during that time.

Frost's poems are the ideal next step from children-specific rhyming material. The work is approachable, despite some antiquated grammar forms, the meter is satisfying to the ear. The themes are rather approachable too; nature, farming, the condition of our not-too-distant ancestors, as well as emotions that are ever-relevant.

Here's another I remember liking, also about a cow:


The Cow in Apple Time

Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry. 

10.20.14

Weekend words got away from me, so have some for a Monday.

Vital Force

Whirling points of charge

            Form the vortex of connection

            In a convulsion of structure

            A new fire is made.

The fusion breathes tendrils

            Of new exploration

            To course along channels

            Of the vital frame.

The force of careful measure

            And catalytic conception

            Grows, lithic and crystalline

            At the base of every age.

                           

The rising sun has a boiling point

            The crucible overturns

            And each upthrust column

            Will equally burn.

The monstrous melting rage

            Downswing of such energy

            In the caldera, all elements

            Unite in the purge.

The conductive lattices rent,         

            Bright spark stilled,

            Vital forces spent,

            Life unlearned.

Forms of the surge of life

            Struggling to intend

            The grasp of overturning

            Without and within.

Turning toward the bright strike

            Dislodging the grains

            Of ancient malefactions,

            Points sparked again.    

10.17.14

Here's a little point-counterpoint fun. My last two "poem of the day" offerings confused me at first. I thought at first that I had gotten the same poem twice, when I glanced at the titles I confused them for each other. Here is the first



Holding Posture by Howard Altmann

History sits on a chair
in a room without windows.
Mornings it searches for a door,
afternoons it naps.
At the stroke of midnight,
it stretches its body and sighs.
It keeps time and loses time,
knows its place and doesn’t know its place.
Sometimes it considers the chair a step,
sometimes it believes the chair is not there.
To corners it never looks the same.
Under a full moon it holds its own.
History sits on a chair
in a room above our houses.



And the second. Not sure why I confused these, other than a glance at the capital H in the titles. 

A Home in the Country by James Allen Hall

Down on Comegys Road, two miles
from the Rifle Club that meets Wednesdays,
summer to fall, firing into a blackness
they call night but I know is a body,
in unpaved Kennedyville, not far
from the Bight, on five acres of green
organic farm, next to the algaed pond
that yields the best fishing in all of Kent County
(my neighbor says it is a lingering death I deal
the trout when he sees me throw the small
bodies back), down where the commonest
cars are tractors and hayfetchers, and men
wave as they pass, briefly bowing a gentleman’s
straw hat, you can find the wood cabin
where I live, infested with stink bugs. 
Every day, my boyfriend asks the murder count,
making light of my hatred. Even reading I sit,
swatter poised on the couch’s arm,
all the windows closed, fans off, the whole house
listening for the thwat of stink alighting
smartly on sun-warmed glass, their soft-backed
geometric carapaces calling to be stopped. 
I did not grow up like this, here
on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but I am most
at home now I live with something inside to kill.


While I hadn't read these when I confused them, it turns out I may have had reason. Both read with a calm, measured voice, rolling the subject out in front of the reader. Both concern with the location and surroundings of the subject, albeit one literal and one figurative. I prefer the pacing of the first, because the sentences are a little more cropped and don't force you to be smart about your breath the way the second does. That being said, the initial long sentence with lots of clauses in A Home absolutely serve the piece, as they lead you down the road, past all the landmarks that lead you to the home. 

10.15.14

I read yesterday that Caroline Kizer passed away. She was an accomplished poet and educator, as well as an expert on Asian literature and language, serving for a time as a writing teacher in China and Pakistan under the umbrella of the State Department. 

Kizer is known as a Pacific Northwest writer, born in Spokane and studied under Roethke. She did graduate studies at Sarah Lawrence and the University of Washington, focusing in mythology after she was told her musical career would never take off (she was a pianist). Among her honors are the founding of Poets Northwest and serving as its editor for a time, a Pulitzer prize for her poem Yin, Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets until 1998. 

She is noted as a feminist poet, quitting university posts due to lack of diversity, and one of her most-famous works is Pro Femina, "For the Woman" in Latin. Not just for the woman in general, but specifically for the female writer, it seems. I selected the first 2 "cantos" to share. 



Pro Femina 

ONE

From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.

How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie   

The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters.

Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.   

Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices

Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart:

Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted   

To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner—

“Think I'm crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us,   

As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those   

Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it.

While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it,   

Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines.

Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery

Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient   

Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male—

I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions   

Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen,

Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man.   

I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine   

But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me.

Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery,   

Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken,   

Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known   

Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it;   

Disdainful of “sovereignty,” “national honor;” and other abstractions;

We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders,   

“Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance   

In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades   

Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence   

And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos,   

Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it!

         TWO

I take as my theme “The Independent Woman,”

Independent but maimed: observe the exigent neckties   

Choking violet writers; the sad slacks of stipple-faced matrons;   

Indigo intellectuals, crop-haired and callus-toed,

Cute spectacles, chewed cuticles, aced out by full-time beauties   

In the race for a male. Retreating to drabness, bad manners,   

And sleeping with manuscripts. Forgive our transgressions   

Of old gallantries as we hitch in chairs, light our own cigarettes,   

Not expecting your care, having forfeited it by trying to get even.

But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment.   

So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it?   

We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us,   

Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then   

For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine   

Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting.

Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient   

Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released

Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness,   

Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s   

Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze,   

Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine   

Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me,

In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages.

Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,

In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,   

Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.   

Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope!   

Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance.   

The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness.

So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you:   

Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else.

You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading.   

So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,

All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!

Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?

What pomegranate raised you from the dead,

Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena?

I really liked this work, and will be seeking out more of her work to enjoy. Reading this made me beam, just hugely smile with the force of her words, their humor, honesty, and poise. The fragment "cute spectacles, chewed cuticles" is nearly a chaismus and made me laugh as if it were a tongue-twister. "Observe the exigent neckties" also made me smile. I am sorry that Kizer has passed, but I'm glad her legacy is as strong as it is.

10.14.14

Last night's Jeopardy (it's true, I'm a big fan!) featured a poetry category. I didn't get every question right, but I did get a few of them! One was about the famous Casey at the Bat: a Ballad of the Republic sung in the year 1888 by Ernest L Thayer. Wikipedia says this poem was popularized by vaudeville performers, but I'm familiar with the Mudville 9 from the John Fogerty song "Centerfield". 

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, “If only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now, with Casey at the bat.”

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despisèd, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It pounded on the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile lit Casey’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt ‘twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt;
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance flashed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style," said Casey. “Strike one!” the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted someone on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the dun sphere flew;
But Casey still ignored it and the umpire said, “Strike two!”

“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered “Fraud!”
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

10.12.14

Somewhat belated weekend words:

1/19/11

It pours through green needles in a quiet but breathing wood.

Sweet or hard-tasting, it is the inevitable memory.

Always present on that morning or this moment,

And always better-looking in the light.

Suspended in flight along the beckoning highway

We are sick with it as we leave and come anew.

Purloined from the rough, we grasp to what seems beautiful now, and right.

It should have been, and was, in treacherous mutation,

And always better-looking in the light.