but I know something’s starting right now…
– Ariel
I sent out a mass update to some friends of mine yesterday, about Poland, among other things. One of my oldest and dearest collaborators wrote back, saying, in effect, “I’m glad you’re feeling so inspired, cause I am having an inspiration deficiency.” Well, we talked, and now we have a project. I’ll say more when it is already happening.
Okay, Baltimore, you win. Having now watched THE LITTLE MERMAID, the first Ashman/Menken Disney collaboration, and all the special features, I can report something important: Howard Ashman, the brilliant lyricist of both BATB and TLM, was born in (wait for it)
Baltimore, Maryland.
John Waters is featured all throughout the TLM features talking about Ashman.
This means more to me than any other connection I’ve had with this city so far. Even Poe. There has to be stuff about him here: and I have to find it. As if this wasn’t enough, Ashman was Jewish – something else I just learned tonight.
I have been answering the question “What poets do you like?” a lot, so I made a cheat sheet for myself. If I could have only one poet, now and forever, it would be Auden, though.
I didn’t include Eliot in this list because it’s like saying “Shakespeare.” I feel about Eliot the way that one of my colleagues feels about Bishop – there is no me without him.
If I could get everyone who looks at this post to check out only one of these people, and be Awed, it would definitely be Atsuro “they broke the mold” Riley. So cool. Like this earth-shatteringly good poem, HUTCH. Read that one first, and then read CLARY. It’s very Faulkner. He has a book coming out in 2010 – he should have all the hype Pynchon does. He wins.
This is the short list. There are many more.
BUZZWORDS
narrative, accessible, dramatic, dialogue, monologue, persona, rhyme, free meter*
OLD DUDES
Sophocles, Aristophanes
John Donne
GM Hopkins
John Clare
W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
Langston Hughes
Robert Frost
Edgar Lee Masters, Dylan Thomas, anyone who ever wrote a monologue-based verse play…
LESS OLD DUDES
Phillip Larkin
Mark Strand
CK Williams
EVEN LESS OLD DUDES
Atsuro Riley
M.att.hew Dickman**
Brian Teare
Marshall Mathers
NON-DUDES
Sara “I’m better than you think I am” Teasdale
Sonia Sanchez
Wendy Cope**
G. Calvocoressi
E. Freytag (going to knock all our socks off. Already has.)
Okay, and there’s this contemp woman who wrote this poem in POETRY a few years ago where the last lines were “while I think of John Clare / and decide to find out if I could be lucky in death,” I may have the verb tenses wrong, and she was so good, and I have forgotten her name and can’t find her or the poem. But she should be on this list too. This is a problem I often have – I remember last lines but not first, and you can’t search by them.
I guess I could call them and ask.
* I just made that up! I like it.
** don’t hate me cause I’m popular. Hate me cause I’m good.
I am going to DC today to visit the Smithsonian museum of American Art, and to have lunch with an old friend I haven’t seen in ten years, who has been brought back into my life by the death of our other friend.
Theme Index: (Dara Weinberg, 1982 – ?)
Theater
Travel
Sweat
Rain
Rot / decay
Missed Connections
Sublets/roomshares
Apartments For Rent
Men Seeking Women
Women Seeking Men
Furniture For Sale
Free
jobs: writing
Conversations W. The Poem
Family
Los Angeles
Nature (but only in relationship to Los Angeles)
Cars
Cali
Guitar-driven rock music
The Greek Dramatists
Overheard Dialogue
Did I Say Theater Already?
(thank you Rachel for the list idea.) Very narrow, isn’t it – and limited to the topics in my own life. Knew this, but realized it more strongly when I saw how much better the fiction writers were than the poets at trivia. Doing fiction leads you into research, to knowledge. Poetry – at least contemp., at least most of it – often leads you to your self.
This is a problem, isn’t it? There should be more poems that lead you to knowledge, to news, like a novel – nouvelles – news.
But I am learning that coming into writing with the attitude of “I should be doing X Y Z” is ineffective. The only way to write is to write the poems you have to write.
Still, I am going to give myself extra points for every poem that expands the topic list.
So it is Wikipediaed: couplet, tercet, quatrain, quintain, sextain, septet, octave. Throws me off a bit…I would have guessed quintet, sextet, and octet instead of quintain, sextain and octave. Also, I want names for one and nine-line stanzas.
I have to learn the names of everything, now, to teach. This is a pain. It’s not that I don’t like stanzas, or meter, I just find that calling them by their proper names removes both my enthusiasm for them and my ability to execute them. I love lines that have eight syllables and four beats, but use the word “tetrameter,” and my interest in them shrivels up.
I do like the names of form structures (sonnet, sestina, etc.) for some reason. But I don’t like theme categories (lyric, narrative).
Anyways, this is beside the point. It is not about what I do or don’t like, any more, it’s about being a teacher of poetry stuff who knows what they’re talking about. Terms, terms, terms. It is only within the last two years that I have memorized the difference between simile and metaphor – and it’s about as shaky as my ability to go back and forth between stage left/stage right and house left/house right.
I think you could probably replace (Write it!) with (Wait for it!) in the E-Bish villanelle. Did I mention that in the writing class I observed, the students were trying to guess what a villanelle was, and one of them called it a “tritina” – like a sestina but in 3’s? Awesome guess. Someone should make up a tritina.
Anyway, this is the rewrite I’m proposing:
Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
The art of losing’s not too hard to master
Though it may look like (Wait for it!) disaster.
You have to read it with a lot of emphasis.
A: Can you make the ‘wait’ more operative in ‘wait for it’?
B: (horrified) Are you giving me a line reading?
A: Uh…no. I’m telling you the line reading.
Actually, playwrights/poets/writerthings italicizing/bolding/underlining words that they think should be emphasized almost always leads to bad line readings. It trips up the natural rhythm of the line. It inevitably makes the delivery sound very fake. I’ve never seen it work. In fact, “(Write it!)” is the exception that proves the rule.
But “(Wait for it)” is much better. It now only remains to add the phrase “Oh, snap!” to a famous contemporary poem.
I have met a real Martin (he didn’t look like a hologram), I can’t continue using the name “Martin” for the character I was planning to. It’s time for the Internet baby names game! I see, for example, if I want to stay with M, that I could name this person “Maaz,” which means “wooden.” Or “MacFarlane,” which means (wait for it) “son of Farlan.”
I definitely get into name patterns. I remember a time in a college playwriting class where one of my co-workshoppers had named all of his characters things that began with A – Angel, Alejo, Alejandra, etc.
Last night, we watched Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. The midsummer Maryland humidity watched the movie with us, and we sat in silence, too hot to laugh, sweating into the couches while the men on the screen sweated into their cowboy hats.
CHEYENNE: You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother.
(Pause. Stare.)
She was the biggest whore in Alameda, and the finest woman that ever lived. Whoever my father was, for an hour or for a month, he must have been a happy man.
My brother, optimizer of pixels, solicits your opinion on the best-looking rectangle. It reminds me a little too much of the GRE’s math section, but there actually is no right answer: only your preference.
This gives me an idea for an entire standardized test full of visual preference questions.
Dara Weinberg 