poetry, theater

perspective

I spend too much time reading, online, the history of various recent absurd public feuds in the poetry community. It makes them seem kind of spoiled, in comparison to what people in theater have to put up with.

How can they be so viciously and publicly angry at each other when they don’t have tech?
They don’t have set budgets?
They don’t have certain words in their poems who can only show up to the revisions on Tuesdays and Fridays and other words who are only available on Wednesdays and Saturdays and other words who just had their car repossessed and really need a ride to the rewrite session?
They don’t have to worry about paying a cast of eight and a staff of twenty a living wage – or, as was more often the case for me, not being able to pay those people anything close to what they were worth, and still asking them to work for you? And to work themselves, sometimes, into illness or injury?
They don’t have to “load in” and “load out” their poems on a three-month poem tour of the Southwestern states?
They don’t have to write enormous grants to subsidize the cost of their poetry production?
They don’t have to resign themselves to full-time careers as “poetry administrators” in order to have influence, financial stability, or any kind of presence in the field?

In short, what are they so angry about when they get to make their art for nothing more than the cost of a piece of paper?

And I have to laugh every time I hear a poet complaining about poetry not having an audience. Folks, if you want to see “not having an audience,” you should try producing 99-seat theater in Los Angeles. Poetry is pinging and poking and pervading itself across the blogosphere and the Netograph and the InterTextene Conferences with the ease of a keystroke and a backslash. Poetry is everywhere. It’s text-based, for heavens’ sakes. You can circulate it with nothing more than the same tools being used to circulate everything. You don’t have to videotape it, get permission from the Words’ Union, get the rights for the music, pay or exploit a videographer, edit it, to put it online. All you have to do is TYPE. And the poem you write in Chicago or Dallas or Hoboken or Eugene can be read, in seconds, by people in Palintown and Bidenville, at the same time.

I am also learning that poetry, having a large national audience in a way that theater doesn’t (i.e., although more people numerically may see a particular play than may read a poem, that smaller audience for the poem has a wider geographic distribution) has a stickier and more public version of snark. Even people who don’t read poetry read the poetry arguments. The text, snipertextual, has a way of hanging around.

I suppose that under all this speculation and comparison is a level of curiosity as to what will happen when I begin making my own mistakes in this field. Theater is a great art form in which to make a lot of big mistakes, because no matter how public they may be at the time, no one remembers them even one month later. Write a bad poem, and publish it, and I think you never get rid of it. That’ll be interesting.

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poetry, quotes

practicing the art at its highest levels

“When we lose sight of greatness, we cease being hard on ourselves and on one another; we begin to think of real criticism as being “mean” rather than as evidence of poetry’s health; we stop assuming that poems should be interesting to other people and begin thinking of them as being obliged only to interest our friends — and finally, not even that. Perhaps most disturbing, we stop making demands on the few artists capable of practicing the art at its highest levels.”

– David Orr, “On Poetry: The Great(ness) Game,” NYT via Jason at Bookslut, with a roundup of naysayers to all this greatness-is-so-great business.
(Addendum: I finally looked at poet-critic Jason’s own blog, and he turned me on to Dropbox, an app for syncing documents. Now that’s some greatness. )

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books, quotes

too much to be known

“Certum est,” I murmured, “quia impossibile est.”
“What’s that?” the young man asked. He did not know Latin. But, then, he might say, those who know Latin do not know the language of computers. We all know, relatively, less and less, in this world where there is too much to be known, and too little hope of its adding up to anything.
” ‘It is certain,’ I translated, ” ‘because it is impossible.’ Tertullian.”‘

– John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION. I haven’t been able to get myself to return this book to the library. It’s too good.

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poetry, writing

cathy & heathcliff avant la lettre

“She was never beautiful. Her extreme thinness, weathered skin, the effect of a lifetime of weekly, sometimes daily, migraines and the gradual loss of her teeth meant that she aged prematurely, looking 20 years older than she was. It was her energy rather than her appearance that appealed, and in particular her responsiveness that was valued and praised.”

– Frances Wilson on Dorothy Wordsworth, poet William Wordsworth’s devoted sister, who lived with William all her life as something of a second wife-figure, in the Times Online. Taken from her new book THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH, reviewed here by Miranda Seymour, which comes out March 6th. Seymour writes:

“Such was their closeness that Wilson suggests Dorothy and William may have been the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Although this may seem a little farfetched – particularly the Heathcliff element – Dorothy in her youth certainly embodied all the wildness of the heroine of Wuthering Heights. As described by de Quincey, she was a pagan goddess with “a gipsy tan”, and “an impassioned intellect”.

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grants & fundraising, writing

time: relative

If you spend eight hours avoiding writing a grant and two hours writing it, how many hours have you worked? The mistake I always make is by starting with a blank document, as if I were composing something. Grants are not composition. It’s a pastiche of other people’s work. Once I remember to open up all the old grants and cut-and-paste, the work flies by. I suspect that at least some of the eight hours that I feel like I wasted was spent thinking out the grant, which is why I wrote it so quickly.

I don’t want to EVER ever ever spend another hour staring at a blank Microsoft Word document, and then reading Mary Beard’s blog, and staring at the document.

When I do this, I always have this conversation with myself:

Me: If it was only going to take you two hours, you could have done that at 10 am, and then –
Self: I wasn’t ready to write it at 10 am.
Me: How am I supposed to know when you’re ready to write it?
Self: I told you I didn’t feel like writing the grant at 10.
Me: This isn’t the kind of writing where you get to “feel like” anything. This is the kind of writing where you’re being PAID, like with MONEY, and so you have to do it on time, and regularly.
Self: I got it done, didn’t I?
Me: I’m getting too old for this.

Contract is contract. Two hours is two hours. My timesheet for the day says TIME IN: 7:45 PM, TIME OUT: 9:45 PM. But I’ve been at a desk since this morning.

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writing

untitled poem

I keep poem first drafts in one ever-expanding Word document, usually with no titles or line breaks. Stream of poem. I allow myself to write there without any formal consciousness. When I go back and pillage it for material, I usually end up putting the line and stanza breaks in different places, and I add titles in at the very end. This is how I have written 9 out of 10 poems (9 out of 10 dentists) in the last two years.

Today I was trying to write something for a friend’s birthday, and the act of putting “For X” on a line by itself stopped the flow of that document. I have forgotten how to write to order, or I’m not as good at it as I used to be.

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education

becoming irrelevant

” “Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

Patricia Cohen, NYT via AJ

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poetry, writing

rather than words

TRYPEWRITER
TRYPE

I was going to make a line from High Windows, by Philip Larkin, the new What Do You Want On Your Tombstone for this site, but have decided, instead, on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, arranged in the un-ergonomic order of the keyboard. Text, text, text.

High Windows is the first anything I encountered that made me aware that there might be something greater than, or beyond, the artistic mega-vitality of words – something that could not be expressed in words. (And what is that, Philip? Sex! Sex without societal constraints!)

Before I read High Windows, I used to write A WORD IS WORTH A THOUSAND PICTURES on my notebooks, like a radical textualist. After that poem, my notion of textual-artistic dominance was troubled.

My nineteen-year-old response to the poem, which, unfortunately, I remember, reads like this: “Yes. Rather than words. Because WORDS ARE THE DEFAULT FOR WHAT MUST BE THERE. Yes, yes, yes.”

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music, travel

a harrowing choice of self

“Despite the millions of times I have packed my suitcase, I still regard each packing “event” as a kind of metaphysical decision, a harrowing choice of self. Am I the person who cares not for image? Pack a hoodie and black sneaks, maybe some underwear, and your concert clothes, and fill the rest of the suitcase with Horace, Pound, Susan Sontag. Or, am I the snazzier metrosexual? Suddenly, my suitcase blooms with flowered shirts, orange sneakers and strange shirt-jacket amalgams, leaving no room for verse. (Always pack a notebook; then, you say to yourself, I can “work on my writing.”) In the midst of this decision–this quasi self-realization–one often forgets one’s toiletries! A concert without deodorant is not to be tolerated, especially by the pageturner. And so, at the eleventh hour, you assemble your sundries. Don’t forget your music, you idiot!!! And fill the humidifier. Hide incriminating evidence. Breathe.”

– Pian”blogger”ist Jeremy Denk, packing.

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