Tag: found poetry

The bathos of Donald Trump

From an anthology yet to be conceived, The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of  Donald Trump. The subject, climate change. The source, this interview with the Washington Post.

“No. 2”

If you go back
and if you look at articles
they talked about
global freezing.

They talked about
at some point the planets
could have freezed
to death.

Then it’s going to
die of heat exhaustion.
There is movement in
the atmosphere!

There’s no question
as to whether or not it’s
manmade and
whether

or not the effects
that you’re talking
about are there.

I don’t see it.
Not nearly like it is.

With a nod to Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, by Hart Seely. The image up top is from A. Richard Allen’s homage to Katshushika Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa.

high_res_editorial_a_richard_allen_trump_wave

Read more about it here.

Wreading the Labadie Tract

Susan Howe is hard to teach. She’s one of our most important poets, doing something no one else is, at least not at the white heat she is – wandering the shelves of musty archives, brushing on the wilderness of the otherwise forgotten language stashed there. A materialist transcendentalist, busting through dualities we thought constrained our thought, such as mind and body

     Green cloud conceals green
     valley nothing but green
     continually moving then

     silk moth fly mulberry tree
     Come and come rapture

Mulberry tree becomes silk moth becomes silk. Green valley becomes a green cloud that hides it. The ghost in the machine is real and it is the machine. There are no discontinuities. Thus rapture, a coming invited, and, beat, proclaimed.

So much there. But she’s dense, allusive, often hermetic. Students can dismiss her as dry and academic, verbose. You have to keep all your book learning online, probably do some research too, even as you keep your soul naked to the mystery the spaces between the words shine with – it’s asking a lot, and students can lose courage.

And yet my Art of Compo course did good heavy lifting last week with the title poem of Souls of the Labadie Tract. This morning, though, something different. Her work lives on the edge where rational and speechless apprehensions meet, and where reading becomes so overfull, it writes. In that space, this group assignment.

We’ve noticed the role little scraps of paper have in this book. Howe describes how Jonathan Edwards would, when riding in the course of his ministry, as “an idea occurred to him, … pin a small piece of paper on his clothing, fixing in his mind an association between the location of the paper and the particular insight.” (The paper remained blank. The body in motion was a memory palace.) And Wallace Stevens, who walking to work “observed, meditated, conceived and jotted down ideas and singular perceptions, often on the backs of envelopes and old laundry bills cut into two-by-four inch scraps he carried in his pocket.”

Now, you do likewise, sort of. Working together, using

     • pencils (provided by the English Department)
     • post-its (same)
     • found text from Souls of the Labadie Tract
     • some chance element or operation

compose a poem that expresses your understanding of Souls of the Labadie Tract.

They’re a good group, well knit, so the unsurety didn’t last long. Soon they’d left their chairs around the ringed seminar tables, for a cross-legged circle on the floor inside them. (That circle became the final form of their poem.) They each came up with their own way of gleaning words from the text. A post-it would do the rounds, found text accreting to it as it passed through each student’s hands, whatever scrap of language seemed – crucially, intuitively – to belong.

They decided the board was the place to assemble it. My main intervention was to remind them of the chance element (we’d looked at Howe’s use of errand, and its kissing cousins errant and error). “Maybe flip a coin to decide which ones go in the poem?” Instead they rolled a D20 (one is a D&D gamer) to decide their order. A bit shaky, to an aleatory purist, since there were more than 20 post-its; but I wasn’t going to suddenly go hands-on.

The poem whole:

And a little gallery of close-ups (click ’em):

Not too shabby for an hour and a quarter’s work.

And, we had deviled eggs and blueberry and chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. Do I complain about teaching sometimes? Stop me.

Student work: Compost mural

A mural my students made last week in class. The prompt: using only the materials you have on hand, or can forage from the surrounding environment without breaking the law or hurting anyone’s feelings, express your understanding of “the art of compost.” Oh, and no legible text, other than found text.

Here it’s, as composted through my iPhone:

Interesting to watch them work. Each one herself, himself, just about perfectly. Last year I gave this, every one worked pretty much on their lonesome, class dynamics, long story, and it did come out okay. This time, some leaned toward solo, some into duo, some asked as to overview, but as they felt their way into the actual question at hand – are we one or are we many – those arrangements softened and shifted.

That is, as they composted their thinking, they found a rhythm where each had room to breathe, or so it seemed to me, and nice to see. Nice to be part of just in watching. Here ’tis, as panorama,

Compost mural 2015
Click on me to see (and again) compost understood

Sometime soon, a post on breath, breathing, the breath, which I’ve been thinking and not-thinking about, these days of hot high still air all round. How’s it I ever thought my breath was anyone else’s to order around? That’s my little bit cryptic thought of an evening, after a day hiking up at Baker, forest fire haze out of BC hanging on air, dulling Baker and Shuksan to the eye, but someone or something was watching lupines and mimulus shivering in wind bits, and what’s wind but earth’s breath, what we’re in.

Student work – Scrap elegy

The exercise, upon reading Anne Carson’s Nox:

Build an elegy out of scraps, fragments, parts. At least some of its text should be found text.

Nox a text I admit to some mixed feelings re. Gorgeous seductive reproductions of crinkled scraps. You can see the shadow where the slip lifts off the ground it rests on. The tears and stains are palpable. The thing ages afore your eyes. A sepia principle squared and resquared perhaps. Apotheosis of mimesis.

Nox - CI

First day discussing it, a tenth or thirteenth point threeth muse came down upon me, and I held the faltering accordion o’er my head, and cried out, “is document porn, people, document porn.”

I meant, it promises all the satisfactions of actual cotton fibre, passionate tears, coffee stains or such under your fingertips, but it’s mere dissembly. A 2D picture plane w/ a pretence to texture.

Yeah, I know, book’s an elegy, and first and last elegy for itself, and eros is longing for what’s gone missing, yadda. Porn knows it’s porn’s still porn.

Not, in the words of a comedian or three, that there’s anything wrong with that. But there are other options.

My students, bless’em, haven’t the production budget of a New Direction behind them, but their work on this exercise’s been wonderful. All sorts of elegy, acknowledgement of lack and loss and longing, and done without making their scraps into fetishes. (Admire Carson lots. Lots structural in Nox I love. But not its slick mimesis which makes me sort of sick.)

Herewith a gallery of their deft encounters.

One interrogates the torn edge without making a fetish of the tear.

Ex 6 no 1

One abrades the boundary between beauty and ugly in a way only plastics and the postmodern can.

Ex 6 no 2

One applies a mathematic of the shell to arrange swatches cut it might be from a Louis Quatorze drawing room.

Ex 6 no 3

Click on this one to get some sense how it shone. Also it had a warm shaggy waft of tobacco which made me want to smoke which I’ve never (almost). It was, that is to say, multi-modal. Okay now I’m doing the nostalgia I got on Carson’s case for. O mimesis. O Plato.

Ex 6 no 4

Been on this student’s case to get his thinking into his fingertips. He broke through and big.

Ex 6 no 5

And this one, my goodness, click on it too, the layers! the textures! the heart! (all of them, the heart)

Ex 6 no 6

Student work: Found poems

From my students’ found poems (posted with permission). I’m stunned by how good these are. I sense in some a little imitation of the Ashbery I gave as example—but a little imitation’s no sin.

YOU ALWAYS

Every little bone
Lost and found

Some sickness
Coming home
Stretching you

Still I have to wait
Giving you a chance to go on

Source: bits of overheard conversation on local buses.

BUST TALK

Bring it to the boid. Where people do.
Moment of your. Ladies . . . ? Put antlers on my.
Can’t do it without. Don’t want kids.
Girls had to be escorted through the. Tilting it in besides using.
Fairly difficult to. Friends who couldn’t boil.
I can just carry. I lied I said I was.

Sources: the bus, roommates making dinner, the grocery store, a girl talking on the phone in the library, some girls in a parking lot.

(UNTITLED)

My life in the garden. A professional creep.
Measuring mortality. Underestimated desperation.
The God of eggs. Drops hundreds on stupidity.
Leeching souls. Rotting citrus. Raining hedgehogs.
A glottal stop. The crazy’s back.
Can’t trust delusion. In a house of stray cats.

Sources [this list makes a companion poem to the first] [some names changed to preserve anonymity]:

1. Meghan working in our yard
2. Kayla liking to explore attics
3. Liz, population issues
4. Dr. C., on human tendencies
5. Evelyn making snack
6. Me, on calling a lock smith
7. Sam’s dramatic description of a professor
8. Brandin, on the rotting fruit in our fridge
9. Kayla’s friend got a hedgehog, misheard “training hedgehogs”
10. Kayla, it’s a sound in Arabic
11. Meghan, on Arianna’s return to our house
12. Marylin, warning us about Arianna
13. Boston, describing our housemates as kitties.

FOR NEW ZEALAND

For New Zealand and
in Iceland over yonder
a bottle of wine . . . or two
so superficial
off the light like you.

Freaking cute!
My Hawks and future cowboy
perfect comment
so much ass
three times the national rate.

In your prayers, but
years from now
in the dark
a moment at the Texaco
tis the season to fawcking love this.

An Autumnal mood
Monday, like crazy
and outnumbered benefits
yummy Mexican, oh so texty
but fly as shit.

Source: Facebook statuses of friends.

(UNTITLED)

All of us on the road from Scotland to Silverado.
The sound and the fury as I lay dying.
Sex lives of cannibals, basic logic.
Kama Sutra, great expectations.
Two years before the mast. The poisoners. The Italians. The great pyramids.
A tale of two cities. Mumbo jumbo.
To a god unknown. Welcome to the monkey house, beat reader.

Source: a bookshelf.

(UNTITLED)

A dusty room. Deprived of sun.
Melancholy soul. Little sinks.

Against a rule. Being ignored.
The sun to night. To worlds of dark.
Of memories. With setting skies.

The patter of rain. A wound unmended.
Slept through. A candle blown.

Our sorrows in shades. Once a vessel.
And every song. A complicated knot.
About my regret. My every thought.

To never be found.

Source: Love and Misadventure by Lang Leav.

DID YOU HAVE A GOOD DAY?

Letter openers. Cardboard cutouts. Ibuprofen.
Kites everywhere. A nap midday. Chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.
His Hungarian going? Dry erase. Pink computer.

Things that actually kill us. Educated math students.
Happiness shaved off the Neverending Story.
The Hello Kitty blanket tastes like burnt meat.

Sources: The West Wing, overheard conversations at a friend’s house, class lecture.

MESSY PHRASES

Sweet Everlasting Voices. may have Blamed. Word for Word.
left on. Loose Paper. an Aged Man. the Sea swept.
He drew. says the Ghost. live in the Peeling Mansion.
with feeling older. let the Tongue slip. swap our Lies.
They made You. to fear Them. praise this Mess. the Slow Rain.

Source: poems on the Poetry Foundation website.

MEDIA OVERLOAD

Well the situation is
What’s wrong with the kids these
Staying high all the
Let’s forget these tragic
Days long ago

Hello folks
Drugs aren’t the
WRONG ANSWER!
Let’s continue on
With the sex drives of teens

…

Monsters aren’t
The only thing
Giving these all
Away to fairyland
Drug dealers are too

…

So in the end
Nothing makes me
HAPPY, HAPPY, FUN TIME
After this tragic
Floods in Florida

Sources: Listening to two or three media devices at once, tablet, desktop computer, phone, each on a different kind of media. E.g., one playing YouTube videos, one with live and old news, one streaming music.

Exercise: Found poem

A writing exercise from our unit on the phrase.

Write a poem made of found phrases. “Found” means you don’t make them up yourself—you see or hear them around you. “Phrase” means more than a single word, less than a full sentence. Choose one kind of source to take your materials from. A few possibilities:

  • bits of overheard (or misheard) conversation
  • first phrases of poems in an anthology
  • phrases seen in print ads (magazines, posters, billboards)

Avoid song titles and song lyrics—they tend to be clichéd and to make clichéd poems. Find a source that offers bits of language you feel eager to mess around with.

It’s okay to make small changes (e.g., removing a verb to turn a sentence into a phrase, or changing verb tense to make two phrases line up) but avoid introducing any words of your own.

You may not be able to make the sort of sense you wish to. Let the material lead and you follow. Instead of worrying about making sense—focus on setting up resonances.

An example, from John Ashbery’s “Title Search” (though not in fact a found poem it reads like one):

The Little Red Church. The Hotel District.
I’ll Eat a Mexican. The Heritage of Froth.
The Trojan Comedy. Water to the Fountain. Memoirs of a Hermit Crab.
The Ostrich Succession. Exit Pursued by a Turkey.
In the Pound. The Artist’s Life. On the Beautiful Blue Danube.
Less Is Roar. The Bicyclist. The Father.

(Most of these are phrases. Which ones aren’t?)

One more torn page

One more from Barb (she’s on a tear).

image

And transcription:

(old men)no books (3)

on is made in Was—
of the Mone.

Man how pear trees
settle power

to see and believe.

(such
dire
need)

I think I mentioned I came up with this exercise 10 minutes before the first meeting of my Art of Compost class this summer when I saw in my notes “exercise: something with torn pages” and realized I hadn’t worked out what “something” was.

William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “write carelessly, that nothing that is not green survives.” Not sure the same always applies to lesson planning but here it worked okay.

The pages we tore in class were from a battered second copy I had of his Imaginations.

Final projects: Caitlyn

Caitlyn assembled a source text from found material and then performed an erasure on it to generate

EVE

          She thinks          this is
                      morning,         “I’ve got my

    things, I’m on the
verge.”

                    Guess
                    I  have
                        you

  breathing.

                      Finally, this

                                                two to one

static:

                        I swim across an
                    ocean
                from an         empty

                                                    room.

(Erased from a base text made of the first words of each song on the album Everything in Transit by Jack’s Mannequin.)

One thing I really like here: how the poem combines (composts) two time-honoured practices — the found poem and the erasure poem — in a way that feels seamless and self-assured.

Torn Page

This just in from my dear friend Barbara Nickel. A torn page poem along lines I suggested however many aeons ago (~ seven weeks give or take).

image

Which she transcribes as:

(old men)no books (1)

participation of our
young men
ror of their way
ich God
could give sin-war

come, they gladly
make, are in
which is church
and eir,
having feeling
which make them
and in love
well