More fun with grammar curmudgeonry

This peeve is the one that's probably dearest to my heart because it's* so pervasive.

Bob the Angry Flower on "its" vs. "it's"

* correct usage :-P

My new favorite pastime

(Poetry aside, of course.)

FreeRice.com

I posted this on my other blog, but it bears repeating. A fun little word game that boosts your vocabulary while contributing to U.N. food donations to help end world hunger.

Don't you just love the English language?

Well, in fact, I do, despite (or perhaps, in some perverse way, because) of its vagaries of pronunciation.

And speaking of English, there's a bunch of these out there, but I thought this amateur (very amateur :) production of Beowulf was cute, but perhaps not as high in production values as the new film with Angelina Jolie as Grendel's avenging mama.

Quote: Arundhati Roy

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

-- Arundhati Roy

Uneasy Rhymes

"Hellish" and "relish."
Will keep in mind for my next sonnet (although it seems to call for a limerick.)

OK, so, yeah, I was having a really bad week. But now that the weekend's here, I feel quite un-hellish. Quite good, actually.

Last night I started the first phase of planning for an online lit journal, something I've been mulling over for about a year (and thinking about in a "someday" way for much longer.) Will take a while to get it off the ground... generating interest for quality submissions will probably be the hardest/most expensive part -- how much is a classified in Poet's and Writers? -- but it's fun to think about.

Poet's Mantra

It's probably no accident that, among recent Western adherents of Buddhism, a large number are writers or artists. The bare-bones psychology of Buddhism is a lot like the artist's (ideal) way of being. Mindfulness might be translated as very rigorous observation.

My artist's mantra would be that, wherever I am at the moment, I would aim to be perfectly there, perfectly hot or cold, but keeping what some Buddhists call the Buddha in the Center. An artist might just call this the observer, taking notes, equally serving art itself and the sanity of the artist.

And in the Western tradition, Socrates, in probably his most famous line, had high praise for the value of observation as well.

I think it was the personal credo of the poet Anthony Hecht, whom I've been reading for class, regarding the crucial role of faithful observation in the life and work of a poet, who inspired these musings.

I met Hecht when he was a guest in the first course I took in the writing program. He signed my book (well, everyone's book.) I was feeling callow and nervous, aside from my usual shyness, and hadn't been able to come up with a perfect question to ask him, as the instructor had requested (well, he hadn't said "perfect," but I had hoped to impose that requirement on myself and failed miserably.) I think it was after he read from a poem of his about Flannery O'Connor, watching the trees through the window as she was lying in bed dying of lupus, that I scrapped whatever I had come up with and managed instead an off-the-cuff but heartfelt question that included the word "rigor." His eyes sort of flashed for a moment and he said, emphatically, "Yes."

It was a moment of hope for me, even though thus far I had produced nothing satisfactory at the level I was aspiring to, that I might have an inkling of what it was all about, and therefore something to guide me and to hold onto. And it was indeed a rocky road from the first couple workshops until these last two, so that hope was a valuable gift. He died later that same year, and I felt so lucky to have had that opportunity, even though I hadn't been ready for it.

P.S. And some belated good news: That habit of submission which I mentioned earlier (of poems to lit journals... what did you think I meant? ;) has paid off with some actual publications. Some rejections, too, but, so far, in fairly equal measure, so it's definitely been worth the effort... sending some more stuff out today.)

What is Poetry? P.2

Here are the rest of my definitions from the summer workshop's recurring assignment (including a few alternates I didn't submit):

Poetry is the jargon of the subconscious.

Poetry is nothing but if's, and's and but's.

Poetry is an oasis made of sand.

Poetry is reality's halfway house.

Sometimes poetry has to be mined deep in an underground shaft; sometimes it flows over like lava at your feet.

Poetry is the alchemy of language from experience.

This semester I'm taking a course on Poetics, so I'll probably have to come up with some more.

Don't you "hate it" when people use "quotation marks" just for "emphasis?"

These bloggers certainly do.

Hee hee.
I guess this trend has bugged me so much that I've refused to analyze what motivates well-meaning souls to do this. Now, thinking about it, I guess it's the idea of appealing to a higher authority, e.g. very important people want you to know that these items are "on sale," see? It's not just me, the poor schmuck writing this crappy sign by hand who says they're on sale, but very important people. That is my best guess.

Thanks to Mr. X for the link.

And in a similar vein:
Apostrophe abuse

Writing too many lines of blank verse...

... in a row can make one go a little bonkers. After 42 straight lines of it, tinkered with until the wee hours of the morning, one might start scanning one's own name (iambic tetrameter, ended with a trochaic substitution?) and wondering if the caesura was intentional on one's parents' part.
My next poem will be a haiku.

What is Poetry?

A weekly assignment for the workshop has been to come up with new definitions for poetry. It's one of those things for which there are seemingly infinite answers (although I might not think so by the last week of the semester :)

Here's what I've come up with so far:

Poetry is the by-product of narrative, exposition, and rhetoric.

Poetry is what still matters at the end of the world.

A poem is a discrete body of compressed language that would lose rather than gain meaning and impact if clarifying or additional information were added.

Poetry, like magic, is the intentional hallowing of objects.

Lyric poetry is more like dream logic in its confusion of the tenses of past, present and future, whereas narrative prose is linear like the conscious mind.

Much of a poem's music comes from the patterns and harmonies one hears but doesn't recognize.

OT: Poetry in a Bottle P.2

My new second favorite beer: Orange Blossom Cream Ale by Buffalo Bill's Brewery
It's one of their seasonals (actually, their pumpkin one sounds kind of intriguing, too.)

New workshop

Much to my surprise, it's going well, at least so far.
Since this was the same instructor I'd had two years ago, who had been less than impressed with my style, even giving me an A- because it was "less polished than some of the others" (I think this was her polite way of saying it pretty much sucked) I'd had very low expectations for what she'd think of my new stuff, just hoping I'd learn some things about meter and form that would be useful, and of course, that I'd get that last workshop credit I need.
I guess she appreciated that my first submission was a ghazal (although not in the strict back-to-the-Arabic style that is the new model for ghazals in English) and in general, she seemed to dig it. I was shocked and relieved. I know that she's very accomplished with that particular form, and I trust her judgment in all technical matters; she's very meticulous and thoughtful; so it was a nice way to begin the semester.
And I was inspired to try to work the ghazal into a "true ghazal" for one of my revisions, since I guess, when it comes to poetry, I respond more to positive reinforcement than negative... playing right into the formalists' hands, aren't I? ;) Nah, to be fair, I think I really have improved since that first workshop and the one I took the following year (owing partly to taking a break from workshops, reading a lot of poetry, writing a lot of to-heck-with-it free verse stuff, and getting some of my confidence back) and maybe she's become more open, too, over the last two years. I think we'll get along swell... which is good, because I need to choose an adviser for my thesis soon.
And since any possible defensiveness I might have been harboring has dissipated, I'll be more open to "constructive criticism" on the next submissions. Like I said in the previous post, I've developed a pretty thick skin, anyway, based on the last workshop I took with an instructor who was less polite than this one (although also more of a character and more open to experimentation, which kept things interesting at least... I liked her better than most of my classmates did.)
But I guess it's nice to feel that there's not anything to prove now and it can just be about the work itself, which is the point, after all (and what I'm paying the big bucks for, not my precious little ego :)

Lines that knock my socks off: A. R. Ammons

from Corsons Inlet (Thanks to my workshop instructor for choosing this as one of the first two discussion poems for the class... The other one is this, equally amazing in an entirely different way, although both are perfect unions of form and function... bodes well for the course.)

the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness

and later in the poem...

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes:

A little madness in my method

I've found lately that my poems have been originating in two distinct ways: from free-associative/stream of consciousness writing (I got this from Julia Cameron's Morning Pages idea, although being more of an afternoon/evening/middle of the night person, I just call them "rambling rites" and do them whenever I have a free 15 minutes and something to write about it. And of course, I use the computer. This is the 21st century, after all. So yeah, basically, it's nothing like Julia Cameron's Morning Pages, but that was the genesis of it, anyway.)

After the free-writing, the next step in this method is to highlight the better parts and then delete the parts between; then start moving lines around, coupling, quatraining, or otherwise stanzafying them and seeing what fits where, before finally trimming around the edges; letting the finished piece sit for a day or two and then re-reading to see if it resembles an actual poem.

And the other method is just writing down two or three lines that come to me and then expanding and building a poem around it. This is the way I wrote for my entire life (well, ever since I started writing poetry regularly, about age 14, I guess) up until I first tried the rambling rites about three years ago. But it was still my primary method up until this year. Now, I'm leaning toward the other.

I think the reason I'm leaning this way is that the free-associative method tends to yield a more dreamlike, lyrical product, whereas the latter produces more narrative stuff. And since the writing program I'm in strongly favors more formalist work (neither too narrative nor too lyrical) I've naturally rebelled and wanted to run in an even more informal direction than I was already headed. We'll see how well that goes over with this summer workshop (I'm guessing not that well. But this is my last year and my skin's grown pretty thick. Nobody's going to beat the free verse out of me and turn me into a meter-head.)

And a little poetry humor...

I didn't expect to see Robert Pinsky hosting Stephen Colbert's metaphor match with Sean Penn on Thursday's Colbert Report. It was pretty funny.

A Good Day

I woke up with a hangover this morning, but the sunshine lured me out of bed. It was 81 degrees today! This after it being like the middle of February for most of the last few weeks.
I wrote a poem, one that doesn't particularly suck (it seems odd that, on the past two occasions of having hangovers, I've written poems that I'm happy with. What's up with that? Did I kill off the brain cells that were getting in the way of my poetic process?)
Anyway, then I went outside and tilled the soil for the garden, and D. and I planted the tomato and basil seedlings, and sowed the seeds for the cucumbers, lettuce and dill. Also, he put up a fence so the dog can be outside unsupervised now, without getting into mischief. And right now, he's making us boiled red potatoes with olive oil, sea salt and dill (I loves the dill), and my head will soon be aching less.
A good day.

The last word on Spring?

I came across this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay on another poet's blog, but here's a link to a copy on Poetry Archive:

"Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I guess the answer to my question is no, because The Waste Land wasn't published until the year after Millay's collection Second April, available online in its entirety, appeared, and as unfashionable as it is to admit, I love The Waste Land. But notice the congruence of themes between this short and sweet number and that tortuous epic: a zeitgest of the cynical times, I guess, a time in which "signification" was everything, because it was still expected that there just might be something hiding around some corner, hope against hope, waiting to be signified. I guess it would be a relief to find out that there was nothing after all.

In any case, Millay's poem just seems to sum up the season so well in a 20th-century nutshell that it makes it that much harder for those who come after to say anything original about it.

What would a 21-century poem about Spring sound like? Many have been written and published. I've tried a bunch myself (none so far published.) But with any success? I dunno.

So yeah -- a daunting task, the April poem, but not one poets will give up very easily.

My kind of people, poets are

The NewsHour just aired a series of profiles, "Poetry of the Middle East," over the past two days, featuring Israeli and Palestinian poets, respectively. It made me interested in reading more of their work, each of them.
It also reminded me why I'm glad I chose this profession (or rather, this way of life, since I guess "profession" implies a livelihood.) But these are the people I want to be counted among, or with whom, I guess, I feel most kinship, far beyond tribe and creed.

Some quotes:

GHASSAN ZAQTAN (through translator): I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration. I feel that's not my place. I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it's the handkerchief or a child's backpack or a purse. That's my attitude.

AHARON SHABTAI: The world is big, and there are many big things, and poetry is tiny. But this tiny thing, it's like a small knife that you have in your pocket. But this is something that can say very important things.

TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But, in my poetry, suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and this is, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel. The art is to take from life something real, then to build it anew with your imagination.

(And that last is profoundly good advice, summing up the crucial trick that I'd been trying to find words for recently.)

Reading List: Last Thoughts on "Green Squall"

I just read the last six poems in Jay Hopler's Green Squall and all but maybe one of these ended the collection on a strong note. In fact, everything I liked about this book (and very little of what I thought made it overall uneven) is here in these last poems.
My favorite poem in the book is the next-to-last, which, if I were a proper poet, I would refer to as the "penultimate" poem, since, if one is a proper poet, everything that is next to last in any group of things is referred to by this term, which, though admittedly useful, I find somewhat irksome and therefore refuse to use just now.
So, anyway, the next-to-last poem :)
It's called "A Book of Common Days" and is grouped in seven parts, spanning three pages. I think this poem also suits my stirrings of early Spring Fever state of mind. (See my other blog for a happy rant on this year's early start to Daylight Savings Time.)

These are my favorite lines, from parts four and five:

When the good and the violent are sleeping
When the city moon looks out on the streets

When the soul lies down in that grass
When spring comes back

When Judas writes the history of solitude
When I was young and miserable and pretty

When the green field comes off like a lid
When it prays --

I keep a blue bottle.
It convinces me I have seen my soul.

P.S. The new Yale Series book is coming out next month, but I'm wondering if I should run out and buy it the minute it hits the stores, having been exploring the world of DIY and small-small press poets in the blogosphere lately, and struggling to re-think my all-or-nothing attitude toward publishing. Struggling.

A habit of submission

No, I'm not talking about my personality (that would be another blog, which currently does not exist, thankfully :)
But on the digital front, I've found Google's calendar to be a wonderful, magical thing. If I add an event to it, out there in the analog world, the thing in question generally gets done. So it is written...
So if, for instance, I research journals to submit to, in Poets & Writers, which has a great classifieds section (not available in their online edition, it doesn't seem, unfortunately), or from an online resource, and I type something like "Submit to Such-and-Such Journal on Sun., March 3, then, most amazing of all, I will send stuff out on that very same date, electronically, of course (we'll see if this holds up for next month's planned submission, which actually involves a stamp and envelope.)
After years of hopeless slack with respect to trying to publish, it seems incredible how easy it is. Getting accepted, by comparison, seems less than half the battle, especially since it's out of my hands. Once I have something polished to the point where it seems worth the effort, the important thing is to give it an honest try -- am I right, self-help gurus? (This should be a commercial. I could dress like a winsome slacker poet chick and talk about how Google changed my life. Fortunately, I don't think Google makes commercials like that... last time I checked.)

Reading List Update

I've been reading Crush and Green Squall simultaneously... along with other stuff, so it's been slow-going on the poetry front, which isn't a bad thing. Poetry is sipping material, and not really made to be consumed by the truckload. (Or maybe that attitude is just what's wrong with the state of poetry today -- or, more likely, what's wrong with the state of me as a reader...)
In any case, Crush is the stronger of the two, more even in tone (the tone being devastated, but in a frantic, urgent way that never sinks into melodrama.) Beauty and violence seem comfortable together in Siken's poems. I read in an interview with him that he's gotten some of that violence out of his system with this one, so it will be interesting to see where he goes next time.
I can't say quite the same for Green Squall on the narrowly-avoiding-melodrama front (there are several instances of head-on collision), although Hopler doesn't aspire to the same sort of urgency in tone; in fact, his subject is largely entropy, so maybe I'm talking apples and oranges. His strength is in language and wordplay, and there are a handful of near-perfect poems, including the title one and the central long poem, where you can understand exactly why Gluck chose him. I'll definitely look for his next book as well.
What I'm really excited about now is that I just got a collection of Paul Celan with English and German versions side by side (not that I read German, but do have enough vague sense of it for purposes of comparison, or to get a feel for the translator's style of translation.) I stumbled onto some mention of him on a literary blog and have wanted this for several weeks and now that I've been scratching the surface (it's a nice big volume), I'm even more excited. This is stuff to sink your teeth into.
Yay. Because I need inspiration. Less than a year now until the first draft of my thesis is due, and I want to throw everything out and start from scratch. Except a few things I grudgingly still think are probably decent, if only they were written in a different style :) And I kind of like what I've written in the last two months, only since I've started getting freaked out about the deadline. I hope I can just stay freaked out about it all year.

OT: Poetry in a Bottle

My new favorite beer: Éphémère by Unibroue in Quebec

Yes, it's light and refreshing. I like it that way. Probably, my tastes in beer are not analogous to my tastes in poetry.

Text Message Novel...

... published in Finland, according to this news bulletin in Poet & Writers online.

I don't know if this will catch on, but it's an interesting idea -- especially in the Finnish language, which isn't known for its simplicity.

You Write What You Read

So Alexander Chee, in this BookSense article, quotes his former professor, Annie Dillard, as saying.

So right now, I'm reading two of the latest Yale Series of Younger Poets winners. Well, they just happen to have been chosen for an award which some of us still under 40 would not decline if offered (to say the least) but Louise Gluck, the current series editor, has my kinda taste in poetry, the kind that she finds living up to Emily Dickinson's definition of poetry a bit more than does some of today's pretty, well-behaved verse:

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

Speaking of milestones/ deadlines, I just read this quote from Virginia Woolf, from a letter or journal:

"There's no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice."

At 33, I'm not sure if I should take heart from that or despair, but I guess if I could write like Virginia Woolf, I'd be willing to wait another seven years, at least.

The titles I'm reading now are Jay Hopler's Green Squall and Richard Siken's Crush.