Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.
Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.
Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.
Poet/translator Geoff Brock (who read D.A. Powell’s poem for Linebreak) has a new translation of Pinocchio coming out from NYRB Classics. NYRB’s book designs are always beautiful, so this one is a definite preorder.
Disclosure: Brock is also my MFA thesis advisor.
(Link via Derek’s Facebook account.)
Given that Fayetteville’s annual Bikes, Blues and Barbecue festival draws over 325,000 bikers to Northwest Arkansas for a cacophonous weekend of terror, I’m shocked to learn that I’ve never heard of biker poetry, which includes a variation on the haiku dubbed “baiku”.
The only formal explanation of baiku that I could find was on a personal blog, which described the poem as a six-line poem written in tercets with a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5-5-7-5 and a rhyme scheme of abcabc.
The author of the blog goes on to give examples of baiku, including a section titled, “Tales From Shakespeare, Retold In Baiku”. My favorite? “Romeo And Juliet”.
However, not every biker poem has to be formal. A light-hearted poem entitled “Bugs On My Face” proves the point:
I got bugs on my face
There’re June bugs and May flies
On summer’s wind ride
God knows when they‘re born
Now I know when they died
While plenty of biker poetry is available online, an anthology edited by Jose Gouveia, “Rubber Side Down: The Biker Poet Anthology”, is already available on Amazon.
Maybe next year the rally should host an open mic?
I’m at a loss, so I’m just going to lay it on you. Evidently, according to a report from William Keckler, John Ashbery died on July 21 of ’63. After this point, a carny was hired to give readings and a computer was programed to produce poems:
“They were all authored by a computer.
That’s right.
And not even a supercomputer.
They tried a supercomputer in the nineties, but it got bored writing the poems and commited suicide.
That was the first recorded instance of machine suicide. But it’s still classified information.
No, it’s NOT a supercomputer that wrote Rivers and Mountains and Flow Chart (wink wink, nudge nudge…get it??) or Hotel Lautreamontor…well the list goes on like Banquo’s line, doesn’t it?
It’s this really clunky thing with vaccum tubes and little dice with letters on them and sometimes it starts smoking and the administrators have to turn it off for a few hours to let it cool down.”
I could use one of those computers. Also: a carny.
Than again, it is quite possible that I am unjustifiably entertained. This occurs on a terrifyingly frequent basis as my sense of humor is unfortunate. Still, while I take the above post as good fun, Ashbery’s poetry does, evidently, evoke some volatile reactions.
On Daniel E. Pritchard’s blog, a frenzy of commenters are attempting to hash out Ashbery’s aesthetic, namely whether or not, as Daniel claims, “[h]is is a poetry of ‘just words’, strung together, evocative at times but intentionally un-meaningful.” Even if this the case, some might see it as harmless. Daniel feels there is a real danger in this way of writing:
“Words actually are the end of the experience, words that purposefully lack their referential meaning, that undermine by extension the idea of all possible meanings. [...] He may not intentionally be pursuing the deterioration of meaning, intellect, and humanism, but his work demands just that by denying so much of it. It is destruction without replacement – it is a gag without any substance, all laughing at the funny sound of names.”
Needless to say, some staunch Ashbery supporters were in the crowd. It began, and got a little dirty at times despite the mod’s best efforts. One commenter wrote:
“Likening Ashbery to “language poetry” is madness. No, I take that back–it’s “cute.” Someone trying use them big poetry expressions and all. To reduce Ashbery to a collage poet (whether the poet used this term or not) based on a few recent poems (he’s been around a while and written a lot, if you didn’t know that) is equally cute.”
For the most part, though, the defense of Ashbery is very thoughtful and clear. It’s worth cruising through the post and the comments. Also, as always, it’s nice to see people who are so passionate about poems.
I’m not exactly ashamed to admit a long-lived obsession with the villanelle, but this has consistently proven itself an unfortunate affair: the passion seems to be very much unrequited.
I’ve written innumerable first, second and tenth drafts that are, at best, horrifying—the latest failure included the word “tin” as an end-rhyme of a repeating line, which I’ll admit to despite Johnathon’s tactful and somewhat anonymous earlier reference—and I’ve always claimed that if I wrote one good villanelle, I would quit poetry altogether. While I certainly realize the benefit this would have for the poetry world at large, I assure you that there is no need to pop those corks quite yet.
However, from a recently attained copy of Patterns of Poetry by Miller Williams, I believe I may have developed a wandering eye. The latest infatuation: the terzanelle.
In his introduction to the form, Williams writes that this form is “French in origin, originally syllabic with lines of equal length. A nineteen-line poem, of five triplets and one quatrain, akin to both terza rima and the villanelle. Lines 1 and 3 are repeated as lines 17 and 19 or 18 and 19, depending on the resolution chosen by the poet. The middle line of each triplet reappears as the final line of the following triplet, except in the case of the final triplet (the penultimate stanza), after which its middle line appears as the third or first line of the final quatrain, depending on the form of the resolution.”
In short: it’s slightly ridiculous.
If you’re like me and need to see this spelled out A1 B A2,, Wikipedia has—of course—the entire scheme mapped out. If you would just like to read a lovely example, Williams cites “Thunderweather” by Lewis Turco. As a warning, this link does seem to lead to a personal blog, but it’s the best copy of the poem I could find online.
Regardless, I seem to have found a new way to fail miserably, which is always exciting.
Cannibal Books founder Katy Henrikson writes about life as a freelance writer and small press publisher at her new tumblelog: Hello, Loretta.
A first-edition copy of W. B. Yeat’s “Easter 1916″ sold for 7,100 euros ($9,600 dollars) according to an article published by the BBC. Yeats handed out 25 copies of the poem originally, but 22 are hiding out somewhere mysterious. Check your attic?
A Wikipedia Fun Fact about the poem: “The date of the Easter Rising can be seen in the structure of the poem: there are 16 lines (for 1916) in the first and third stanzas, 24 lines (for April 24) in the second and fourth stanzas, and four stanzas in total.” I think Yeats may have been more neurotic about numbers than I am. That’s saying something.
My obsession with Yeats leads me to be thoroughly entertained by the following quote, which is probably to be expected. I’ll keep you posted with more prose on Yeats as I read further.
“In Irish Theosophist, a magazine whose very title is enough to raise the ghosts of the ninties, carried an interview with Mr. W.B. Yeats in its issue for 15 October 1893. It had been conducted by the editor, one D.N. Dunlop, who set the scene in his opening paragraphs:
“‘A few evenings ago I called on my friend, Mr. W.B. Yeats, and found him alone, seated in his armchair, smoking his cigarette, with a volume of Homer before him. The whole room indicated the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genius. Upon the walls hung various designs by Blake and other less well-known symbolic artists; everywhere books and papers in apparently endless confusion.
“‘In his usual genial way he invited me to have a cup of tea with him. During this pleasant ceremony little was said, but sufficient to impress me more than ever with the fact that my host was supremely an artist, much in love with his art.’
“Yeats was then twenty-eight, and could deploy that elaborate style he had learned from Pater with as much indolent calculation on a sofa as in a sentence. If he had not yet formulated his theory of the mask, he had an instinctive grasp on the potency of his image; and if he does not altogether ruffle here in a manly pose, there is neverless a bit of peacock display going on. The Homer volume was a nice touch, and so was the cigarette and the ‘ceremony’ of the tea.
“The young man whose concern for appearances had led him, a few years earlier, to ink his heels in order to disguise the holes in his socks has obviously mastered more complex and sure-footed strategies for holding the line between himself and the world. He had not, to be sure, acquired the peremptory authority which Frank O’Connor was to see in action decades later, when the poet could silence an argument or butress a proposition with a remark such as ‘Ah, but that was before the peacock screamed ….’”
– “Yeats as an Example?” in Preoccupations by Seamus Heaney.
Yesterday I read Camasin Middour’s “A Last Poem” and I’m still thinking about it.
Thanks to Maureen Alsop for the poem, and to Adam Clay for the reading.
Submissions remain welcome at submissions@linebreak.org. Guidelines are available on the about page.
The English faculty of the University of Cambridge recently survived the execution of a marathon reading of “Paradise Lost” by John Milton. The reading occurred in a small studio described as a “large black cube in the basement [...] with an absolute minimum of visual stimulus, allowing listeners to remember Milton’s own blindness and to relate it to the kinds of darkness—moral and visible—which he imagines in the poem.”
Moreover, those who had seats in that dark cube seem to have been trapped for at least a full book: “A video feed of the reading was relayed to a lecture room in the Faculty building to enable people to listen to less than a full book, or to follow the reading no matter when they arrive or need to leave.”
The joy of all joys here is that the University of Cambridge is planning to release the recorded reading as a podcast, which will eventually be posted on their site. This might be useful to those of you teaching the text: just refer your students to the iTunes music store, and they can turn it up to eleven, rocking out to “Paradise Lost” as they roll down the main drag on Saturday nights.
Just make sure they don’t get the poem confused with the self-proclaimed ‘Gothic metal pioneers’ that also go by the name Paradise Lost. On second thought, that might be one way to make grading essays more interesting?
“HV [Helen Vendler]: In your new book [Mirabell: Books of Number], you say there will be one more volume in this vein; after that you will be permitted to return to your “chronicles of love and loss.” These three books have all been based on Ouija-board material. Is there anything else that unites them, in general, and that separates them from your earlier poetry?
JM [James Merrill]: Chiefly, I think, the—to me—unprecedented way in which the material came. Not through flashes of insight, wordplay, trains of thought. More like what a friend, or stranger, might say over a telephone. DJ and I never knew until it had been spelled out letter by letter. What I felt about the material became a natural part of the poem, corresponding to those earlier poems written “all by myself.” [...]
HV: How did the poem get transcribed and composed? The work of transcription alone must have been enormous.
JM: The board goes along at a smart clip, perhaps 600 words an hour. Sometimes it was hard to reconstruct our words—”What was the question?” as Miss Stein put it. Then what to cut? What to paraphrase? What to add? Plus the danger of flatness when putting into verse a passage already coherent in prose. I could have left it in prose, but it would have been too sensational—like Castaneda, or Gwendolyn’s diary [in The Importance of Being Earnest].
HV: Couldn’t you have written without the help of the Ouija board, since it all comes out of your “word bank”? If not, why do you suppose the Ouija board is indispensable, in terms of the workings of your imagination?
JM: (a) It would seem not. (b) You could think of the board as a delaying mechanism. It spaces out, into time and language, what might have come to a saint or a lunatic in one blinding ZAP. Considering the amount of detail and my own limitations, it must have been the most workable method. And, as I have said, it’s made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.”
–From “James Merrill’s Myth: An Interview” by James Merrill and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 26, Number 7. May 3, 1979.
This interview is billed as an exploration of the psychological backing for a couple abstract associations, namely those listed in the title, “Metaphors of the Mind: Why Loneliness Feels Cold and Sins Feel Dirty”. It gets into that, but also detours into the process of unconscious problem solving:
“[T]here is no doubt that unconscious processes may be most active during sleep but they can also be active while people consciously focus on something—just not the problem you hope to resolve. In our study, we manipulated unconscious thought by distracting participants from the task at hand and focusing them on a different, very cognitive demanding task. Thus, to harness the benefits of unconscious thought, one does not need to lose conscious focus. The key is to focus on an unrelated task while still keeping the goal of resolving the original problem. Second, it partially depends on the complexity of the problem. As it turns out in our research and other work by Dijksterhuis, consciously focusing on a problem is more effective than distraction when the problem does not involve remote connections. The advantages of unconscious thought are most prominent when resolving difficult problems that involve weak associations.”
–From “Metaphors of the Mind: Why Loneliness Feels Cold and Sins Feel Dirty”, an interview with social psychologist Chen-Bo Zhong conducted by Jonah Lehrer, an editor for Scientific American
Does this mean I should refrain from counting the blinks of the cursor, then? How will I spend my Saturday nights?
“Politics are liable to fuse into aesthetics in Walcott’s conversation. His literary theory could be boiled down to a single principle: that the artist must make maximum use of the resources of tradition. ‘If you asked a young Caribbean painter, ‘Why are you painting like Turner? He was an Englishman,’ he would tell you fuck off. As writers we’re not as belligerent about this as we should be. What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it’s better than anybody else’s because it’s yours. It’s extremely provincial, and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be: ‘Don’t read Shakespeare because he was white.”
“His own experience in universities allowed him to witness ‘the terrible devastation to young minds caused by people who are poets themselves, who believe there are all sorts of horrible things about technique’. As a teacher, Walcott insisted on ‘the importance of the shape that you make out of a poem. That makes me a dinosaur, an old fogey. And why should I care? I always cite something that Pasternak said: ‘Great poets have no time to be original.” Imitation, he believes, ‘is not only a form of flattery, but is in a way creation. No two things are going to be alike. Whatever you bring to the craft is going to be individualistic.’ Bruce King suggests that, because of his education, Walcott was raised “in the Arnoldian world, not the Third World”. Walcott agrees, though it is Matthew Arnold ‘with a percussive beat’.”
–From an interview with Derek Walcott by James Campbell, “You promised me poems”, care of The Guardian, Oct. 04. 2008
Photos of British novelist and journalist Will Self’s writing room
Ashley, I take back everything I’ve ever said about your space being messy.
“Gangel: You mentioned before you get inspiration from conversations overheard in the streets. Where else?
Ashbery: I’m very much of a magpie as far as reading goes. I read anything which comes to my hand. National Enquirer, Dear Abby, a magazine at the dentist, a Victorian novel. I don’t have a program in anything, as a matter of fact.
Someone remarked about an obscene passage in a poem. I replied that this shocked him not because it was there, but because there were not more of them.
There is an American feeling that if you do one thing, you’ve got to do that and nothing else. It goes against my grain.
Poetry includes anything and everything.
Gangel: Do you find it easy to relate to people?
Ashbery: Yes I do. I am a very gregarious person. This often surprises people, because my poetry does have a reputation for being aloof and antihuman. But I’m quite the reverse. I enjoy talking with just about anybody. My students, for instance. We get along very well socially. I don’t believe in closing myself off from anybody or anything.
My best writing gets done when I’m being distracted by people who are calling me or errands that I have to do. Those things seem to help the creative process, in my case.”
–From Sue Gangel, “An Interview with John Ashbery” (originally printed in the San Francisco Review of Books [November 1977], rep. in Joe David Bellamy, Ed. American Poetry Observed: Poets On Their Work (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1984), 14.
“I am interested very much in debased and demotic forms of expression…. They often seem so much more moving than something that is beautifully phrased and composed. The crudeness of a Hollywood sound adventure picture on the one hand and a sort of high-flown translation from the Greek on the other were both elements that attracted me and not entirely just to make fun of them either, but to sort of purify the language of the tribe.”
–John Ashbery, on the film Where the North Begins, and its influence on his plays The Philosopher and The Compromise. (American Poetry Review, May-June 1984) courtesy of the Ashbery Resource Center.
These photographs from the opening reading at the Frank Stanford Festival aren’t doing any good sitting on my hard drive, so here they are in all their glory. The reading offered a fantastic introduction to sixteen or seventeen different small press poets, most of whom were unfamiliar to me. Being exposed to so many new voices in a single night was both overwhelming and exhilarating. Congrats and thanks to Matt and Katy at Cannibal Books, who put the festival together.
Oh, and a special thanks to Abraham Smith, Maureen Alsop, Tony Tost, Adam Clay, and Ralph Adamo for recording poems for future updates of Linebreak. Abraham’s reading of Emma Bolden’s Testimony was posted on Tuesday.
Any omissions or inaccuracies in the photo captions should be posted to editors@linebreak.org.
Karen Rigby’s poem “The Lover” appeared on Linebreak on July 21, a short time after it was selected for the Best New Poets 2008 Anthology. Here’s Karen on her writing space.
When the editor for Linebreak, Johnathon, asked me if I’d be interested in showing my workspace, I thought of the Guardian’s series on writer’s rooms.
It’s easy to imagine writers sitting at roll-top secretary desks, writers with curios lining their shelves, the honest disorder of a happy household, the sheaf of papers, the glowing screen. Viewing the rooms of much more established and well-known writers, one might believe that being a writer almost requires a space resembling a private library, artist studio, or cottage. Grand or eccentric retreats for grand, original minds.
The public’s curiosity may stem from the desire to find out what belongings reveal about their owners. I wondered if my own room might seem very austere by comparison, or what characteristics a viewer might try to superimpose on a writer based on an image.
The easy explanation for the clean look: My husband and I have been living in our current (first) house for only half a year, have enough storage space, and are still making the fundamental decisions regarding furniture. The “bones” of the space must come first. The dressing up of these interiors will come much later.
Still, I think even the choices already made say something. We are in transition. The furniture, like many of my stanzas, has been repurposed, reassembled (from other drafts or in this case, other rooms–the chair was borrowed from the kitchen table. The desk was once a sofa / console table and is lightweight enough to move around the house–I migrate according to whim or seasonal changes in the natural lighting).
I don’t require a large footprint. I always write on a laptop. All I need is a wireless connection and the printer, which is in another room.
One of the benefits of moving from an apartment to a home is that suddenly all of one’s items become dispersed or dwarfed by the whiteness of the walls–if “clutter” is an accumulation of objects within the confines of a particular space, the easiest way to remove it is to simply spread out so that everything finds a place. The books, then, remain outside in the foyer.
Inside the cabinet: books by Edward Hirsch, Sandra McPherson, Larry Levis, Sandra Lim and others. Also Audrey Hepburn movies, and (of course) Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. The dust jackets for hardcover books are wrapped in plastic sleeves like those in a library. Haibane Renmei, an anime series. A plush Scottish terrier in the back, behind the books. An Edith Piaf CD, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Alice Fulton’s short stories, more books.
Now that I look at these pictures they do make sense with how I tend to write: I usually write one poem at a time until I’ve finished, rather than producing many drafts of many poems at once. When I write, I often begin with the title and then proceed to work from the beginning to the end, line by line until I am satisfied with each line. Such a methodical approach seems fitting for someone who is most at peace when the surfaces remain clear.
But lest a reader or viewer imagine perfectionism, there’s always more to the story than meets the eye: there’s a terrific phrase in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, wherein the main character, Holden Caulfield, describes someone else as a “secret slob”.
You wouldn’t know from the photo that these nightstands are actually our dressers (multi-purposing again) but that on my side, everything in the drawers is jumbled. This has nothing to do with writing at all but may one day become the one quirk I maintain–akin to Roald Dahl’s ball of chocolate wrappers in the Guardian article–I may be particular about the more visible surroundings, but drawers are another matter.
From all this one may surmise that I am a practical person, not fond of excess. I favor simple lines, small patterns, and a somewhat wintery look with rare lapses in taste or sudden bursts of enthusiasm (yellow! of all color choices!) and that I pick and choose my battles.
A hearty congratulations to Linebreak contributor Carolyn Guinzio on the release of Quarry, her second book. Carolyn’s reading Friday during the Frank Stanford Festival was one of the high points of the evening, which is saying a lot, considering the company.
Just a reminder: The Frank Stanford Festival begins tonight at 7:00 with a reading at The Garden Room here in lovely Fayetteville, and at least two of the Linebreak crew will be in attendance. Be sure to say hi if you see me or Ashley milling about. Just look for a tall, devastatingly handsome dude accompanied by a svelte, coquettish blonde. Failing that, the foul language and empty whiskey bottle should be a good clue.
Oh, and I’ll have my camera. You can’t miss the camera.
The full schedule is available at the festival’s official site.
For lack of a better introductory sentence, the Poetry Foundation has a pretty little project happening:
“As a way to help readers discover (or rediscover) our archive, poetryfoundation.org has invited some of today’s most vital graphic novelists to interpret a poem of their choice from the more than 4,500 poems in our archive, reaching from Beowulf to the present.”
My favorite to date is A.E. Stallling’s “Recitative” illustrated by R. Kikuo Johnson.
This is interesting to me on a number of levels, especially when I think about the ekphrastic poem. In my mind, the best ekphrastic poem are those that exist in the same world as the painting, but are distinctly independent from the painting; poems for which the painting is the point of entry into a given world, that make sense to a reader who has never seen the painting, but that take on additional meaning once the painting is viewed.
“The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton is most likely my favorite, but–of course–one can’t argue with “Musee de Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden, either. Both of these poem create something new, and, for me, have changed the way I understand “The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh or “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel–to whom I’ll attribute the latter painting despite an apparent controversy, but only because I don’t know any better and like making links.
I can’t help but wonder whether these graphic novelists took on the Poetry Foundation’s reverse-ekphrastic project with the same expectations of their art, but I’m sure they faced similar challenges. Regardless, it seemed like a good enough reason to pontificate, and pontificate I did. Lovely.
