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.
However, my coffee has not kicked in yet. You get cartoons instead!
The picture should link back to its home, Toothpaste For Dinner. If not, this was just another failed technological experiment– but you got some really awful open mic flashbacks out of the deal, right? Here’s the link anyway: Toothpaste For Dinner. Everybody wins!
Hello, my name’s Jennifer Jabaily, and I’m a recent addition to Linebreak– this is my first post on Unstressed.
Some musicians want so badly to give their poems to the world. We’ve seen volumes released by Jewel, Jeff Tweedy, Jill Scott, and Billy Corgan, among others. I’m not going to take any real shots at them. It’s unsporting. It’s like mocking a celebutante’s fashion line.
Some are poets by accident or reputation: Christopher Ricks has defended Bob Dylan’s lyrics as poetry, and Harper Perennial advertised “The Lyrics of Tom Waits, 1973-1982″ in the latest issue of “The Writer’s Chronicle.” Maybe there’s something in it. Maybe they’re our time’s answer to Arnaut Daniel or Bertand de Born. Maybe not.
Others have released volumes of poetry with more success– or at least have been shielded by unimpeachable street cred: Leonard Cohen, David Berman, and Patti Smith (as highlighted in a 2006 Slate post by Meghan O’Rourke) are among the comparatively lucky.
Hoping to find some poets who’ve crossed into the seedy world of rockstardom, I came across a 2008 article from The Guardian in which British poet Simon Armitage proves this is not a one-way street. You can hear some selections from his band, The Scaremongers, at last.fm. I don’t know what to say, exactly. There’s a certain forgiveness in a catchy melody.
UBUWEB offers a handful of Erica Baum’s photo collections, including her series of library card catalogues.
I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been reading Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Maybe I’m a little ashamed. Regardless, I will now regale you with Richard Wilbur quotes. Please don’t despise me too terribly much.
”The drug experience is shadow-boxing, and the business of the poet is to be confronting, with his imagination, these solid objects here.”
“[I]n the poetry of this school [the New York School] generally you find a hidden sentimentalism–they all think childhood was the best of times; there’s no sadder sound in nature than the sound of a running-down nursery music box.”
“I don’t care much for confessional poetry when it is just the sort of whining you get at a bar from drunks.”
And, of course, an obligatory quote on form, the length of which probably reveals something about my character:
“If I say hook-book to you, it’s not the same as if I said brush-stadium. There’s some kind of implicit, magical demand made on you by the fact that hook and book sound a bit alike, and your mind starts trying to pull them together in some way or the other…. There are certain kinds of control that you can’t have [in free verse]…. There’s an example–I hope I can quote it properly–a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, one of his terrible sonnets. It begins, ‘No worse, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief;/ More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./ Comforter, where, where is your comforting./ Mary, mother of us, where is thy relief?’ Notice the relationship between that ‘wilder wring’ in the second line and that ‘comforting’ in the third. The ‘wring’ is a very hard rhyme, and ‘comforting’ breaks off, and it tells you where to break your voice. It almost lets your voice crack at the end of the third line. There’s the kind of accurate music that a fine user of rhyme can force.”
Granted, I had to go through a lot of interviews to find those three gems of snark, but — oh! — wasn’t it all worth it?
Despite our election day jitters, we managed to update Linebreak this morning. Thanks to Sandy Longhorn for the poem, and to Maureen Alsop for the recording.
Enjoy the diversion — then get down to your polling place and vote.
As a break from poetry and its accoutrement–letters, biographies, journals–I’ve been reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks. It is, essentially, a collection of case studies of patients with various neurological diseases. It’s charming, light and hopeful for the most part, and as a consequence, it’s been a great relief.
However, while I was reading Chapter Nine, “The President’s Speech”, poetry couldn’t help but elbow in. The chapter seemed to suggest a new way to conceive of what makes a good poem, new questions to raise in the process of revision.
In “The President’s Speech”, Sacks describes how his patients reacted while watching a technically unnamed president ( “the old Charmer, the Actor” ) give a speech: some patients “looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive”. However, the far majority of the “patients were convulsed with laughter.”
This particular collection of patients consisted of two groups: one group with aphasia and the other with tonal agnosia, which is also known as aprosodia. Aphasia is, according to Wikipedia, “a loss of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language” and Sacks describes tonal agnosia as a state when “the expressive qualities of voices disappear – their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character–while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood.”
Sacks says that while patients with aphasia cannot understand speech on the word level, “something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that–at least with emotionally-laden utterance–the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed.”
As a consequence, he feels that it is impossible to lie to the aphasiac: “to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one–this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs–they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give–or remove–verisimilitude to or from a man’s voice. In this, then, lies their power of understanding–understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic.”
Patients with tonal agnosia, on the other hand, have to rely solely on the literal world of language, but can also get along with the aid of observing body language. However, in “The President’s Speech”, Sacks describes “Emily D.”, a patient with tonal agnosia who is also losing her sight. As a result, Emily had to give “extreme attention to exactness of words and word use, and to insist that those around her did just the same.” He goes on to explain,
“She could less and less follow loose speech or slang–speech of an allusive or emotional kind–and more and more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose–‘proper words in proper places’. Prose, she found, might compensate, in some degree, for lack of perceived tone or feeling.
In this way she was able to preserve, even enhance, the use of ‘expressive’ speech–in which the meaning was wholly given by the apt choice and reference of words–despite being more and more lost with ‘evocative’ speech (where meaning is wholly given in the use and sense of tone).”
In an essay titled “Writing” included in The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claims that every poet has an inner censor to whom he or she submits work for approval and criticism. He goes on to recommend that “to keep his [the poet's] errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”
After reading “The President’s Speech”, I should like to nominate two new personae for participation in this censoring process: the blind tonal agnosiac and the blind aphasiac, each of whom could simultaneously critique the poem that has been–or is being–written, and both of whom the poet should aim to please.
This would mean that the poem should, on the one hand, be completely emotionally authentic in “every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations”; there should be no emotional misstep.
However, as Ezra Pound writes in “A Retrospect”, “if a man use ’symbols’ he must use them so that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.” A poem has to work on this most literal of levels as well, not relying only on the authenticity of emotion, but remaining clear to the tonal agnosiac who can grasp only the literal meaning of the poem through “the apt choice and reference of words”.
The poem should be understandable both as an inarticulate emotional whole and on the literal level of the “verbal contraption”.
However, as Sacks writes, “We normals–aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (‘Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”
Maybe it’s time to start passing our poems around at the psychiatric ward instead of in the MFA program? Would that be redundant? I guess the MFA program at least has access to booze. Is that enough of a definitive characteristic?
Although this may be old news to some, New Yorkers seem to be taking the poetry reading to a whole new level, one which includes fishnets, corsets and absinthe:
“The ‘Madame’ presents a rotating cast of this city’s finest poets (both men and women) engaged in a night of surreal happenings, literary debauchery and private poetry readings. Here’s how it works: The poets play ‘whores,’ visitors play ‘johns’ (and are also encouraged to attend incognito!) but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry by giving private, one-on-one readings in curtained-off areas. All of the resident ‘whores’ are available for private readings at any time during the event (for a small fee).”
–From the main page of The Poetry Brothel
If only I’d known about this during the last AWP.