World Class Poetry Blog

Sorry I missed my post yesterday. I was afraid that would happen. I was at the Dover Public Library in Dover, Pa. and they closed on me. Evidently, they close at 1 p.m. on Friday.

Today I’m posting from The Emporium in York, Pa. The reason I’m in York today is because it’s YorkFest, the annual arts festival the city sponsors every year. I and a few other poets in this area are performing a one-act play at 2 p.m. I had to come in this morning at 10 a.m. for a dress rehearsal. That meant I would be here all day and since I had work related to my Internet and freelance writing businesses that I’d have to find a hot spot to log on and work through. I found it at The Emporium.

I’ve written about The Emporium before. The bookstore, an independent, is sponsoring a writing contest and I promoted that contest in a blog post. Jim Lewin, the owner, told me that he was getting quite a response from that post. Some other bloggers, evidently, have picked up on the post and promoted it as well. Thank you to everyone who has followed up and spread the word. That helps build my relationship with local merchants that I like.

Jim also sponsored Horrible Saturday, in which I participated and rendered a dramatic reading of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. Peruse his website and you’ll see he frequently has specials and promotions that he runs like that. I’d like some of you to enter his contest and have a good time. Well, here’s till the next post ….

Early post today. My wife and I will be camping out over the weekend. I will try to get to posting while away, but I can’t guarantee it. It’s the end of the summer here in beautiful South Central Pennsylvania and we want to take advantage of the nice weather before it begins to get cooler. As fall progresses, the evenings here get cooler and cooler so this is the best time to enjoy the outdoors. Plus, we are heading to Dover, Pa. for Olde Tyme Days and to set up a booth to sell my wife’s crafts and some old tools we’ve got lying around (I’m selling the tools, my wife is selling the crafts; though it may end up being the other way around).

At any rate, I’ll try to post over the next four days, but I may end up missing a day or so.

Getting a late start tonight. Was at a critique group I hadn’t been to in a while. We went a little later than usual. It was a good night.

I found myself in the unusual position of defending a piece written by a young college-bound woman who was new to the group. It’s not unusual that I was defending a young woman, but that I was defending her Cubist aesthetic. As you know, I’m not preferential to the avant-garde schools, and particularly Cubism, but I’m a firm believer in critiquing a poem toward a poet’s intent and not toward my own preferences.

The regulars of the group are a rather diverse crowd. We met in Michael Hoover’s home. Mike is the current poet laureate of Hanover, Pa. He is a poet’s poet, a sort of John Donne among a cast and crew of rather colorful characters. My friend Gary is the Beat poet, protege of Jack Kerouac. Anna is an older woman, a traditionalist who is rather rigid in her poetics. Janet is another older woman who is quiet most of the time, but who writes strictly in form and meter, almost always. Tonight she presented a sonnet, complete with the obligatory and obvious end rhymes. Katie is much more contemporary and Millennial-thinking in her approach than the others, tipping toward the postmodern without falling into it. Then there is me and I’m all over the poetic map. Some of the other regulars weren’t there.

At any rate, the young college-bound lady is a former student of Mike’s. Her poem was firmly entrenched in the avant garde. Her poem consisted of several hyphenated adjectives, a handful of colons followed by short bouts of terse pith, imagery that would make Ezra Pound stand up and sing “Holy Moses”, uncanny indentations, and an all-around creative visual and thought-provoking piece. It was quite imaginative and I was blessed to have read the poem. At her age, to have pulled that kind of poem off without the use of the most overused word in any language - the confabulated “I” - was incredible. I think it may have been the best, and certainly was the most creative, poem of the evening.

I defended her because everyone else in the group seemed to want to change the strophe in the poem that I thought was the heart and soul. In the midst of all this imagery surrounding that verse, the poet committed the cardinal sin of “author intrusion”, only it wasn’t so much an author intrusion as it was an addition of “self” in a family portrait. The poem’s title, you see, was “Cubism Family Portrait.”

What Is Cubism?
Anyone who has seen a Cubist painting will have one of two reactions. They’ll either love it or hate. I hate them. Pablo Picasso, heralded a genius by many art lovers in the 20th century, was a crazed, maniacal canvas abuser. I don’t like his Cubist art and I much less like his Blue Period paintings. But a thing is what it is.

When a poet presents a poem that is titled “Cubism Family Portrait”, it is pretty obvious what she is attempting. As a critique group participant, it is my duty to help her achieve her goal in creating the poem that is true to her aesthetic and reaches the point of perfection according to the principles of that aesthetic and not to infuse her poetry with my own aesthetic preferences or attempt to turn her into a miniature me. But that, unfortunately, is the approach of many critique group participants.

The Cubists attempted to present their subjects as geometric lines and shapes rather than the way we would normally see them. Cubist paintings are like stick figures on steroids. They are, in a certain sense, simplistic, but then they are also quite complex in other senses. The idea is to turn reality into an abstraction and the Cubists did that quite well.

I thought the young lady’s poem captured that sense of abstraction that can be found in Cubist art quite well. There was no mention of “I” in the poem, which I thought was a marvelous absence, yet the poet, or narrator, was definitely present. The poem attempted to describe the family in a very imagistic sense, including the dog, and even included two thoughts, spelled out explicitly, of the narrator regarding two imaginary events based on the movement of a chair in the scene. I thought the scene was spelled out quite well. Others didn’t think so. I didn’t have a problem with their inability to visualize it so much as I did with their attempt to fix the problem.

The suggestions had more to do with changing the way the poem was presented rather than improving it in the direction that it was moving. Group members didn’t like that she numbered her thoughts; well, it was unconventional, sure, but I thought it worked for her poem. The “author intrusion” as it was called was a necessary component to the poem because how can you have a family portrait without the painter, who is also a part of the family? The painter has to draw herself in too, doesn’t she?

So what we had was a poem that was primarily based on images, but which took a short excursion in two ways:

1. The painter, who was also a member of the family, entered the poem with thoughts and feelings (well, she is human, isn’t she?)
2. And the form of the poem changed, including a numbered sequence of the intruding author’s thoughts along with double indentions and italics

I thought the author intrusion was appropriate, but I was in the minority.

That’s not to say I thought the poem was perfect. I had my issues with parts of it, but I thought the one verse that everyone seemed to fixate on and wanted to fix was the part that needed the least work. Michael was the only one who saw my point, though I could see that Katie also agreed with me in at least one sense. While Michael could see my point, he still insisted the verse needed to be fixed.

I never try to fix someone else’s aesthetic while in a critique group. I don’t think it’s appropriate. I may not like their approach to writing, but it’s not my place to say it there in that setting. The best influence I can be is to help them improve their poem in the direction that they want it to go. If the aesthetic they have chosen doesn’t work for their poem, I think they’ll discover that on their own in due time. If they don’t then it will just have to be a bad poem. I’m not there to put a clay roof on a steel building.

Some interesting reading online this week:

Silliman’s back (unlike AC/DC) in black and white.

Enjoy The Second Coming. It’s been Finnished.

And yet, another Amazon boycott.

The Jewish geniuses a la Andy Warhol.

Meet President Iambic Dimeter with a pyrrhic dangler.

Capitalist poetry. Solicitation anyone?

Time to prepare a submission. Later.

Russian novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. Very significant. I don’t know that we have a modern equivalent unless it would be Gore Vidal. But Solzhenitsyn leaving this world is a real deadening event for soviet culture - and for the world.

Jim Murdoch writes about poets and art.

I still have not seen The Dark Knight.

Reginald Shepherd has a very interesting take on MFA programs. He says two things in particular that are the reasons why I’ve never pursued that course for myself. No. 1, I’d have to put myself in debt to attend one (which I just hate to do) unless I went to a program in the state of Texas and took advantage of the state’s veteran’s education benefits program, but I haven’t found a program in Texas that I’d like to attend. I figure if it’s a program that I wouldn’t pay for out of my own pocket then why would I put myself through it on someone else’s dime? Secondly, I’m afraid that going through such a program might kill my love of literature. Not necessarily the MFA, but if I pursued an MFA then I’d likely want to keep going and I’m sure any doctorate program I pursued would sour my love of literature. I just know it would. So I stick to working full time and managing a family while continuing to write. It’s difficult, but I consider it a character-building exercise.

Happy Birthday, Diane Wakoski.

I’ve been playing around with a couple of websites and I just wanted to share a little about them and how working poets can benefit from them. Both of these websites are free, but they’d be valuable even as paid services. If you get a chance I’d encourage you to check them out and start using them:

Duotrope’s Digest - Duotrope’s Digest is an online database of markets for writers. They include markets for short stories, poems, and novels and collections. A very useful tool. But it’s more than just a listing of places to send your work for consideration. It’s much more.

You can look up markets by genre, size of work they publish, whether they pay or not, and by a list of other criteria as well including whether or not the market is a print market or online publication. For each market Duotrope’s will tell you whether they accept simultaneous submissions or previously published material, the expected turnaround time on submissions, and they usually link to the market’s website so you can check it out on your own and read the submission guidelines. Some markets even accept e-mail submissions and Duotrope’s will tell you which ones do and which ones don’t.

But one of the most useful features of Duotrope’s Digest is its online submissions tracker. This is a great tool and I’m going to ditch my Excel Spreadsheet, which I’ve found is rather cumbersome. Duotrope’s isn’t, and it keeps track of my submissions rather nicely. For each poem or story that you submit you can track the date it was sent for consideration, the date you were notified of reception, the date of acceptance or rejection, and Duotrope’s will take that information and roll it into the general feedback that it gives writers to notify them of the expected turnaround time. I like that feature a lot!

Other useful features of Duotrope’s Digest include:

• A theme calendar for upcoming contests
• Search for publications by title
• New changes to markets
• An awesome weekly newsletter
• Interesting statistics for the curious (such as top 25 good, bad, and ugly sites; markets that send the most personal responses; and a whole lot more)

I highly recommend Duotrope’s Digest to any poet at any level of development and, as a side note, you can see the latest updates to Duotrope’s list of markets under the RSS News tab of the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

Zoetrope - Zoetrope Virtual Studio was started by movie-making genius Francis Ford Coppola. So it’s got to be good, right?

You bet it is!

Since it was started by a movie-making icon, Zoetrope has a lot of features that are useful to script writers, producers, actors, and others in the film industry. But it isn’t limited to that scope. If you are a short story writer, poet, novelist, or a visual artist, they have features for you too.

Zoetrope allows you to post your work for others to critique and review. This is a good way to get feedback without having to join an MFA program or shell out thousands of dollars on writer’s retreats and such. Not that those aren’t valuable, and you have to take some criticisms with a grain of salt, but if you can get good feedback on your poetry for free then it’s worth it.

The catch is Zoetrope doesn’t let just anyone dive right in and ruin the party. There are some control measures. First, you are allowed to post a poem for critique and receive feedback right away, but you can’t read your feedback until you’ve provided reviews for five other works yourself. The rooms are split up into categories (i.e. poetry, art/design, novellas, short stories, etc.) and you have to join each room separately, which means that if you are a member of the Poetry and the Flash Fiction rooms then you have to review five of each kind of work before you can see your feedback in the room corresponding to the respective category. After your initial sign up, you have to provide five more reviews before you can submit a second work for review. This ensures that you don’t hog all the attention and that you help others as well. It’s a “pay it forward” system and I like that.

Zoetrope also has other cool features. You can receive mail from other members through Zoetrope, a sort of private messaging system. And all members can create a private office and invite others to their office. Only people you invite have access to your office. So if you like a person’s feedback and you want to offer up a complete portfolio for them to review (and they are willing) then you can do that. Also, each private room has a chat/discussion feature so that you can actually network with others.

I highly recommend Zoetrope and Duotrope’s Digest to poets at any stage of development. Both are free.

I just returned from an art exhibit in which I was the featured poet.

Rich Hemmings is a friend of mine who runs one of the best poetry readings here in South Central Pennsylvania. The poetry reading is in York, Pa. and his name for the venue is Poetry Brew. They meet twice a month at an art gallery in York. But once a month the gallery changes out its exhibit and when they do they have their reception party for the artist and what they call a “Poetry Bomb.”

The Poetry Bomb is simply a short reading period that features one poet with a strict three minute reading period. The main event is the showcasing of the art that will be on exhibit for the next month. But the poetry is simply a way to mix the art with literature in a way that doesn’t intrude upon either the artists or the poets and that allows extra exposure to each before a group of people that might not otherwise pay attention to either. It’s a great concept.

I like these types of mixed arts events because there should be some cross communication between the arts. One lady approached me after the reading and mentioned that she was a painter. She complimented me on my poetry because she said that she could visualize what I was actually reading. As a painter that is very important for her. She gave me a postcard with one of her paintings on the face of it and her calling card information on the back. It’s a good way to network with other artists with different skills.

If you live in a community where you can find an art gallery, this might be something you could try. Ask the gallery director if you could sponsor an open reading at the gallery on nights where they are not using the gallery or if you could introduce a short reading featuring a single poet at one of their exhibit receptions. It’s a win-win for poets and artists too.

I think I’ve found the epitome of the Millennial Poetics School that I’ve been talking about. The journal is Mad Hatters’ Review, and I highly recommend it.

First, I like the name of this journal. It says something. This is a brand that can’t be matched. The Mad Hatter, of course, is an allusion to the character in Alice In Wonderland by that name.

What I like about this online journal is that they fuse different media into one package. I usually surf the Net with my laptop’s sound on mute because I don’t like landing on a website and having someone else’s favorite music blaring at me. Even if I like the kind of music that is playing, I just want to hear it unless I click a button that says “play.” Mad Hatters’ Review is the first website I’ve ever visited that has made autoplay easy on the ears. You’ll definitely want to un-mute your speakers when you land on this journal’s website.

Issue #9 is currently live, but you can also look through the archives of the previous eight issues. It is an online journal after all. Being an online journal, there is no subscription fee; it’s all free. That’s nice because, while I believe that artists and creators should receive something for their work I also know that with all the journals out there no one can subscribe to them all without breaking the pocketbook. Economics aside, however, the journal is a fresh gust of multimedia wind.

No. 9 is broken up into the following sections:

• Poetry
• Fiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• Whatnots
• Wit & Whimsy
• Audio Features
• Audio Text Collages
• Featured Film
• Book Reviews
• Foreign Feature
• Columns
• Comics, ‘Toons, & Parodies
• Contests
• Galleries

That’s a lot of offerings, and let me say that it is not a let down in the least. While I didn’t find every selection something that I could sink my literary teeth into, I did at least find it to be literary. The journal’s tagline, “Edgy and Enlightened Literature, Art and Music in the Age of Dementia,” was right on.

If you click on any of the poetry selections in No. 9 you’ll be immediately transported to a visual landing page - that’s precisely what I’d call it. It’s a landing page for that particular poet’s work and you’ll see a visual image that is often created by someone other than the poet. Each poet’s landing page has links to several poems. Click on a poem’s link and you’ll be taken to the page where that poem is printed and an audio file will automatically play with some background music so that you can read the poem to a backdrop of music. Don’t want the music? Just click the pause or stop button and it goes away.

The same is true of the fiction and creative nonfiction categories, a visual landing page followed by your selections of prose accompanied by visual art and music. The fiction is all flash fiction, no long stories to read, page after page. They’re all fit for consumption in a single reading. Even the creative nonfiction. But it’s all accompanied by visual art and music, each medium created by a separate artist.

I’m not sure what a “whatnot” is, but I’m pretty sure you want to experience it. This is prose of some sort, though some of them border on illuminations, after the order of Verlaine or Rimbaud. Still, visual art and music to go with your reading and beverage of choice (bring your own).

The Wit & Whimsy section is humor, literary humor. Not Monty Python. But more like a carnival (the music) and Reader’s Digest with some high brow social verities. The Audio Features are just what they sound like - no text, just audio. You land on the page and an autoplay audio recording begins. Pure enjoyment.

The Audio Text Collage and Featured Film are the only two features that I found which required some action before you got to enjoy what was being offered (other than the galleries, which are presented as slide shows). I presume this is because of the nature of the media used for those productions. Done in QuickTime, the user has to press play before you can see, or hear them. I found them both to be quite interesting. The featured film, though it is prose, is what I think of when I think of a video poem, as opposed to a poetry video, which would merely be someone reading a poem on video. A video poem would be a poem voiced over interpretive moving images, which the featured film is, except that it is an excerpt from a prose work. Nicely done, though.

The Audio Text Collage is an audio recording with a visual. Another prose production, the audio recording is set to a visual of an old television, reminds me of the old RCA black & whites in the 70s, with the VHF and UHF turn dials. If you are 25 years old or younger you might not remember these. The screen is full of snow and the production, again, is a nice production titled “Jesus Epidemic.”

In all, Mad Hatters’ Review No. 9 is an excellent composition. The creators use the Millennial Poetics 10th column to great effect.

The publisher of Mad Hatters’ Review is Carol Novack. She was interviewed by Belinda Subraman on the latter’s Gypsy Art Show, a poetry and indie music podcast that I enjoy listening to. You can hear Belinda interview Carol by downloading the World Class Poetry Toolbar, and you can also access Mad Hatters’ Review from the toolbar as well as other online poetry journals and magazines. Look out, the future of poetics is about to get better. We’re on the edge of a breakthrough.