World Class Poetry Blog

I had projected that I would get 10,000 unique visitors to World Class Poetry in the month of March. I was right. Setting a new record, I ended the month with 10,600 unique visitors, my first month over 10 grand. Those are uniques. My total visitor count was 14,970. I also set a new daily record for visits on March 12 with 683 and a new record for unique visitors in one day on March 31 with 636, but I shattered that yesterday with a whopping 818 visits and 752 unique visitors. April looks to be a not-so-cruel month for WCP. Since it is National Poetry Month, I fully expect April to be another banner month.

The blog is doing equally well. I saw 3,491 visits in March and 3,112 of those were uniques. Not bad for a blog that was started only six months ago. My biggest day to date was March 20 with 376 visits.

It’s equally interesting to look at the content and see which posts have been the most popular. How To Market Your Poetry Online is my most popular post to date. That’s very interesting since it was posted just 20 days ago. Since then it has seen more than 700 page views.

Other popular posts have been:

• Hyperbole: A Necessary Evil … In Poetry Or Politics (one of my earliest posts)
• In Poetry, No Subject Is Taboo
• Poetics: The 7 Essential Elements Of Poetry
• My Favorite Poetry Blogs (Thanks Ron Silliman)
• Get Paid For Your Poetry
• Blog Critique: Poetry By Stacey

Interestingly, if I include yesterday in my analytics, An Ode To Alexander Hamilton, which was posted yesterday morning, comes in as the fourth most popular blog post since I started this blog last September.

And that’s the state of World Class Poetry today.

The State Of Religious Poetry Today
Speaking of yesterday, a commentator had this to say about religious poetry:

My own speculation is that most religious poetry today, like much of the contemporary “church” music, has a lack of depth (unlike many of the religious writers of the Renaissance). There seems to be, pardon the cliche, not much meat on the bone. There seems to be a lack of basic biblical/religious literacy that seems to pervade our society and spill over into the literature realm so that we end up with poetry fluff.

I empathize with this reader because this has been my own thought as well for several years. Why don’t religious writers of poetry write with more depth? For one thing, I think that most religious poets do not keep up with the latest trends in poetics. Many of them are still writing trite phrases in iambic pentameter as if mimicking John Donne or William Shakespeare. There is nothing wrong with iambic pentameter, of course, but if you’re going to write that kind of verse, whether religious or not, you need to bring something new to the park bench, which most poets don’t do. Your meter may be traditional, but your subject matter or the way that you present your subjects must be new and unique, and that’s where many religious poets fall short. They’re stuck on “Jesus loves me” and have forgotten that there may be other ways to say it, or to show it, than simply using Biblical language that one can read by picking up a leatherbound KJV.

I hate to commit to a month-long project on this blog because I never know when my full-time job will require more and I have to break a commitment, which I hate to do. I’m one who doesn’t like to commit unless I am sure that I can fulfill the commitment. Funny quirk I have.

But I would like to post a religious poem every day for the month of April. Especially since I got at least one reader to acknowledge me on that last post. There are some religious poets I admire. Donne, of course, is at the top of the list. And my favorite is Gerard Manley Hopkins. I will try to find quality religious poems that I can share throughout April. Some of them may be my own, but others will not (likely, most of them will not be). If I falter at this, please forgive me. I am only human, but I will do my level best.

The first poem I’d like to share is this one by Denise Levertov:

The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velasquez)

She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice
is his - the one
who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,
as no one ever had looked?
Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?

Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he'd laid on the dying and made them well?

Surely that face - ?

The man they'd crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?

Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don't recognize yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen, absently touching
                                     the winejug she's to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening,

swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.

Notice how very different this poem is than your typical Jesus freak verse. How well laid out it is from the very beginning. Not in traditional verse at all, rather written like the postmodern free verse that it is. Yet, we know immediately what the poem is about, a certain man from a moment in history nearly 2,000 years ago.

If it weren’t for the title, we might not know in the first stanza who the man is. There is a mystery to it. The subject is a woman. The repetitive “listens” in the first line set up for what follows perfectly. Then the enjambment is in itself spellbinding. Words like “holding”, “touching”, and “listening” ending lines that lead to greater mystery. And the indented line toward the end of the poem - how jarring that the winejug gives the impression that there is an indenture in the air of the place of this setting, though the poem never tells us in so many words.

Again, without the title of the poem, by the end of the second stanza, when we know that the man has laid his hands on “the dying”, we are intrigued. Who is this man? This mysterious stranger. Is this a love poem? It is, but not the type of love poem we might imagine.

The mystery continues, and well.

The single line about his face, broken with a dash and a question mark. So simple a technique, but not common. Brevity in beautiful measure. And the perfect lead-in to the next three lines …

The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?

There is no question who those lines can be about. If we did not know by now, we know for certain now. This man is the crucified Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, God in the flesh. His crucifixion so appealingly alluded to, his disappearance from the tomb, the rumors of his appearance to the women on the road … clues, yet no mention of his name. There is no “Jesus” in this poem, but we know who it is about. We know because of the subtle and crafty way that the poetess has lead us to discovery. And that’s what makes this poem a success. It appeals to our knowledge of the past while not spelling anything out. It leaves just enough to the imagination that all we need are the subtle hints, then the spirit (of the poem) does the rest.

John Hewitt wrote a fabulous blog post on how to write a pretentious poem in seven steps. It’s a rather fitting topic because the catch-phrase for poetry these days is “accessible”. Everyone wans to write poetry that is “accessible,” presumably because people who don’t ordinarily read poetry will flock to their poem and praise them for their accessibility. One problem with that: It seldom happens.

Instead, people who don’t read poetry don’t discover accessible poems. Imagine that. But then, they don’t read pretentious poems either. So I guess they’re at a total loss.

Hewitt takes a very ordinary, accessible poem - Roses are red, / Violets are blue, / Sugar is sweet, And so are you. - and turns it into a pretentious poem simply by changing the poem in some way through seven steps. How does he say to do it? Funny you should ask. Here are Hewitt’s steps to a more pretentious poem:

• Add old time words nobody uses in real life
• Add complex terms for simple words
• Add some foreign words and italicize them
• Add something technological so people realize you’re living in a new age
• Add some other modern stuff such as abbreviations and slang
• Mix up the line endings
• Take out the punctuation

I like this list and Hewitt is correct. All of these things can make for a more pretentious poem, but simply having them doesn’t make a poem pretentious. If you use old time words like doth and art simply to make an impression then you are obviously trying too hard to sound poetic. Stop it. But that isn’t to say that you couldn’t write a narrative poem that plays on Elizabethan English. The key is propriety. If it is right for the poem then it’s right to do it, not pretentious.

Generally speaking, simple words are best. Why use a million dollar word when you can use one that is more easily understood by the majority of your readers? Well, the obvious reason is that because a more complex word might actually be the right word to use for the context. It’s an editorial decision you’ll have to make. Just don’t make the decision based on your desire to sound poetic or more intelligent. That’s pretentious.

Foreign words are generally not necessary. I’ve seldom seen an instance when a foreign phrase in a poem made the poem any better. All it tells me is that a poet is bilingual, or in today’s technological world it may mean that they’re a decent researcher.

Contemporary poets love to use technological jargon in their poems. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If you think techno-jargon will improve your poem because the 21st century has arrived, think again. Future generations will just think you’re pretentious.

I’ve never liked to see acronyms in poetry. I’ve tried writing poems with acronyms and just thought it looked stupid. It’s pretentious. And the people who don’t understand the acronyms won’t get the poem. So why bother?

Line endings are important. Yes, you can take a poem like “roses are red … yada yada yada” and move around the line endings and that would be pretty pretentious, but if you are writing a poem from scratch, well, you have to put line endings somewhere. Just put some thought into them and don’t be pretentious.

Worse than taking out punctuation is trying to outdo E.E. Cummings and using odd punctuations like parenthetical clauses sandwiched between hyphens and capitalized letters in the middle of words. I’ve always thought that was pretentious, even when Cummings did it.

But if you really are going for the pretentious effect in your poems then I can suggest a way to do it in one simple step. Just make a real strong effort to be accessible. And make sure everyone knows it.

Here’s your chance to support freedom of speech.

Get published @ Teenypoet.

Ah, plagiarism.

Reginald Shepherd on New American Poets.

Slamming the Bluz in Charlotte.

Openness, inclusiveness. Is that possible in poetry?

“Outside the Flood Walls” by Edward Byrne.

Slam event: audience participation.

Veterans against the Iraq War.

Making sense of Mamet, the poet and the man.

Simic on time.

Read Ted Kooser’s penultimate column.

John Giorno is a giant among poets. He was friends with William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, lover to Andy Warhol, disciple of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, and has been an inspiration to at least two generations of poets since. That’s quite a pedigree.

This article plugging tonight’s performance of Giorno and Thomas Hellman in Montreal is quite a treat. I’d like to respond to some of its prose:

Charles Bukowski, the American poet, novelist and Giorno’s longtime friend, once described his experience in reading the great poets of the literary canon as amounting to “a goddamn headache.” Bukowski’s complaint is far from uncommon. Outside academia, popular audiences often regard poetry as traditional and arcane, elitist and unapproachable. But in the documentary Poetry in Motion – a project Giorno helped to coordinate – Bukowski stresses that this does not have to be the case. “Poetry itself contains as much energy as a Hollywood industry, as much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive. Poetry has always been said to be a private hidden art….The reason it is not appreciated is because it hasn’t shown any dance, any guts, any moxy.”

If you can relate to Buk’s proclamation then you’d probably feel right at home with the Beats and their offspring. The Beats rejected much of Modernist poetics simply because, as Bukowski so eloquently put it, the stuff was stiff, esoteric, arcane, and just plain too academic. Ever since, there has been a raging battle between the high brow academics and the gutter stench street poets like Buk and his religious followers. I find myself stuck somewhere in the middle.

The Modernists And The Beats
T.S. Eliot is one of my favorite poets. “The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock” is still one of my favorite poems. But, like many of his critics, I find the constant footnotes nerve wracking. For that reason, I can do without his more popular poem “The Waste Land,” although I do agree that April is the cruelest month and that is an awesome line, but if a poem needs endless footnotes it should be an essay, not a poem. That said, I don’t mind one or two short notes to shed light on a word or phrase that may be borrowed or that an average reader might not understand the reference to. And just for the record, I find Ezra Pound, who was a close friend of Eliot’s and helped him prepare “The Waste Land” for publication, even worse.

Ah, but the Beats are not without their problems. Their admirers are even worse. Trash garage poetry has become so chic in today’s post-punk world that we will soon start seeing Bukowski imitators gang raping has-been Elvis impersonators in the foyers of national museums. But the hills do strangely look like white elephants.

All of that aside, however, Buk is right on point when he says poetry needs verseteers who can bring it alive, whether they come from the halls of academia or the dark and deadly alleys of Inner City, USA.

Performance Poets Versus Formalism

Giorno’s work literally breathes life into poetry: “If you are performing to an audience, it is just like a singer in that when I perform, I use my breath in a strong way and allow the sounds of the words to come out,” Giorno explains to me. “Music is just the sound of the words. But poets aren’t trained; it’s not like they go to singing school.” Giorno bounds and sweats on stage like a musician, too. “I am not playing with my body to amuse the audience, it is the poem that moves the body that way,” he says.

I’ve never been able to perform. I’m not a performer. To me, the performance can often detract from the actual poem. I love to read a good poem on the page. But I’ve seen many performance poets who can make their poem ring, and that’s OK. It sounds like Giorno has found his medium. Performance is good as long as it doesn’t take over. I still want poetry.

Like the Beats, his work is highly politicized and overtly critical of traditional and conventional values, but he is no stalwart disciple. After all, he was a full generation younger than a lot of the beatniks, and wasn’t afraid to immerse himself in other artistic movements. In 1963, he collaborated with Warhol – his lover at the time – as the star in the “anti film” Sleep, composed of a single long shot of Giorno lying in bed for five hours.

I think it is very important for poets not to get stuck. Immersing yourself in other artistic movements and literary styles can only improve your writing. If something doesn’t work for you, you can abandon it. No harm done. In fact, it might even make your poetry stronger. I think this is especially true of performance poets.

In the 1980s, as a student at the University of Texas at Dallas, I had the opportunity to show my poetry to a former editor of The Kenyon Review, Frederick Turner. Those familiar with Turner will know him as a formalist poet, which I’m not. At that time, in my early 20s, I was beginning to write in a style of contemporary poets - without rhyme, unique line enjambments, and in a conversational style. Although my poetry was much more lyrical than the norm, I was capable, due to being raised in a musical family, of creating poetry that could make its own music. I still like writing those poems even today, rhyme or no rhyme. But to shorten the story, Turner encouraged me to read - and write - more formal poetry and added, “It can only strengthen your own style and your voice.” He was right. It did.

Why Burroughs Should Be Beat

To explain his interaction with the Beats and Pop Art, Giorno borrows the metaphor of “the third mind” from another one of his long-time friends, William Burroughs. Burroughs’s model of artistic process rejects the idea that one artist directly influences another. Instead, he believes that two minds come together to create a work that is more than the sum of its parts, transcending either poet’s vision. “This metaphor of William’s,” explains Giorno, “is not so much about influence as it is the mind flowing together.” The two clearly admired one another: “He had one of the most brilliant minds in the world and so it was a great blessing to be with him. William and I lived together. I knew him for 40 years and I lived with him for most of it.”

I don’t agree with Giorno’s perception of Burroughs. Though regrettably, I’ve never met him. Had I, I might change my tune. But I’ve read other statements that Burroughs has made about things and I’ve never seen a quote from him that I thought made any sense. The Third Mind is such a concept. Artists do influence. The idea that somehow T.S. Eliot and I have collaborated on certain poems, or that Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes were co-creators, is just absurd. That is just metaphysical swill. I like Burroughs as a writer; I think he stinks as a philosopher.

The Future Of Poetry

John Giorno has worked tirelessly to bring poetry to the masses and to ensure its accessibility. In 1965, he started Giorno Poetry Systems, recognizing a great potential in mass media and technology to promote the arts. The project, perhaps best described as a non-profit artist collective, committed itself to the distribution of LPs, videos, vinyls, and tapes which featured performances by some of the most influential and innovative poets of the past five decades, from Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to Michael Ondaatje and Patti Smith. The idea was groundbreaking, but to Giorno, it seemed obvious. “One had a feeling that one should be connecting with an audience. It was common sense to work with all of the opportunities that media offered. Nobody had done this before, so I was walking a bit blindly into it.”

Until this article, I’d never heard of Giorno Poetry Systems. I like it, though. It’s a sublime idea and I agree with Giorno that such experiments are what poetry needs to keep it alive. I believe we are now on the verge of a new poetic movement, a digital movement that will transcend anything that has ever happened in the world of poetry. Keep your eyes open. This new digital poetry is about to explode and it will take the idea of the poetry slam to new levels. Just watch.

Giorno’s aim is not only to connect to an audience, but to evoke a response: “When you connect to an audience they can perceive the poem in their minds. They can relax, or you can shock them – any one of any feelings that can allow the mind to feel. It’s all a part of connecting to an audience. People tend to think a poem is like Beethoven or Mozart: you can’t scream! Audiences treat it like classical music.”

No truer words were ever spoken. Catharsis, to borrow a word from Aristotle. That’s the poet’s aim. Create catharsis any way you can.

As for poetry’s current status, both Hellman and Giorno are particularly excited about the growing amount of poetry slams in Europe and North America.

I think the days of the slam are coming to an end. Something better is about to emerge. Something really wild. I mean it. Keep your eyes open.

Giorno echoes this optimism. He entrusts today’s emerging spoken word artists with moving poetry forward – and with hip hop and slam poetry on the rise, his legacy is in good hands. “When you go to these slams, you see these kids who just get some real physical reaction in the heart and mind. Slams are all over the place. It is a fabulous phenomenon,” he concludes. Giorno is evidently an idealist at heart: We are in a “golden age of poetry,” he says.

Yes, this is the golden age, but the slam is history. It has run its course. Time to move on.

It’s been awhile, but I’ve read Aristotle’s Poetics. It is one of my all-time favorite philosophical works related to the arts. Kurdish Aspect has a brilliant blog post on the ancient Greek philosopher’s treatise and how it relates to film making. It got me thinking about what is important in poetry.

According to Plato’s main man, the seven essential elements of Greek storytelling included:

• Plot
• Character
• Theme
• Dialog
• Music
• Design
• Spectacle

The Poetics Of Film
KA does a great job of interpreting these elements for the screen, a technological advancement not available to the late great Mr. A. Poetry, on the other hand, doesn’t have such sophistication. In its rawest, purest form, poetry is today as it was during old Stot’s day. So it will always be.

That isn’t to say the forms, expressions, and modes of presentation haven’t changed. They have. Slam poetry is, in many respects, much like stage performances were then. The primary difference might be that slam performances are mere monologues while stage performances were mostly team efforts, much like today’s screenplays. But it’s taken how many thousands of years to walk that full circle?

I can see the incorporation of poetic elements returning to the stage, and I can see more clearly the return of stage production to poetics. It is time for poets to start thinking about these seven elements of poetics and apply them as well.

Adapting The Elements To The Art Of Poetry
While the elements are basically the same, they do require a little bit of modification for the medium. Poets don’t necessarily need background choruses to set a scene. Though it can be argued that the addition of that dimension can often enhance the poetic experience for the audience. I see no reason why it couldn’t happen. To repeat, here are the elements again, this time they are termed in such a way as to make sense to the medium of poetry:

1. Plot
2. Character
3. Theme
4. Dialect/Dialog
5. Rhythm
6. Form
7. Presentation

It is easy to see these elements in light of either a poem on the page or a poem on the stage. Whether one is a performance poet or one sees oneself as a poet that should be read, one should think about these elements in light of both the poem on the page and the poem delivered at the microphone. Let’s face the fact that open mic readings have become as much a part of the poetic culture of our times as reading a poem in a book. Many poets muse that “a poem is enhanced by the oral reading and meant to be heard.” I don’t necessarily subscribe to that point of view myself, but I do read in open readings and give thought to how I present my poems in the hope that when others read my poems in the privacy of their bedrooms at night that they will have a better understanding of them because they heard me read them. Presentation and delivery are equally important on the page and on the stage.

Explaining The Elements Of Poetry

Plot
Plot needs no introduction. It is what it is. We often think of plot in the context of film, stage, and fiction writing, but it exists within poetry as well. To speak of narrative poems in terms of plot is easy. You tell a story. For that is precisely what is meant by plot. But I submit to you that plot can exist for the lyric poem as well.

Plot is simply a pattern of events. It is synonymous with scheme. In fact, you can call this particular element Scheme and it would be just as relevant and appropriate as plot. The idea is to form your poem around a series or pattern of important events, objects, or things. Poem is action. What is the poem about? Can you tell your poem in terms of its scheme? If not, there is likely something missing.

The scheme need not be complex. But there should be a series of ‘plot points’ within your poem. They can be particular actions performed by a character or the narrator, by an animal if the poem is about that, a living being of another sort, or even an inanimate object. “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams is about a wheelbarrow that does nothing, yet there is a plot. A scheme.

so much depends
upon (plot point #1)

a red wheel
barrow (plot point #2)

glazed with rain
water (plot point #3)

beside the white
chickens (plot point #4)

See how each secondary line is dependent upon a single word? Each word consists of two syllables and represents an action, even if the action is not stated.

“Upon” sets us up for the next stanza. The action could be said to be anticipation for that is what the word instills within the reader, an anticipation for what is to come. “Barrow” gives us an object. We have yet to see why the red wheel barrow is so important. We only know that it is important. Again, the anticipation continues but is enhanced by the sight of the object’s first mention. Water, actually the word “glazed,” gives us our first real glimpse of action. It isn’t exactly an action verb for the action has already happened. What we see is the aftermath of the action, but we know the action was there by the word “glazed.” Our experience with rain water tells us what that means. We’ve seen it before in our lives, in our towns, in our yards. We see it again now in the poem. Then, the final act - the chickens. They don’t move. They are only there. But we know what chickens do. They cannot be still. Have you ever seen a chicken alive that wasn’t moving or making a sound? We know what the chickens are doing and we can see them clearly through the lens of plot.

Character
Do poems have characters? Usually there is at least one character: The Narrator. Truthfully, that is all that is necessary. Even if that is all there is, the poet must develop the character of the narrator. Who is she? Who is she talking to? Why is she talking to them? Does the narrator have any particular prejudices? Are there other characters in the poem? What are they doing? Are there characters “outside” the poem? Maybe a subject that never actually does or says anything, or a looker on who doesn’t contribute? These are things you must think about. Perhaps your character is the person the narrator is talking to. Whatever it is, you must think about character - even for a poem.

Theme
Theme is very important for a poem. What’s it about? Is it a complex issue or something as simple as a red wheelbarrow sitting in the rain? Not every element of theme needs to be presented in your poem. “The Red Wheelbarrow” is effective because it leaves so much out. But what it does reveal is so important to theme. Be prepared to write your theme in a sentence or two. You may or may not include that in your poem, but you should know what it is nonetheless.

Dialect/Dialog
Many poems are written with no dialog. They are not stories, after all. They are poems.

Dialog is important, however. If your poem is a narrative poem or if it includes people speaking, and some poems do, then you must think about dialog. But even more important than dialog is dialect. In fact, dialect is even important if your poem includes dialog.

Apart from dialog, dialect is the manner or style in which the language of the poem is developed. Whether you have characters speaking within the poem or not, dialect is important. It is important to develop the language of the poem and to keep it consistent within the poem. Does your narrator speak with a lisp? He must maintain his lisp throughout the poem. Does he speak in a high brow dialect of Latin? Keep it consistent. And if you present characters who speak within your poem then each one must have their own dialect apart and separate from the dialect of the narrator. They must be distinguishable as their own so that your reader, or listener, is not confused.

Rhythm
Like music, every poem has a rhythm. A poem must set its own music. If it follows a rigid form, like a sonnet, the music will probably conform to other poems of the same form. Exceptions may occur, as in the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote sonnets in sprung rhythm, his own character imprint upon the form, but in a general sense, poems of a particular form achieve a similar music or rhythm, just like songs of a particular genre of music do the same. Rhythm is an important element to think about when crafting your poem.

Form
It is important to think about form in more than its written assembly. Form is as much about the way your poem is structured in a visual sense and in a stage sense. If you are a performance poet, you give special consideration to how you move when you deliver your poetry. This is something that “page poets” must think about as well. When you read at open mic readings, do you “talk with your hands?” Do you scratch your nose when you say a certain word? Do you read with your notebook pages close to your face in order to cover your eyes? Bad habits are hard to kill so think about them and do them in before you develop them fully.

Read your poem in the comfortable setting of friends before you do it on stage. Ask them to tell you if you do things like cross your legs, mumble, scratch your ear, or do anything that will distract from your reading. Better yet, read in front of a mirror (preferably a full body mirror) so you can see yourself. If a particular hand movement, body stance, tilt, head toss, or other physical action is distracting then you want to find that out before you get on stage. Whatever will enhance the experience of your poem for your audience should be explored. Sometimes, that means adding a hand movement or gesture. But it does bear consideration.

Presentation
Aristotle talked about spectacle in the sense of special effects. This is something the movie industry has become very good at. Some entire films are dependent upon special effects. Maybe your poem doesn’t need car crashes, gun shots, or explosions in order to make an impact on its audience, but you should give thought to your presentation, both on the page and at the microphone. Will you change your tone, pitch, or pace at a particular place in your poem? Should your poem be read fast or slow? It does matter. And you should give it some thought.

Not all poems are the same. The point is, you must tailor and massage your poem for the proper presentation. Some poems are written for the performance, others for the page. You must know what your poem is better suited for. That doesn’t mean that performance poetry will never be written down and published, nor does it mean that a page poem can’t be read at open mic night. But when you make the transition from page to stage, or vice versa, be ready to incorporate the appropriate elements in the proper way for that poem’s best presentation. You will reap huge rewards when you incorporate all of these elements into your poetry, whether you write for a physical audience or an invisible one.

Thanks to Jim Murdoch for engaging in dialog with me over the matter of poetry. Other voices added to the conversation would be nice as well.

I wanted to add a little something extra. Of course, the spark that started it all was Dana Gioia’s essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” While retrieving the essay so that I can quote from it for this post I found another, shorter, essay written by Gioia, which I had read before but forgotten. The essay is aptly titled “Being Outed.” In this essay, Gioia talks about his hidden secret while in the corporate world - he wrote poetry - and how it came to pass that his secret was let out. I can honestly say I’ve never felt the need to hide my passion for poetry. I probably should have. But it never occurred to me to do so. Nevertheless, I do sense a common theme, that non-poets, when they find that someone they know writes poetry and they would have thought otherwise, have the same reaction. Funny, that.

Now, back on the poetic matter at hand. Gioia wrote of six things that poets can do to make poetry matter again. I’d be curious to know your thoughts:

1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work—preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author’s work.

2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.

3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader’s trust by candidly admitting what they don’t like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

4. Poets who compile anthologies—or even reading lists—should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry’s gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse’s property for professional favors.

5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry’s future.

6. Finally poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand the art’s audience. Poetry is an aural medium, and thus ideally suited to radio. A little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners. Some programming exists, but it is stuck mostly in the standard subculture format of living poets’ reading their own work. Mixing poetry with music on classical and jazz stations or creating innovative talk-radio formats could re-establish a direct relationship between poetry and the general audience. The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American poetry establishment is locked into a series of exhausted conventions—outmoded ways of presenting, discussing, editing, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.

My Thoughts On Gioia’s Poetic Proposal

1. I agree that some time should be spent reading the poetry of others. It’s a poetry reading, right? So why not?

2. Again, that’s a great suggestion. I know two poets in my local area who do this well. Rich Hemmings in York, Pa. is the best promoter of poetry I’ve ever met. He often mixes music with art with poetry and isn’t afraid to take risks. I’m not just talking about his own poetry. I’m talking about the open mic readings he organizes in York and the features that he presents in those venues.

Another poetry organizer I admire, who incorporates open mic readings with discussions of dead poets, is Daniel Armstrong in Frederick, Md. He has a weekly poetry reading where every other week a featured poet is invited to read and the weeks in between are spent reading the poems of dead poets. Great idea. And it works.

3. Another good point. I do agree that poetry critics need to be candid. And it helps to have an idea of what you stand for, what you consider “good” poetry and what you won’t stand for. We all have our prejudices, but we ought to be able to back them up with reason and not wear our poetry on our sleeves.

4. Bravo! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up a journal or a book of contemporary poetry hoping to find a gem only to be met with feeble attempts to impress someone who has no bearing on my enjoyment of the poem. Mediocrity should not be allowed in poetry. Period.

5. I’m OK with Gioia’s position on this one, but I cannot deny my own tendency to criticize. I am not a performance poet. It is difficult for me to perform. I read and I believe I read well. I’ve been told that I have a good reading voice, but I am not a performer. To some extent, my poetry is intended for the written page and I hope that some reader 100 years after I die can enjoy it as much as my audiences do when I read at open mics. Nevertheless, reading aloud aside - and I do agree that high school students should be met with the reading and performance of poetry with the intent to enjoy - there should be some analysis and criticism involved in the education process, particularly for poets who are learning to write.

6. Again, Gioia’s insight here awe-inspiring. But keep in mind that his essay was written in 1991, a time when most people in America had never heard of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee had coined the phrase “World Wide Web” just one year earlier. The Internet went commercial in 1993 - after Gioia’s essay was published in The Atlantic Monthly.

Why is this important? Because when Gioia wrote and published “Can Poetry Matter?”, the radio was the dominant medium for voice transmissions. The Internet was still a science and military-industrial complex tool. The commercialization of the Internet made many things possible that before were only a pipe dream. Poetry is now popular again in ways that Gioia was talking about in his essay, but primarily right here on the Internet.

Just look around. There are countless blogs and websites that consist of published poetry. Much of it - most of it, in fact - is garbage, but it’s there. It’s being written and published by ordinary people - not by tenured professors. And some of it is good.

Then there are poetry podcasts - the Internet’s equivalent to radio. Internet radio has ten times the potential that traditional radio has. It has a broader appeal, can transcend national boundaries, and overcomes obstacles related to time as well. If I’m invited to read a poem on National Public Radio next week, there is a point at which that recording will enter an archive, and who knows when it will be revived? If I record the same poem by digital recording and upload it to a website on the same day then that recording can potentially remain in its location for the next 50 years, assuming I maintain the website for that long, and I could direct my living heirs to maintain it long afterward, which they could certainly do. This is what I mean when I say we are on the verge of a new revolution in poetry. We have the medium. Now we just need the move.

If you’re a huge iTunes fan, you’ll love the poetry podcasts available. Podcasting has become very popular and iTunes is at the forefront of that movement. Like to read poetry? You’ll love to hear it read. Today’s top 25 literary iTunes are listed below with those that focus entirely or primarily on poetry highlighted:

1. PotterCast: The Harry Potter Podcast
2. The Classic Tales Podcast
3. APM: Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac
4. The New York Times Book Review Podcast
5. MuggleCast: Harry Potter Podcasting
6. iTunes: Meet The Author
7. NPR: Books
8. PRI: To The Best Of Our Knowledge
9. NOCTURNAL: A Free Scott Sigler Audiobook (this one includes explicit content)
10. “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” Audiobook
11. Poetry Magazine Podcast
12. Poem Of The Day
13. Escape Pod
14. NPR: Book Tour
15. Great Books - A Free Podcast Of Masterpieces From The World Of Literature And Poetry
16. Phases: A Twilight Podcast
17. The Essays Of Ralph Waldo Emerson Podcast
18. Playing For Keeps
19. “A Tale Of Two Cities” Audiobook
20. PoemTalk
21. LibriVox Audiobooks
22. alt.NPR: Poetry Off The Shelf
23. Merriam-Webster’s Word Of The Day
24. “Heart Of Darkness” Audiobook
25. Lit Summary Podcast

Many of these podcasts from iTunes are free. More poetry podcasts from iTunes include:

• IndieFeed: Performance Poetry
• Poetry & Literature from Broome Community College
• Digital Poetry @ NJIT
• Poetry On Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006, Volume I
• The Poet’s Corner: The One-And-Only Poetry Book For The Whole Family by John Lithgow (yes, the actor)
• Poetry PodCast
• Shattered Thought Spoken Word Poetry
• National Champion Performance Poetry (explicit)
• Poetry X Radio
• Poetry Weekly
• Children’s Poetry Time
• Dancing With The Feminine Voice: Reading The Poetry Of Women Writers
• Classic Poetry Aloud
• Houghton Mifflin Poetry Podcast: The Poetic Voice
• miPOradio Poetry

There are plenty more poetry podcasts available through iTunes. Again, many of them are free. Some of them, like John Lithgow’s poetry audiobook require a fee, but you can listen to many poetry podcasts for no charge at all. If you believe poetry is best listened to, then I’d encourage you to check out some of these podcasts that focus on poetry and literature.

This from Ploughshares:

It occured to me the perfect confrontation between the ironic and the sincere. In the movie, at least in this scene, the sincere has the upper hand. In the ideal writer, however, I suppose these characters’ traits would be combined, aesthetics dictating what percent of each character would be included.

I haven’t seen the movie (Mulholland Drive) from which this scene is extracted, but I like the idea Chris Tonelli is working with. Irony is one of my favorite poetic techniques. But I’m a little bit unnerved at the thought of irony and sincerity being put beside each other this way. It’s as if Chris is saying that one cannot be ironic and sincere at the same time unless one is aesthetically inclined. I may be interpreting it incorrectly.

In my mind, irony is the sincerest form of word play. It allows us to see the world through the lens of opposites without being overtly confrontational. There is always a silent humor attached to irony no matter how dark it might be. The humor is typically a light, a beacon that shines with an illumination of some truth the reader is intended to glean from the poetic tool itself. This sincere gesture on the part of the writer is most effective when the reader shares a common set of values. Otherwise, the irony runs the risk of not being recognized.

Irony, sincerity, humor, truth - like a ball of yarn, the elements just tangle themselves into a toy of usefulness. What is a mere plaything for one cat is a useful tool of trade for a spinner. The writer plays; the author spins a yarn. The reader either gets on the level of the cat and enjoys the fun or heads to the department store to consume a garment. Either response is acceptable, but one can’t do both. Ahh, the irony!

I’ve written before about local poets laureate. I know a few. One local poet laureate, a man named Michael Hoover, is one of the best poets that I know personally. His recent appointment to the poet laureate position in Hanover, Pa. is well deserved.

The previous poet laureate, Dana Sauers, wrote a weekly column in the local newspaper, The Hanover Evening Sun. Michael Hoover is continuing that practice with much verve. But another thing he has taken up in addition to the weekly column is the creation of audio podcasts of his poetry. Two of his poems have been published, in print and by podcast, on The Evening Sun’s website.

I love to hear Michael Hoover read. I’ve had that privilege on numerous occasions. He is in no hurry, articulates every word, every syllable, every letter. He is the type of poet that, when you hear him read, you realize has the gift and makes the art of reading poetry aloud seem easy. That’s a cliche, I know, but some cliches are worth repeating.

Michael Hoover is also a teacher. That may be why he is so good at reading out loud. These two poems are new to me. I’ve never heard him read them. To hear him read these poems aloud over a medium on which I spend 95% of my time is as much an honor as to hear them in them in person. I’d like to thank Michael Hoover for his poetry, his service to Hanover, Pa., and his willingness to move hometown poetry into the 21st century.

I couldn’t wait until this evening to make a post. The following items appeared in my inbox this morning along with my Google Alerts for the key terms I track:

Robert Peake laments the late arriving issue of North American Review. What on earth could it mean?

Nicholas Manning wonders if visual poetics and poetry videos should have their own Pushcart Prize. Personally, I think that’s a good question. What do you think?

Finally, a poet named Ezra opened a restaurant called Ezra’s Pound.