When Words Speak Part I: America by Allen Ginsberg

My Fellow Contributors,

Below is the first episode of my new video series called "When Words Speak". This series will go over verbal techniques you can use and master in order to effectively convey the meaning of a poem through your performance. 

In this episode I perform "America" by Allen Ginsberg. 

Cheers

The Point of Poetry

I'm gonna keep this short because I want to know what you folks have to say about the question I'm posing in my blog. This is something I've been wondering about for the last quarter because I read a shitload of poetry that was written for a very specific purpose. With that being said, I'll just get right into it.

Writing poetry for the sake of writing poetry is a fairly new phenomenon. In the past, writing verse was chiefly something one did for a very specific reason. If you pick up an anthology of English Renaissance verse, you’ll find a lot of commissioned poetry (i.e. epithalamion, shit about the church, etc.) and poetry that was written – to put it crudely, though perhaps in the way a modern Marvell or Donne would put it – to get pussy.  Other poems were written to commemorate events. This sort of poetry, in particular, is all over the place in early American poetry. However, most of the poetry I read today isn’t setting out to do these types of things (an exception of this, though, is the poetry of witness).

So, why do you guys write poetry? What is it that compels you to put pen to paper? Personally, I’ve recently been writing some poems that deal with physics. A lot of these poems are attempts for people to embrace scientific principles.  I recently wrote a poem about the Schrödinger’s cat experiment. I did this because I really like that particular experiment and because there is a lot to be said about the poetic implications of the experiment as a whole. When I read it at our last poetry reading, only one or two people in the audience knew what the experiment was. Since then, I’ve decided that my next collection of poetry will be based around science so that my friends, most of whom are poetry fanatics, may become more interested in thinking about things like theoretical physics.

This is sort of a unique endeavor, though; and, as far as I know, most modern poetry isn’t seeking to do something like that. So, please, let me know what you guys are hoping to accomplish through your work. I know that poetry is often something that people do because of therapeutic reasons, but surely some of you write it for reasons other than that, right? Let me know your thoughts.

J    

Letter To the Leaves: You Don't Need a Masters to Understand This

My Fellow Contributors,

I am graduating in less than a week. I think it is finally sinking in that I will no longer be an English-centered undergrad. This is a bit disheartening but I have a theory. My theory is that I don't need to be an English grad student to further my understanding of Literature. I have this crazy idea that I over these past five years I have been trained to read, analyze and think critically about any piece of literature that is put in front of me.

And it's this idea I want to explore in this blog.

But before I begin I have a question for you.

What added value does reading a book in a classroom give you?

If you take away the other students, many of whom have misinterpreted the text to begin with, and the professor, who if he or she is any good will undoubtedly remain silent and let you struggle through the material on your own, what are you left with?

Yourself and the book.

And this is exactly my point. One thing about English, which sets it apart from other majors is that you don't need someone over your shoulder explaining the importance of this symbol or that. Now it should be noted that of course, someone who is practicing English and reading texts on a daily basis will be better at it than someone who is not putting in as much time. And it does help to have a tour guide. Who helps you to pick out the books you should read, tells you which aspects you should look out for and who provides accountability. Also you need to be trained. You need to have the right tools in order to complete the job.

But after four years of English classes, I don't need a tour guide. I can venture out on my own and find my own enlightenment through books just like countless others. And so can you (and when in doubt claim Reader Response).

So even though I am going to be studying law next year, I am still going to be studying literature and learning and growing as an artist. I may not have a master's at the end of it, or a Ph.d (although a Ph.d in American Literature is on the to-do list), but I will have that knowledge. I will earn those merit badges you get after reading a work from the literary cannon.

This pursuit is further made possible because of the internet. Rather than having to go to a professor to put a particular image in context, a quick Google search and a peruse of the hits will give me the answers I need.

I guess this blog seemingly is just a long-winded denial of the claim that learning stops once you have a degree.

Because, at least for me, the most important thing college taught me wasn't anything in a book. But how to get knowledge out of a book and convey that clearly and confidently.

The books will always be there. Just be driven enough to read them. Stay on top of yourself. There is no reason why you can't have the knowledge people go to grad school for. No reason why you can't understand civil war poetry. No reason why you can continue your love for literature and pursue other interests.

English is not physics (although many of us would have you believe that). It's just a few lines on a page which put pictures in your head.

So I challenge you to go out there read valuable books and teach yourself the wisdom in words.


As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,

Bermuda the Man

Relationships With Poets

Folks,

As I’ve been doing lately, I will be keeping this short. This blog post will serve as a springboard for actual conversation. More often than not, we – the authors – are usually opening up a discussion board to the readers of our blog rather than reporting on our own insights; however, I’ve noticed that – again, more often than not – discussions don’t really happen.  That’s ok, I suppose; after all, I’m assuming the readership of this blog is composed mainly of English majors and literature aficionados – many of which are introverts.  Today is different, though. If you are reading this, I implore you to comment on the question I will pose today.

I read two articles today about the role of the poet and the role of the reader in “witness poetry.” I’m not going to get into what the article had to say, but I am wondering what you all think about the role of the poet and the reader. I know most of you all have read Roland Barthes and the structuralists, (haha, that sounds like an 80s pop band) so I’m sure most of you are familiar with the whole death of the author thing. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that the author has a purpose aside from writing poetry. Let’s also assume that the reader is not the creator of the meaning behind the poetry. In short, let’s assume there is a sort of symbiosis between the poet and the receiver of the poetry.

So, what is the role of the poet? What is the role of the reader of poetry? What is the nature of the relationship between pet and reader? Does poetry in a historical context change the role of the poet and the receiver of poetry? I’m sure you all have thought about this to some extent, but if not, now’s the time. Please let me know what you think about these sorts of questions. Are they even worth asking? Who knows.

I’m looking forward to your responses.

J

Letter to the Leaves: There is No Try, Only Do

My Fellow Contributors,

While researching the life of Charles Bukowski for our Facebook profile's "People of Character," I came across a quote that he had etched into his grave stone.

"Don't Try"

I was troubled at first glance, but as I researched more into his life, I found it strangely gratifying.

I mean, think about it. To try is to accept the fact that you might fail. But to do is to resist failure and leave her in the rear view mirror.

This reminded me of a few lines spoken by the famous fictional philosopher, Yoda, in The Empire Strikes Back.

"No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try"

I remember hearing these same lines, from my sixth grade Drama and Performing Arts teacher. The point she was trying to convey is that "to try" implies to the receiver of such a phrase that the sender is not fully confident and wants to give a sense of possible failure whether conscious of this intention or not.

The power of language to guide and shape our subconscious is without doubt. When Bukowski says, "Don't Try," he means do not set out to write great poetry or the next classic novel. Let it flow out of you. When we try we put up dams which block the flow of words. But when we let the Muses take over and let them guide our pens we find that we have uncovered something in ourselves that is mystic and cosmic. Something that doesn't even feel like us.

It's as if Milton and Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac and Shakespeare and James and Howells and Twain and Emerson and Whitman and Poe and Hemingway and Sartre and Sedgwick and Dickinson and Austin have met in your mind to form an unctuous orgy in your unconscious, leaving their love children to berth themselves onto your page.

I find it strangely gratify to relieve myself on the page without trying. To relax and release and let go.

Remember as writers we're are a mixture of mediums.

1st is the writer who uses words to create clay.

2nd is the reviser who molds and shapes the clay into a form.

3rd is the editor who bakes and hardens the form into a sculpture.

4th is the publisher who displays the sculpture and shares it with love.

5th is the viewer who looks, reads, and touches. Appreciating art in all its minute nuances which strike with each sight.

Greatness comes not from the writer but from the reviser and editor.

Remember, just do it, think later.

But if you feel like you've hit a wall laced with writer's block, then please:

CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:

You have to live vicariously in order to write interestingly.

And On the Road was written by Kerouac when he was 29, after he had lived through the lines he let flow onto that long continuous script.


As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,
Bermuda

Some Perspective for Reading Poetry & Some Better Advice

With our reading at Coffee Klatch right around the corner, I thought it would be fitting to post a blog about reading poetry. Don't get me wrong; our last reading was wonderful, and I have absolutely no complaints. I hope that all of our guests from the last reading will meet with us again this Friday – including our “occupationally challenged” friend, Phishfoot (a homeless man who contributed a great reading last time). My inspiration for this blog on reading poetry definitely did not come from our last reading. My inspiration comes from nearly every time that a teacher of mine has asked the class for a brave volunteer to read a poem aloud; it comes from nearly every time that that brave student has propped up their book, cleared their throat, and let spill a monotonous stream of words from their mouth, not even stopping, just plowing through the page as if line breaks meant nothing and as if punctuation were only for grammar's sake. I understand that it is extremely difficult to perform a poem unrehearsed and that it truly is courageous to attempt to tackle a performance in front of peers, and I respect those individuals who try, but I still wish that students who don’t know how to pronounce the word, “bough,” would refrain from raising their hands to read.

This blog isn’t really about those students though… It’s about poetry in general. Please remember, I’m no professional, and I won’t be teaching a lesson on performance today. What I’d like to offer instead is a bit of perspective:

A poem, once removed from its author and placed on paper, dies. The poet doesn’t shadow his/her poem, following it where ever it falls; the poem is left alone as its own lifeless entity. The dead poem drifts around the world, attached to paper as ink blot symbols. Its lifeless body is left to the whims of its readers.

To a poem, a reader is a god. The reader breathes into the dead poem and brings it to life with his/her performance. Whether that performance is silent, existing within the mind of the reader, or aloud to an audience, the poem lives for a brief moment as an expression of thought. The reader controls what a poem will become.

Please, for the sake of Walt, show poetry respect. If you are to give life to a poem, then give it a respectable life. Take notice of what it wants to be, of what signals it has left for you. Be a loving god, and breathe into it with compassion for its author and its message, and if you happen to think that the author and the message can suck eggs, then give it a life you see more fitting for it. And never never never read a poem as a monotonous string of sound – unless, of course, you can argue why you gave it that life.

So there it is. That’s my perspective and a little bit of advice. If you’ve read all of that, and realized that you want something other than a college kid’s opinion, then I hope you enjoy this:

I think the bard said it best.

Letter To The Leaves: Poetry, The Final Frontier

My Fellow Contributors,

I have always been jealous of scientists. Mostly in part because they are in the business of exploration. They ask questions, form hypotheses, and create experiments. They push past boundaries and open our eyes to new possibilities. They can do this because there are clear limits to the physical world.

But are there such, in the universe of Poetry?

Where does the sidewalk end?

Where is the next frontier of Poetry and who will take us there?

(I feel as though when I write, I am only RE-discovering)

I guess what I am really asking is where is Poetry in our current times?

But as I write this I begin to understand that Poetry is not a place. It is only a vehicle. Poetry is the ship I sail to explore the seas of my soul. I begin to find comfort in this. Somehow this reassures me, that it is not Poetry that is undiscovered, but the voices.

There are voices of Poetry yet to be heard. It is the new voices of Poetry that we must search for. Because it is the voice of Poetry that animates the corpus.

Poetry is dead.

You. You alone have its saving breath.

On January 27th, 2012, at the Coffee Klatch, let us hear that voice.

Let us resurrect the dearly departed, and embrace the spoken word together as one.

As Always,

Undoubtedly Yours,
Bermuda

Finding Forms of Language (and listening to some dope music)

So far in college I’ve never received an assignment that I’ve absolutely hated. I’ve always accepted whatever it is that I have to do, and, even if I have to stay up for a few days straight, I do it happily. I like that rush of progress that comes from working on a challenging paper… But with all that said, I think this paper that I recently received in my Shakespeare course has to be at the top of my list of least favorites.

Let me complain for a second:

I had to write 4 mini-essays (150-250 words), which each focused on a different moment in some of Shakespeare’s plays. Sounds easy enough, right? My task was “to make explicit what is implicit in the play” – I was actually pretty excited about the project until I got to the part where the professor spelled out how each one of the mini-essays should be laid out. He wanted the first sentence to be this, and the second to be that, and so on…

I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I was initially pissed that some “Shakes-pe-herian” was trying to tell me how to formulate my thoughts. I am a writer because I love the freedom of creation. To me, writers are like the Green Lanterns of Literature (<--let’s see who gets the comic-book reference). Basically, what I’m saying is that my work is nothing more than my thoughts manifested in exactly the way that I see fit for them to be presented – all of my choices are my own. From the start, I knew this assignment was going to be hell for me.

I struggled with the assignment, and I hated every second of it; every sentence that I had to write twisted me up inside... but after 2 all-nighters, caffeinated and frustrated, I noticed the title of the handout that my professor had given me, "The Commentary Form", and I had an extremely helpful realization: the true artist of language can manipulate his thoughts into any form, be it a piece of flash-fiction or creative non-fiction, a poem, a biography, or a novel... or even an assignment. A great writer works to manipulate the language within the structural setting of the form.

I sat and thought for a while, and I was amazed at all of the different forms I could think of. Even within the form of poetry there are countless different types of poems, and each type of poem has its own structural identity that allows the language in it to be compared and contrasted with other poems of the same type. I guess in terms of Literary Theory, I got to experience structuralist theory at it's best at about 3:30 in the morning.

The idea stayed fresh in my mind for a few days, and I began applying the theory to things other than writing.. I'd like to leave you with what I think is one of the forms that I enjoy the most. I don't really know if this form already has a name, so I'll just call it the "Assumed-Role Poetic Flash-Fiction Form" (please, help me with a better name, because that one sucks).

Here are the lyrics, and you can listen to the song on the video down below.

The Waitress

A city full of people and my favorite is that waitress
And she treats me like some type of common vagrant
I see her everyday, but there's nothing to say
Unless I decide to step inside of that cafe
I only get to sit if I buy something to eat
Otherwise it's best to keep my feet moving down that street
And god damn she's a hard bitch
Talks at me like I'm the bad dog that got into the garbage
Yeah I know that the toilet is for customers
You ain't got to tangle up the strings to make this puppet work
It doesn't have to be a game of patty cake
But it ain't like you don't know I sleep in that alleyway
And by the way, I can see it in your eyes
You're angry with your life, not a stranger to the fight
I bet you hate every man that you date
And you're probably addicted to all types of escape
You take it out on me that you're all alone
When you know you got your own closet full of hollow bones
Watch the tone when you speak to old folks
I'm grown, just trying to get out of this Minnesota cold
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/a/atmosphere/the_waitress.html ]
Look lady, I'm homeless, I'm crazy
I'm so hopeless I'm suicidal daily
If you and I can't co-exist, let's fake it
Cause I ain't got the energy it takes for this relationship

I'm waiting for a city bus to flatten me
And transport me to the ever after happily
Maybe reincarnate and with luck
Come back to Earth as a cockroach in your tip cup
She said she's had it up to here
She's gonna call authorities if I don't disappear
I love her threats, it rejuvenates my breath
I give her stress for the reaction that it gets
I got a pocket full of pan-handled money
On a cup of bad coffee and a stale honey bun
In front of everyone she calls me bum
But she notices my absence on them afternoons I don't come
So here I am, thorn in her hip
Holding down the corner table all morning with some corn chips
Ignoring the insults and evil eyes
I feed off of 'em, I wonder when she'll realize
That she's the only reason I visit
The only woman in my world that acknowledges my existence
And if my ship ever comes, I'll miss it
Because I'm getting old and I ain't got much left to give it
So there it is and I have to live with it
I had the chance to make a difference, but I didn't
In the cafe bathroom drinking free tap water
Thinking: "Damn, I should've been a better father to my daughter"

-Slug (of Atmosphere)

Until next time,

S.Pine

Surface vs. Substance: An Examination of Editorial Responsibility in the Literary Community

Originally posted on Tuesday, October 18, by Jack Foster at www.afewlinesmagazine.com

Hey guys,

I've been thinking a lot about the publishing world and what it means to be part of a literary magazine. I believe there is a certain degree of responsibility which all editors need to uphold; however, when I look at other magazines, I sometimes feel cheated by the product I look at - namely because I've seen some pretty awful pieces published in some magazines I respect. I, like every other writer, have a rather large stack of rejection letters, and sometimes I'm baffled by them. I'm by no means an established poet, but some publications surprise me with their decisions.

So why is it that some pieces, regardless of how good or bad they are, get rejected by certain publications? Obviously that's a hard question to tackle and there isn't one good answer, but I've been looking through a ridiculous number of magazines lately and a common thread I've seen spread through said magazines is the issue of taste.

Taste, I think, should not play into determining whether or not a piece holds literary value. It really kills me when I see certain types of poetry published in magazines. I'm not going to name names, but there have been a couple of pieces in a fantastic magazine that have made me cringe. One poem even had an explanation of itself posted underneath it. There have also been poems published in certain magazines that seem to be purely aesthetic in nature - structurally so, not aestheticism based in imagery or subject matter - and seem to lack any nuggets of actual meaning. Unorthodox structure does not hold literary value in and of itself, nor does it really mean anything if it's not being used as a means of conveyance. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a poem centered around structure rather than content, I'd have a shitload of nickels. And it's silly that I have to address this issue in the publishing world, but it seems some publishers are hooked in by pretty looking poems. Surface vs. substance comes into play here, and, sadly, it seems that many magazines reject substance over surface.

I don't want to go on a rant, though, and it certainly isn't my place to tell a poet how to write. I do think, however, publishers ought to look past aesthetics and focus in on what is actually being presented in whatever work they're reviewing. The issue of taste is multi-dimensional, and structure is just one example of how taste serves as a detriment to the publishing realm.

There, I would think, are many ways to keep taste to a minimum, though. I believe our publication is less inclined to let taste play a role in our review process because we have eight editors, all of whom read through every submission. By having such a large reading staff, we are able to keep each other in check, and thereby review submissions based on their literary merit rather than their "flavor." I realize "literary merit" is a very loose term; however, we are all strongly grounded in literary theory and American literature, which, I think, qualifies us as responsible reviewers of literature.

I really do believe literary magazines need to have large mastheads, and I think they serve many purposes in terms of maintaining literary integrity in the publishing world. I realize this article might come off a bit hostile, but I really do believe that some magazines need to take a step back and reflect on how they go about reviewing the work they receive. Editors have an enormous responsibility to not only the audience we present work to, but to the countless up-and-coming writers who flood our inboxes on a daily basis. The act of giving away a piece of creative writing is a dangerous one, and the editors/publishers hold the power to uplift or destroy the spirits of the people who submit to them. So with that being said, please, publishers, be careful with how you review literature, and make sure you're remaining diligent in selecting works of literary merit. The world of literature is ever-changing, and it is our responsibility to make sure the tradition we foster is one we can someday look back on and be proud of.

Cheers,

Jack