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    

"Poetry Exists in the Valley of its Making" - W.H. Auden

On Saturday, February the 25th, William Winfield Wright will be coming out to California for the first Wormwood Chapbooks poetry reading. This is an incredibly special event. Not only will Cosmonauts be, finally, unveiled for the public to obtain, but Wright himself will be orating sections of it as well as portions of Bird Feet, his second chapbook -- slated to release in the summer of 2012.

Now that you all have some background, I'd like to take some time to give thanks to the English Department of Cal Poly Pomona. The poetry night will be taking place in a room called Orion C, which is located in the Bronco Student Center. Cal Poly does not allow rooms to be occupied free of charge to people or associations who are not affiliated with Cal Poly-run clubs; however, the English Department of Cal Poly has agreed to front the room rental (which would have come out to be about half the cost of a print run) and will be providing beverages and other accommodations for the night. So, on behalf of the AFL staff, I'd just like to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts; we could not host this special night without your support. As Liam Corley has said time after time -- taking from the words of Auden -- "poetry exists in the valley of its making." The Cal Poly English Department -- especially Liam, Alison, Maria, and Liliane -- have provided a valley for which poetry can exist. Thank you all so much.

So, please, if you live in Southern California, stop on by and support us and William Winfield Wright. It's going to be an amazing night of poetry.

Regards,

JF

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.