LAST POEM / FOUND POEMS

So-- read below and go to links and find a way in to your own found poem... a cento, an erasure, a transmogrification (writing from one random line to another) or create your own form.  You can even do this by self-plagiarizing -- using several of your own texts as raw materials. the point is to create OUT OF existing materials, to view yourself as conductor rather than all-powerful creator... and see if the role suits you. Wolf Cento
by Simone Muench
Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart, the sun breaks down. What is important is to avoid the time allotted for disavowels as the livid wound leaves a trace      leaves an abscess takes its contraction for those clouds that dip thunder & vanish like rose leaves in closed jars. Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot crystal bone into thin air. The small hours open their wounds for me. This is a woman's confession: I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me. Sources: [Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, Larry Levis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Octavio Paz, Henri Michaux, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Joyce Mansour, William Burroughs, Meret Oppenheim, Mary Low, Adrienne Rich, Carl Sandburg] ERASURE EXAMPLES (some links below, from Wikipedia) Radi Os - Ronald Johnson's Radi Os is a long poem deconstructed from the text of Milton's Paradise Lost.[1] A Humument - Tom Phillips' A Humument is a major work of book art and found poetry deconstructed from a Victorian novel. Mans Wows - Jesse Glass' Mans Wows (1981), is a series of poems and performance pieces mined from John George Hohman's book of charms and healings Pow Wows, or The Long Lost Friend. Nets - Jen Bervin's Nets is an erasure of Shakespeare's sonnets. [2] Hope Tree - Frank Montesonti's Hope Tree is a book of erasure poems based on R. Sanford Martin's How to Prune Fruit Trees. The O Mission Repo - Travis Macdonald's The O Mission Repo treats each chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report with a different method of poetic erasure. The ms of my kin - Janet Holmes's The ms of my kin (2009) erases the poems of Emily Dickinson written in 1861-62, the first few years of the Civil War, to discuss the more contemporary Iraq War. Seven Testimonies (redacted) - Nick Flynn's "Seven Testimonies (redacted)" in The Captain Asks a Show of Hands, is an erasure of the testimonies from prisoners atAbu Ghraib. Of Lamb - Matthea Harvey's Of Lamb is a book-length erasure of a biography of Charles Lamb. Voyager - Srikanth Reddy's Voyager is another book-length erasure, of Kurt Waldheim's autobiography. Tree of Codes - Jonathan Safran Foer did a book-length erasure of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz which he entitled Tree of Codes. The Found Poetry Review - A print journal publishing found poetry that goes beyond the simple addition of line breaks to found language and creates a piece whose form and meaning differs from the original. FOR TREE OF CODES    GO HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsW3Y7EmTlo

poem#11: EKPHRASTIC PROSEPOEM

PROSEPOEM

Michael Benedikt’s “working definition” of the prose poem: “A genre of poetry, self -consciously written in prose, characterized by the intense use of virtually all the devices of poetry…”

Charles Simic has defined the prose poem as “the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle.”  He calls the prose poem, “a veritable literary hybrid” this “impossible amalgamation of lyric poetry, anecdote, fairy tale, allegory, joke, journal entry, and many other kinds of prose.”

EKPHRASIS

The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.

Be Drunk
by Charles Baudelaire translated by Louis Simpson
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

The List of Famous Hats
by James Tate
Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pinhead at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something.

SO... What is a genre that does not claim for itself a new space, but sets itself on the borderlands between two well-navigated spaces?  Must such a genre be a “veritable literary hybrid”?  A nomad?  A beast?  A monstrous coyote or hyena roaming the edges of the city, scavenging and cackling?  Will that form have identity other than that of trickster-courier, go-between, the lesser god, the Hermetic prince-of-thieves?  I can tell you, if that form were my child, I would cradle it.  Counting its fingers and toes, I would cry out in delight at its “impossible amalgamation”—at every extra digit, every unexpected and/or borrowed and/or seemingly useless appendage.  I would want for that child to grow and grow and grow. 

Baudelaire described the properties of his little monster (which are at the same time the properties involved in its composition and the reader’s experience of it) in his introduction to Paris Spleen in 1869: “We can cut it wherever we please, I my dreaming, you your manuscript, the reader his reading… ”  At what is widely recognized as its inception, the father of the beast proposes experiments on the child.  Fit it into a circle, dismember it, throw pieces of it to the wind—it will survive, he says.  And so it has, but it has survived in America with American poets as an animal fit for experimentation, as a place—a body—in which to Frankenstein together humor and horror and close attention and the surreal (not to mention the ingredients of the absurd… never an American favorite).  

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Write a prose poem in response to some other work of art. Prose poems always end up as questions about form--so you will use them to illuminate some other art process from this unstable light box -- you can continue working on something from class or do an entirely new poem.  Due Thursday.

Poem #10-- Other People's Problems

Now... THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE

A poetic dramatic monologue (also known as a persona poem), is similar to its counterpart--the theatrical monologue--in several ways:  an audience is implied (even if the poet seems to be talking to herself, she IS talking and this is important because a way of formulating thought which is uttered has qualities that differ from a stream of consciousness which is perhaps less located, less logically ordered, etc); there is no dialogue (only one character please--though she may speak of others); and the poet speaks through an assumed voice--a character, a fictional identity, or a persona (this mask can be as close or as far away from the poet as she chooses, as historical or fictional, as found or created). Because a dramatic monologue is by definition one person’s speech, it is offered without analysis or commentary, so the drama of this type of language comes when there is a gap between how the speaker describes the situation and how the audience perceives that rendering.  In other words: how does this particular persona see/experience her world? What is particular or peculiar about that seeing?

Best O Luck, my little leprechauns.

Read HERE

And HERE

And Hamlet--

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterrill promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this Majesticall roofe, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeares no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!' And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so

And finally

one of my faves-- "The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All. 

poem#9: ORGANIC FORM/THE FIELD POEM

Read Levertov's essay HERE --4 pages (easier to "get" than Olson's Projective Verse, and also influential)

1  THE BURNING (excerpt from WATERLILY FIRE)

by Muriel Rukeyser

Girl grown woman     fire     mother of fire

I go to the stone street turning to fire.     Voices

Go screaming     Fire     to the green glass wall.

And there where my youth flies blazing into fire

The     dance     of sane and insane images, noon

Of seasons and days.     Noontime of my one hour.

Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces

Among the tall daylight in the city of change.

The scene has walls     stone     glass     all my gone life

One wall a web through which the moment walks

And I am open, and the opened hour

The world as water-garden     lying behind it.

In a city of stone, necessity of fountains,

Forces water fallen on glass, men with their axes.

An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass,

Behind the wall I know waterlilies

Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes

Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers,

Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon

Who will not believe a waterlily fire.

Whatever can happen in a city of stone,

Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall.

I walk in the river of crisis toward the real,

I pass guards, finding the center of my fear

And you, Dick, endlessly my friend during storm.

The arm of flame striking through the wall of form.

[in Just-]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

Ellen West (excerpt)

BY FRANK BIDART

I love sweets,—
                      heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...

But my true self
is thin, all profile

and effortless gestures, the sort of blond
elegant girl whose
                            body is the image of her soul.

—My doctors tell me I must give up
this ideal;
                  but I
WILL NOT ... cannot.

Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.”

But he is a fool. He married
meat, and thought it was a wife.

.            .            .

Why am I a girl?

I ask my doctors, and they tell me they
don’t know, that it is just “given.”

But it has such
implications—;
                      and sometimes,   

I even feel like a girl. 


Assignment: DUE THURSDAY IN CLASS.  Write -- as Levertov suggests-- "open-mouthed in the temple of life" while using the page as a compositional field. Freedom of form offers so many choices that it can be paralyzing--both Olson and Levertov say to write from this place you must be terribly attentive to your impulses -- able to sense their nuances -- to go when they say go, stop when they say stop.  This is more an exercise in process than in product.  If you need a subject, make it SPRING or HOW IT FEELS TO BE IN YOUR BODY.  In other words, keep the subject matter close at hand, so that attending to it is much like listening to yourself think/feel/be.

I'll send you some Wallace Stevens later this week in prep for next week's assignment. Best O' Luck.

POEM #8--APHORISMS

APHORISM ASSIGNMENT (cliches, axioms and spin-ner-esque language also welcome)

Read: THIS ESSAY ON HOW POETRY SHOULD BE MADE ACCORDING TO CHARLES OLSON

Sonnet

  by Bill Knott

The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn't blink a leaf
When we step from the house
Leads me to think
That beauty is natural, unremarkable
And not to be spoken of
Except in the course of things
The course of singing and worksharing
The course of squeezes and neighbors
The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out
And the course of course of me
Astonished at you
The way the world is not

A Book Of Music

  by Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers.  Where
Did it end?  There is no telling.  No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end.  Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons.  Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

Improvisations On A Sentence By Poe
by Jack Spicer
"Indefiniteness is an element of the true music." The grand concord of what Does not stoop to definition. The seagull Alone on the pier cawing its head off Over no fish, no other seagull, No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning As a French horn. It is not even an orchestra. Concord Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what Does not stoop to definition. No fish No other seagull, no ocean—the true Music.

Aphorisms

  by Antonio Porchia
translated by W. S. Merwin 

Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take 
the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.

                      *

When one does not love the impossible, one does not love anything.

                      *

Every time I wake I understand how easy it is to be nothing.

                      *

Now you do not know what to do, not even when you go back to being 
a child. And it is sad to see a child who does not know what to do.

                      *

Only a few arrive at nothing, because the way is long.

Measurement Fable
by Rusty Morrison
like water in water —George Bataille Eggs, transparent and sometimes red-veined as insect wings, might be hidden in bark crevices or a scatter of tawny leaves. The distance between one gestation and the next, a pleat of the dress I wear carelessly, as if I could sew myself another. Practiced, my tendon-reflex where the tunnel narrows its halo into a noose. I trust dexterity as a kind of nourishment, as I believe my own mother couldn’t. To own, beauty is the first lie of it, and brief as incident is gray thistles turning silver in sunrise as if for my eyes alone. I see you surround me, mother, measuring what my exoskeleton withstands. Embellishment is thin. When the eye inside blinks, its bone-house splinters. No eye inside sky but an insect drone can cause the entire horizon, seasonal as hindsight which follows rain. No death will stop measurement spiraling out, a long ribbon of salt I must choose repeatedly to cross.

No world is intact
by Alice Notley
No world is intact and no one cares about you. I leaned down over don’t care about, I care about you I leaned down over the world in portrayal of carefulness, answering something you couldn’t say. walking or fallen and you were supposed to give therapy to me— me leaning down brushing with painted feathers to the left chance your operatic, broken book.

The best way to explain what an aphorism is to offer examples, and as I am becoming lazy and have company this week, I'll offer a few off of the Wikipedia entry:

"Usually an aphorism is a very concise statement expressing a general truth or wise observation often in a clever way. Sometimes aphorisms rhyme, sometimes they have repeated words or phrases, and sometimes they have two parts that are of the same grammatical structure. Some examples include:

    * Science is organized knowledge. — Herbert Spencer

    * Lost time is never found again. — Benjamin Franklin

    * Greed is a permanent slavery. — Ali

    * Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

    * Death with dignity is better than life with humiliation. — Husayn ibn Ali

    * That which does not destroy us makes us stronger. — Nietzsche

    * If you see the teeth of the lion, do not think that the lion is smiling to you. — Al-Mutanabbi

    * When your legs get weaker time starts running faster. — Mikhail Turovsky

    * Many of those who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lampposts. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

    * The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs. — Celia Green

    * Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see. — Mark Twain

    * It is better to be hated for what one is, than loved for what one is not. — André Gide

    * A lie told often enough becomes the truth. — Vladimir Lenin

    * Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long. And in the end, it's only with yourself. — Mary Schmich

    * Like a road in Autumn: Hardly is it swept clean before it is covered again with dead leaves. — Franz Kafka

    * Hate the Sin; Love the Sinner. — Mahatma Gandhi"

Many famous quotes are aphorisms, and many philosophical conclusions as well.

This week's assignment is to gather (or create) several of them, and then mix and match them to create/distort your own wisdoms.  The work that you read this week is filled with aphoristic statements (sentences that FEEL like aphorisms).  Feel free to follow the above poets as stylistic models.  I would like you to start from familiar-seeming statements, but you should rework them into your own brilliance.