Odd Bits of a Creative Life (9/13)

Tags

#readNDN, A Little Book of Form, acrylic paintings, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Alicia Ostriker, An Exaltation of Forms, Brenda Hillman, Copper Canyon, Death Tractates, Duppy Conqueror, Fish Psalms, grant applications, Kwame Dawes, Lit Hub, Lyn Hejinian, Matthew Zapruder, Native Arts&Cultures, Oceania, poetry readings, Robert Hass, Robin Houghton, short stories, Terrance Hayes, The Rumpus, Vievee Francis, Why Poetry, Wind in a Box

BOOKS, Books, books

I was happy to discover Matthew Zapruder’s Why Poetry at my local library, and have spent several happy weeks with it. The chronicle of how he evolved as a poet was interesting, but mostly I appreciated how he was able to articulate so much of what I’ve been thinking about poetry, but didn’t quite know how communicate.  Wow, that sounds very self-centered, but maybe it is. It is what it is. Here are a few of my favorite passages from the book:

There really was no such thing as ‘poetic language.’ The words in poems are for the most part the same as those we find everywhere else. The energy of poetry comes primarily from the reanimation and reactivation of the language that we recognize and know.”  (p.9)

“I began to discover why poems look the way they do on the page…A poem, literally, makes a space to move through. To read a poem is to move through that constructed space of ideas and thinking…As we think along, we start to make connections, and have experiences and feelings we might not have otherwise had without the poem.” (p.57)

“One of the greatest pleasures of reading poetry is to feel words mean what they usually do in every day life, and also start to move into a more charged, activated, even symbolic realm.” (p. 164)

“In a poem, language remains itself yet is also made to feel different, even sacred, like a spell. How this happens is the mystery of each poem, and maybe its deepest meaning.” (p. 166)

That last quote really made me think of Terrance Hayes’ collection Wind In a Box, and more specifically the poem “The Blue Seuss”.  You can find text and audio here. But also please buy the book. It’s one of my favorites.

More than once, he mentions Brenda Hillman’s Death Tractates, (as does Hass–not surprisingly– in A Little Book on Form).  I remember reading some sort of mini-review from him about this book several years ago, and wanted to pick it up then.  [Here’s the 2014 Rumpus “Last Book of Poems I Loved” article if you’re interested]. I know I had it in my Amazon cart at some point, but somehow didn’t get to the actual purchase.  Remedying that soon.

I tackled Hass’ Form book alongside the Zapruder one.  They make a fantastic  pair. First of all, Hass’ “little book” is not ‘little’ in any sense, not in length and not in intellectual weight. It is less textbooky than say  An Exaltation of Forms (which incidentally I was introduced to by a youtube video featuring Terrance Hayes.)

Hass’ book has wonderful sections on sonnets and odes, but the last few chapters–“Collage, Abstraction, Oulipo and Procedural Poetics”; “Mixed Forms”:  and “Prose Poem” were worth the price of the book.  Before I die, I will have to audit at least one of his Berkeley classes.

When I go, I will also crash Lyn Hejinian’s “Slow Seeing/Slow Reading (English 190) class, which Lit Hub teased recently in their “Classes 25 Famous Writers Teach” piece.

Via that post, I also found out that Vievee Francis, one of my poetry heroes, teaches “Engaging in Hybridity: Race, Gender, Genre” at Dartmouth.  I am at this very moment scooping up much of her reading list, especially Kwame Dawes’ Duppy Conqueror,  which how have I not read that already?

Also, I am hoping the ARC gods at Copper Canyon, will bestow a copy of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s upcoming Oceania on me before I lose my mind waiting. Maybe if I send a muster of peacocks up to the author at Ole Miss, she will help smooth the way.

SCRIBBLINGS

This year, I am scheduling a few readings and really appreciated Robin Houghton’s timely post on Tackling Poetry Readings.

In other news, I applied for a Native Arts& Cultures grant. They were super helpful in the application process. Receiving the grant would help me launch a better funded #readNDN campaign, revive this blog and allow me to finish a WIP collection of poems that I’m calling Fish Psalms.

 

Why psalms?

Psalms as a form have always intrigued me. The Hebrew ones are essentially lyric poems set to music, in other words, a type of song language. The Tlingit word for ‘poetry’ is roughly translated “song language” (at shí yoo xh’atángi). Additionally, the Tlingit (other Native Americans, the Irish and Acadians) have much in common with the Hebrew people, down to the complicated clan system, a tight focus on landscape common to the displaced, and a reliance on the larger community in times of trial. These groups are all deeply spiritual, each in their own way, and are all groups that inform my work by heritage or adoption.

I am also drawn to psalms for another reason. Poet Alicia Ostriker put it best when she stated that “the emotions of Psalms surge and collapse like breaking waves”. I want FISH PSALMS to tap the full range of human emotion and to mimick natural cycles of water, evening to morning, creation to death, etc., as the Hebrew ones do.

By the end of the week, I hope to finish a short story that is on the surface about a lost dog, but underneath about the ever-present class struggles in the Deep South. I am 2 scenes away from being done. Currently calling it “Denny Albers’ Dog.

ART

Besides taking new photos for the blog, twitter and the grant application (see a few below),

I tried to translate the success of my oil pastel portraits to acrylics by trying out sheets of 10x 12 canvas paper and reinterpreting photos from the historic New Orleans collection.  This seems to be the right mix of materials and subjects. FINALLY.

 

 

Sunday Sentence 6/19

Tags

American classics, David Abrams, Fathers and Sons, Hemingway, short stories, Sunday Sentence

 

My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”

There had been a sign to detour in the center of the main street of this town, but cars had obviously gone through, so, believing it was some repair which had been completed, Nicholas Adams drove on through the town along the empty, brick-paved street, stopped by traffic lights that flashed on and off on this traffic-less Sunday, and would be gone next year when the payments on the system were not met; on under the heavy trees of the small town that are a part of your heart if it is your town and you have walked under them, but that are only too heavy, that shut out the sun and that dampen the houses for a stranger; out past the last house and onto the highway that rose and fell straight away ahead with banks of red dirt sliced clearly away and the second-growth timber on both sides.

SOURCE: Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Fathers and Sons” from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition

 

 

Sunday Sentence #10

Tags

David Abrams, Florida writers, Karen Russell, magical realism, short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Sunday Sentence, Women writers, Z.Z.'s Sleep Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers

My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”

I was expecting some ineffable girl smell, dewy and secret, an eau.

SOURCE:Karen Russell‘s short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves  (from “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers“)

 

Pondering Motion…………….

Tags

Amy Falls Down, Black Eyed Peas, David Sedaris, Degas, Fergie, Jincy Willett, Joy Hakim, lab, Melinda Falling, Motion, NASA, Newton, poetry, prompts, short stories, The Story of Science

Today I’m exploring the idea of motion in art, science and literature.

First of all, I have to tell you that I’m reading The Story of Science: Newton at the Center, which is part of a series for kiddies.

And I have to say that I am flabbergasted at all the things that I never learned in school. Who knew that science, and motion in particular, was so dadgum interesting?

And who knew that thinking about Newton and his laws of motion would lead me back to Degas, who is hands-down one of the most talented painters that ever walked this earth.

I forgot about all those dancers and how well he rendered their m o v e m e n t  on canvas.  Observe:

Also those pretty, little  ballerinas twirling, twirling like falling leaves.

Lovely!! Lovely!!

Now, that little exercise led me back to one of my college texts (not an art book), a paperback called Jenny and the Jaws of Life, which was actually hard to come by back then, before David Sedaris got it back in print. We may have had to *ahem* make some bootleg photocopies to make it go around.

Anyway, what’s important is that inside this book is a snazzy, little short story, titled Melinda Falling, that opens with a falling scene. Check it out:

The very first time I saw her, Melinda was in midair, just below the summit of a long, winding staircase, on her way down. There were three other women on the wide carpeted stairs, two were prettier than Melinda, and all more chicly dressed—cocktail party, Newport, lawyers, bankers, brokers—but Melinda eclipsed them all, descending, as she did, by somersault and cartwheel. She was upside-down when I first caught sight of her, left profile to me, splayed hands poised above the stair upon which the uppermost chic woman was standing, long black skirt accordioned around her hips, plump pink face partially obscured by a curtain of brown hair. I thought: Oh, my. Her right foot came down first, glancing off the edge of a step, snapping free the golden heel of her plastic shoe, and, momentarily upright, she pivoted and went down the rest of the way sideways, arms and legs extended like spokes. She wheeled, in stately fashion, between the other two women, who stood motionless as handmaidens in a frieze, watching her. All watched her, all held their breath: she whirled in dignified silence, broken only by the soft thuds of hand and foot on thick red carpeting. She did not exactly defy gravity, but mastered it by the perfect rate of descent, so that, for instance, the hem of her skirt ebbed and flowed with tantalizing discretion. So deliberate, solemn, and utterly magical was her progress that it promised to go on forever. When finally she touched down on the floor, upright, there was a little collective sigh of disappointment and then spontaneous applause led, I believe by me. “Magnificent!” I said. “Bravo!” And I took her arm and led her away from the crowd. I was half in love already and wanted her all to myself. “Get me out of here,” she said—her first words to me—and the expression on her flushed, round face was regal, impenetrable.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. What a talent is Jincy Willett.  Incidentally, she also has a novel Amy Falls Down which I haven’t got my hands on yet, but I soon will. [On the library waiting list. Number 4 now.]

I so adore that scene and have tried to imitate it not nearly as successfully (in fiction).  I did, however, manage it in a poem, with the aid of The Black Eyed Peas, of course. Oh yeah, who loves Fergie? My humps. My humps.

So, then with all that twisting you gotta factor in Slinkies and hula hoops and windmills and oooh, oooh, look at this:

Pinwheels in the galaxy. So very cool. Thank you NASA!

And what about churning hurricanes:

Way prettier on “paper” than in person. But still interesting.

Tell me what inspires you. Better yet, show me. I want to see motion in your painting, in your poetry, in your fiction, whatever you got. Post it! Come on!