Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Creating Readers 4

As mentioned in a previous post, Teachers & Writers Collaborative demonstrates an on-going committment to germinating lifelong readers of poetry. Their website hosts some valuable forums for teachers:

WRITERS ON TEACHING: Professional writers and educators share their techniques for teaching imaginative writing and review books on writing pedagogy and related subjects. This month, Tara Tandlich explains step by step how to teach young kids to write poems about the night, and Sarah Fay McCarthy reviews The Triggering Town, by Richard Hugo.

FICTION WRITERS ON FICTION WRITING: Matthew Sharpe interviews fiction writers on their novels and stories, their working methods and philosophies, their lives in the arts, and their insights into writing pedagogy. This month, Lydia Davis talks to Sharpe about her new translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and her own experiments with narrative form.

POETS ON POETRY: Daniel Kane interviews poets about their poems, their poetics, and their ideas on how to teach poetry to students in grades K-12. This month, Harryette Mullen discusses Oulipo word games, the relationship between racial identity and innovative form, and a whole lot more.

STUDENT POEM OF THE MONTH: New poems every month written by students from around the country in grades K through 12.

CONTACTS: A list of organizations helpful to writers and teachers interested in teaching creative writing.

VIRTUAL POETRY WORKSHOP: See how a poetry workshop unfolds on-line. Teachers & Writers Collaborative is proud to feature the fifth on-line workshop led by poet Hoa Nguyen of Austin, Texas. Sixteen student writers from around the country are participating this time around. Adapt Hoa's writing exercises for your own students, and learn how to critique student poetry by reading Hoa's responses on the forum page.

Now why the hell does not every K-12 teacher who dares to read poetry and who dares to teach it not know about this site? Creating readers, methinks, is more a distribution than a political problem. How to get the particular spark into the mind of the particular reader? The drought's long been upon us.

Investigations by Marton Koppany

I intend to continue the thread on creating readers, much in my thoughts these days (read the comments that have been added in the past two days), but tonight I have limited time -- preparing to work on growing 16-17 year old readers (weaving the Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence play "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail," with "Resistance to Civil Government, " selections from Walden, and Emerson's "Self-Reliance"). I also intend to revist another previous thread -- Publishing Vision -- which I also can't get out of my head.

As much as I love the electronic community I am engaged by -- we sow connections wherever we can here in rural America -- I love even more the surprises that fill my mailbox, that technological throwback. Today's delight: Investigations & Other Sequences by Marton Koppany, poet, translator, and editor residing in Budapest, published by Ahadada Books. How do they find us?

In a few words: this is as good as minimalism gets -- simple and profound, humorous and gut-wrenchingly serious, language at perhaps its finest (pun intended).

For more information, click to www.ahadadabooks.com You've got to love a press whose logo is Marcel Duchamp's infamous urinal "sculpture."

Creating Readers 3

First, make sure to read the comments from Toni, Tom Beckett, Graywyvern, Ray, and Eeksy-Peeksy, comments that extend my brief thoughts on creating readers, from practical suggestions to a gentle reminder that poets must first attend to the poem (let the audience find itself).

Some backstory to my first post on this topic: I've been watching a student teacher work his butt off to expose his sophomores to contemporary -- Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ted Berrigan, Taylor Mali, Billy Collins, and many others. He's got them reading, writing, talking about poetry, about poets. He's coming at it from all angles. And though there doesn't seem to be much reaction on the surface, the optimist in me hopes he has planted seeds.

I've been thinking about this topic, then, from the point of view of a teacher and as a poet. What can poets do for teachers? What can teachers do for poets? I know the much lambasted Billy Collins has tried; I know many poets in the 70's got into classrooms through the poets in the school program (Kit Robinson, for one): and I know Teachers & Writers Collaborative has been working with teachers (I met Jordan Davis at an NCTE convention hawking their wares). But it's not been enough.

I also keep going back to what Nick Piombino posted last week, echoed in Ray's comments: the in-fighting turns readers off.

And I remember my introduction to contemporary poetry at a small bookstore in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in 1975. I went searching for books of poetry. I found four: Ginsberg's Howl, Richard Hugo's What Thou Lovest Well Remains American, Anne Sexton's 45 Mercy Street, and The Collected Shorter Poems of W. H. Auden. I didn't know enough to realize I just might be taking home four poets who would probably have nothing to do with any of the others. Sometimes I miss the naivete that makes such strange bedfellows.

Creating Readers 2

Nick Piombino in a long, thoughtful Thursday, October 23 post, pushes this topic: "It seems to me there is a next step for poets to take after so much insight has been gained through innovative writing, through the struggle with form and formal innovation. I think so much has been accomplished- the form issue has not exactly been "done to death" but it has been done, and done very effectively at that, not that there is general consensus among poets and poetry readers by far, but the territory, and the main avenues have certainly been very well sketched out. It seems to me the next step to take is to pull together all this linguistic advancement in verbal skill and work to connect it to the "forms" or “genres” poets choose to work together cooperatively, not destructively. To understand this means most of all to examine the forms by which we publicly acknowledge what each of us has accomplished, rather than perpetuate the conventional systems of awards and traditional critical and academic apparatus, canon building and the like, negative reviewing and piecemeal scholarly fiefdom creation around specific earlier writers, as well as personalized, systematic, destructive “polemics,"directed at particular individuals. This activity attempts to achieve its own competitive goals by means of a "divide and conquer" mentality, that sometimes leaves the polemicists themselves pathetically isolated."

And unread.

It's pitiful how much energy has been spent fighting for but a few thousand readers of contemporary poetry. Fights between those inside and outside the universities, the supposed canonizers; fights between younger innovative writers and those in the preceding generation; fights about poetry published electronically and poetry published in hard cover; fights over the microscopic print space devoted to reviews of poetry; fights between poets who foreground the performative aspects of poetry and those who do not; fights between small- and medium-presses for distribution... We're squabbling over disappearing crumbs, ladies and gentlemen.

How to bake more bread?

Creating New Readers

Any other choices for avant-poets: New readers, preaching to the choir, or, to say it another way, in-breeding, or no readers?

If I can assume that the latter two are undesirable, as much as I love to cuddle up to Silliman's Tjanting, or Saroyan's Pages, or Bromige's My Poetry, how create new readers? Public readings, listservs, and blogs help. Curious readers can encounter disconcerting ideas with no risk. Electronic magazines, too – Sidereality, M.A.G., Shampoo, xStream, and others – foment revolutions in the way and the what readers read. Curious readers sample, again, with no risk. But these are readers already in the quest for contemporary poetry, undoubtedly a microscopic slice of potential readers.

How to develop new readers then? Avant-poets are not answering this question. I’m not sure they are even asking.

I offer: Develop readers before their hate for poetry solidifies that no amount of reading Mayer, Silliman, Notley, Hollo, Mlinko, Saroyan, Perelman, et al chips away at the hardened surface.

When, then, does calcification occur? High school. Junior high school. The teen years. (The best years of our lives? I doubt it.)

Teenagers come to my junior English classes with an aversion to poetry – oh if you could witness the eye-rolling, the shoulder-shrugging, the too-easy blow-off statements such as “That’s stupid” -- yet the wall’s but a brick or two high. They may cringe at the sound poems of B. P. Nichol or Michael Basinski, stare at their desks over/under a poem by Rae Armantrout, question the certification rigmarole that puts this man reading Pavement Saw 7 to a captive classroom of adolescents, yet their minds, developmentally, remain open.

Teenagers grapple furiously, daily, with the world, will die to understand it. It's that god damn urgent. How can poets get in the turbulent mix?

Adolescents are ripe to become life-long readers of poetry. What they crave is what avant-poets crave. Avant-poets illuminate/eliminate/permeate (never hate) our world, its language, its notions of space, time, logic, its perception/reception/deception, its meanings, sensual/essential/intellectual.

My challenge, then, to avant-poets: Approach your local schools. Get into English classes. Talk to students. Read. Write. Keep an open mind. Build the next generation of readers one reader at a time through your own individual work, yes, but also through your own social interactions with younger, unaligned readers.

In Plathology

The plot derives

the dead father again

the abandoned

kissed back and then bit

mouth of their monster

mother's words," she wrote

however you choose to tell it

The Generals by Liam, age 7

THE GENERALS

do you think that we shod fight in
This war.
we might diy
in this war
but maybenot
or maybe
so but lets not

Unaware of the politics behind the Iraq war, my 7 year old son still makes it clear, after two lines of hesitation, where he stands. It may not be Joe Bonham's rant (after all, Liam has legs, arms, and a big-toothy face), but they share the same message: let's not This war.

Two interesting slips: "shod" in the first line suggests the shoddiness of the planning, the burden put on all of us. "diy" in the third line suggests "do it yourself," an echo from Johnny Got His Gun in which Joe exhorts the planners of war to do the fighting themselves. What about the overlay of the slip "diy" -- do it yourself -- with the intended word "die"?

The Quandary in Braille

brittle as Cassiopeia

but cold to fish

or milk on the chair

elbows on a tray

then they must be varlets

starlings growing brighter by the pinion

The Poetry of Quentin Tarantino: Kill Bill

I think we can all agree that Quentin Tarantino is no confessional poet. He's no new formalist, no sonneteer. Is he a haiku poet then?

Slash of limbs
Blood spraying
Like an autumn shower

Or is is he a slam poet?

When you do as you did
I can find where you hide
Take your life limb by limb
Of, if I must, skim
Off the top of your skull
To make sure you are null...

He's a language poet, I'd argue, foregrounding the language of film, its material/s, script, lighting, sound, acting, editing, the visual page in its overwhelming instant/ce, over story, making each artificial moment in Kill Bill totally absorbing.

Hmm, has he read Charles Bernstein's "The Artifice of Absorption"? Has Charles Bernstein read Kill Bill?

Below Directions, For Edward Abbey

When streamers ready official advancing files
state heavy stiff gun proud sun flaming sky
elegant steel of back asphalt implies cold color river
mute countersunk formation of walls diverts mighty Spirits

breeze speech mouths a circuitry charcoal
above strangled boom roar AUTHORITY
bridge great growing economic rawk! blonk!
on Navajo swarms munching sandwiches

bridge emptiness grasp a sigh carries the barrier
Cadillac masses shaded under live league forming more pale
tornado collapses but above perceptible vultures gather hooded
making workman onlookers ribbon last-minute yellow

class crossbones stitched completing quickly engines ahead
damn please crowd only Indians saw seats of cut flurry
fireworks candles firecrackers the end of serial blasted smoke and leaped lashing
by great high-explosive monolithic walls no physical began abyss going finally sound wrinkled still suggesting upward shreds
in sky below unhurried finger indicating Yes Yes
canyon sounds in visible circles impoundment like play water
upward to primal connections elapsed collapsed Meaning under all blue