Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

A Writer's

intension

                         - misspelling from a student's paper

Dan Waber's 40 words, 40 years Project

Dan Waber's got some of B.P. Nichol's genes. So beautifully, indefatigably inventive. Check out this recent idea from Dan, and try it out for yourself:

40 words, 40 years
365 days, 365 people

I turned 40 on January 12th, 2005, and I wanted to mark the occasion
in some positive fashion. So I got this crazy idea: I know! I'll write
40 words (no more, no less) every day for a year, and each day I'll
write about a different person (in no particular order--in fact, in a
shuffled order) who touched my life in some way. But not just anyone,
it's got to be someone I've actually met in person, someone whose name
I still remember, and someone who was interesting.

Because I often think up great ideas for things that turn out to be
impossible (that darned reality!), the first thing I did was attempt
to make a list of 365 people whose names I remembered and who were
interesting to me. I recommend you try this. Soon. It's a worthwhile
exercise, I promise. Don't think you can do it easy, or you can't do
it, no way, really try it and don't give up easily.

For me, the first 50 or so came lickety-split, easy-peasy. The second
50 were not too tough. After that, it got really tough, really
fast. When I got to 200 I honestly thought this was going to be
impossible. When I got to 300 I was pretty much certain it was
impossible and I thought I was going to need to relent on the
restriction that I had to remember their name. I have lost a lot of
names from my memory. I still have faces, and the floorplans of houses
and the shapes of mouths, and the words they used, but I have lost the
names.

40 words is a tiny lens to look through. How do you put a mother, an
ex-wife, a best friend, or the love of your life into 40 words when
that's not even enough for the junior high math teacher, or the son of
the guy who sold meats and cheeses to the place you worked? There's
only one way to find out.

Try this: make a list of 365 people whose names you remember and who
were interesting to you. Even if you don't want to write 40 about
each, at least try making the list. And then, if you can, write down a
few words about each of them before they're gone from your memory. If
you can't do this, it might be wise to spend the next 365 days meeting
more people in person who are interesting to you. Learn their names.

This is the only time I'll post to this list about this project,
though I will be posting them daily to the WRYTING-L list (where the
regular posting of experiments seems more appropriate), and also to a
blog set up for this limited purpose at:

http://www.logolalia.com/40x365/

I have begun with my mom because, well, I began with my mom, and this
is being begun on my birth day. The rest will be done from a list
whose order has been shuffled.

Regards,
Dan

I tell my age-conscious students (who nag me to know my exact age -- were you a hippy, a punk?) that I am the last surviving Civil War veteran. I regale them with stories and images from my experience at Gettysburg as part of the 20th Maine regiment. Dan, do I have to write 165 words (I tell 'em I was born in 1840) for 365 people? I've met 373, 783 people in all those years, had significant relationships with 6, 781 of 'em. How do I select the 365 to write about?

Selvedge

By Tom Beckett & Crag Hill

Wanted: State's Sky

WANTED:

Non-profit press based in New York City seeks amateur photos of your state's sky for a collection of poems about the 50 states. Selected photographers will be listed as contributors and will receive a complimentary copy of the book..

Please submit your photo as a 5x7 inch high-resolution jpeg or tiff (300 dpi), color or black & white. 

you can email it and any questions to: states_50@yahoo.com

Or send your photograph to:

Ugly Duckling Presse
106 Ferris Street
2nd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11231

P.S. If you happen to live near a state line perhaps you will consider photographing the sky of the adjacent state, i.e., "Indiana sky photographed from Ohio."

a / skeletal memory / of fleshy desire

By Mark Young and Crag Hill

course would course

By Jordan Stempleman & Crag Hill

The Abstraction

dreaming its usual dreams

all events are equidistant

place in the present, it has the feel

aseptic

keyhole

Poetry Magazine Attempts to Save the World of Poetry: Related Blog Post By Amy King

Amy responds in this blog post to an interview with poet lariat Ted Kooser in which he lassoes the elitists among us (choke): "I detest elitism of any kind,’ [Kooser] says. ‘There’s been this assumption along with modernism that the reader should come halfway to the work. I frankly don’t believe readers should be expected to make an effort to learn something in order to understand a poem."

(Choke, cough, hyperventilation, elitist elbows flying backward to release Ted's grip from my throat, one pathway of oxygen to my brain.) Sure, I want the poets I read to work like hell to reach me, yet I'm immensely offended and disappointed and underwhelmed if they think I can't reach past the obvious. Don't tell me in your poems what I should think or see or feel or breathe.

As I live to read, as I love reading, I read to live, Ted. Do you really want to do my living for me?

Poetry Magazine Saves the World of Poetry: Jim McCrary's Response

An e-mail from Jim McCrary: "Good to see your take on idiots at Poetry Mag.  Certainly agree with all you said.  My experience working with HS kids is the same.  Spent several years with kids from very rural Kansas at writers' camp.  These were kids living in broke dick farm communities under the thumb of, among other things, cruel hostile evangelical parents.  BUT they loved what I brought  that was, to them, unknown.  The favorite every time was Greiner!!  Not just the easier work but the "scrawls" - they loved to read and disect them - and had no problem 'seeing' through them.  Ditto Silliman, Howe etc etc.  Also yours, Bennett and Leftwich stuff from old Lost and Found Times which they howled over when I passed them out.  I think that what they recognized was a text that looked a hell of a lot more 'familiar' to them than the usual 'school of quietude' crap.  Anyway, the money ran out and the camp no longer in existence, which is sad to me.

But you're right we should all spend more time in schools.

take care,

mccrary"

Other works that have engaged high school students that an institution like Poetry Magazine wouldn't sponsor? Got to get those works into the hands of emerging readers, multi-million dollar stink fall or not.

Poetry Magazine Attempts to Save the World of Poetry

Give a man or an organization $175,000,000 and they think they can save the world.

Hey, I think even with $1.75, you can save the world. It all matters what you're going to do with it.

In the January 8 issue of Boston Globe, Poetry Magazine editors mention a couple of their proposed projects. There's enough flak on the interwaves, so I'll not take the space to comment on them.

I would argue: spend the money in the schools (I remember the California Poets in the Schools program of the 1980s). Teachers K-12 are beleaguered by the current testing frenzy; arts education -- including time for creative writing -- has been left behind. To counter this, I say every poet who cares about creating new readers, volunteer in your local schools. Read a variety of poems to one student at a time, to small groups, to entire schools.

Current Poetry Magazine editor Wiman argues that more "poems should rhyme. More poems should have meter. More poems should tell stories in accomplished ways. More poems should do the things that people like poems to do," he said. ''There is great stuff that's being written in an insular and esoteric vein. But there should also be a broad band of poetry available to common readers."

I doubt he's been in a K-12 classroom recently. Yes, students K-12 appreciate rhyme and meter (who doesn't like a good beat?), are engaged by narrative poetry, but we would sell these budding readers short by simply bringing rhymed, metered, narratives to them. I know from experience that they also are capable of loving B. P. Nichol, The Four Horsemen, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Ron Silliman's Tjanting, Score's "Laughing Song for William Blake," Michael Basinski's sound poems, the visual poetry of Nico Vassilakis, Karl Kempton... Poetry that their parents might find difficult.

The educational system simply does not have many teachers who read a wide-range of poetry (we can thank their universities for that). I modestly propose that every poet give them a hand and an eye and an ear in their classrooms.