Sherry Chandler

Community

Over at Very Like a Whale, Amy King answers Ten Questions on Poets and Technology, with advice on using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. She begins like this:

Technology offers a variety of platforms for disseminating one’s work. Some are difficult to master, but most are not. Poets who don’t want to spend tons of time convincing a handful of big-name publishers their work is worthwhile should master just a few platforms like blogs (I prefer WordPress.com) or writer-friendly DIY sites such as Red Room and She Writes, and even the self-publishing mediums now readily available like Lulu.

Women in particular might consider knuckling down and forego the fear of “going public” independently (i.e. no publisher to do your PR, which is rare anyway). We’ve been modest and quiet far too long. We need more women’s voices, styles and revelations in that literary landscape, from what I’ve seen.

And then this:

Poetry survives because it’s primarily about human connection and interaction as mediated by words and what that entails (the latter being a complex multitude I cannot possibly outline here). Technology is making it possible for us to get the word out, in a variety of formats and styles, to more people daily. Some of us plug away at proliferating poetry. I do. I’m invested in setting an example of someone who does not apologize for wanting others to engage with her through the poetic. Poetry is transformative, where culture can stagnate and water down to the lowest form and function, if you let it. So why not use that technology to spread the poetic? Technology is neutral; it’s what we do with it that’s going to make or break us, so to speak.

If you’re a poet looking for community, check out Big Tent Poetry

Big Tent Poetry aims to create a fun, inspiring, motivational and supportive community for poets at all levels of writing. In addition to a weekly writing “Prompt” and a weekly “Come One, Come All” gathering for poets to share their work, Big Tent Poetry provides writing challenges, revision activities, columns and reviews

One of the interesting features of this new site is a forum of blogging poets, the sideshow barkers, who will inlcude Robert Peak, James Brush, and Dave Bonta, among others. As Dave says:

[My ideal would be a] decentralized internet where we all have our own sites (whether blogs proper or sites on Tumblr, StatusNet, etc.), subscribe to each other’s feeds, and link and comment back and forth with the enthusiasm now reserved for Facebook and Twitter.

O.K., that day will probably never come. But Big Tent Poetry’s mode of operation definitely contributes to the dream of a decentralized social web. Carolee, Deb and Jill have made the wise decision not to try to line up a bunch of regular columnists, but instead get a bunch of us to agree to send along links whenever we write something poetry-related, and let them decide whether to feature it on the site. They have dedicated a whole third ring (the circus kind, not the Dantean kind) to collect such contributions, and I’m pleased and honored that they chose my piece about Poetry Reading Month as the second entry there. I like the idea of Via Negativa as sideshow and me as its barker. And I’m in good company — see the complete list of barkers on the site’s About page.

Illustrating another form of community, Poemeleon has released their collaborative issue, which explores various permutations of collaborating — poet with artist, poet with actress, poet with poet (with poet with poet), even reviewer with reviewer. the issue aslo includes two fine essays on collaboration by Martha Deed and Millie Niss and by Marilyn Taylor. Marilyn begins:

One of the most rewarding things about being a poet is, for many of us, the pure pleasure of discovering and getting to know other poets. Our relationships often have a way of blossoming into a remarkably supportive community– a flock of enthusiasts who find joy in talking poetry, reading poetry, arguing poetry, and sharing with one another the poetry we’ve written.

I’ve found, in fact, that if a poet hangs around long enough with kindred souls, chances are excellent that somebody, sometime, is going to suggest a poetry collaboration project. In other words, someone will decide that if two or more of us team up, pooling our talents and energies, the result will be something wonderful, publishable, and more than the sum of its parts.

That person will be wrong.

Well, maybe not entirely wrong. I admit to possessing a strong sense that the odds are stacked against the true success of most poetry collaborations—at least in terms of their real artistic merit, and the likelihood of their being read and appreciated by others.

Why do I come to such a grumpy, unsubstantiated conclusion?

Read the essay to find the answer to that question and also to find some examples of collaborations that Marilyn considers successful.

And, because poets are part of the community at large, I recommend you read Robin Kemp’s Dispatches from Saints & Sinners 2010: Part 1 The Oil Spill

Back in my hometown of New Orleans, I’m sitting at Rue de la Course at the corner of Carrollton and Oak, shaking off the late-night arrival and waking up to continued universal agitation over the oil spill in the Gulf. As a former CNN newswriter and environmental reporter for Gambit, I’m in the unhappy position of reading some of my poems, grounded in this city and its surrounding wetlands, through this new lens.

. . .

National coverage of this story has been spotty at best. The spill’s impact began to seep into CNBC’s consciousness yesterday—as a story on possible seafood price increases in New York—as if the question of what the spill means for all Americans were not one of benthic depth. We tend to think of North and South, East Coast and Gulf Coast, as universes apart, yet our lives are far more interdependent than regional allegiances would have us believe. The hundreds of thousands of dead baitfish I saw (and smelled) yesterday at low tide in Ocean Springs, MS have everything to do with Saints and Sinners, with our literature, with queer survival, with human survival. Our coast has been queered, and not in a good way. Some people don’t care whether we live or die. From the point of view of those who live and work in New Orleans and the Gulf South, who “we” are has spread its dark sheen across a far wider surface in recent weeks.

“woozy, reckless through the barricades”

The other day in the comments, Jessie Carty said “I love a good chapbook.”

Lately, I’ve come into possession of a number of good chapbooks from a variety of publishers, and I hope to bring them to your attention here in the weeks before Christmas, with the reminder that chapbooks, which usually sell for around $10, make great stocking stuffers.

First up is Marilyn L. Taylor’s Going Wrong, from the Parallel Press chapbook series. Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. The chapbook is saddle-stapled with cardstock covers with three-color cover art on nice cream-colored paper. It’s fat for a chapbook, offering 37 pages of poetry. It sells for $10.

Marilyn L. Taylor is poet laureate of Wisconsin. Marilyn is a master of formal verse who delights in the satiric mode. I think it was Robert Graves who said that poetry has two modes, the lyric and the satiric. Going Wrong manages to combine the two in personna poems in the voices of women who have, in fact, gone wrong. In love, of course. That’s what makes a lyric.

For the most part, Going Wrong is what you might call a lighter look at love. As, for example, the “Valentine for a Bashful Boy”

Lovely man, my shaggy puppy,
Why the frown? The visage droopy?
Does the lack of making whoopee
Make you feel all misanthropy?

It’s fair to call these verses comic but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re light. Well, the Valentine is pretty light, but others, like “I Miss You and I’m Drunk” reveal Taylor’s startling mastery of image:

Look at the way the moon just sits there
with its brights on, aiming
that yellowish beam across the water
at the lovers and the skinnydippers

and how the summer sawgrass
grabs me by the ankles, making me
stumble, making me think about
the flaming ache of falling down on top of you

Not every poem in Going Wrong is satiric. Some, like “To the Mother of a Dead Marine” and “In Other News,” take a daring look at the violent dark side of eroticism. What the poems never are is confessional free verse. They are all about language and its possibilities.

The chapbook is a catalogue of forms, some of which I probably am not sophisticated enough to recognize. Sonnets abound, and there’s a ballad and a villanelle, terza rima, and plain vanilla rhymed couplets. The chapbooks tour de force is a crown of sonnets called “The Seven Very Liberal Arts.” Those arts are Logic, Grammar, Music, Rhetoric, Geology, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. The crown has a poem for each art, each poem plays exquisitely with the language of the art in question. Here are a few lines from the sestet of “Grammar:”

Scribble suggestions slowly down my spine
with your intense, exploratory care,
and punctuate, with sharp intakes of air
the way my staves and strophes intertwine.

Here is a chapbook of poems for a wide audience. Those who say they don’t read poetry because it is difficult will find these poems very accessible and entertaining. Those who prefer texture and nuance will find it in abundance in Taylor’s language play and mastery of craft.