Poetry and the Selfie

Yesterday, thanks to a Facebook post by Shape&Nature Press, I read a great post on Literary Hub. In Poet Selfies: Searching for the Thing-In-Itselfie, 39 poets respond to questions about selfies. The answers range from surrealist and goofy to heartfelt and thought provoking. It was also cool to see the non-traditional selfies that some of the poets supplied and I felt inspired by their responses to write one of my own. I was at first surprised and then not surprised by my answer, which I’m sharing below. 

Question: What is the relationship between poetry and the selfie?

I don't like my selfies when I'm the only person in them. I've tried and failed to take a solo selfie I like, even in awesome situations like at concerts or while rock climbing. And it's not because I don't like how I look. It's because I don't like seeing myself alone.

I'm an only child, but I didn't mind that until I was 8 and my parents moved us from a New York City apartment building that served as my neighborhood to a small town in Pennsylvania where the kids on the street thought I was weird and made fun of me (for being tall or Episcopalian or a bookworm or something—and later for having purple hair).

I made friends at school and at the church where my mom worked, but something in me never got over the loneliness of the next 10 years spent without any neighborhood friends. For the first year or so, I had imaginary friends. Tracy lived three blocks down the hill and was always sitting on her front porch swing when I walked by to get her on my way to the corner store. David hung out in the yard that bordered ours in the back and would hop the fence to climb part way up the spruce tree and then just sit with me.

When those friends faded away I turned to nature and books. These have been my refuge and my sources of inspiration, poetic and otherwise, ever since.

I take selfies with other people to capture moments, and also to prove to myself that I'm not alone. Look, I have a friend, she's not imaginary, she shows up in pixels! 

Answer: The poem explores what the selfie avoids.

Oh the Chickens

Today I spent a fair amount of time daydreaming about chickens, gardens, and digging in the dirt when I was supposed to be thinking about work and databases.

My non-required lunchtime reading included this essay by Michael Mauri, in which he muses, "Someday, maybe, our insignificant micro-decision to raise laying-hens in the backyard will prove provident. Maybe it won’t seem so odd in this American neighborhood setting where maintaining mow-able lawns is a top priority, where status is measured in lack of productivity."


Here are my friend's chickens, photographed last summer. I don't have my own yet, but maybe someday.

Eternal Paper

I was both entertained and educated by Michael Agger's article in Slate about writing for the web (writing for the web is part of my day job, so I'm continually learning more about such things).

I was simultaneously heartened by the author's observation of the permanence of paper. "We'll do more and more reading on screens," he writes, "but they won't replace paper - never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you."

Intimacy and tactility - sensuousness - are the most notable aspects of reading from paper as opposed to reading on the screen. Agger describes paper as "a balm for the distracted mind." This is absolutely true for pleasure reading, where one treasures the feeling of diving into a book. I also prefer to proofread and copyedit publications of any length on paper instead of on screen, since paper allows for easier concentration and focus.

When I visited Goddard College for the first time and heard program director Paul Selig describe the MFA experience, he talked about how most of the professors still prefer to receive packets of physical paper in the mail (oh, the time we spent on those packets!) as opposed to being emailed manuscripts. "You might get your manuscript back with wrinkles and coffee stains," he said, and I felt the instinctive joy of a bibliophile whose passions have been recognized and acknowledged. Not only did we all love writing, but we all loved paper.

Extreme Reading

For today's post, I bring you an essay by prose poet John Olson. While at first I found "Extreme Reading" difficult to get into - it really reads as more of a prose poem at the beginning - I was soon able to drop into Olson's particular and illuminating logic that zooms around in a nonlinear, beehive fashion.

He writes:

"Reading is a form of hallucination. The images and people we encounter among the letters are not there. The reality they acquire in our mind is equal to the effort we make in building them in our mind. Sufficient training will help understand the meaning of someone waving semaphores up and down but true reading requires something more of you than knowing how to spell or understanding the relationship between a sign and its referent. The letters invite a cooperation greater than the peremptory commands of a traffic light. Whoever came up with the idea of separating green from red with the happy ambiguity of yellow was clearly someone who enjoyed reading."

I have to admit, I needed to look up two of the words in this paragraph... but that's also part of extreme reading.

Read the entire essay here.

Earth is Hiring

It's the time of year for sitting through graduation ceremonies. Education is such a big part of the economy where I live, I think that people here have a much higher than average chance of sitting through at least one or two addresses. It's too bad that the two graduations I attended this year didn't feature this inspired speech, given by Paul Hawken at the University of Portland. Here's an excerpt:

"You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn't afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done."

Reading Girls / Girls Reading

I've been trying to read Twilight to see what all the hype is about. So far, I'm not really enjoying it but haven't stopped reading because I want to see what happens. I'm doing the skim-until-you-don't-know-what's-happening-then-go-back-and-
see-what-happened thing.

Fascination with fantasy and creatures of other worlds is, to me, explained by this quote, which arrived in my inbox this morning: "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." - Jules de Gautier

There's an excellent review of Twilight in this month's Atlantic Monthly that I think is a fabulous description of the pull of reading on certain girls (of which I certainly was one). Here's an excerpt:

"The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading."

Read the full article here.

Yay, Obama! Yay, America!

Oh, I am so happy. So relieved and hopeful and proud.

As Obama said in his speech last night:

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.

Read the full text of Obama's inspirational speech here.

Yipee!

Powerful Article

I encourage you all to read this blog post and consider its implications. I was grateful for the reminder of how far we still have to go as a culture.

This is Your Nation on White Priviledge

Harvey Karman, developer of a certain soft, flexible tube

There is so much to say around the experiences of women exercising our right to decide and direct what happens to our own bodies after an evening of misjudgement, contraceptive failure, or rape. It's an issue that's close to my heart and the topic of the middle section of my poetry thesis. I think that poetry is the best genre for such discussions because poetry is a such a good form for nuance and ambivalence.

This morning I read an obituary of a psychologist who helped many women out of their difficult situations. I particularly appreciate this article because it paints his activities as humanitarian, which they were. It reads, in part:

"He became interested in abortion when he was conducting research at UCLA on the emotional aspects of therapeutic abortion. During this time a student with an unplanned pregnancy committed suicide and another died from a botched abortion. Karman responded by helping women obtain illegal abortions in Mexico. Unhappy with the high prices and poor care some of the women received, he began performing abortions himself."

Here's a link to the full article.

15 Ways To Annoy Friends Who Love Harry Potter

Harry never goes out of season! I'm a big fan, which is why I find these so amusing. This list was written by my friend and fellow poet, Mike Biegner of Easthampton.

15 Ways To Annoy Your Friends Who Love Harry Potter

-1- Call Professor Dumbledor "Professor Dum Dum".

-2- Suggest that in a duel, Samantha Stevens from "Bewitched" would kick Harry's ass.

-3- Confuse the Lord of the Rings Trilogy details with those of the Harry Potter series of books repeatedly by saying things like: "Remember when Gandalf and Voldemort were fighting and the Orcs took over the Hogwartz School of Wizzardry in the Town of Rivendale?"

-4- Wonder out loud to your friends if Harry Potter was not in fact the secret love child of Colonel Sherman Potter and Hot Lips Houlihan from the TV series M.A.S.H.

-5- Suggest to your friends that Harry should consider a line of Prada eyewear instead of those horrid round glasses.

-6- Tell your friends that if Weezie Jefferson married Ron Weasly her name would have been "Weezie Weasly".

-7- Inform your friends that "muggles" are what Fraggles drink beer from.

-8- Whenever speaking about Harry, refer to him as "Mr. Pot-Tare" the way Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington did in the TV Series "Welcome Back Kotter".

-9- Suggest that Andi McDowell would have made a better Voldemort than Ray Fiennes.

-10- Refer to the author, J K Rowling as "J J Walker" and tell people you think she is "Dyno-Mite!"

-11- Repeat every 15 minutes to your friends that "Hermione rhymes with 'hiney'."

-12- Insist to your friends that you saw the actor who plays Professor Dumbldor on a TV infomercial for Viagra, talking about his "limp wand" problem.

-13- Tell your friends that Quiddich is not a real sport, like golf, NASCAR, horse racing, bowling and poker.

-14- Wonder out loud to your friends where Harry takes his invisibility cloak to be dry cleaned.

-15- Order the last Harry Potter book UPS ground and then when it finally DOES arrive, read only a few pages per day.

Join me in creating the Republic of Poetry

I am so proud to be a Hampshire College alum. The college is exemplary in so many ways and continually allies itself with people I admire. The speaker at my commencement in 2004 (chosen by a student vote) was brave and pioneering journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. This year's speaker, also chosen by students, was brave and pioneering poet Martin Espada. His inspirational speech advocates justice and love as strongly as it does resistance and determination.

Espada wrote: "In the Republic of Poetry there is no war, because phrases like 'weapons of mass destruction,' 'shock and awe,' 'collateral damage' and 'surge' are nothing but clichés, bad poetry by bad poets, and no one believes them. They bleed language of its meaning, drain the blood from words. You, the next generation, must reconcile language with meaning, restore the blood to words, and end this war."

Read the whole speech.

Unusual Beauty

If I had kids, this is one of those stories I'd tell them dozens of times, until they rolled their eyes: I had an art teacher and he changed my life. He turned my ideas of color inside out, and my ideas of subject matter upside down. He took my art history class on a field trip to a junkyard. He showed slides of graffiti he'd found inside abandoned buildings. He taught at my small private school for four years, long enough to shock some parents and just long enough to affect me forever....

Read the full story on Minds Island.