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.

Poetry off the Page

One of my friends is teaching poetry in her son's elementary school, as a community service. She had a book called The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet: 104 Unusual Ways to Write Poetry in the Classroom and the Community. Many of the exercises in this book have the class write poems on objects - chairs, foam heads, etc.

I love poetry best when it's performed or read aloud. That's when the words truly come alive - when they are embodied. This allows a connection to occur between two or more individuals - and that, to me, is the essential different between poetry and prose. I'm happy to read a novel alone, curled up in my favorite chair. I'll also read nonfiction that way. But poetry is so much better when I read it to someone or someone reads it to me. Poetry is music, is performance. Performing poetry - through the voice or via a physical object - gives it a temporal, momentary, golden quality.

One of the best writing workshops I ever attended was based on the creative practices of John Cage. One thing the leaders did was give us various objects on which to write - coffee filters, cash register receipts... changing the surface changes the writing, and pushes the creation into more of a performance space.

A class at the University of Auckland in New Zealand is doing some cool things in this realm: the realm of poetry off the page. Check it out - then grab a napkin, or a matchbox, or some duct tape, and create!

Better When Broken

eggs
a fever
the waves
a seed casing
water
morning
day
horses
rules
norms
buds
silence
the mold
a pattern
bread
taboos
bad habits
new ground
the fast
records
the seal
wedding glasses
pinatas
hearts

I wrote this list poem after a discussion with my friend Bob led me to think about all the things that we break on purpose, even though "break" usually has a negative connotation. Leave me a comment if you can think of others.

Poetry Videos

Ok, so even though I'm a blogger, I'm not the most tech-savy poet around. I hardly ever visit YouTube, except when my partner has me watch rap videos from the 90s. So, excuse me if this is late-breaking news, but I recently discovered the coolest thing. Poets are making videos of their poems. The written word is coming alive in yet another new way: portable, transmittable, and off the page.

According to Patricia Smith, "Words - in particular, words laid down in hopeful, lyrical lines - don't even begin to approach their potential until they reach the open air. There, anyone can snag them, dream on them, memorize them, twist them to fit their own lives."

There must be dozens, hundreds of websites out there featuring video poetry. I'd love to hear of more. For now, check out my friend Cara Benson on The Continental Review, as well as several famous page and slam poets at Open Door Poetry.

Onward!

Wonders of the Babelfish

Who remembers the Babelfish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which translates every language when inserted into a person's ear? Today's circuitous route of wordplay began when I logged into www.gazettenet.com and read a story about an exchange student who became malnourished while overseas. The boy's father suspected Stockholm syndrom. I didn't know what this was, so I looked it up online. I found a block of text where the content was emotional but the tone very dry and clinical. I wondered about the text's potential for transformation.

When I was in high school, I was friends with a couple of exchange students from Germany and France. I loved listening to them speak because their near fluency caused them to use English words in uncustomary ways that made literal sense but were not colloquial. They seemed to refresh the language.

Juliana Spahr used the Altavista Bablefish while composing her chapbook about Hawaii, things of each possible relation hashing against one another. She wrote poems in English, then translated them into other languages and back into English. Since the translations are literal, word order gets mixed up. Syntax is skewed. Some nuances are lost and others created.

This is a way of using chance to refresh language, one of the many ways a writer can mitigate her tired language assumptions. What I did, after translating my block of text into Russian and then back again, was to pick out the best, most surprising lines and arrange them into a poem. Maybe I didn't completely "write" it, but I did make artisitic decisions in arranging it.

strategies for to remain living

They focus on kindness’s captors. As a result,
victims know much about captors, less about themselves.
An honest reaction to the destructive working,
victims are encouraged to begin
psychological characteristics pleasing to captors.
Both feel the fear also as love in these high anxiety acts.
Victims from the existing versions
know the impossibility to act, decide, think, etc.
Perceiving their victimizers as omnipotent,
victims fasten psychologically to captors.