My last blog post for BAP so thanks to all of you for following along as my literary adventures took me from Jackson Hole, Wyoming back to Connecticut, where the state flower is the Mountain Laurel, state animal is the sperm whale, state fossil the Eubrontes Giganteus (some sort of carnivorous biped though it's one of the rare examples of a track [picture below] without any kind of fossil record), and whose state motto is "Qui Transtulit Sustinet," or "He Who Transplanted Still Sustains." That motto seems to get at the itinerant nature of the state's population, that even with a root system branching back to New York, Boston or the Old World, the flowering is still abundant, even though I rather prefer Connecticut's unofficial motto, "Like Massachusetts, Only Dirtier and With Less Character."
The current poet laureate of the state is Dick Allen, whom I consider a friend, and who offered this definition for the making of a poem that I find ever-compelling, "To make something that lasts eternally isn’t possible for humans. Still, some poems “last” quite a while, at least long enough to affect those like me whose lives have been changed by poems. . . I’m trying to make something that lasts in this way. Why? Because like all humans I’ve been given the gift of consciousness, the chance to live on the incredible and mysterious planet, in this incredibly mysterious universe, and I want to—in my small way—offer something in return for the gift.... I’ve written in other genres, but from the beginning it was mainly poetry, probably because of poetry’s concentrations, its ability to make such sudden associative leaps, its sounds and how by following the rhythms and rhymes, consonance and assonance can guide you into images you never expected."
Of course I can never think of Connecticut without the whimsical metaphysical shadow of Wallace Stevens falling like a Pinchot sycamore on the literary landscape, Stevens whose presence in the state finally has been memorialized in Hartford by the intrepid organization, the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, which has installed thirteen granite stones each with a stanza of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" on it, allowing the walker to retrace the poet's steps from where he worked at The Hartford building at 690 Asylum Avenue, to his former home at 118 Westerly Terrace. For their annual reading, they just had two amazing poets, Susan Howe and Liz Willis read, an event I would have been at if I wasn't en route to Wyoming. Liz Willis has written a couple of terrific books and won the Boston Review poetry contest a few years ago with one poem in particular, "Bohemian Rhapsody" which I found magical in its simplicity. Here are the last four couplets of that poem:
The letters come
directly to the point
like a Guide for the Perplexed.
The boy so insect-like, so young.
The letter behind
its piece of green silk.
An appointment floating toward you
with nothing to declare.
And you can listen to a conversation with Liz Willis here:
Download Willis-Elizabeth_Close-Listening.mp3
Since I'm morphing back into teaching mode, I thought I'd end my column with you all with a few new texts I find indispensable to teaching creative writing. I'll begin with a new book published by Dos Gatos Press called Wing Beats which includes exercises from nearly 60 working poets. Some of my favorites, include the “Three-Day Defamiliarization” and Bruce Covey’s “Two Sides of the Same Coil: Google Sculpting and Automatism.” I have contributed an exercise to the collection myself, an excercise on constraint that I've found succesful everywhere from New York City to Hong Kong (and speaking of Hong Kong, if you don't know about the first international MFA Program in Creative Writing, you should; I've been teaching in it and at Fairfield University's MFA Program and have found both programs unique in the kinds of students and professors they are attracting).
I also think Kim Addonzio's book Ordinary Genius, is well worth the price of purchase. Some of her lists of prompts, of ways to jostle the calcified nature of your perceptions, of revision methods that allow you to see your poem in a whole new way are extraordinarly useful and I've found that a class of undergraduates responds very well to the combination of specific example and irreverance in the authorial voice. I don't know a better way to express the following idea other than the way Addonzio baldly puts it out there: “If you don’t read, your writing is going to suck!” Now that's something the students can respond to and use as a mantra in their own lives!
Finally, I think illustrated field guides of all variets and from all eras can be an indispensible resource to poets of all abilities. After all, we are in the business of coming up with new metaphoric ways of looking at the world and so to deepen the range of what both tenor and vehicle might be is to stregthen the body of the poem. My personal favorites might be Night Climbers of Cambridge about nocturnal climbing on the roofs of Colleges and town buildings of Cambridge, England in the 1930's and the Color Atlas of Hematology, because "it lists the critical keys to successful morphologic identification of cells, ranging from the routine to the markedly abnormal." There's something about the teeming world of the microscopic that reflects the gargantuan world of the cosmic in a mirror that is a veritable image storehouse for the poet. Humans are caught somewhere on the continuum between the immense and minute, and it feels to me that a poet's job is to build arcs and vectors of music across those architectures in an attempt to transmogrify them into cognitive perceptions.
I have been reading a bit of Albert Einstein this summer and I have been curious about what might have changed - and be different now - if the Special Theory of Relativity was called Invariance Theory (as Einstein would have had it) instead, because its calculations depend on the existence of absolute space-time. Would postmodernism have a decidedly Calvinist flair? I must admit I'm a sucker for the corals and pathways that one can only see under an electron microscope.
Finally, I want to end by telling folks about some upcoming calls for work for Drunken Boat. We've closed down our poetry submissions for the seasons, but have some very specialized calls upcoming for new work. These include Open the City & Drunken Boat's call for Asian-American's on the City, Hypnopoeia, Hypnogeography, Hypnoecology: And Other Imagined Futures, work for a Handmade/Homemade Folio and work for a folio on Exploration, that takes as it's cue this quote from Apollo 14th astronaut Edgar Mitchell, one of the first dozen men to walk on the moon and he returned from that interstellar exploration to found the Noetic Sciences Institute. As he writes, “What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of connectedness. I actually felt what is described as 'the ecstasy of unity.' It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me. And there was a sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental, but that there was an intelligent process at work. I perceived the universe as in some way conscious." We will be looking for work that responds to this notion of boundary, threshold and exploration in written, visual, sonic and multimedia form. Edited by Michael Robinson of the blog, Time to Eat the Dogs, it should prove a fecund dossier.
Finally, let me end with some music. Thanks for sharing this week with me friends. I'm glad to turn you on to some of the things I'm thinking about and hope that you'll send us work for DB sometime. In the meantime, I'm going to be hitting the road in the fall to do some launch parties for my new book, Deepening Groove, so if you'd like a visitor, let me know. I've been a rather reluctant barker until now but figure I should start getting the word out. And speaking of getting word out, here's Gabon's hip hop duo, the conscious activist poets, Movaizhaleine. I think of them as part of the future of poetry, galvanizing crowds across Africa and Europe with a message of ecological and aesthetic awareness.
Have a safe holiday weekend and until we meet again in page or person!
-Ravi Shankar, June/July 2011
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