Poetry and.... The Storm

Here in the northeast, Hurricane Irene is harassing us with overlapping waves of calm and pounding force. Sporting events have been cancelled and the Stop-and-Shops have been out of milk for 18 hours. Many people have retreated into their homes with days of water and prepared foods, and aren't expecting to have anynything asked of them for days. Almost (or by now, maybe more than) 10,000 flights out of area airports have been cancelled. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

But Jayne Jaudon Ferrer at Your Daily Poem tried to find us a hurricane metaphor and came up empty. My library may not be comprehensive, but it similarly let me down as I searched for something to present here as a place where poetry had come to rest up against the coming threat. And I finally realized my mistake.

While we're exhibiting some similar behaviors in the face of the storm, what we're really doing is projecting our unique fears upon it, allowing it to distract us from something we would otherwise be fearing. Or for those who are refusing to yield, refusing to leave their homes, are doing the same - standing up to the storm because it's something they can stand up to.

Poetry operates at the place between what you want to say and what you can say. At times, it says the unsayable. At times, it starts with what is said and works back to how the need to say it was created. In both cases, it tried to surprise us, even as we put the pen to paper, with what we come to believe when we read it.

Which is what happened to me here. I'll leave it up for a while. At least until the storm ends.

The waters have receded. Poem has been deleted.

Poetry and.... Information Technology

My friend Joe, a man has who traveled the line between art and technology at least as frequently as I have, recently forwarded this from CNN contributor Bob Greene:


Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal selects the writer each week for a terrific column called "Five Best." The premise is simple: One man or woman who is an expert in a given field is asked to recommend and write brief reviews of five books he or she loves that were published any time in history. The column turns that culture of newness, of hotness, on its head, with great results. Readers of the column, Rabinowitz told me, eagerly seek out the books in libraries or in used bookstores. She said that she tells each week's writer of the column not to worry whether or not readers have ever heard of the books; she instructs them: "The more obscure, the better."

Greene reminds us in his column that there are millions of titles available for free in the collective libraries of the world, and we shouldn't allow a culture that believes "new" = "good" (read: "iPhone v2304.x") to turn us off that subject.

I'll go him one further. Technology, with a little help from its friends, can make those millions of titles available for us. One such example is Project Gutenberg, which came to my aid this weekend by making available the works of a 16th-century Italian epic poet whose name popped up in other research I was pursuing. As much as I lament at times that communications technology has affected the basic elements of life, this access, combined with the converstation starter that is Wikipedia, if of great use to a poet who is writing his way into places in which he is not an expert.

Formerly Cosmic Liverwurst

in·ter·sect [in-ter-sekt]

–verb (used with object)
1. to cut or divide by passing through or across: The highway intersects the town.

–verb (used without object)
2. to cross, as lines or wires.
3. (Geometry) to have one or more points in common: intersecting lines.

(courtesy Dictionary.com)
====================================================
After a hundred years of thinking about it, I have finally come arrived up a new name for my little space, and I'm pretty excited about it. I'll be bringing the rest of Cosmic Liverwurst over as I weed through it and decide what is worth putting up here. And I'll leave the old space up and periodically update it, but this is the primary place you'll find me from now on.

Where the heck did the old name come from, anyway? Well, when I first discovered Googlewhacking, it got me thinking about the relationship between the utility of labels for identification and the drive for all artists to be considered unique. I talk about it here. The name emerged from experiments along those lines. I liked what I came up with then. Still do.

So why the new name? Well, to make it a little more findable and easier to label, for starters. And as I move toward more ambitions artistic pursuits, I thought maybe the artists with whom I'm fortunate enough to work - performing poetical and musically, hosting in the Spoken Word Series, etc. - might be a little happier to see me if I weren't associating them with a pork liver sausage. Not that there's anything wrong with that....

But really, where my writing interest lies, the place I covet in the pantheon, if you will, is clear. I write primarily at the places poetry intersects (geometrically speaking, of course) with other things - science, history, and parenthood, especially, but more and more other art forms as well, and more interactively - the poems speak to things and the things speak back. The poems I've placed for publication most recently have all been intersections and poems in response to art, and that continues to be where the less dog-eared pages in my journals point.

So here we are with a new name and maybe a new focus. Stay with us if you will, there are many more common points to be explored.

In which stuff I've been contemplating on long car rides comes bubbling out becuase it's been so frapping long since I logged in

{begin Mike Greenberg voice} and we're back and better than ever! {end Mike Greenberg voice}



A busy, good, frustrating, scary, wonderful month since last I checked in here. This is not a place where I discuss the business world, but no one associated with an American corporation can look at the events of the past month and not wonder a bit about the future. It is in times like this that we typically turn to our art for solace and encouragement, for a place to voice what we need to voice and hear what we need to hear. Which makes me a bit of a banana for having been separated from the art for a while.



Well, not really "separated". I haven't been separated from preparing on the new season of the Spoken Word Series in our new location. We've moved from Symposia Bookstore (where we spend 8 terrific years growing and thriving under the stewardship of the amazing folks there) to The Theater Company. We're giving up a location in which words literally surround you, and moving to one where performers can dial up the volume a bit. I've tried to reflect that a little in the choice of artists for the coming year, and as usual have tried to blend voices new to Hoboken with word artists who have visited us in the past. The first event will be Sunday October 2, and the whole season will be announced here and at The Theater Company in the coming weeks.



And not separated from my writing projects, per se, but rather in a different mode - a "research" mode, if you will. I've got two projects in the cooker right now - each focusing on heroes of mine in one way or another, and since I'm producing poems that actually are grounded in reality (in principle, anyway), I feel a responsibility to be aware of the truth. Note that I say "be aware of the truth", not "depict the truth faithfully"; I don't want to get caught in that same old trap of something needing to be true to matter to the reader, but neither do I care present a complete guess at the truth when written history is available to guide me.



And not separated from the muse, but rather giving her a chance to recharge. I've challenged her to keep up earlier in the summer, to sit with me while I experimented with solos on my accordion, or tried to prepare energizing and meaningful education experiences (not "training materials"), or to do the little writing I'd been doing. She needed a break. I spent almost an entire day last week just playing with my kids in the pool and eating my father-in-law's ridiculously good cooking. Those who do not consider this an essential part of the creative process can just kiss my beefsteak.



And not separated from poetry. From the recent arrival of Jeannine Gailey's terrific new book, to finally getting to Horoscopes from the Dead, to coming late to Elizabeth Bishop, I've been populating the mental database with new words. Ray Bradbury (and many others, I know) said many times that if you want to write you must read. Bradbury, though, was one of the few I recall saying you should read everything (poems, plays, novels, nonfiction...) to uncover metaphors outside your experience that can inform your own writing. I'm especially open to this idea, I guess, since my poems are informed so much by a primary source unexpected (in many opinions) to show up on poems.



But still, in a world preoccupied with output and emotion (heavy on the latter, if the NYSE and Iowa are any indication), I haven't produced a lot lately. Of either, I suppose. But we have those stages.



I just wonder in which order I'll start producing them again....