... and Remembering

Today is about remembering. Many people far more eloquent than I will speak at length about the tragedy of the attacks on our country. We all have our memories from that day: those who lost friends and family, those who witnessed the events up close, those far away who watched with the helplessness of a mute on the wrong side of the glass. My own memories are that of the almost 2,000 people at my office campus leaving our desks, gathering in conference rooms to watch the news feeds that started showing up on all our video equipment, about hundreds of people heading to our loading platforms - we're a medical device company - and loading trucks to send across the river into Manhattan. It's interesting that no matter how great the event, all remembering is a local, personal act.

Do you recall how quickly Auden's "September 1, 1939" started being quoted in columns and appearing on websites? How quickly old and new poems began to appear everywhere, as people attempted to find ways to say what they couldn't otherwise say. Many poets have spoken about poetry as a vehicle for "saying the unsayable", whether it be on tragedies of a personal sort that would never be known without a brave poet's voice or those of the kind of 9/11/01 or 9/1/39, or any of a number or other horrific days that require the distance and craft of the artist to present them in a comprehensible way.

Poetry is of course, not uniquely able to convey the layers of an event; even a short look at Picasso's Guernica tells us that. But poetry may be able to do a few things differently than other art forms:

Primarily, it permits a juxtaposition of images with an immediacy and pacing that other art forms don't. Visual arts (like Guernica) hit us all at once, movies (and plays, and novels) bring us along at the rate the director has chosen. But a poem (often) strikes us with a complete visual on the page, and provides aural or linguistic beauty that begins to unfold immediately and as long and as fast as we care to take it in.

Second, it allows a deeply personal interaction without sacrificing a view of the entirety. In Auden's poem (and Yeats' "Easter 1916" which it reflects in structure and tone), we leap into a helicopter trip down through history (Thucydides even makes a brief appearance) from the most local of observations ("I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street..."). After the trip through the eons, Auden brings us home to the the individual ("All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie..."). In this way poetry is most unique among the art forms, as it permits the reader to (choose to) assume completely the perspective of the narrator by speaking the poem. An actor in role takes on a part of the memory, but not the whole

Third, the poem uniquely packages hope with recollection. The choice to connect hope to a tragic memory is the poet's choice, of course, but the call to action, the voluble pronouncement of what can be done in response, or of what has already happened, is most real and most direct in the narrative poem. We can speak the poet's words and find ourselves carried along just by the act of saying them. We can be moved by an act of remembering, by a capture memory that was not even our own.

The risk of being cloying and cliched is more present in the poem of recollection than in other forms, I suppose, but that's a discussion of craft for another day. Other media can provoke insight, or outrage, or meaning, but when done well, there is an affirmation, a commitment possible in the remembrance poem that is unavailable in other arts. Auden closes with

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

We remember today with the commitment that poetry can provide.

Poetry and.... Teaching.

As school starts again I think back upon the great teachers I have had and what has made them great. Sure, there's compassion and a desire for service. Without casting any disrespect upon these essential attributes, I'm learning toward something else today; I don't know about you, but I've known a number of people who are compassionate, great with kids, intent upon serving others, and/or devoted to making the world a better place. Many of them have been good teachers. But that's not what's separated the best.

When you think about it, what really distinguishes great teachers? I think it's the ability to make connections between the material and other things - maybe its application, maybe some analogous concept that helps the student establish a connection with that material. Like the grammar school teacher who can make fractions visible objects for a child who doesn't like math. Or the Bible teacher who hooks an adventure-seeking boy with the wars of the Old Testament and leads him out through the Gospels. How about a science teacher who discusses Stranger in Strange Land and the qualities of a good sausage-and-peppers sandwich in (almost) equal increments to keep a room filled with high school boys interested in corrosion* chemistry? I'm fortunate to have known all these people - they taught me or people close to me - and I think they have something in common. They're all poets.

At least one of them would raise an eyebrow for that comparison, but I think it holds. What do we do as poets? In successful, well-crafted poems, we establish connections - metaphors - that make visible something that might not otherwise be visible. It needn't be truth, it needn't definitive, but needs to be memorable and it needs stay with the reader, to create a desire to take in more. I'm sitting here remembering the tools my AP chemistry teacher used 30 years ago, not for their great scientific insight - 20 years of practice has taught me a great deal more than I learned there - but for how they kicked open a door for me that I leaped through joyfully, and how I've spent my life recalling his lessons. Even when I don't know that there's anything more for me to mine. But still I go back. And find something worth remembering again.

This is another place I go when people tell me they don't "get" poetry. For those who don't like or appreciate the surprise of making new connections, I rely on craft, or allusion, or something "intellectual." But for those who teach, as their career or as their vocation, as a part-time effort or as a part of their larger job, I say the poetic and the learning moment are the same. I invite you to join me there.






- hint it's pronounced KAT-eye-on, not KAY-shun.

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....

Poems and Projects and Pop/Folk, oh my!

While I'd be pleased to propose the paucity of publications since my previous post was atypical, I shan't purport that preposterous prevarication upon you, my people.

(I need to purge my alliterator from time to time, else it spills forth into the poems. Thanks for your patience.)

****

It's been a busy summer at Vincenti Central. I'll tell you about the poetry stuff at the bottom of this post, but I think I'll deliver the rest to you in rough reverse chronological order....

I suppose my May appearance with Alex and Janel must have gone OK, because they were nice enough to invite me to appear with them again, this time at Rockwood Music Hall. I realize what most people think when they see the accordion appear (at least those who recognize the instrument - it's not a frequent sight at most Manhattan clubs), and it's a joy to be able to join in with great artists like these to bust up a few misconceptions. I think there are likely to be more such opportunities; if you'd like a chance to open your mind to a new free-reed experience, go "like" my FB page, or drop a note to the davidvincenti.com list email address and we'll keep you in the loop.

****

The reason I was available to join Alex and Janel was that I was not able to join my Staten Island Music School bandmates at the 2011 American Accordionists Association National Festival in Charleston. I have it on good authority that the Busso Accordion Orchestra rocked the ballroom with our southern medley; you can check out one of our warm-up sessions here (audio only).

****

I am now officially a Project Management Professional; last weekend I passed the PMP exam! All PMPs are honor-bound not to divulge any bit of the content of the exam, but this much I can tell you: Don't take it lightly when the prep materials tell you that you're at a real disadvantage if you haven't managed a large (seriously, LARGE) project previously in your career.

This was the first significant educational challenge I'd set for myself in quite a long time, and I'm a little surprised at how I settled into a study routine. Granted, it was a routine heavily tailored to my schedule (audio books for commuting time, microexercises for those moments before meetings start, etc.), and my family was gracious enough to give me the 4 Saturday mornings leading up the exam for uninterrupted study time. Sitting in a library studying... THAT brings a person back...

****

Finally, the Voices From History tour is taking shape. S. Thomas Summers and I trialed the event, in which we present stories from the lives of Galileo Galilei and a confederate soldier, at The Theater Company during Monroe Arts Center's May Open Studio day. We're pretty pleased with the way it comes across. So far we've got presentations planned in Campbell Hall, New York and Fanwood, NJ, and we're expecting to present more in the months to come. The best way to keep track of that is through FB, but don't worry, we'll find a way to get you the news.

****

We wish watermelons for you to welcome the warm weather as we wander away....

Rats. Fire up the alliteratinator!