Speaking of work that sounds good. . .

Go enjoy the poem "Epic" by Ange Mlinko over at poetry daily. Passion, history, revolution, and reflection--all in just three concise and beautifully rhymed stanzas. Very cool.

If you like what Poetry Daily does, send the organization some financial love this holiday season. This note explains what's going on.

Holy Moley! The Chapel of Inadvertant Joy sounds good so far!

I read McDaniel's "The Grudge" on Poetry Daily two weeks ago, and I loved it. Poetry Daily's website placed his latest book, The Chapel of Inadvertent Joy, only two clicks away, so I bought it. Thanks, University of Pittsburgh Press.

For me, a new book of poetry is like a new CD or album download. I flip through the whole, looking for things that catch my ear. I stop. I sample. I skip around some more until something else catches my ear. This can go on for hours or days.

Then, eventually, I settle down--and settle in--for a long swim from beginning to end. A swim? What can I say? Metaphors always draw me in--short similes to long conceits. I'm listening. That is, if the metaphors are novel or exciting--if they work.

McDaniel's metaphors work. From the six or so poems I've read so far, I can honestly say that they are exciting. They crack the world open and pull out new treasures--ideas to put between my teeth. Minerals, vegetables, flesh. Good stuff so far. And it's not all "dark" as some might say. Underlying this work, and sometimes in full bloom, is a delicious sense of humor. I'll post more about the book once I've read it from cover to cover.

The Blog's New Title

You may have noticed that the blog has a new title. I consider the old title a "working title." This new title means I don't have to change links, and, more importantly, I think "abandoned balloons, offered poems, and blossoms outwitting winter" more accurately describes what I'm trying to do here.

Don't you?

Thanksgiving

I love the idea of this holiday tremendously. In practice, it's a damn mess. But in theory--as an idea--this a beautiful practice. Gather together, eat together, and express thankfulness together.

What am I thankful for?

My daughter. Over the holiday weekend, she turned three months old. She is healthy. Her mere presence lifts the spirits of those around her. She gives my life new purpose--and joy. The past few months have been difficult, as evidenced by the lack of posts, but things are looking up.

Here's to a grand close for 2013, and year full of wonders to appreciate. Cheers.

From 1986 comes. . .

life in 2019.

The latest essay at the Reanimation Library's Word Processor blog covers Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century. The essay by rahel aima is funny and insightful. Enjoy.

Studio B's VALUE exhibit offers alternative to Hallmark version of Mother's Day

Visitors to the VALUE. woman. artist. mother. exhibit expecting Hallmark notions of motherhood and art will be deeply disappointed, and that's a good thing. The exhibit is a collection of works by artists who happen to be mothers--and it's a smart and moving show that resists simple ideas and superficial emotions. I'm not lying when I say that some of the pieces moved visitors to tears.

The exhibit is a forum of sorts, where the artists speak through their chosen media to the reality of motherhood and art in their lives. Seventeen artists are featured, and each artist uses her space in the gallery to display works responding to a specific artistic term--a term that also has value to mothers. For example, one artist responded to the term "composition," another responded to "juxtaposition."  Peggy Lonjin Olley, responded to the word "Concept" with three sweeping forms made of wood and natural fibers. Her pieces were sad and beautiful. They suggested struggle and growth, and this was a piece that caused some teary eyes.

Each artist also included a short statement about her artistic term and what that term meant to her work and her life. The written component to the exhibit was a welcome touch. The perspectives, stories, and reflections--even poems--shared in the statements make the pieces on display all the more moving.

Angela Colasanti and Tara Dolan co-designed the exhibit. I hope the two of them get to take this exhibit elsewhere. There are galleries in Philadelphia that would benefit from hosting it.

Final note: I know that you want photos, but the moment I walked into the gallery space I turned off my phone. There's a sacredness to this exhibit that I didn't want to cheapen with photos. If you want to see the featured pieces, please visit the gallery. Hours and directions are at the Studio B website.

For Mothers Day: An Art Exhibit

Looking for something to do on Mother's Day weekend this year? Why not an art gallery? Why not an art exhibit about motherhood?

VALUE: WOMAN. ARTIST. MOTHER. opens Friday night, May 10 and includes works across a range of media--all from artists responding to their motherhood experiences. The exhibit features works from seventeen mothers, including grandmothers, young mothers, stepmothers, adoptive, and foster mothers.

Sounds cool, right? I know. Details:

The show is curated by Angela Colasanti and Tara Dolan, and exhibits work by Colasanti and Dolan (also mothers) and Linda Rohrbach-Austerberry, Mary Brady Begnardi, Debra Burkert, Stephanie Corfee, Rachel Blosser-Derstine, Elizabeth Flaherty, Juanita Gaspari, Deborah Hamburger, Peggy Lonjin Olley, Meredith Mustard, Darla Rodriguez, Patti Tinsman-Schaffer, Sarah Smith, Teresa Vadala and Elisabeth Walakovits.

Colasanti explains in a press release:

We sought to create a broad canvas of diverse motherhood experiences, as well as a wide range of artistic media.  As each artist was added, the common threads between their individual experiences emerged into a series of cohesive artistic themes, often centered on dual meanings of other art terms, such as balance, form or tone.

Should be a quite an exhibit.
It runs through June 15, 2013. Parking is on street and in a lot across the street. Studio B is located at 39A East Philadelphia Avenue, Boyertown, PA 19512 and open Thursday through Saturday 11am-3pm, and by appointment.  

Am I going? Sure as hell am. I'll definitely be there for the opening. I'm looking forward to seeing work by several of artists I know--and artists I don't. Check this blog next week to read my response to the exhibit and individual works. And, who knows? Perhaps some readers who visit the exhibit will share their comments.

Profile of William Zinsser at 90

This is one of the reasons I read the Times. I appreciate how this article reminds us of the spoken quality of good writing--of how Zinsser's methods and advice can help a writer to craft a piece that would is just as beautiful to read as to hear.

Poetry in America: Hoagland's Vision

In a post from April 13 on the blog (called "The Stream") over at Harpers.org, Tony Hoagland argues that we as a nation failed to keep the flame of poetry alive in education in the latter half of the century. Fresh from his bout at AWP where he presented "Camouflage & Capitalism: The Intellectual Appropriation of American Poetry" and beat-up academia for its affect on how we regard poetry in this country, Hoagland takes the mic at the press conference with his side of the fight: "Twenty Little Poems that Could Save America."

What I love about Hoagland's argument is how it appeals to me on an emotional level. Through clear scenes, Hoagland shows me students suffering through poems that are supposed to be "deep" or "complicated" and require, as he puts it, "a priest" to reveal its mysteries. I was reminded of a move he made in his presentation at AWP: a question he asked that basically went something like this: How many of us [he's referring to all of the writers and teachers of writing in his audience] while preparing for class, have considered two poems, both beautiful and interesting and worthy of discussion, but we choose the more complicated one because the students can "get" the easier one on their own, and because they're paying a lot of money for school, discussing the more complicated poem feels more appropriate. He presents scenes where people discuss some of the twenty poems he proposes, and in those scenes, people listen, people disagree, but people come to appreciate the craft.

Hoagland's "twenty poems" are not as "easy" as we might think, but the point seems to be that they encourage not the need for a priest class, but discussion. Honest, let's-talk-about-this, discussion. Considering how much we all seem to shout at each other, perhaps these poems might do some good.

Old-timey Reviews Make My Day

Solid review of the 600 Grant Street Rooftop.

Absolutely solid.


In case you can't see the text, Beth L writes:

I attempted to land my human powered auto-gyro on this roof top during my excursion from Whetherbee to Quintorp. I found the ground crew most amiable and helpful. The view of Pitts-boro was splendid as well. Bully!

What is a poet?

I found this perspective from Tony Hoagland on youtube this morning. It was recorded in October of 2011 at the Poetry Foundation as part of the Chicago Ideas Week series (think Ted Talks with Chicago folks). In his talk, Hoagland suggests that poets are the complainers of society. Their pain is our pain, articulated. Where as some are forced to speechlessness by some events, the poet is forced to speech.

I don't mean for my summary to make Hoagland's talk sound romantic. It's not. And, it's not finger-wagging either. It's a clear argument that good poetry comes from that person we don't usually want to listen to--that person who our culture, with its relentless enthusiasm for positivity, asks us to ignore. Hoagland uses personal anecdotes and well-known poems to make his point. If you write poetry, make a cup of tea/grab a drink and listen closely. It's inspiring.

After listening, I was compelled to reconsider what I am giving to my writing group for tomorrow's workshop. Will I turn in schlock molded from the shape of my comfortable middle-class life or articulate deformity?

How is that writing group going, you ask? Well, one of is in now New York. Our Friday afternoon "band practice" is a bit more precious now. We meet at 30th Street Station just a few hours before she catches her train home to her new city. Weird to write that.

Victory is mine, Inbox!

 

The relentless flow of time will soon enough deposit a mountain of emails on me, but for now I have this little celebration from the programmers at Google. Bless them.

April Madness Continues at Powell's Books

Not many surprises this round. Perhaps Gary Snyder losing to Theodore Rhoeotke and Walt Whitman to Emily Dickinson--but those juggernauts were fairly evenly matched going into this round.

http://www.powells.com/poetrymadness

Oh, and poetry is 15% off this month.

National Survey of College Graduates

The National Survey of College Graduates is an effort by the National Science Foundation to gather data on the employment particulars of individuals with college degrees of various levels. It's a massive survey with tens of thousands of respondents (according to the Office of Management and Budget), and for the past three months, the Census Bureau has sent me a few pieces of snail mail encouraging me to take the survey. Last weekend, I finally did (well, the online version anyway--I'm sure it's the same). It was kind of fun, actually.

As I clicked on various responses and entered information, I thought about the work my college degrees prepared me to do, and every few pages, I sat back and thought about the trajectory of my life over the past twenty years. I thought about several jobs I had--the ones closely related to my education and the ones that weren't. I thought about the degree to which our society values the work I do. I considered how rewarded I am by the work I do--that's a series of questions on the survey, actually: all about salary, benefits, and satisfaction. I considered those I know who aren't satisfied by their work--those with work thanks to their degrees, and those with work unrelated to their degrees.

The results are available for download here at this NSF webpage. When I get around to downloading and reading this thirty-seven megabyte file, I'll post an update.

One more thing: Besides gathering data on college graduate employment, I'm sure there's some interesting research going on into the workings of a survey this big. I mean, how does one manage a voluntary survey this large?

Perhaps with rhetoric like this:

Start with Out-of-date Science

I love this opening from the Reanimation Library's latest "Word Processor" feature:

If you want to learn anything, start with out-of-date science. You can read the latest reports of scientific journals, study advanced biology and chemistry and so forth, but that will only get you so far. You need disreputable texts, you need fanciful conjecture, old wives' tales, hasty assumption, poor observation, bias, faulty method.

Colin Dickey takes us through C. P. Idyll's Abyss, and in the process reminds us of the folly and beauty of taxonomic quests. All taxonomic quests seem beautiful and foolish, but so deep underwater, so far from sunlight--all of that work is under more pressure and a whole lot less light.

March Madness Ends. April Madness Begins

Greatest Living Poet? Greatest Deceased Poet? Greatest Poet in Translation?

Oh, it's on alright.

Powell's Books, perhaps the coolest independent bookstore to also be gigantic, has created a bracket system for the 2013 Month of Poetry, which as we all know, is April. Head over to what the folks at Powell's are dubbing Poetry Madness and vote in this single elimination tournament. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and vote as you see fit in this first round.

First round eliminations will be difficult on all of us, I know. Is it unfair that Li Young-Lee has been pitted against Kevin Young? Is it nonsensical that Billy Collins is up against Mary Oliver? Perhaps, but the league commissioners decided this, in their own words, as:

Three or four of us chatted over coffee and doughnuts.

Powell's has been in Portland, Oregon for decades, and silliness like this is part of the culture. A cat, Fup, inhabited the store for years, and in the early days of Powell's online presence, monthly email newsletters included a short section on the cat's adventures as well as reviews, and interviews.

Customer service is good--and I enjoy shopping from them. I don't know if I'm going to vote in Poetry Madness, but I thought I should share it--and the store--with others.


Who am I kidding? Of course I'll vote.

I liked this short animated film, and now I recommend it to you.

Two years ago, one late Saturday night, as I climbed into the rabbit-warren of the internet exploring yet another curiosity (How does one make cheese? How many spoken languages are left on planet Earth?), I found references to this short animated film, The Hidden Life of the Burrowing Owl. I wasn't able to actually find the film, just references to it.

It wasn't on Amazon, Netflix, or iTunes, so I wrote the director and asked him how to get it. He sent me a copy for free. He's that cool. The film is sad, funny, adorable and very clever, and I'm happy to report that it's now available on iTunes. Yay!

You can get it here on iTunes, or just go to iTunes and search burrowing owl. Now if only Amazon would distribute it. Amazon needs to show more respect to makers of short films.

Oh, what was I searching for that night two years ago? I was looking for videos of burrowing owls. An animated short? Close enough. Actually, better.

Vague Documentation

I was here. This is a college campus in the autumn of 2012. A student uses her phone on the way to class. My friend takes this photo, and I and another friend are next to him.

And, now the weird part. If my timeline has a halfway point, that afternoon was it. It's not that my life is going downhill from here. Hardly. It was just a feeling I had, something I felt going into that day, and something I felt departing it. The feeling of midpoint.

Perhaps I was merely hopped up on caffeine and loratadine, and these are the iffy memories of a re-wired brain fighting seasonal allergies. Well.

It was a nice day. I'm glad I was with my friends. I'm glad I have this photo.

I read an essay and think about an old friend.

In graduate school, I had the pleasure of taking a course on Classical Greek Rhetoric (taught by Dr. John Poulakos) with fellow graduate student, Steve Llano. I was in the English Department, Steve, Communications, and we hung out a few times: pizza, beer, Doctor Who. We also talked about the intersections of our teaching. Steve taught rhetoric and debate. I taught composition (writing). We were cool guys. Steve, also a clever guy (and still cool), influenced my thinking about composition, and for that I will always be grateful. I still read his posts on Google+ from time to time. Once he described what he was doing with his debating students as "languaging." Like I said, clever.

This morning, reading Peter Elbow's 1999 essay from Written Communication, "In Defense of Private Writing," I re-discovered a moment in the essay that I think is quite brilliant--a moment where again, I get to see the cool intersection of composition and debate. Elbow is tackling the tricky idea that writing can be a private act (even though we learn it socially), and he writes in his essay that some of the absolutist-sounding claims about composition should be seen less as positions of victory, and more as lenses through which we might see the world. He writes:

". . . if more people understood that lens statements and empirical evidence had only positive force and not negative force, they would be quicker to notice when they had slid into an unfruitful either/or argument. This understanding might even temper the hunger for winning as we know it. If by winning we mean demolishing the enemy view, this is impossible. If by winning we mean making everyone accept our position and feel the opposing one as old-fashioned, retrograde, naughty, shameful, or stupid, this is indeed possible. We see it all the time. But such winning is really losing because it robs the community of the fuller understanding that we need. I fear we may be (or perhaps recently have been) in such a condition among composition scholars: a condition where members had come to feel that the private lens, the sense in which language has a private dimension, was illegitimate or naughty.

There is only one way to really win—but winning is not a good word for this happy outcome: getting people to see the value of our  lens, getting them habitually to try it out when they want to understand something—even people who do not quite like our lens or are not disposed toward looking through it. Surely, the best way to get reluctant people to look through our lens is to be willing to look through theirs.

Winning. Don't misunderstand my quoting of Elbow here. I don't see Elbow's position here as excuse to suffer fools. This moment of wisdom reminds me that any conclusions I want to make about a topic—if I want them to matter—are only arrived at through much careful observation and consideration (as in being considerate), and to mix a metaphor, listening. Something that debaters are well-trained in. How often do I remind myself of this? How often do I take the time to demonstrate this to my students? Yes, but do I do it rigorously enough?

Anyway, all of this is probably a bit too nostalgic for a post, but this morning's reading was a pleasant reminder of the good times with Steve.

Man Of Mystery; Fred Siegel

Fred Siegel's show, Man of Mystery, has its last performance tonight at South Street Magic at 8:30. Details below.
 
The work is a brilliant one-man (basically) performance memoir composed of stories from Siegel's life as a denizen of magic shops, a dynamo at Coney Island, and a disciple of the dark spaces people gather to be amazed.

There's a hilarious "dream-sequence" that I have the feeling changes with each performance. I can't wait to see that--and the entire show--again. Why do I love this show?

I love this show because it reminded me of why I like to write poetry. There's something magical about the idea of reaching across space and time to try and affect someone's view--to excite, to amaze, to amuse, to cause someone else to question thoughts, feelings, or perspectives. Siegel knows better (PhD from NYU) to waste time addressing this directly, but that point comes through elegantly in his stories. Through his performance he creates moments that are funny, tender, strange--even uncomfortable--but above all, the audience is treated to moments of mystery. Just when we think we have Siegel figured out, we don't. The only think left to do is listen and observe more carefully.

Artists, performers, and anyone who makes art for others--even those who just followed an obsession--will be captured by this show. That said, the occasional behind-the-scenes look into the world of magic (not magic tricks) should interest everyone.

This is my second time seeing the show. If the dream sequence does change, I will note it in a future post. I hope the show is extended. If not, I'll post again the next time it appears.

Get tickets online here.

South Street Magic is at:

519 South 4th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147

(267) 519-3733

Butch Geography

Stacey Waite's book of poems, Butch Geography, is good. Really good. I pulled it out of the stack of books I brought home from Boston. Made some coffee, and started to read.

It was so good I forgot to drink my coffee. Engrossing, yes, but it's also tough on the heart. I actually had to put it down about half-way through. Only my cold coffee made me realize how long I had spent reading and re-reading these poems about gender, growing up--and not, fitting in--and not, and being tough--and not. Waite makes these poems look easy--I felt like she could be telling me these poems over a beer--but there's a complexity that kept bringing me back--will bring me back later this week to finish it. As I said, it's good.

I'll post another update when I finish it. Here's the link: Butch Geography by Stacey Waite.

Unpacking from AWP 2013 in Boston

After every trip, I always spend several days unpacking the little things I collected: notes and ideas on scraps of paper, menus, maps, even the occasional napkin or two. With a writing conference the piles are larger: books, bookmarks, flyers, pages of notes--in addition to all of the usual strange mementos just mentioned. This year's AWP conference in Boston is like unpacking a pile of presents.

I attended several panels and took pages of notes. I bought books from Tupelo Press by Stacey Waite, CM Burroughs, from Many Mountains Moving: Rebecca Foust, and from Saturnalia Books: Natalie Shapero's No Object. I also picked up issues of great journals: Bat City Review, One Story and 32 Poems.

New discoveries for me? One Story (each issue holds--you guessed it--one story), Prime Number (a journal of poetry and prose from Press 53), and rkvry (I was happy to read a story from Randall Brown in the latest issue). I also discovered how much I miss this sphere--this creative writing sphere--of my life. Links to these places will be on the right.

New projects are in the works. Life goes on.