Generic Haiku

What is the thing that
one has to do to have an
interesting time?

WWW

When we were writing, we went where we wouldn't
wither. Wildly wanting words, we waited
while wandering. Wolves with weird women
waded, weighted, waited. Weavers wove while
wrenches wracked, wrens warbled. Whole world
working without, while whistling whispers.




This poem is based on an internet acronym. This time I chose www. Previously I did a poem called OMG.

Excuse Poem

I forgot where I parked my car.
The police came and towed it
away. I lost my keys.
I lost my license. I
forgot your address.
And phone number.
I got lost on the way there.
I ran out of gas. I
couldn't see in the dark
because my headlights
were broken. I turned
around and went home.

I will call you when I get there.


Based on an exercise on Charles Bernstein and Bernadette Mayer's Experiments List.

Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Sound Poem

"Sound Poem" based on the previous post, cutting the words into nonsense syllables and being very careful not to make anything identifiable as a word.

I recommend reading this out loud with a particular emotion in mind. Perhaps love, since it is a wedding poem. Or disgust, since it is about the Kardashians. Maybe rage at the fact that these people are famous. Or laughter and humor, which should be self-explanatory.


Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Sound Poem

Etluc utof aves plew ret emy ure ilo oun frit en eko fes kyab eup. Henin iha meweed thop meve sogla jod dat tivit venoid icsup yameit osel dsig. Olif vemy salit sola lyno semu intes. Elot nard exym tysak resfo ict tru shen. Urenam uraso eawe resh doysmy fisdet woute ket tage hud.

Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Poem

I could only stand to watch the Kardashians for about 20 minutes. This poem is made up of words and phrases that Kim Kardashian uttered during those 20 minutes. This was also inspired by facebook. But don't hold that against the Dada intent here.


Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Poem

Pretty sexy, makeup so lame. It's a little weird. I have no idea we're sisters. Festivities up your ass. So glad for your picture. I love my last name. My life is so selfish. Do you need me? We have stages, my friends. I get lucky about a week out of the loop. Then I need five hundred hours, 10 minutes, truly. No joke.

Optic Topic

This poem was inspired by a typo, in which I realized that optic and topic were anagrams of each other, and by a conversation I had with a former classmate of mine, Gina Dunphy, about Dadaism.

Optic Topic

Open your eyes to the
people who ride
to nowhere.
If you can believe it,
conceive it, create it and then sedate it

The Ramones will immortalize you in a song from the beyond
once they are complete again.
Punks and Dadas, artists and singers
in unison in disharmonic disarray
cry out, calling, curdling, curling your elf toes.

Clouds (An Invisible Poem)

Grey clouds in the blue sky, last thing before I close my eyes, Think think about the metaphor, about what is not clichéd about how to express twilight and how to talk about clouds. Judy Collins said I really don’t know clouds at all and I think of that I say that every time I’m on an airplane. It sounds kind of silly to say that. What’s too stupid to be spoken is sung, said Voltaire but why is it so stupid so say you don’t know or don’t understand clouds, really understand them, not just meteorologically. I don’t understand as a poet, how to talk about them, how to be new with clouds. I am not stupid, just a poet who is struck by grey clouds in a dark blue sky at purple twilight.

--Written with my eyes closed, September 23rd

Poetry After Auschwitz/9/11

Poetry after Auschwitz 9/11

I.

Theodor Adorno after the atrocities of World War II were made know to the world, said “"To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric." Many scholars and artists have taken up this idea and rephrased it as a question, or a collection of questions. What is the responsibility of poets in light of such barbarity?

Certainly poets were writing poems at the time. It is what poets do and if you are a writer, for many writers, it’s all they can do in the face of horror. There were all kinds of poems and paintings recovered from people who died in the concentration camps. Many of the images were horrifying, but the artists who painted and poets who wrote could not cease to tell us what they saw. They were compelled to write, to leave something behind.

For the survivors, certainly, poetry provides a kind of succor for the soul when we find ourselves among such uncivilized cruelty. Perhaps it shouldn’t. Maybe that’s what Adorno meant. Maybe we have no right to give ourselves comfort at a time like that. Perhaps we have to just face the facts, as horrible as they are, with no window dressing, no images – horrible or beautiful – to ease the blow. All we deserve is journalism: a straightforward telling of the facts.

In fact, there are usually any number of heartfelt but terrible, sentimental, moralizing poems and stories written after a horrible event. We are too grief struck to be able to process it all. Our emotions come out too easily. And while people associate poetry and art with emotion, it is not true that we can write poetry and do it well when our hearts are on our sleeves. Poets, like everyone else, often need just a little distance to make sense of what they have just lived through. All they can really do is to record images of what they have seen, a kind of poetic journalism. Not a straightforward telling of the facts, but a mishmash of those images, all churned up and mixed up, ready to be sorted out by critics and academics down the line.


II.

I would not even begin to compare the events of 9/11 with Auschwitz, although the aftermath of 9/11 may very well be comparable. But to compare the deaths of 3,000 people in one day with the systematic extermination of millions over a period of 10 years is an absurd proposition. But there is no doubt that it was a tragic day that still lingers for many.

I started out writing this not because I want to write about 9/11. I’m actually tired of writing about 9/11. It has permeated my very consciousness and it seems that I am unable to write about anything else, overtly or inadvertently. Many of my theatrical concerns, including the inevitability of death, which I dealt with in Antigone, and the horrors of confinement and uncertainty, which I dealt with in my Guantanamo demonstration, have come directly from thinking about 9/11. Recently, when I tried to write a manifesto about myself as an unruly being, it turned into a meditation on 9/11.

And in fact, I had already written about September 11th years before it ever happened. In my poem, The City, written in 1998, I believe, I had written:

Window frames
hang heavy like fenders bent beneath truck
tires, sidewalk shattered. I could be
anywhere. Belfast.
Oklahoma. Beirut.

It didn’t take, for me, a whole lot of imagination to make the link between the abandoned American city and the images that I saw on the news. It didn’t take a huge stretch to imagine that our cities could one day be like other war-torn areas. My inclusion of Oklahoma City was one way to make that connection.

I wrote as much as I could for five days. I wrote again, six months or nine months later or something like that, when I noticed a guy in my neighborhood and developed a fascination with him. I did not write in the interim. And I did not write poetry for some time after – maybe a year, maybe 2 or 3. I don’t know if I didn’t write, or if I just didn’t write anything that I considered good. Maybe I never really stopped writing. But I perceived that I had stopped.

Years later, when confronted with Adorno’s edict in graduate school, “to write poetry after Auschwitz in barbaric,” even though I had rejected the notion, that was exactly what I had done. Faced with horrors that my emotions that the core of my being could not and might never process adequately, I had stopped writing poetry.


III.

One of the standards of poetry is that you write in images. In metaphors and similes. This is like that thing over there. But there was no point to writing in metaphor. The entire experience was real and metaphoric at the same time. It was a strange otherworld. It was hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t. I would wake up several mornings over the next six months in a panic, thinking I had just woken from a dream, that none of it was real, that I had made it all up.

For myself, without even being aware of it, without saying it consciously, it felt like at once it was such an overwhelming experience while at the same time, these were images that were all too familiar. They had become stock photographs. The broadcasters on the radio in New York that day kept saying this is like a movie, this is like a movie. And I thought, and said out loud to no one, no this is like television, this is like the news. This is like what happens every day in the rest of the world.

And it was true. We had already seen those images in our own country and around the world: the fireman carrying the dead baby from the child care center, the bomb in Beirut that was so strong it burned the patterns of the sheets onto the bodies of sleeping marines.

What use is there for metaphor when those images are so powerful on their own? Does poetry serve any purpose that journalism doesn’t in such a case? Does it help us to understand it any better to say this thing is like that thing? Or is it still incomprehensible, not to our conscious, rational, intelligent minds, but somewhere deeper, in that place where poetry touches us, where it works on our irrational, non-rational, subconscious mind?

IV.

I’m teaching poetry and in the process, I am slowly starting to write poetry again. I am revisiting my old poems which I haven’t really pulled out and looked at seriously in 7 or 8 years. Every once in a while I pull one out to submit somewhere to get published. But to seriously look at the poems, to even perform them in public, hasn’t really happened in a long time. I found myself, on this, the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, despite all of my attempts to ignore that day, thinking about the legacy it had had on me, as a writer and as a person. I wanted to revisit Adorno, to see I could make any sense out of my experience through that quote. I wanted to think about how a poet comes back from terror to poetry.

Manifesto of a Modern Woman

I did not set out to write about 9/11. In fact, I have been studiously avoiding it and all references. But still it comes out, even when trying to write about something else! So here are my thoughts, as usual, interspersed with other things, on the 10th anniversary of the event.

I have been experimenting with using strikethoughs to show choices that I have made in the text, so I am using that technique publicly for the first time.



I am made up feelings, not memories. I do not live in the
past if pressed
I can summon(s)
the memories, remember the moment the men
in suits covered in soot slow as statues in hardening cement
walked up the streets the
disappearance of a building the
long lines to use the anachronistic pay phone in the park
see and says strung together like tin cans
across states a continent but I prefer to let memories
fade in favor of feelings the tears that come forcefully on hearing
siren after siren after siren song the sun shining in my eyes
the darkness in my lungs the feeling of not taking abreath after breath.

I am made up of feelings that don't fade, of love anger courage.

I am a woman who is made of feelings once attached to memories that must fade, shed like an extra skin, an old layer, no so much to make me new but a skin shed no longer needed so that I can livebreathe.

Authencity. Bah!

Ok, so this is why I don't get very many books read, especially when I am trying to do research. I read 3 or 4 pages and then I have to stop and write 3 or 4 pages of commentary that turns into a blog. This time, it is about the return, always the return, to that infernal word:

Authenticity.

I can't tell you how many times I have read about poetry slam and the authenticity of the author/poet's voice and how the strength of poetry slam is from that authenticity.

Humbug.

I thought that we had long ago abandoned the modernist notion of an authentic self, a holistic sense of identify that you could point to and say "this is me." I thought that long ago, for example, black feminists had said I'm black and I'm a woman and I come from a certain socioeconomic class and I have an urban or a rural and a northern or southern upbringing and all of these things go into making me the multifaceted person that I am and sometimes several of these things come into conflict so I sometimes have divided loyalties and so I don't really have a stable subject position from which I can speak. Then again, about 150 years ago, Walt Whitman wrote Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself. For I am large and contain multitudes.

This was my problem with poetry slam 15 years ago, when I dabbled in it. I saw this functioning as well. People pimping out their identities as a woman, as an angry (or depressed - take your pick) college student, as a gay man, as a grandma, as a Latino, etc. etc., giving the audience what they want to hear, spewing out cliches in the process. When I did my bitch feminist poems I placed. I took home money. When I did poems that were not only more complex, filled with more original images, were metaphorical and lyrical and also were performed every bit as well, I got lukewarm scores. (Not responses however. The responses I got after the slam was over, were generally very positive, dare I say, fantastic.)

Besides which, it's a poetry slam. Poetry. Poetry is about imagination and images and language. What you write about is not as important as the way you write about it. You can go ahead and write identity work, write political work, write about -- heaven help us -- flowers. I love to quote Bryon Gysin. Writing is 50 years behind painting. As long as we insist on some kind of authenticity of the writer's voice and experience instead of on the actual work, daring to do abstraction perhaps, or at least mess with the conventions as visual artists have done, we will continue to be 50 years behind painting.

I did a project a few years ago on the Iranian-American artist/photographer/filmmaker Shirin Neshat. I read a quote from a Turkish artists who said that the non-western artist, the "other", is always playing catch-up. It is assumed that they will always be one step behind. When artists in the west had already moved on to abstract work in painting, they were at the same time praising middle eastern artists for painting nudes. This is the assumption that there is a natural evolution to art and culture, so nonwestern artists must paint nudes, their culture must be advanced enough that they can paint nudes, before they can do abstraction.

This would seem to be the case with poetry slam. Many in academia praise poetry slam for getting young people to care about poetry, praising it for giving a voice to "marginalized groups." Fine. Good. But I think the problem with getting young people to care about poetry has been the presence of poetry teachers who were somewhat lacking. Who looked at poetry as a higher art and too good for the common person. You were supposed to read poetry for the same reason you were supposed to eat broccoli. You could have been doing ass-kicking poetry readings for years and it would have encouraged students to read poetry.

But we are perpetuating and praising poets for doing what post-modernism (and in some cases, it's parallel movement post-colonialism) have said is not possible. If there is always a doubled consciousness in post-colonialism, what self is the most authentic? And ultimately, does it really matter? The exploration of the fractured, doubled, shattered self, in fractured, doubled language, in imagery, is so much more interesting than trying to create and perform an "authentic self" for the masses. And how condescending to the audiences of poetry slam to assume that creating a populist poetry means that we have to give people what we think they want from us, to assume that we have to "dumb down" our poetry for them and save our good, "literary" poetry for editors of literary magazines, for people who can appreciate them. I have seen more than one poet who has good, difficult, beautiful poetry refuse to read those poems before a slam audience, choosing instead to do easily digested work that they know will go over well.

My critique is not of the poets themselves (at least not entirely), but of the people who perpetuate that system -- the academic, the promoters of authenticity in the form of slams, Def Poetry Jam, those who perpetuate a worn out system of reference that condescends to audience and poet alike, that continues to keep them at arm's length, always one step behind the "innovators," rather than encouraging poets to do what poets ought to do best: to create new and fresh images for our time, using our references, rather than cliches of what they see on television of what they think the audience expects them to be, which is someone else's version of authenticity anyway. Poets should be experimenting with language, taking us to new levels of seeing and understanding, rather than to perpetuate the old, the given, that which we have already been living with.