Seven Ways of Looking at a Necktie: a Twitter poem

Apologies to Wallace Stevens.

One time, while surfing in the bluest ocean that ever evaporated into sky, I accidentally swallowed a sea slug.

Swirling dust in a desert of cupcake mix.

When flowers rained like diamonds, and distant strains of a pan flute grazed mist-soaked hilltops, a forlorn sheep bleated in the afternoon.

Three tigers prowl in a jungle of their own making.

As they argued over the nature of the soul, Picasso became enraged, and punched Matisse in the mouth. Matisse bled pure color.

Fiesta, a party. Fiesta, a car.

Burning with the fury of a thousand sunlamps.


[Original version starts here and ends here. Oh, and the tie is here.]

a Palin poetry reading

Majestic stuff.

[via Slate's Twitter feed]

blazing through Friday

Friday was a bit of a crazy day for me. But at least it was a musical, poetically crazy day.

In 2nd period, a group presented its research on "old school rappers" that launched a discussion of image versus authenticity. (I learned that "old school," for sophomores, means the 90s. Ah, youth.) Third period took a poetry walk around the school, lucky enough to see the red-winged blackbird that occupies the freshman pond.

As they've been studying Langston Hughes' poetry, my three junior classes were introduced to the world of the Blues, hearing classics performed by Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, Skip James, T-Bone Walker, and more. I started with Walker's "Stormy Monday," since it fits the classic pattern of the 12-bar blues. This would become significant later.

Class got out, and it was time to prepare for a Student Congress tournament for middle schoolers, with a small, but boisterous turnout. It was mostly a dry run for another we'll offer this coming fall.

But the day was just getting started. Up next: a drive out to Elma, or, more specifically, the Grays Harbor County Fairgrounds.

The formula: The Elma Relay for Life + The Mike Dean Project = annual tradition. Friday night from 11 until two, we played for the third time in three years.

As the Luminarium ceremony started, I saw a few Capital students from my junior classes across the way, waving frantically. Turned out they were part of a walking team, and they were as surprised to see me there as I was to see them. They eventually joined the energetic Elma crowd, right up front, blasted by Mike and Brian's rockin' guitars, Jeff's funked up bass groove, Kent's keyboard antics, and the powerful vocal stylings of the audience's other favorite teacher, Kim Hinderlie.

A couple songs into our set, Mike turned around and said, "Stormy Monday."

We launched in, and the Capital crew busted out in smiles. Later on, during a break, one said I must have planned it that way.

Of course I did.

elite eight: Whitman sings the blues

For inspiration on this first day of the Elite Eight, we turn not the spirits of the game, who are notoriously fickle, but rather to the spirit of Walt Whitman, the mangy prophet.

Song of a Quarterfinal

I loaf and lounge in the TV's gaze, observing a game of college hoops.
I, now thirty years old in close-to-perfect health begin,
hoping to cease not till commercial break.

I recline and let the apparitions of a thousand layups, fadeaways, alleys-oop,
born of the merging of desire and dream,
play and re-play on this electric canvas.

The jumpers and the dribblers, the passers and dunkers: the same.
The short, the tall, the lunky, the lanky: the same.
The Lawsons, the Thabeets, the Aldriches, the Hansbroughs: the same.

Glass, steel, cord, hardwood, paint,
glaze of sweat and the supplication of a halfcourt heave,
out of this tumult of noise and smell and motion,
four visions arise.

Tigers, shelled by a shot-block, innards drooping from the husk.
Panthers locked in death-dance with wild-cats, brother against brother, clawing and scraping until the elders collapse in defeat.
Cardinals swooping, spiraling, unstoppable.
Tar Heels choking in the dust of a hundred thousand covered wagons.

I recline, lodged between the seeing and the knowing,
waiting for the whistle, this call in the midst of the crowd:
My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.

sweet 16: an NCAA bracket poem in sixteen lines

Old Father Gumption and his mistress, Lady Luck, have together whittled the NCAA bracket down to sixteen. Eight games arrive Thursday and Friday. Only poetry can provide a prediction of the outcome. Poetry with YouTube links, that is.


2009 Sweet 16 Bracket Prediction Poem

Forget the past. '08 is just a memory.
Mizzou falls to the cats from Memphis, Tennessee.

Sorry, Purdue. You beat Huskies from Washington,
But Calhoun earns top dollar, so your time is done.

Xavier, in a down year, brought back super yields,
Until the crash. Meet Tyrell Biggs and Levance Fields.

The Pope declares: hatred of Duke is not a sin.
Duke gets the calls, no doubt. But 'Nova gets the win.

Gonzaga brings their A-game against UNC;
The spirits forecast Heytvelt over Psycho-T.

The Orangemen hope to dominate Blake Griffin's squad,
However, sadly, nothing rhymes with Devendorf.

The Arizona Wildcats--only 12th seed left--
Will take the game from Louisville. A major theft.

Lastly: this year's Kansas takes on Izzo's crew.
'08 is just a memory. Winner: MSU.

this poem... sucks

Elizabeth Alexander, unlike Maya Angelou, hasn't enjoyed a boost in sales from the inauguration, the news reports. Bafflingly, the article offers no real explanation, just saying that the poem lacked "spark."

There's a better explanation: Her. Delivery. Sank. The. Poem. It sounded trite, even if it might have seemed interesting on the page.

Nobody buys poetry books anymore. And even fewer want bad poetry.

that inimitable poetry-reading voice

Terry Teachout:

Today's literary critics have fallen into the unfortunate habit of using the word "voice" when they mean "style." It's easy to see why that metaphorical usage has become popular -- a writer with a strongly individual style often seems to be speaking directly to the reader -- but appearances can be deceiving, at times cruelly so. Take Raymond Chandler, the creator of Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled private eye with a heart of mush. On paper Marlowe was forever tossing off snappy side-of-the-mouth wisecracks ("He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food"). Humphrey Bogart played him in "The Big Sleep," and you know what he sounded like. But what about the real-life author who put the words in Bogie's mouth? Brace yourself: Chandler's mild-mannered speaking voice bore an uncanny resemblance to the milksop whine of Elmer Fudd.

How do I know? Because Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, interviewed Chandler in 1958 for a BBC radio broadcast, a tape of which survives. More than a few of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century spoke over the BBC at one time or another, and to hear them is usually to be astonished, sometimes because they sound so wrong and sometimes because they sound so right. Max Beerbohm, the great Edwardian essayist and caricaturist, made several BBC broadcasts during World War II, and his precise, wistfully gentle voice turns out to have been ideally suited to his witty prose.

I'm not a huge fan of books on tape, or of poetry readings, but there are a few exceptions. My favorite out-loud poet is e.e. cummings, with his lilting cadences and musicality. Even better: in some recordings he sounds exactly like Winnie the Pooh.

reading poetry with a barcode scanner

I've dabbled in randomesque poetry from time to time, so I get its aesthetic. But, to be good, even randomness has to mean. Joan Houlihan, reviewing Matthea Harvey's "Flatland," explains:

If “to read” means to follow with your eyes, one word after another, until a text becomes comprehensible, then I cannot say I’ve read Modern Life. If, on the other hand, “to read” means to scan, in the sense of reading labels, like a grocery store’s optical reader, or if it means to observe various-sized and colored containers without being able to see what’s inside, or if it means to skim, admiring the typeface design and visual placement on the page, or if it means to obtain data from a storage medium (the page), and transfer said data to another storage medium (the brain) via the movement of eyes, then I can say I have read this book. But what does such a reading mean? I can’t say I enjoyed it, nor can I say I didn’t enjoy it, since each word, then each poem, overwrites the previous one. Was I changed by the experience? I don’t know. I don’t think I had an experience.

With only other poets left to read poets, with critics at a loss to read or evaluate poems (how to read or evaluate a poem not meant for a reader of the first type, above?), and with a blurb-storm that blows over the landscape with such force the landscape is itself is in danger of being obliterated, poetry has entered its Golden Age of Logorrhea.

That's the diagnosis. What's the cure?

[via AL Daily]

a lament for the Mariners

Alas! This sodden team is dead,
Adrowned in muck and mire.
For once the other team's ahead,
From Rainier's slopes will surge lahar
To douse the rally fire.




[Tacky tie provided gratis.]

a twenty-minute poetic analysis

Yeah, I'm practicing. I make my students do this all the time, so this should be easy, right?

The poem: "Shampoo & Sponge Bath" by J.W. Marshall.

The challenge: write a coherent commentary on a poem I've never before seen, covering at least three specific features, all within 20 minutes.

The results:

The poem presents a vivid and shocking picture of the frailty of human existence. There is nothing so humbling, the speaker of the poem obliquely suggests, as a shampoo and sponge bath: being taken into someone else's care, someone else who may only partly understand the "mess" that the speaker has become due to the ravages of age or extended illness.

The poet employs several literary devices to amplify the reader's sense of the speaker's humility and humiliation, and to strike up empathy; the reader is meant to not only visualize, but feel the speaker's plight.

One device, polysyndeton, in the fourth stanza, illuminates the comprehensive and cumulative nature of the speaker's hapless and somewhat helpless situation: the water from the bath covers his "gown and skin and sheets." (The lack of punctuation and the additional conjunction suggests the totality of the spill--the reader rushes through the line, much like the water "slopped" all over.) The staff assisting the speaker are careless and hurried, so that the speaker's humiliation is magnified by a form of psychic isolation.

The immersion becomes almost like a baptism; the speaker dies "and happily that time" when his head is placed in a metal basin for washing. This form of hyperbolic symbolism suggests that the immersion, much like the spiritual awakening of baptism, opens the speaker's eyes to his place in the cosmos: feeble, small, and sopping wet.

The poet further describes the smallness by recourse to simile--"Like a tuber on the pillow"--though this is offered only provisionally, since it is contrasted immediately with an alternative, "or the shadow of a spade." On the literal level, the speaker is physically shrunken by extended bed-rest. Figuratively, the speaker has been dug up from life; the reference to the spade might also ominously presage the approach of death and burial. (The hyperbolic death at the end of the first part lends to that particular reading.)

So, not only in the first part but in the poem's entirety, the theme of human frailty in the face of death, the existential crisis upon the discovery, through sight and sensation, that humans inhabit a shriveling body, tiny compared to the "terrifyingly large sky," is made clear and powerful. The reader, influenced by the surprising confluence of banal detail and philosophical observation, cannot go away unmoved.

There are a few reaches, but overall, passable. I use semicolons only when in a hermeneutic mood, I've noticed.

happy birthday, PZ

It's his 51st. As always, this necessitates a poem.




A temper burning hotter than a tower of flaming tires:
Who's that conflagration? PZ Meyers.

His ire directed straight at evolutional deniers:
What's his name again? PZ Miers.

Oh, woe betide the kill-filed that his acrid wit expires,
Their visc'ra disemvoweled with a pair of rusty pliers;
It's only what's expected for a crowd of cranks and liars.

Can you spell it right? PZ Myers.

the poetry sweatshop

In Princeton, no less.

A young man in horn-rimmed glasses who said he majored in English at Princeton challenged someone to write a villanelle. “On what subject?” asked Kate. He thought it over a bit and said, “Monkeys.” It seemed to me he was trying to stump them — requesting an intricate and difficult form on an inconsequential topic — though I couldn’t tell if it was out of whimsy or smarminess. Either way, the guy was astonished when, a couple of minutes later, Kate handed him a villanelle — which we’d practiced in the studio, but only once — that was as flawless as it was instant....

You'll have to click through to read it. It ain't bad.

to see oursels as ithers see us

Today I videotaped myself as part of a practice run for the National Board certification process. I'll begin official recording next week, for my small-group component.

Nothing is as excruciating as self-observation. There is a place in this world for autobiography, but largely as a form of self-serving fable-making. Auto-anthropology, though, is entirely masochistic.

I wore the tie pictured at right. The camera survived.

(Burns poem here.)

and indeed there will be time

For the first time, I'm teaching a senior lit class that gets to study Hamlet.

Which means, of course, bringing up T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Which makes this mashup perfectly apt.

[Thanks to Jason Kuznicki for the pointer. "If I were an English teacher," Jason writes, "I’d play this in my introductory poetry class." Some of us are so fortunate.]

e pluribus, McClane

First it was Walt Whitman. Then came Langston Hughes. Now, spanning the last three decades, an American Everyman for the ages:

When terrorist-slash-exceptional thief Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) taunts hero John McClane (Bruce Willis), "Who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child?" and asks this "Mr. Cowboy" if he really thinks he stands a chance, McClane's answer—"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker"—marks the moment that McClane, an everyman, assumes the mantle of America's archetypal heroes: Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Gunsmoke's Marshall Dillon, and others who have been so vital to American boyhood. Unlike the many action-movie one-liners that are rooted in the hero's narcissism, McClane's stems from our collective wish-fulfillment. He is not referring to himself, not suggesting an "I" or a "me" but an us.

Walt Whitman, idiot?

I've been reading a lot of Langston Hughes' poetry lately, doing my best to help students appreciate its nuances, its power. Part of that requires understanding Hughes' poetic lineage: son of Carl Sandburg, grandson of Walt Whitman.

It takes work, and a level of care and dedication to the poem. It raises my hackles a bit, then, when Joe Carter writes,

As you'll recall from your high school literature class, Whitman's paean of narcissism contained the oft-quoted line,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The reason that Whitman could--using the language of poetry--make such a claim is because he was--using the language of philosophy--an idiot.

I'm saddened that Joe, either because of a crappy high school lit class, crappy study skills, or willful ignorance can't see the point of Whitman's supposed "paean of narcissism."

To "get" the poem, we have to realize that the speaker of "Song of Myself" isn't Walt Whitman. The difference between the poet and the speaker is basic. It's a fact I've been trying to draw juniors into understanding; most get it, but a few--the future Joe Carters--have trouble distinguishing the two.

For example, consider Langston Hughes' "I, Too, Sing America," which directly descends from Whitman:

I, too, sing America.



I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.



Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.



Besides,

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed--



I, too, am America.

Guess what? Hughes isn't literally a servant in a white household. He also isn't literally America. Instead, he uses "the language of poetry"--Carter's words--to give voice to a more universal, Whitmanic I, to declare the essential dignity and Americanness of the "darker brother."

Whitman's vision of America, the vision that Hughes appends and clarifies, is that of a "barbaric yawp" composed of many voices, yet speaking as one. It is a poetic version of E pluribus unum that does not resolve the contradictions, but swallows them up into a larger vision of American--and, more fundamentally--human identity.

high school graduation poems, take two

Looking for high school graduation poems? Wanting to know the right way to read a poem at graduation? You've come to the right place. Follow these three steps to success.

First, learn the rules for selecting a good graduation poem.

Second, read a poetry anthology or pick up a book by a quality poet. Skim, then peruse. If you're unacquainted with poetry, you can't go wrong looking at this quality list. Note that these poems aren't about graduation, but about life, love, the universe, and everything else--in other words, what graduates really care about, and what you should really be talking about anyway. The power of poetry is its ability to reinvent the world, to see and hear things in a new way. Same with education. Same with your speech.

If you're still uncomfortable with poetry, or if you have no experience reading poetry, stop. There's no law that says you have to read a poem at graduation. There is a law that says you shouldn't if you're only going to mess it up.

Third, practice reading the poem. Record yourself. Listen to your intonation, your timing, your pauses. Do you read it smoothly, or does it seem halting? Do you read over-metrically, if the poem is metered, or does it flow naturally, after the punctuation? Beware of over-emphasizing rhythm and rhyme.

Don't worry if a poem seems too long; you can always choose an excerpt. Be mindful of time. Unless you are Winston Churchill reincarnated, you have five to seven minutes, max, for the entirety of your speech.

Langston Hughes, self-censor?

Today my juniors heard Langston Hughes, arriving from 1959 via the magic of CD, sharing his poetry with an college audience. In one of the more interesting moments, Hughes, reading "Elevator Boy," makes an interesting substitution. The speaker of the poem talks about his dead end job manning a hotel elevator, and describes what his new earnings provide:

Two new suits an'
A woman to sleep with.

Hughes, though, says, "Two new suits an' / a whole lotta money."

I've said before that my view of the writing process is that each text is a "frozen moment of stasis"--that even the final, published version of a text is up for revision as the author finds a better way to read things. I wonder, though, what prompted Hughes' change, and speculate that it might have been the propriety expected while speaking to a late 50s college audience. Any Hughes scholars in the audience have a better idea?

Update 5/25/09: Listening to Hughes again, I realize that, when writing this post, I unconsciously edited Hughes self-emendation to make it more rhythmic than it actually is. His reading is clunkier: "Two new suits an' / a lotta money." Strikes me as stronger evidence for self-censorship, rather than mere preference.

woo 'em with Wadsworth

Brilliant or bonkers?

Longfellow's epic poem, "The Song of Hiawatha," was written 152 years ago, but Michael Maglaras thinks the story can be as appealing to modern-day audiences as "Superman" or "Star Wars."

Like Clark Kent and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Indian hero Hiawatha has human traits and super powers, while battling evil and doing right. Maglaras, the owner of a record company, is now producing a six-CD audio recording of the poem that he plans to complete in late summer.

It's fitting that the CDs are being recorded in a studio here in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's hometown in the year of the 200th anniversary of his birth. Maglaras hopes the project will stimulate interest in both Longfellow and the art of storytelling.

I doubt it. Although recent versions of Beowulf have helped spur a renaissance* of interest in ancient epics, "The Song of Hiawatha" doesn't qualify. At minimum, it would have to be adapted out of Longfellow's trochaic tetrameter before I, or anyone else, would want to listen to it through six (six!) CDs, no matter how vivid Maglaras makes the voices. (To hear a sample of Maglaras's talent, click here.)

Read the opening stanzas aloud to yourself, quietly if in a room where others might listen in and think you mad:

On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
He the Master of Life, descending,
On the red crags of the quarry
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.


From his footprints flowed a river,
Leaped into the light of morning,
O'er the precipice plunging downward
Gleamed like Ishkoodah, the comet.
And the Spirit, stooping earthward,
With his finger on the meadow
Traced a winding pathway for it,
Saying to it, "Run in this way!"

After reading Hiawatha
Through all twenty-two long chapters,
Twenty-two all in this meter,
You'll be ready for the nut hatch.







*Terrible anti-pun.

Washington will soon have a poet laureate

We finally join the ranks of the civilized, as Governor Gregoire has made it official.

Gov. Christine Gregoire this week marked National Poetry Month by signing legislation that creates the new post of poet laureate....

The governor and state Arts Commission will appoint the honoree after getting recommendations from a special screening committee. The laureate must be a state resident and would hold a two-year appointment.

It's not a get-rich position, since the state budget provides only $30,000 in startup costs for the first two years, including a stipend and expense money for the poet-in-chief. Other states typically give an honorarium of between $2,000 and $5,000 a year. Future financing will come from private grants, donations and endowments, rather than the state budget....

The legislation, which passed after 12 years of efforts by sponsors, takes effect in 90 days. The choice for poet laureate could be announced this fall.

I humbly nominate myself.