Sometimes a Picture Says It All: Leo

Colette and the Art of Losing (01-28-1873 to 1954)

"By means of an image, we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet."




The art of losing's not too hard to master, except it requires a wrench.



She herself is a flower slowly fading.

Call for Submissions

You are invited to submit an acrostic poem for a chapbook-sized edited collection entitled Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe. These poems must follow the format employed in Saw Wai's now infamous poem, "February 14." (See the link for more information.) Acrostics, telestitches, and the like will be considered, so long as they integrate the phrase "Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe" into their format in a manner true to Saw Wai's poem.

Four poems have already been selected for inclusion, and the chapbook will contain roughly 12 to 20 pages of poetry. Should the quality of the work remain high, the chapbook will be published as a supplement to an online, literary journal. Further details, including sample poems, are available upon request. All queries and submissions should be sent to liszkiewicz AT gmail DOT com.

Deadline for consideration is noon, Sunday, 3 February 2008."

If you'd like to see my effort, please email me: pamelajohnsonparker@gmail.com.

Five Songs/Poetic Sensibilities

The Meme: Choose five songs and/or artists who best approximate your poetic sensibilities.

As a poet who's recently returned to the world of writing, I take these as my hymns.

1. Patti Smith, "Horses," Horses. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. And violence. Poetry is ruthless.
2. The Beatles, "Eleanor Rigby," Revolver. Rhyme, rhyme, rhyme. And violins. Poetry has more than one music.
3. Al Green version, on 1974's Al Green Explores Your Mind, and the Talking Heads version, on 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food, "Take Me to the River." In the best poetic tradition, poetry talks to its predecessors. Punk meets Preacher. And voice is paramount.
4. Alvin Slaughter, "Midnight Cry," Yes. Faith, rapture, belief, transformation. No one reminds me of Ovid so much as Southern Gospel music on the resurrection. Poetry believes that we'll be quickly changed. And changes us.
5. Bob Dylan, "I Want You," Blonde on Blonde. Despite what Miss Dickinson asserts about success in circuit, there are times you just have to say it straight out. And Bob does: So baaaad.

And I have to mention one of the greatest records ever, Dolly Parton's "Jolene," which haunts me to this day. I also love the White Stripes and Mindy Smith versions--see #3.

Splurge: Shoes Make Me Feel Young and Skinny

Unexpected arrival of $2000 check. Divided four ways, that's $500.00 for each family member. Here's my shoe splurge (top to bottom): Anne Klein Chynna pumps (awesome, ruby colored with ribbon trim), Via Spaga black pumps (elastic on heel back!), Max Studio Boots (one black and one brown, buy one/get the second pair 75% off). I still have almost $200.00 left--on to the bookstore. Do you have any recommendations for me?

Another Link Between Poetry and Prose--Stephen King on Story

I've argued all my life that the story means more than the delivery systems involved (and that includes the writer). I have never been able to understand the prejudice some people seem to feel about recorded books, for instance. Not only are good stories better when they are told out loud; bad stories declare themselves almost at once, because the spoken word is merciless. You cannot, for instance, listen to one of the later Patricia Cornwell novels without realizing how little feel she has for language, or to a Sue Grafton without appreciating her divine eye for the minutiae of ordinary life.

A smart thing to say about fiction--and true of poetry. The spoken word is merciless, and the delivery system doesn't matter more than story/sensibility.

Also, this is the first "glamour shot" I've ever seen of Stevie.

Of Course!

You're Prufrock and Other Observations!

by T.S. Eliot

Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic
and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying
to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you've really
heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Sample Lesson Plan--Roethke

NOTE: I'd be interested in ways other people teach this poem.

Dolor--Theodore Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
_____________________________________________________
Strategies:

1. Formal concern--The Line: Focus on enjambment, how it weighs the poem way, way down. There are only two sentences, but seems much lengthier, much heavier...How does Roethke do it?

2. Formal concern--The Fixed Form: Focus on the idea of this poem perhaps wanting to be a sonnet, but at 13 lines, is it too exhausted to reach a conclusion?

3. Formal concern--Poetry and Fiction: Compare this poem to "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville--especially "duplication of lives and objects."

4. Formal concern--Repetition/rhetoric. Focus on appositive/serialization effect of the comma--which is also an image in the poem. Repetitition, repetition, repetition: combination of abstraction with the concrete common object ("sadness of pencils").

5. Does the opening of this poem resemble Prufrock's "And I have known them"? Discuss.

6. Writing Exercise: What's something mindless you do that evokes a mood? Brainstorm. Cubicles. Hives. What's on your desk?

7. In On Poetry and Craft, Roethke writes: "We Americans...continue to make a fetish of "thing-hood," we surround ourselves with junk, ugly objects endlessly repeated in an economy dedicated to waste."
a. Think of the movie Super-Size Me. Is it the thing, or the speed of the thing that weights us down? Both? Neither?
b. Compare/contrast "Dolor" with Richard Wilbur's "Junk." What's the overall musical effect in each poem, and how does each poet achieve this?

8. Roethke also writes about "Dolor" specifically:

"This poem is an exposition of one of the modern hells: the institution that overwhelms the individual man. The 'order,' the trivia of the institution, is, in human terms, a disorder, and as such, must be resisted. It's truly a sign of psychic health that the young are already aware of this. How far-reaching all this is, how subtle its ramifications, how disastrous to the human psyche-to worship bigness, the firm, the university; numbers, even, let me say, the organized team effort."

Personal Note: This poem encapsulates all the reasons why I don't want to teach high school English/composition. The “inexorable sadness” of joyless repetition crushes the love of words, and enthusiasm for students themselves, under the barbelled weight of red pen, green gradebook, and forms, forms, forms.

.

Postcard from the Far Edge of the MFA

Hello, Poetry Lovers:

Having a wonderful time, wish you were beer--oops, here. I'm reading tonight--poems about cigarettes,slugs,and cedar chests, or, perhaps more accurately,sex and slugs and time rolling on.

Love, Pamela

PS I have changed my mind about Tony Hoagland, which probably wouldn't impress him in the least.

The Least Read "Popular" Great Books

I was given this link by one of my MFA friends. Highlight the books you've read; star the ones you started but couldn't finish.

Disclaimer: I was astounded by the books I couldn't put down, which my friend often never finished.

Disclaimer 2: Where the heck this "popular great books" came from is a mystery perhaps never to be solved. I think Dan Brown is on this list as much as Virginia Woolf!

Disclaimer 3: Of the books from the 19th century, I read most of them during my protracted adolescence.

Disclaimer 4: Where in the hell is poetry here? Just the Canterbury Tales?


The Historian
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion*
Life of Pi: a Novel
The Name of the Rose*
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged*
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex*
Quicksilver
Wicked : the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead*
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch*
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi BoysThe Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno*
The Satanic Verses*
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune*
The Prince*
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/141556">

Final MFA residency--packing up!

An Ephemeral New Year's Greeting Card

Bonne Annee, mes amies.

Memento Mori: Last Poem of 2007

The Night Before Christmas from J. Cleese

=



Genius, sheer genuis. Merry Christmas!

Although It's Been Said Many Times...

Nothing says it quite like these three Christmas carolers!

I hope your holidays are wonderfully bewitching, and that old Sandy Claws is good to you all.

Peace on earth and good will toward poets everywhere, Pamela