American Poetry Today

00:00:08 I could happen in everybody and welcome to helix Center my name is Jerry Hurwitz I'm one of the organizers here at the helix and I want to make a brief introduction of art to our moderator today Ann Marie Levine is herself an artist painter and poet and she will moderate this panel discussion and introduce you to our distinguished panelists

00:00:44 I think whoops I think we're also supposed to remind you too there's a conference on December 1st the right I don't have the information inside the SCI art conference which you can see on the website it's it's yeah it's fully explained so today we're going to

00:01:15 attempt to tell you about American poetry today it's only a beginning so to introduce the program the American poet Ezra Pound proclaimed that poetry is news that stays news on a different note his contemporary William Carlos Williams said that it is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found their due modernist Maxim's such

00:01:46 as these also define the ever-expanding range and diversity of poetry today which poets or groups are doing interesting or important work who are the earlier poets that inspired them and what is the nature role appeal and significance of contemporary poetry when it comes to grasping experiences and communicating their meaning what does this art form provide what kind of subjects to poetry journals and other publications focus on how has the production promotion reception of poetry changed in the internet age it's very much about the

00:02:18 Internet age and the 21st century in response to questions such as these a roundtable of diverse and accomplished poets will discuss what's going on in the poetry world today it will explore the allure and value of contemporary poetry through different lenses ranging from the formal to linguistic to the conceptual to the psychological and in the second part of the program we'll have our usual QA I'm going to introduce the participants in alphabetical order and ask you each to raise your hands as

00:02:51 I say your name so people will know who you are Patricia Carlin received her PhD from Princeton focusing on Shakespeare studies and poetry and poetics her most recent poetry collections second nature appeared in May 2017 previous books include quantum jitters and original green poetry collections and Shakespeare's mortal men a study of Shakespeare's plays in their cultural context she's published widely

00:03:21 in journals and anthologies such as play adverse Boulevard Baum American letters and commentary and is this rep McSweeney's internet tendency right and she couette it's the poetry journal Barrow Street honors include fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the creative arts she teaches literature and poetry writing at the new school where she has received the University distinguished Teaching Award can everybody hear me is this no uh-huh

00:03:54 slower okay Amy Holman Amy Holman is a pushcart prize nominated poet and a literary consultant her collection Renne fly through this opened window was described by one reviewer as part freak show part searing insight she's also the author of four poetry chapbook s-- including the prize-winning white for me I'm gone from dream Press her poems have appeared in numerous

00:04:25 magazines and anthologies to tomb to numerous to name including archaeology magazine American letters and commentary Barrow Street fail better all stop but I'll ball end with the first anthology of TV poems and the best American poetry in 1999 she teaches poetry workshops at the Hudson Valley writers Center Paulo Xavier his

00:04:56 collaboration with listening Center David Mason appeared as a limited edition book cassette of his name I cannot pronounce you have to help me earlier ok published by text in town in early 2017 a featured artist in MoMA ps1 2015 Greater New York show he's the author of four full-length collections of poetry including court of the dragon which Publishers Weekly calls a linguistic time machine a new chat book

00:05:28 maybe the sweet honey pours is coming forthcoming from neon editions and last but not least Steven massamilla is a poet scholar professor and painter he holds an MFA in writing and PhD in English and comparative literature with a focus on poetry from Columbia University his new multi-genre volume cooking with the muse won the Edgar Eric Hoffer Book Award the national index

00:05:59 illan Award and others his previous books include the award-winning poetry collections the plague doctor in his hull shaped hat 40 floors from yesterday and later on ie as well as translations of book length works by Neruda and a critical study of myth in modern poetry massamilla has published recently in hundreds of journals and anthologies again the list is too long Agni American literary review Barrow Street Colorado review Denver quarterly

00:06:31 poll or poet daily he teaches literature and write at Columbia University and the new school okay that's it I guess I have to get my microphone back and yeah if it works can

00:07:10 you hear me I'm not gonna talk my second yeah yes is this alright okay so I'm gonna ask Steven to to say a few words to begin the program very good I would like to thank anne-marie for that gracious introduction and thank all the panelists for being here today and thank everyone in the audience for joining us to share an afternoon talking about poetry and

00:07:41 I've been tasked with the impossible mission of conveying to you the the various strands of modern contemporary modern and contemporary poetry and to do so in just a few minutes when it would normally take me about 400 hours started I thought I'd start by just pointing to something unusual this is counterintuitive but this project that Ann Marie mentioned cooking with the muse is a cookbook that's also a poetry book it contains hundreds of recipes and

00:08:13 hundreds of poems and some recipes that could be poems and that's the most avant-garde aspect of it but I just thought I would point out some homes in the book to show you that they look different these are all contemporary and some of them modern poems but here's one called spiced reflection it's a sonnet a love poem set in a restaurant I wrote this one myself oh by the way this one's paired with a recipe for duck confit spiced with coriander and star anis which is wonderful to make this time of year if you're not committed to the

00:08:44 having turkey for Thanksgiving there turkey recipes here two poets like to write about swans the only problem with Swan for Thanksgiving is that everybody fights over the neck here here's a recipe here's another poem by Claude McKay Harlem Renaissance poet you see it's also a sonnet so we're not explaining what a sonnet is you can see they look very much alike here's another one by the contemporary poet Vietnamese American poet mung lon it's called love poem - spinach as you see all the lines are scattered across

00:09:17 the page and that looks very different and others might look more like I mean there are more sonnets by people from water here's from a supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg and the first line of the poem is what thoughts I have you tonight Walt Whitman and it's written in long whit manian lines so if these are all and I write lines like that too I don't just write sonnets so the point I want it to make is there's not one form that writers are writing in today some people may think that there's a 19th century way of writing that's all

00:09:49 formalist and then there's a modern way of writing that's all open but the terrain is much more complicated than that so I thought I'd just mentioned briefly if there is even a group of new formalist poets Dana Joya Marilyn hacker I can think of many Alfred corn right I mean certain a lot of us can think may example to a write almost exclusively in form they write sonnets they write villanelles and longer forms this is not so different from what at the beginning of the 20th century and the late mid to

00:10:20 late 20th century many other poets were doing Robert Frost wrote this way michaei the founding Harlem Renaissance poet wrote this way Auden so I'm just gonna let you know that group exists but that's not what I'm gonna focus on because modernism is often seen as a break with the past both the formal break though I don't think it applies as much to that particular team but also a break in somatic a break in subject matter and a break an approach to theme in both

00:10:51 modality and theme so what we see in a lot of contemporary poems is radical subjectivity or radical objectivity or fragmentation or an emphasis on alienation displacement these are themes that define our era in poetry and encounter distinction to that formalist school I passed out a sheet that you can all look at and I have a poem by the founding American father of modern American poetry William Carlos

00:11:23 Williams when emphasizes middle name is Carlos he's a Puerto Rican American poet also partly a vast Basque background a first-generation immigrant that's important to know that to understanding his work it's important to know that on the right I have a poem by Archie Amin's this is a contemporary poem and you can see right away that a contemporary poem owes something or a lot to the William Carlos Williams poem of much earlier in the you know of close to a century ago so this is the group the the I would put

00:11:55 not only William Carlos Williams in this room but also Gertrude Stein that I'm gonna define this group as the local American modernist group as opposed to the formalist traditional group and I thought just start us off why don't I just start us off for having us look at these foams so that we can get a feeling of understanding so a lot of you know this poem the red wheelbarrow how many people have seen this before how many people have heard of it okay a lot of us have how many people are still baffled

00:12:26 by it don't necessarily understand it right let me read it to you the red wheelbarrow and this is from a much larger work that is multi-genre and it contains a lot of prose and criticism as well all mixed together so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens end of poem and some people are perplexed by it

00:12:56 nevertheless because it's not an exclamation so much depends upon X exclamation point it's not a complex sentence that as a dependent clause so much depends upon X that wat that Y it just says so much depends and that people find a little bit a grammatical or unusual or asymmetrical but Williams wants that effect you can't he's not writing a Romanichal sentence and he wants to do other things like separate the word wheel from the word barrow so that every word gets

00:13:28 equal Democratic attention similarly to if you look at the contemporary poem by almonds on the right the spring in her step has turned to fall we just are watching a woman take a step and we are also watching the season turn from spring to fall and we land on fall that's where the foot comes down the poem is the action the poem steers us in the direction that it is going in and we could talk about it all day you have no idea of how much is going on here but

00:13:59 the point I want to state is that it's not in traditional form its everyday data it's not Iraq Euler it's not illusive or erudite it's it's attune to the immediate and the politics of the poet are liberal I could say that these are things that apply these are characteristics that often apply to members of this team and if we look back over the past century who are some poets and some schools of poetry that were inspired by the local American modernist I would say that includes the Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Williams even

00:14:33 included some of Ginsburg's letters in his epic Patterson would include the New York school Kenneth Koch John Ashbery who is a big adjust I'd recently a big influence on everyone on this panel I believe or at least on their friends Frank O'Hara and for example Kenneth pokes one of his most favorite famous poems is entitled variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams you could see the influence just by looking at the title and then there's ted berrigan and

00:15:04 Ansem beragon if you want a contemporary poet that's still very much influenced by the New York school or Dean Young there's also an Objectivist group Olson and Creely or the Black Mountain poets they're sometimes called or the language poets and maybe we'll looking at sample of language poetry in a few moments but that would include Charles Bernstein and then Jean Ian all of these poets claimed that they loved Williams they're not particularly found for instance of TS Eliot the next part I want to talk about but you know that

00:15:36 monlam poem I showed you with all the words scattered across the page very much influenced by Williams and so it doesn't really matter you can pick so many contemporary poets Ellen Bastian Hurstville Marlon they have all been influenced by the local American modernists William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein and they their grandfather is Whitman so for a graphic for this talk were originally going to start with an image of Whitman as the grandfather of American poetry but what he really is is the grandfather of this

00:16:07 strand of American poetry which has ramified this trunk that is ramified out and created many branches but women wanted to break the back of the pentameter and embrace people from all backgrounds and and all walks of life and celebrate the flesh as much as as much as the spirit but then there's another group and maybe I'll mention just one or two more groups because I don't want to go on too long in this introduction and that would be the classical modernist troupe so how many people have heard of TS Eliot okay how

00:16:40 many people can recite a TS Eliot poem by heart it's hard to do it's harder to it's harder to do than but easier than to do with a Bernstein poem for instance but if we were to look underneath what I have here the red wheel biosample mr. Eliot Sunday morning service and without even reading the poem you'll see the first word is poly phyllo Pro genitive no no no word is too difficult for Elliot Elliot I mean in other words wants to make poetry difficult and it's

00:17:11 deliberate my students sometimes look for that word in Greek and Latin dictionaries and they don't find it because it's it's not there Elliot made the word up it means something like loving to produce much offspring it has to do with the fertilization of eggs it has to do with chickens in this sense and I think we could compare it to the chicken poem by William Carlos way and without reading the entire poem the sapient settlers of the Lord those would be the learned it sales people of religion in the beginning was the word

00:17:41 in the beginning was the word super-fit ation of towhen that's a word in Greek that suddenly appears in the middle of his poem and what he's talking about is how the how the learner tells people of religion theologians like Origen mentioned in the last line there who castrated himself to bring himself closer to God their enterprises completely futile because their work the proliferation of interpretations they

00:18:11 offer us do not bring everyday people closer to the divine and in that sense Eliot's frustrated that the erudition and subtlety of these great thinkers is futile and in perhaps Elliott's own poem might be futile if he's trying to reach a deeper truth and he was with Ezra Pound he formed a group of classical modernists who did not like conservatism they did not necessarily want to preserve nineteenth-century traditions they wanted to reach back to something more Titanic than rationalism or then

00:18:45 market economies or then perfunctory practices of Christian rituals they wanted to reach back to a Renaissance of classical Renaissance of the Renaissance idea a rebirth of the great rebirth of classical antiquity and everything it signified for them and so they set the buy and the bar high in terms of their erudition and what they were seeking spiritually and in in in their

00:19:15 Eurocentric attitude that they were seeking to embody the what is best in the mind of europe they believed that Europe had a mind and Williams rejected all of this he felt that poetry is not sacred poetry does not have a philosophical mission like this it's not a racula all those things I said about Williams Williams hated Elliot Elliot did not think much of Williams Williams loved Stein hounded Elliot work together and you would think that you know Elliot wouldn't have many you know incarnations today but I gave

00:19:47 an example on the right of the contemporary poem Shiloh Church and you can see right in the second line we get planned vistas milky with Jehovah's calm so an invocation of the biblical Lord and it ends with the line in deserts dropped the odd white turds of bone which is not a good omen and basically this poet is suggesting that even those who were sacrificing themselves for the noble cause of ending slavery committed you know great slaughter and therefore believe that they were unredeemable and

00:20:18 so there's a greater or might not be redeemed or that they were sinful as there's the same sense of futility and historicism and high language in this poem that we find in the Elliot poem but these are not the only heirs of Eliot and so what I want to suggest is that Eliot and Williams if you put them together if you take Eliot's classicism or at least his architecture and you combine it with Williams local belief in local modernism you get other groups of poets like the Americans sublime the Hart Crane Wallace Stevens group or the

00:20:50 confessional poets the lowland Plath and Sexton and very men and I thought maybe I give you a couple of example one example of a confessional poem and then I would pretty much end the talk there but we have this one by Sylvia Plath lady Lazarus actually put it next to this line from Eliot and Prufrock I am Lazarus come back from the dead come back to tell you all I shall tell you all there's another side to Eliot to balance the erudition he often includes his own anguish or expressions of his

00:21:21 own anguish and in his work and professional poets like Eliot in the wasteland in this moment describes under that his wife having a nervous breakdown my nerves are bad tonight yes bad stay with me speak to me and that passage ends with I think we are in rats alley where the dead men lost their bones so you can see the influence on the hill poem the contemporary poem but you can also see that Eliot is talking about a problem in his marriage about a mental breakdown about his wife's nervous breakdown and she did

00:21:53 end up in an asylum and Elliott finished the wasteland while making clay pots in a sanatorium and he lets you know it in the poem that's why his influence is so great because a lot of poets in the late 20th century and 21st century are interested in revealing intimate deals details about themselves in their poems so this poem by Sylvia Plath for example in it she describes a suicide attempt or multiple suicide attempts the second time I meant to Tet to last it out and

00:22:25 not come back at all I rocked shut is a seashell they had to call and call and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls dying is an art like everything else I do it exceptionally well I do it so it feels like hell I do it so it feels real I guess you could say I have a call and then she did take her own life so she's revealing how she feels and and Sexton took up poetry when her analyst

00:22:56 suggested that it might be cathartic for her it might be a way for her to deal with her postpartum depression I also included here we don't have time to talk about it and the lower left corner of France right tome contemporary poet writing in the confessional mode and on the next page poems by Tracy K Smith an ocean balm which I don't think are as raw and intense as the platform but are still in the confessional mode so Sharon olds there are many contemporary poets writing in this mode and other groups that I don't really have time to talk

00:23:26 about right now would include the post-colonial poets Derek Walcott and company or what do you think for instance of erasure poems is that a new kind of poetry or is that just a tool or a technique that poets used to inspire them what about slam poetry in Eureka no Chi maybe some of you've heard of that heavily influenced by the beat poets but that's another possible group we could talk about what about what's happening on the internet today tumblr poetry is

00:23:57 that you know a good enough platform for poetry what do people think about conceptual poetry maybe add Marie the panel could explain what that's about some more but the point I might end with is that I didn't really have time to talk about Walcott them out the way I wanted to but there is also a multi multicultural post-colonial strand and I want to suggest that poetry today is much more diverse so the few strands I gave you merge and some poets are hybrid and there are a lot more women

00:24:28 poets and there used to be a lot more openly gay poets and lesbian poets so poets from Whitman to Ashbury we're gay but they didn't always write about that directly a lot more recent immigrant poets or poets who write about their background and so forth and so on so maybe that's one place to look for the difference and I thought I would just open this up to the panel did they do people on the panel agree with this schema with this map or where do we want

00:24:58 to take it from here so yes I will supplement Stephens remarks I'm gonna give you the Twitter version of where we've come from and where we are now and I'm very glad to look at these because these are examples of a lot of what's happened American poetry today we are very lucky to be readers of it which brings me to the question and do not be embarrassed by this how many of you actually read poetry regularly most people do not oh that's wonderful yes and a much

00:25:28 bigger proportion than usual because usually today people remember poetry from college or they'll see a couple of poems in The New Yorker they're not really conversing with it but American poetry is definitely the most diverse energetic poetry in the english-speaking world today how did we get here that's what I'm going to talk about briefly American poetry has always been marked by improvisation and very idiosyncratic invention especially when we finally

00:25:59 turned finally away from European models and from over valuing all things European in the arts in this century the 21st art poetry is fully finally triumphantly American what does that mean to better understand where we are now we can look at where we've been and here comes the Twitter version of it okay American poetry has a forefather Walt Whitman and it has a four mother Emily Dickinson and in some sense all later

00:26:32 developments point to one or another of these wildly different wildly idiosyncratic poets they invented kinds of poetry the world hadn't seen before which is still going on and they also invented themselves the invention of the self is a very American undertaking and I would argue at the heart of what's happening in poetry right now a good place to start in recent times and this is supplementing or complementing what Stephen said start

00:27:03 with the 1950s mark might be poetry Ginsberg and a competing formalism very traditional poems meter and rhyme I think of Allen Ginsberg um I'm sure most of you have heard of and Richard Wilbur who really until 96 still going strong in the late 50s in the early sixties confessional poetry dominated as the new thing and you notice this again is the self but I would want to say that even when it purports to be your actual self talking about what's going on in

00:27:35 your life it isn't it's a linguistic creation of a self that speaks in the poem think of an sexton Robert Lowell Sylvia Plath some of the people that Stephen mentioned well I hope that's not the first time but it's in the late 60s and in the 1970s language poetry arrives on the scene and this is an avant-garde movement that's generated instant heated controversy traditionally which I mean

00:28:06 hundreds of years a lyric poem was marked specifically by the creation of a single stable speaking voice and a poem that was led by the author to a certain conclusion in other words closure practitioners and theorists of language poetry insisted no language is speaking itself in any given poem there is no stable single self or speaker and a reader has to step in to create and make meaning out of a poem no one

00:28:39 authorial voice controls meaning in a poem I think this is the most significant thing that happened in this very brief history this poem also resists closure bring bringing you to the neat end you'll be familiar with in any traditional poem instead a poem is a process and it stays open-ended these poetry Wars raged for decades and they were heated up town mainstream traditional versus downtown experimental innovative resisting belief in a single

00:29:12 self and in the authorial imposition of meaning and you can think of the movements really geographically a centered uptown 92nd Street Y downtown st. Mark's and the poetry project but what happened is that where we are now is that gradually poets writing simply took devices from every point on the poetic spectrum a lot of which Stephen has touched on so what were once bitterly fought and contested

00:29:42 ideological matters simply Rico opted as techniques that a poet would deploy to expand his or her expressive range which is very much what I do and almost everyone I know does for example collage fragmentation multiple voices speaking within a poem disjunctive development great big leaps from one thing to another and very quick shifts of tone and speech registers collapsing of distinctions between high culture and

00:30:13 popular culture so you could say no more uptown uptown or downtown everybody's gone to Brooklyn which is where we are now geographically I'll say a couple of more things external conditions have radically impacted poetry today and one very important development in my opinion is the diminished influence of the gatekeepers I don't want to put a particular but I'd say last 10 20 years to get your poems into publication you would pass through elaborate series of people who put their

00:30:46 imprimatur on yes this is worthy of publication but recently journals and presses have proliferated and the web provides another very far-reaching and very different means of disseminating poems which I'm happy polos going to talk about much though certainly not all of the most interesting work in poetry is coming out of small independent presses and there's no one kind of poetry that predominates the Stephens also indicated an anecdote here a few years ago the

00:31:17 National Book Awards the five finalists for poetry were offering tiny little barely known presses which understandably annoyed the more commercial and mainstream press is who after all as they pointed out we're funding these awards so that mistake got corrected in the next series of national poetry Awards at this moment I conclude there is no center in American poetry but at any given moment one or another of these many strands you mentioned tend to be

00:31:49 highlighted or spotlighted so right now for example we're hearing more from traditionally underrepresented voices here's an example besides Frank Badar who won the National Poetry Award this year two of the four finalists drew on their experiences African Americans and the third drew on her experience as a Lakota Indian Native American the other big thing that I notice in you'll all notice is as you'd expect there's an outpouring of poems responding

00:32:19 politically to the dire situation the country and in fact the world is finding itself in I'm struck by the melding of political response with intense lyricism which is something new in political or social response poetry oceanview on you have an example there his new book his only book night sky with exit wounds is an example of this he is a Vietnamese foreign refugee but there is no center now and no one kind or kind of poems

00:32:51 that predominate it's good that there's no scent very one way in which you evaluate any country or any time period in literature is to go to the to see who's publishing these particular writers and for the poets especially the literary journal literary review literary magazine however you call it whether in print or

00:33:22 online and if online whether it also involves audio that's that there that's there may be hundreds probably at more than a thousand literary journals and they're not all doing the same thing they there is going to be some overlap and what people consider to be good poetry it will in in what Patricia and Steven have talked about it they will be

00:33:53 representing certain kinds of poetry styles of poetry certain modes whether its formal or not but I think there is a kind of poetry for every kind of person unfortunately schools where we get poetry from the beginning don't represent the wide variety of phones available that people are writing literary journals are the are the means by which poets get read so there should

00:34:29 be a wider reading of the literary journals but online there's a wider readership they it takes a long time to put together a collection of poetry as a book so the magazines support writers and gives them readers they're stepping stones in some cases some smaller magazines lead larger magazines but one thing that they do represent is all the different subjects that you could be

00:34:59 writing about surfing beekeeping art science math money the there's no matter who you are if you have an ability to write about something in the form of a poem a poem can be a form of communication a way to almost a different kind of

00:35:30 language by which to to talk about something and it is also its own form but so this well there are many general interest literary journals Barrow Street would be one Kenyon review Agni all of those that are in essence interested in whatever you may want to send them if you write in the way that they deem is good poetry there are lots of magazines

00:36:03 that want very specific subjects I don't you know that's an anthology on food but there's a specific magazine called Alimentum who's who's the publisher is a chef and a poet and she and they take poetry and fiction or nonfiction about food but the food verse contests out of literal lot a is also an option okay yes

00:36:36 I have a huge number of my own poems in this book so we don't even know if it's an anthology or recipes but but this is what we can do today there doesn't necessarily have to be the rules are are there are there there are lots of ways to blur boundaries and that's yeah there are lots of points I could pick up and I'll let you finish yes we just want to mention that there's a poet laureate of the Union Square Green Market never

00:37:07 never anything that you can't write about or some post you can't have in poetry good for The Times there are two of the best that I can think of literary journals focused on work and being out of work there's one called draft horse and there's one called just work works that's an online magazine and they do they have a very nondescript white sort of background so that if you want to read it at work and look like you're just reading looking at

00:37:39 magazines but these are like any kind of any kind of work blue collar white collar pink collar sex work volunteer anything they say there's J Journal which is out of the John J school of criminal justice and they want justice just the letter J there's the v to crime poetry weekly and there's there there's politics and ends up in most successfully in everywhere but new verse

00:38:13 news the Boston review which is a magazine that that doesn't have to take poetry on politics but but has a focus overall in the magazine on progressive politics there's pop culture and is wanted by many magazines that but it's all that barrelhouse wants everything poetry fiction nonfiction has to if it doesn't have pop culture send it

00:38:44 elsewhere they say but gargoyle they like history and subculture and culture and pop culture the largest areas now are the health injury illness death as represented in these magazines that come out of medical universities that by and large there's Bellevue literary review

00:39:14 which is actually out of NYU medical these are edited by doctors and nurses who may also be writers as well as some writers regular who are not in the medical fields they want that magazine tends to they so they ushered in this but there are now to my they'll have counted 29 that come out of of medical universities there's the healing muse up and one of the Sunni Sunni colleges

00:39:47 bioethics they like a little more of a lyric poem than a narrative poem that Bellevue likes and then there's Hospital Drive down in Virginia there's one that's not associated with a medical program recovery which is an online magazine they spell it our k dot v ry wants all four definition well among the bright something about from one of the four definitions of recovery which can include also obtaining usable resources

00:40:21 from unusable sources but it can also be recovery that isn't successful you can write along a wide range of health and injury related subjects and then the other big area is the nature environment ecology place and if you if you just want to write about the pleasure of nature and human interaction snowy egret is one maybe ecotone and if you want to

00:40:54 write about the ecology there's po ecology there's a precipitate journal and Avocet and about place that are interested in the more environmental the loss of nature rather than the pleasures of nature and I don't know there's step away magazine if you want to write about neighborhoods there's just everything out there it's a that's a start there's

00:41:25 so much more I would say but you know and it goes into books of course you know there's a one of my favorite more recent books is by Nick Lantz it's called we don't know we don't know any basis he uses either Pliny the Elder or Donald Rumsfeld quotes so that we don't know we don't know is as a Donald Rumsfeld quote and he is as elliptical the elliptical

00:41:56 quality of those statements in poems about very serious things as well as humor right so even if we're just talking about poems about nature in place I can think of a few more like terrain org is just about yes yet the environment built or natural and there are others like Appalachia people are going camping and want to read a poem and that when they're learning how to make a tent so what what Amy's suggesting is just the diversity and the range of subject matter that is sometimes a revelation to people but but

00:42:27 to also speak to a point that and I think that Paulo is going to want to pick up a little bit on the point about homogeneous Asian in education or something let's know okay now this is but I think I first want to pick up on the point that that Patricia raised about the fragmentation of voices and in contemporary poetry and we're just going to ask how would we make a distinction then between because there's one thing

00:42:58 that I tried to point out is that that we can draw a line from poets earlier in the modern era to poets who are contemporary it seems that as soon as this was happening as soon as modernism cracked the egg so to speak and I was suggesting kind of giving an answer Eliot kind of wanted to put the chicken back into the egg but he ends his wasteland with a with a pastiche of different languages and it's somewhat radical to a modern reader he called it classicism but it can look like craziness the end of the wasteland goes

00:43:30 like this shall I set my lands in order and then the next line is poised tesco scenic ke afina cuando via boutique le down Oh swallow swallow the plants that beaten are dr. Eberly these fragments I am short against my ruins London Bridge is falling down falling down four down why then I'll teach you here on emo is Merrigan doctor damn yatta diovan shanti shanti shanti

00:44:02 so that's Eliot's version of classicism but to us it might sound like craziness how are poets today in their embrace of different voices in different languages doing something different from what Elliot is doing well I think what Elliot is doing in that sense is formal and technical it's a tissue of voices but I also want to suggest that Elliot had a pretense of objectivity and that he's writing about a dis disarray and

00:44:32 dissolution of Western civilization but more and more when people read Elliot it's pretty clear he's talking about his own psyche and this is far more personal poetry than Elliot would ever have acknowledged in fact almost all of Eliot's notes and essays and he's not alone among poets in doing this most poets develop an aesthetics or a poetics that happens to be what they're doing and he was no exception to that in his view you couldn't be subjective you had

00:45:02 to be objective but almost everything he does is subjective here is what I would say about Elliot the difference between Elliot and what happened in what I consider to be current happens in that fault line when you move to language poetry and it's very connected I don't know how many of you remember the 70s or have read about their intensely theoretical that's where I may add importation mostly of European ideologies again it's not really American and what that that's what the

00:45:35 cracking of the self is coming from and where I would draw the fault line is really in a self conception of the self I think that what happened is people both culturally and ideologically lost the sense that they were one person and now that doesn't mean there aren't people writing I poems of course there are it's a lyric I did this I love this one I feel this way but it's a constructive eye and a stable self has simply dropped out of the equation and that's where I would

00:46:06 draw the distinction that wouldn't have been something that Elliott himself writing about would have acknowledged or any of the other people so I would draw it modernism is considered to be the cracking and destruction of the past post-modernism is considered to be a return to that but in an ironic way and I would want to suggest that what's happening now is really something different and then it's back to that conception and reinvention of a multiple self if you look actually if you think about yourself for a minute aren't you

00:46:38 kind of one person on Monday at 4:00 and another person Thursday at 7:00 and it's that sensibility that I think has crept across all of these different schools and the one other thing I'd want to say is I think that we are which is helpful all of us dividing poems and poets into schools and Inter movements but when you come right down to it every strong poet is a school of one and these groups that you can that we all do that I did it myself there might there Birdseye or schematic

00:47:10 maps but like a map you know if you get right down on the ground an area that looks as if you could group it know there's a rock here there's a pun here and they are in fact quite individual an idiosyncratic that would be my long answer to your so much your question okay so we went from a time where people especially those were the Eurocentric leaning we're having a crisis of faith and they're representing a kind of trauma also associated with you know

00:47:41 became kind of trauma that a lot more people could relate to once World War one hit and so forth and we know people asked if if civilization was moving backwards as we just developed greater weapons a greater ways of creating mass destruction and so forth so there's a lot of trauma that underlies the fragmentation and even the fragmentation of voices but what I think Patricia is saying is people are you know across the modern era writers and artists learn to also embrace the fragmentation and to see it as

00:48:12 an expression of just once well think of it the way the Buddhists will say that there is no self that once fundamental humanity depends on not not being attached to that ego whereas there's a tortured quality to some who let go of that ego at others celebrate that and I think the ones that celebrate it more are more influenced by that local American modernist group the fragmentation and Williams is very different from the fragmentation and Eliot but I thought I'd give an example I have this poem by Charles Bernstein just a fragment and again you know the

00:48:48 well this is a easel is sometimes categorized as a language poet and they trace their influence to two new school poets who loved Williams but take this Harrow off my chest I don't feel it anymore it's getting stark to start to see I feel I'm barking at hellspores the new sentence what is the I in that poem is that the speaker or is that coming out of a Bob Dylan song or have I just given too much away but you know there's a way

00:49:20 in which the part of the language is appropriated as earlier modernist Eliot pound appropriated a lot of foreign languages and even whole lines from other texts into their work but here it's much more playful I don't think he's making some grand statement about civilization and it's it's it's it's a medium for play I'm barking at hellspores hellspores heaven's door' the words correspond and yet we're almost saying the opposite but we're not really

00:49:51 talking about how the way a confessional poet would yeah I wanted to say I think actually this poem is about language poetry the new sentence is a very influential book criticism written by Ron silliman yes right and Charles Bernstein is based in the East Coast and the term language poetry is an arbitrary designation for a group of poets primarily in the Bay Area some in the East Coast who were reading marks very

00:50:22 deeply and considering capital and its relation to language and in the new sentence Ron silliman he's exploring and I'm just generalizing here because he explores a lot pair taxes you have syntax where you have word order right determining meaning then you have hypo taxes which is the kind of sentence that James Baldwin was great at a lot of subordinate clauses and they have power of taxes which I think ancient Greek is

00:50:55 in where you don't really know you every word isn't in its rightful order and so that opens up meaning and Gertrude Stein is considered to be still even a limit for language writing and a goddess and a God for language writers because her writing truly dissenters opens up the English sentence and you know maybe open

00:51:25 as a euphemism right destroys it right and and and any and that has everything to do with her growing up hearing and speaking for languages being queer Jewish in occupied France living in France as an American right and really writing at midnight till 6:00 in the morning right when everyone's asleep right your your brain is not really

00:51:56 paying much attention in the word order at that time right but she embraced that negative capability so I think also with Charles Bernstein who I know personally he's also interested in the tradition of Jewish comics coming out of the Catskills and so there's a playfulness that is very specific to his work that you will not find in other language poets but I'm so glad you mentioned playfulness no yeah and so did Stephen I didn't mean please go on oh okay

00:52:30 I just wanted to add my two cents I don't have elaborate outline prepared I just want to say in terms of how I see poetry being different today there's a lot more diversity right and by diversity I mean you have a lot of poets of color with first books a lot of well for the last 35 years I think there have been more female poets being published but now you have a lot of poets of color a lot more women poets a

00:53:01 lot of GLBT poets a lot of trans poets were not just coming out with collections but gaining visibility because their books are actually being given Awards I think the first book of trans poetry came up came out two years ago published by night boat books which published my last full collection and I you actually see poetry bestsellers Claudia Rankine who has a background in experimental poetry she published citizen which has

00:53:33 sold an astonishing number of copies right so maybe that also speaks to the moment that we're in that's unique where we are dealing with social right in a way that we haven't before because of the mediums at our disposal to engage with it right so you have rupee car I don't know if you've read rupee car ka you are she's from Toronto she's South Asian Canadian she was publishing her poetry on tumblr I believe and I'm as a

00:54:06 mass or Instagram and amassed like a following of 2 million followers and she's published three books of poems that are bestsellers number one on Amazon everywhere right and you couldn't see more diverse aesthetics in these two best-selling poets right we have a very popular populist poet and droopy car and then you have Claudia Rankine whose work is challenging right

00:54:37 I also wanted to say perhaps these sensations are also made possible because of social media I don't think Claudia Rankine has a very palpable digital footprint but certainly her press does most poetry publishers and let's bear in mind like most of most of us poets are published by small presses it's a gift economy right but let me correct that by saying their poets were making a lot of money these

00:55:08 days and they have careers right but social media you get on YouTube you get on Instagram you know lin-manuel Miranda was in the White House dropped that Hamilton piece and how's it right I mean it's more than that he worked his butt off for that and there's a buildup but yeah social media can really give you a visibility and then an agency that oh it's 10 years ago couldn't enjoy right now having said

00:55:39 that and I mentioned poets have careers now there's a professionalization of poetry right like you have career tracks as a poet poets have agents now right they do like they have agencies there's three big agencies now if you want to hook a poet you got to talk to their agent right that's relatively new right they used to be exclusive to folks big names you know but now it's not so

00:56:09 exclusive folks with first books that make a mark digitally they have agents right and that's also I think a phenomenon made possible because of rise and prominence and prevalence of the MFA MFA programs right that's a Master of Fine Arts so creative writing programs yeah which we're not nearly so numerous even a few decades ago as they are now now every University and Community College has one right yeah so so

00:56:43 probably you seem to be saying that it's some something of a mixed bag that there might be poet that we've heard of like rupee car but at the same time you're saying that that getting known might depend on the internet or depend on how a press promotes the work and yet to take the rupee Court example then to write in a way that's suitable for an Instagram post you have to write the really short poems that would appeal to everyone and you might actually sell over a million

00:57:15 books between one and two million books when you put them together in a book but is this really the way to construct the best poems is online construct because I mean poesis that the Greek word means a made thing is there enough of an artifact there or enough agency on the part of the poet or is it a matter of pursuing what's trending or a matter of pursuing the bigger audience as you move and does that take us out of the the creative space that a lot of poets would

00:57:46 want to operate in and that's a question right that you might be raising well I guess in terms of I mean there's no questioning taste and I I'm always hesitant to sort of qualify a poet's work I'm always mindful of Gertrude Stein's reception right right look now she's undeniably one of the greats and she's still influencing poets but what fascinates me about Rupa car is the platform that enabled her success right

00:58:16 Instagram which is also as a platform Instagram Twitter you gotta have a Twitter handle you don't have to but that's a lot of poets coming up are thinking like they feel that it's incumbent on their career that they have a digital presence or digital citizenship get a Twitter account you have a nice author photo that gives you traction right so it makes you write very short poems I I think what's

00:58:48 interesting then maybe for me my question would be well let's talk about that like these platforms that are enabling greater visibility for poets and then we can talk about the poetry after I always a mindful of the fact that myself personally I in facebook free for eight years you know the fake new scandal you know all that stuff right but I was always very uncomfortable about it just because it

00:59:18 was so distracting from writing the poem for me it's so hard to do that to begin with and so but I think my point is that you've got tumblr you've got Facebook you've got Instagram Twitter they're owned by billionaires right so there's a there's an inescapable matrix there of poetry and capital that is new know but

00:59:48 is not discussed right so I think it's worth it as a poet what you make your poems on now is definitely something that I think about and Who am I giving it to not to be a paranoid or anything but I think about it cuz I'm gonna be getting money too I don't like it you know I can fight the power on Twitter but what's his name is cashing it in person who runs Twitter you you're probably looking at the only to Facebook

01:00:18 free poets in the country right here it's you know the professional I'm thinking about it just in what's come up two things one is the professionalization of poetry which is actually an odd and rather modern thing there didn't used to be a career track but there absolutely is now complete with resumes and credits you amass one that's partly because although there are some poets on the net and that's just going to increase who can

01:00:49 actually make money at this most poets still cannot they're dependent on a day job and the day job has increasingly been in the university which has also had an effect on the poetry it's a cyclical feedback kind of thing I think and then the second part of that that I wouldn't want to lose is play which you brought up and which Paolo brought up you can forget about all of this that the purpose of poetry is pleasure and the way to read a poem is to immerse yourself and experience the poem and you

01:01:19 mentioned negative capability it was Keats thing about poetry has ruined for many people I'm happy that I read it way before I ever got any of it in school it's taken into school in the what is this pump saying no that's not what poems are doing what they're doing is setting for something and a dance with the language that creates pleasure play and the meaning of the experience which you will only feel if you let yourself experience it so although we're trying to map it here we all know and

01:01:52 you all know too that's really not the poetry escapes that and it's not where it should be it's only a useful way of doing it I don't know what's going to happen I still don't when you look at the history of poetry which I tend to take a long view of really a very long view huh going back actually a couple thousand years what survives what survives of people's poems at the most is a handful of really good poems and I think that's going to be the same thing

01:02:22 that isn't to say that I don't have a negative repository of what's going on now it's one way of disseminating it klaudia ranking to me is a superb poet I really love her work and what she did in her book particularly called don't let me be lonely is she put all kinds of logos and things for newspapers and all kinds to give you the felt sense what is it like what does it feel like to be an American at this moment I really don't

01:02:53 know any any book that does it as well that's what poetry can do but the other thing I'd say is that you know Keats referred to poets as possessing negative capability which is the Irit the ability to take something in without he said any irritable reaching after reason but I would want to suggest that that's not about poets that's about the way everybody should be reading poems you should look at your own response first and then you can say afterward well what in this poem gave me that response and

01:03:23 the last thing I'd say is about poetry always pulling two ways it looks it's language so it may look more intellectual to people that it in fact it's but it's words on a page and in one way they're pulling toward meaning but in the other way they're pulling towards sheer play attending toward music and that's where you see Stephens great examples you even look at the Bernstein look what he's doing with Ryman there WH Auden when he was judging the Yale series younger poets he said

01:03:56 and he also edited a book called good bad poetry which was just a whole lot of things I've done that kinds of things deliberate kinds of things and he said I have much more confidence in a poet who is just playing around of whatever the reverse of it than I do in anybody who is more purportedly serious so that would be my take on this phenomenon and I like Paulo have no idea what's going to happen now that you can sell a million copies of something I still

01:04:26 think a handful of poems are going to survive of anybody's as well it is very hard to know the trajectory of something something that's very big at one time I taught be so significant later they take an example from England I mean the if you were we went back a hundred years the most renowned poet would be Robert bridges poet laureate of England and an unknown poet who he was actually aware of but nobody knew who he was was Gerard Manley Hopkins and sapiens was published

01:04:57 and he died in his 40s was published after his death and you know if you look at anthologies there's some point where Robert bridges disappears and Hopkins becomes because he invented his own language becomes the for very home why you know is talk about play you know a dappled dog drawn Falcon is that a falcon drawn by the dawn or is that a falcon drawn like a picture in the dawn or is the dawn drawing the Falcon is the Falcon he just created compound-complex words that no one had ever seen before in language combinations and I think

01:05:29 there are poets now doing things just to talk about play so I'm sagging into this comment on play you know like Bill not who invented his own language or John hula I mean most people don't know who they are because people really want narrative very often that's something they can get right into but those folks are not all that well-known necessarily but they might end up being much more important in the long run and so it takes a while for all these things to sort out to talk

01:06:00 about reception well I'm gonna also add in about play and also about the platform and back to the you know editors the more curious and flexible editors of magazines is that if you do there are Twitter there are a lot of magazine editors who are on Twitter and they and and so if you if you're a poet you can find out about things and then and they post when poems are are published but they also have Twitter

01:06:32 specific contests and little things so you're writing these tiny things so maybe it's it's not what you're gonna do all the time but it's another way in which to play and be confined by something and then to create within a forum which is which is part of what poetry does and and other platforms are like that well right well yes they do have specific haiku ones but they also have other on other kinds of poems and

01:07:04 then you can also do it with us as we know a series of tweets can create a poem you don't have to just like it can be a rant so I would say that that play the Lang language is first I agree in a poem and just what that language is matters to a whole lot of different people in a whole lot of different ways so yes that one would think I mean

01:07:35 somewhere I'm Natasha sorry I asked can't Pat Campbell McGrath who is a poet dude made us really interesting work with you know it with pop culture and so forth but it makes political statements you know what do you think of Twitter poetry so when he said like you know it seems like now because we have these short forms the short form platforms that you know being perfect for haikus and everyone be writing great haikus but that's not really happening and perhaps

01:08:06 because it's all disposable it's a disposable context and people don't really want to stop and think about a poem all day they want to keep swiping and poetry really requires sustained attention the play is is play but it takes a while to sink in and it's it's it's a very kind of artful chaos even when it looks chaotic for example if we look at the Gertrude Stein from what strikes me I put it next to the bernstein poem because it's also based on music and people will look at it and see sweet

01:08:37 sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea Susie asado sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea Susie asado first of all it sounds good so we're already there are things we like to say like when Wallace Stevens says be the finale of zeem you just want to keep saying that and I think that's part of the appeal I think it might not realize that Susie asado is a flamenco dancer and she's imitating I wouldn't say imitating because she's not a representative poet she's embodying the sound of the flamenco dance you know and I wish I could stand up and dance a little bit but it's like you know sweet

01:09:08 sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea sweet sorrow you know so the language is its own music and then if you look at the syntax she's there's no one more radical today Susie asado is that told trasure a lien on the shoe this means slip slips hers it's completely ungrammatical but people will even look at told trasure and they'll see a tray there may be the tea could go on a tray and that would be a domestic column that could contrast with the the passion of the flamenco

01:09:40 dancer or maybe trasure is tr es su re like the French word play su or maybe it's treasure like something we really value and the opportunity to just play with words and associations is great and yet she didn't want us to as say a confessional poet like Plath or a poet like Eliot might have wanted to just say you know I think we are in that where the dead men lost their bones he said rats Ali could be the trenches of World War one you're comparing the break-up in your marriage to world - you

01:10:11 know - a battle and she didn't want to do that she wanted to get the words clean - to wipe them free of the associations with which you come to them and you know it's striking to see how much the language poets can resemble a poet who really just founded the movement you know you know or much earlier in the modernist era so but start but Stein actually was trying to be a best-seller right she wrote well to make money who he

01:10:43 offended and she became the best that's not what she's felt bad about it was accepted as much in the you know in the in the ivory tower and you can find this you know with there are those who are accepted more in that kind of it's it's the way the Beat poets had a hard time getting accepted as as establishment writers they were viewed as as activists who just the way perhaps they're followers of the Nuyorican poets today

01:11:14 and slam poetry even some of it is not good I mean we have to admit because it's poetry for everybody but yeah some of it you know is based on written poems that are actually that's why I put a slam poem next to a against bird poem so you can see the you know it really it's obviously coming out of Ginsberg but people are still writing like this I'm not going to read it to you but up it's very political as Ginsberg was and as Whitman was political you don't have to be like the social issues are a

01:11:46 political way of you could write about violence you could write about not being able to find a job you could write about all kinds of social issues and be in in a in some way or have a social conscience without it being the upper politics of you nope you know what's happening in the presidential office there are all kinds of politics and then there's a and then you can have

01:12:16 it almost back rounded in a poem you can you know there are all different ways again lots of basalt and you mentioned Nuyorican because another way in which poets are supported in and by support not just you know being heard having their poems heard is by giving readings or performances of their work and that's another there's a set of people who are running regular reading series around

01:12:47 any around the country in any city and in suburbia to libraries cafes bars universities literary centers and and those people are all so flexible and and who they present present and and it's up to the audiences just as it's up to the readers to help determine who who should be who should continue really being

01:13:17 heard and part of what everybody loved Gertrude Stein was because she was so different they liked that they didn't you didn't make the ivory tower certainly ones who came after they wouldn't because we you know we we edit

01:13:52 when we look back in history we forget how radical and how malign she might have been in certain circles and that's what I'm saying but it is tricky because there are you know you go to some open mic night and people are reading off you know to cocktail napkins that a lot of it is just awful and that could be true of a lot of slam poetry but if it's a gateway drug that brings people into the art form maybe that's all that that matters there are lots of people who believe that yes in performance writing that it really ought to work on the page or be

01:14:23 more about that so you know there is good and bad in every yeah well sure and we know that the more that we are immersed in our own field there's always the good and the bad the poets used to have it all I mean there was the Iliad and then you know two millennia later there was war in Pisa that although the popular genre became the novel and so a lot of questions that that what poets struggle with is how to reach that audience without without you know because we don't want to say what what reaches a bigger audience is better or

01:14:54 that what's even what's what's more moral is better I mean that seems desirable that you know maybe that's not possible maybe there could be you know just because it's well-meaning that doesn't always mean that it works as great art but that there is that challenge to try to reach out and at the same time preserve a certain amount of integrity and I think I don't know maybe I'm just reading what do you so but at the same time I think these avant-garde

01:15:25 movements even when they're a little bit rough around the edges often have much more to them than people recognized at the time so people might have looked at Richards side and thought it was just direct I mean and now I think a lot of people reject a lot of work because they think that it's not formal enough for them or but they also reject it because they think the opposite you know maybe it's too ivory tower so I think everything has to be taken on its own terms I'm not sure the ivory tower in that sense really exists anymore I know

01:15:57 exactly what you're talking about but if that's what I meant by the gatekeepers are gone and that has also to do with the way MFA programs have moved into the universities it's a feedback loop both ways there's another kind of gatekeeper system because they're all these programs where people are taught to write a certain way they can't start with the spoken word the way writers of the Iliad did and then move on to something else they have to start writing short poems that follow certain criteria I don't really think that's true about MFA programs I think they get

01:16:28 a bad rap I think it just depends who's teaching them I understand what you mean it does put a certain constraint around what's happening you know the the common thought about MFA programs since they're just producing a lot of people who are writing perfectly crafted pawns all of them a muchness and nothing really exciting but you know in any age there's only ever been a couple of people who were any good and would last all I have to do is look at the sixteenth century when the Sun it comes along I unfortunately have looked at these there are hundreds of these uh turley

01:17:00 forgettable silent sequences that were extremely popular in their own day and I think that's the equivalent of what's happening now you know we don't know till fifty or hundred years who the people are going to be that people will still be reading we can't tell that now but I think they're there I don't and I don't I don't see formal academic rejection the way there used to be there certainly what we're you wouldn't let certain things in and you wouldn't look just look the curriculum alone if you

01:17:30 look at it it's broadened in a certain way that yeah I can think of a large number of poets though that talk a lot about how much rejection they're getting and yes and so forth so it's not as if there is I mean there are certain rules you're supposed to follow I think even about poetry books what if you tried to write a poetry book that you didn't put any blurbs on it and there was nothing on the cover this would affect its reception that's the professionalization

01:18:03 at the same time I think rupee rupee card go back to her she published herself I think she's self-published and then it's sold so many copies on Amazon and then a big press latched on to her so I think I do I do agree with you that the MFA is really powerful right now the the desire to write poetry and publish a poet feeling incumbent to enroll in the

01:18:34 MFA and unfortunately most MFA programs only admit ten people per year so there is geek think that's happening and who gets to teach in these programs it's sort of like connect the dots and the the template for poetry that in the MFA programs has adapted is still the traditional lyric narrative poem which is a long tradition right um so but and so if you are writing left-of-center if you are exploring performance poetry

01:19:06 right you're there are programs that yeah would all would accept you but you have to do a little bit of research and perhaps the great equalizer or the Great Satan depending on the you ask is the internet where you're then as a reader I think you're at a very golden age for experiencing so many different types of poems and poets more so than ever before that's it there's another way now yeah it's another instance of gatekeeping

01:19:37 dates falling down no gatekeepers they're on to the net to go to performance poetry for a minute because that's so important I mean poetry began obviously in the oral tradition there are no cultures ever done without poetry and really until very recently there were still cultures like in Yugoslavia when people wanted to know about Homer they sent somebody to Yugoslavia where they were still repeating epics orally the tradition it's gone now but only the last like 40 years something like that but here's the thing about performance

01:20:07 poetry it's I agree with Amy there is no kind of poetry that doesn't yield I think we all agree with this really good instances of what it is it's not the kind of thing you're doing it's how well are you doing it so for performance poetry the question is if you want to translate it you may take the position that you don't want to translate it to the printed page you're only about the spoken word but if you want to translate it then you have to put it on the printed page so that a reader who is unaccompanied by

01:20:37 you reading it will hear what it ought to sound like which I think a number of performance poets are able to do to make that transition from one to the other it's because there's also a lot of publishers publishing yeah a lot of performance poets who want to be published in book form yes so it's not just that there they want to remain in the public and no I'm saying yes yeah yes I'm going along with that and you know so well you know so it

01:21:08 is hard to regain the oral tradition but this might be one way in which we're reminded of it and that certain groups of poets are keeping the the eye on what's potent sound like when they are read out loud or and I think that really a poem to be worth its salt it has to it has to sound right yes and Amy brought up readings which is a good thing readings have proliferated it's another way of disseminating it and I've noticed just from when I used to go to reading so there's a lot younger poets read

01:21:39 terribly they were almost embarrassed to be reading as if it were something that took away from the sacredness of the page so they would read in a certain poetry voice do mean understand anybody which was over and related and pretentious I opened the door to the Twilight it was a miracle there's been a feedback loop where poets read much better they write differently because they're reading to audiences you know it works when you're reading upon my poems got a lot better when I started doing a lot of reading because I understood what

01:22:10 work not just on a page in reading so I would want to add that yeah I want to say that I actually disagree I think the oral tradition has never been more popular in fact I'd say the most popular pulp poetry is and has never been more popular if we are going to keep an open mind and accept hip-hop and rap oh that's nice oh yeah and right it's because of hip-hop and rap that we had seek tremendous diversity in terms of young people who are taking a chance at

01:22:40 expressing themselves and instinctively going to the poem but it's actually not instinctively because they've grown up listening to this very old tradition of poetry oral poetry which is and rappers are great great poets of our age I I know I just not yeah straight why did your nails except for a minute I'm not sure what made you think I was disagreeing with that I'm saying the opposite that readings are one of the most important ways that the oral stuff is disseminate and I also would want to say if you look

01:23:12 at a poem I hope people go and read Latin poems if you go look at a poem it's ego that gets in the way when you're a grown-up when you're a kid you hear something think about the way kids parody a poem you know we remember light a match and watch it watch the schoolhouse burn to ashes follow a sort of thing they just look at a poem and they don't feel that they're challenged to understand it and a few go back as an adult and you just read a poem the best way to pick up your

01:23:43 point Paolo is just read it aloud and listen to yourself and if you do that a couple times you will understand what that poem means it will it will come into you because that's where it is yeah but one thing about rap is that it is performed with instrumentation or with singing voices and I think that it also has a lot more followers than poetry I mean we're talking the you know the not just I just say it's it's unheard of to sell a million poetry books but to sell rap music for an album for a song to go platinum it's no big deal really um so

01:24:15 the question the poet's always asking themselves is how especially in this day and age where there are some poets just by conceptual poets that are using appropriated material and there is no political meaning to what they're doing it's not about social engagement and right next to that we've got other writers I think how I'll mention the diversity of poetry today I mean I mentioned the Harlem Renaissance we can draw a line from there to the Black Arts Movement of Brooks and Baraka and how

01:24:47 activists they were in their time and well you know if you go to the st. Ross you know I don't know Ross gays poem on an Eric garner even if he makes an important statement or a sensitive statement about that who will really see that how I accept other poets and so it's a question we have to ask is there a way to that poets can reach out especially this so many poets want to be activists and I don't know if we really have a platform

01:25:17 for doing that because poetry requires that one not write propaganda that every line has to be its own has to undercut itself on so many levels when I hear politicians use lines out of poetry they almost invariably use them incorrectly or demonstrate they don't understand the work but I think right now it's a very challenging time for the poets who want to be socially engaged and want to you know convey their responsibility to make a difference go ahead yes I actually don't thinks I think um poets have

01:25:48 always been the first to respond with language in response situations it's just in our culture in the United States we don't really care as much about poets giving voice to what we're experiencing compared to Mexico compared to South America where poets actually have a voice in terms of expressing what's going on credit events I would argue that a lot of publishers right now when they're publishing poets they want to look for poets who are engaged but I do yeah well but let's go back to 9/11

01:26:20 which is not that long ago how did people grieve most people who don't really write poetry their first instinct was to write poem when I went to Union Square so many poems Angel Island right the immigrants or denied immigration the Chinese are non European Americans I mean they wrote poems instinctively I just think that you know it's now seems to be there's greater agency for you to be a poet who is socially engaged

01:26:52 combination of social media combination of the visibility of poetry and combination of I mean hip-hop right hip-hop rap has always been about what's going on social in the social realm right so it seems that you also for a moment talked about poetry as therapy which was because it goes back to what I said about Sexton yeah but it's interesting on the other hand I'm not sure that that always works because poetry and psychology is a very big theme but for instance friends right

01:27:24 when his father James Wright found out that he had become a poet he said to his son welcome to howl and I I mean I I like the saying that I um I like to say that a sad poet is a happy poet but really it is a whether poetry really works as you know as a way to grieve it seems like it should be cathartic but it also can um can become an obsession or a dark obsession of sorts and I don't know it's about transformation lovers of

01:27:56 what's dark that's the difference transformation through language it's like opera you ask yourself why is this pleasurable they're all dead but it is and because it's been transformed through the art is born well yes but the other thing is you know we're talking about terms of reaching people which is important and all of us who love poetry would like poems to reach more people but they may never and when you think about it in absolute numbers they're

01:28:26 probably because there are so many people alive the tiny percentage here that are reading it or interested in is probably or more than people who've ever lived at any other time and it doesn't ever have to be just about rapping you're bringing that up because I grew up in New York and they are Street rhythms and I was so struck like that I just saw Hamilton and this is the thing it was cumbersome lately it wasn't a gimmick it was so appropriate because the Americans who I mean by American poetry finally come into its own in this century partly through those responses

01:28:58 because our revolution was a twisting upward from the ground up and the city up of these energies that couldn't be contained and that's what you hear in rap and hip-hop and it's wonderful because the second act of that is a really very sad act its devolved from that into politics as usual but there it is if we open it up thanks yeah well does anyone have any questions

01:29:31 good I think the microphone works and people who have met for more than 10 years every other week who get together and read poetry we read what we've written we read whatever interests us

01:30:02 and we always discuss it in terms of what can we know about the poet what was going on at that time and it it's just been extraordinarily valuable for us as a venue for us to find out what's universal where we are in our growth in 10 years we have people in their 90's - people in their 90's one - people in their 70s people in their 60s people in their 30s about 8 people that show up for this thing and the growth that we've

01:30:32 all had by reading aloud every week and we read poems more than once and asked and we're not erudite to say I don't know what this means what do you think this no one's trying to be crazy about their ego with it it's really therefore an exploration and I think it's the universal a necessary expression for for us to experience intimacy through through through writing and I think it's very exciting that the written word is

01:31:03 happening on the Internet I have a young niece in rural Massachusetts who listens to who reads a ruby car and she's a young woman finding out about her own voice as a woman and here's here's a great venue for her and this is a kid who would never be exposed to poetry so I think there's a lot of hope about what's going on and I'm very happy to have listened so nice there are more avenues for people to

01:31:34 share their work and yeah for published work to be accessible for longer to a greater number of people there are a lot of advantages to the online presence of poetry and this 8.0 V there are downsides of course is an aim is pointing out those aren't only journal so you can read and for those of you who write those who the journals you can send too many of them are web scenes like the ones I mentioned had a.org at the end and so I was very interested to hear you talk about the pleasure and the

01:32:04 pain in poetry how much is known about the neurobiology of poetry particularly in the developing brain and in the deteriorating brain how much do we understand in this area young children people with neurodegenerative disease well we do know that I know men have very limited knowledge about this but I do know that play makes a difference both ends of that that it's

01:32:36 very important for people to engage and in play not necessarily to worry about what they need to get done or what she provides that it is a it is a lifesaver for a lot of people who engage in that art I think well I want to give two personal anecdotes about that one is my publisher one of the fellow poets in the list had a book out that was a really fine book of poems but she was losing her mind and she was able to function in any other way I don't know what this

01:33:07 says about poets was a terrific book and the second experience I had was in the public school in Queens in April the Poetry Society ask some of you have done that I'm sure poets to go into the public schools and teach a few classes yeah so I was teaching sixth seventh and eighth grade which was a first and the sixth graders were incredibly good they had an instinctive sense of aesthetics which is what may survive as in my colleague who were nothing much else survived mentally they were wonderful

01:33:38 they were moving my husband Roy came along with me he was struck by the same thing at the end of it the principal was debrief and I said well I take it the sixth grade was her advanced class and she said no they were our special-needs kids they were so far ahead of the other classes so you were probably the scientist and doctor I leave that to you to figure out what that means but I don't know if the study has been done about the effect on you know what the synapses are if someone's been hooked up

01:34:09 to a bunch of sensors and then reads a poem and what we what parts of I can't I didn't end up getting very far into reading it I put it off but there was a book called the midnight disease written by an neurologist who is also a writer at trying to evaluate the brain and and and she referenced more than just poets but that that perhaps that's the contains something of the answer I guess

01:34:46 you get you could ask the question about creativity in general it doesn't have to be just language I mean some people like de Kooning the painter I think he has Alzheimer's or some form of dementia and I think he went right on painting good paintings to the end they may have been affected by what happened to his brain but they was still a great painter things like that are interesting but I don't think we really know I don't have

01:35:22 anything to say about that question specifically although I suppose I should honestly there are psychiatrist but because there's not that much research I think done on that that particular topic but in general is interested in the comparing languages it's used in let's say prose where and we Patricia you touched on this a little bit at one point where you know the the meaning of the message is sort of intended in any way the writer intends to intend it they intend to make the meaning clear they don't always that sometimes spills out

01:35:53 over you know they have messages that it intended to create but that's the point of and then in poetry it seems there's an interest in pushing past gushing past the limits of what the words are actually meaning on the surface there's that sort of pushing past I thought that's really interesting and it raises two questions one relates to this gentleman's question so play playing is a little bit of you know we know animals play right we know that they they are rehearsing physical programs so they

01:36:24 learn how to hunt and move in a certain way but they do exceed whatever it's improvisational so they're not you're not practicing like someone might practice playing the piano where you feel you need to meet especially if it's classical let's say well you're trying to meet that particular note they are moving around but they're also exceeding their their being inventive and improvisational and that's what play involves instead of pushing past whatever the sort of the sheer formal aspect of what the brain seems to be doing so so that's a that's one

01:36:58 important thing but the other was to bring up the question about poetry is being changing over time as being an evolution of the constraints on poetry I thought that'd be an interesting topic that just touched on briefly because we talked about constraints like Twitter so many letters can be loud or another constraints whether it's professionalized capitalized whatever eyes that's another interesting way of looking at what's happened with poetry well I think poetry does require for a poet to write a poem certain restraints

01:37:30 are required even if they're arbitrary so it's helpful when writing a sonnet to know what the rules are and one can decide when to follow them when not to the same would be true if I would assume if one's writing on Twitter when it's a certain number of characters and that might actually inspire creativity but without some constraints we know how it's like Emily Dickinson gave gave themselves their own strange constraints and they vented their own rules and I think all of us do that to a certain degree and yes play I think the play

01:38:00 starts very young I think I remember being just a child and loving the word hippopotamus I'm wanting to say it over and over or so a machine which sometimes give out as much mass swing shine or whatever but you you you a lot of people start off as little gertrude stein's before they they lose before they forget you know the wonder that that's that is possible in the discovery of language whereas poets are always trying to discover and yes and I do you

01:38:32 think constraints are at the center of everything that poets do in poetry does obviously in a traditional form somebody gets at you but I think all of us and people I know I teach a workshop of actually awfully good poets and they what we're doing is setting ourselves our own constraints we're learning how to give ourselves our own assignments and set a constraint and it develops maybe as you write a poem but the constraint is what makes the poem again I wanted to add to that you have poets

01:39:05 who are actually responding to these developments in terms of the new platforms that we're writing in poetry you've got Tommy Pico Morgan Parker I mentioned to you Morgan Parker has one book got Tommy people has two books out Tommy Pico is a First Nations Native American poet queer came out with a book called IRL which is an internet term so he's actually embracing the language that he experiences daily right in real time on the Internet and that's actually

01:39:36 changing how maybe not consciously but he's allowing it to enter into his poem he wrote a book called it's on it's based on the pastoral but it's also like an anti pastoral because he uses a lot of language that you don't typically consider would be pastoral worthy you'll find on blogs you find on Twitter and he's very self-aware and he's writing this long poem on nature thinking about the past or then go back ten years ago you had Thanh Lin teaches out in New

01:40:07 Jersey he came up with a he's a conceptual poet he came up with the idea of poetry is boredom and boredom as actually being a pleasurable thing so he republished this tool called blips soap for one which is fantastic and when you're reading his work language is scattered all across the page like my arm a and he doesn't expect you to read it read it like treated ambient he calls it ambient stylistics why can't you engage in poetry like you do music you can do

01:40:37 three chores at once while listening to Tchaikovsky and still appreciate Tchaikovsky why can't it be the same thing for poetry so I understand if it's the poetry of boredom you're not even necessarily required to read the poem when you read it you can sleep around er yeah well you are reading three senses right you've got sight sound and then meaning yes so you can look at the words and if you look at his book he's playing around with typeface and but you don't have to read the whole poem it's

01:41:09 impossible it's 300 pages long which you can read bits of it and then sip your coffee go water the plants take the dog out for that go back to it and appreciate it like an as an ambient experience but it's on the page right then so you know and that's I think a response to this oral and visual environment that we are finding ourselves immersed in ten years ago before the success of YouTube right we're now like you had eight windows

01:41:40 open on the internet and you're reading the tires right so I've been talking to Ann Marie - there's something called called visual poetry which is really a branch of concrete poetry where you arrange the words on the page to represent what the what your subject matters so I mean it actually has a long history but manry had an example of a poem about a dog shaped like a dog there's one over one by E Cummings called grasshopper where the word the letters of the grasshopper jump across the page so it might seem a little gimmicky but this goes all the way back

01:42:11 to Robert Herrick and Herbert's Easter wings and so forth there's a long tradition of representing poet the words visually that said when there was this because you mentioned malhomme when there was a discussion between Mallory maeín advert and de casa do you know I've been painting so much would love try poetry have so many ideas and mallar may said to him my dear de god poems are not made out of ideas poems are made out of words so but then if you can arrange the words and pictures maybe poems are made out of images I mean images in two

01:42:44 senses of the word go on yes I think of boredom there's a kind of repressed anxiety so if it can be transformed into pleasure that's very interesting question among a number of things I've been puzzling over in the course of your presentations one in particular and that is well wider and wider dissemination through more and more channels and

01:43:15 venues engagement in social and political activity performance in a number of ways all an even intimacy all phenomena of the present moment and at the same time Patricia you were mentioned at least twice maybe three times the the notion that only a handful of poems perhaps in any given era tend

01:43:46 to last to endure and I'm wondering about the sort of dialectic between these two things because for example if you read as I tend to do a lot of poetry reviews you often hear the phrase so-and-so is the greatest poet writing in the English at the present time or so-and-so is the greatest American poet of the end of the 20th century now if that's more than your to move books at

01:44:19 forest routes or Norton in these reviews and what what does that have to do with is more and more what seems like democratization of poetry huge diversity of poetry and then what does what's the meaning of the greatest poet writing in whatever language there's a class there that I can't quite record you may well wonder about I listening to I'm thinking if we just collected all the blurbs on the back story books but

01:44:52 here's the real situation as opposed to even 20 years ago maybe you would ask a list of people interested in poetry we'll give me a list of the 10 most important poets writing now and most of them that there'd be a lot of overlap if you did that now with even 10 or 20 names there might be no overlap or maybe two or three names I don't I don't think there's exactly a contradiction in what you're saying I think it's again the

01:45:23 winnowing effects of time I think reading the blurbs could skew that in fact I think the best things reviewers can do I really think most poetry reviews first of all they're hardly any which is really sad and secondly the best of them don't really talk that much about poetry they'll give you enough of a selection from the book under review so you can judge for yourself what you think of this book but most of them don't as you've probably realized they'll talk about it I don't know if that answers your question well the

01:45:53 point is it is a subjective claim no matter how we look at it if someone says this is the greatest writer or the greatest writer according to whom and in by according to what standards what is them and I think that's the place to start the Herrick who I mentioned you know has worked in visual forms he the reception of poets can be so odd he was slightly he was completely unknown during his time and then was discovered which is you know centuries ago and that

01:46:24 was discovered in the 19th century so that's a really odd one sometimes people die and then they become really big after that like Emily Dickinson but here's someone who just lay underground for centuries I mean there's every kind of and others who like Oscar Wilde who did write some poems very popular in his time very popular afterwards it's very hard to know we can't know I think that it's important that you have you know there are going to be those but those lasts through time but in the meantime we're

01:46:55 living now and it's who we are interested in yes individuals and that's and that's important it's important to living life who we who we are interested in seeing and watching and in any reading everything who we are this is now and these are various you know any any used bookstore in a small town will make you sad because you'll be come across books that were published by

01:47:26 major publishing houses and you don't know who these people are greatest can only be temporal really yeah and you don't have every strong poet being the school of one but every reader is also a school of one and I think what Amy's saying is just look at what appeals to you that's the only important word greatest is a superlative which means that it can only be one and if many many

01:47:56 people are saying so-and-so is the greatest then it can only mean I like this or it speaks to me okay great any word there should be a list of little words you can't use in poetry Seuss great it would certainly be one of them it says absolutely nothing but you touch on the connection to capital in that statement right like you talk about the industry and you can't ignore thinking about great and greatest because every

01:48:26 year we've got every month we have a new award that is going to some body requires right qualifications and yeah we need to combine greatest and scarcity American blurbs are especially hyperbolic actually if you would just compare American blurbs to Irish works or English works or others in the poetry speaking world that's pretty striking surprises or something going all the way back in fiction and poetry you'll see a

01:48:57 lot of names that nobody knows anymore it's astounding right and that's a relatively new prize the people is surprised if there was something that that went back to the thousands of years we can only imagine what would be on that list so Robert bridges did write at least one great poem arrows Terenure I feel that actually you know arrows the one who begins arrows Tyrannis that's right wonderful great poem that's

01:49:27 there's an example of it's a great poem whatever else I'm told that we make you wrap up I'm really glad to have to stop things but it means everything so interesting