May CommQuote

Hooray for May.  This month's quote goes to poet Vijay Seshadri. The poem is titled New Media and comes from his latest collection 3 Sections.

"Anyone concerned about the state of American poetry should put aside his or her thesis notes and pick up a copy of 3 Sections. . . . Mr.Seshadri is talented and assured enough to lay his self-consciousness bare on the page with a generous, fluid, avuncular wit reminiscent of W.H. Auden." —The American Reader


New Media

Why I wanted to escape experience is nobody's business but my own,
but I always believed I could if I could

put experience into words.
Now I know better.
Now I know words are experience.

"But ah thought kills me that I am not thought"
"2 People Search for YOU"
"In the beginning there was the . . ."
"re: Miss Exotic World"
"I Want Us To Executed Transaction"

It's not the thing,
there is no thing,
there's no thing in itself,
there's nothing but what's said about the thing,
there are no things but words

about the things 
said over and over,
perching, grooming their wings,
on the subject lines.

--from: 3 Sections, by Vijay Seshadri (Graywolf Press, 3013). p20

February CommQuote

Let's go with another poem for our February Commquote (since April is approaching which we know is Poetry Month, how's that for logic?).  The poet is Rae Armantrout, who is coming for a visit to the Kelly Writers House later this Spring.  The poem is called Cursive from her 2007 collection, Next Life.


Cursive

In my country,
in "Toy Story,"

sanity meant keeping
a set distance

between one's role
as a figurine
and one's "self-image."

This gap
was where the soul
was thought to live.

*

When he thought of suicide, he thought,

"It ends here!"

and

"Let's do it!"

As if a flying leap
were a form of camaraderie.

As if a cop and his
comic relief partner
faced off'
against moguls.

Crossed wires released such
hope-like sparks.

 *

This thing was called
"face of the deep,"

this intractable blank
with its restless cursive

January CommQuote

Let's ring (hint hint) in the new year with a poem called Cell Phone by Ernesto Cardenal (transl. by John Lyons). It's from his 2011 collection titled The Origin of the Species and Other Poems (Texas Tech University Press).

Cell Phone

You talk on your cell phone

and talk and talk

and laugh into your cell phone

never knowing how it was made

and much less how it works

but what does that matter

trouble is you don’t know

just as I didn’t

that many people die in the Congo

thousands upon thousands

for that cellphone

they die in the Congo

in its mountains there is coltan

(besides gold and diamonds)

used for cell phone

condensers

for the control of the minerals

multinational corporations

wage this unending war

5 million dead in 15 years

and they don’t want it to be known

country of immense wealth

with poverty-stricken population

80% of the world’s coltan

reserves are in the Congo

the coltan has lain there for

three thousand million years

Nokia, Motorola, Compaq, Sony

buy the coltan

the Pentagon too, the New York

Times corporation too

and they don’t want it to be known

nor do they want the war to stop

so as to carry on grabbing the coltan

children of 7 to 10 years extract the coltan

because their tiny bodies

fit into the tiny holes

for 25 cents a day

and loads of children die

due to the coltan powder

or hammering the rock

that collapses on top of them

The New York Times too

that doesn’t want it to be known

and that’s how it remains unknown

this organized crime

of the multinationals

the Bible identifies

truth and justice

and love and the truth

the importance of the truth then

that will set us free

also the truth about coltan

coltan inside your cell phone

on which you talk and talk

and laugh into your cell phone

 

April CommQuote

Since April is Poetry Month a poem is in order, one from Andrei Codrescu called the new gazette. It's from his collection, So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, which I recommend picking up because Codrescu is not only a good poet, he's one of the giants. When looking for a copy of the poem to post I stumbled upon this 2006 NPR radio interview with Robert Siegel (excerpted below the poem), Codrescu talking about this very piece.

the new gazette 

I want to be the publisher of a vicious illuminated newspaper.

All the viciousness in it will be gold-leafed, raised and colored-in

by art students with medieval bodies.

The bend of their heads and the angle of their breasts
will outlast sunset

to exchange body with Chartres.

My writers will hate everything
with passion, fervor and murderous disregard for their safety

which will take in writing the form of classical tragedy.

Sophocles will be movie reviewer, Richard Speck desk editor.

Euripides and Charles Manson will be in charge of the clergy.

The translators under penalty of death will have to be faithful.

In the office only foreign languages will be spoken.
Faithfulness and alienness will be the order of day and night

since they will succeed each other on the front page.

The paper will appear twice a day, four times a night.

The readers will be mean, nervous and ready to kill for the cause.

There will be plenty of causes, one for every hour, and in later
issues, one for every minute,

The causes will be biological and spiritual and they will incite
war for molecular differences.

Molecular terrorists in hiding will write letters to the editor.
Two persons, a man and a woman, called Tolerance and Intolerance,
will be in charge of love and lights.                 
--by Andrei Codrescu

From: Virtual Privacy: A Myth of the 21st Century, November 03, 2006 4:00 PM, National Public Radio

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:In some ways, Commentator Andrei Codrescu is a member of the avant garde. Take a poem he wrote back in 1973, which looked ahead to the rise of blogs.

ANDREI CODRESCU: I wrote a poem called The New Gazette that said, among other things, I want to be the publisher of a vicious, illuminated newspaper. The paper will appear twice a day, four times a night. The readers will be mean, nervous and ready to kill for the cause. There will be plenty of causes, one for every hour and in later issues, one for every minute. The causes will be biological and spiritual, and they will incite war for molecular differences. Molecular terrorists in hiding will write letters to the editor. Two persons, a man and a woman called Tolerance and Intolerance, will be in charge of love and lights.

I've quoted at length from this youthful work not only because it proves that I'm a prophet, but also because I used to write pretty great poetry. Looking back on early work is not advisable though, just as it isn't advisable to look back into the past when one was vital, strong, blustery and brilliant. Truly, youth is wasted on the young, but only if one looks back. The past is a mirror that shimmers and draws the soul in. More people die everyday from falling into the mirror of the past than fall from horses or get snuffed in car crashes.

Anyway, when I wrote that poem, I had no clue that in 2006 every person alive on earth would be able to broadcast their most intimate thoughts everyday into a new public nervous system that collects every human now. Back in 1973 I still suffered from the trauma of childhood under a totalitarian government who looked into every thought of its subjects and used that knowledge to terrify and belittle us. Surveillance was a bad thing. Privacy was sacred.

In 2006, we still hold privacy to be a right and we pay lip service to it. In reality, privacy means little in the age of personal computing. Anyone can find out in minutes all they need to know about you and everyone is ready to broadcast everything anyone might want to know. The desire to expose everything one feels or experiences and the need to translate all of it immediately into an urgent bulletin is an inexorable process, a progressive disease that leads to the foreshadowing of every difference. Every half-baked thought or passing incidence takes on a personality, a body for consumption.

Bloggers produce molecular bodies blown up like balloons with significance. This type of communication is not friendly to threat, a form of rape maybe. Of course, you don't have to read anybody's blog or submit to the increasingly epileptic flicker of television, but you are hooked. There's no escaping it. If you were born before the time when communication was compulsory, you might be tempted to look to a more innocent past and then you'll fall in it, blinded like a bird.

October CommQuote

Here's an offering for our October CommQuote from recently crowned Nobel laureate, Tomas Transtromer.

The Scattered Congregation

I
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.

II
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.

III
Inside the church there's a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.

IV
But the church bells have gone underground.
They're hanging in the sewage pipes.
Whenever we take a step, they ring.

V
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way
to the Address. Who's got the Address?
Don't know. But that's where we're going.

--Tomas Transtromer:Selected Poems, 1954-1986, edited by Robert Hass, Ecco Press, 1987

April CommQuote

Newspaper blackout poetry is a pretty cool idea. It's a bit of a gimmick, but nice things happen.
Invented by Austin Kleon, it works like this: Grab a newspaper. Grab a marker. Find an article. Cross out words, leaving behind the ones you like. Pretty soon you’ll have a poem.

Said The New Yorker: "[The poems] resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead...like a cross between magnetic refrigerator poetry and enigmatic ransom notes, funny and zen-like, collages of found art..." (The New Yorker)

So our April CommQuote is a one of these poems. More can be found in Kleon's book, Newspaper Blackout (Harper Perennial, 2010). Happy Poetry Month and long live newspapers!

Since you probably can't make most of it out from the copy-paste, here's the text of Time-Traveling: so/they look/as they did when I was 10/the Old King/and his queen/ my parents/ The size of/Egyptian/ sculptures, all/ Secrets/ that/ I didn't know

February Commquote

This month's feature is a poem that appeared in The South Carolina Review a few years ago (Volume 40, Number 1, Fall 2007). The poet is Michael Cadnum.

Foreign Tongue

Pay too much for the great pink
naked hares I carried through
the flies and the lottery ticket sellers
those weeks before the gunfire.
We wanted to be alone in the world, but we settled

for being bad at it, taping past tenses
to the kitchen shelf. One day
you didn't have to peek into the book,
and began flirting with the accountant
upstairs, and the owner of the broom shop,

dustpans and pirated DVDs. This was before we
burned the early footage, me jockeying
the delete button, you getting
it all with your ultimate megapixels,
and before we stayed awake all night,

shots--those silvery automatics every cop sported in white
leather holsters--pricking up and down
the mud river. What lasted and what didn't--
the aqueduct, the pagan temples, contrasted
with your patience in watching me sweat

the local dialect, mayors and grandees
disappearing every night, carved into the outgoing
wakes ebbing down the whitebait-
angry moon.

--Michael Cadnum

November CommQuote

Communications

by Neal Bowers

Sent in after new ground was taken,

my father ducked from ditch to shell-hole,

unwinding the telephone cable behind him,

a pfc. cast as Mercury, connecting

the gods with the lesser gods.

Funny to think of him trailing

the complex filament of speech,

that man, neither shy nor sullen,

who answered only “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,”

and never volunteered a private thought.

Standing off with his hands in his pockets

or cupping a cigarette, he seemed to be waiting

with the great rural patience of fields

for whatever might rise pure and nameless

or fall from the sky beyond explanation.

If anyone asked what he was thinking,

he said, “Nothing,” and when he died

he rushed out leaving everything unsaid,

uncoiling a dark line into darkness

down which a familiar silence roars.

from Out of the South (2002: Louisiana State University Press)

August CommQuote

The Mr. Cogito (Pan Cogito) poems of Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert are among his most intriguing. Lucky for CommPilings, Mr. Cogito reads the newspaper. But first a little insight into his character:

… Both from the stylistic and from the grammatical point of view, Mr. Cogito is a combination of the self and others. This ambiguity reflects the major philosophical theme of the volume [Pan Cogito]: man’s identity and the problem of his relationship to others. In reply to a letter inquiring about Mr. Cogito, Herbert wrote the following: “As for Mr. Cogito – well, if I knew exactly myself? In any case it is neither a persona nor a mask, but rather … a method … An attempt to isolate, to ‘objectify’ what is shameful, individual, and subjective" ...Mr. Cogito is clearly a little man and some have called him petty. His concerns are frequently ordinary and practical; he enjoys reading sensational newspaper articles, he tries transcendental meditation and fails, his stream of consciousness brings up detritus like a tin can, he needs advice and so on. ...Mr. Cogito is a device allowing Herbert to admit this ordinariness we all share, to establish it and, once this is done, to build upon it. Herbert wants to underline ordinariness and imperfection because he wants to deal with practical, not transcendent, morality.

--Carpenter, Bogdana, and John Carpenter. "Recent Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert." World Literature Today 51.2 (Spring,1977): 213.

Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper

by Zbigniew Herbert

On the first page
a report of the killing of 120 soldiers
the war lasted a long time
you could get used to it

close alongside
the news of a sensational crime
with a portrait of the murderer

the eye of Mr Cogito
slips indifferently
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with delight
into the description of everyday horror

a thirty-year-old farm labourer
under the stress of nervous depression
killed his wife
and two small children

it is described with precision
the course of the murder
the position of the bodies
and other details

for 120 dead
you search on a map in vain

too great a distance
covers them like a jungle

they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction

a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion

June CommQuote

from Lessons From Television

by Susan Stewart

You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh.

Music swells the emotions;

music exists to punctuate seeing.

Emotion, therefore, is punctuation.

Formless, freedom resembles abasement.

Abasement is as infinite as desire.

You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh.

Those who are not demons are saints.

You are not a demon or a saint.

Women are small and want something,

so laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh.

Bed are sites of abasement.

The news is about the news.

Faces in close-up are always in anguish.

Hair and teeth are clues to class.

Clothes are changing,

hanging up or down

And change itself is a laugh.

Cause can’t be figured

and consequence is yet to come.

You’re either awake or asleep

and that, too, is a clue to class.

Children are never with groups of children

unless they are singing in chorus.

Their mothers cannot do enough,

though there’s always room for improvement.

And improvement lies in progress,

though collapsing is good for a laugh.

Saints will turn to the worse.

Demons die if they can be found.

Nature is combat, weather is sublime.

Even weather can make you laugh.

People you don’t know are louder than you are,

but what is far away cannot harm you—

Books are objects, families are inspiring.

Animals protect their young;

the young come with the territory.

English is the only language.

Reading is an occasion for interruption,

and interruption is a kind of laugh.

Something is bound to get better.

And there is a pill with your name on it.

When indoors, stick with your own race—

that way you’ll feel free to laugh.

Strangers are paying attention to your smell.

A camera will light like a moth on disaster.

Pity will turn to irony.

The street is a dark and frightful place.

Fires are daily.

Your car is your face.

You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh.

“Lessons from Television” from Columbarium (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,2003) as cited from The Poetry Foundation Archive

ONandOnScreen

Just discovered an interesting site called ONandOnScreen.

"Here poems and videos meet their match: poems are written for videos, and videos are made and paired with poems. The poems may enhance the videos and the videos may glamorize the poems.

ONandOnScreen is a conversation between moving words and moving images, on and on."

The site does not feature video of poets reading poetry, but rather poems and videos "talking" to each other.

Edited by Thomas Devane (check out his Burning the Bear Suit with accompanying video), and published quarterly, ONandOnScreen is currently accepting submissions.

February CommQuote

This month's quote is about is a nice meditation on television and reality, as well as nobility and 9/11. The poem comes from Poetry.org.

Don't Let Me Be Lonely [On the bus two women argue]

by Claudia Rankine

On the bus two women argue about whether Rudy Giuliani had to kneel before the Queen of England when he was knighted. One says she is sure he had to. They all had to, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Mick Jagger. They all had to. The other one says that if Giuliani did they would have seen it on television. We would have seen him do it. I am telling you we would have seen it happen. When my stop arrives I am still considering Giuliani as nobility. It is difficult to separate him out from the extremes connected to the city over the years of his mayorship. Still, a day after the attack on the World Trade Center a reporter asked him to estimate the number of dead. His reply—More than we can bear—caused me to turn and look at him as if for the first time. It is true that we carry the idea of us along with us. And then there are three thousand of us dead and it is incomprehensible and ungraspable. Physically and emotionally we cannot bear it, should in fact never have this capacity. So when the number is released it is a sieve that cannot hold the loss of us, the loss Giuliani recognized and answered for. Wallace Stevens wrote that "the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility . . . nobility which is our spiritual height and depth; and while I know how difficult it is to express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its definite presentation a horror of it. But there it is." Sir Giuliani kneeling. It was apparently not something to be seen on television, but rather a moment to be heard and experienced; a moment that allowed his imagination’s encounter with death to kneel under the weight of the real.

January CommQuote

I think a New Year's resolution for our monthly quote will be to call upon more poetry. Here's an excerpt from a poem by Raul Hernandez Novas featured in THE WHOLE ISLAND: SIX DECADES OF CUBAN POETRY (University of California Press, 2009). The poem is called Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

...Maybe we play in the same park
a mute telephone between us
and electric cord coiled vibrating
working in the white curve of distance
the path at whose end a sad snow falls
the flight of a silent bird
a migratory bird's promise
seen with the soil of Wisconsin my bone gone to pot
a telegram carried by birds and between us
nothing but a shining window
that I pass through without breaking the glass.

--Raul Hernandez Novas, trans. by Mark Weiss

August CommQuote

Flarf, both a verb (the act of surfing the web and cobbling internet words and phrases together to create poetry) and noun (the result of such activity) is getting a lot of attention these days in and outside the poetry world. Kenneth Goldsmith (poet and conceptual artist) writes on two 21st Century controversial and new media-based poetry movements in the latest issue of Poetry.

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

--Kevin Goldsmith, "Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo," Poetry (July/August 2009)

May CommQuote

It was only a matter of time until I worked New York School poet Frank O'Hara into this blog. It's not even a stretch because his poems are full of references to the movies and feeling about the whole movie-going experience. Here's a rather famous one.

AVE MARIA

Mothers of America

let your kids go to the movies!

get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to

it's true that fresh air is good for the body

but what about the soul

that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images

and when you grow old as grow old you must

they won't hate you

they won't criticize you they won't know

they'll be in some glamorous country

they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you

for their first sexual experience

which only cost you a quarter

and didn't upset the peaceful home

they will know where candy bars come from

and gratuitous bags of popcorn

as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over

with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg

near the Williamsburg Bridge

oh mothers you will have made the little tykes

so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies

they won't know the difference

and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy

and they'll have been truly entertained either way

instead of hanging around the yard

or up in their room

hating you

prematurely since you won't have done anything horribly mean yet

except keeping them from the darker joys

it's unforgivable the latter

so don't blame me if you won't take this advice

and the family breaks up

and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set

seeing

movies you wouldn't let them see when they were young

[1960]

From Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O'Hara. City Lights Books. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Frank O'Hara.org.