Lyn Hejinian and my "Good Ideas" class. . . .

 This morning I listened to Lyn Hejinian giving a Harvard Woodberry Lecture called Reinventing the Workshop. This occurred in 2014, and she clarifies that she isn't interested in workshops for the poet who speaks from his or her heart, though "profound experience" and "astute observation" are favorably mentioned. In contrast, she spends a lot of time on so-called procedural methods of making poems. These are poems in which the author function gets pushed out of primacy. (My heart!) (We are late to all the parties.) 

On the Harvard site that introduces this, she is quoted on this philosophy, which I might consider the topic of communal poesis--or the questioning of authorship--that constitutes the reinvention of the workshop in her lecture. Somewhere else, apparently, she has written, "The elements of expertise and inspiration that writers seek, whether in solitude or in the contexts of a workshop, are largely assumed to be requisite tools of an individual who can acquire and use them: the author. This workshop will query that assumption, and offer terms for imagining modes of composition in which authorship becomes a dubious proposition, and the grounds for establishing an aesthetic event become communal."

That expresses what she's up to here, though she doesn't say it quite like that. 

Anyway, after she has run through the Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge and Caroline Bergvall work and created a group assignment for the audience--all recommended (by me, too, if you listen)--the students in the audience want to pin her down to her own work. How does she, Lyn Hejinian, "establish an aesthetic event"?

This is not exactly something she came to address, so naturally she is most interesting here. A little hemming and hawing. A discussion of a collaboration (with a visual artist) that didn't work, and of one with a poet that did. Finally she says (admits), "I have various ways of pushing myself out of the way in order to make work that's better than I am."

Various ways, huh? A student asks the million-dollar question: what is her "criteria" for recognizing that betterness?

A brief glance heavenward, then: "That I don't fall back on motifs where I'm just repeating myself or echoing what I was raised to think of like mellifluous sounds." 

Okay then. Of course, it's hard not to fall back on the old sounds, our ideas of sounds, not to mention our ideas of ideas.  But okay. 

Poetry Month Sez Who

Ralph Emerson:

The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is...to be surprised out of our propriety...to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.....The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.

Teaching, Not Teaching M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!

The first time I assigned NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, a book for which I practically needed a trigger warning the first time I heard of it, I did not want to get it wrong. 

I'm hardly a perfectionist as a professor. My pedagogy hero is Count Leo Tolstoy, who once wrote:

To teach, to bring up a child, why, it is a chimera, an absurdity, for this simple reason, that the child is much nearer than I am, or any grown man, to the true, beautiful and good to which I undertake to raise him.

I take comfort here, especially when discussing complex texts that are meaningful to me with a room of nineteen-year-olds. I was never confident about explaining Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin and James Joyce and Helene Cixous, anyway. In my class, you don't have to like anything, but you have to know the general facts and you have to have a grounded opinion on what a text is, have to be able to connect it to a few other things you know. 

Still, back in 2017, considering the teaching of Zong!, I conscientiously gathered my notes and proceeded to read the truth to the youths. I got the students to read, then made them write to several prompts that would turn into a -- yes -- a paper. They had to get it, and they had to get it my way. 

But at the end of the semester, a few of the students who came to my office hours regularly were still puzzling over their papers -- or simply trying to ensure As. One afternoon, four of them had gathered and we began reading the poem together. We were in a large adjunct bull pen at the Bronx campus that sits in the middle of the Economics department. One fellow read, then another, then we decided to read it in pairs, then to split it up and read it in columns, overlapping, singing, really. An athlete, a musician, a philosophy major, and a senior who just needed an English credit to get out raised their voices. There were no adjuncts around, to my dismay, because the result seemed to me very beautiful, but when a few of the Economics folks peeked over the safety glass that encaged us, I was proud.

This semester, I'd learned my lesson. Rather than "teaching" Zong!, it's been all reading. Little chunks at first, then larger chunks, and, yesterday, the passages at the end, the part from the printer foul-up. 

At first three of them were reading downward--one for the left column, one for the right, and one for the center. Some admiration, some complaints. (Fine.) Then we were all reading--one third of the room to the left column and so on. After we'd done a page it was as if we'd emerged on a new beach. Some of the students still were not happy with the text--not clear, not connected--but others were joined to it, intrigued, excited. when I suggested we record ourselves and send it to MNP herself, they were thrilled. 

Et voila. 

The next morning, I'm not sure this is good enough for her. Not yet. But posting here and will start digging around to reconnect to her on Twitter, where we once followed each other, or to get her email another way. Maybe we will revise--I guess, a la Tolstoy, I should let the class decide.  

In speaking of the earth, a poet beats the New York Times (again)

This week The Times devoted their Sunday magazine to a single article, which I only scanned, about how we (they?) didn't address climate change last century. Now some of my Facebook friends are arguing about the essay and about the real (real) cause of our failure to fix. I think it's too late for all of it, and maybe impossible anyway, and our only recourse is poetry.

Fortunately, poetry is quite a recourse. Poets.org has just published a brill pair of stanzas on and around the topic from Marcella Durand. Read from The Prospect here; below are a few lines that work like a surgeon on the situation, opening its ugliness cleanly to take stock.

                                                          I finally understand

what we’re doing, in this moment of glowing darkness I understand 

       what I put in the water I drink the water and if together 

       we are all getting hot we are making it hot and I must find 

       my way to the water 

The other night someone asked if I had a blog.

The other night someone asked me if I had a blog, and I've been thinking about the question, off and on, ever since. I told him about this blog, but I as easily could have told him about the poetry blog on blogger, Ab Chaos Poesis, which is mostly for the daily draft poems during poetry month, but now is a warehouse for links to other poems I've written and published on the web. Or I might have told him about Ab Chaos Iter, the wordpress travel writing blog started when writing for Travel Weekly and other trade magazines, now mostly abandoned.

No doubt this fellow was only trying to be polite. He couldn't have cared that I have three blogs, four if you count the one started just after marrying that I can't even find any more. (How many abandoned, ignored blogs are also forgotten by their authors?) So I conflated them and told him about the poetry blog but told him its name was Ab Chaos Lex. Lies still come very easily to me. And just today, after wasting a lot of time on my phone with the news, I thought I should take a look at the blogs, since it's been a while.

In a perfect world, my three blogs would be one blog, this one. I still like the name, its lifting from Finnegan's Wake, its play off my own name, and it reminder of my old sneaking certainty that Chaos is not only the mother of this world (thank you Hesiod) but its substance, too. Particularly these days, when the most powerful man in the world (what a world) has a little problem with mood swings.

But mood swings are a cinch, compared to chaos. As Hesiod wrote:

Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, [110] and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. These things declare to me from the beginning, you Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, [115] and tell me which of them first came to be. In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all¹the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, [120] and Eros （Love）, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether²and Day, [125] whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods...

Still Chaos isn't what I was thinking of when I opened my computer today. All afternoon, I'd been flipping through my phone's Washington Post app, squinting at the news and thinking of the limits of love (fairest among the deathless gods). Hate is not generative, as everyone knows, whereas love is--that's agreed upon. Even though it "overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods." Or maybe because of that overcoming. Still, love is not much better than hate in the face of the world described by the Washington Post.

No, in the face of this news, we need poetry. Lots of poetry. So I scooted around the web and landed upon this recording of a poem by Charles Bernstein, "Ballad Laid Bare by its Devices." It begins:

Somethin’ ’bout sound

Repeatin’ in degree

        A voice not mine

Singin’ as a we.

I've heard him read the piece, written for the 2017 MLA convention, and found a fulsome pleasure in its full displeasure. This urbane New York language poet mockingly considers the ballad while creating one, dropping his gs all friendly-like, and using it to critique a little post election pain as well as the current disaster in the academy. He even references my very fave Malcolm X speech.

A ballot says, this is what we want.

A bullet does that too.

A ballad’s just lousy fantasy 

Goin’ out from an us to a youse.

The effect was painful, for this listener. Toward the end, he recites lines from "Lord Randall," an actual border ballad that pretty well sings his song (mine too):

I ha been to the wild wood; mak my bed soon; 

I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie doun. 

Oh, yes, I am poisoned; mak my bed soon 

I’m sick at the heart, and fain wad lie doun.

We are poisoned here, and maybe we always were, or maybe it's been rising like the temperatures, the oceans; the border ballad lines (from two different stanzas) fit well. In all, cycle of the poem somehow cradles the incredible exhaustion of this moment, verse and voice vexed. And though I recommend listening first, here is a text of the poem, located on Critical Inquiry.

(Maybe the reason I don't blog is that, when I do, I write about three blogs, politics, Hesiod, squeeze in the name of Malcolm X, conclude on a poem by a male poet and still feel like I haven't begun.)

from "Mothers" by Nikki Giovanni

the last time i was home
to see my mother we kissed
exchanged pleasantries
and unpleasantries pulled a warm
comforting silence around
us and read separate books

The amazing human and poet Frank O'Hara

Thanks to Selina for posting one O'Hara poem, which reminded me of this one which I love sharing with friends:

Autobiographia Literaria

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

A fab YouTube lesson on Iambic Pentameter

I know that you are working hard on your sonnet and on placing your best insights and ideas into iambic pentameter. I can't wait to see what you come up with. I did a little research on iambic pentameter myself tonight and found the google to be very full of help. Or at least able to give me plenty of links.

For the record, the words "iambic pentameter how to" yielded a scary 229,000 results.

This 2-minute quickie youtube video is from the Kennedy Center and pretty helpful.

Fortunately I found a still better work of strange genius by a high school senior out there somewhere in America. Its 5 minutes will not waste your precious time. In fact, I can pretty much promise you will enjoy.

As for tomorrow's handouts, I have emailed them to your addresses. My attempt at blackboard failed.

excerpt from an experimental poetry manifesto:

Manifest

1.2 The poem is a set of topological figures or features.
1.2.1 Words are subject to disintegration, death, and other natural events that individuals of all types face.
1.2.2 The words on the page represent the page at a certain geological moment.
1.2.2.1 This moment implies a history.
1.2.2.2 This moment entails a future.
1.2.2.3 The reader sees merely a moment captured.
1.2.3 The "level of the page" is the only level.
1.2.3.1 The vertical "reader to page" and "author to page" and "author to reader"
relationships are eradicated.
1.2.3.2 The horizontal journey through the page, as a hiker on a trail,
is the only way to search for meaning.
1.2.3.2.1 As such meanings will be different for each traveler.
1.2.3.2.2 As such meaning is made through memory.
Connections are delayed, soundings are delayed, meaning
is delayed. Meaning is put together.
1.2.3.2.3 As such meaning is a compound impression of a physically traversed
space (the eye moves physically through the space as the mind
encounters fragmented signifiers).
1.2.3.2.4 Each poem is a microcosm.
2. The page is a slice of geological time. It has a past and a future. It has physical features.
2.1 It could have been otherwise.
3. The poem and the page become topological at the same time; as the reader traverses their space, he or she perceives a shifting, coming-into-being topology.

From Manifest by Jessica Smith. Ubuweb