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

If students are linking, teacher can link, too

The poet I have in mind this week -- this month -- is Arthur Rimbaud. The Frenchman wrote all of his poetry in the course of five years when he was as young as my students. At the age of nine he wrote a 700-word essay against having to learn Latin in school. At 16 Rimbaud was discovered in Paris by the poet Paul Verlaine, who left his family to become Rimbaud's lover and encourage the boy's writing. The affair was tumultuous, ending after Verlaine shot him in the hand in an argument just over a year later. Soon after that, the prodigy stopped writing for good at the age of 19 (or 21, according to Wikipedia's version).

What's certain is that his only writing after 1875 can be found in government documents -- Rimbaud often worked in French colonies in Africa -- and letters. He died of cancer at the age of 37. His former lover , gathered all his work and made sure it was published, ensuring his future fame.

Here follows an excerpt from Rimbaud's very famous "A Season in Hell."

A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.
One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.
I armed myself against justice.
I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure's been turned over to you!
I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.
I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles.

And yes, I named my dog after him.

New Semester, New Class of Advanced Creative Writers

This semester I've assigned a totally new book: Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. By Virginia Tufte, it was strongly recommended to me last summer, and I thought it would be a strange but fun treat for the class. Advanced writing classes are good places to examine the sentence, the basic unit of communication.

Besides ughs, grunts, and eye-rolls, that is.

And besides gerund-filled invective and hair-twirling.

So, let's call it one of our basic units of communication. Fine. Still, in a creative writing class, it's pretty crucial to truck in sentences. Better still is the ability to really manipulate them. We want to know when a short, emphatic sentence is going to give a kick to the paragraph, or if the form is just going to belabor a point already made. Will a winding, langorous Henry James-ish sentence seduce your reader into the narrative scene or will it merely make her impatient for the point (or the period)? These choices are generally unconscious for writers, at least at first, and they remain largely unconscious for me. Yet our ability to think about them surely enlarges the project here, this semester. This semester we'll take a step back from the sentence, and from our sentences in particular, to see what they are doing for our work as a whole and to learn what a few alterations and adjustments might do.

Lines Written Using a Google Search of "Poetry Totally Dead"

Poetry Totally Dead

I.

Dem bones was shivering
and shaking. Williamsburg totally
time for the mixer (why

speak?) for the windows
toward the world. A big
thanks beautifully

crafted, deeply felt, totally
earned, these
poems of love and bereavement.

II.

Without that poem everyone would be
dead, so poetry totally looks after
its own. Gangsta. The world and hope,
the possibility, the proverbial
country bucket. Sometimes you eat
the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.





note. search run at 10:52 a.m. 28 April 2009. every word above found on first page of search results, selected at random in order of appearance. some periods and capitalizations added or retracted.

Not sorry in the morning and not planning on being sorry in the afternoon

Fear is the devil said that lady of the house
at the house, grandmother's house. Get
rid of it now, she said on a visit

from some far place whose name
devils but Cast it out, she said, that
lady of the house, lady of grandmother's.

On another day same dying world same
chop up the food to feed her realm
the real grandmother seemed to

whispered If you'd been mine,
I'd have raised you different though
her grammar had been impeccable.

Leslie Scalapino says:

There’s no hierarchy (in existence), though it occurs socially created and created by animals, authority does not derive from it. The writing enables one to see that and be ‘without’ it. A poem can be a terrain where hierarchy can be undone or not occur (in the writing), but obviously the writing does not make it not occur in the world. So, its subject is also the relation of conceptual to phenomena, conceptual being an action also. Yet even proposing conceptual non-hierarchy frequently meets with great resistance (usually).

How to recognize a poem

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ... Is there any other way?"

--Emily Dickinson