Susan Firer's Pier

Poet Susan Firer has fun with lines from famous poems, replacing a word in each of them with the word "pier." Somehow, with this substitution, she leaves her mark on these poems, as though scrawling her own graffiti--"Pier was here."

Call Me Pier

Best Blogs for Poetry Month

April is poetry month, and along with the daffodils, poetry readings are appearing in Northern Indiana on college campuses and in local bookstores. If you can't make it to the readings, poetry blogs are an intriguing alternative.

A website called Online Colleges has recently put together a list of the top 50 blogs for poetry. It's a rich and varied list that will keep you reading and keep you current with innovations in technology and web publishing for quite a while.

Top 50 blogs to follow for national poetry month, 2011.

What is Poetry? -- Some notes and definitions

This is the question I've asked students to answer for their last paper of the course.

Students--I'd like you to craft your own definition based on your experience with modern and contemporary poetry this semester, but there's no harm in looking at definitions by others.

My hint here is that your definition should have something to say about the ways in which poetry uses language, the way in which it might be differentiated from other kinds of language usage, and the responses it seeks to kindle in its readers. So your definition of what poetry IS should have something to do with what poetry DOES.

I've asked you to reference two contemporary essays by poets that attempt to define what the best of contemporary poetry is and does--one by Yusef Komunyakaa and one by Lyn Hejinian. (See Moodle.) These essays will give you an idea about how a professional poet might respond to this question and a context (the introduction to an anthology of 75 of the Best American Poems published the previous year) in which they might create such a definition.

It might be helpful for you to create your own mini-anthology of poems read this semester--10 poems that illustrate, support, or challenge your definition of poetry. Refer to examples from some of these poems in your paper.

While I'm most interested in what YOU think poetry is, here are some definitions by others you may want to consider as you come up with your own.


What is Poetry? on poetry.org

What is Poetry - a poem by John Ashberry

Here are lots of famous quotes out of context on The Poetry Garden site.

Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;" Emily Dickinson said, "If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry;" and Dylan Thomas defined poetry this way: "Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing."

Notice how the above quotes all have something to do with getting the "unarticulated experience" of life into language--whether it's emotion, sensation, or something else--and with the effect that poems have on the reader, as in Dickinson's test of heat or cold.

If you really like someone else's definition, feel free to reference it when you are stating your own definition, which should be distinctly yours. You can agree or disagree with Komunyakaa, or partly agree with both. Then the rest of the paper should support and illustrate your definition of poetry--with poetry!

Have fun!

Disclamor--The "Other" Poems . . .

In order to give our class a sense of structure in their approach to Disclamor, we first read the Battery Poems, a sequence embedded in the collection, but first published as an award-winning chapbook. Then each student chose another poem from the collection that attracted them. I encouraged them to go out on a limb and formulate a response to the poem, even if they didn't fully comprehend it. The result was some beautiful language as they attempted to group with the "tracings" of presence in these poems.

Feeding the Pear

Lyn Hejinian - My Life: An Autography

Lyn Hejinian's My Life, first published in 1980 and re-issued in 1987, has become a small "classic" of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry. In this work, Hejinian writes a self, rather than writing about or describing a self.

Here's an essay arguing for the reasons My Life has become popular in University classes about contemporary poetry.

This image of Lyn Hejinian is from Wikipedia.

Resources on Hejinian from the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo

Disclamor -- The Battery Poems

Disclamor, by G. C. Waldrep, is a postmodern book of poetry that requires a "new" kind of attention.

To help you grasp its structure, we will first focus on the "Batteries" poems--a nine-poem sequence that won an award and was published by itself in a chapbook before Disclamor was published.

"The Batteries" are nine military installations on the California Coast, just North of San Francisco. These batteries were decommissioned after World War II, except for Battery Bravo (1 & 2), which served as nuclear missile launch sites during the Cold War. The Batteries are now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Waldrep wrote these poems on site while he was living in California (post 9/11.)

To give you an idea of what the batteries look like, here is a list of websites that offer photos and information about the batteries, located at Fort Barry and Fort Cronkhite.

Battery Rathbone-McIndoe

Battery Wallace

Battery Mendell

Battery O’Rorke

Battery Smith-Guthrie

Battery Alexander

Battery Bravo (1 & 2)

Battery Townsley

Read a review of Disclamor in Luna magazine online.

Read another review of Disclamor in Cutbank

An appraisal of Disclamor is included in my review essay "Some New Voices in Mennonite Poetry," published in the April 2010 issue of the Mennonite Quarterly Review.

Make it New? The Wasteland on the ipad

On February 15, 2011, it was announced that Faber & Faber, the British publishers of the Wasteland by T. S. Eliot are collaborating with Apple on creating a version of this poem for the ipad.

What poems will be "saved" for the digital age? Why?

Several hypertext sites for the Wasteland exist--many of them put up by "fans" rather than scholars. Here's one that, despite its advertising banners, appears to be pretty reliable. What is it about this poem that continues to intrigue? Is it the puzzle-like text, or is it the underlying grid of cultural myths, themes, and stories--the quest for meaning, the intertwined nature of death and rebirth, the reference at the end to different religious names for the sacred--that continues to fascinate readers?

Many sites offer audio clips of Eliot reading the Wasteland. Here's one of them.

Above is the cover of the first publication of The Wasteland in England, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf set the type herself. (The poem was published three times in the U.S. before it was published in England.)

9/11 and Poetry

When the planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York, I was on my way to a Humanities lab led by my colleague, John Blosser. Together we had devised a mask-making activity as part of our arts and literature class at Goshen College, and when I arrived at the lab with the unbelievable news of the terrorist attack, students were in the process of preparing their materials. The students were stunned, but in Indiana there was little we could do but make futile cell phone calls, so we continued with class. John very calmly conducted a demonstration with one of the students, showing how the entire face needed to be covered in vaseline, and how to make a cardboard frame before molding the moistened plaster of Paris strips to the face. The entire process was an act of trust--offering the vaseline-coated face with closed eyes to the hands of another who would create the mask. This act contrasted vividly with what had occurred in New York, and served as a kind of balm as we began to absorb the awful news. We suggested to the students that they could respond to the fall of the Towers in the ways that they painted and decorated their masks in the coming days.

Perhaps because I was team-teaching the Humanities course with an artist colleague at the time, and we sought out art that responded to tragedy and suffering to share with our students in the aftermath of this event, or perhaps because I am a poet, I noticed the frequent use of poetry to express the inexpressible. Poems responding to the tragedy appeared in prominent magazines. Adam Zagajewski's poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" was published on the back cover of The New Yorker, which also published poems by W.S. Merwin, Deborah Garrison, C.K. Williams, and Galway Kinnell, among others. As the US began to move towards war in Iraq, poets protested by refusing an invitation to the White House to a gathering on American poetry in January 2003. Poet Sam Hamill, who declined the invitation, started the Poets Against the War website, which now contains over 20,000 poems--the largest poetry anthology ever published. Martin Espada's poem "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100," remembering the kitchen workers who died in the attack, was published in 2003, and ends with a memorable passage in which smoke clouds from New York and Afghanistan rise and meet:

When the war began, from Manhattan to Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.

Meanwhile, during this same period, American journalism grew saturated with Orwellian wordsmithing--Weapons of Mass Destruction, Orange Alert, the Patriot Act. The news seemed to be stuffed with double-speak. The President, always a bit of a klutz with words, became a speaker of vapid nothings. Michael Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 9/11 exposed much of this verbal evasiveness, and audiences watched his narrative that began with the election fiasco of 2000 and culminated in an expose of the many ties between Saudi oil and the Bush family. It was a grim, discouraging time. Poet Jena Osman, in this time of language spill when fictitious WMDs led to the invasion of Iraq, printed off political memos on her computer, tore them up, and "bombed" her office floor with them. She made a poem, Dropping Leaflets, out of the torn phrases to express her frustration with the ways in which language had become a cover-up, rather than a precision tool for revealing new truths.In this way, poetry took up its work of reviving the language--of "making it new" once again.

Photo of Jena Osman.

Welcome to Make it New! Modern and Contemporary Poetry

"Make it new!" Ezra Pound exclaimed as he exhorted poets to greet the new century with a change in artistic vision and creation.

Modern poetry seeks to respond to an expanding and changing world--evolving at lightning speed through world wars and technical innovations, increasing migrations of ideas and peoples, the breakdown in old systems of explanation and the creation of new theories of explaining the world we live in and how people act in it.

In English 210 at Goshen College we are looking at the work that poetry does in the world--both during the formative era of modernism and in our own postmodern times.

To begin, we will look at three poems written post 9/11.

Alabanza! by Martin Espada -- hear Espada read the poem

Dropping Leaflets by Jena Osman -- hear Osman read the poem

Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski

The image above is a drawing of Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis (1920) found on the Modern American Poetry site.