uninspired - the legacy of the world's biggest apple -

k: hello dear,
how are you?

i just ate the words biggest apple. it took me a very long time. it was too big around for me to open my mouth around comfortably to get a big bite, so i took lots of little bites. i would never buy an apple that big for myself, but kerry and richard had left it behind, and i can't bare to see an apple go to waste (especially when it's a variety i am fond of).

in other news, ryan says that katamari has not made me stupid. this is good news. this means when i get home today i am going to play it some more, until either ryan or danielle arrives.

now for today's top story: inspiration! yay!!

it's not something we've talked about in depth before (not that we have to), but i was trying to think of a topic to discuss (something related to poetry). as a means of laughing off, i set out to read a bit of ron silliman's recent posts. however, after reading three or four posts i was still feeling "uninspired". that's the exact word that came to mind.

i dwelled on the word "uninspired" for a little while and then it hit me... aha! inspiration = topic

for most, for you, for me, for every poet and every writer, inspiration comes from life. for some though, inspiration comes in dreams too. and for me, inspiration comes from imagination. one might argue, though, that imagination comes from life. if you wanted to go that way, then, i'm sure a stand could be made that dreams come from life as well. so... what's life?

life = over sized apples
life = new cell phones, orange ones
life = the sound of a boy's heart beat when you press your ear to his chest
life = a 50" high definition rear projection mv (for megavision, instead of television)
life = made up words like megavision
life = memorizing your best friends email address
life = mint
life = your next pay check
life = all of the above

i could go on for days. the point? life is in the details, so is poetry.

but there's a middle man. the poet. right? one doesn't see an apple as a poem. the average person sees... an apple. that's it. whereas you or i might see an apple and think of eve, of the waxy finish, the taste or the smell. that's inspiration. we pick out parts and give them depth and symbolism. that's what poetry is, at the heart. salamander means ashraf, mountain means katy. we pick up on the details and they give us the jolt needed to transform an apple into a monument of love and affection or disappointment or whatever we may be feeling or we may associate with the apple.

now there's a word, associate. that's what inspiration is to me, a series of associations.

enough of the sort of ... intangible talk of inspiration. before i mentioned imagination. i get ideas from imaginary scenarios that i paint in my head. the poem "nice to meet you" was an idea i had as part of a longer story. i guess i think stories through (without beginnings or ends, most often, or with lots of different endings) like a novelist would.

i take pieces of these fantasies and turn them into poems, like excerpts of a non-existent novel or film. i have quite a few poems like that, actually. more than i care to admit ^_^

i also get a lot of inspiration from dreams. they are so easy for me to translate into poetry for some reason. "set up" is as literal a transcription of the dream i had as ever. part of the reason why i think dreams make great poems is because dreams don't happen in prose. they skip around, things don't make perfect sense. our brains work in verse, not prose. isn't that a wonderful idea? that we, poets, are more in tuned to our own conscious by virtue of understanding being able to produce verse. i think it's a wonderful gift.

i know you're writing process. i can't clearly define my own (because it's all sorts of hodge podge and over-developed thinking). this is more to do with that moment though. that instant which a phrase pops into your head.

have you been thinking about something? did you hear the words somewhere else? did you see something and translate it into words. i see, right now, a man in an old grey sweatshirt climbing down a short ladder. is that poetry?

i will go on and on about all this if you'd like, ashraf, but i'd also like to hear some of your reactions and ideas about "inspiration" or what it means, maybe, to be "uninspired"?

a: Katy, that is just a brilliant beginning to an e-mail! I thought it was so distinctive I read it out loud to Wojtek (and that's a bigger thing even that reading it out loud to Snuffy, say, who I think is a much better listener). But yes, on to inspiration, or what I thought was even more inspired (all puns intended) is the title: uninspired. I think it is such a good word, one that I very much identify with these days. Maybe inspiration in its antiquated classical/uber-romantic sense (think Batman) is off-putting to us with our jaded contemporary sensibilities (I am thinking of a comment by Danielle that I read yesterday on your blog, about how it's a poem about love without using the words love, or heart, or any similar taboos). It is interesting that modern poets have reacted so markedly to the image of the poet as the uber-romantic that now such notions are directive--negative ones--in their own accord. One of my favorite poems here on the Philadelphia poetry scene is one by this guy I really like (and can't remember his name, of course) that he wrote in reaction to an editor rejecting one of his poems because it contained "heart". So he wrote this entire poem called "Heart" in reaction to this silent taboo. It became in a way one of those writing exercise/experiments that you are fond of, of writing about something without calling it by name--except it is in permanent enforcement now if you are to be taken at all "seriously" by the "people that matter". And so we end up writing this other, equally extreme, genre of poetry that my mother can wrap her head around. And I am running into this now that I am thinking about writing in Arabic again, specifically writing a song for Majida. So, how is this related to inspiration? Well, I'll try to establish the tie eventually...

To jump off sideways here, all those songs and names I mentioned to you in my e-mail yesterday. They naturally don't mean much to you at the moment, part of the difficulty of translation in its larger sense, as in the translation of life experiences, making them relatable, etc. I have been thinking of this old world of song that I cherish so much and that was really my entry way into the world of poetry. I have been thinking about it obviously because of the project I assigned myself. When I started translating my poems into Arabic I became aware of how heavy and awkward some of the images are in Arabic. Conversely, while translating song lyrics for you from French and Arabic, I realize how overly simple and borderline hokey they are. And yet these are songs that I consider great, and that many others equally revere. So, what is it here? One element I think is song vs. poetry: they are two slightly different animals, I think. Another is language: I think images that work in one language don't in another. I think the very ornate French and the very elaborate Arabic require a simplicity that in English is just dull. Conversely, English, in its almost dull simplicity almost demands the kind of twists and turns that in other languages might simply be uncalled for. So, what does this have to do with inspiration?

See, in my thoroughly uninspired state, and in revisiting old songs, I have been thinking of what made them so inspiring to me at the time. And I do realize that some of those very simple phrases that I loved to much I thought they were genius still hold true... Allow me here to translate impromptu Fairouz's "Ma 2dirt nseet (I Couldn't Forget)" (lyrics by Joseph Harb, audio to follow):

I wish you were here, my love
And the wine and the candles of the night endure
And I'd write to you on a paper so I wouldn't say
I wish you weren't leaving, I wish you'd stay

If I came back one night to my place and found
That you, my love, passed by while I was away
You'd see that they didn't pass, only your eyes, by this house
As if you, my love, and your eyes, have just left

Quite mainstream romantic stuff. I don't know what you think of it, but reading it in English... almost makes me squirm. And then I realize, some of the stuff at heart still is strong: that wistful wish for the night to lengthen, that fragility in prefering to write such a heartfelt desire rather than say it, the way eyes can linger in our memory and haunts us... Yes, it's pretty clichéd stuff by now: wine, and candles, and eyes, and I wish you'd stay... And maybe it's Fairuz that makes it work, the music, the associations that this song has for me and my mother (a big point to come back to, associations)... But is it really better to just spin around the point? Why is it more acceptable now to find the poetry in the more mundane things than in the obvious ones? Because it's more difficult (as is difficult better) or is it because we're jaded? I would hate myself if I wrote something like that now, especially in English; I don't think I could even allow myself to. Censorship before the page, one of those things that I'd abort in my head. And yet, I though Joseph Harb was god because of that (and "Li Bayrout"). Granted, love could be a turn off; especially in song. Heartbreak could be even more of a turn off; it's everywhere. So what do we write about? What do we read about? I haven't been reading. Or actually I read non-fiction and magazines mostly now. They don't even attempt to touch me. Is that the end of literature? Have we become so jaded that we're rarely touched?

So, let's write about the everyday. But what is there about the everyday to write about. Do you really want to read a poem about an apple or pancakes? As you said, is that old man poetry? Maybe he is, maybe he has a story or we can imagine one behind him that makes him that. But... Is it just me? Probably.

So, how is all this related to inspiration? I think it is in that I have lost it. Whatever it was, I am now uninspired, to read or write. Which is sad, very sad. But then, there are way sadder things in life, as I always try to remind Wojtek (and he hates it every time). This wasn't an argument; this was a ramble. Maybe I'm just hungry: I get low when I'm hungry, and I get very emotional then (either angry or depressed), and that usually makes me write. Is hunger inspiration? Oh, this is getting absurd. I'll just cut it short and send it...

outside voices anthology

ashraf and i have both been added to the list of poets to be featured in Outside Voices' own Anthology:

Understanding People

k: now this… you wrote that magnificent email to me in reply to my email to ahmad and my goings on about prose poetry… you had all that to say about the humanity in poetry. i haven’t responded to it yet, other than saying that it made me happy.

it does not make me uncomfortable when you compare me to the poets i admire. on the one hand, it puts this tick in my brain… of course i’m not as good, not as this not as that… on the other hand it makes me feel… appreciated, understood, happy and proud.

i am interested in this idea of empathy as a key ingredient to poetry. do you think it can go both ways? you made all the point there is for the poet to write a good poem. are there good poetry audiences, though? do i like poetry more than someone else because i am more empathetic than that someone? or is all the weight on the shoulders of the poet? walt Whitman says: "To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too". is this true? i think it must be. i think we understand the poems by and/or about the people we know better than the ones we don’t.

poems are also more fun and much more exciting when they are relevant to the individual reading them. i sent you a mary howe poem. it was a message from me to you. you did the same with rohrer. that conversation through page numbers was brilliant because it forced the poems to transcend. those poems do nothing like as much work without people like you and i who play with them, who expand and contract them. that frank o’hara poem is so much more now than it ever has been because we own it for each other now.

isn’t is curious how reducing a poem to an ownership makes it greater?

i’m sure there are mountains more to be said about this topic. i’ll be honest with you though, i’m whipped out after all this. you must be too. take your time with this… i don’t even expect we’ll have finished with it all by friday. let’s take it all one chapter at a time :)


a: And it seems to me that there are two issues here: one of empathy, and one of audience. As for empathy, I do think it is important, in one way or another, however it is reached. (So preferably not in the crass Hollywood/Hallmark way). But audience... that's a good question. I remember when I wanted to do film and I was frustrated and I went to one of my heroes at the time, my philosophy/existentialism professor, and she told me, You know, it is just as important to appreciate a good movie as it is to make one. I wasn't too convinced then; and I am not sure that I am now. Though I agree that it is pointless to have a good movie without a good audience. Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating a mass media approach of number crunching and satisfying the masses--I am still ultimately an elitist who believes most people are stupid and boring and not everyone is the same. I do believe in equal rights and obligations, but that is not to say that everyone is equal. And I think smart people are a minority, unfortunately. But what I don't believe is that people were better back then... That whole nostalgic argument that people were more interested and educated and refined and stuff. People have always been the scum that they are, for the most part. Under the belly of the "refined" always lay the suffering of the underclasses, etc. So, let's not get me started on that. But I do believe there is a better audience in New York, and that is why it has better art (or the other way round), etc.

So, time to go home... I never thought I'd do it! But here it is... And thank you for all your effort on Poetship; I will try not to feel bad about it (that I'm doing nothing). I do very much appreciate it.

Poetry as Therapy

k: yes, this is completely and utterly separate from everything i just wrote. jarring, no? i did mention lauren’s middle-school poetry dabblings before at least. this idea of poetry as therapy was the one i had to write you about first, when i sent that email about having some idea of what to write about poetry. it is also related to my addiction to poetry.

at the undergrad conference i attended last year, i was on a panal with a young man who’s name i cannot remember for the life of me, who presented his idea of poetry as a mean of therapy. i love this. i did then and i still do now. high-school students write poetry to help themselves coop with the ever-expanding universe that is their life and to help themselves understand and interpret everything that goes on around them and inside them during that phase of their life. i did this. i know others have to. lauren wrote poems to deal with her family’s long and damning struggle with alcoholism. the guy who’s name i can’t remember, had a learning disability which prevented him from having what he thought would have been a normal childhood; thus, he created that childhood in poetry, immortalized the one he did have, made it beautiful, and wrote verse about all the things that brought him pain and struggle. he cleansed himself with his poetry.

i get the sense that ashraf the poet does this to an extent. poetry helps to alleviate something. “the lower take” is a therapeutic poem from my perspective. i was frustrated and upset so i took out a pencil and scribbled out this poem. it made me feel so much better having gotten everything i wanted to say out. i disguised it as a poem and no one has to know how much or how little is truth. poetry makes great therapy because it is camouflaged by language and art. a poet, or anyone who writes a poem, can expose themselves out-right without being too forthcoming, too overbearing. and then, in defense of oneself, the poet can dismiss any embarrassment with the argument of poetry as art, interpretive, metaphorical, purely imaginary and so on. one does not need to admit to anything in a poem. i don’t admit to very much in any of my poems. poets have so many secrets—this makes us powerful.

for me, in addition to getting any heat off my chest, poetry is also a means of relaxation and meditation. often times at work i will think poetry in my head to release me from the monotony of my current job. i think poetry when i drive, to occupy me. heh, i must sound like i’m always thinking J it’s more that i let my mind open up to what’s going on, to be inspired. the thing about hawks… my first reaction was, how does this picture fit into words? how can i do this… and the poem, the words, started to develop. it almost appeared to me like one of those 8-piece puzzles with one empty square so you can move the others around to make the picture, those sliding puzzles. i had to move the words around to make the poem in my mind, the words… hawk, rain, wing, drying, after, barn, tree… they were all there, they just needed arranging, and a few prepositions and articles.

if i’m anxious, like i was at work the other day, i can take a deep breath and set my mind and my fingers to work on something. this works for boredom too, though i haven’t felt bored in a long time thanks to you and brian and billy and all these piles of books around me. if anything, i’ve felt like there hasn’t been enough time lately.

overall, this is a simple concept. it’s just one that we haven’t talked about yet, and i think it’s important, valid, and might also work with dana’s article. poetry in the masses, the poetry of house wives, is all about therapy.


a: I so agree with you on the role of that one, perhaps even more literally than you realize. In fact, a poem ("Lazy") as a therapy assignment. When I was in therapy (about 2 years ago?) my therapist was trying to get me to do these Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) exercises where I have to tabulate my feelings and reactions. And I just couldn't do it. Week after week after week, he would give me these forms to fill when I sink into one of my "holes" and I would bring them back empty. Instead, I would go and write something on arch.memory. And then one day he said, Alright, write something, anything, about how you feel and bring it next time. So I wrote that. And you can even tell from certain poems from that period that he, my therapist, figures prominently as a character (most notably perhaps in "Comfortably Numb"). And many other poems (perhaps my least favorite ones, but ones that Ahmad seems to like) have been written therapeutically: to get something out of my system (ex. "Exit", and all the ones with "corpse" in the title). I don't like them because I find them too crass, too brash, too angry, too forward. I like the more obscure ones, like you say, that hide more (like "You Lie"). So, yes, I know what you mean, more than you can imagine. But that is also perhaps why most of my poems are "downers" (as Wojtek puts it) and why I find it so difficult to write "happy" poetry (I do think my poetry loves life very much, though in its own disappointed way, life as it is not as it should be). And that is perhaps why I haven't been writing as much (I actually haven't been feeling so down!). I find it very difficult to write "descriptive" poetry, too. I never enjoyed descriptive writing to begin with: the driest part of "The Thorn Birds", I thought, was that one in the middle where she goes one describing the fields endlessly... Ah, kill me! And Laura Ingalls Wilder just slew me in "Little Home in the Prairie" with her endless description... Get on with the program, woman! I guess that is also why I prefer photos of people to those of nature: far more interesting! But I digress... Which bring us to...

Buffalo & Jackals

k: this is in response to the article i sent you earlier, the one about poets being buffalo—showcase animals of the literary universe. (this article is getting around… http://bloggingpoet.squarespace.com/.../can-poetry-matter.html and it seems my new friend mr william f devault has quiet a bit to say, in contrast, i must admit, to what i have just written. he’s already offered me advice on capbooks and publication and is sending me a copy of his book. i call him batman.)

let me start by saying that i think it is an amazingly coherent, well written and enjoyable article. i am going to buy his book of poetry-related essays and possibly a collection of his poetry. if i ever go to california, i am going to make it a point to go meet him. i think he’s very clever, very smart, and poetry needs him. and if i ever teach a poetry course, this is the first assigned reading.

i’d written quite a bit last night about the article, taking bits and pieces from it to then talk about, doing sections and stuff, but i’ve just deleted that because i’ve just finished the article and think it’s a better idea to address the whole issue. there is so much to talk about. i’m almost not sure where to begin…

the main idea, the main force, behind the article is that poets have, over time, separated themselves from the other arts (theatre, music (specifically jazz, in dana’s examples)) and from the intelligentsia of modern america. we have done this by grouping together in such a tight-nit family info-structure that we (as a mass) have carried the weaker poets on our shoulders. what would have been considered a poor and unacceptable poem 50 years ago is now published, awarded and praised because the poet is friends with this person, has published this much, has done this that and the other thing for the editor, compilers, reviews, etc. this is foetry, right? except dana does it with more finesse and colorful analogies.

i like the idea of poets merging with other arts. as much as i adore the “club” feeling that i’m starting to get off our little web of poetry-blogs (billy is the metaphorical bouncer, is he not?), i have always liked being the poet among the group of culturally and academically diverse individuals. this is what i was at university. dina painted, jonah played music, i wrote poetry, bunny was our scientist, rachel our politician, hortensja our model, audrey our ballerina, reid our cartoonist, keith our extravagant modern-anthropologist… we crossed all the lines. sure, there was more than one of most of these in the extended network, but generally, we had everything except a math major in our group (bunny was in the minor, so i guess she’s sort of the science/math brains all over).

and thinking back, i did talk about poetry with them, with dina at least. i did read them some of my poems, i even wrote poems for each of them. i was acting out as a poet, drawing my audience in. i think that poetry needs to go back to that format on a national, if not global, level. i’d very much like to consider that doing things like the word verification contest, draws in the non-poet. my two best friends from high school and my sister all wrote poems for that contest. people that don’t write poetry. lauren wrote a bit in middle school, but that was a therapy exercise, not a literary endeavor.

forums like poets101.com are fantastic for poets, but does it exclude and intimidate the non-poet? i imagine it would. perhaps i ought to check out the web designer’s other sites. i get the impression they are bit broader in topic. even as a poet, i enjoy those blogs that include drawings or photographs to accompany or at least break up the monotony of poem after poem. then on the other hand, i find the purity of a poetry-only blog rather comforting. the pure, clean… just poetry; those that let the poems paint the pictures. i don’t think blogging is the forum for which poetry will blossom back into the popular culture. i think it needs to happen on a real-life plane. i think that niches like billy’s lists are part of what dana sees as the problem. are poets too cosy with one another?

poetship is part of the solution. aren’t we spectacular? we are critics, ashraf, you and i. we disagree, we don’t pamper, we speak our hearts and minds about what we encounter. i think i might even start doing more reviews like the one i did for lilla that time. though perhaps not all as glowing? and not just poems of my friends. are poets afraid of telling the truth about other poets? i am a little bit. i don’t want to be the breaker—i don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. on the other hand. a bad poem is a bad poem and there isn’t anything i can do about it other than let the world know that i think it is a bad poem. right?

i think that that is all that poetry needs. for other poets to speak up about what they like and what they dislike and speak less of who their friends are. silliman doesn’t write very many negative reviews for the poetry he reads. perhaps if we start to speak up, non-poets will give us back our potency and our seat in the parliament of literature.


a: That is one amazing article you sent my way! It is so well-written: smart, consistent, coherent, well-researched and argued... I just haven't read an article this good and well-informed in ages! Thank you. And I am very glad it is catching on in the bloggosphere, as it deserves to. But I think the question you raised is a very good one: isn't this just another form of the very closed clique that the article is criticizing? Well, yes and no. On the one hand it is a band of poets; on the other I think it is a more diverse band of poets than you can find in creative writing programs. Just look at the two of us, an "insider" (you) and an "outsider" (moi) ;) And I think that's what makes our correspondence so good (amongst other things). That article was so right about attributing the decline in poetry to its inbreeding (amongst other things). And I applauded the fact that it had those 6 concrete steps at the end to make a difference: it took it upon itself not only to criticize but also to suggest a way out.
On the other hand, I revert to the argument above to suggest that other art forms have emerged that have taken on parts of what poetry used to do: satire, epic, politics, science, myth, religion, etc. And that is not a bad thing! I would never wish "Wings of Desire" away! Ever. It is a poem in a different form. I would so much prefer watching "Wings of Desire" over and over again than reading "Paradise Lost" once. So, we cannot expect poetry to be all that it used to be. It took new forms, new forms took some of its functions. I think we should accept its new diminished status and embrace those other forms, too. And that is why I agree with the article that we need to be more exacting, that there is a lot of crap passed out there for all the wrong reasons, and that maybe the market of creative writing programs, while beneficial to poets, might already be over-saturated. I believe in the "market", and that is why I was rejoicing when he made that Marx reference. And I think in a way what we are bemoaning is simply the natural result of over-abundance.

Internet vs. Books

k: this wasn’t what i had in mind when i told you i had an idea, but it’s a fine something something to talk about (and it does actually correlate with everything else, so i’ll bounce back to it a few times). my basic feelings are this; the internet is an amazing tool for all mediums, poetry benefits, as an entity, from internet. where would we be without our blogs? i certainly wouldn’t be planning a trip to philly for the weekend, would i? i am rather found of peer-editing in forums and similar poetry venues. the internet is a marvelous place for amateur and blossoming poets to learn, grow, develop and expand—especially if there is no community of poets surrounding them in the real world.

i love poets.org for their sound clips. i’m greedy and want more. though, overall, on published and easy-to-find-at-borders poetry, i don’t see why it ought be published online as well. in the case of tender buttons, wessex poems, howl, and i’m sure tons others, these poetry collections are so easy to find in book stores, and other than wessex poems, they are cheap (less than $10). why then, make them available online for free? gertrude stein does not need publicity. while it was nice that i could cut and paste that poem in an email, having found ALL of tender buttons online was heartbreaking for the mere fact that someone who doesn’t own it is going to read online and never purchase a copy, never expand the real-world-based poetry universe.

this all comes from my love of material goods (=books). i must remember to bring my darling wessex poems with me at the weekend. if you’re really good i’ll let you hold it J

there are some rather marvelous things about books that you cannot do with web pages. you can’t say “this collection, page ##” to a friend who’s clever and end up having a four-poem-long conversation. sure, i could have sent you links, and you could have done the same, but there wouldn’t have been the excitement of flipping through the book to get to the right page.

websites don’t have pretty covers; books do. also, you can read a book during take off and landing, whereas all lap tops must be turned off.

the argument for aesthetics goes on and on, doesn’t it? and we all know it. some people don’t think books have to worry. but i say they must. publishers don’t produce books like this one on my desk, from 1898. the pages are thick, the binding is strong, the pages are sewn with precision and care. the cover is sturdy, embossed and rugged. i have hard covered books from a mere 10 years ago that are falling to pieces; this is over 100 years old and is aging a bit at the edges, but is overall in much better shape that more recent books.

books have a smell, a charm, you can carry them around and feel really cool. also, i like to pencil in the margins of some poetry and some poetics (the stuff that’s a bit more dense and takes a bit more thinking). i find it rather difficult to get the same effect on a computer screen.


a: As sympathetic as I was to the case you made for books (or perhaps because I am that sympathetic to the case you made), it feels to me that in a way you stated the obvious. You made the aesthetic/sensual case for book, a case that I find very valid, but I would like to push the argument beyond "why books are great". I think that the threat that the internet and soft media poses to books and hard media is at the same time very real and overrated. As seductive as the argument you made is, and as seductive as books are, I don't think that is enough to carry them through, to stop the bleeding or decline of the medium, so to speak. I can imagine that any small bookseller can attest to this pain. On the other hand, I do not believe that the soft media will ever eradicate the hard media. I think they will make them painfully secondary, but never eradicate them. Part of the argument is the fragility of soft media: the Library of Congress still uses resin to store its most valuable audio; CDs are too fickle. (This argument was made in that Wired article I sent you the link to.) The other parts you have already covered, I think: those of convenience (I still print your longer emails and articles and then read them) and the sensual/aesthetic experience. Another thing that you alluded to is the objectness of hard media and therefore the idea of possession: to own a book because you value it (and the book format lends materiality to what is otherwise abstract, ethereal). And I think that is precisely why the Internet feels so threatening and is so pervasive: because in a way it is bringing words back closer to their abstract immaterial nature: it makes words (and music) paradoxically more difficult to possess (as objects) and easier to possess (by making it easier to disseminate). Ultimately, I think digital media are here to stay; technological progress doesn't (and shouldn't, I think) be undone. It just needs to be regulated, at best, and even that is often approached too naively. The argument that I keep making to Wojtek (and that I believe I have already mentioned to you) is not to be nostalgic about older media to the point that it limits one's appreciation of the new, which would be ultimately to one's own detriment. I am not advocating either the complete abandonment of the old and blind embracing of the new. I guess all I am trying to say is, know what each can do well so you can use them well. A book is not necessarily better than a movie, or a magazine better than a TV show, etc. So, I can understand your unhappiness about your beloved texts being available online, but I don't really think it's a one-to-one equation here: that people would go and read things online instead of buying them. If I wanted to read a whole book, even if its available online, I wouldn't do that. I don't think I'd even print it and then read it. I think I'd go and buy it: one, because I would like that and, two, because I can afford it. Now, if I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't, even if I wanted, but it would still be available to me, which is how I think it should be. And I don't think I am any more ethical than the average person. When I used Kazaa I used it mostly to get Arabic and European stuff I cannot find easily here (or that is way overpriced here because of lack of demand on it); but if I wanted a Madonna CD that is available at every other drugstore, I would just go and buy it because I love cover art and I think it is more convenient (put a copy on my iPod for work, a copy for the car, etc.) Similarly, the digital book allowed you to easily search for a certain passage and copy it, which is a great thing! So, I think it is a tad simplistic to argue the "downfall" of books on digital media: we still love them, and many else do, yet I would never wish the Internet away! (And I know that in a way I am preaching to the converted here, as I think you are the queen of digital poetry!).

a red hat - close up on prose poetry

k: i’m sort of bored, and while i could read a book or write another poem, i think instead i’ll write to you about my feelings on prose-poetry. i am not going to do research or any of that, just…

i resisted the prose-form of poetry for such a long time. i was adamant that it wasn’t poetry. i sounded much like you did today in your comment. part of my first course on poetry at university was that one with noah, where he completely exploded my vision of poetry. we read tender buttons by Gertrude stein—she is the queen of the prose poem, though some would disagree with that statement, she’s who i think of when someone brings up prose-poetry—and i completely didn’t get it. okay, it’s poetry, but it’s more like paragraphs. then i read part of an interview with stein about what she was doing in tender buttons. the way she spoke of the words and sounds… she spoke like a poet. so i reread tender buttons and began, slowly, to understand.

here’s a section. my favorite section actually. it’s the section that, when i reread it, i began to get tender buttons and everything stein was trying to do...

A RED HAT. A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.

i don’t know if it works out of context with the book. it kills me that the whole thing is available online (like wessex poems is) but if you want, you can read it all here… http://www.bartleby.com/140/ (it really … i feel like it’s a terrible waste to give all of these poems to someone for free, i don’t mean, for you to have them for free, but for me to give them to you, to not have to go out and get the book for you… it’s websites like this that (while really rather wonderful) are contributing to the ever growing fear of the disposal of books. it actually makes my heart hurt to see all of tender buttons free online. it’s a crying shame. (i think i need a closing parenthetical here)…)

i side tracked, sorry. that’s an entirely different email topic.

for a while i thought that prose poetry was just a cheap way out of getting a poem right (i feel like, with fish into six writing it in prose form means that i didn’t do the form-form (the verse) poem well enough and the easiest way of fixing it is to put it into prose poem (and it works for the poem, too, which makes it even harder to resist)).

in the new yorker (i’ve actually been reading it lately, can you tell?) there’s an interview thingy with an artist who at one point says that drawing hands and faces were too hard so he’d draw people with shot off hands and paint blood on their face so he wouldn’t have to draw the features. and he says it in such a cocky, proud, arrogant awful way!! i honestly believe that, before you can go breaking the rules you have to know and understand them first. HOWEVER, if you are doing it for your own pleasure, dabbling, having a bit of fun, do whatever you want, but don’t pretend, like this guy was, that you’re some super hot-shot mover and shaker with all the bits and pieces of some modern Michelangelo, because frankly, you’re not.

prose poetry is equivocal to this in that it may not take a genius to draw/paint, but i don’t think i could do it. it takes a bit of gift, a bit of practice, and eye for color and a knowledge of color. you can slap together a string of words and call it a prose poem. you can’t go ignoring syntax and grammar without understanding that you are ignoring it for your poem to work—if you do you are transparent to other poets. am i making sense?

what stein is doing, to go back to stein and to explain to you what there is to “get” out of her poems, is to form the surroundings of an object, a food, or a room. have you seen schindlers’ list? you know how the red coat is the only thing with colour? or the flames on the ceremonial candles or the gold ring?

those objects are the only objects in color to give them an over-powering emphasis. what stein is doing in “a red hat” is to paint the picture of everything surrounding this hat because, like she says, what’s so spectacular about a red hat if everything around you is red? now, if everything around you is grey and brown, a red hat is stunning. i think her choice of form is perfect for this. for what she is trying to achieve with her words—to put the poem in prose, to disallow it verse form, is to emphasize the point that she is not describing the red hat, but it’s surroundings. the red hat itself would make the poem into a verse. describing just why the red hat is so brilliant and beautiful is paralleled by the use of prose as a way of getting the reader to think more about verse form, the regular. what stein does is create the antithesis of the verse form of poetry.

i guess the main reason why a prose poem works for me—outside of stein’s revolutionary used of the form—is because it is a different kind of meditative poetry. it is an abstraction of poetry and an abstraction of traditional prose. there are certain elements which help to make a prose poem work. for example, short two-word sentences and punctuating vernacular. a line of soft sound words that ends in a lash. harsh s sounds or a z sound are always a nice ending to a breath. what i think is so profound about prose poetry is that it relies on the language to dictate to the reader where to breath and when to hold on. full stops (by that i mean periods) are useful, i rather enjoy seeing brackets in prose poetry, and other long punctuation like dashes and semi colons also aid. the key though, is the language and the poets ability to anticipate the readers’ understanding and capability to understand the language. there’s a lot of encoding and decoding that’s going on below the surface. really, when read by the poet, let’s say, one in the audience should not be able to tell the difference between a poem in form-form and a poem in prose-form.

you could easily argue that prose-poetry and flash fiction are exactly the same thing. i won’t stop you from that. names are fun, but they’re just names. poet-theorists are merely taxonomists of the written genres (it is as make believe as the internet—millions of people believe in this massive entity that isn’t even real); every day we define our favorite terms differently. it’s useless but i love it.

so there is a time and a place for prose, at least in one instance. personally i prefer not to write in prose poetry because i feel, unless a function of the content of the poem, that it is a cheap way of writing. brian writes a lot of prose poetry; however, brian, when he uses line breaks, uses them very wisely, very well and i do not worry that he could not have written any one of his prose poems in verse form.

i do enjoy reading prose poetry when it is entertaining—when it is funny or quirky. serious prose poetry, without justification, is awful. this is in part why i cannot wrap my head around lyn hejinian. though i own two of her books, i cannot understand nor appreciate nor enjoy her work—though i try constantly to do so.

there’s my schtick on prose poetry. i hope you gained something from it, or that it will at least give way to a really juicy debate. ^_^

a: Morning, dear:

I read both of your e-mails (umm ahmad & prose poetry) last night before I went out. The evening was nice, although it seems that I always feel old and not fun when I go out with single gay guys (even though one of them was older than me). I think it is the state of coupledom; do you feel that way around your single friends? And I was so tried from the day; it's the first time we bike to Center City this season, and I am so out of shape I was aching all over! In any case, back to your e-mails, I appreciate the fact that you just write, without the research; that I can do for myself. And as much as I appreciate your passion for Gertruge Stein and the Red Hat, I felt the same way as I did reading the Red Wheelbarrow: shrug! I could feel your passion in both cases, but I couldn't share it. And I am glad I read both e-mails at the same time, because I found what I thought to be a better example of prose poetry:

and you know now that some day, and i hope not too far from now, we will have the chance to shrink the globe down to the size of a dining room table somewhere in your tumultuous city. perhaps someday, too, you'll come visit my humble paradise, and i'll take you to my favourite beach so you can hear what silence sounds like.

I hope I don't make you uncomfortable everytime I do this (set you against your gods, so to speak). And that is not to say that everything you write is of the same level of excellence (nobody's writing is). But that is to say that I see it as part of my "duty" first of all to humanize these gods (for they were human, too) and to remind you of your worth (even if you might see is as biased). See, you did make your point clear, how you see prose poetry, and I appreciate your sensitivity to sounds and punctuation and form... But ultimately I don't think I share that sensitivity, or certainly not the same degree. For me these are tools; poetry is never about the punctuation and the sounds. If what you have to say holds no value, then no matter how much you dress it up, and add hisses and dashes, and break it and clump it, it will still have no value. And the contrary is true. For me the form of poetry is a form of distillation, of simplifying in order to make impact. And it is a thing of balance (as everything else in life?) That is why, no matter how evocative a red wheelbarrow is, or pseudo-philosophical a red hat is, for me they don't hold as much water as the vastness of the world, the distances between us, and the human confronting the sound of silence. Mind you, the sound itself is worthless to me, which is why I can't relate to most of the poetry about nature and I found it strange when you mentioned nature as a tenet of my writing; for me I think it is about the human experience in defining nature, and things, and time... A stone aging moves nothing in me, but a woman aging is what life and art are about.

I hope I didn't disappoint you in that I don't share your passion for certain things (but I am sure you don't expect it for everything, as I don't expect anyone to share my passion for Dalida). And that is not to say that I do not apreciate highly poetic prose (that is ultimately what I adore about "The Hours" and Harold Brodkey's Profane Friendship and Dale Peck's Martin and John). But that is to say that I appreciate the poetry within their prose, even when it is so distilled that it is in every sentence. Though I don't see that in the form, as much as in the sentence structure and especially in what they're saying. I don't think, no matter how good a poet you are, say something about shit and make it sound touching or moving or profound (I just though of shit as it seems the worst poetry I have read or heard was about that; though I have heard an excellent poem about hernia!).

But aside from all that, I have realized what is so precious about you: that you are not limited by yourself. You think of others (I guess it is that same degree of empathy that make your robot poems work so well). And believe me, most people (I know) aren't like that. And that is not to say that they are evil (the best example is the one I live with: his self is his port hole to the universe; everything is filtered and tinted with it. That is not to say that he is an evil person, but that is to say that he is a self-centered one.) And I think that is also why you find such ease in writing about others: other people and other things. Because you are capable of thinking of them on their own terms. And I think that is what makes you such a good poet, and good person. I don't think I am that way; I am (as established by my mother's letter) more self-centered. But that is not to say that I am self-limited. I think what works in my poetry is that through this port hole of myself I am capable of going deep enough to reach at the core of the experience that makes it human, and therefore gets beyond that limiting factor (I can imagining anyone bristling at the self-indulgence of that statement!). I guess all I am trying to say is: I was so touched by your letter to Ahmad...

-isms

k: hello ashraf,

no movies tonight, ryan wants to hold off until tomorrow, as he’s just started to feel better, he doesn’t want to risk it right away.

so what i really ought to be doing is working on my personal statement since i just realized what the date is and that i’m going to Amherst in a few weeks and haven’t give my prof’s anything to go by for my recommendations. instead, i am going to start my poetics rampage on isms.

this isn’t going to cover all the isms, and i’m not going to look anything up!!! well, i am going to reference a few bits, but more just for examples of poetry. this is going to be as much from memory as possible, so it’s going to be wrought with errors, i’m sure. you can always look this stuff up on your own time anyway, what you really want is to view these isms in katy-vision (imagine 3-d but with glasses tinted green and pink instead of blue and red).

so where to begin… how about the biggest ism of them all?


MODERNISM

it coincides with the american industrial revolution, Marxism, and feminism. within these (there’s a hierarchy developing) there are such factions of thought and interest as economics, medicine, politics, racism, equal rights, social classification (as it begins to blur), exploration of uncharted wilderness (heart of darkness), psychology is still an infant (Freud has only just published in the late 1890’s), evolution!, and with the second world war, existentialism is the most popular religion.

i suppose i should try to come up with some dates… 1890 to, say, 1960 (that, then, includes the new york school, though they are arguable post-modern).

some poets that, for me, embody the motion towards modernism (the pioneers, if you will) are miss Emily Dickenson, Walk Whitman (i was shocked to find out he was gay, even though now i realize how obvious it is in his poetry!), defiantly Thomas Hardy, and Gertrude Stein. I guess we can include Wallace Stevens too, though i’m not sure if he was writing before 1890 or not.

Modernism or Modernity is mostly (in philosophical terms) a reaction to technology (isn’t it all?) of the time; emerging technology. i.e. plastic, denim, cars, trains, elevators, evolution (this isn’t a technology as much as a discovery, but i’m including it, as it caused quiet the shake-up), advanced medical techniques and practice, a reform in prisons (from torture chambers to psych wards), woman with big mouths (i mean, opinions and the courage to voice their thoughts), and wasn’t it in the late 1890’s or the early 1900’s that the double helix was discovered? (i read the book but i can’t remember what the dates were for the life of me, anyway, stuff like that was huge.)

as far as the poetry… what have we got going on? we’ve stepped out of metric feet, strict rhyme schemes and traditional punctuation (Emily’s famous for her dashes) addressed issues like homosexuality (whitman and stein), an indiscrete sense of morbidity and mortality, and have begun to explore the boundaries of poetry. we have begun, as poets, to define ourselves in poetics and by our limitlessness, our revolt against form. modernism is, to me, the age of experimentation. yet, curiously, form remains, throughout, a sort of obsession (we can’t break away from it).

there are hundreds of isms within modernism. the two i know most about are


IMAGISM & OBJECTIVISM

so confusingly similar, yet so different, only, i’m not sure which one came first… i think imagism did.

imagism is a movement with rules defined by (cringe) ezra pound and a pal named flint (don’t remember his first name).

the rules for imagism (yeah, they had rules) are as follows (and these i did look up in one of my texts):

1: direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
2: to use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
3: as regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

the epitome of imagism is pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” which goes like this…

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

that’s it. two lines. it started as some 20 or 30 lines, and pound took everything out. the basic idea behind imagism is “bracketing out the I”

the poem works like this:

[ezra pound sees] the apparition of these faces in the crowd;
[they remind him of] petals on a wet, black bough.

somehow, this poem, is everything you’ll ever have to wonder about what it’s like to be at a subway station in France. go figure.

my poem called ‘swallow song’ is as close as i’ll ever come to this form, this idea. William Carlos Williams was a bit of an imagist. though i’d class him more in the field of objectivists in consideration of most of his poetry, most which excludes his most famous Red Wheel Barrow. The Red Wheel Barrow is quintessentially imagist:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

(you should memorize this one, it’s a gem).

there’s no i. there’s no me or you or… there’s no one. everything is the wheel barrow and there happen to be a few chickens in the picture.

what i like that these poems do for the reader is create a crystal clear image (that’s the point, isn’t it) without the burden of a story, characters, time, narrators. it is, literally, timeless. however, it becomes so impersonal, and they are so short (how could they not be) that the whole movement really has no motion in it at all.

now for Objectivism, the brain child of one, most magnificent, Louis Zukofsky.

the objectivists are L. Zukofsky, WCW, George Oppen and a few other German/Jewish men i haven’t read anything of. Carl R. and Charles R. (no relation, i just can’t remember their last names).

so much of the energy of the objectivists is drawn from Marxism and the repression of the Jewish race. Zukofsky and Pound argued furiously through letters. pound being the ever-charming anti-Semite that he was, and Zukofsky being the empathetic and sorrowfully misunderstood Jew that he was, obviously did not get along. Zukofsky stood up to defend women against pound, as well as the Jewish race/religion (he was a Russian Jew i believe).

so, objectivism is, basically, a way of looking at a poem as a concrete object (have you read any of karl marx’s essays or economic theories? it’s stupidly complex and i struggle through it, but i have read a bit). here it is in pieces: this is a word, it has been manufactured throughout history, it has been wrapped and shipped and displayed and sold and now lives inside this pocket in this man’s coat. this is the objectivist angle. this is epistemology understood on a functional level. (i am soooo into objectivism, i’m sorry if i lose you along the way, i’ve read An Objective by L. Zukofsky and based the better half of my poemtree intro on his ideas. i apologize if this comes out all… scholarly and confusing, i get excited.)

let me relate this to lenses and prisms for you… Zukofsky used the analogy of an optical lens (which is where my idea for light and poetry came from, directly). “An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. That which is aimed at.” (i cheated just then, and looked up his exact words.) what i understand this to mean is that the poem is the lens. everything that you the reader understand and associate with “the object” and everything that i the poet understand and associate with “the object”, converge in the poem. when we both put our histories in through the poem the result is a fixed beam. we have now added to one another’s collections of understandings and ideas surrounding “the object”. does that make sense?

i have an idea of what a white chicken looks like, what it eats, where it belongs in the world. you have an idea of all these things too, though they might be very different. now that we have both read the poem by WCW called “the red wheel barrow” we have a new image to associate with “white chickens”. now, after looking through the lens that wcw created we can come to the same conclusion about white chickens.

objectivism, in part, is a way of linking people’s ideas and thus creating a web of understanding. this is the way language develops. one inside-joke after another. for example, on our level. when i say “salamander” i’m sure we both think of something rather unique and different to the rest of the world.

one time on the bus home from school, our freshman year, Danielle and i used to play the word association game, among others. Danielle starts, she says “apple” and i say, without a moments hesitation “cow”. this stopped Danielle in her tracks. “cow?” what does a cow have to do with an apple?

4 years later lauren and i are visiting Danielle at school. i’m on one bed, Danielle across the room on the other and lauren is leaning up against danielle’s bed. she leans over and whispers something to lauren. they both look up at me and daneille says “apple” and i instantly say “cow”. lauren was amazed. Danielle had told her “i can make katy say cow, want to see?” it’s a fun trick. every now and again daneille will send me a text message: “apple” and i’ll reply with, you guessed it “cow”.

for me, that’s part of objectivism, part of epistemology. for me objectivism goes far beyond poetry. all of it though, is to do with words. part of it all, too, which i mentioned at the beginning of my objectivism spiel is the idea that the poem itself is an object. this is the part of objectivism that i struggle with only because for me, the poem is relative to glass—i know it’s there but i can see right through it. maybe i’ll ponder this more, but for now i’ll end objectivism here and let you ask questions.

and onto…


FEMINISM

there isn’t much i have to say about this topic because everyone already understands the ideas and reasoning’s behind feminism. you mentioned that maya was/is in some ways a feminist or at lest a feminist-thinker, right?

there are a few details though, which i can ravish upon you. one is that my beloved Mina Loy wrote the Feminist Manifesto. her take on feminism is one i find particularly appealing. she says, basically (if i remember right) that it is time for women to stop making themselves out to be victims of men and to realize what power and strength women have. she doesn’t compare men and women, instead she separates them. she also focuses on the woman’s ability to change… from daughter to blossoming virgin to mistress to partner to mother to comforter to inspiration. the part that i remember best and the part i like the most is how she defines the revolution. women need to revolt within themselves, to denounce the way they see themselves and to take the steps necessary to become confident and independent of their male counterparts.

unfortunately, i don’t remember the date she wrote this. anyway, i know she took her own advise, the little minx. in every one of her biography blurbs i’ve read in anthologies it says something about all the poets and painters she had affairs with during her hay day.

there is another kind of feminism brewing throughout modernism though. it is along the same vain, i suppose, but it’s more focused on poetry. that is, experimentation.

men experimented, sure. but there’s one woman who i hail as the pioneer of experimental poetry and that is Gertrude Stein. she was really the first to address the importance of process in writing poetry; whereas the emphasis had always been on product. i’ll be honest here, i care more about the product than the process, but i find the process of writing exhilarating and intriguing—after all i do my fair share of experimenting with poetry.

also, i admire Stein’s bold approach to poetry. she is steadfast in her ways and she does not yield for anyone, especially the reader. reading her essay on composition as explanation was more difficult than reading marx’s essays!! but i gained so much from my struggles to understand her and interpret her. it is possibly one of the most rewarding essays if you can dissect it and understand it well enough. i’m sure stein’s responsible for a few of my gray hairs.

it’s difficult for me to explain the link between feminism and experimentation, but just think of it as a breaking off of the main stream of poetry (which was primarily composed by and of men). also, stein has a gentle touch. a grandmother’s touch. if you ever get a chance, read some of tender buttons and be sure you read it out loud. my favorite piece in that collection is called “a red hat” which i think embodies the whole of her efforts (but explaining to you what her efforts in tender buttons was, is an entirely separate email).

there are other isms, but these are the three (imagism, objectivism and feminism) within modernism that interest and influence me the most.

i hope i haven’t bored you to death by all of this!! i hope that you enjoyed it in fact and that you learned something, anything.


a: This e-mail has been sitting flagged in my "Follow-up" folder the until work week now; it's about time I attempt to tackle it, especially that there is still quite a bit to follow up on. It is the end of the day, the end of the week. The office grows quiet here, and I haven't written in ages. So, I'll just jump right into it, sideways if I must.

I am glad you took the time to write this in your own terms, and from memory. That is what I was hoping for. See, it wasn't just laziness on my part, but I did want to see these terms from your perspective, as it is essential to be on the same grounds. For example, I am not sure we understand the same thing by "epistemology". My understanding of the term is based on my philosophy courses meaning "the study of knowledge", or how we come to know the things we know--the senses, the mind, empirical data vs. belief, etc. And I had the feeling that you intend a different nuance of it. That being said, however, I think I won't go as much into my understanding of the same terms (which, if anything, would be more architecturally biased) but rather my reaction to them (as indulgent as it may be; but what are blog if not ultimate self-indulgence?).

I really liked your understanding of modernism; as I believe I already mentioned to you, it reminds me of one of my favorite professors understanding of it: distant enough to be encompassing, and yet down-to-earth enough to be relevant. As you can imagine, Modernism in architecture has different, though interestingly different nuances. I would say industrialization affected architecture more directly than art, literature and poetry: it changed the means of production and construction, it changed the actual building materials, necessitating the "invention" of a whole new architectural language. The rest of the arts I believe were affected more by the social, cultural, economic and perhaps, yes, epistemological effects of industrialization. The interesting thing, though, is that I think in both form was a primary obsession. In architecture, for more obvious reasons, old forms were called into question because of the new construction methods & materials. In poetry, I think it was more of the cultural aspect of modernization, and by that I mean the questioning of old beliefs & values. Another uncanny parallel is the reductionism that was the perhaps the trademark of modern architecture and I see the essence of imagism: the shedding of the "unnecessary", the questioning of established notions to the degree that their reconstruction from scratch, more lean and minimal, is sometimes required. And I think in both cases it was necessary to hit the irreducible for us to realize the necessity of the superficial in our existence.

Sex without Touching

k: “sex without touching” is a lyric from a bjork song, but i can’t remember which one and haven’t the energy or ambition to look it up. (okay i’m playing all my bjork songs that i have on my pc, i’m sure it’s in one of these, so i’ll tell you which song it is when i hear it. do you like bjork? it’s ryan’s fault i like her at all, he had the hots for her because he saw this video where she cooked a fried egg… or something, he’s strange ^_^ but i love him.)

ah, this email isn’t about bjork or ryan or anything to do with eggs or iceland or anything like that. it’s about sex and poetry. and somehow that has to do with your wanting me to explain better my preference for modernists as opposed to beatniks.

i have this sort of grand illusion in my mind, that somehow these schools were clearly marked. like history. this happened on this date and the world changed. i imagine that the moment the titanic sank, women stopped wearing corsets and bonnets. that the moment the first page or paper was pressed against blocks covered in ink that the world started reading and publishing and learning. that the moment the steam engine was fired up, cows started getting scared and farmers started to complain (though that one might actually be true). anyway, i know that the effects of one moment take time to cause revolution. it takes a lot of motion to create a movement. and it takes retrospect to see when and where things happened.

anyway, holding onto my silly belief, modernists came and went (mostly to europe) and then beatniks came and lingered and then there were the boys of the new york school (we all love them, and they all loved each other!!). i want to meet john ashbery so i can ask him if he ever kissed frank, and ask him, if he says yes, if he was any good.

this time line a’la katy is obviously bare-bone, oh and actually, all of these movements and groups overlapped, so it shouldn’t even really be called a time-line, it’s more like a big heap. as much as you might think, i’m no expert on poetry! i read all the texts, lavish in all the isms and movements, look them up, read about them, learn who was a part of them, learn about those poets lives… i am always searching, looking, questioning. i only learned recently, truthfully, that zukowski is the fore-father of objectivism. all this time i thought pound was the granddaddy. (pound really gets my back up, you know this already). needless to say, i was very pleased to learn this. william carlos williams and pound really pushed the movement, but it was my louise who had been developing the ism and gave it it’s name.

i still haven’t gotten to the issue though… why do i prefer modernists over beatniks? it’s part in the poetry itself, and part in the characters behind the poetry—the poets. i don’t like kerouac’s poetry, and i couldn’t finish on the road for the life of me, it was rather dreadful i’m afraid. (generally poets shouldn’t write novels, unless they happen to be leonard cohen—i feel like i might be going on about him too much at the moment… i should buy one of his collections…). james dean’s character in rebel without a cause is how i image beatniks. provocative, dirty, cig hanging from their lips, nice hair, care free hitch hiking, writing poetry on scraps of paper, living off ma and pa’s income. and oh! how i loved the idea when i was 16. but i don’t enjoy, now, the drug content. it’s really the only thing i really don’t like about brian’s work actually, is all the smoking and drinking. it’s unattractive, off-putting even. i don’t mind, in the real world, someone having a drink and a smoke. one of my best friends at school—jonah—is a very jazz-club sort of guy, smokes lots, drinks lots, but he never glorified it in any way. he’s a genuine genius, actually, so it was great to get him drunk and get him talking stupid about shoes and the alphabet. but to glorify and dramatize smoking and drinking, so very not sexy.

now you want to talk what is sexy? mina loy is sexy. george oppen, though i’ve only read the first say 5 poems in the book of his i bought, is sexy (http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/authors/oppen/images/oppen-sel-poems.jpg even though his nose is a bit too big, when he was young, he was defiantly hot. he got old and grew a mustache though, so don’t go looking for any picture other than this one, you’ll be disappointed). and they write sexy poems, like that one by mina loy i put in that post about her and frank. frank’s poems are defiantly sexy, no question. as far as modernists though, and the appeal i have for them… i feel like, when i read the letters and poems and essays (they wrote so much!!) i get a real sense of community. i have no idea how many of them mina actually did sleep with, but i know she was very active in the modernist community. in “to want to art” she is “Expression”.

so i guess it’s the community i love so much, and the lack of all the drug stuff. they don’t glorify the bad habits, they merely allude to them in passing. they’re sly and subtle. their poetry is difficult, complex and dense and so rewarding when you finally get it. i love how deep you can dig into a zukowski poem. i have such a difficult time reading his poetry and really enjoying it. though i’ve studied him and written papers on him and use him as a crutch for my prism metaphor, he is such a challenge, and i love it. one of his poems A-9 actually has an equation hidden in it for a cone of light. i have it all written down… something about the ration between r’s and n’s that appear in the poem… unbelievable and so… modern. that whole era fascinates me, actually. the industrialization of america, the late 1800’s into the 19… say 40’s or 50’s… the height of the world’s fair, trains, canals, the great depression, subways and elevators and sky scrapers and all this… robots. it’s all about technology. and the poet’s role in that era was to remind us what butterflies look like, what water tastes like, what a rain smells like. there’s this war being fought on the literary field between nature—the old wise and beautiful—and technology—the strange mangled birth of something astonishing and glorious, the triumph of man.

the song is “enjoy”

there’s a whole new arrangement of poetry today. and there are one thousand and twenty eight ways to talk about it. i won’t here, it’s defiantly too big to deal with in one email, which is why people like ron silliman take it one day at a time, one poem at a time.

more to do with sex… this new poem… the only good part in it is the part about sex… do i embrace this ability to exploit… love? is it really an exploitation, or should i view it more as a celebration? i really enjoy writing those poems, and enjoy reading sexy poems, and since we talked a bit in reaction to ron’s statement about gay men and women writing all the sexy stuff recently, i’ve been thinking about it more and recognizing it more. i don’t know that ron’s really right though… i think plenty of men are writing about sex. but they’re doing it like rohrer, disguising it in the third person or they’re just not that popular, or they’re writing song lyrics instead. they’re out there, just not in the form that ron looks for, i suppose.

anyway, at the moment i find it unnervingly easy to write a good sex poem. i thought, actually, about writing a poem called “a good sex poem”. i think not though, not tonight anyway. the thing is, i have no reason or understanding of why this might suddenly be true. perhaps i’ve been suppressing it? and not really knowing? i wish there was at least one more great robot poem in me. or something… you know… i’m still trying to write the green river into a poem that’s worth something. i just can’t “green river girl” and one about feeling feelings for a robot… those aren’t good enough for the green river. ah, but alas, i am lost in a world of poetry sex… sex without touching. and ryan being ill is really starting to put a strain on … eeergh. enough said.

by the way, the poem that i mentioned earlier is on my blog, complete with disclaimer in the comments. bjork says “enjoy” and if you haven’t seen dancer in the dark then i recommend you get a box of tissues and watch it.

a: Good morning, dear (it was when I started this e-mail!). You know you set yourself up now for explaining "objectivism" in poetry (is it different from whats-her-name Ayn Rand's Objectivism?). I know I could look these up, but the explanation probably wouldn't be half as fun. This is beginning to feel like "Sophie's World" for poetry instead of philosophy (which I frankly think is a great idea; besides, I see poetry as a more concise and eloquent form of philosophy). Have you read that book? I read it when I was a teenager, and except for a dry spell in the middle, I thought it was excellent--the ending just blew my mind off! (Ok, my shirt is officially now the talk of the office: it is shades of pink in an office that is all shades of grey. I thought I'd hear about it...)

...

In my adolescence and early twenties I enjoyed being so open about sexuality that it might have been jarring; but I enjoyed the shock effect of it. I enjoyed shocking people with that especially because I had such a cute and innocent persona (and I was such a nerd/golden boy in school). But all that changed with Wojtek; he didn't like it. It got me into trouble. And also I realize that I am not that comfortable anymore reading my more explicit poems in public. Besides, this is an instance where I can't think of poetry except as autobiographical (whether reflective of real life or fantasy life, I see both as faces of one persona).

But I think your e-mail brought up a couple of other points for me (that I am sure I forgot one of since I started this sentence and then left it off to go an plot a full set of drawings...). One is the issue of simplicity and complexity (something that I meant to write you about earlier in regards to that Shakespeare sonnet that Silliman posted). In your e-mail you mentioned the complexity of the modernist poems as an asset. And while I do appreciate a layered poem and admit to the joy of a poem "emerging" on one, and revealing itself increasingly with multiple readings, I have also come to appreciate the understated virtue of simplicity in poetry. And even when I appreciate complexity in poetry, it is usually a complexity of meaning, and not structure. And that is perhaps why I react so negatively to Shakespeare. I do realize that part of Shakespeare "difficulty" is the change in language (and mind you I see "difficulty" not as a good thing but as a bad one), but I also find his structures unnecessarily complex. He tends to embody similar simple themes (mostly the anxiety about time and mortality, which admittedly is perhaps the biggest theme in any human endeavor) and present them as complex ideas just because the language is complex. And I realize that at his time his ideas weren't cliched, but they certainly have become so since--a testament to their "greatness" perhaps, but for me that is also a testament to the idea that it's time to move on. I would like to think of myself as a champion of the contemporary, in the sense that I do not subscribe to that nostalgic school of thought that just because they're dead they are great. So, when that complexity gets to the level of encoding, such as in that Zukofsky example, they immediately lose their appeal to me. They become gimmicky, the words no longer mean something but instead becomes assemblages of letters. I can enjoy a good puzzle or mystery (such as the DaVinci Code), but it wouldn't touch me.

The other topic your e-mail brought up for me is the subject of poetry (not as the person, but as the topic): rain? eggplants? trains? time? mortality? love? sex? robots? foxes? trees? I guess that is realted to that idea of sitting down to write about something, which sometimes I wish I could do. I was rereading some of my poetry yesterday to pick what I'm reading tomorrow, and it hit me, for example, how depressed and depressive some of my earlier poetry is. I realize now that I started writing poetry as my way of grieving my grandmother, who raised me, especially that I was away from home and my family and therefore could not engage in the common grieving rituals that they had. Still, the shift in topic from then till now amazed me. I feel now that I am reading the old stuff mostly to air it, so I can put it to sleep. I'd like to get it out of the way, in other words, so I can move on to the newer stuff. Still, sometimes I wish I had the discipline of writing about something (when I started arch.memory it was memory, fresh from my thesis). Now, I don't know... The smallness of life, perhaps?

Which made me wonder, if you were to start or be part of a movement, what would it be? Mine I think would be a riff off existentialism (probably with a different name, since the word now is so passe). By the way, I did very much appreciate your bringing down these movements to their essential human elements and reactions (that was the strength, I thought, of one of my favorite architecture history professors). But also I appreciate your awareness of the artificiality of these isms.

[I Walk Through the Rain]

k: dear,
it doesn’t sound like you’re having the best of days. i’m glad, at least, that writing to me is a sort of relief from whatever’s getting to you. i’m quite flattered actually.

i hope your sister is well. i’m sure she is.

we’re talking about personal in poetry, about autobiography. for me, i think poetry ought to have an entirely separate section; away from fiction and non fiction, away from memoirs and comic books and all that. in my book store i’d put poetry in with the road maps and cook books. and as far away from arts and crafts as possible. though i might make an exception for origami. oh and drama (as in written plays), would get compiled in with all the imported dvds and classical music. i’d have a very special book store, don’t you think?

the prism ^_^ i love that you brought that up, that it’s something of a reference point. i labored over that concept, and it makes me feel so good, almost accomplished, to read it brought up! thank you so much.

i have a poem for you, one that frank wrote. one that you gave me as a christmas present that i’m not going to give back now. hold your prism up to it J this is our autobiography in someone else’s poem…

[I Walk Through the Rain]

I walk through the rain
and it’s really piling up tonight.
My head like a bullet
pierces the downpour.

She in a dark window
irons some man’s shirt
with ponderous columns
atop which the sleepy eggplants
shine in the moon of her peering
out at the mysterious night,

and that’s me.
Why must my eyes, pleading,
response the sky’s convulsion,
humble me before a domestic shrine,
obscure, lonely, slow,
as if I needed this stranger?

[New York, February 1952]

i read into everything frank writes. down to the eggplants. for me, he exists in his poems. he is his poems. i love him because i love his poems. to me, they are real. and i like to make myself the she/her in all of them. in this one, the i is more ashraf. because poetry is that flexible.

i’ll write more to you about this later perhaps. for now i want to leave you with the poem.


a: Oh, Katy, this is wonderful! Thank you for sending it to me. This will be our poem now, okay? I just love it!

tragic

a: Here's my share of grumbling. I have been reading Rohrer, and I think he is growing on me. He still annoys me at bits, but I can tell that he's a good writer, and why you like him... I'll keep on reading.

k: i'm glad he's growing on you. thank you so much for trying and for understanding, you're such a good friend. such a good poetshipanion.


Here's that crappy poem I told you about. I still am unsure about two words in it (the ones parenthesesses); I think they're too... Bla. Open. Out there. There is no restraint about them. I want something that is more askew. That hints at what they say but doesn't spill it. You know I usually don't do the consulting thing with poetry, but I could use some feedback here:

Tragic

No compromise.

When the final curtain falls,
I will come down in flames.
No half exits,
No hesitant escapes.

When the call comes around,
I'll stay rooted in my place.
No hasty excuses,
No clinging to the earth.

I will take it as I find it,
I will gulp it as it is.
No syrup for me, thanks;
No god with a sweet face.

Tomorrow when I falter,
I will shatter with (despair).
I will tell you where I have been,
I will leave without a face.

Tomorrow in the (gallows),
When the sirens lose their voice,
When they tell you it will linger,
I will enough.

Someday there will be none,
When tomorrow doesn't come.

k: how about a return to the stage, the final curtain falls, instead of gallows. Tomorrow in the orchestra pit, Tomorrow below the audience, Tomorrow in the grand hall, grand theatre, Tomorrow in the spot light, Tomorrow in the black. in the black?

as for despair, the only other word i can come up with is fatigue. another solution to getting around this word is to look at the with as the trouble spot instead of the despair, or perhaps both? I will shatter in, i will shatter this, i will shatter this illusion. (i keep going back to the final curtain line; to write "i will shatter this illusion" is to perpetuate the presence of the stage, no?)

just ideas, of course. but ones to get you thinking. i hope.

dear portishead

1. i don’t like blue mouth wash, but i used it anyway, because it’s all that we have at the moment.
2. i’ve given up cereal. it used to be my favorite thing to eat, but now it just makes my stomach hurt.
3. i think that dick van dyke was hot when he was in his early 30’s.
4. my first memory is of being afraid of a rainbow; i didn’t know what it was so i cried and hid under the kitchen table. i think i was 3.
5. i like it when ryan reads books to me because he does the voices.
6. i like to keep as many as 3 different types of conditioner in my shower at all times.
7. i displace my feelings onto my goldfish--"wibble likes it when you ...."
8. meaghan (my sister) and i were very serious about our barbies.
9. i am really starting to enjoy horror films; i never thought i would.
10. i have 3 brown sweaters, and i want 3 more.
11. the teddy bear i slept with from the age of 2 to marriage is an official tupperware bear and his name is tedso.
12. i wish i knew how to read korean
13. i don’t have any superstitions surrounding numbers.
14. “only you” by portishead would play if you turned my car on right now (a song i have been listening to waaaaay too much recently).
15. i wish we had trash pick up service instead of having to go to the dump.
16. i haven’t spoken to my grandparents on my mother’s side since october 2004. i just want them to apologize, so i can love them again.
17. i HATE when people throw cigarette butts out their car windows onto the street. (and i don’t have very much)
18. my cell phone is named “watashi mo” which means “me too” in japanese.
19. i don’t like the smell of coffee, never mind the taste.
20. i still have the bouquet of roses from my wedding dried and hanging in our bedroom closet.

hi,

i did a different list for my friends a few months ago. it’s a fun little exercise, and you learn a lot of interesting things about people. so i did an updated one (the cereal thing is an update, and the last one was made before i got my new phone). when you get the chance, maybe this weekend, you can do a list of 20 for me. “20 random things i didn’t know about ashraf” J

it’s really fun to write, at least for me, i hope you think so too.

and i’ll stop emailing you for today. my iichiban tomodachi Danielle is over and we’re going to watch a film once she’s done battling ryan on the xbox. which means i’ll next be checking my mail from work tomorrow. whatever that means to you, i don’t know. i hope you’ve had a nice day though. and i hope you enjoy my list. you don’t have to respond to anything in it unless you really want to (i wouldn’t mind, of course). it’s just for you to get to know me better. and useful, because now you’ll never offer me coffee.

best always.

a: Uh-oh! Houston, we've got a problem! I don't know how we can be friends if you can't stand the smell of coffee. See, I'm an Arab, and for us coffee is an art, if not a religion. (I guess, for me it ranks just after poetry and Dalida... See what happens when one rejects organized religions? He ends with several more arbitrary ones!) One of my favorite passages in "Memory for Forgetfulness" by Mahmoud Darwish is a passage where he is describing his attempt to make it to the kitchen to brew the perfect pot of coffee while trying to avoid sniper fire... Coffee as a last wish!

But I guess I can forgive you that since you've been listening to Portishead. I guess, besides Dalida, Starsailor (first album), Lhasa (first album), and Pink Floyd (and maybe a couple others), Portishead are amongst a few of my 5-star acts. LOVE them! I saw Beth Gibbons in concert here in Philly, and she autographed my CDs and a postcard. She is awesome! (And a wonderful live act; mesmerizing!) Have you heard here solo album, "Out of Season"? That website has the best screensaver:
http://www.bethgibbons.com/outofseason/

(And I loved #7!) So, thank you so much for sharing!

Here is a questionnaire that we played as a game at Christmas Eve at Wojtek's parents. It's an American Express ad, but we were bored and out of games, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I'll try to remember my answers...

My name:
Ashraf Osman

My childhood ambition:
To design perfume bottles, car lines, and theme basements

My fondest memory:
Rejoining my parents in Abu-Dhabi on my birthday where they surprised me with a brand new keyboard / Walking in Florence on a sunny day with a gelato cone in hand

My soundtrack:
Dalida (surprise, surprise!)

My retreat:
Poetry

My wildest dream:
To be wildly famous (secretly, to be brilliant)

My proudest moment:
Defending my thesis

My biggest challenge:
Adjusting to my life here in the US

My alarm clock:
The iHome (which I love!)

My perfect day:
Waking up unhurried, slowly sipping the perfect coffee, reading, feeling productive, and going out with friends at night

My first job:
As a medical representative for Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer)

My indulgence:
KFC and porn

My last purchase:
Shea butter-verbena cuticle creme

My favorite movie:
A tie between "The English Patient" and "Since Otar Left"

My inspiration:
Memory

My life:
Still waits to be written.

My card:
A GreenCard!

k:dear portishead,
thank you for salvaging my credibility with ashraf; things were starting to look a bit shaky!
sincerely,
katy

hello,

i didn't say i couldn't stand the smell of coffee, just that i don't like it i have to make fresh coffee all morning at work and it is actually my least favorite part of the job. i'm pulling for a new sort of system where i only have to fill a filter with grounds and the gigantic thurmous brews and serves, i don't have to smell the finished product. (i'm awful, aren't i? though, i'm sure you make much better smelling coffee than the stuff the hotel brews.)

oh and then babies. there's a pic of you and mika on the floor facing each other that made me giggle because i noticed in that picture that you two were wearing pretty much the same thing! kawaiine!!
generally though, babies freak me out. i'm okay with little people that can speak. if i can communicate with it, then fine, otherwise ... no thank you. at least at the moment, i am completely not ready for babies! and i don't hear ryan pyning either, so that's good. my mom on the other hand is unrelenting in her vocalization of her desire to have grandbabies. i've got 4 years before ryan turns 30, maybe in 4 years i'll be ready!

i first heard "only you" on a chris cunningham dvd (he's a music video director who does mostly disturbing nine inch nails type videos). after i heard the song and beth's voice i picked up their album that featured that track. most of the reason why i enjoy portishead is because of beth's voice. i'm so particular about female vocals but sometimes you hear someone and it's bliss and you never can let go. there aren't many female vocalists that i enjoy (i hope dalida is one of them, but i won't go looking for her, i want you to be able to introduce us); bjork, [the ladies of] cibo matto, shirely bassey, kristy macoll, karen from the yeah yeah yeah's and beth from poetishead are the only female vocalists i can think of that i really enjoy listening to. there are one off's though, like debbie harry from blondie, she's an amazing vocalist, and i do enjoy her every now and again, fiona apple has some beautiful moments, and i used to like gwen stephanie before she went pop diva harijuku crazy.

i think i will check out beth's solo act. she's the reason i like portishead anyway. does she write her own stuff, do you know? (am being lazy by asking and not reaching out the internet to find out myself.)

My last purchase:
Shea butter-verbena cuticle creme

i thought you said other than the fact that you're both guys, you shop at banana-republic and you like ikea, that there wasn't much gay about you? i don't even know what butter-verbena is! though i bet you have lovely fingernails!

ah, i should read more lorca. talk about poetry displacing religion, lorca's deep song is apparently a bible. more later.

best.

a: You are so cute with that "dear portishead,"! And don't worry about the coffee; I guess we don't have to agree on everything (though it might be difficult to cleanse my place off the smell of coffee, or wane myself from it when you're here...). And I don't think it'll smell any better to you (as much as I'd like to pride myself on my fancy coffees!).

As for babies, for some reason, I did not realize till now how young you are! (You're younger than my sister!) I think it's because you are so mature, sensitive and talented. I was talking to a friend of mine about you over the weekend, saying how I hope you don't become as jaded as I am when you are my age, and she said: if she isn't jaded at 22, she'll never be. I'd like to think that's true. As for me, it's not that I mind children as much as I mind the responsibility. I guess I have such a staunch existentialist bent that I would refuse to impose this life on anyone (hence, I refuse to procreate) and I will not want to make any decisions for anyone, or take responsibility for them (which is why I don't think I'm well-suited for my job, as it is about making decisions for others). I was hoping that this will not be an issue for Wojtek and me anytime soon. But he seems to be getting more and more serious about it (if only to fill that growing existential void). And I refuse to use children as plugs! I wrote another bombastic poem to that effect; I'll try to post it soon, but I am having some computer trouble at home. Our anti-virus expired, and I uninstalled it to install a new one that we get free with Verizon. But it wouldn't work (again), and that got me so frustrated. I was waiting for an excuse to ditch Verizon (I hate big corporations: they charge so much and have such crappy customer service!). So I think I'll finally do it. So, I might not be able to write from home for a while (I don't like to venture on the web without anti-virus).

I do hope you like Dalida's voice. I would have burnt you a CD, but our burner at home is busted (and at work they're iffy about stuff like that). So, I'll figure something. And yes, Shea butter-verbena cuticle crème is pretty gay, however I have the worst cuticles ever! (That is why I buy all these creams.) I basically butcher my cuticles. When I was a teenager I used to pick at my acne, and I have a forehead and neck blotched with the fading scars of my nasty habits (I have to get one operated on because I messed it up so bad the skin got keratinized, whatever that meant). Now I don't pick at my face as much, but I bite my cuticles all the time. It's quite obsessive, and quite out of control. But I can think of worse self-mutilation. (That and my teeth-grinding at night... All that tension!)

As for Lorca, I have to say, you have such a knack at selecting good passages of poetry! Those are two great passages (I especially love the first). As for the sketches, I think they'll have to wait until I fix the computer situation at home.

Mr. Rohrer I will hold off from commenting on until I have read a bit more. I can certainly appreciate him more, though I am afraid I will not be as smitten with him as you are. His writing still strikes me as mostly too dense, ingrown and restrained. I will elaborate later, if you don't mind. Now your poem, on the other hand, is what I call delicate, simple and humane (in the best senses of all words, and it was so lovely to see your handwriting!). It takes a tender (almost mundane) everyday moment, one that is there, that would in most cases just pass, but is also the kind of stuff that Life (with a capital L) is made of, and captures it so skillfully that it seems effortless. (And I love "haunches"; it is such a good rough counterpoint to "graces" and the rest of the poem; it fishes it out of being too delicate. Punctuation, on the other hand, is nothing I give much importance to...) But then again, who am I to judge? I just got another batch of poems reject from another publication that nobody's heard of except its editors. And I am bitter, and I am baffled, and I am giving up. Goes back to how arbitrary poetry is... I guess giving up is not so bad after all. No expectations, no disappointments.