Sunday, April 18, 2010

hey! over here!

all,

due to cataclysm! and disrepair! and just needing to move along, you can now find me, most of the old stuff, and a whole lot of new stuff over at http://www.ohbara.com/weblog. Please update your bookmarks & send your browsers over there.

:)

Friday, April 16, 2010

poetry, daily: 12

Well, we're more than halfway now, so thank you if you're still hanging on and doing this daily practice. It's no easy thing, that's for sure.

A thought on critique: For serious writers, when looking at another writer's work, the question does not become 'is this the thing that should be done?' but 'what is this thing I have here?'--not 'is it working?' but 'how is it working?'. Once these questions are resolved, the writer and her critics will be in a position to interrogate the workings and make substitutions, if necessary.

Good peer review examines what is on the page explicitly and thereby examines the potential (what could be there if the author changes things, or what would be there if you were the author). It doesn't make what doesn't exist the focus of its study. I'm not talking about rejecting the conditional or future tenses when talking about the poem, but about basing any projections on what is there, rather than on what I-critic might personally desire. How is the thing in front of me working and how can I make it better? The engineer doesn't say the bicycle should be a light socket, but might incorporate some function of the latter into the former, if necessary (like to light the way at night!).

And ask, maybe: What can this poem teach my practice?

the light was beautiful and it was warm

Writing exercise: Write a poem about something lost in interrogatives, rather than declaratives.

See you Monday.

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Thursday, April 15, 2010

poetry, daily: 11

The series. What is it, how does it function? By series I mean both poems in parts and series of separate poems that function together. The series can be a way for a poet struggling to relate things to box them into separate areas but leave them on the same page. More capably used, it can, as in Seamus Heaney's poem "Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication", make us think about two disparate elements in terms of their relation (which in this case is not formal or tonal or imagistic), while the poet clearly composes two objects--and places them together, changing and complicating what they would have been alone. The series means we can't go back to the single poem. It desires the complex relation that moving parts have, because it is composed of parts that relate internally (both vertically and not), relate to the whole, and relate to what is outside (as with any poem).

Poems in a series are train cars, rooms in a house, little worlds with their own rules. And have to merit these. There's no flab on a freight train; everything working, everything carrying its weight.

Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality I: Composite bodies greater than their parts' sum (136).

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spring

Writing exercise: Write a poem in parts or a series of poems.

See you tomorrow.

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

poetry, daily: 10

Writing exercise: Take 10 of your poems you feel closest to or most affectionate about. Go through them and list the nouns, verbs, and adjectives/adverbs you use. This is your lexicon. Compose a new poem using only the words on these lists, plus any conjunctions, articles, and tense/person changing suffixes necessary. What is the new poem like? Does it feel similar to/different from the source poems? Reductive? Fresh? Have you been forced to use the same words you tend to use in new ways? Or not? Have you fallen into your usual tendencies?



See you tomorrow.

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

poetry, daily: 9

Writing exercise: Write a poem without the word 'I', without the word 'he', without the word 'she'.

Check out the slender, lovely slip of a poem that is Rae Armantrout's "Second Person".

How about this anthology compiled by C. Dale Young?

IMG_0820
Our shadow is our second person.

See you tomorrow.
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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Monday, April 12, 2010

poetry, daily: 8

Check out these words about Michael Dickman's book, The End of the West. Two very different reviews in two quite different outlets, and the second one is not entirely kind (which is fine--reviews aren't meant to be laureates, but this one, unfortunately, has the slightest aura of sour-grapishness about it). I met Michael once, quite a long time ago now, at a party at a friend's house. We talked about Randall Jarrell and then exchanged letters for some months. I wish I had kept up the correspondence, because I liked his poems then and I like what I've read recently.

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coats, mirror, sink

One thing I like about his poems is how you enter them. I am drawn to poets who are methodical and considerate, and his entrances feel that way. The dangerous other side is plodding.

Writing exercise: How do you enter the poem? Via what door, tunnel, passage, arch, window? Begin the poem at its entrance.

See you tomorrow.

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Friday, April 9, 2010

poetry, daily: 7

Tragedy, beauty, and absurdity in the newspapers (and everywhere). For example.

Writing exercise: Find a newspaper story that interests you and write from it. Don't feel bound to a reportage-style recounting of the facts; just use it as a starting point. What does the story call up in you? What is missing from it? Where else could it go? How could it depart from the 'realities' of its situation? How can you step away from what we assume and see those realities in other lights? What is strange about it?

frituur bea


See you Monday.
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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Thursday, April 8, 2010

poetry, daily: 6

"I am not proceeding by linear deduction, but rather by concentric circles, moving sometimes toward the outer and sometimes toward the inner ones.... Rather than founding a theory--and perhaps before being able to do so (I do not deny that I regret not yet having succeeded in doing so)--my present concern is to establish a possibility" (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics, 2007; pp 128-29).

#657: Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

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If poetry is the mode of possibility, as both Foucault's poetics and Dickinson's poem seem to imply, then how is that expressed? How to create a form that continues in possibility? How to renew the language (repeatedly) so it can be alive, rather than easy? How can poems themselves be "a project for reconstituting [their own] aesthetic form" such that "a disordering of one's senses of the work would make us dwellers in possibility" (Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, "Deformance and Interpretation" in Poetry and Pedagogy, ed. Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; p 154).

IMG_0813


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Writing exercise: Take Dickinson's poem and break it apart. Insert spaces, move words around, break lines, make new lines, extend lines; do everything except add words. Make a new reading or a new poem.

See you tomorrow.
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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

poetry, daily: 5

I'm reading Sharp Stars by Sharon Bryan right now. I like it for its play, especially its wordplay. I like its sense of space. I like how trim the poems feel. They feel so crafted. Not impetuous, though they do feel ready, like a runner on the blocks. You can read about the book on the publisher's (BOA Editions) site, read a review in Rattle here, and buy it at Powell's here. You could wait a few months and read my review of it, too...more on that later.

crown/light

Writing exercise: Click this link and write about the first image that strikes you.

See you tomorrow!


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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Tuesday, April 6, 2010

poetry, daily: 4

Writing exercise: What is the particular geography of the place you love? What are its most intimate, actual, physical, material details?

This time, play with the physical largeness of the poem. Make yourself use lines that go all the way across the page (with or without breaks in the middle). Use the white space to create meaning. Start lines from both margins. For example.

Create a picture of this place you love, including the things you can't say or that are too big to say. These things might take the place of narrative or imagistic gaps, formal play with white space, punctuation, etc.

the mosses are blooming

See you tomorrow!
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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Monday, April 5, 2010

poetry, daily: 3

Writing exercise: imagine you've come home and someone has moved all your furniture.

chair

A beautiful poem: "Sweet Habit of the Blood" by Sarah Gridley in Cerise Press 1.3.

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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Friday, April 2, 2010

poetry, daily: 2

A poem can be just a moment. It doesn't have to tell a grandiose story, or travel vast distances. Mostly the things close to home, the physical things we know and can touch, are what will touch others (and ourselves on rereading).

leicester, delay

Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Métro

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

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Writing exercise:

Take public transport this weekend. While you're waiting for it (or while riding it, or after you alight), take note of the things you see. Write a short poem from this experience.

See you Monday!

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

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