I feel a return of the hypofigure poem coming on.

Half and Half Project

I’ve been writing poems lately that put a new twist on a pair of (for me) old and reliable forms, namely, the Minimalist Instagram project and good-ol’ automatic writing. It’s a simple concept: write a line or half a line using a seed text (in the style of the Instagram and Bibliomancy project), then write a line or half a line in an automatic, semi-automatic or improvisational mode. These two processes occur alternately, but in general, the automatist strands should not be conceived in the “context” of the poem’s evolving shape. The automatic language may, however, deliberately continue and finish phrases syntactically (and vice versa). For example, in this poem I wrote “He engineered a strange,” then flipped to a random phrase in my source text, The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and got “loneliness.” Then I continued, “from the waist up, / part of the order…” then to the book for _”a pure sound.” Etc, generating the next several lines (italics are Rilke):

that should plunge into temptation
but tenses the bourgeoisie and
holds up the huge doors.

Instantly the paintings all around you
knock my sad theme
in several ways…

Proceed accordingly until you feel satisfied. Revise lightly, mostly punctuation. Embrace dissonance.

A word about the automatic writing. I’ve been thinking lately about the poets (Spicer, Mac Low, Coolidge, Perelman) who turn their mind into metaphorical radio tuners that listen to a “voice” in their head that is really the clamor of modern experience. Often this entails an artificial form of stimulation, like the Grand Piano project or other forms of “automatic listening.” The source is not conscious but neither is it subjective or expressive, in the sense of issuing from the writer’s ego. A fragmented, incoherent conversation is going on in the background noise of all our lives, and these poets attempt to record it. Something like this is what’s going on my microdreams. After a while, the “flow” of this voice gets easier to channel and becomes the touch-point for automatic writing. I’m sure some writers will know what I’m talking about. Anyone who is improvisational in any way also has a point of contact. Use this sense of “automatic” writing when writing for this project.

That’s it. Submit the results. Have fun.

All the half and half poems.

The Poetics of Process

Yesterday I quoted Altieri on Ashbery:

“There is no aesthetic pursuit of form or transcendence in early Ashbery; rather, his is the ontology of aesthetic seeking to reverse the Romantic dream of erasing art so nature will stand clear. His goal is a life of process not of forms, but process is most freely and complexly experienced within the self-referring, though not necessarily self-enclosed, book.”

And added:

So I realized when I read this that I used to think of poetry in terms of form, but now I think about it, thoroughly, in terms of process. Surrealism is process; language poetry is process; most postmodern styles are process. This is the overarching logic (that I wasn’t aware of) behind my “projects,” which are not forms, but processes, of writing.

Then graffitiesprit comments:

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the accessibility of this process by readers. Is this ultimately irrelevant to an exclusively private process undergone by the artist or writer or is the position of the consumer ultimately outside of that process?

My thoughts: No, the reader/consumer is not outside the process. The process is not private, but transparent—it is the form, replaces the form, such that it carries the weight and tension that drives the poem forward for the reader. Take blank verse or free verse—Frost or Browning or Whitman—they go until they are done. They are using something more than form (in addition to form) to shape the poem. For Browning and Frost it’s narrative. “My Last Duchess” is done when the dramatic moment has ripened. For Whitman, it’s something else. The point is that these are processes that are open and available to the reader…and it in fact is imperative that the reader detects the process in order to enjoy the poem.

Now, when talking about artificial hueristics and chance operations and the like, what I use a lot of here, the process is less organic, but no less present. And, as with any artificial set of rules (or traditional forms), it is best (as the reader) to know or recognize the rules. We all know that we can enjoy a sonnet more if we know what a sonnet is. In the same way, Jackson Mac Low puts his operation/method/process front and center (as do I) before presenting his text. This is because the tensions that emerge must be appreciated as emerging from the dynamics of the process. For instance, in my logopoetics projects, there are often deceptive moments of cohesion, as if the poem is constructing a coherent dramatic thought. This is not just a parlor trick or gimmick—the value is in apprehending those moments as uncanny intersections of chance and intention, organic and inorganic, conscious and subconscious. It is a poetry that unveils the dualisms of consciousness and problematizes them. So even though the important poets “of process” make it sound like the process happens in a private way, the assumption, it seems to me, is that the text is charged with the traces of that process and is (mostly) the attraction of the text.

Logopoetics IV

This isn’t the promised Zapruder-Mirov-Schomburg project but it’s headed in that direction. The instructions:

1. Use a profound sentence from a book or other source text as your title.
2. Begin the poem by describing the weather. No cliches. Say it in a way never said before. Strange stuff.
3. Write a short sentence or phrase of your own—it will be used again later.
4. Begin the next sentence, “My life is ________________,” filling in the blank with an elaborate and surreal metaphor.
5. Compose a sentence/phrase that sounds like a proverb or piece of advise, but isn’t quite sensible.
6. Follow that with two parallel phrases: “In [some period of time], I _____” and then, “in [same period of time], everything/something ________________.” Fill in the blanks using the Random Word Generator and/or the Acronym Maker for heuristics (bend them as needed).
7. Write a scooter sentence that refers in some way to the title. A scooter is a series of appositional phrases or metaphors (e.g. “Love is emotion is rain is holiness”).
8. The next sentence: “I use my __________ to touch your _________.” Use this word generator (set on 2) to populate these blanks.
9. Then write a sentence using an idiom and an adjective-noun combination from this generator (substitute with other heuristics as needed).
10. Quote a pithy/torqued sentence or phrase from one of your beloved authors, but introduce it by negative hypothetical attribute to another author. (E.g. “Keats might have said, ‘a woman made of bendy straws,’ but Ben Mirov said it first.).
11. Restate the sentence/phrase you wrote in step 3 (slight changes allowed) followed by a restatement of the metaphor in step 4 (ditto).
12. End with a profound-sounding sentence of your own, perhaps alluding indirectly to the title.

Example.

As always, submit it, denoting which project you used and perhaps including an image to post it with.

Acronym Project

I found this wonderful acronym generator this morning that is just too rich. Project:

• Use the Acronym Maker to generate a non-sense acronym. To do this, you need to input a short series of letters (I recommend four) which you can generate from any number of chance methods available. (E.g. seed text = Altoids; thus the first four letters, ALTO, fed into the Acronym Maker yields “Anarchy Loco Teeth Opera.”
• The generated acronym shall be the title of the poem and shall be used once in the poem.
• Also refer to a real acronym using the same letter series somewhere in the poem. Refer to this index of acronyms to find one. (E.g., ALTO = Analyzed Layout and Text Object.)
• Write the rest of the poem using a combination of intuitive thoughts/images and/or chance operations. Some of my favorite sources of inspiration lately are idioms and instaroulette.

First acronym poem.
Second acronym poem.
All acronym poems.

Your acronym poem.

Forthcoming Project & Some Bombast

After spending years perusing the bookshelves and occasionally buying and reading a book of contemporary poetry, I keep wanting to go back to a few of these young poets. That’s a sign that they are on to something. They are: Zapruder, Shomburg, Mirov. There may be others, but these three stand out in my mind as doing something along the same lines. Something wonderful that expands on the rhetorical surrealism of the New York School poets. The hypofigural elegance that is successful because it is surprising and incongruous. In an interview a few years ago, Zapruder and Schomburg called themselves the New Surrealists. I’d call them Hipster Surrealism, and that’s meant in a good way.

Over the next few weeks, I want to analyze these poets more closely and try to come up with a “formula” or “form” of the prototypical “Hipster surrealist” poem. And then I’ll make that a project and write poems with it.

Is it trite and shallow to take the art you love and turn it into a formula? That’s what I asked myself immediately after I had the idea of doing this project. A lot of the poets I studied in college would say “yes, formulaic writing is death—death to the poetry being imitated as well as the poetry being created.” But over the past few months, I’ve come to realize that this notion is not only wrong and self-deceiving—it’s also tragically debilitating. I call it the “cult of sincerity” and others call in the “cult of genius.” Poetry is a craft. Artifice. Teche. You can learn it and get good in the same way that you can learn painting or carving or knitting. It’s about technique. The key is whether the technique we use and how execute it produces something pleasing or boring. These poets have found a technique that produces amazing poem after amazing poem. I want to learn that technique for myself and make my own poems, and for others to do the same, like each knitter makes his own variagated sweater from a common pattern. That’s not cheapening the art, that’s demystifying it and returning it to its former glory. The joy of making with words and forms.

Logopoetics (III)

Got the itch for another go round of this project. For this version, you will need these Source Texts:

• A book of poems. (I’m using Mac Low’s 154 Forties.)
• A online text, such as a book from Gutenberg project. I recommend something slightly philosophical. (I’m using Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.)
• A book written in a foreign language you can read aloud (optional).

Directions:

1. Begin by quoting someone—anyone. The quote will be the poem’s title. The poem’s first line shall be “is something _____ said about _________,” where the first blank is the name (first, last or both) of the person quoted and the second blank is a noun or participial phrase. This noun or noun phrase may be chosen randomly from here] or deliberately, but its relation to the quote should be arbitrary.
2. State matter-of-factly one thing you or someone else wore today. Describe the color of the item using an Italian color term.
3. Using a poetry book (Source Text 1), copy the first complete syntactic unit of the third line of first poem and formulate a sentence based on it, connecting in some sense to the previous sentence. Each time you use this exercise, proceed to the next poem in Source Text 1 for this step.
4. Write, “My [body part] is [adjective].” Pick the body part yourself; get the adjective here.
5. Write a sentence using a random idiom here and combine it somehow in a sentence with Step 6…
6. Go to Instaroulette and briefly describe the contents of the image that comes up.
7. Using the online book (Source Text 2), copy the first question in the text. Find it by searching for “?” Each time you use this exercise, proceed to next question in Source Text for this step.
8. Answer the question as you see fit.
9. Start the next sentence with a phrase from Putnum’s Phrase Book for “Pleased.” then write a connecting phrase defining or identifying the phrase from Step 10 (see example).
10. Using the foreign language text (Source Text 3—or any Source Text), flip through and let your finger or eyes fall haphazardly on the page. Record the syllable you see, transliterated into English if necessary. Do this five times. Connect the (sounded) syllables with hyphens. Example: “kin-hap-play-cord-un”
11. Write “When I think of _________, I think of _____________.” Fill the blanks with whatever you wish.
12. For the final line, write a incomplete sentence that repeats or revisits something earlier in the poem.

You may combine any sentences or phrases into larger sentences or syntactic units, as you see fit.

Logopoetics (III) poems here.

Send me your Logopoetics poem!

Old Moleskin Project

On January 1, 2008, I began a free-writing exercise that lasted almost two years and produced over 400 drafts of poems. At the time I had no blog or audience. I was taking graduate classes and teaching Comp. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I just wanted to start writing again. I knew going in, it was going to be rough and that I would sound like a slavish imitator of my favorite poets: Bly, O’Hara, Breton, Ashbery, Whitman.

The rule was to fill up one page a day: these Moleskin planner journals have 29 ruled lines. I would stay up a few minutes later every night, trying to force something to come out to fill up those last few lines… The journal traveled with me wherever I went and lived by my bedside. I wrote in pencil and scratched and erased and smudged. For the first six months, I was disciplined and only occasionally missed a day. When I did, I’d make myself make up for the lost day, writing two, sometimes three pages. Eventually, I got too far behind to catch up. These two journals (2008 and 2009) have just been sitting on my shelf for over three years now, waiting for me to do something.

Gradually, I want to “restore” these poems. What I mean is that I want to type them up (to “finish” them, really) and post them. A few are horrible, and almost all of them have some horrible parts that will get cut.

“January 1, 2008” is the very first poem in this journey. Micah Towery is my buddy from my undergraduate program, now a creative writing teacher and editor of The The Poetry.

Read Moleskin Projects poems here.

Reblogging Project

Following up on the “Uut Magazine” idea, most of you said reblogging is the preferred solution, and I think you’ve convinced me, so I’m trying it.

But I need to say that a week of perusing my dashboard (which I actually don’t read faithfully), the “poetry” tag and generally sniffing around, has left a lot a to be desired. I’m picky when it comes to poetry, and I don’t think I can stomach the superficial love, angst and eroticism that is out there. A handful of poets seem to get it: express emotions indirectly, through images, avoid confessionalism. But even fewer actually do what I really like: the obscure, surreal, pedantic, pained, fragmented, rhetorically-overblown, etc.

I want to support the Tumblr poetry community out there—many are doing okay work and deserve promotion—but I don’t enjoy sifting through the bad stuff, and I don’t want to shift my blog away from what it has going for it, which is a very niche kind of style.

Solutions and Directives:

• I’m taking submissions. I’ve been doing this already anyway, and the results, sorry to say, have not been pretty. I am willing to give this another shot, though. Please submit your poems—but only one a day and something that fits the style this blog specializes in. I may not see your poem for up to a week, and I may not publish it. This is a specialized blog. Even great poems outside that specialty will not get accepted.
• If you find a poet that you think I’d like, please share! There are about half a dozen of you that I enjoy and will probably feature regularly, but I need to find more to avoid increasing insularity.
• When I find a poem I like, I’ll reblog it, and very happily! In fact, I’ll probably give it some art work and a title (if it doesn’t have one) and link back to you and all that jazz. In order to add the art work, I’ll actually need to post it as a photo, which means I’ll be starting a new post instead of reblogging. I’ll try to send you a note letting you know when I do this, since otherwise you might not realize your poem is getting likes…
• Often I find a poem has a few amazing lines but the poem as a whole isn’t a win. If that’s the case, I’ll just post the zippy lines as a quote post and link back to the poem. Like this.

Remix Poem Project

Tumblr writers seem to occasionally reblog their older work. It makes sense: since a poem or post often doesn’t “play out” its potential in its few-hour lifespan on the event horizon of the Tumblr ecosystem, giving it the resurrection treatment is almost as good as creating new content. But overdone, it can seem pretentious or lazy.

So instead of reblogging, try remixing. Here’s a suggested formula:

1. Pick out one of your old poems. Start a new post; don’t click reblog on the old one. That way your new poem shows up as a post, not as a comment on the original.

2. Begin the new poem with one of the following: (a) the first image, line or sentence from the old poem, (b) the last image, line or sentence from the old poem, (c) some other, compelling image or sentence from the old poem.

3. Write a few new lines. Don’t look at the original for this.

4. At some point, integrate another image or sentence from the original poem, but reverse the statement or meaning: “The stones lie like chestnuts in a glass bowl” becomes “a glass bowl lies like a chestnut on the stones.”

5. (optional) Perform a few other permutations, such as (a) negating an image/sentence from old poem, “The stones do not lie like chestnuts…” (b) keeping the syntax structure from a sentence/phrase but changing the words, “The balloons sip like Chesterfield in a mango purse…” (c) translate the sentence into a foreign language, then back into English using Google translate: [e.g., into and out of Arabic, then Czech] “Rocks fall like chestnuts in a glass jar.”

6. Add as much new content as you wish. Rearrange and revise at your discretion.

7. Use the same poem title as the original, but stick “remix” after it in parentheses.

8. If you use artwork, recycle the same image or take a detail from that image. Optionally, filter the image, run it through a glitch filter or otherwise edit/distort it.

9. Stick a permalink to the original poem at the bottom of the post.

10. Tag it #remix.

11. (optional) Submit it.

Bibliomancy Project

Bibliomancy: divination through books. Specifically, through opening up a sacred text randomly and reading where your eyes/finger falls as the answer to your burning question.

I’ve been doing this for almost a year now with the instagram minimalist poems, so why not re-package it, call it prophecy? Why not.

• Pick a seed text. For this project, a somewhat literary, stylized, or otherwise diversified text will likely get better results.
• Flip through randomly, letting your eyes fall haphazardly on the page. Record the first or second phrase you read. (A phrase is a unit of grammar, such as a prepositional phrase, subject-verb clause, participial phrase, etc.) Sticking to, roughly, phrasal units will help with the next step.
• After recording an even number of phrases (I recommend 8-20), pair up the phrases into couplets.
• Feel free to change punctuation and capitalization to connect lines and couples grammatically.
• Arrange your couplets as desired.
• Give it a title.

Bibliomancy poems here.

Submit yours here.