Ahhh! I didn't die! Oh and Goodbye

So, I was really sure I was going to die at the poetry reading. Luckily, I got sick with a stomach virus on tuesday, so I was distracted from my anxiety. In fact, I didn't feel my anxiety that much at all, which allowed me to sing in my highest voice that song. Hope no one's eardrums exploded. I was very glad I was able to come this far with the help of this course. I had a great semester and I learned a lot of cool and interesting things to do with my poetry. Thanks for an awesome poetry class guys. It was really awesome to be around you all. Goodbye =]

Last Blog!

So I was surprised at how easy it was to read at the poetry readings. I thought overall everyone did a really great job, and a lot of the performances were really creative and intriguing. I thought it was interesting to hear everyone's unique personalities and styles come alive. Everyone reads their poems aloud during workshops, but a lot of times that is more rote reading off of the page, where as everyone's stage presences were a lot more involved and lively. I was very nervous to read my poem. I do not do well with public presentations and I am especially nervous when reading something that I have personally written. I was truly surprised by how easy and painless it actually was. Overall I thought the poetry readings were some of the most valuable and enjoyable assignments we have done all semester. Great job to everyone on their reading!

New Addresses

I chose a book of poems by Kenneth Koch. He currently resides in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. I purchased his book from the book store because I was immediately attracted to the cover. The book is titled New Addresses and looks as if the cover is filled with hand sketched drawings and segmented poems which make it look like a private diary. When I opened it up, the titles of the poems that are listed in the contents are captivating and grasped my interest. For example, To My Twenties, To Psychoanalysis, To Testosterone, To Piano Lessons, To Carelessness, To Living In the City, To Insults, To Fame, To My Fifties are just to name a few.

Reading the poems, I learned that the individual poems work together in a cohesive manner by using lines or phrases from earlier works in Koch's book (assuming the reader started with page one and so on and so forth...). Each poem is addressing something, hence the title, New Addresses. As he addresses his topic of choice, the poems speak out to readers such as me, yet he was from an older generation, like my grandparents age (me being 21). Koch makes the reader feel as if his poems could have been a stream of consciousness during his earlier years. His technique is not extremely abstract but made me think of surrealist poetry and the New York School of Poets we had studied earlier in the semester; this observation was funny as I came to find out Kenneth Koch was a poet of the New York School where he knew people like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.

Kenneth Koch writes about the addressing topic by using the pronoun "you" a lot; I feel like this technique works because when I use "you" in poems it allows my readers to consider themselves as the "you" or the poem can relate to the reader, making them feel as if they are the speaker and the "you" is someone they know. As I came to see how the "you" makes the writer's poems relate to his readers, I also felt the situations and the way the incidences happened in his poems are techniques which emphasis the poems' uniqueness.

The order he chose for his poems made the book more personal than if he were to lay them out in any other order. I write a lot of personal poems which I am going to put in a particular order for my chapbook in hopes of making my work more personal as a whole, but relatable as individual poems. Koch’s poetry includes a lot of poems in which people can relate to, but personal at the same time. I believe the order in which a poet sets up his or her book is a technique that makes the piece of work very personal. My chapbook will also use a technique which allows my personal issues to relate to my readers just like Koch has. I'd like to think my poems are pretty "straight-forward" and, therefore called prose poetry. Well, the poet and I had something else in common because his poetry was to the point as well! All the similarities I share with this poet made me appreciate his work even more.

When I think of poems that acknowledge the poet’s personal experiences, I can't help but think about Christian Bok. I remember he mentioned how he came about his style of poetry because it was a style that was almost as dead as Latin and he had told his friends that he would never write poems about himself. So, if you are a fan of sound poetry, then maybe this book isn't for you. However, when you can make personal poems as witty, relatable and entertaining as Kenneth Koch, including the snazzy cover, then you must take a glance at New Addresses and other poems about a happy, healthy life!

book review # 2

So the book I chose to review was The Bride of E by Mary Jo Bang. I found it just by walking through the browsing section of ODY and leafing through a couple different books of poems. It grabbed my attention because it was structured around the alphabet and kind of reminded me of some of the poets we have been reading during class. In particular I was reminded of Christian Bok's Eunoia, because the praise on the back of the cover claimed that through writing the book Bang discovered that each letter in the alphabet appears to have their own personality. Bok once spoke about he thought each of the vowels from his Eunoia had their own personality too, and the idea of letter and words has having their own identity and personality has really intrigued me this semester.

The entire text is structured around the alphabet, though some letters have more poems than others. Some titles are centered wholly around the letter, such as C is for Cher, while others such as In the Present and Probable Future just address ideas relatable with the letter P.
My favorite poem is actually the first one in the book. It is called ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness is the Bride of Existence. It describes girls flirting with boys in bars, and seems to critique the strange way people cling to eachother and seek partners only because they are alone. I really liked how it was written, but I also liked a poem that critiqued love instead of praising it as so many poems seem to do. It seemed like a really fresh idea to me.

Though the overall structure of the book is obviously the alphabet, the book is also divided into two different parts. Part one seems to follow the sequence of the letters while Part two seems a little more interesting because while each poem is still attached to a specific letter and idea, they are not ordered in any particular way and only the letters G, J, S, L, and U are addressed. Overall , I really enjoyed the poems in this book and would definitely recommend it to others.

Failure-Philip Schultz

I decided to read Failure Poems by Philip Schultz, published in 2007. I chose it because I tend to be drawn to poems that are passionate and filled with emotion, ones that make a reader feel. Even if the emotions are those of intense failure, they still are about a feeling and I get a great deal from them. As it turned out, this book of poems was about a range of “failures”, every day failures that are entirely relatable to the regret of death to fear, even the fear of losing new found success.
Each poem reveals a little about Schultz’s life, both past and present. He is married, in his early sixties, and has two young sons. He has known sadness, depression, death, regret, but even in these failure poems, the reader understands that his sons and wife have, in a way, saved him from some of that.
The poem Talking to Ourselves (p. 2) is one that surprised me and made me think about the theme of the book because on its own it does not seem like a poem of failure. In two sentences per person Schultz tells the stories of four different people and himself talking to themselves or just saying a word or two out loud and what those utterances meant. The context of each is where the failure happens, but he writes the poem so that each word is heavy with regret or confusion. He obviously had a troubled relationship with his own father, and in the poem The One Truth (pp. 46-7) he says: “is this what failure is,/to end where he began,/no one but a deaf dumb God/to welcome him back,/his fists pounding at the gate” (47). It feels here like the whole book has been working up to that moment and from there everything is a bit clearer.
In terms of format, Schultz doesn’t do anything too formal in his poems. Most are written in full sentences; it is where he chooses to break the sentences into lines that emphasizes his voice. The poem My Dog (p. 17) is about the death of Schultz’s dog and it’s written in five stanzas of three lines each. Two of the stanzas end in the middle of a sentence and the sentence is continued on in the next one. I think this was done purposefully to illustrate his inability at first to let go of his dog and in that way he used the format of the poem to convey more than his words could.
The poems aren’t particularly long or complex, but they say a great deal about Schultz as a person. A young writer might look at his silences and his ability to say a lot and convey great emotion in just a few words.

Book Review #2

For my second book review I decided to read:
Six Sections from Mountain and Rivers without End Plus one by Gary Snyder.

This book is very simply presented (and the library version is currently in pretty shabby condition): a solid blue paperback cover with the title and author written in plain font and nothing written on the back except for the price of $2.25 in the left bottom corner. Under the title and author on the front cover is a drawing that seems like it could be a scribble someone drew in a classroom. But this is what I liked about it. This cover is not ostentatious or pretentious, it doesn't beg for your attention. It feels as if the poems inside can hold their own, they don't need any aid from a flashy cover. It is only 44 pages, and as the title suggests, it contains seven poems all by Gary Snyder.

I enjoyed the poems themselves very much. They're written in a narrative style in both what seems to be his voice and the voice of others (in one poem a high school aged girl who is pregnant talking about a river). They are all written using different methods of writing, which keeps things interesting. The first poem reminds me of Jack Karouac's "Dharma Bums", as Snyder he talks about going hiking in the Sierras and the style is somewhat (obviously there are difference between poetry and prose. The second is the voice of the pregnant girl. The third describes experiences in different cities or towns along a highway on a trip taken by hitch hiking. The towns are listed along the right side of the page adjacent to their descriptions on the left. I thought this was especially cool, especially with the intent of the poem. The fourth may be my favorite, and is describing what someone is experiencing while under the influence of what ever it is that they were under the influence of.
Etc, etc, etc.
The last poem uses images (drawings), that look like native-american symbols to separate different sections of the poem. Different languages are used and it almost seems like a song or chant when they're used... like the drawing/symbols indicate a "sing-along" time as they sometimes do in books for religions practices or other situations I can't think of right now. It reminds me of books used in Jewish practices when there is both Hebrew and English translations of things and both are read (I'm not Jewish, so I don't really know that much about this).
Well, now that I've given you a silly summary of most of the poems in the book, I suggest you go read it for yourself. All of the poems really drew me in and kept me interested. I guess the cover was right, the poems could stand on their own. Good job, cover. Yeah.

Cyber Poetry

I thought our discussion in class yesterday was really important. I went to class not liking cyber poetry at all, but our exercise we worked on as a class and hearing other people's opinions changed the way I was feeling about cyber poetry. I didn't like the style while I was doing the reading simply because I didn't get it. When Theo asked me about my opinion and why I felt weird about the style, I said, "I don't know, it was weird!" I had no specific reason except for the style being too complicated for me to understand.
I had never heard of cyber poetry till now. When our class came up with a list of visual and cyber like poetry, I learned that this genre of poetry has a wide range. I reading liked the "choose your own adventure poetry." I thought it was going to be easy then it really was when I constructed on with my partner. But, instead it confusing and we did it completely different then we were supposed to. (I wonder if our construction could still be called poetry.) I like how everyone else's turned out and I felt like other people got as confused as we did. However, the activity overall showed me the art behind the genre which involves cyber poetry.

Flarf and conceptual writing

After going through some of the readings today I would have to say that I am more drawn to the Flarf school of cyberpoetry than the Conceptual. I felt like the poem from Blackice that we read was more or less just technological nonsense. I found it difficult to read because I didn't know what to do with the website addresses or double slashes in the middle of the lines. Probably because of all the attention we have been giving to performance poetry in preparation for our own poetry reading, I couldn't help but wonder if cyberpoetry will ever be able to escape the computer screen and be performed? Maybe it already has, but I wondered how a poet would perform something like that, and what the audience might lose by not seeing such a technological poem in its original technological environment. So much of the inspiration for both schools of cyberpoetry is derived from the internet and computer that I think it would be interesting to see if the content of the poem transferred when read aloud and was removed from the computer screen. It will be interesting to see what comes up in discussion for today's class.

Randy Hill and Performance

So, I guess you can say I'm a little bit less nervous about performing in the next coming week. At first, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to do it. I wanted to drop the course in the beginning of the semester because of my anxiety and being in front of everyone. I know people say to pretend like everyone is naked...but that doesn't help. Nothing normally does...so I'm hoping above all things,I'm able to do it.
Randy Hill definitely opened up my mind to new things I could do. I found what he said helpful and kind of uplifting. The ability to perform might be hard at first, but I'm hoping that with these new ideas I have came up with, I'm going to give a solid performance and then panic off stage. I have changed my Black Ink poem into something a little more readable for me to perform. I think I will have to do that with all my poems, change them to make it easier for me to perform them.

Performance Poetry: Randy Hall

I loved the class speaker yesterday! I thought he made everyone in the class a little less nervous to read in front of people later on this semester. Personally, I don't feel and never felt nervous to read my poems in public, however Randy Hall did make me more intrigued and excited to read in front of people. I enjoyed learning about all the option a reader has in order for him or her to make there poetry more entertaining. I thought that Randy was also well prepared for our class because his presentation made everyone more comfortable. The little hints that he gave to make a reader more prepared were so useful too.
When he had all of us stand up and do certain exercises to show us how to prevent passing out from being so nervous I found these techniques were important to know. I felt a lot of the tips he gave us we can use in the future for any type of public speaking. As he began to tell us how we should respect our poems and every line in our poems it made me look at publicly reading our poems in a different way. I feel as if my approach to reading my poems for people has totally changed in such a way that I feel more prepared and excited. I hope people feel the same way and are as excited as I am.

Performance Poetry

So I really enjoyed today's class. I am honestly really nervous for our poetry reading so I thought it was very helpful to have some pointers on to present. It never really occurred to me how technical actually figuring out how to read a poem could be. I thought a lot of the ideas he discussed about what people did in his performance poetry class as a technique of presenting the poem was really interesting. Other than Christian Bok's reading which i thought was very different and surprising I have never seen live poetry presented in any other way besides the traditional stand in front of the room and recite. I especially liked the poetry video we watched at the end of class. I think it must be a really interesting experience to see your work translate from a page into a movie clip like that. It is interesting though to consider that if that is poetry, where the line between poetry and other forms of art really exists.
On another note I am a little nervous for workshop tomorrow because I am not sure I wrote my poem in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E tradition. I think I am in the same boat as Chesney, I read the packet but a lot of it seemed to go over my head and it wasn't until we discussed it in class the next night that I started to feel like I understood a little bit better what they were going for. So hopefully my poem wasn't too too far off base!!