Tracy K. Smith

TRACY K. SMITH

This afternoon, Tracy K. Smith gave a fantabulous reading down in the TCNJ Library Auditorium. The turn out was superb which can only mean that the PUBLIC RELATIONS GROUP did their job, top notch.

*wink wink*

(I have to represent for my people, obviously.)

She read a good assortment of her poetry, with special emphasis on Duende, which came to be expected as it is the more recent book. She then let us in on a couple pieces from her up and coming book (the date of its release as well as the expected title have completely escaped me) which was a real treat. The slight, distopian, otherworldly themes that she only slightly touched upon in Duende, are a main focus in her new work. The pieces gave way to wit and humor as well as peaceful beauty and scene. She read with grace and comfort infront of the crowd, which led me to believe she may have some theatre background; however, when asked, she denied anything of the sort. Just natural ability!

After the reading, she was superbly receptive to the questioning, especially when we got down to the hard ones, digging into her nitty-gritty detail. Even when a random crowd member asked her what "her body's question" was, she handled with with a giggle and a joke.

Then rest of the event went on with only a slight hitch...the girl from the bookstore had LEFT!!!! I suppose she got bored and figured, "well, who would want to buy a book and get it signed now that Ms. Smith has read and we know just how great her work is?" I was ready to get fist'a'cuffs! So after I ran back to the bookstore and gave them a piece of my mind, I returned with the books and a man to sell them.

At the end of the day, I think we were all rather pleased.

So how would you write this?

I suppose I would erase it:

And here was the recipe:

"Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of piece.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. "~ Ezra Pound

The Stretch from California: Joe Wenderoth

  

Joe Wenderoth.
        It is really only right to begin a discussion of Joe Wenderoth with a quote from Letters to Wendy’s. When I was first introduced to those work, I had never seen anything quite like it, and with each new reading I find something new and inconceivable to explore.

“February 8, 1997
Wendy will you not even poke me? Not even a slow poke? I wonder why you treat me so. Am I a wooden board? Am I to be thought of as a simple wooden board? Come on, just give me a slow poke. I’m not a wooden board, honey. Come on, just poke me like you used to. Just a slow poke. Look into my eyes—are these the eyes of a wooden board?” ~Letters to Wendy’s.
 
         Wenderoth hails originally from Baltimore Maryland and is currently an Associate Professor of English and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of California. (I site him with the hope that he has family still living in Maryland, and he could possibly use a trip to TCNJ as an excuse to visit family on this coast as well!)

Wenderoth has made a name for himself in many anthologies and has been called “one of the ten best writers under 35.”
 
          Author and literary critic, Calvin Bedient claims that “Joe Wenderoth's brave new poetic talent is like nothing so much as a live wire writing its own epitaph in sparks. [His poems] throb brilliantly with a sense of the 'too much.' . . . But in Wenderoth's case the too much is the too little or the too ordinary-a very remarkable discovery to have made so late in the history of poetry. Philip Larkin and a few American poets have approached it, but Wenderoth's instrument is sharper than theirs; he makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible."
Besides my own personal fascination, Letters to Wendy’s (2000), Wenderoth has published several other works:
Disfortune (1995)
It Is If I Speak (2000)
The Holy Spirit: Essays Written for John Ashcroft’s Secret Self (2005)
No Real Light (2007)

An interesting tidbit: In 2007, Wenderoth performed in collaboration with Gibby Haynes (butthole surfers) in Brooklyn at the Issue Project Room.



“April 19, 1997

It is rare for a baby to be so bad that it is sentenced to be hanged, and even rarer for the sentence to be carried out, and yet, when a baby is hung, what a pleasant surprise it is for the passersby.” ~Letters to Wendy’s.

*Youtube.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zTwb-F7Mtc)

The Gibby Haynes sessions are a litle muttled on youtube, the music is a little low (but the one with the glasses is Gibby) and the blonde man reading, looking like he came in after a night on the street,  is Wenderoth.

*Here, I am including another video by Joe Wenderoth, from a collaboration he has made with several artists, including Gibby Haynes, where they are known as the House Crackers in their Jame sessions.*

"She asked me if I liked Tattoos..."

This is my second workshop poem, written in response to an ill-informed poem about tattoos.

[Untitled]


The pen pierced into my soil, planting 
her favorite flower.
“African Violets,”
 I demanded.

They tried to sell me just a rose.

My blood pooled upon the petals; these 
flowers had no thorns. The air
filled with bees.
Stingers. Buzzing 
down into my bones.

When the flowers fully blossomed, 
 fruits of his labor meticulously 
drawn: She criticized my choices 
but kissed me, 
sweetly,
for the blooms.

Visit this site at your own cost...

...because Erasures are addicting.

When we were Mexican, revised. by Rachel Pinkstone

*Original Text: Bohemian San Francisco by Clarence E. Edwords

http://www.wavepoetry.com/erasures/

Just keep reading, Rachel...just keep reading...

"Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking and when she passes, each one she passes goes, "A-a-ah." -  "Girl from Ipanema" -English lyrics written by Norman Gimbel.

D.A. POWELL

If you aren't caught off guard by the obvious need to turn your book sideways in order to take part in some of D.A. Powell's poetry, his use of catchy, and often ironic pop songs will definitely give you a little kick in the pants.

I seem to be drawn most passionately to the poets who are hiding personal pain(of the speaker) or experience right out in the open. Powell's poem, "[tall and thin and young and lovely the michael with kaposi's sarcoma goes walking]" uses a play on this popular song about a beautiful young woman to heighten the power and beauty of living with disease.  The Bossa Nova song, fits perfectly, crooning about a landscape so different from the one provided in the poem; however, the speaker seems to walk with content along the cold beach displaying the battle scars of his disease and little power he still holds in his "final stages." The power of the song, and the movement, and the hope.

Wow. That felt deep.

Anywho, it's D.A. Powell's ability to mold the music that keeps together the frail world that the characters of his poems live in, with the harsh words of the reality that they exist in. 

Reflections on the First Week, pt. 2.

"You know the way Jesus/ rips open his shirt/to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny"

NICK FLYNN 

Massachusetts born with a stint at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a graduate degree from NYU, he writes in all the right publications and when he isn't teaching at the University of Houston he is "elsewhere."

The above quote does not come from the two poems that drew me to Nick Flynn, but, boy oh boy, it show is one sentence how this poet is able to turn you completely around with the use of one word. Specifically: thorny.

It is, in fact, the two poems entitled "Cartoon Physics, part 1" and "Cartoon Physics, part 2" that caught me.

Contemplating the perceptions of real life pain and atrocities through the eyes and psychological abilities of children, he provides irony, sympathy and playful lyricism.

Pardon me for this forthcoming long quote, but I feel this is a more than appropriate example:

"Years ago, alone in her room, my mother cut/hole in the air/& vanished into it. The report hung &/deafened, closely by an over-/whelming silence, a ringing/in the ears. Today I take a piece of chalk/& sketch a door in a wall. By the rules/of cartoon physics on I can open this door."

These "rules of cartoon physics" are used as an insightful tool in the speaker's specific perception of the loss of his mother.  The story telling is built around childish ideology, but the  first line ends with cold facts: "my mother cut."

The poem about Jesus is easier to consider with humor as well as the underlying confusion/fear, but the innocence of the cartoon physics saturated in the distance of the speaker intrigued me far more than the thorny Lord.

First reading it, now writing it?

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” ~Percy Bysshe Shelley  

Write a poem that lifts the veil and makes the familiar unfamiliar. 

I do believe this Poetry workshop will be a definite stretch for my creative abilities, as Poetry is not exactly...my bag. Don't get me wrong, as I have mentioned, I happily provide feeble attempts at deciphering contemporary poetry and the grand array of new writers popping up like delectable little mushrooms. Unfortunately, when the pen is put in my hand and I am asked to create in this genre, I often revert back to kindergarten tactics, with childish rhyme schemes and silly imagery.

More often than not, I revert to being funny...because that's what I do best.

All right, then. Here goes. Lifting the veil:

[“Half past the hound’s leg”]
Rachel Pinkstone


Half past the hound’s leg,
noble purpose is spoiled 
by the day’s early waste.

August heat swells and
puckers; still, the air is too moist
for a spark.

Respect and function pass by
these proud pillars rounding 
every corner, alongside power-
walkers and bichons.

That is, until metal clangs and 
sinks cold between the joints, 
prying apart the Johnnie
on Second and Chester.

And, finally, when the pressure
is released and fluid rushes
forward, children squeal with 
delight and relief.

Originally titled, "For the love a Hydrant," I decided to leave and air of mystery in the first few stanzas as this is the only arena where the poem is accompanied by a visual.

Reflections on the first week.

Let's talk about Poetry. Let's talk about Poets. Let's talk about abstracts, obliquity and unexplained line breaks. Let's talk about things I don't understand, but have a burning passion to talk about with authority and delight.

JOSHUA BECKMAN 

I will have you know, it is not simply because he was positioned at the beginning of the alphabet and thus plopped in front of me from the start of Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century that I chose Joshua Beckman as the first poet to indulge. There were a few names and pieces I perused first, but his cut and dry, often comedic, thought-provokers struck me with something special.

However, before I even tackles his use of language, I would like to make note of something in his "blurb." With each poet I encountered, I made a point to labor through their two to three paragraph biographical excerpts. This process put in me a trance of university patterns: Swell undergrad, Super Post-grad, and presumed elite writer's workshop or doctorate. Soon enough, I was beginning to believe that all these poets have ever done was attend school. Beckman, however, states happily his stint at Hampshire College and then his the honest life and writing experience that has followed. I am not saying, that having a PhD in English Literature and teaching Creative Writing in a Princeton MFA program is small peanuts, but it was slightly refreshing to hear that not all poets have to fit the mold.

Ok, here we are: ["I like your handsome drugs. Your pleasant..."]

"Yeah. I go/running in, all ready to show everyone the/karate chop of love. And that girl named Katie./A Barrel of Chicken."

Upon three reading of the same poem, I feel that his work really needs to just be taken in, laughed at, taken in again, and then the reader must reach back into his memory and find the moment where he sat at a party, beer in hand, contemplating the actions of his baffling "friends" and slowly letting reality catch up to him, right before he takes another swig.

The poem reads well with humor. Beckman and his audience give a laugh with the reading. As the is in the present tense and written entirely in short, noun-ridden sentences, it's seems urgent and honest, like the reader is part of the thought-process of the speaker. The fact that there is little "sense" or moral provided by the poem gives it that feeling of unstable acceptance. It's as if we, the readers, are at the birthday party, we may be sitting next to that girl Katie, and as we reach in for the next pieces of fried chicken before he performs the "Karate chop of love."

A play of stupidity? Nostalgic musing? Commentary on youth and booze and drugs and balls and girls? A poetic play of language? Purpose or poetry? Just plain fun?

I don't know, but I am totally into it.

It Begins...

 

[The New one talks like me—She is for ever rid] by Rachel Pinkstone

*Original Text: A Bundle of Letters by Henry James

My work here begins with a piece of found poetry, if you will, in order to ease the reader into the creative, instructive and ridiculous nature that I plan to provide.