Poetry Ahead: NaPoWriMo

Yup. It's April and that means National Poetry Month and NaPoWriMo.

I'll be doing NaPoWriMo again, but I won't officially sign up and won't be publishing every poem here. It's not because of my worrying about the 'previously published' stigma if I post a poem here then submit it to a journal.

No, this is more about using this challenge (to write a poem every day this month) to grow as a poet, to experiment, to free myself and be bold. I'm not sure I can even approach freedom & boldness if I'm thinking about an audience at that delicate stage in my poetry process, that stage when a poem is newly born and just opening its eyes, taking first breath.

That said, I won't start NaPoWriMo without posting a  poem at all. So here's what I'm working on today. Seems a bit like notes for how I want to proceed this month.




once i dreamed my skin was peeling
in long strips - delicate, translucent -

and i carefully saved each one
intending to make something with them.

when i woke i knew it was about

how every day i wake up new
and tender

how the currency of my old life
is spent on art

how i will spend my whole life
becoming.    
                             ----Zann Carter (2012)



)O(

Poetry Ahead: Liminal

 Oh, the constant back-and-forth in my head about the issue of posting poems to this blog and worrying whether I have to submit them only to those publications that accept 'previously published.'

I just shouldn't care. I should just share my poetry whenever I want, wherever I want and not care about that elusive, unlikely future of getting published.  That's what I'm feeling like today.  And, since I'm doing more writing than making visual art lately, if I don't post  poems, I won't have much to post here.  And now that perennial rant is done & I won't do it again. Ever.

Liminal

It’s space made of a bell rung sixty times,

pieced from the gaudy drama of autumn,

its insistence on being about dying

grandly.

It’s where I’m standing chilled and still

at an artfully peeling threshold, strewn with blue

paint chips, a sill covered

in leaf-fall,  all priorities shed

and abandoned for the wind’s

taking.

Crossing that threshold

is part of a bargain I’m making.

First I draw a great inbreath.

Oxygen silvers my center

swirls down to my roots

splayed hungrily in the earth.

I burrow firmly

into the snug province

of gnomes, the dirt workers, the spirit miners.

Lithic glitter dances from my fingers.

Soon I’ll lie three months silent

in the crystal heart of winter, an inclusion

wrapped in wool, tattooed with dreams,

stitched wth silence.

My jitterbug pulse will slow

and I’ll enter a simple fairy tale

of a crone who appears to be sleeping,

yet crosses a bridge,

wildly awake behind her bruised lids.

                                   -- Zann Carter  12.20.11

Poetry Ahead: Charles Olson

I just took one of those cyberspace wandering journeys of serendipity.
It began when I clicked a friend's link on Facebook - a link to a new MIT initiative in putting courses onine which led to:

MIT OpenCourseWare, 
current MIT courses online where I clicked on:

materials for a course in poetry which used the 1999 edition of Allen's The New American Poetry and began with the assignment to read:

Charles Olson's Kingfishers  which led to:

1. me getting up and searching my bookshelves for my copy of The New American Poetry (a trade paperback edition from the 60s)
2. reading Kingfishers.
3. going back online to the MIT course and going to:

a link to the American Academy of Poets page on Charles Olson which led to:

me looking for his 1950 "influential essay "Projective Verse" " which I found here at the Poetry Foundation site, read just a fraction and have made a copy to print and read later.

And throughout this journey, I was googling a bit,  reading, and searching YouTube and watching and listening:

The Kingfishers

By Charles Olson

1

 

What does not change / is the will to change

 

He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He

remembered only one thing, the birds, how

when he came in, he had gone around the rooms

and got them back in their cage, the green one first,

she with the bad leg, and then the blue,

the one they had hoped was a male....

more

--------------------------------

So what am I thinking after this journey?

That I intend to read "Projective Verse" and think about breath and poetry.

That I'll read more Olson.

That I'll explore the Black Mountain school of poetry.

That I won't need to get a copy of the newer edition of The New American Poetry...my 40+ year old copy ($2.95 cover price, but which I apparently paid .35 for* )  is spine-broken, but it's a sewn binding, not glued, and seems like it's got quite a bit of life yet.

That I'm reminded, once again, how little I know and how much there is to know.

That I need to remember that I can't know everything, that perhaps all I'm meant to know is just what comes to me from the great world, what I encounter as I breathe in it, as I wander in it.

-----------------------------------

*I recognize the handwriting in that .35 penciled price on the front free endpaper, so I know just where I got this book, if not exactly when. I got it at one of the Indiana State University used book sales for the American Association of University Women, which used to be my annual birthday-present-to-myself. They were always held in late September, when we had run out of money over the summer, so it was wonderful to be able to spend $20 and come home with bags of books. The price was written by the late Elizabeth Bevington, who volunteered her pricing expertise and clerked at the sales. She was one of my mentors in the business of selling used, out-of-print, collectible books. She was from the pre-internet days. She didn't have a television. She carried on her business  (Books Below, in the basement of her home) with a typewriter (manual) and 3X5 cards and the ABA listings of books wanted. I bought lots of books directly from her and I even have a book that was hers when she was a child, Legends Every Child Should Know by Hamilton Wright Mabie. Her name was Elizabeth Hodson then. Then was 1916.

Amazing what seeing that penciled .35 evoked. I'm thinking about Nicholson Baker now.

And now I'll stop.

)O(

Poetry Ahead: John Lennon

John Lennon lived until December 8, 1980.
And what a gift to us was his work!

John Lennon Plastic Ono Band (with The Flux Fiddlers) - Imagine by Yoko Ono

I remember reading this book of his.
I still use phrases from it, like instead of saying I'm having a nervous breakdown, I say I'm having a nervous breadvan.

Maybe you had to read it, too.  Did you?

[edited to include this photo 'cause I think the nervous breadvan came out of In His Own Write ]

---------------------------
The night John Lennon died

we were in a meeting,
all the servers and busboys squeezed
into that big-party corner booth.
who said it?  Sam? the bartender?
I only remember looking up in horror
and how the only other horror-filled eyes
were yours,
how our gazes locked, tractor beams colliding,
drawing us back and forth into each other’s shock--
what was the meeting about?
I only remember us fiercely hugging after,
going for pancakes,
how bereft the world felt
how everywhere we wandered that night
his music played and played. 

                                           --Zann Carter

Published in Ides of March Journal June issue




)O(

Poetry Ahead: = DADA! +

Marie Osmond talks about Dada sound poetry and reads Hugo Ball's Karawane on an old episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not :





Listen to Christian Bok's rendition here.


Now, your turn to read it.  Yes. Out loud.

Karawane

jolifanto bambla o falli bambla
großiga m'pfa habla horem
egiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa olobo
hej tatta gorem
eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu
–umf
kusa gauma
ba–umf


Now, go write a sound poem of your own. (Share in the comments if you like.)
 -----------------------------
Here's mine (written after I first posted this last night.)

t’pta

ilp ilp respituto
iiiiya iiiiiya iiiiiya
lumbo paru
sono-o-o-o-o--ba elubin
herago gaganga
omp swempo timp
plpl op-op
pik’il prak oood
ahka sem
a kasem vy
ch ch ch
macaroo macaroo
harfam tatrum
plemp sucra til
fe’feek ola kreptil
plan-ta-rah abdoo-oo
tt’pta tt’pta tt’pta
uptra pt
oolp.  plip.  plap.

----------------------------
Next step of course is to see if I have the nerve to perform this at the next monthly reading!  Or make and post a recording of me doing it.  I have to say it's great fun to write and to read aloud.  

)O(

Poetry Ahead: Joy Harjo, then me

Joy Harjo - A Poem to Get Rid of Fear

--------------------------------

So now I'm not afraid to follow Harjo with one of my own poems...haven't posted one here in a long time. Mostly because of that 'previously published' issue in case I want to submit somewhere. But I'm tired of not sharing my work here. Tired. 

This one is new, read it at the last Poetry at the Grounds, started out to be an Occupy poem and then shapeshifted a bit....

No Lipstick

I hear there will be no lipstick
come the revolution.
So we will stain our lips
with pomegranate juice

and know forgetting

forgetting how afraid we are of change
forgetting how afraid we are of loss

forgetting  our capacity for violence

We will high five ourselves and let everything go,
there’’ll be a river for all that stuff.

We will be wearing all that we own.

Come the revolution

cooking will be a communal rite,
eating together a sacrament.

No one will talk about what they let go

we will all be poised on the edge of each moment
reveling in what is

deeply understanding the nature of forgiveness

knowing
that the spiritual world
permeates everything in the physical

that every bird’s wing
has a shadow
that shifts through us

as they fly by

that all our beloved dead drift
through us like white smoke
on the deep sky of our souls


We will hear them with us always.
They will draw nearer.
We will co-create the universe with them.

We will know love at last.

Come the revolution

we will see there is something pure after all
at the beginning of everything

at the beginning of our truest selves.

                                      ---Zann Carter (2011)

-----------------------------------

)O(