Saturday, September 15, 2007
WWWC
Meeting September 15, 2007
Missing persons report:
Carol Shapiro—I have no further news
Julia, Peter and Debbie will not be here today
Minutes of last meeting
Thanks to Mina for the use of her house for the picnic. Again, grand and gracious.
Welcome to Chuck Haddad who attended for the first time and also to Louise Botelle who we met and horsecollared at the Arts Festival at MCC.
Business
$10 dues due today
In the absence of the treasurer who would like to collect and keep track of the dues?
We have a balance of approx $450 after the final check to the MACC for proceeds from the Gold Shoe chapbook
What about the Poetry Corner
I will call Richard Tambling but I think he has ceased to promote the item. He seems to be gaining responsibilities at the JI and hasn’t returned by emails. Contributions have been dismal.
Is it time to cancel the PO box and seek another outlet?
CPS
IN MEMORIAM: GUSS STEPP
With sadness we announce the passing of Guss Stepp, Jr., treasurer and long-time member of CPS. A retired electrical engineer and human resources executive, Guss also served as Vice President of Connecticut Renaissance, one of the oldest nonprofit drug treatment agencies in the state. An award-winning poet, he facilitated the Saugatuck Poets and was a frequent host and visitor at the Tuesday Night Poetry Series in
CT River Review and Long River
The 2007 editions of the CT River Review and Long River Run are back from the printers and should be in the mail to members and contributors by mid September.
The
WALLACE W. WINCHELL POETRY CONTEST
Open to all poets. NEW GUIDELINES AND PRIZE AMOUNTS
Submit poems: Oct. 1-Dec. 31 (postmark)
Prizes of $400, $200, and $100.
Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 80 line limit each. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact info and one with NO contact info. Both copies should be marked Wallace Winchell. Include SASE for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification. Send fee of $15 for up to three poems; make check out to Connecticut Poetry Society. Prize winning poems will be published in
Send submissions to Wallace W. Winchell Poetry Contest, CPS,
Education and news
See Ashberry, Morrisey below.
Spamoetry
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Spamoetry? (Spam Poetry)
From Wikipedia:
A recent phenomenon is an e-mail spam tactic in which randomly-generated text passages are used to thwart Bayesian filters. For example,
The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they me as I walked, the remembrance of my churlishness and that I must confidence between himself and Mrs. Micawber. After which, he for his dagger till his hand gripped it. Then he spoke. I kissed her, and my baby brother, and was very sorry then; but not
Even grammatically consistent sentences can be formed, such as
Then, from sea to shining sea, the God-King sang the praises of teflon, and with his face to the sunshine, he churned lots of butter.
Such text is called spamoetry (spam poetry) or spam art. Since the text is often derived from actual books, this is effectively a cut-up method.
Assignment
Write a disconnected poem. That is one in which the sentences have nothing to do with one another. It’s like a conversation in which each speaker says something completely alien to anything said before. Somewhat like spamoetry, it will be a poem (rhythm, rhyme, stress, etc) in which the language becomes somewhat meaningless although all the words are real. It will be a test of Crabtree’s Bludgeon which states that "No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated."
This is sort of opposite to the poems we brought today in that we were required to contextualize lines we took from other poets. We are de-contextualizing for the October meeting.
Poems
John Berryman - Dream Song 77: Seedy Henry rose up shy
| Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world & shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up and p.a.'d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand moment to Henry, ah to those less & none. Wif a book of his in either hand he is stript down to move on. —Come away, Mr. Bones. —Henry is tired of the winter, & haircuts, & a squeamish comfy ruin-prone proud national mind, & Spring (in the city so called). Henry likes Fall. Hé would be prepared to lÃve in a world of Fáll for ever, impenitent Henry. But the snows and summers grieve & dream; thése fierce & airy occupations, and love, raved away so many of Henry's years it is a wonder that, with in each hand one of his own mad books and all, ancient fires for eyes, his head full & his heart full, he's making ready to move on. |
Change date to Sep 15
Sep 15 meeting
Sometimes I know how the poem will feel in the end
Spamoetry
Update members list with Debbie's referral, Chuck Haddad and new person from
The Monster of Mr Cogito
1
Lucky Saint George
from his knight's saddle
could exactly evaluate
the strength and movements of the dragon
the first principle of strategy
is to assess the enemy accurately
Mr Cogito
is in a worse position
he sits in the low
saddle of a valley
covered with thick fog
through fog it is impossible to perceive
fiery eyes
greedy claws
jaws
through fog
one sees only
the shimmering of nothingness
the monster of Mr Cogito
has no measurements
it is difficult to describe
escapes definition
it is like an immense depression
spread out over the country
it can't be pierced
with a pen
with an argument
or spear
were it not for its suffocating weight
and the death it sends down
one would think
it is the hallucination
of a sick imagination
but it exists
for certain it exists
like carbon monoxide it fills
houses temples markets
poisons wells
destroys the structures of the mind
covers bread with mould
the proof of the existence of the monster
is its victims
it is not direct proof
but sufficient
2
reasonable people say
we can live together
with the monster
we only have to avoid
sudden movements
sudden speech
if there is a threat assume
the form of a rock or a leaf
listen to wise Nature
recommending mimicry
that we breathe shallowly
pretend we aren't there
Mr Cogito however
does not want a life of make-believe
he would like to fight
with the monster
on firm ground
so he walks out at dawn
into a sleepy suburb
carefully equipped
with a long sharp object
he calls to the monster
on the empty streets
he offends the monster
provokes the monster
like a bold skirmisher
of an army that doesn't exist
he calls -
come out contemptible coward
through the fog
one sees only
the huge snout of nothingness
Mr Cogito wants to enter
the uneven battle
it ought to happen
possibly soon
before there is
a fall from inertia
an ordinary death without glory
suffocation from formlessness
Zbigniew Herbert
Emerson, I thought the following article might be an interesting one to share with the group. I'm not totally sure that I can make the 15th, but I will try my damndest (is that a word?). Julia
An 80-Year-Old Poet for the MTV Generation
By MELENA RYZIK
Published: August 27, 2007
MtvU, the subsidiary of MTV Networks that is broadcast only on college campuses, will announce today that it has selected its first poet laureate. No, he doesn’t rap. And it’s not Bob Dylan, or even Justin Timberlake.
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
John Ashbery, poet laureate for mtvU, at home in
Times Topics
John Ashbery
Additional articles, links, poems, recordings and the poet's own MySpace page.
Multimedia
The New Higher: A Poem by John Ashbery
Soonest Mended
Related
Poem: ‘Some Trees’ (August 27, 2007)
It is John Ashbery, the prolific 80-year-old poet and frequent award winner known for his dense, postmodern style and playful language. One of the most celebrated living poets, Mr. Ashbery has won MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”
Excerpts of his poems will appear in 18 short promotional spots — like commercials for verse — on the channel and its Web site (mtvu.com, which will also feature the full text of the poems). In another first, mtvU will help sponsor a poetry contest for college students. The winner, chosen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of the National Poetry Series.
“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU, which broadcasts at 750 campuses nationwide.
The idea of the laureate program was not to create more English majors, but simply to whet an appetite, said Mr. Friedman, a poetry aficionado since he majored in literature, philosophy and history at Wesleyan. Mr. Ashbery, he added, was the No. 1 choice to inaugurate the position. “He resonates with college students that we’ve talked with,” he said.
And Mr. Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of
The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From “Retro” (2005): “It’s really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill/and you’ve gotten over someone/salty and mercurial, the only person you’ve ever loved.” From “Soonest Mended” (2000): “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued.”
The excerpts were chosen by David Kermani, Mr. Ashbery’s business manager, and two interns and an employee, all in their early 20s, in his office.
“We were just trying to pick lines that were catchy and sort of meaningful in some way, something that would appeal to what we thought younger people would be interested in,” Mr. Kermani said. These young people picked “things that had sort of raunchy references,” he added. “They thought it was sort of a hoot.”
Mr. Ashbery too was pleased by their choices, particularly because they reminded him of what was in his own canon. “I have a lot poems, so there are a lot of them that I don’t really think of very much,” he said. (Mr. Ashbery published “A Worldly Country: New Poems” in February, and an anthology, “Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems,” is due out in November.)
But will droves of young people respond?
“It’s our hope that we will interest college kids in poetry in a new way, make it hip for them,” said Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins that has published Mr. Ashbery’s work. But, Mr. Halpern admitted, “it’s very hard to tell what exactly is going to come of all this.”
Though his roots are in 1950s bohemia, Mr. Ashbery is perhaps not the most obvious choice for the iPod generation. He works on a typewriter and doesn’t listen to popular music, with the exception of a chance encounter with the Peaches & Herb song “Reunited” in a cab in the 1980s; it inspired his poem “The Songs We Know Best.” (“Just like a shadow in an empty room/Like a breeze that’s pointed from beyond the tomb/Just like a project of which no one tells-/Or didja really think that I was somebody else?”)
But Mr. Friedman is optimistic that verse will find its new audience, and mtvU plans to continue the program with other laureates after Mr. Ashbery’s one-year tenure is up.
“I don’t think there’s such a big leap from the artists we’re playing to the poetry that John is creating,” Mr. Friedman said. “Some of the music we play, Bright Eyes and the Decemberists, they’re phenomenal poets. I feel like there’s a connection there.”
Though he has not been offered the job, Mr. Ashbery has said that he wouldn’t necessarily be interested in being the
“There is a great deal of responsibility that comes with it,” he said. “You have to spend part of the time in
But the mtvU gig — which is unpaid — came with few strings attached, and was not very demanding of his time, he said.
“I don’t have any specific duties,” he said. “They’re going to publicize my poetry and maybe people will get interested in it and other poets will benefit. That’s about as much work or responsibility as I would want.”
After a 50-year career and nearly as many published volumes, is Mr. Ashbery finally slacking off? He laughed. No, he said. “I’d rather keep the effort for writing poetry.”
Job Profile: Life as a poet
What's it like to be a zookeeper? Or a poet? The BBC went on the road to find out. In this online series, we look at four jobs, from the quirky to the extraordinary. Today, part three looks at what it's like to work as a poet.
Name: Sinead Morrissey
Hometown: Portadown
Occupation: Poet
How's the pay?
As a poet, it's rubbish, but you don't do it because you want to make money it.
How are the hours?
The hours are entirely self-determined.
Where do you spend most of the day?
In my office at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
Best part of the job?
Well, it's a reason for living. There are more, but it's one of them.
Worst part of the job?
Self-doubt. Doubt that what you've written is good. Doubt that if what you've written is good, that you'll be able to do it again. And doubt that if you do it again that you'll be able to do something different.
Sinéad Morrissey was born in
Genetics
My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure –
I know my parents made me by my hands.
They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.
With nothing left of their togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.
I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father’s by my fingers, my mother’s by my palms
demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.
So take me with you, take up the skin’s demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by our hands.
Poetry Corner issues
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