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Monthly Archives: April 2013

Everything Else is Meaningless

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Before I started teaching, I was a voracious reader. I would devour any book I could find, typically reading it cover to cover in a couple of sittings, and then either writing a review or paper or some type of notes on what I had read, and how I felt about the book. When I started teaching, this all seemed to change. I was so focused on building proper curriculum, and keeping a step ahead of my students, that – with the exception of the novels I was teaching – books fell by the wayside. During the summer I’m able to finish a few books, but I’ve never gone back to the type of reader that I was during my formative years.

One of the last books I read prior to teaching was Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. I’d seen the movie, and I felt that it was missing too much. Characters seemed to trail off, and I wasn’t convinced that Patrick Bateman was just simply evil for the sake of being evil. I knew there had to be more. I purchased a copy of the book, and sat down for one of the greatest roller coaster rides I’ve ever been on.

I read that book cover to cover, only putting it down when I felt so ill from the descriptions that I thought I was going to lose my lunch. There has never been a book that has felt so visceral, and so beautiful at the same time. Through all the evil, and all the abuse, and all the destruction of person and persona, I felt that it was such an honest look at the darker side of the human psyche.

To me, Elis had written an updated version of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” or “Porphyria’s Lover.” A stunning look at how the mind might work if every dark thought were to take precedence over anything good. Patrick Bateman was an honest character, who just decided that he wanted to take control over every situation – even if taking control meant that he had to manipulate and murder everyone he cared about, much like the lover in Browning’s poem.

Elis’ quote, found above and in the Paris Review interview, speaks perfectly to how someone should write. A writer writes what they want, and not what they feel they should. If one is honest with himself in the writing process, then he is more apt to write the piece that best represents who they are, and how they are. Everything else is meaningless. Never forget to just write.

Doe, a Deer, a Female Deer

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The deer in my neighborhood do not find me as funny as I do.

Perhaps I should explain.

I live in out in the woods, and there is a small herd of deer that roams my neighborhood all year round. They eat flowers and cross the road at unexpected times and look you right in the eye while pooping. Visitors gawk and stop their cars and take pictures of the exotic animals that, thanks to the large birds of prey in the area, are more common here than cats. It’s mildly irritating, but also allows me a lovely sense of superiority.

I only bring all this up because, lately, as I pass the little herd on the way to and from my home, I have been finding it hilarious to ‘mistake’ them for other animals. “Hi horsey,” I’ll yell out my window as I drive by. “Baaaaa,” as I ride by on my bike, bleating like a sheep and then laughing like a maniac as the deer bound away. They don’t seem terrified as much as annoyed. I get hilarious and they just leave. I’ve been in this situation before.

The thing is these deer and I have known each other for years. They should get me by now. I’m gonna make that joke every time. If you don’t laugh, I’ll take it as a challenge and keep it up if only because I’m obnoxious, and if you do laugh I’ll keep doing it because I assume you love it, EVERY TIME.

In many ways comedy, like language, is dependent on the audience. If it doesn’t convey a message or get a laugh it can’t be called effective. Those deer don’t get the joke, so logically I should stop doing it. It isn’t effective. But I can’t. Because I need joy in my life.

“All experience is fleeting, but that you have experienced it is not.” I’m paraphrasing, and I can’t remember who, but it sounds pretty good. There is something about life that begs to be captured by language even though we know it never really can. At times, if you’re lucky, you may find that the perfect sentence seems to spring out of your mouth at the perfect time, cracking everyone up with exuberant laughter or bringing awestruck silence. Sometimes this happens when you’re all by yourself, driving through the woods and chuckling at the deer. It’s no less important.

So, am I saying that hanging out a car window making farm noises at wildlife is poetry? Sometimes. Poetry can be an urge.

It’s also sometimes called a nervous breakdown.

Funny. I’m not at all nervous about it.

-Doran Simmons

QOTD: What is your favorite word (and why)?

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My first QOTD stems directly from the driving question of this initiative – Is Poetry still relevant in the 21st century? To answer the question truthfully would not only be to explore the society of today, but all of recorded history. It is a question at the very root of the human condition. Is Poetry relevant today? Has poetry ever (or always) been relevant? It is a question that can be answered in thousands of words, eloquently written and meticulously explained—or can be summed up in one word: yes.

What is poetry if not a collection of words attempting desperately to describe that which cannot fully ever be explained, to share an unsharable moment? How then, can poetry not be relevant to any person at any time in any place?

Words, then, are the building blocks of humanity (at least until google and SIRI join forces to rise up and hijack our brains into Philip K. Dick’s dystopian wet dream). The beauty and power of a word can never be explained, it must be understood. As one may create the universe one blink at a time, we construct understanding one word at a time.

When he was two, my nephew’s favorite word was “no”. A majority of my high school students seem to categorize into two camps – #SWAG or Ratchet. As for me, I have always held a strong affinity for the word facetious – maybe it’s my lifelong search for irony or maybe it’s the perfect organization of vowels (a,e,I,o,u – if you are a “sometimes Y” kind of person, try facetiously).

At different ages and stages our words change, but there are always those we hold near and dear. So today’s question: What is your favorite word and why?

– J. Gabriel Allan

QOTD: How Do You Hustle Your Words?

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It is so difficult to keep track of each and every social media outlet. For example, The Poetry Question is housed on WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (though, that one is not functioning quite yet). Realistically, these are probably the only media outlets we will use for the early days of this project. As we grow, will that mean we will also have a Tumblr, Myspace, and a physical outlet? It’s hard enough to make sure that everything is linked together in order to alleviate any need for duplicate posts, or overkill of posts that might turn away some of our readers.

As new media outlets become available, it seems that it is more and more difficult to find the websites, blogs, music, chap books, and whatever else one might search for. It leads people to find new ways of hustling their words – sort of. I remember when I was a teenager, I would head to Django Records in Portland, and crate dig. I would sit there with my portable Discman, and go through hundreds of CDs over several hours each week to try to find that next perfect disc for my collection. They used to have these massive $1.00 bins set up throughout the store, and they got to know me well enough, that they would simply let me sit there all day and listen to whatever I wanted, before giving me amazing deals on whatever I would take home. My days of sitting there typically came in lieu of going to school. Music, and the lyrics that came with that music, seemed much more important to me than sitting in class. I was discovering knowledge in my own way. This search is much like how bands and authors are getting their material into the hands of today’s public.

I spent my weekend in Las Vegas, and while the big lights, sounds, and clink of chips definitely grabbed my attention, I found something beyond the typical Vegas thrills to make me smile: poets and musicians hustling their words and music. It’s normal to see buskers, or vendors on sky bridges in between hotels; however, it is not as typical to see a poet, standing on a crate, giving a reading of his work. He didn’t have a crowd around him, but he spoke loudly, and with confidence. He wanted someone, anyone, to hear his words. I was with my parents, and my fiance, so I didn’t have a lot of time to stop, and listen to what he was saying, but I asked them to wait a moment, and they did. I listened to the last portion of one of his pieces, and he handed me a copy of his chap book. He wasn’t looking for donations, or anything beyond someone to appreciate what he had done. It was his hustle, and in his honesty, it worked.

Beyond the chap book, I was able to take home a few CDs from people who just wanted someone to hear their work. It is incredibly difficult to get people to take notice of your art. As a musician for more than 15 years, I’ve definitely found that getting people to notice what you’ve created is more difficult than the writing process. There is nothing more meaningful than when someone takes your creation, smiles, and offers a true “thank you” for what you have given them.

So, this brings me to my Question of the Day:

If you are an artist, what is your hustle? How do you get your art into the hands of people who might not notice you otherwise?

– Margolin

Welcome to the Team

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When I came up with the idea of expanding a simple classroom assignment into a full website, and truly begin to widen the audience base, I knew that I could not do it alone. There was never a question of who I wanted to work with on this project, so I reached out to my two closest friends from college, Doran Simmons and J. Gabriel Allan, and told them that I they had no choice but to join The Poetry Question as full partners.

So, two English teachers, and a fish collector have started a website, a Facebook page, a twitter account, and the trek to discover the answer to The Poetry Question.

To keep everything straight…

The Poetry Question is run by Christopher Margolin, J. Gabriel Allan, and Doran Simmons. Together they will be posting, responding, and probably complaining about the current state of the world. They will let you know who posts so you don’t get confused. That being said, it won’t take you long to figure out that Doran supplies the wit and humor, J. Gabriel Allan provides the high intellect, and Margolin will provide a bit more of the dark, stream of conscious sarcasm that has gotten him in trouble for years. This could be a dangerous dynamic, but they promise to make you think about The Poetry Question.

Building Your Own Quill Pen

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A Twitter follower of mine, RXheadz ( @AZeekiel ) made an offhand comment about writing with a Quill. It got me to wondering if a person could even find a quill pen anymore. While there seem to be several options for them around the internet, I discovered a site that walks you through how to build your own.

I’m not the most handy person, but I might give this a try. If you choose to make your own, please post a photo so we can all take a look!

Click HERE for the link to build your own!

Are You Digital or Traditional?

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While at my parents’ house a few weeks ago, I noticed something vaguely familiar on the kitchen counter: a floppy disc; It’s faded green label, holding the scribble of my childhood signature. My best guess puts this artifact near 25 years old, I would have been six, and so it probably contains my earliest writings. Unfortunately, it won’t work on my PC disc drive at work, and I don’t have an Apple II anymore, or an apple that can run a disc drive, so I have no way – at least not yet – to know what treasures it contains.

In my home office I have every notebook, scrap of paper, metacog-log, written-in novel or textbook, and printed copies of the majority of my middle school, high school, and college papers. While some of them may now be crumpled and faded, un-filed, and in no particular order, they are at least readily available. The pieces on that disk, are not.

Over the last ten years, I’ve transitioned from notebooks and scrap paper, to computers and cell phones. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a pen to write in a journal. Instead, I type, hit save, close the application, and assume that everything will still be there when I return. Sometimes I bank it up to a thumb drive. Sometimes I store it in “the cloud,” but most of the time, I simply leave it on a device that could crash at any point, and lose my hard work. In fact, I’m currently thumbing out this piece on my iPhone, while sitting in a plane heading back to Portland. How does this new found technology not scare me? How am I, like the majority of writers, now leaving things to chance, or the hope that someone at the Apple Genius Bar will be able to recover my files?

What happens to this generation’s version of the floppy disc, when next generation’s i-whatever comes along? Time to hit print on those thousands of pages, file them away, and hope there’s never a fire, flood, or magic shredder looking for your valuable words.

The Poetry Question of the Day: Traditionalist or modernist?

Question of the Day: Should We Focus More on the Present?

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As someone who fell in love with the poetry of the 17th-19th century long before that of a more current era, I often find myself drifting in the direction of the former during classroom discussions with my high school students. Unfortunately, I find I’m met with that deer-in-the-headlights stare by the majority of them, as they begin to groan that they are bored, or that it doesn’t make sense, or that the language is too old, or that it’s just simply old. I can help to explicate, and walk them through the pieces, and while a few of them will have that lightbulb moment, the majority get lost in the clock, or their cell phones, or the pretty student across the room. It’s frustrating to recite the words I love, and get little in return. This, however, is part of being a teacher, and I learned that a decade ago.

Over the past few years I’ve started to inch closer to a purely modern perspective on poetry. I’ve replaced much of the Donne, and Byron, and Browning, with Mark Halliday, Donald Hall, and Sharon Olds. While the newer pieces are still stunning, and definitely words the students should know, I’m yearning for them to see where it all began. How do we get to John Ashbery if we had never had Wordsworth? How do we find beauty in Billy Collins if it wasn’t for Christopher Marlowe? Where is the stark reality of Donald Hall’s “A Perfect Life,” if we don’t get Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”?

This leaves me with today’s question – or questions – of the day:

I realize that each generation celebrates a new form of poetry, but shouldn’t the masters still be taught? Or as we move into a new time with a much newer English language, and much newer meaning of poetry, do we simply focus on the present? Should we leave the 19th century and below for students who choose to study poetry in college? Where do we go from here, and what will our curriculum look like in the years to come?

It’s a new world, and while I want to embrace it with a bear hug, I find myself barely willing to shake its hand.

————

Leave your answer in the comments, or post it on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/poetryquestion

Question of the Day: Lyrics vs Poems

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As someone who is very interested in Hip-Hop culture, and lyricism, I knew that when I started this project I would have to ask today’s question. I was able to receive quite a bit of feedback and response from emcees and lyricists of whom I have the utmost respect: Sage Francis, Saul Williams, Talib Kweli, Big Daddy Kane, Aesop Rock, Lord Jamar, and several others. It’s an ongoing battle to decide whether or not rap lyrics, or any lyrics for that matter, are poems. Pigeon John, another lyricist whom I respect, even went as far as to say that 2chainz is akin to Bob Dylan. There has to be a line somewhere, but where is it, and when do we know?

I believe that lyrics definitely have their place in the world of poetry, but I’m not ready to call 2chainz, or YG, or Drake the new Blake, Whitman, or Plath. They may be honest voices of a newer generation, but that does not make them poets. There are those who i feel deserve the poet title, such as a 2pac, Biggie, KRS-One, Common, Kweli, and even Jay-Z, Kanye, and 50 Cent. But, that being said, you have to be fairly selective about which if their songs would make the poetry cut. Kanye’s “Workout Plan” wouldn’t, but his “Bittersweet” would definitely be in consideration.

So, I bring you today’s question:

Are rap lyrics to be considered poetry? Why? Why not? And if so, who would you consider to be among the poets of hip-hop?