5 New Poets

Below is an essay of mine detailing the discovery of 5 extremely influential poets and the way or extent that technology has impacted their work:

Ezra Pound, one of the leading figures of the early 20^th century Anglo-American modernist movement, was a known proponent of Imagism – a creative technique centered on the focus of minimalistic, experimental writing processes whose historical grandiosity and impact is still disputed. His poem below, written in the early 1900s, is a great example of the efficient use of language as opposed to his 19^th century romanticist counterparts. The movement is heavily influenced by Japanese and Chinese writing techniques in their structures. Pound’s works were likely written on typewriter due to the mass commercialization of the medium in the late 19^th century.

Albatre

This lady in the white bath-robe which she calls a
peignoir,
Is, for the time being, the mistress of my friend,
And the delicate white feet of her little white dog
Are not more delicate than she is,
Nor would Gautier himself have despised their contrasts
in whiteness
As she sits in the great chair
Between the two indolent candles.

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Over 300 years earlier, a clergyman and epigrammatist named Thomas Bastard was procuring what would be considered today to be the most traditional of poetic forms – a complete structural and linguistic reversion of Ezra Pound’s stylistic principles. A staple of the time and the inherent education received by a man of the cloth during the infancy of the age of enlightenment, the rhythmic phrasing is obvious and predictable to a near fault, and the subject matter mainly revolves around piety, and salvation. Below is an excerpt from his collection, “Chrestoleros: Seven Books of Epigrames”, published in 1598. Churches were still utilizing parchment and quill-pen for most of their written works, those either published by hand or printing press depending on the funds readily available to the author.

Book 3, Epigram 36

The peasant Corus of his wealth does boast,

Yet he’s scarce worth twice twenty pounds at most.

I chanc’d to word once with this lowly swain,

He called me base, and beggar in disdain.

To try the truth hereof I rate myself,

And cast the little count of all my wealth.

See how much Hebrew, Greek, and Poetry,

Latin Rhetoric, and Philosophy,

Reading, and sense in sciences profound,

All valued, are not worth forty pounds.

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             One of Ezra Pound’s contemporaries across the pond that was rarely, if ever, mentioned in lectures throughout this semester is William Butler Yeats. A Nobel Prize laureate and a leading cultural icon in Ireland, Yeats was both praised and questioned in his time for his staunch nationalism as an Irishman and for his fascination with nature and the occult that seeped its way into his sonnets. Below is a passionate piece from his collection released in 1899 called “The Wind Among the Reeds”. Classical rhyme schema can be seen here with the a-b-a-b format – a genuine mark of Yeats that was a stark deviation from Pound’s influence on him – the phrasing and imagery is much more modernistic in style, however. Fountain pen was likely the writing instrument of choice, given that there seems to be a predisposition to eloquence and romanticism in the use of language in the poem. None of the outward abruptness and efficiency of the typewriter style can be observed in the stylistic changes that are seen later on in his career.

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE THAT HAS COME

UPON HIM AND HIS BELOVED, AND LONGS FOR

THE END OF THE WORLD

DO you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?

I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;

I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns,

For somebody hid hatred and hope and desire and fear

Under my feet that they follow you night and day.

A man with a hazel wand came without sound;

He changed me suddenly; I was looking another way;

And now my calling is but the calling of a hound;

And Time and Birth and Change are hurrying by.

I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the West

And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky

And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest.

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In the spirit of paying homage to the impact of more modern movements and their leaders, Langston Hughes not only embodies the traits of a great literary influence, but also a cultural influence. “The Weary Blues”, published in 1926, is a shining representation of jazz poetry and its components. The movement itself was a reaction to the emergence of Jazz music and the unprecedented social impact it achieved in post-WWI America. Poets like Hughes either worked at or enjoyed heading to the bars and seeing the immediate effect of the unique and liberating rhythm and sound created by the genre in its heyday. In a way, the poetry was their tool to reflect upon and emulate the emotions that echoed through the spout of every brass, the skin of every percussion, and body of every stringed instrument that howled and moaned into those long, dreary nights of Charleston dancing. Unsurprisingly, attributions to political plights and causes were evident in the content of many of the works, especially due to the hardships of black citizens in the time of racial segregation. Typewriters’ ubiquity and accessibility was very much solidified by the time of Hughes’ first book which the poem below was published in, and would be a logical medium for a man of many talents and a college education in this period. Repetition patterns are used liberally in the poem, accompanied by traditional rhyme that is reminiscent of some work by Paul Laurence Dunbar, known as an influence to Hughes and his writing style.

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied—
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

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 Concluding with a very recent, up-and-coming poet whose historical impact has yet to stand the test of time is Amit Majmudar. At 35 years of age, this American poet is currently the subject of a lot of critical success and renown from his recent books. Majmudar seems to be akin to Christian Bok in the sense of trying to bind the seemingly entirely opposite disciplines of poetry and science. As an MD graduate, and presently working as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Ohio, Majmudar would be no stranger to the instruments and technological marvels of the information age and is clearly heavily influenced by being witness to the advent of the “everything, all at once” generation. Nevertheless, his poems delve into very metaphysical themes of spirituality, mortality, and cultural identity. “Matter and Antimatter” is a piece that is but a sliver from his already generous repertoire that appeared in Poetry magazine in 2005. In the true post-modernist fashion and spirit of celebrating motley, the verses are written in a very prose-like manner and the artistic direction spans from the celestial to the down-to-earth. The scientist and the artist. Resulting therein is a renaissance man that is leaving a very refreshing taste in the inundated maw of 21^st century poetry.

A Brilliant Billy Collins Number

Definitely one of my favorite poems discussed in class this semester is Billy Collins' ending note in his TED talk from 2012, "To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl". Brisk, witty, charming, and downright funny, this is one of those poems that can reach out and relate to anyone and everyone all too easily. Here's the video cut from Youtube along with the lyrics in case you'd like to follow along:

To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl

“Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon
on the day you were born,
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done that all alone.
So never mind; you’re fine just being yourself.
You’re loved for just being you.
But did you know that at your age
Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory
and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room
— no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator?
Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life,
after you come out of your room and begin to blossom,
or at least pick up all your socks.
For some reason I keep remembering that
Lady Jane Grey was queen of England when she was only 15.
But then she was beheaded,
so never mind her as a role model.
A few centuries later, when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas and two complete masses as a youngster.
But of course, that was in Austria at the height of Romantic lyricism,
not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you’re special just being you —
playing with your food and staring into space.
By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.”

—Billy Collins

The Soundcloud Recording

As promised earlier, here is my crude vocal rendition of the Leonard Cohen piece discussed earlier in the blog. Listen to it at your leisure using the Soundcloud link below:

https://soundcloud.com/yoav-gurevich/police-gazette-recording

A Summary of Christian Bok's DNA Project

Christian Bök, a Canadian poet and an English professor at the University of Calgary, has come up with the daunting idea of effectively storing comprehensible poems in bacterial DNA in order for it to outlast any and all current methods and mediums of long-term storage of printed or electronic intellectual property.

Deinococcus radiodurans, an extremophilic bacteria that is purported to have been on earth for billions of years, is the biological tablet Bök is utilizing in order to inscribe his works using a cipher that uses the four genetic nucleotides (some of the basic units that make up DNA) that are available to him with this particular bacterium strain - adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine - in rearranged combinations of three that end up corresponding to a letter in the English alphabet. These cannot be arbitrarily chosen, however, since there are potentially trillions of possibilities, but only a fraction would yield amino acids that produce a relatively coherent vocabulary in return. He has also written a computer program that is assisting him in this process.

Once the triplet cipher is chosen and finalized, it will likely take multiple attempts of trial and error in order to achieve the most ideal combination of words and phrases that make up the poem, considering the poem will need to "repetitive", and "incantatory", in its qualities.

When the poem is written, a group of lab technicians will append the nucleotides to one another to build a DNA fragment that will be inserted into the bacteria. It does not seem certain as to whether the bacteria will immediately accept the newly formed genetic code or not, but if proven to be successful, it could ultimately be the magnum opus of legacy storage by remaining in the biological makeup of the bacteria for the entire life span of the species. 

Some links that proved to be helpful in researching this project are:

Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA - Wired Magazine
Experimental Poet Puts Poems into DNA - Simon Fraser University
Poet Encodes his Masterwork in Bacterial DNA - io9.com

A Poem from my Favorite Canadian

This is Police Gazette by Leonard Cohen, from a collection of his works titled "Flowers for Hitler". I intend on verbally reciting this and adding it to the Harriet/Poetry Foundation Soundcloud:
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My grandfather slams the silver goblet down.
He clears a silence
in the family talk
to comment on the wine.

It's hot. Jesus is dying of heat.
There he lies on the wall
of the sordid courtroom
trying to get air into his armpits.
Judge runs a finger
between neck and collar --
hands the sentence down.

Love me this first day of June.
I'd rather sleep with ashes
than priestly wisdom.
Of all the lonely places in the world
this is best
where debris is human.
I kiss the precious ashes
that fall from fiery flesh.
On these familiar shapes
I lay my kisses down.

Hitler is alive.
He is fourteen years old.
He does not shave.
He wants to be an architect.

The first star tonight
insanely high, virgin, calm.
I have one hour of peace
before the documented planets
burn me down.

Link to Silliman's and Harriet Poetry

Here's a pair of sites that revolve around the world of poets and poetry with news, discussions, and links to readings and other related media:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.ca/

On the note of Silliman, here's a page off of one of his sites that displays strictly Modern American Poetry of his choosing:

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/online_poems.htm

Fiddling Around with the iPad Poetry Apps

The first app I randomly entered was Werdsmith, a poetry creation assistance app. My first impression of it was quite underwhelming. The few relatively nifty features it had were:

- (Terrible) word prediction when trying to complete sentences, but it's fun to predict what it'll suggest to you next.

- Word definition lookup.

- "Idea" to "project" transitions whose purpose and usefulness I've yet to discover.

- Word count goals which can be followed using a pie chart presented next to your list of ideas, or a thin bar that changes in size relative to your advancement in the prescribed word count.

Nevertheless, I did manage to start a poem in the app out of the sheer disappointment and apathy I felt towards it which luckily, I managed to harness into a muse. 

Following that, POETRY was an absolute delight. It's a poetry reference app and it does exactly that using an ingenious method that combines subjects of you choice by spinning two "wheels" of separate topics so that you can combine ones to your mood and specificity's content. You can also randomize the feature by simply tapping on "spin", if you're feeling particularly adventurous and vapid at any given time.

Spine Sonnet is fun as well, serving as what appears to be a random phrase and/or prose generator that can build a poem or novella extremely quickly and efficiently from what it seems. One simply taps on a phrase they find favorable, and the program immediately draws up another list of phrases to continue the supposed train of thought. Ideal for those who are bereft of any and all literary creativity and habitual users of mind altering substances.

Visual Poetry takes a poem you've written or are in the process of writing and tacks on a template that can be customized to alter the entire look of the poem presentation. Font, background, sentence structure, and color are all interchangeable. Specific words can be highlighted in separate colors as well. Effectively, pretty much all the basic tools are here for you to share your poetic yawns on a social networking site and become another cheesy excuse for an "artwork" that might or not be passed around the internet for people to stare at and reinforce their ever growing sense of misanthrope with.

Lastly, Verses Poetry aims to achieve a similar goal to Spine Sonnet with a more interactive word-for-word experience. You can mock up words and using a few categories such as "old school" and "new school", and play around with the amount of words being displayed on your poetry mosaic. The general feeling that prevailed throughout my time with the app was something along the lines of "Sure, why not."