Poetry is prosody plus judiciously
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Blessings upon you, Children of Summer!
What a week it has been! I forgot to send this last week so you get two installments of my newsletter in one weekend! You’re welcome!
Last week?
The weather, extreme; the days monotonous; the nights, wild; the light, magnificent.
I worked on grants all week - this is basically like writing a book report to try to get ice cream money from your parents. They haven’t read the book, they’re just glad you’re reading but you have to convince them not only that YOU have read the book but that it was a very very good book and worth reading. They want to give you the money and they have lots and lots of it, but they also want to instill in you the VALUE of their money—so they ask lots and lots of questions about how you will manage the money, what you would buy with the money, for example what flavor of ice cream you’ll buy and where you’ll stand to eat it and will you share it with lots and lots of other people? Which people? how many? what will those people look like and will they be people who usually eat ice cream or people who never get ice cream? Have you shared ice cream before? can you prove it with photos or videos? You do your best to answer truthfully even though you’re not sure you have a single friend who will want to share your ice cream—you really hope they will, but your point is that you can’t afford ice cream.
I’m glad I have air conditioning.
Nights? This week I went to a show at MoMA that’s closing and thought it looked fun to be 22 in the 1970s with a new toy and a lot of friends that eagerly disrobed and moved around the way you told them to so that you could use your new toy to film them walking around in weird patterns. My question is not about the value of Joan Jonas’ seminal video work as art but the value of her friends as supporters.
How many of us have a group of ten friends who willingly would disrobe in public to walk around in circles holding mirrors? Did Joan make them dinner? Buy them coffee? Was it only her that came up with video games to play or were there poetry readings by someone else and then fingerpainting by someone else and then a singalong when Davy pulled out his guitar? Were any of them accountants or supermarket clerks?
I also went to KGB bar to listen to some science fiction writers (one of them did accompany himself on guitar),
I also attended a poetry reading in Bryant Park, (Sarah Kain Gutowski read from her excellent new collection, The Familiar)
and in more poetry news, Pen Parentis had a booth at the New York Poetry Festival and I sat there all day Saturday with Marcia Le Beau and am still there all day Sunday (yes, while you read this if you’re reading it on Sunday, I’m probably at the Poetry Festival at the booth - come visit me!).
Poetry festivals are unlike any other festival - at poetry festivals instead of writers exploring to see what the various tables have to offer, the writers come to your booth to give you their book.
And finally, I attended the opening night shenanigans of Oh, Mary! which is a side-splitting over-the-top campy cabaret show which just moved from Joe’s Pub to off Broadway and now to Broadway — with zero pretensions of being anything more than a delightful gay cabaret — I wonder if this genre would do half as well if it didn’t rhyme so perfectly.
It was a good night - here’s hoping the coming week is as full of inspiration!
Writing News
I really need to get these grants done and get back to writing. I’ve been appearing on podcasts and getting interviewed and that looks a lot like writing success but the real success is when I actually write something new! (I did send out two flash fiction pieces this week and I’m working on… you guessed it… poetry! I guess all these readings rubbed off on me).
I just had a delightful surprise too - I was trying to look up the link to my interview on After Dinner Conversation, a great journal that only publishes stories that you can discuss—think philosophy or ethics, fables and cautionary tales - and I discovered instead that I’m included in their Best-Of After Dinner Conversation Anthology!
I guess sometimes we need to Google ourselves—because even COOLER someone at the Philosophy Documentation Center summarized the short story included in that anthology! Here’s the one-paragraph summary in case you don’t have the time to read the whole 10 page story. Too bad this person can’t write my executive summaries for my grants!!
Random Final Thought:
This is the sign that I am up too late and need to go to bed: my computer starts speaking in tongues….and I forget to hit send on a newsletter.
Your newsletter was missed at noon last Sunday, and I was tempted to contact you and observe the absence and express my concern, but the one time I do that will probably be the only time you haven't written it. But, so far, on both occasions it hasn't come, you simply haven't hit 'send.' The best students are the ones who make mistakes of this type; it only adds to their legend.