About That Review . . .

Ange Mlinko’s review of the just-released Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology evinces a deep and true concern (dare I say love?) for poetry  — a rare quality and something to be admired and treasured in a reviewer.  But as gifted and astute as Ms. Mlinko is, I believe she missed some important opportunities for contextualization.  Suggesting that beauty is gone from poetry because of flarf, Conceptual, or the march of history, is like saying that gay marriage will ruin traditional marriage.  There’s plenty of “beauty” in poetry, still, and there will always be.  Why can’t poetry, like poets, contain multitudes?  It must.  And what is “beauty” in poetry? Does it reside only with lovely content or word choices?  I’m sure people lamented, thousands of years ago, at the advent of writing, the moment when poetry became less of a mnemonic device and more of its own dynamic.  I wonder if, back then, a lament went up for “the end of memory.”  Probably.  So, poetry has already been “ruined,” as Rimbaud noted in a famous letter to a boyhood friend back in the 19^th century.  But that poetry has always never changed is part of that “ruined” beauty.  And can’t there be beauty in the profane?  Comedy has a Muse, after all.  What finally surprises (shocks, really) is that Ms. Mlinko can’t see work that she herself doesn’t completely embrace as part of the long and continuing conversation that is poetry.  Haven’t poets always sought to “correct” in some way what went before?  To paraphrase the poet Nada Gordon: “ . . . nothing static or fixed or preconceived, and probably something rather fearsome and sometimes grotesque.” 

That’s the kind of poetry that can still contain multitudes.

 

“Hybrid Texts” at Chicago School of Poetics

I’m happy to be teaching this course on hybrid texts:  http://www.chicagoschoolofpoetics.com/hybrid-texts/

They also offer scholarships!  More info here: 
http://www.indiegogo.com/CSoPScholar/

My Upcoming Poetry Project Workshop

Cathexis/Catharsis: Writing To/Through Illness and Suffering

Poetry workshop taught by Sharon Mesmer

10 weeks beginning Tuesday, February 5

7 > 9pm

$250

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th Street, New York

212-674-0910 | info@poetryproject.org

 

Illness and suffering are usually imaged as sites of trauma, feared as obstacles, rejected by a youth-obsessed culture.  But what if these forsaken places could be re-imaged and understood, with the help of poetry, as talismans, thresholds, gateways?  What if suffering were a language like any other that could be learned, manipulated and deployed in a powerful new way?  In this form-based workshop we will look at how poets encode and stabilize ideas about illness and suffering (their own and that of others) into traditional and novel poetic architectures, enabling readers and writers to find new meanings in these witnessed experiences.  We’ll begin by looking at Jennifer Nix’s essay, “Finding Poetry In Illness,” then move on to poems by Anne Sexton, Aracelis Girmay, Joanne Kyger, Robert Lowell, Laynie Browne, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Wordsworth, Jane Kenyon, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Hardy.  Each week we’ll examine and discuss a poem that utilizes a form (the sonnet, the ode, the list poem, the “instruction” poem, the Fibonacci, etc.) and flow and encode our own experiences into the stabilizing mechanism of that form.  Guest speakers will include Kristin Prevallet on the mind-body connection to poetry and healing, and Laynie Brown on the poem-as-amulet.

 

My Three-Part Fiction Workshop at the New School, Starting Thursday, January 31

I’m teaching an exciting three-part fiction workshop at the New School beginning January 31.  You can attend one, two, or all three of the five-week segments;  the writing you do in the first segment can be continued in the subsequent segments, to produce a finished piece, or you can work on three short pieces. Here are brief descriptions:

 

— Exploded Prose.1:  Form Follows Emotion (5 weeks) —

Emotion and innovative writing are rarely mentioned in the same breath.  In this course we will bring emotion to bear on the innovative memoir, as we read, discuss, and are guided by By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart’s powerful “prose poem novel” (her term) chronicling her affair with English poet George Barker.  Through class discussions, directed in-class writings and suggestions for at-home writing based on the text, we will create a memoir that blends non-fiction with poetic language, and in which the emotive voice is the engine that not only gives the piece vibrancy, but provides a stable structure and lively pacing as well.  We will also touch on how Smart’s text is a hybrid form that blends non-fiction with fiction and poetry.

* * *

— Exploded Prose.2:  ” . . . Great Writers Steal”  (5 weeks) —

T. S. Eliot’s quote about how mediocre writers borrow but great writers steal is less about promoting plagiarism than it is about finding inspiration and source material everywhere and making it your own.  In this segment we’ll examine how to find and use secondary “texts” (including non-book sources like the Internet) to create an innovative prose essay or short nonfiction piece that maintains the integrity of your individual voice and original intention.  We’ll read and discuss Eliot’s “The Waste Land” alongside Nelson Algren’s “prose poem essay” (his term) about urban political corruption, Chicago: City on the Make, as well as a few short prose examples by the flarf poetry collective. Through discussions, directed in-class writings and suggestions for at-home writing based on the texts, we’ll create an innovative essay (or short non-fiction piece) that blends “found” materials with original language and imagery.  We will also touch on how the Algren text is a hybrid form that blends non-fiction with poetic language.

* * *

— Exploded Prose.3:  Old Is the New New (5 weeks) —

“Make it new!” was the battle-cry of Modernist poet Ezra Pound, who made his most innovative work “new” by referencing historical Chinese and Japanese literatures.  In this course we’ll read and discuss selections from Sei Shonogan’s 11th century  “Pillow Book” and examples of 16th and 17th century Chinese hsiao-pin (“short form”) prose vignettes, and consider them alongside the vignettes and prose poems of two contemporary writers, Sandra Cisneros and James Tate. Through discussions, directed in-class writings and suggestions for at-home writing based on the texts, we’ll create an innovative story told in vignettes — either fiction or non-fiction, or a mix of both — that “modernizes” a favorite text or texts of a former era with concision and lots of attitude.

* * *

Interested?  If you’re one of the first 100 people to sign up at the Open House (Tues., January 8, 6 > 8pm, 2 West 13th Street) you’ll get a $50 tuition discount!

Email me at mesmers@newschool.edu if you’d like to see the syllabi for each section.  Here’s the link for the Open House:  http://www.newschool.edu/openhouse/

Rachel’s Letter, by Ram Dass

How to go forward in the face of an almost unbearable loss?  This letter, written by Ram Dass to the parents of a murdered girl, may offer a place to begin.  From the Ram Dass Tape Library:  http://ramdasstapes.org/index.htm

Dear Steve and Anita,

Rachel finished her work on earth, and left the stage in a manner that
leaves those of us left behind with a cry of agony in our hearts, as the
fragile thread of our faith is dealt with so violently. Is anyone strong
enough to stay conscious through such teaching as you are receiving?
Probably very few. And even they would only have a whisper of equanimity and
peace amidst the screaming trumpets of their rage, grief, horror and
desolation.

I can’t assuage your pain with any words, nor should I. For your pain is
Rachel’s legacy to you. Not that she or I would inflict such pain by choice,
but there it is. And it must burn its purifying way to completion. For
something in you dies when you bear the unbearable, and it is only in that
dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees, and to love
as God loves.

Now is the time to let your grief find expression. No false strength.
Now is the time to sit quietly and speak to Rachel, and thank her for being
with you these few years, and encourage her to go on with whatever her work
is, knowing that you will grow in compassion and wisdom from this experience.
In my heart, I know that you and she will meet again and again, and
recognize the many ways in which you have known each other. And when you
meet you will know, in a flash, what now it is not given to you to know: Why
this had to be the way it was.

Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts
– if we can keep them open to God – will find their own intuitive way.
Rachel came through you to do her work on earth, which includes her manner of
death. Now her soul is free, and the love that you can share with her is
invulnerable to the winds of changing time and space. In that deep love,
include me.

In love,

Ram Dass

Flarf at Princeton

The first of several announcements . . . people of New Jersey: please come!

The Princeton Contemporary Poetry Colloquium presents:

“I Think I Might Be Facebook Pregnant” — Flarf with Sharon Mesmer and K. Silem Mohammad

Wednesday, November 14 / Reading at 6pm, discussion to follow / Location: McCosh 40.

Flarf poetry has been described variously as cloying, obscene, liberating, purposefully awful, offensive, hilarious. Flarf poets distill their poems from internet search results, a constraint with room for improvisation that turns convention on its head. Mesmer is the author of The Virgin Formica, Annoying Diabetic Bitch, Vertigo Seeks Affinities, and three fiction collections, two from Hanging Loose Press and one from Hachette Litteratures in French translation. A two-time NYFA fellow and 2010 Fulbright Specialist, she teaches poetry and fiction at New York University and the New School. In his current project, Sonnagrams, Mohammad creates anagrammed sonnets from the sonnets of Shakespeare. He is the author of Breathalyzer, A Thousand Devils, and Deer Head Nation and editor of Abraham Lincoln. He teaches at Southern Oregon University where he is the faculty editor for West Wind Review.

Reading Tonight at the Rubin Museum . . .

… with some stellar folks, to celebrate the digital release of Allen Ginsberg’s “Holy Soul Jelly Roll” on Rhino Records: http://www.rmanyc.org/events/load/1893