NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

Last year for National Poetry Month I posted pictures of poems on my instagram, looking for interesting short little pieces of poems that could fit in the square format of the instagram feed.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Eileen Myles, Snowflake

Eduardo C. Corral, Slow Lightning

This year I'm doing the same thing, but different. I'm going to write the poem/lines up myself, maybe with a little illustration, and then post them, where ever I am, in real life. I'll be using Label 228s and they'll be mostly going up in Durango Colorado, but if I happen to be somewhere else, that's where they'll be posted. I'm going to be sourcing most of the poems from the internet, giving links to the original work. I'll also post pictures of the posts to the internet via my tumblr and my instagram.

This is what they will look like in the wild/this is the first post (I know, not an totally an internet poem, but it's so so good and you can hear Abraham Smith read the poem here):

Abraham Smith, Whim Man Mammon

I'm doing these mostly day-to-day, so I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow (probably something from this by Mark Cugini) and if you want a poem to be featured, you can nominate it through my twitter account. Just @ me with a link and I'll check it out.

The Conceit :: The Concept

The first poem(s) that I'm sharing for my National Poetry Month activities are Jeff Bridges poems by Donora Hillard from Hobart online.

You tell Jeff Bridges you fear
your dying breath will be just like
the whimper you make when trying
to remove glitter polish from your
toenails. He sets his guitar down on
the fur rug. Baby Sister, he says,
live like you’re already dead.

*

You are sitting at my kitchen table
and Jeff Bridges is in California.
It is either very late or very early.

I am sorry for shaking the table,
for shaking so many legged things.

I kiss your ear and your ear is cold.
I hope Jeff Bridges is wide awake
and writing songs about gnats.

What I like about these poems is the humor, the pop-culture references and the way those are used to access emotion. I think using pop-culture references in today's literature is like dropping Shakespeare or the Bible or Homer a hundred years ago. Pop culture is readily accessible to all levels of society and it's just another form of intertextuality; not anymore or less sophisticated, just different.

It seems from the few bits of the project that we see, that the poems use or treat Jeff Bridges as a sort of mediator, an interlocutor, for a relationship, but also a sort of third wheel wrecking the relationship or a ghost haunting the relationship. It's hard to say from a little section of what is obviously a larger project.  Like, what's gonna happen when the poems start channeling Lebowski, or the old guy in that Laser Tag movie? And I guess that's where you run into potential problems with sections of a project vs individual poems: is the conceit bigger/better than the writing?



I'd pay money to find out how Jeff Bridges actually functions in the full project. By that, I mean, I'd purchase a book of poetry titled, Jeff Bridges. Jeff Bridges would look super sweet on a bookshelf too. I think maybe Jeff Bridges' Greatest Hits would also be a pretty cool title. Jeff Bridges: Unabridged would be pretty cool too, except the pun, but that might be the coolest part of that title.

National Poetry Month

It's National Poetry Month and there are some festivities to be told about.

1. 30 x Lace, curated by Carrie Murphy and Birds of Lace. I will have a poem in it. It's new, it's fresh, it's about being disappeared, and it's gonna be rad. Today there's a poem by Nichole Steinberg and she writes about a really interesting book of poems, Diana Lucifera. Here's a couple lines from her piece titled, There Is No Romantic:

...We’re all so warm

and pink, it’s obscene. I don’t want any

part of it. It took me years to learn

simple tasks: how to snap my fingers,

tie my shoes. My mother’s early gaze

full of worry that love would escape

me, too.

2. I'm writing poem things on my tumblr everyday. I'm going to write through the major arcana, reblogging images of the cards and attaching notes to them.

3. Here I will be trying to share an excerpt from a poem that's in an online mag along with some thoughts about the poem from time to time.

4. Anyone know of any good things to follow? Good poets that are also doing something? Good magazines/poetry websites/etc?