G.M. Palmer's Blog, page 3

The Orange Bottle by Joshua Mehigan

Stop.
          Run.
                  Go.
Read.
         This.
                Poem.

Joshua Mehigan's "The Orange Bottle" is just fantastic.

It's got everything I've been calling for since I started this blog. It's narrative, long enough to satisfy, and plays with sound in some wonderful ways:

For instance, listen to the way Mehigan changes sound in this stanza near the poem's end:


In the car away from that place,the family had a pleasant chat.He seemed fine again, and humble,though his speech was oddly flat.
The c's, ch's, t's and f's throughout--except the c's being replaced with h's in the third line--which reinforce the humility (which Mehigan's poem posits as restricted humanity, at least for our subject) and the t's being entirely absent--that is, the only hard sound in that third line is the "g" of again, which is hardly cacophonic while all the other "oddly flat" lines have far more displeasing sounds.
Utterly delightful craftsmanship, I must say.
Keep it up, Poetry, and I just might renew my subscription, even if all you give me is rejection (and the occasional commentary on my reviews. . .).

My electronic newspaper

Now that the morning newspaper tradition is obsolete, what do you do to fill that void?
Here's my newspaper replacement routine:
Read the funny papers: Sluggy, QC, Penny-Arcade/The Trenches, OOTS, Erfworld, pfsc, xkcd, etc.
Update Literary Magnet. (You can participate by reading!)
Check my twitter since I follow a lot of folks who talk about literary news.
Check reddit, especially r/literature, r/cogsci, and r/redditdayof (I'm not going to link anyone to reddit if I can help it--that's your own black hole of information to discover).
Check the drudge report. I know it's a flaming pile of inflammatory screed BUT it's really a collection of news feeds and spares most commentary apart from headlines. If there's a neutral site that does this, I'd love to know about it.
Read the new posts on E-Verse Radio and CPRW.
See if Kirby has said anything fun at Lutheran Surrealism.
There are a few other sites I visit, but I go to these places nearly every day. Since Google handles most (if not all) the ad revenue on the sites that use it (note: no ads ever on Literary Magnet), it seems not that newspapers have died but simply Google has become the world's largest distributed (or dis-mastheaded) newspaper.
What do you read daily?

And Literary Magnet is born

Back in 2006, I was awarded a grant for the furtherance of poetry.
I have tried several times to get a little literary mag off the ground.
Finally, I have come upon the way and thing I want to publish.
I would like to introduce you to Literary Magnet.
Each day you will be treated to a new poem, illustrated poem (you know, like a webcomic), review, or other literary work.
I hope it becomes part of your newspaper replacement daily routine. 

Memorizing poetry

From the article:
Why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when—tap, tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons, trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear. (And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow them.)
The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”

A 250th post whine.

Clearly, I don't get Poetry.

A Don Share tweet led me to this poem which gave me apoplexy:

"The Gargantuan Muffin Beauty Contest."

Love is in the air, it’s in the whisper of the trees.

This is not America, this is the cover version:sun, sex, sin, divine intervention, death and destruction,welcome to The Sodom and Gomorrah Show.All those white muffins trying to be black muffins!Give us our daily muffin, save us from temptation.Jimmy Buffett was singing, Why don’t we get drunkand screw? In Times Square the most beautiful muffinsin the world were hanging on a thousand screens.Where are my singing Tibetan balls? Am I dead?
I hope you recognize all the clever references and the oh-so-unsubtle allegorical use of "muffin."
In the immortal words of Liz Lemon, "what the what!?"
Please tell me what I'm missing. Because I see the work *I* write and the work of other folks I like and think "yeah, that's pretty good stuff." And some of it, truly, does appear in poetry.
And then I see this and ask "WHY GOD WHY?" Maybe I'm missing something.
Maybe it's just sour grapes. Poetry rejected these two poems, for instance. 
But if you've got some insight, I'd love to hear it. Maybe I'm not old enough or British enough, or something. Maybe my poetry sucks and I don't know good poetry from a muffin.

Literary cage match: Literary Fiction vs Children's Fiction

Which 20th Century books are more important to the West?

1900s: Heart of Darkness (1902) versus The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
1910s: Ethan Frome (1911) versus Peter and Wendy (1911)
1920s: Ulysses (1922) versus Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
1930s: Of Mice and Men (1937) versus Mary Poppins (1934)
1940s: The Stranger (1942) versus The Little Prince (1943)
1950s: The Old Man and the Sea (1951) versus The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955)
1960s: Catch-22 (1961) versus A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
1970s: Gravity's Rainbow (1973) versus The Princess Bride (1973)
1980s: Beloved (1987) versus Redwall (1984)
1990s: Infinite Jest (1996) versus Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

Let's talk about death, baby!

So like, people, like really like to talk about poetry being dead.

This bro is all "DAG YO, SLAMS KILL POETRY"

When what he probably really means is that a lot of performance poetry is bad.

Well, duh. A lot of poetry is bad.

A response here addresses some points, but skips over its most important one:

"poets should learn their trade."

We should ALL be excellent writers AND readers.

Look to the March 7th reading, everyone. You'll see some living poetry for sure.

Graphic Novel; how about Graphic Epic?

So,

What would you all think of a "graphic epic"?

That is, an illustrated verse narrative?

Do you read graphic novels?

Manga?

That sort of thing?

What if the words sounded as good as the story read?

What if it also were presented in not only a static format but also like a "motion book" a la Reading Rainbow?

If you're reading this, I'd love some commentary. Don't just think it, type it!

Hourly Comic Day 2:10-3:10

Hourly Comic day 1:10-2:10

I got home and had to change the font. Sorry!