G.M. Palmer's Blog, page 6

"She was a monster actually."

There's some Plath buzz going on this month. No real reason why--it's not like the 50th anniversary of her suicide is rapidly approaching or anything. . .

Anyway, the Guardian interviewed Olwyn Hughes, Plath's literary executor and she apparently couldn't help defending her brother, Ted:


She was horribly unjust both to her mother and to Ted. And I'm sick of reading that he left her for Assia – that's all you get whenever his name is mentioned. Assia. But Ted didn't walk out.
It was actually a friend of Assia's who told Sylvia. She rang her up and thought maybe she was helping her, or wanted to warn her, or something, I don't know. But this person had no idea how on edge Sylvia was. That she wouldn't be able to cope with this information. And so when Ted next went down [to their house in Devon] she was in a rage and threw him out.
I wish the newspapers would get it right. He didn't even know that Sylvia would find out about Assia. He'd done everything he could to be very discreet. It was just one of those things … And of course Sylvia, when she did hear about it, it reminded her of all her terrors about abandonment and everything else. She wouldn't listen to anything but separation and divorce. But he didn't leave her for Assia. That's just not true. He was actually staying on friends' floors in London until he got a little place by himself. He certainly wasn't living with Assia.
Oh and she took all the money out of their bank account. She was a monster actually.
Hm. A wife and mother finds out her husband is sleeping around, she kicks him out, and takes all their money out of the bank account. Sounds like a set of best practices to me. But maybe I'm not British enough. Stiff upper lip, what.
I will take this opportunity to remind you that if you've not read the excellent Ariel: The Restored Edition , you've not read Plath properly (unless by chance your only introduction has been Crossing the Water). I'm sure this can also be done online, but I don't have the resources at hand to link to. At any rate, Plath is our best employer of phonemes in poetry, so I suggest you forget about the mythology and read the verse. Of course, that's what I recommend for reading anyone.

Is

Is manslaughter man's laughter?
It depends on what your definition of is is.
If the love fits you mustn't quit.

Is
It
If

I see
I touch
I feel

Is ee
It ouch
If eel

Is the above a poem, why or why not?

Fundamentally, what does poetry do? Not, by the way, what do we want poetry to do. But what does poetry do?

James Franco's "Blue Being": an explication

So James Franco is the biggest thing to hit poetry since Jewel and Tupac.

I am torn now as I was torn then--I really want these famous people to be good poets.

Really I do. I remember being disappointed picking up (actually just seeing the title of) A Night Without Armor and just being wholly underwhelmed by The Rose that Grew from Concrete.

So when Actor-turned-Poet James Franco started popping up all over the blogo-twitter-facebook-sphere I was trepidatiously intrigued.

And then Eyewear (linked above) published his poem. I'm not convinced their lineation is correct, so I'll take out the extra spaces. Feel free to send corrections:


BLUE BEING
by James Franco
There is a surfaceThat we all make togetherAnd the wild manSeems to pop through
Like a line dancer out of stepAnd others start complainingThat he doesn’t know the movesAnd he’s stepping on everyone’s toes.
There was a man named MikeWho called my father five times a day.You’d hear each burdened voice of the familyShout across the house,
Daaad, it’s Mike.
At dinner my father often explainedThat Mike saw demons.They spoke to him,He thought they were real.
I pictured a flaming blue beingEntering the dingy room,And sitting by MikeOn the gray sheeted bed.


Part of me can hear William Logan's voice crawling through my ears: "what damned surface? how do we make it together? You expect the reader to believe this bullshit? No reader is going to buy this. Quit telling the reader what is and what isn't."
But I ignored William's advice for a while so let's skip that, shall we (note: he was at least partially correct).
The title: "Blue Being" (let's forego the all caps). It's ambiguous and playful and sonic but it's also cliched. Both words. "Blue" and "Being" are struck right out of some Beat-Ashbery mashup. Again, though, they sound nice (and it's better than the possibility of the reverse: "Being Blue").
The two opening stanzas don't give us anything the transcendentalists already hadn't--and folks have said it better before. There's an interesting colloquialism regarding line dancing--one assumes most poets are too uppity to know the boot-scootin' boogie and may even scoff at the electric slide--but if one's attempting to secure a broader readership, I can see the appeal of gutterizing one's metaphors. The problem is that it's not a terribly interesting symbol. The out-of-step line dancer. I think it implies we're having more fun that most people say we're having. 
Having said that, I must address the damned word "seems." Franco--and all poets--should know better. As Pound said, either it is or it isn't. A little decisiveness goes a long way.
Then to this Mike fellow. Would the father have to "often explain" that Mike saw demons? Wouldn't that be something you'd likely remember?
Then the image of the "flaming blue being." 
Snore.
Like, folks, not even the promise of the hint of a description. And it's in a "dingy room." Franco is demonstrating a serious need for the "show, don't tell" lecture. 
The poem's not good. It's not terrible. I've read terrible poems. It's just not good. I could see it getting a chuckle or two with a well-timed reading at a poetry jam but unless Mr. Franco is releasing a YouTube series instead of a book he better get serious with his verse.
I hope for his sake and that of Graywolf Press the remainder of his book's poems are superior to this one. Otherwise The Strongest of the Litter will turn out to be a runt.

Why modern education doesn't work in one Wikipedia article

Dunbar's number, folks. We have schools that are 10-20x this number.

Bad juju.

James Franco: Phile or Phobia

I've a lot of friends who really hate the idea of James Franco The Poet. I don't think they necessarily hate Mr. Franco himself--but they're Francophobes when it comes to poetry.

David Shook interviews and micro-reviews Franco here. I think there are three important things we discover.

1: Franco is not a terrible poet. Shook quotes him:


My bus is muscular;
A brontosaurus
With a tiny brain
That is me.
Looking out.

While this quote is hardly enough to inspire full criticism, I do love "my bus is muscular." That's proof of at least the potential of a good ear.

2: Franco has some valuable thoughts on poetry's place among the other literary arts:

"Poetry is not more universal than film. Film is the universal language. So is music. But poetry is too bound up in particular written languages to be universal. And because it often uses language in more intricate and complex ways than prose it is harder to translate. It is a great conveyer of emotion, but lyric emotion, meaning emotion bound up with imagery and written language. Film and performance can convey emotion much more directly than poetry, but poetry can reveal more complex emotions than performance. It can put the reader inside a character’s head in ways that film can not."

3: The publication of his book in 2014 will be interesting.

I, for one, hope that James Franco uses his name recognition to help poetry in general and not just his own name recognition. His reading list of poets was a bit scant and I've got several suggestions for him. Are you interested, James Franco? Let me know.

Kickstarter: great for comics, great for poetry?

I put up a link yesterday to my Kickstarter: Film The Best Reading and After-Party Ever!

But I thought maybe you don't know what Kickstarter is.

It's a site that facilitates "crowdfunding" or "crowdsourcing" of projects. You donate to a project of your choosing and get rewarded for that donation. In my project's case, you're helping me to make a film and documentary of what promises to be an amazing reading in Boston. The rewards go from a .pdf of poetry to editorial help by amazing poets to a huge collection of signed works.

Please help us out!

The readers are:

Annie Finch
Erica DawsonG.M. Palmer (me)Heather O'NeillJessica PiazzaMichael BobbittNick CourtwrightRebecca LindenbergTara SkurtuThaddeus Gunn

Thanks for your support!

Duocrap

I rather enjoyed Duotrope's search and sortability function.

Not enough to pay for it, though.

This is not the model we want to promote, folks.

I can't help but think that part of their problem comes from folks using ad-blocking software. Folks: advertising pays for a lot of the internet. Don't block revenue streams unless you like paywalls.

Kickstart my Art!

Help me fund an awesome documentary and reading in Boston!

Are you stymied because you’re spending too much time trying to defend and extend your old poetry in the face of game changing trends?

In reading a Forbes Article on the indisputable fact that Jeff Bezos is a rockstar, the end caught my attention:

"Don’t ask customers what they want, instead give them what they need.  Customers may be on a trend, but they will frame their requests in the old paradigm.  By creating new trend-promoting products and solutions you can capture the customer and avoid head-to-head competition with the “old guard” titans selling the increasingly outdated solutions.  Don’t build better brick-and-mortar, make brick-and-mortar obsolete.
So, what’s stopping you from growing your business like Apple or Amazon?  What keeps you from being the next Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos?  Can you spot trends and provide trend-supporting solutions for customers?  Or are you stymied because you’re spending too much time trying to defend and extend your old business in the face of game changing trends."How do we artists answer this call? How long can we ignore webcomics and video delivery of literature?

Regulation is bad m'kay?

Just a reddit reposter today, folks.

Of course, rules and regulations play a hell of an important role in the creation of poetry.

The difference is between "natural" rules and externally imposed ones.