Here Comes Everybody

Sunday’s a slow day at the library, especially in freezing mid-winter temperatures, so I’m cozied up at the circulation desk, surfing the web and hoping my boss doesn’t catch me. I thought that I could get some ideas for my blog by reading other literary blogs. I started at Ron Silliman’s blog, which is completely daunting to a novice blogger like myself.

I’ve been playing around on “Here Comes Everybody,” a blog that asks the same ten questions to different contemporary poets. I’ve read some of the archives, and poets such as kari edwards, Jonathan Skinner, Rebecca Wolff (current editor of Fence), Dana Ward, Linh Dinh, Kristin Prevallet, to name a few of the ones I recognize, have been interviewed.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Kristin Prevallet described finding “a slim volume of Dorothy Parker’s Selected Poems, heavily marked up by her mother with exclamation points and smiley faces.” I like the idea of poetry being hidden in the drawer, like a flask, sneaking sips when no one’s looking. Why can’t we have Poets Anonymous? Oh wait, we do: blogs.

As for me, I loved Shel Silverstein as a kid and thought that Frost’s “Birches” was so sadly beautiful,-- esp. the lines, “here your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs/
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping/ From a twig's having lashed across it open.”
But I think the first poem that really impacted me was e.e. cummings’ “maggie and millie and molly and may:”

maggie and millie and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

millie befriended a stranded star
who's rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea.”
“a smooth round stone/ as small as a world and as large as alone.” In less than two lines, cummings captures loneliness, apprehension, wonder, identity—this poem definitely made me want to know more about poetry.

2. What is something/someone non-"literary" you read which may
surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

kari edwards in Dec. 2006 said, “what is not literary? where is that demarcation, maybe the telephone book? the back of a can of beans? Is not most of what is written literary? and is it not our definition that is limited?”

I tend to agree, but for the sake of answering this question: in my pathetic attempt to become culturally relevant and hip, I’ve been reading things like DIW and Nylon. Sometimes the sheer volume of pop culture references overwhelms me to the point that I feel that if I wasn’t already born with the info of, say, Trivial Pursuit or Lorelai Gilmore, I’m never going to be able to interact and relate to the world.

I also read Dog & Kennel for tips on how to train Captain, my black lab mix.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Wasn’t it Plato who had no role for poets in his Republic? So maybe philosophy and poetry don’t really mix well. And Wordsworth and Coleridge were supposed to write the master philosopher-poem, which would save the world, but Coleridge was too busy getting high in India (?) to come up with the philosophy end, leaving Wordsworth to write the Prelude and die, feeling like a failure.

So I’d say that my philosophy is that philosophy shouldn’t mix with my writing.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
The word “Anglo” always reminds me of “Day-glo.” Probably Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Federico Garcia Lorca… I don’t know. I mostly read British or American poetry.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?
I’m trying to read more—as evidenced by this blog. It’s important to know what’s been done, what’s being done… I have a lot to learn. And I don’t want to be redundant in my own writing.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you've
read but haven't? Why haven't you?
Proust seemed to be the most common answer on “Here Comes Everybody.” I’d have to agree—haven’t read Proust. Or Dostoyevsky. Other stuff just looks more funner.



7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I like Paul Hoover’s second two definitions in this month’s interview:
(B) It’s what you say into the telephone when no one is listening on the other end.
(C) It is a poem if, when they hear it, they will cut themselves shaving.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Alan Gilbert, in Nov. 2004 said: My point is that just as I don’t walk around calling myself a dishwasher, despite a relatively serious commitment of overall time and energy to the task, I don’t consider myself a poet, either. It may only be when the experience of art is no longer a separate category from everyday life that it has a chance to make a difference, to have a “role.” This doesn’t have to be literal, in the same way that I’m not literally a dishwasher or literally a poet. After all, conceptual art is a serious effort to collapse art into the everyday (as is commodity capitalism, though in a different way: the former fetishizes the intangible, the latter the how-can-I-get-my-hands-on-it?).

In my opinion, the role of the poet is to communicate. To interact with language and culture. Although I agree with Gilbert that it shouldn’t be self-aware.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**pie!
Chiseled**gristle
I**Spy
Of**Montreal (new band a friend told me to check out… not bad)
Form**Content

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

Stephen Burt, in Aug. 2005 said: “I hope that relationship varies from poem to poem! In the criticism I don't think there is one-- that is, I'm not conscious of there being one. In the poems, some are meant as visceral, coming from inside the body, from below or beyond obvious rhetoric and logic; some are meant more as performances, with the body and voice of the poet giving a more clearly conscious performance, showing more unity and control.”

I must say that I personally didn’t really understand the question. Text and the body—text on the body? Whether, as Burt suggests, the text has a visceral effect on me? Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Agreed.

http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/