On May 20th, each of these poet bloggers will share their favorite 20-30 minute recipe:

Kelli Agodon, Book of Kells blog
January O’Neil, Poet Mom blog
One Minnesota Writer
Spoon Fed Writer
Inkwell Blackout
Hungry Poet
Monica Wendel at No Ideas But
Being Poetry
Jessica Goodfellow
Kristin Berkey-Abbott

How different we all are is nothing new.

What seems new to me is a fresh perspective that all of the difference doesn’t matter much when it comes down to reading a poem and assessing whether you like it or not.

What strikes me most about the reviews is how each seems to take most issue with the idea that there are only two camps and a poet has to be from one or the other. That an editor or editorial team can absolutely decidedly affix a label on a single poet based on the handful of poems from that poet’s ouevre that fit their editorial slant. Want to call so-and-so a lyric poet? Sure, go ahead. Just don’t include any of the narrative or political works that he/she may have written over the years.

Göransson mentions in his review the portion of Swenson’s introduction that references Robert Lowell’s quote that there is “cooked” and “uncooked” poetry. And on the same day I read that review, I was reading an interview with Peter Gizzi in issue #14 of jubilat, in which he says: “When I was a teenager, I began with the Beats, Rimbaud, Homer, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Whitman, but I never read just one stream. To me the tradition is much larger than just the recent postwar ‘raw and the cooked,’ as Lowell broke it down. I didn’t want to think of it in those terms.”

“Deborah Ager’s Midnight Voices takes us to a place not unlike midnight itself, to a precarious edge between tenderness and unkempt desire, between a good laugh and the brutal truth, between the day’s stark glare and clarity, and the murk and backwater of deep night. Intelligent, subtle, uncanny, and playful, these poems, at each turn and turning, take me by surprise. The work is beautiful, exact, and exacting: it deserves and commands our attention.”—Eric Pankey

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In other news, I was going to blab that I’ll be a writer’s residency at the same time as _____, a fellow blogger, and then I realize he (yes, a ‘he’ is all I’ll reveal at this point) might not want to blab about his good fortune just now. So, I’ll blab about mine. I was accepted to a residency. Whee!

Debbie Yee points out a possible new trend in poetry rejections.

Collin Kelly offers holiday weekend music.

Thanks to C. Dale Young for a link to an article on Michael Hofmann.

Mary Biddinger spreads the word about new and not-so-new poetry magazines.

Check out the photos of DC-area poets posing like ESVM.

Allen quotes a blog post by Michael Palmer that says poetry must do the following to promote itself:

1. Shift production from lyrical to narrative verse
2. Change its distribution model
3. Working toward canonization

Number two particularly resonates with me. I’d like to see video used more with poetry. I’ve been wondering how to get poets reading their poems on video, how to host it (YouTube?), and how to distribute it. If I used YouTube, I’d not have to pay for hosting the large files.

My next question would be about the best way to get quality video of poets reading their work. Would they use their cameras? Would I only videotape people near where I live so I could do it myself? Do I really want to spend my time on this?

About point number one above, Michael Palmer writes:

To change production of poetry we need to shift toward narrative verse. This is an easy task, as nearly all poetry published today is lyric poetry. Almost no one is writing or publishing narrative verse. This alone can explain the marginal state of modern poetry because people love stories. They crave them. They pay billions of dollars a year on movies, cable bills, novels, and video games just to experience stories. But they don’t turn to poetry. Why? Poetry can tell a story with such power that the reader or listener’s body chemistry alters to fit the rhythm of the line. Nothing else can do this. But people don’t think of poetry because poetry no longer tells stories; it no longer entertains; it has become art for a dying art’s sake. When we ignore narrative verse in favor of the lyric we are depriving poetry of its natural audience.

First of all, vegging out in front of a movie, a cable show or a video game does not take the same mental exertion as reading. I can’t see anyone making the argument that watching American Idol takes the same energy as reading Wallace Stevens. I think people’s inclination to do what’s easy — like water taking the easy route through a canyon — will incline people towards spending more on movies and cable television than on poetry. Comparing cable and movies to poetry is comparing apples and oranges.

Moving to narrative poetry is not the answer. Not all lyrical poetry is “difficult” to understand or necessarily lacks a story. Please tell me if you can’t understand this lyrical poem by Philip Larkin.

I don’t think “dumbing down” poetry is the answer.

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In the world of marketing, you rarely market to everyone. You define a target market and aim to solve the problems of that target market. A dog agility expert will not care about your golf clubs (most likely). Someone who “doesn’t get” poetry will rarely be part of a market who will read your book. What we need to do is develop that market aka “audience.”

In a recent interview, I answered questions about how I started to write. That reminded me that I LOVED the poet who visited during a Poet in the Schools (PITS) program in the 5th grade. After that, no one could get me to stop writing and reading poems. Since the No Child Left Behind act was implemented, I wonder how many poets have visited schools?

I agree with Palmer that we need to add to our distribution methods for poetry and disagree that poets need to change how they write.

What do you think?

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I’m on a high today! This Saturday, I spent the day with writers. These were folks who could understand why a comment like the following is funny about the New Yorker not publishing much fiction:

“These are the dark days for The New Yorker since they only publish fiction when they have a John Updike story.”

Ah, writers!

For the conference, I presented on literary blogging with Wendi Kaufmann , C.M. Mayo, Pietrzyk and Shawn Westfall, who also teaches improvisational theatre.

I was hoping for what that the fiction writers would accept me, a poet, into their group. After all, what would they think of a writer whose lines don’t make it all the way over to the right side of the page?

Madam Mayo kicked off our panel with outstanding and glorious introductions, including one for me that made me think I should run for President…of something.

Wendi — aka The Happy Booker — discussed how she started blogging after she saw her 8-year-old get in touch with hundreds of people after having a blog for only 24 hours. She thought she’d give it a try. After a while, she started to notice visits from CBS and publishing houses in NYC and wondered what was going on. Now, she gets enormous packages from FedEx with books from publishers and more offers to write articles from the Post (after they noticed how much traffic her articles would receive).

She’s written for the Washington Post for 10 years. She’d post a link to her article on her blog and send loads of traffic towards her article. The Post editors noticed and started to give her more assignments.

Madam Mayo emphasized that a blog is what you make it. In other words, you don’t have to write about your cat or what you ate for lunch. That is a good point for new bloggers, as well as those considering blogging, to note. I originally thought this blog would have a different focus. That focus was boring, so I moved on.

Leslie Pietrzyk sets a blogging schedule. I’m not much of a schedule person, so that in itself is impressive to me. If you visit her blog, you can pretty much count on posts Monday through Thursday. Thursday is reserved for a longer essay.

The three blogs above also include a number of posts about events in and near DC.

Shawn Westfall, writer and improv teacher, writes for DCIST.com. That group of blogs attracts 1.8 million visits per year. He posed some intriguing questions:

1. Are blogs literary?
2. Will blogs last?

He observed that we read books of letters and so on, yet we’re not likely to see an entire blog published and offered up as a book to future scholars. He also mentioned that the value of a diary is writing candidly and blogs don’t allow us to do that.

What did I talk about? It’s a secret!

I’ll share what I talked about in another post soon.

I wish I could list every blog in my blogroll. These are probably the seven I’ve read for the longest period of time — from back when I did not even know what a “poetry blogosphere” is.