literary usefulness

A couple days back, I watched this discussion from someone I subscribe to about the purpose of reading and studying literature. It made me laugh when she brought up the claim that  lit study has been inundated by identity politics, since what is writing about even if not identity and our place within the world.  I came of age while New Criticism was gasping its last few dying breath and more cultural studies based approaches were sneaking in. While many of my white and male professors, though not all, were reluctant to look much beyond what was there in the text, my abundance of amazing women undergrad lit profs (as well as some theater history instructors) were bringing more progressive discussions and criticisms into the classroom. I got to take courses from people who taught seminars like Psychology and the Novel or Southern Women's Writing.  It continued in grad school, where my focus continued on women writers--mostly novels and drama--culminating in one of the most rewarding classes, Writing as a Woman's Profession. 

In classrooms, we weren't just talking about he texts, but the world and the persona that created them. The movements and structures that supported or destroyed them. It was much more holistic than the experience other English majors I've encountered here and there who were my chronological peers in the mid to late 90s. 

With the dwindling of humanities departments and decisions to cut majors like creative writing, even in arts-focused college (ahem, Columbia) due to funding, the English major is a dying breed. And yet, studying literature as a subject is how we study stories we tell about and to ourselves  (I feel its very similar in the same ways we study art history or cinema, just in different forms with different tools. ) Columbia is also axing the Cultural Studies major which I remember was new at one point in the mid aughts, which sees artists art and media more a larger mass in which all of it--literature, art, mythology,, music, entertainment--is all something we can take something from (and actually seems even more ripe for study  with the rise of internet culture and social media.)

I've always believed that if I hadn't studied lit, I'd have probably wound up in something like history or folklore, which scratches many of the same itches and has a lot of overlap with the literary arts. These subjects are also about stories, though one "unofficial" and the other "official" (depending on who is writing and telling the story, which is also a subject worthy of study.) I think now i have greater understanding of texts--be they written, oral, visual, or purely for entertainment purposes only (though this is also suspect.) Some of the greatest pieces of art were meant as entertainment --Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, a lot of poetry and more literary writing (I'm thinking the Romantic poets, who were the rock stars of their time, or someone like Dickens who had a huge serialization readership during his lifetime.) 

So if everything is text, the pursuit for studying them, whatever medium, is a gesture toward meaning making and understanding, something which it seems would be even more necessary now than it was nearly 30 years ago when I entered college and enrolled in my first lit classes.  

more from the woods

 

poetry and the machines

This Lit Hub piece is a very interesting read about the rise of the poetry machines.. Last year, I applied for a part-time position that was supposed to help AI bots to write poems, and while I got all set up to be paid, when it came to the training, they sort of ghosted me (which didn't give me a lot of faith in the company, so I just let it go after a couple emails.)  They seemed highly unorganized and bad at communication, not what you would expect from a tech outfit, so no major loss. I applied as a lark after seeing someone post about it on FB, and was infinitely curious about the ability of a non-self entity, an LLM, to practice a very self-oriented activity. Poetry, perhaps more than any other genre, is a reflection of the self and personal experience and imagination, an interpretation of language and symbols and a translation. Take apart the craft and poetic devices and really its just one person sounding a bell to resonate in someone else. I am not sure a bot can do this.  

I tend to have a more welcoming attitude compared to some about generative AI. I think it will open as many new doors as it will close. For visual art and design, it doesn't not feel all that different from what I've been doing for decades as a collage artist. It's just faster and has a broader scrap box to draw from. I'm not sure what I get there could be called art. Even the scraps that I then try to make into art.  Or I can make them into art by using them as a jumping off point. 

Overall I think there are dangers of echo chamber effect for prose, especially when it comes to writing informational and promotional content and I occasionally stumble across blogs and articles very obviously not written by a human. Yes, you can get copy in seconds, but I am not sure you want it. It seems ripe for misinformation and just unintentionally erroneous statements. It troubles me not that they exist so much, but that some folks wouldn't be able to tell the difference. In general, I am actually a little excited about LLMs and their ability to amass massive amounts of information and spit it back algorithmically. I think they also give us the opportunity to delve more into what makes creativity creative beyond technical skills. What it means to be artists, not just by what we can do with our hands or tongues, but what makes us different as humans. That art is a broadcast of self and identity that a machine does not have. You can take the entire collective consciousness of the internet and it still does not have human emotion and resonance. 

The results of the study in the article do not surprise me, mostly since whoever they are asked are likely not familiar with contemporary poetry at all. (or perhaps not even aware that it exists.) So of course, they would see end rhyme and clunky ballad meter and say, yes, that's a poem because it looks like what they've read before in high school. Its like you AI-generated a bunch of Marvel movies and showed them to a group and they rated them. Stick any brilliant indie film in there and they will rate it badly based on those expectations and their understanding of what film is even supposed to be.  

11 things I am loving

I was flipping scrolling back through some older posts on ye here old blog and stumbled across things I used to do that I don't anymore. Mostly it was the sort of newsy stuff that eventually moved over to social media. Not really promotional things, which I usually post to both, but just the sort of randomness that really doesn't have all that much to say, but nevertheless is still fun.  

One of these was a list of current obsessions, inspirations, things I love, etc that I used to post periodically in this space that are fun to look back on now from the lens of more than a decade out. Some of them became permanent loves and passions, others were a passing fancy. So I thought I would post a few of my obsessions that have been delighting and inspiring me of late. 

Scandinavian holiday decor

brown paper packages

mint hot chocolate

Wicked movie soundtrack

Christmas horror films

cozy gray afghans

jam thumbprint cookies and tea

all things velvet 

handmade pottery

pierogis in Chicken soup

layered shades of berry colors

piano shawls

the woods

 This years haunted advent calendar has commenced from now until Christmas Day. I'll be posting daily collages and maybe, just maybe, an e-zine version of the still images on the last day with a textual component I am plotting out as I go. For now, you can enjoy new collages daily over on Instagram...

writing as time capsule

 When I was a baby poet, I remember there was much discussion about waiting til there was a "right" time to start publishing and sharing work. A duration between your first efforts at putting words on the page and trying to find places for those words to appear in public. Even longer a duration before beginning to hot the "high tier" journals or applying for awards and funding. Before trying your hand at MFA applications and doing public readings. This time varied for writers, probably based on their own development as a creator, and certainly no timeline between two poets was remotely the same. But there was so much emphasis on waiting. On "when" to make your debit as a poet and how.  Also where.  The more academic the setting, the more strict and specific these guidelines and what qualified as "success."

I've always been a person who takes writing and art very seriously and yet sometimes, probably not serious at all. In college, when I was only writing in spurts when classes and late night rehearsals allowed, I started sending out work. First to mags and anthologies published in the back of Writer's Digest I checked out monthly from the public library. Later in vanity-esque anthologies that crammed several poems per page and required you to buy at least one copy. A couple college lit mag publications, and at least one campus writing contest that paid cash that last year.  The work was pretty terrible, then less so as I neared graduation, but it felt important to be doing it. To be getting it out there. To be doing the thing. The poems from this period are often spare, usually emo, sometimes rhyming (yikes!)  Then they weren't so bad. By the time I hit my MA program at DePaul, they were getting better, and of course, would get much more so. I was still intent on submitting--though now to places listed in Poets & Writers or venues like The New Yorker and Poetry.  I was determined to finish a book by 25, and it was a terrible book, but some of those poems would later form my first chapbook and netted me what was probably my first publication in a lit journal as a regular submission.  I still have copies of most poems I ever wrote, and this period feels like a snapshot of late 90's me. My obsession with the history and the Greeks and fairy tales (not much has changed really.) And most of those obsessions largely just because I didn't yet have much experience or writerly imagination to write about many other things besides what college and grad school had instilled in me. When I look at this older work, I used to feel uneasy should anyone read it, but now they are more like very old and badly shot photographs of your thumb or the inside of your pocket. 

When I moved back to Chicago after working in Rockford for a little over a year in an elementary school (and therefore less time for writing or creating)  I plunged back into writing and submitting to the newly opening world of online journals. The poems, some of which wound up in my first book, the fever almanac, are also an encapsulation of both experience and fictionalized narrative. Ditto with each book that came after. Each written over the span of a few years (though I write more and more often now after figuring out a routine and schedule that works better (mostly just writing first thing of the day rather than last) , so the time between new books is much less. My second book contained a couple of projects that originated in my MFA classes between 2003 and 2007. girl show was my thesis for that degree. Other books caught relationships and detritus of the other years. Some go really hard on certain topics and concerns while others, you have to look at them in the light to see the threads. In the past decade or so, there is much of loss and grief and desire that echoes non-poetry life. 

In many cases, feeling ready is more about feeling a need to share projects rather than feeling like the work itself is "ready."  There are obviously things I write that are not ready. Many things that get discarded and rebuilt into other things that are closer to ready. Some that get set aside or paused indefinitely because I don't know if they're ready or if they ever will be (blue swallow, ahem). Other things I finish and seamlessly drop into the world. There are a lot of projects that will be coming in the next year. Some are fast, some are slow.  Some are good as/is, others need just a little more work. The time span on them is as long as several years, though also sometimes as short as a couple months. 

The books feel like a vault, into which I have cast all my messiness and obsessions into, so its hard to take them seriously, but also hard to not take them that way. More like it feels I filed a room with treasures or madness or monsters and want someone, anyone, to see what it looks like right in that very particular moment in time.   

5 facts about my newest book

1. ) The earliest poems in this collection were written in late 2021 and were based around TS Eliot's The Wasteland, one of the most influential works on my baby poet self back in the 90s and something that felt it needed to be revisited, especially amid the modern political, social, and post-pandemic environment. Conversely, the latest poems in the collection were written early in the spring as the broken places series about crumbling houses and disappearing pasts.  

2.) The image on the cover, and on the back, were some early experiments in AI generative art, which I was playing with a lot in the spring, as both a way to get badly needed customized elements for collages, and in this case, just adjusting and tweaking prompts and photographic styles to get what I wanted. AI art always looks slightly wonky and uncanny valley, which is actually something I wanted in this case, though not always. You can see more of that style in the zine version of the broken places series. 

3.) This is my seventh self-issued title somehow, which means the process of layout and design is a little smoother and doesn't take as long mired down in formatting stuff, which I can get close to in place by the first or second proof copy (which means a faster turn around from start to finish and actual copies in my hands faster.) I learn more, however, each time I do it, both about design and promoting a new book amid a sea of other poets and other books. I still feel like its much more work than traditional publishing in so many ways, but most of it is work I enjoy and I love having complete creative control. 

4.) The middle, and longest section of the book is memoir in bone & ink, which was basically all about not wanting to write poetry anymore, and yet, here I am. 

5.) Some of the most fun poems to write were the technogrotesque series that closes the book, which both look and sound very different from what comes before, both in tone and line length. Narrow lines, short stanzas, more attention than usual to sound (or at least it seems like it in their spareness and musicality) The poems themselves are about technology and de-individualization and disassociation amid internet culture.. 

release day!

 

order a copy HERE....