Oneword. They give you a word. You write about it for sixty seconds. They post it. Go! Via One Good Bumblebee.
National Book award nominees for poetry. Via Poetryhut.
Seth Schoen reveals himself as author of the DeCSS haiku, a 457 stanza work explaining how to decrypt CSS. Cyberpoetics, indeed. Via Me-Fi.
_______________
So it's gotten to that point where the next logical step in the old poetry rat race is for me to actually submit stuff for publication. Which is a gi-normous pain. It's like applying for a job through cold letters. You have to research journals -- what kind of stuff they take, what their requirements are, in order to ascertain your best chances. Moreover, you have to go over your work and figure out what pigeonholes it goes into--basically, a tedious process of "defining" yourself. Do I write New York School? New Formalism? Confessional Lyric? Post-avant pastiche? (Can I tell you how much I hate the "post-avant"; what the hell does it mean? Not what does Ron Silliman think it means, but what does it mean, where meaning is a socially agreed-upon value? Can I look it up in Websters? Is it like obscenity--you know it when you see it? For the un, or under-initiated, such terminology is obnoxiously subjective.)
Anyway, I actually made a freaking Venn diagram of my poetry last night, in order to help me visualize the type of stuff I've been writing. Given, however, that many of the labels on my diagrams reflect such "poetry groups" as "fish," "sounded good in my head," "started out forty lines, ended up three," "robots," and "written on a moving bus," I'm not sure that the exercise has helped me to figure out where to submit.
On a happier note, I wrote two new Calamities last night, at least one of which is pretty darn good to start with. The other is sort of on the line between "good enough to revise," and "start over," but at least I have something down. My plan to have enough of these things to fill a chapbook is looking more and more realizable.
And now it's interactive time! If you were a poem about a mythic character named Calamity, what would you be called? Anything goes!
posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
