Dim-witted gods and the importance of poetry

God of Wednesday:

I think the brilliant character of the giant Utgard-Loki, with his wry attitude toward that little fellow Thor who “must be bigger than he looks,” is a stand-in for Snorri [Sturluson] himself. They share the same humorous tolerance of the gods. There is very little sense throughout the Edda that these were gods to be feared or worshipped, especially not the childish, naïve, blustering, weak-witted, and fallible Thor who is so easily deluded by Utgard-Loki’s wizardry of words. What god in his right mind would wrestle with a crone named “Old Age”? Or expect his servant-boy to outrun “Thought”?

It also fits with why Snorri wrote the Edda: to teach the 14-year-old king of Norway about Viking poetry. This story has a moral: See how foolish you would look, Snorri is saying to young King Hakon, if you didn’t understand that words can have more than one meaning, or that names can be taken literally? The story of Utgard-loki is, at heart, a story about why poetry matters.

Delusions of an erasure poet: the shadow text

There is — I’ve come to feel — a text within the text, made up of the words and phrases that lodge most firmly in our minds as we read and the hidden relationships we sense between them. Can it be brought into the light and given at least a minimal coherence? If so, what if anything might it tell us about the parent text?

I think this shadow text is based in part on semi-conscious, momentary misinterpretations which we are continually correcting automatically as we read. It’s of a piece with those false ideas and associations we all harbor based on misunderstandings that were subsequently corrected, sometimes very quickly, but still too late to prevent such shadow ideas from persisting, showing up in dreams and sometimes even influencing conscious thoughts. (This is, in part, how propaganda works.)

If I were able to read with perfect focus, perhaps a shadow text would not develop, but the imagination is an unruly beast, and fluent reading gives it latitude to stray to one side or another as I proceed, like a dog on a long leash inspecting things of interest while its owner plods straight ahead. It has, in other words, its own agenda. To recover the text within a text, do we not also need to be dog-like and follow our ears and noses more than our eyes? Certainly we need to be more active. Investigation may even require that we bark and listen for a response.

“Two Kinds of Boxes”: cliché and meaning in videopoetry

My first new videopoem of 2013 required more planning than is usual for me. The text is kind of the central poem in my Alternate Histories series. The footage speaks directly to its theme of rewinding and remaking the past. I’m also ridiculously pleased with myself for figuring out how to lie through video so as to make it appear that I am unwriting my footprints as I walk.

As curator of Moving Poems for almost four years, I’m all too aware of the fact that I am — as I say in my profile at Vimeo — a very amateur filmmaker myself. My command of the technical aspects of filmmaking is still pretty poor, and my image vocabulary is basic. But I do have the advantage — or is it a burden? — of knowing that some of the most obvious moving images have been done to death: shots from a moving vehicle, for example, or shots of walking feet (often female and barefoot). All my favorite contemporary videopoetry/filmpoetry makers have employed both these kinds of shots, some more than once. Hence, in part, my idea to include point-of-view footage (heh) of footprints rather than feet.

Is it fair to call such images clichés, though? Doing so smacks a little of the modernist scorn for writing about falling leaves or the moon. Moving through the world is a pretty inescapable aspect of existence, after all, and walking prompts thinking so readily it might as well serve as a metonym for it.

Moreover, a certain interplay between movement and stasis seems intrinsic to the videopoetry genre. Archibald MacLeish’s justly famous “Ars Poetica” says that “a poem should be motionless in time,” which while hyperbolic does capture the essential stasis in much modern lyric poetry (including my own): “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” states the opening line. By contrast, motion is the soul of film, and therefore I suggest that an unresolved tension between movement and stasis is the fundamental agon in poetry film, akin to the dynamic balance between life and death in any organism or ecosystem. (One thinks of the French for “still life,” nature morte.)

A look at the entire second section of MacLeish’s poem shows that the poem itself is (irony alert!) rather more interested in movement than in stasis, proving once again that it’s difficult to say anything about videopoetry that isn’t just as true of poetry as a whole:

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

Moving images have pretty much replaced celestial bodies as a central interest bordering on obsession in our culture, so perhaps it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to compare film in general to the role of the moon in this poem. Be that as it may, I think that makers of filmpoems and videopoems have long sensed a MacLeishian contest between stillness and movement as the ultimate expression of that creative juxtaposition between text and shot which distinguishes the true videopoem from other films or videos involving poetry. (Tom Konyves’ manifesto goes into some detail about the optimal sorts of text-image juxtapositions required for successful videopoems, but Konyves is far from the only poetry filmmaker to discover this principle.)

Immediately following the lines quoted above, in the third section of the poem, MacLeish writes: “A poem should be equal to: / Not true.” This too sounds as if it could be addressing videopoetry. Too close a match between text and image feels contrary to the allusive spirit of poetry (and of good film), but too random a match-up and that sense of “equal to” is lost. So in my video above, showing an actual black box, for instance, would’ve been absurd, but I thought I could get away with dark footprints. And when the poem talks about examining oneself, it seemed sufficiently suggestive to have the actor’s body move out of the frame and leave the now-unmarked snow bare for the closing credits.

Then again, that’s just the sort of move you’d expect from someone whose blog is called Via Negativa. It’s almost an apophatic cliché.

Luisa Igloria on audience

The Bakery:

I am aware that much of my poetry works with recurrent themes involving place (I am always writing about my hometown— Baguio, it seems), the complicated dynamics of family, the often tangled relationships between history, time, and memory. […]

At the same time, I am aware of the desire to make a clear and accessible connection to readers, whoever they might be, while remaining true to my heart’s first subjects and passions. The notion of a “universal audience” has about the same significance and importance to me as the arguably comparable notion of a “global citizen.” (That is to say, the construct of universality which posits that underneath all the indices of identity, history, gender, etc. which mark us, we are essentially all the same, might be useful in certain contexts, but also undeniably dangerous for its potential to conflate the details of our histories, which are singular.) But also, I cannot believe that what I write would have relevance only for an audience “just like me,” or that such an audience really and truly exists.

Poems vs. bullets

Today I happened to remember I’d written a poem in the voice of a hero from a previous school shooting. Romanian holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, blocked the doorway to keep the gunman from entering while his students got out through the windows, “into the garden.”

Let’s get real, you say. What good can poetry possibly do, faced with these kinds of horrific acts? I’d reply that anything that helps to deemphasize and demythologize the role of the killer can’t hurt. I tend to think that the mass media’s focus on the killers not only ensures that they will be remembered, but also encourages other violent, antisocial types to emulate them knowing they’ll get the same kind of notoriety. And notoriety might sometimes be just what such troubled young men are after. I love old-time murder ballads as much as anyone, but I think it’s time to put those behind us and stop feeding a gun culture that romanticizes lone killers and vigilantes.

I don’t believe that news reports should be censored, so how to combat the sensationalism? By elevating and memorializing those like Librescu who resisted, and who led truly exemplary lives besides. I hope it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing songs and poems about Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung and the other heroes of the massacre.

More than poems of mourning — which are also necessary, and which we poets are always Johnny-on-the-spot with after every major cataclysm — we need poems of celebration and defiance. We can’t allow the killers to dominate our memories of these events, just as we can’t allow the gun fetishists to continue to hijack public discussion of the role of violence in our culture and how to change it. If we do, to coin a phrase: the terrorists will have won.

I’m kind of a big deal on the web

Poets take note! There’s another critter out there even more adept than we are at hiding behind an enormous effigy of itself made entirely of garbage:

New Species of ‘Decoy’ Spider Likely Discovered At Tambopata Research Center

From afar, it appears to be a medium sized spider about an inch across, possibly dead and dried out, hanging in the center of a spider web along the side of the trail. Nothing too out of the ordinary for the Amazon. As you approach, the spider starts to wobble quickly forward and back, letting you know this spider is, in fact, alive.

Step in even closer and things start to get weird— that spider form you were looking at is actually made up of tiny bits of leaf, debris, and dead insects. The confusion sets in. How can something be constructed to look like a spider, how is it moving, and what kind of creature made this!?

It turns out the master designer behind this somewhat creepy form is in fact a tiny spider, only about 5mm in body length, that is hiding behind or above that false, bigger spider made up of debris.

Two years of a poem a day

The Official Website of Poet Luisa A. Igloria:

As these things usually go, I hadn’t intended to do a daily poem “project” when I first wrote this poem in response to Dave Bonta’s Morning Porch post on November 20, 2010. But the experience of making a clearing, right then, right there, and dropping everything in order to sharply focus on nothing else but the immediate goal of writing a poem within a brief window of time, proved to be exhilarating. I kept coming back, and the rest, as they say, is history.

[…]

Two of most important things I’ve learned from my daily writing practice over the last two years have included the following (and the learning, if I might stress, continues): letting go (of the fear of the blank page, of the ego, of opinion, of criticism— Who do you think you are and why are you writing? Who do you think you’re writing to or for? Why do you think others will want to read your crap?); and just using that brief, blessed time to find a way to tune out whatever noise there is, outside or inside, so you can drop quickly down into that part where the you might find the poem and the poem might find you.

Two years of writing (at least) one poem every single day is a remarkable achievement. Congratulations are very much in order… as well as my heartfelt thanks. Via Negativa is much the better blog for Luisa’s daily contributions, and I’m honored to have been able to supply so many useful writing prompts over the past two years.

In the voice of Cortez’ mistress

I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. Here’s a poem in the dramatic monologue mode, written under the influence of Ai with some imagery borrowed from translations of classic Aztec poetry. (Please click through to read the whole poem.)

Malinche, A.D. 1522:

No rain of flowers marked my entry into the world.
I wasn’t born onto a shield or draped
in a robe of feathers. My own mother
sold me in secret & celebrated my funeral
with the substituted corpse of a slave.
I ended up serving the lords of Yucatán,
on the eastern shore.

Four years ago, when Hernán Cortez came back
from setting fire to his ships, slipping
like a thief into camp, I was waiting in
his tent. We understood each other
from the first, before I could speak
one phrase of Castillian. We had
the same hungers.

Imagining an Iraqi imagining us

I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. Though a note on the post says it’s a rough, first draft, I ultimately decided it didn’t need further revision. (Please click through and read the whole poem.)

From a Distance:

God knows how many times
I have stood frozen in the hot street
with rifles pointing at my crotch

& watched myself – small
& impossibly thin – in the oil-black
mirrors of their sunglasses.

They never take them off, not even
to enter a mosque. God knows
they are easy to hate.