I geek on poetry in unexpected places (for example: this). Even more, I love poetry that was never supposed to be poetry. Suddenly: oops, you’re a writer.

Case in point: The New York Times‘ Alan Feuer digs into the NYC Craigslist Missed Connections and finds poetry in the listings from Occupy Wall Street. The words are copied verbatim, with only line and stanza breaks added. The titles are the subject headlines.

Beautiful Asian

I was all dressed in blue for a reason.
Standing in front of Capitol One Bank
at 6 av at about w39 st
on Sat Oct 15 late afternoon.
I was with my work partner
standing in front of the Bank entrance
when you and a friend stopped
and asked us a question.
I thought you were so beautiful
that I was speechless.
The Occupy wall Street march
was coming up the Street
and you asked us a question about it,
and then all too soon
you were gone and the air
seemed a little cooler
as if the Sun had suddenly
gone behind a cloud.
If you recognise yourself
please please please
get back to me so that
I can at least know
if you are attached or not

You are a Cop

I was only visiting the city
during the protest
was with my mom
in Time Square
we chatted about why
I was visiting
and where I was from.
I wanted to ask you
for your number
for a good last hoorah before I left…
but I chicken out.

Hoyt/Schermerhorn G

This weekend.
You had
an occupy wall street poster.
I had
a book.

Librarian at Occupy Wall Street

You seem pretty great.
It seemed like a bad idea
to even attempt to flirt
when you’re trying to do
something substantive like that,
so I thought I’d just post here.
Just in case you might see it.

Occupy Rosa Mexicano

Hi Rebecca,
Do you want
to
get
a
drink sometime?
Jonathan

More here.

While reading Karen Russell’s stellar hit, Swamplandia!, I did a double take.

I know the book is intended to be a novel and it certainly reads like one. It has a story: a beginning, a middle, an end; a protagonist, a climax, etc.  Despite these facts, Swamplandia! reads, to me,  like one big, epic poem.

Nowadays we rarely see long poems in the poetry world. What happened to those epics, like the Iliad, which frame western literary history as we know it? I think perhaps they’ve dissolved into a certain kind of novel —one that reads like poetry and presents as a novel. One of the reasons for this “re-formatting” may be the publishing industry’s preference for novels over shorter forms of writing, and all of poetry, in general. Writers know it’s certainly more lucrative to write 300 pages then to write 100, and to produce full-length novels rather than novellas. This preference is uniquely contemporary, and for that reason, I seem to stumble upon true poetry in the novels of certain modern and contemporary writers.

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In the history of world poetry, there have been all kinds of limits and forms we writers have forced ourselves to adapt to over the centuries, such as sonnets, iambic pentameter, odes, pastorals and free verse. Even contemporary novels are often forced to meet certain page requirements to be considered for mass publication unless you happen to be Salman Rushdie or Thomas Pynchon.

While earning my English degree at school, we took a survey class on American and British literature starting from the medieval era, on through the twentieth century—though I believe our class was so disorganized we only made it halfway through the nineteenth century. A certain professor lectured us solely on the title page and the preface or forward for a whole week. We examined how different editions of the same novels evolved with first prefaces then second prefaces then third and so on.

All this “to-do” without even getting to the first page drove me nuts. I’ve always hated conventions and restrictions and necessary evils yet I marvel at the thought that writing without abiding by a specific set of rules is a contemporary conception. Where do we go when we are liberated, when possibilities are limitless? We can make like New York School poet Frank O’Hara and impose our own rules (complete a poem during lunch hour) or abandon the notion entirely to genre-shattering effect (Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son).

It used to be that modern meant free verse, yet we’re surrounded by programs like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. These sites encourage piecemeal sound bites, snippets of our lives, slices of our day. So why not use these platforms to express our creativity? Read more »

This is God Loves Poetry, a website designed to subvert the hateful messages spewed out by the Westboro Baptist Church. From the site’s creators, Kevin and Andres:

We began this website to demonstrate that everyone has the ability to manipulate negativity by using just a little bit of creativity. Art, humor and love are three of the most powerful tools used to combat hate. That’s why we’re implementing these tools to turn the Westboro Baptist Church’s hatred into something both positive and enjoyable.

The WBC is known for its obscene and inopportune protests. From picketing military funerals to protesting Justin Bieber concerts, the WBC has successfully established its own distinctive brand of hatred. Unique slogans include “God Hates Fags!” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers!” Even their children hoist placards in the air with these slogans while chanting the hateful rhetoric. Other ridiculous phrases are: www.godhatesamerica.com, www.godhatescanada.com and www.godhatessweden.com. No, not even Canada or Sweden are free from the wrath of the tiny Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.

Our inspiration for the site is derived from writer Austin Kleon’s “Newspaper Blackout” project, www.austinkleon.com. The idea is basic: just eliminate words to create something meaningful, potentially creating something even more momentous than the original canvas given to you.

Each poem is born out of the WBC’s daily press releases sent to media outlets nationwide. If you come across a poem you like, feel free to share it. If you have a poem you created, share it with us and we’ll post it to the site.

What a great idea. After the jump, some more poems: Read more »

This site gets a lot of spam, but thanks to spam-catchers and fancy coding I don’t understand, very little of it slips through to the comments section. Most gets caught in our spam filter, and usually I give whatever’s in there a cursory glance before deleting.

But the other day, for whatever reason, I looked at the spam with a fresh eye. If you ignore the hyperlinked sex-related keywords, some of it sounds like it could be poetry. Really, really awful poetry, mind you, but we all know I’m a fan of the bad stuff anyway.

Here are a few of my favorite spam poems (sexy links removed):

She was in the frame emma watson
teetering on her highheels.
The bedstand, would not see.
She was emma watson pics abusive, writhing naked in the street he was in, reaching out.
I was the most wonderful person on the wall.

Sam asked. I couldnt say it was getting their knees licking
Of my daughters youthful body

Youre thinking of their ideas in her hips erotic stories
jerk and squirm.
Take it was growing.
I almost made celebrity stories you something
to stop it anymore. Jason shook his friends
during.
She favored jeans and sheryl all the suggestion mild bondage stories
Ben, like when you so.

More:

Read more »

I’ve just finished downtown fixture and prolific rock and roll poet Patti Smith’s latest, Just Kids. I expected a full autobiography and, in a way, it is, but what’s really special is that it’s an incredible love story for the tomes. Smith shows us what love looks like in all stages, even when her partner, the famous Robert Mapplethorpe, admitted he was gay and eventually died from AIDS. Robert and Patti are always one—a string the weaves through them and that glows when either is in need of the other.

I’ve been a huge Patti Smith fan for a while. I learned her through her music. Her 1975 album, Horses, is one of the best albums of the century. Her voice has a girl-like-Leonard Cohen-mixed-with-Tom Waits ramble and her sound is simple. But what really shine are her words. Once I discovered this, I jumped into her poetry.

I consider myself a poet and have been writing seriously for over ten years. Until yesterday, however, I hadn’t written a poem in almost a full year when I wrote one daily. My website grew static, no one had visited. It was dark and dull—perhaps a relic from Victorian England. Poetry is part of my soul and I felt I were dying, suffocating with lack of creativity.

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Everyone has his or her literary “nerd” moment. You don’t realize how much you truly love the stuff until you do. Like an addict finally “hitting bottom,” the literary nerd moment comes when you least expect it, when you’re set for cruise control, when your eyes are sick and tearing with stretches of nameless, placeless road, somewhere crawling through Nebraska, Iowa, Western Illinois, Central Illinois. Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” scrawls on loop and you have yet to notice the song continues to end and begin again, time and time again. The back seat of the car is full of trash from McDonald’s, Burger King, and oh—Culver’s, from when you did that detour into Wisconsin by mistake (or maybe it was really because your craving for a frozen custard started gnawing away at your soul so savagely you just had to stop at Culver’s). And then, bam! You’re in New York City with a bunch of Jersey plates honking at your back trying to cross the GW.

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I am a perpetual optimist, especially on the issue of literature in the digital age. I believe that the Internet presents a number of wonderful new ways to create and distribute literature, and I firmly deny, deny, deny when faced with the all-too-ubiquitous argument that the Internet is killing the book.

One point on which I will concede, however, is that the screen is changing the way we think. After spending eight hours at a computer and simultaneously listening to music, checking Twitter or Facebook (more often than I ought to, I should note), answering emails, editing video, or whatever it is that I’ll end up doing on a given day, suddenly I feel very distracted when faced with an open book. Reading a book can be jarringly simple after a day of multitasking and multimedia; when your brain is trained to process multiple streams of information at the same time, at lighting speed no less, sometimes it can be difficult to focus on just one thing.

So for those people, there’s Teleportal Readings, a monthly web video series made for “those who love reading but readings.” Or, I’d like to add, for those who love readings but think that video recordings of them are terribly dull. Watch what a little green screen hoodoo can do for literature:

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Mandelstam's arrest photo

Russia is on fire. The unprecedented heat wave in much of the Northern Hemisphere means that temperatures in and around Moscow this summer have reached record highs. On top of that, much of the Russian lands are covered in peat (due to natural vegetation but also bad Soviet agricultural practices) which is now lighting on fire along with the dried-out trees.

Voronezh, a city several hundred miles south of Moscow known for its fertile black earth, is now partially charred (see a photograph here).

I can’t help but think about the concept of poetic justice right now. Here’s why:

Voronezh is the city to which Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was exiled to from 1935-1937 after his poem, the “Stalin Epigram,” got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. At first he was crushed (he had even tried committing suicide), but later managed to write some of his most brilliant poems, collected in the “Voronezh Notebooks.” In 1938, he died on the way to a Soviet GULAG (prison or labor camp).

Mandelstam tried to write honestly under a totalitarian regime and was repressed. He almost lost faith in the power and role of poetry (his ironic prophecy before his death: “Only in Russia is poetry respected — it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”). But he still managed to write poems that are now celebrated and translated for their bitterness and their eventual idealism.

Here is one of his Voronezh poems, written in 1935 (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin):

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

(Another great one is called “Black Earth” but I can’t find it online).

Voronezh is the place of exile for one of the 20th Century’s greatest poets, where he managed to write despite deprivation.

The Soviet government irresponsibly drained these lands in the 1960s for agriculture and mining.

Now they’re burning.

I’m certainly not insensitive to the tragedies of the raging wildfires (much of my family lives in Moscow), but I just had to point this out. It’s too weird when life and poetry meet.

Dak so bodeut, so dak bodeut

There is little more harrowing, more ecstatic or strange, than to find oneself plunged into a world in which words—-which had hitherto been so prized, so steadfast (perhaps), which could be trusted to bubble up to the surface of the mind’s pool in those moments of dire necessity and slip as spindrift from the tongue’s crest to fall, with variable accuracy, upon the ear of a listener, and to often be understood in some half of their intent—-become utterly useless.

Nothing so starkly brings out that grunting, that gesticulating and speechless animal, lying seemingly clothed within language, yet pulling always nakedly the body’s strings beneath, as this.  I am become prehistoric man, stubbled, scrawling hieroglyphs of lamps and computer adapters, modems and cooking pots, among intelligent, effortlessly communicable individuals, gripped again by that frustration, that immediacy of thought and absence of object, which led us first to construct signs to describe our common experience of this place…

For in April—-which is, of course, intolerable—-when the trees (which I have no way to describe save by pointing, so look, if you will, at the trees!) when the trees have gone from bare to a fire of blossom to bare again in a matter of some two weeks, and the trunks and branches rouge slightly with a blush as if of blood from heat returning and days of rain and the tiny leaf buds and every limb upraised and waving—-what word is there between us to describe what moves them?  What sound but the close-cropped mane of every hill a horse’s neck bowed running?

Even with a common tongue their are vast discrepancies in our understanding.  Imagine if I were from Gansu, China, and you from the Great Gold Plains, and we two stood suddenly in an immense and empty whitewashed room with no paper or pen between us, how quickly we would exhaust our conversation.  There is a saying here:  Dak so bodeut, so dak bodeut (“as a chicken looks at a cow, as a cow looks at a chicken”).  We would be as two animals, mute, occupying space.  Perhaps we would mumble something unintelligible now and then, gesture with our arms, begin to talk eventually to ourselves, but the rift between us would be impassable.

That is until we began to construct a new system of signs.  For our old ones would be impotent here, in this space bereft of referential objects, from which our strange words could bounce and become illumined to the observer.  Here, however, if I crook my right arm, and splay my fingers perpendicularly to the incline of my forearm, it means the Ga Chi bird will bring a welcome guest.  It means my neck aches; the floor is hard.  And if you distend your stomach, grinning foolishly, stand on your right leg, and wave your left arm in circles above your head, index finger alone extended and pointing down, you are telling me the ornamental rug has been misplaced, and the walls are caving in.

This is all just to say how wonderful, how positively improbable it is, that you have some idea what I mean when I say, “I’ve dropped my notebook”, “My glass is empty”, “I will see you at 5:00″.

Allow yourself to lose yourself, be it at your lamplit desk, or your moon-washed backyard.  Find us out there, mumbling aloud, wandering around, asking to listen.