POST FOR THE WEEK


A lot has evolved--as if that's the way a class should go!

The books weren't ordered, the computer lab
wasn't reserved until the night before I'd wanted
it scheduled. It's been a spring opening term
for the record book.

It's okay.

We'll slowly explore various art forms and use writing
as a field for expressing whatever we see. It may
take a while to get into gear and hum however.

1. No class Monday, so on Wednesday we meet in our regular
classroom (and I am going to begin at 5:30 sharp) and then we
will go to the computer lab. We will write two "poems."
Your first two poems--which you wrote on Wednesday--
are the search engine poems which should be, now,
hard copy. If they aren't hard copy make them so.
At the end of this third class period we'll have four poems. We
add more each week. Just come ready to do whatever is asked
of you. The spontaneity is good for the soul.

2. HAVE THE AMERICAN HYBRID BOOK
AND THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM BOOK
AND THE 11 X 17 SKECTHBOOK
IN YOUR POSSESSION ON WEDNESDAY.

3. I handed out several handouts. You will need them.
You will need the sheet with the writing prompts. You
will need the packet with the Ashbery poem on the front.

4. As already assigned, read the poems by Ashley Capps
I handed out. Read the Joshua Beckman poems and
the poems by Mary Ruefle in American Hybrid. Don't worry
about understanding them completely.

5. Look at the paintings and read the text on pages 26-31,
on Pollock, Gorky, and Hofmann. Go ahead and be skeptical.
Think of the idea of chaos, and the idea of order. Think of
the sentences you find in search engines as similar to
different colors of paint, or pieces of collage. That is--think
of how placing them actively together creates energy
and communicates energy.

We only meet once next week, and that's partly lab time.

Be patient with the ambiguity right now.

That's all you need to be responsible for at this point.

Slowly, we will integrate and begin to brainstorm and actually
craft pages of collage and text. I think you will want to
make sure you have glue sticks and scissors and some
old magazines on hand. Eventually we will work some
in class on these visual aspects . . .

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

This link.

And this.

Actually, the second link is what informed the first.

Pink Floyd early and then later.

And, a painting by Thomas Hart Benton, Pollock's teacher.

And, here, Picasso's Guernica.

Some collage.

STAY TUNED FOR TOMORROW'S POST

In the meantime, here is the very first "flarf"
poem.

KASEY: Flarf came about a couple of years ago
when Gary Sullivan submitted a deliberately
bad poem to Poetry.com, one of those vanity companies
that lures the unsuspecting with lavish praise
of their poetry and then offers to "publish" it
for an exorbitant fee. Theorizing that no submission,
no matter how heinous, would ever be treated with
anything other than solicitous fawning, he sent in
a poem titled "Mm-hmm":

"Mm-hmm"

Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my "huppa"-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it's so sad that
syndrome what's it called tourette's
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!

**

Sure enough, he received a full invitation to
have his timeless piece of literature
enshrined for all posterity, etc.

Gary shared his poem, the style of which he promptly
dubbed "Flarf," with members of the Subpoetics
mailing list, and before long a few other participants
began posting poems to Poetry.com, including myself,
Drew Gardner, Jordan Davis, and a handful of others.
Eventually, we formed a separate mailing list.

POST SECRET LINK

Here.

Flarf link. Here.

And. Here.

OKAY, WE GOT THE LAB RESERVED FOR TODAY


We'll meet in the classroom and then hike over to
the lab (DW 1270). So, this means we will write most of the
time. Don't worry about what yet! It will be easy, fun . . .

A POST, W/ ROBERT HASS POEM

Still the same assignment for Wed. Jan. 13, the few
pages of Capps I handed out, the Beckman poem.

Please, if you haven't done so, purchase the Abstract
Expressionism book, along with the American Hybrid
anthology. Either way, I'll address, in basic terms,
the work, introductorily I suppose, in that AE book.

I'll also hand around some books about journaling art.

Remember, I'll post further instructions--what to read,
what to write, between noon and 2 pm on Friday. It's
all part of this process. Stay tuned. In the meantime, see
you tomorrow.

*

Privilege of Being

Robert Hass

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed--
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

For Wednesday, Jan. 13

Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields--pp. 1-9

American Hybrid--Joshua Beckman's poems--pp. 36-42

Because of the Bookstore "situation" we'll alter our course a bit.

Buy the two books at the store--the Abstract Expressionism book
and American Hybrid. I'll hand out, on the first day, a few Capps
poems. Check the blog on Friday (noon to 2pm) for the readings
to be done for Monday, Jan. 18.