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BARBARA UNGAR + STUART BARTOW “Poetic Nature”

October 2, 2015 By Word Cafe

WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE

BARBARA UNGAR + STUART BARTOW – 9/24/15

word cafe barbara ungar reading

This week’s Word Cafe was a pleasure to host. Poets Barbara Ungar and Stuart Bartow read an exhilarating selection of recent work, sparking a wide-ranging conversation on “Poetic Nature.” The multitalented group of participants included many published poets; Djelloul Marbrook also took photographs.

Stuart led off by reading four poems from his just-published collection, Einstein’s Lawn (Dos Madres): “Einstein’s Compass,” “Ode to Buster Keaton,” “Moon Lust,” and “Better Ghosts,” interleaving his selections with comments about the poems’ themes and origins. A line that caught my ear (and strikes me as pertaining to poets and writers as well as to Einstein): “his lifelong quest to pick the cosmic lock.”

Barbara read four poems from her latest collection Immortal Medusa (The Word Works): “Things Do Not Look as Dismal as They Did,” “Ode to Tardigrades,” “Why I’d Rather Be a Seahorse,” and the titular poem. All four were inspired by natural phenomena–an abecedarian roll call of names of recovering endangered species, a remarkably resilient (and cute) microorganism, the unconventional reproductive lives of seahorses, a jellyfish that can reverse its life cycle–which led to a discussion of how poems begin, and how these two poets pursue and refine these initial impulses into a finished work.

Barbara is a passionate advocate of free-writing, which she likens to “going fishing. I try to shut off my quadruple-Virgo brain and just write till I feel a little tug on the line.” From this initial gush, she says, “something coalesces.” Once it’s all out, it can be chiseled away and shaped, with “a lot of editing.” She paraphrased a quote from Michelangelo: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Barbara keeps a journal next by her bed and starts the day by writing down her dreams, which prompted Stuart to comment, “I don’t keep anything under my bed.”

The center of his process is “no forcing–training yourself to be there when it happens” and letting a poem find its organic shape. “The hell with what you want. Let it be what the poem wants.” He also stressed the importance of reading broadly: “Reading poetry is practicing writing.”

THE EXERCISES:

— Nina: Think of a person you miss. Now think of a bird, the first one that comes into your head. Put them together on the same page, in a poem or prose piece.

— Barbara and Stuart passed out a stack of notecards, each bearing a plant name from a local day-lily nursery, with the directive to use the name as a title or line in a poem. Here are some wonderful lily names from leftover cards, yours for the taking:

Tipsy

Audacity Bond

Casanova

Coleman Hawkins

Starman’s Quest

Yazoo Elise Hinston

Catamount

Wayside Painted Lady

Carolina No

Purple Rabbits

Nelly Reifler “Points of View”

September 19, 2015 By Word Cafe

WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE NELLY REIFLER – 9/17/15

This Thursday was a hot night in every sense. Nelly Reifler gave a knockout reading of the infamous “Barbie sex scene” from her novel Elect H. Mouse State Judge, followed by “Formica Dinette,” a story she wrote from a prompt on the addictive website Underwater New York, you can find it by clicking on Fiction or Objects (a list of odd items found submerged in the waters around New York City and works inspired by them).

Nelly chose a formica dinette set found in the East River, then started researching vintage formica ads for inspiration. A tag line from one of these gave her an opening sentence–“There is a definite trend toward making Mother a member of the family again”–and one thing led to another, as things always will.

Our topic was “Points of View,” and this story’s may be unique in the annals of fiction; it’s narrated by the first-person-plural entity, “we at Formica.” But, says Nelly, there’s more to point of view than who narrates the story.

Paraphrasing a lecture she wrote for her MFA students at Sarah Lawrence, she called point of view the “genome” of a story. One strand of genetic material is who is telling the story (first, second or third person; singular or plural; single or multiple narrators). But point of view is “really about location–where the speaker is standing in relationship to the subject.” The narrator may be distant or close to the story’s events and characters, in space or in time. Did this happen a long time ago in a galaxy far away, or right this second to someone you love?

Nina pointed out that the narrator’s attitude towards the story’s events–defensive, judgmental, starstruck–can also affect point of view. So can limitations. What does the narrator not know or see?

Nelly feels that point of view is often an intuitive choice, but that shifting point of view can be a helpful craft trick when a writer is feeling uncomfortable. She also encourages experimenting with unusual points of view to shake things up–one of her grad students wrote about a family occasion from the point of view of a deer head mounted on the wall.

THE EXERCISES:

— Nelly asked us to write from the point of view of any non-human object in the room, including the abstract or ethereal (i.e. heat or white noise), the unseen (i.e. underwear) or a plural point of view (“we” or “they”), and gave us the following opening sentence: “It’s happening again.”

— Nina suggested writing a charged encounter between two people at a restaurant from the point of view of their waiter.

Gerard Malanga “Where To Begin”

September 13, 2015 By Word Cafe

WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE GERARD MALANGA – 9/10/15

Our third season got off to a smashing start. Our guest was poet and creative force of nature Gerard Malanga; our subject was “Where To Begin.”

Gerard read a selection of poems, including a series of portraits and elegies, which he called “poems about someone else. And me too; I’m the witness.” The subjects included William S. Burroughs, Stefan Zweig, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Valerie Eliot (T.S. Eliot’s widow and editor), along with Alphonse and Yolanda diPaolo of Fordham Road (“my upstairs neighbors, my upstairs world.”) One of many lines that caught my ear and stuck: “a fandango of love and leaping.”

Though the writer’s point of entry is not always the same as the reader’s, Gerard often begins his poems with their first line, following a stream of consciousness to see where the poem will take him. “Once I have the first line, I self-hypnotize,” he said. He detailed his morning routine: feed the cats, leave the house by 7:00, buy the New York Times, order a cafe latte and pastry at his favorite cafe. While reading the newspaper, he often circles or underlines phrases or sentences that strike him, then starts writing in the margin. Not all poems begin this way, and not all marginal scrawls become poems–“the muse is fickle”–but it’s a daily practice.

He has five typewriters at home, and uses two of them, typing up works in progress on yellow legal paper. He handwrites and types all his drafts, moving to a computer “as a storage facility” only when the poem is finished.

Gerard called his poems “visually erratic,” with a mix of long and short lines. “I don’t care how long the line is. I’ll go all the way to the margin.” He reads his drafts aloud, listening for rhythm and “inner breathing.” He calls this process “scoring” the poem, as a composer does.

He’s a very eclectic reader. Nina noted that his emails always end with the phrase “Current bedtime reading:” and an ever-changing array of titles; Gerard explained, “That’s not to beat my own chest, but to remind people that reading, and reading widely, is a healthy activity.” Amen!

THE EXERCISES:

— Gerard suggested starting a poem that’s not about your own experience, but somebody else’s. Start by writing the person’s name at the top of the page.

— Nina passed out a stack of upside-down stereopticon cards (vintage double-image photos), asking participants to turn them over, write down the first phrase that comes into your mind, and see where it leads you.

In both cases, the idea is to write something down on the blank page immediately, and follow your instincts. The work people shared, after only ten minutes of writing, was fresh, spontaneous, and extraordinary. No matter how little time you have, take that first step and keep going.

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