poetry Archives - Word Café

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

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.

Cornelius Eady “The Music of Words”

May 31, 2015 By Word Cafe

WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE CORNELIUS EADY – 5/28/15

cornelius-eady at word cafe A hero’s welcome to poet-musician Cornelius Eady, who sat in a northbound Manhattan traffic jam for more than an hour to come up and join us! (And while we’re spreading gratitude, thanks to Word Café’s genius webinatrix Nan Tepper for valet-parking Cornelius’s car in uptown Kingston so he could come right in.)

Cornelius made up for lost time with his presentation on “The Music of Words.” Tuning and retuning his Baby Martin travel guitar, he first recited the poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Sterling A. Brown.

Then Cornelius sang us the song setting he’d written for Brown’s words.

Next he sang us his own song (words and music) “Twilight is the Hour.”

So what is the difference between writing song lyrics and writing poetry, which has its own musicality and rhythm? “Same throat, different muscles,” said Cornelius, echoing Nancy Willard’s words about writing across different genres: “Many buckets, same well.” It’s a difference of intent, he continued. Lyrics are meant for melody, and though poems are meant to be recited, we usually encounter a poem first on the page, before we hear the poet.

Continuing the musical theme (also found in the opening poems of his new chapbook Singing While Black), Cornelius read a poem from his book Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems. Its title, “I’m a Fool to Love You,” comes from a Frank Sinatra song.

The poem grew out of a conversation he’d had with his mother shortly before her death. He asked her favorite song (“It’s Only a Paper Moon”) and how she’d met his father. After the book came out, Cornelius reminded her of this conversation and she told him a totally different story about how they’d met. “And that’s fine,” he explained. “Sometimes when you write, you get the idea it has to be true. But it’s her story–the way I heard her story; it’s not necessarily the truth. The truth is out there somewhere. The poem is here.”

When Cornelius teaches beginning poets, one of the first things he tries to do is break down resistance to approaching poetry “like it’s an opera in Italian, in a specific language for specific people. It’s just a human voice, human experience. We all have different ways of capturing that. If you don’t capture it, we lose.”

He also said, “You have to get used to failure if you’re going to be an artist. Sometimes the lousy poem has to die to give birth to the good one.”

As for criticism, seek out family and friends you trust to be tough but fair. But ultimately, “It doesn’t matter. This is your art, this is what you do. It’s not a debate. You own it. It’s yours.”

outdated cafe

THE EXERCISES:

Nina asked people to write down a line from a song or poem you love, then trade lines with someone sitting nearby. Read the line you’ve been given, and use the whole line, or some word or phrase within it, as the springboard for a new poem. Try to follow its music back to the line you gave to somebody else.

Cornelius’s exercise had two parts. First he asked us to review the day we’d just had, from the time we got up to the time we sat down at outdated. Locate a quiet moment and write about it as fully as you can. After a few minutes, he asked for a few volunteers to read what they’d written.

The second part: Write a poem about your first kiss. Again, he asked a few people to read their work. What was different?

Cornelius Eady Word Cafe Poetry, said Cornelius, is about language, image, sound, and memory. While both of these prompts involved sharing an intimate moment, the first memory was recent, quiet and contemplative. The second was active, with an inherent intensity. It requires specifics: you’re trying to explain who did what to whom. It’s detailed and particular; you break it down. Also, Cornelius explained, you need to get to a specific “pow!” moment (he clapped his hands). How do you frame that? What frames YOU? How did you become the person we see? It’s about taking a risk, being bold enough to get it down and share it.

Language, image, sound, and memory. Go!

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