|
1 May 2003
This month's newsletter comes a little early because
Megan will be out
of town. The literary calendar therefore will not be updated for
a few
days.
• Letter from Meg
• wordsinhere joins Poets 4 Peace on Liberation
Day
• Don't miss the last of The Open Stanza's first season!
• Versal: Submission Call
• May Event Picks
LETTER FROM MEG
[This month's Letter
is a continuation of a larger discussion begun in April's Letter.
If you missed it, visit our Newsletter archives.]
If you've ever been in a writing
workshop, you'll have heard it - maybe even about one of your own
poems: 'This [fill in the blank] is cliché.' I've heard it
before. We all have, because it's easy to do. Wracking our brains
at 2am, the cigarette we smoked an hour ago still singeing our throats,
the coffee cold, and the poem hiccupping halfway through because
YOUJUSTCANNOT figure a new way to describe the rain.
The rain pours down like
tears on the windowpane.
Who HASN'T compared rain to
tears? That's the point of the cliché - it's been done so
many times it has completely lost its descriptive and/or emotional
power. It is the task of poetry, then, - as Pound said - to make
it new; to revive these words - or their meanings - in order to
reach beyond the flatness of the page.
The obvious response is: 'How
do you know a word or phrase has lost it's emotional or descriptive
power? How do you know it's turned cliché?' The great M.H.
Abrams tried to explain it in his Glossary of Literary Terms:
a cliché 'signifies an expression that deviates enough from
ordinary usage to call attention to itself and has been used so
often that it is felt to be hackneyed or cloying' (emphasis
mine). Even Abrams could not pinpoint the reaction that we have
- or, more likely, the reaction we DON'T have - to the cliché.
To save face, however, he eloquently quotes Alexander Pope's satiric
commentary against the poetasters:
Where'er you find 'the
cooling western breeze,'
In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees';
If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,'
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep.'
(Essay on Criticism, II.11.350
ff)
Poetry which leans on the authority
of such lines, which pivots around their supposed power, (the poetry
of Jewel, for example) is lazy. Are poets not meant to, on some
level, play with words? If we only rely on the centuries' tried
and tired phrasing, why write it down (again) now?
Every few decades poetry has
an existential crisis, and most of the poets I know have had one
- or several. Typical questions include: What is the point of continuing
Poetry anyway if every subject has been addressed, every emotion
conveyed? What is the point if poetry is an obstacle course around
the cliché and archaic? And what if I'm writing this poem
in a fit of tears and it IS raining outside?
Even though the theories rarely
help in the mid-moment of writing, for the poet in mid-existential
crisis they can be useful. Language is constantly changing, evolving.
New dialects form, new metaphors and associations within the colloquial
develop. The way we would phrase something now is not the way it
would have been put 40 or even 10 years ago. Poets, like artists
and musicians, can never been done. Their task remains in a constant
state of the finishing.
For me, what is so...cool...about
language is that it's momentary. Poets have a choice: we can either
record the old questions in the vocabulary and syntax of our modern
language or we can reduce both to cliché and melodrama. If
we're up to the task then we work hard - because poetry is NOT easy
- to revise that line we wrote in the middle of last night about
the rain:
The rain pours down the
windowpane, tears.
Nice internal rhyme embedded
in iambic meter, and clever implied metaphor. If we have to use
rain and tears in this way, we might as well play with the syntax
to add double-meaning. Or, we could chuck the tears and write our
pain another way - through poetry's greatest ally: the image:
from Exposure
Robin Robertson
Silence is rain with the
sound turned down,
and I stare out now on a clear view
of something left out on the line:
a life, snagged there—
drenched, shrunken,
unrecognizably mine.
(Poetry, April 2002, p15)
You should read the whole poem,
but we can't print it. Email Meg
and she'll email it your way.
NEWS
wordsinhere joins Palabras, A Love Supreme
Braodcasts, and Baobabconnections in a poetic coalition on Liberation
Day. This coalition, dubbed Poets 4 Peace, will host a tent at the
Festival with poetry from 11am to 10pm. The event will also be streamed
live on radio and available on the internet. For more information
check out www.baobabconnections.org
or email poets@end-war.com.
If you've missed this season's The Open
Stanza, you're missing out on something largely unfound in the
Amsterdam and Dutch monthly scene: a night of international performance
and poetry. May's night brings you another mirage of the multicultural,
multilinguistic, multipoetic. Come down to Volta on Friday, May
23 to hear, see, dance, and drink.
We're shaping the night and looking forward
to a good one. The full listing of performance guests will be available
soon but for now, pop the date into your calendars. Prue and the
rest of The Open Stanza crew are gonna end the season with
a bang.
Click
here to visit our Stanza pages, including an archive of previous
shows!
All writers in and around Amsterdam are
invited to join wordsinhere's second creative writing workshop.
The list is getting full so be sure to contact Meg
soon if you want to join. This round will not only focus on the
writing itself but also on revision and performance. The workshop
will go until September 24. For more details check the workshop
pages on the site or email
Meg (meg@wordsinhere.com).
CALLS
FOR WRITERS
The literary print magazine of wordsinhere
— Versal — is now accepting submissions for its second
issue out December, 2003. An international collection of writing
fit for your bathroom magazine rack. Accepted: up to 5 poems; 4000
word max for prose, essay, review. Simultaneous as long as you tell
us. Not accepted: what you already know can be published because
it has. Appreciated: urgent, involved, unexpected.
Full guidelines and online sample of our
first issue can be found here.
For questions and submissions, email submissions@wordsinhere.com.
We accept snail mail only with a SASE: Van Hogendorpstraat 123-I;
1051 BL Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
The Open Stanza is always on the
lookout for writers who perform their work with risk, who give their
writings sound well-deserved, who take their words from print to
stage without something getting lost in the transfer.
Send samples of your writing (poetry, prose,
whatever) to openstanza@wordsinhere.com
or by post, Van Hogendorpstraat 123-I, 1051 BL Amsterdam. Upcoming
dates of The Open Stanza: May 23, June 20.
MAY EVENTS WE'RE GOING TO ATTEND
Monday May 5, 11am
Oosterpark Festival, Amsterdam
Inspired by initiatives in other countries,
Palabras, A Love Supreme Braodcasts and Baobabconnections formed
a poetic coalition and decided there was no alternative but to resort
to verse. On Liberation Day, Poets 4 Peace will host a tent at the
Festival with poetry from 11am to 10pm. The event will also be streamed
live on radio and available on the internet. For more information
check out www.baobabconnections.org
or email poets@end-war.com.
Sunday 11 May, 8:30pm
Paradiso, Amsterdam
Performances & open-mic for poets, lyricists,
& wordsmiths. More information: www.palabras.nl.
Entrance: 6.50.
Saturday 17 May, 8:30pm
Perdu, Amsterdam
With Adrian Hornsby, Jeremy Mercer, Quinn
Commendant and others. In the midst of cultural Paris lives Kilometer
Zero: magazine, art collective, and squat. Under the auspices
of a group of expats from England, Canada, and the US, in 2000 the
first edition of the cultural magazine Kilometer Zero was
published. A magazine for writers and artists running for our massconsuming
and materialist society, offering a rare and interesting view on
the world. This night, Kilometer
Zero brings in association with the Nights by Perdu a show,
literature reading, and a party with burlesque performances. Entrance:
€5.
Friday 23 May, doors open 8pm
Volta, Amsterdam
Featuring poets Ana Simeon and Sarah O'Gorman.
DJ Iron Melon returns to the decks and our very own Prue Duggan
will keep you busy with poetry, live music, and boogy. Join wordsinhere
for another night of the Stanza. Entrance: €5.
For the full list of May Events and for a listing of
regular shows, click
here.
aBOUT THIS LIST AND ADDRESS REMOVAL
This list provides news and information
about the wordsinhere community and its projects, as well
as a listing of this month's choice events in and around the Netherlands.
How do you get an event on the newsletter AND on the site? Email
it to us: calendar@wordsinhere.com.
Please feel free to distribute this e-mail
to those who you believe would be interested. Thank you very much
for your help and support.
You have received this message either because
you or someone else has added you to the wordsinhere
mailing list. If your email address changes, or you wish to unsubscribe,
please send an email to majordomo@wordsinhere.com,
and in the message body type unsubscribe mailinglist-wordsinhere-com.
To remove an address other than the one from which you're sending
the request, give that address in the command: unsubscribe mailinglist-wordsinhere-com
you@mail.com.
Copyright © wordsinhere 2003. No part
may be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the specific written
permission of wordsinhere first hand and obtained. wordsinhere is
a registered association through the Kamer van Koophandel, Netherlands.
Number 34181684.
|
