Category: about poetry

April is National Poetry Month, I discovered, looking at the poetry shelves this weekend at my local used bookstores with my friend tiki (whose birthday it was, incidentally, yesterday). I am going to attempt to write mini-reviews of a poem a day for the remainder of the month to celebrate.

For the first poem, I’ve chosen Chicago, by kent foreman.

I found this poem in the only book of poetry I purchased when I discovered it was national poetry month at the bookstores this weekend, The Spoken Word Revolution, an anthology of spoken word that also includes a CD. Unfortunately, Chicago is not one of the poems read on the CD, but it was the first to really strike me in the book. How could I not like a poem that begins with the lines, “Because I am a patriot, I love this bitch,/You dig?/This sprawling, bawdy breathtaking witch/This pig,”?

Spoken word poetry is both worse and sometimes better because of its colloquial nature–the language that even read “sounds” spoken. This poem does that particularly well, keeping up a sporadic irregular rhyme in the middle of a conversational tone. I admire the lack of indent structure, the visual flow of the poem as it meanders down the page, sometimes sharply returning to the left margin, sometimes flowing gracefuly back and forth. Some of my other favorite lines: “I know her for a great American Janus/’Cause, once, I was a ghetto urchin/Playing in her anus” and “My God, in spring,/Chicago balls the populace.”

Perhaps the only disappointing part of the poem for me is the ending, and I don’t mean in a cleched “sad it’s over” kind of way. The idea, interjected in the last few lines, is that the narrator loves chicago, but he’s leaving. Before that, the poem was basicaly an Ode, and I think I liked it better when I thought it was. I probably would have preferred the author leave off the last three lines, and end with the lines just before… calling back to that great opening, with “This is The Truth!/I love this faithless bitch/That robbed me of my youth”.

All in all, this was a great poem.

As a side note, if I keep this up, which I hope to, I will only be reviewing what I think are great poems. You dig?

Dr Bombay sent me a link to his friend Charlie’s blog, where Charlie talks a bunch about poetry, and in this particular entry, about whether we can talk about poets as brand names.

Charlie’s final point is that brands are stagnating for the artist. Brands must stay the same to be recognizable, this is true, but it seems to me that an artist can still change while their brand stays (basically) the same. Think of U2. Their brand (public image) has definitely changed over the years, but very slowly, and not nearly as often as their music (for better or worse). There are examples of successful brand revolutions too. Think of Christina Aguilera, who went from being branded a twelve year old to being branded a super-slut virtually over night. Changing your image isn’t impossible, just very difficult.

Having worked in a large marketing company for a few years, I heard the term “brand” thrown around all the time… but it was never used to refer to what the actual product was… it was always used to refer to the public image of said product.

I would argue that all artists are branded whether they know it or not. Whether they go through the process of branding themselves is the real question. To market yourself as an artist, you have to have an image. All branding does is try to keep some semblance of control over that image.

This is true of poets too, although many of them (us) choose to eschew the process entirely, and either allow our publishers to make all the marketing (branding) decisions, or attempt to allow our words to speak for itself. Sure, some of the biggest name poets probably have some kind of brand, but I’ll bet none of them have logos. (I just spent far too long looking for this quiz that I saw online a few months back where you had to match up popular artists and sports stars with their respective logos. It was really a cool quiz, if you remember where it’s at, send me the link, please.)

The phenomenon of Charlie’s blog for me is not that it’s largely about poetry and writing (which I love,) but that it’s so amazingly thoughtful and insightful. Then linking from his blog to Victoria Chen’s, it was like finding a wormhole into this other world where people actually care about poetry the majority of the time.

Strangely enough, however, that world is probably as repulsive to me as it is attractive. I think if poetry were more popular than it is, I would be more hesitant to write it. Plus, there is something so sticky about academic studies of poetry. Some part of me just thinks poems are.

I get upset when people talk about this movement or that movement in poetry. The whole idea of having a movement in poetry for me requires an artistic revolution where you write a manifesto and all your friends get together and think about similar ideas. It seems to me that calling yourself this type of poet or that type of poet is such a big fad. Isn’t that era over already? Nobody actually writes manifestos anymore, but they all talk about different types of poetry as if every poem fit neatly into one or two categories and that was it.

I’d much rather hear discussion about a poem itself than about the category it may or may not fit into.

Man, now I’m just whining.