Chatter

Welcome to 2011

February 24, 2011, by No comments yet

Yeah yeah yeah, I know. It’s almost March… well, we’re poets over here & we don’t necessarily subscribe to you’re “calendar.” We don’t feel a need to follow linear time in order to make meaning of our lives. We prefer chaos to order…

…okay we may not prefer it, but chaos seems to prevail much of the time.

However, with hard work, dedication & support groups (we call them poetry readings) we are working through our perpetual procrastination and behind-the-eight-ball-ness.

And speaking of poetry readings (nice segue, right?), we’ve finally gotten around to updating the reading series pages on the main site. Word. There are still a lot of holes, but we’re fleshing it out. Literally, we’re lining up all the warm bodies we can find to give featured readings at the Big Blue Marble in Mt. Airy, Milkboy in Bryn Mawr, Churchill in Pottstown, and the Madness series.

Check it out. And hope to see you at a reading soon.

Posting a comment, 101

August 18, 2009, by 4 comments

I’ve been told this whole entering comments business can be a little confusing for those who aren’t so familiar with blogs, so hopefully this little primer will help you out if this your first time commenting. As with anything new, it hurts just a little the first time, but after that it can be fun to the point of addictive. We here at the Mad Poets encourage you to practice safe commenting. Do it often, for sure. But always do it with forethought & caution.

Here’s how it works:

Below this post, where it says “Post a Comment,” enter your name as you’d like it to appear (can be your full name, first name, nickname, alias, pet’s name, whatever…), enter a valid email address (we will NOT publish this), enter your website if you’ve got one that you’d like people to visit (if you don’t have your very own site, you can enter your MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or whatever other social networking page you might have), and then enter your comment.

Be sure to give us all the essential information. If it’s a reading, tell us the date, time, venue, type of performance, and anything else we need to know (is there any open mic following your featured reading?).  If you’ve got something published, tell us where we can buy it. Add the url to the website of the publisher or link to the book’s page on Amazon. You pretty much want to hold our hand to the check out. If we can read your poem/story/article online, give us the link & tell us the name of the piece and the publication.  We don’t just want these details. We *crave* them!  (P.S. You can use HTML in the comments, or not. It’s up to you. Don’t sweat it if you don’t know HTML, it’s really no biggie one way or the other.)

If you want to receive emails with all the other comments, click that box. This means you don’t have to keep checking back to the site to see what other comments have been added. On Shameless Monday, its a great way to keep up with what else is going on. It’s also an easy way to immediately know if someone has responded to something you commented, which is always nice to see.  But if you don’t want to get the emails, that’s cool too. Just be sure to check back regularly to see if anyone’s responded to you.

Finally, when you’re done, click “Submit comment.”  If this is your first time, your comment will not appear on the site immediately. It will be emailed to the web czar for approval (this keeps us from getting inundated with spam). Approval usually happens within a few hours. After you’ve had one comment approved, all future comments post to the site immediately since we know you’re a real, live person and not a spam-bot.

Once your comment is approved and posted, your name will appear at the top of the comment. If you’ve entered a website, your name will link to the website.  The comments will show up in a list below the post, in the order they are entered. To see what it looks like, check out last week’s Shameless Monday.

Good luck & happy commenting.

Friday: Poetic Justification

June 5, 2009, by 1 comment

Last week, I wrote this post over at my personal blog, on my personal website winterspringsummer.com, and afterwards I thought to myself, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if other people got in on this action.”

So, here’s the idea.  Take something you love — and I mean LOVE — despite its questionable poetic or artistic value, and justify it.  Poetic Justification.  We are writers, poets, artists… but we are also humans, susceptible to wiles of overly sentimental movies, cheesy pop music, or velvet wall hangings of dogs playing poker.  (As you’ll read in the first installment, I’ve got a penchant for 80s hair bands.  I just can’t get enough of that crap!)  I’m open to anything, as long as it genuinely inspires you. I personally think its more fun to dissect the written/spoken/sung word, but then again if you can make a case for why Top Gun is one of the best movies of all time, go for it.

I’ll be justifying for the first few weeks.  But feel free to add your own justifications in the comments, or you can email them to me if you’d like to be featured:  autumn (at) winterspringsummer (dot) com.

So here goes.

The other night I was wondering:  if you can’t be a good poet, is it better to be so profoundly awful or to be just mediocre. Mediocre is always mediocre.  But sometimes, and just sometimes, bad is SO bad that it almost becomes good.

I started thinking about this whilst washing dishes and listening to Monster Ballads, one of my favorite CDs to sing along with.  The CD reaches its zenith for me a little more than halfway through when Damn Yankees’ “High Enough” kicks in.  God I love that song!  LOVE it!!  It’s the kind of song that I will listen to at least 2 or 3 times any time I hear it.  And I know it’s terrible.  It doesn’t even really make any sense.  But something about it makes the blood tingle in my veins.  So, I started thinking, There’s got to be something to this.  There has to be some poetic value — and I’m going to dig right into the lyrics and find it.  So here we are.

Before we get started, you might want to familiarize yourself with the song, if you’re not a hairband fanatic like me.  You can read the lyrics here, and you can listen to it here.  I recommend listening.  As I’ll soon explain, the lyrics don’t have nearly the same impact….

Read more →

Your favorite lovelorn poem

May 9, 2008, by No comments yet

I’m always excited when I see poetry mentioned in some mainstream outlet where I’m not expecting it… so okay, maybe the NYT blog about books isn’t totally mainstream… but its pretty close… so check it out:  it’s a quick little article and pretty active comment stream about favorite poems for a broken heart.

I loved reading everyone’s favorites… and posting a few of my own.  Let us know if you post anything over there.

Editorial Stances v. Political Views

October 9, 2007, by 2 comments

I write free verse all the time. When I try to write metrical poetry, I get a headache and an intense craving for a glass of wine. What I don’t get is a successful sonnet, or villanelle, or whatever. But that’s ok, I’m comfortable with my limitations. Having a best friend who is a formalist, though, means I am kept abreast of excitement in the formalist poetry world. Some of the happenings over the past week caught my attention, and I thought I’d toss them out here for public consumption: Read more →

have you ever wanted to just quit?

September 22, 2007, by 8 comments

recently, i’ve been overwhelmed with work (9-5 job work) to the point of having little to no time/energy to read or write poetry. add to that, nearly all of my recent submissions (scant as they may be, for same reason) have been returned with unsympathetic form rejections. and there you have my reason for wondering why i even bother and whether i should continue. BUT, this is NOT a plea for people to stroke my ego (and if you do that in the comments, i will delete them. Seriously. I’m the site admin, and I have that power).

My question is: have you ever what’s the point of writing poetry? Read more →

Rachel’s Favorite Online Journals

August 7, 2007, by 4 comments

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of online journals. It’s a faster, easier, cheaper way of seeing what’s being published in the poetry world. Standard print journals like Poetry and American Poetry Review are, of course, wonderful – but again, they’re expensive and slow to come (being published once every two months). I’m impatient. And online, there is an infinite variety of journals to choose from – instant gratification. So here are a few of my favorite, in no particular order (well, actually, in alphabetical order): Read more →

The effect of prose on poetry

July 8, 2007, by No comments yet

Lately, I haven’t been reading much poetry. I set a goal for myself at the beginnng of the year to read something like a hundred poems a month. I was doing really well for the first four months – by the beginning of May, I’d read over 400 poems, from journals like Poetry and the American Poetry Review, as well as online journals like Wicked Alice, Stirring, 21 Stars, Diquieting Muses and Apple Valley Review. I could feel the nature of my poems changing – I moved toward a style that was more stream-of-consciousness, more fragmented. I felt it was truer to my circular way of thinking than my previous attempts at more structured narratives.

But since May, I’ve sort of given up on poetry. Well, not entirely. I just haven’t been able to put my mind to it in quite the same way. So instead I’ve been reading quite a bit of fiction, and some personal essays. And now I’m realizing that my poetry is changing again – this time, instead of changing style, I’m changing content. Prior to the shift to reading prose, I was writing a lot of poems about my life – divorce poems, love poems, poems about children. These are things that have meant a great deal to me, and so of course found their way into my writing.

But now I see my writing shifting toward subjects of greater universality – race, gender and sexual expression, politics, war, peace. I’d like to think I’m finding a way to tie these universal concepts to my own life, that I’m grounding them in tangible, believable experience. I don’t know for sure.

So how about you? How does what you’re reading affect what you’re writing?

Who Cares?

May 17, 2007, by 10 comments

I have been weighed down lately by this feeling of disillusionment with the very tangential place of poetry in today’s world, not to say its futility. It seems very few arts can claim a more marginal status in today’s culture, or could matter less for that matter. And the whole endeavor is so close-circuited that it seems incestuous at times, in the sense that the main audience for poetry tends to be poets, poets that are often more interested in hearing themselves than anybody else. Everybody is so eager to get published in journals that they’ve never heard of before (and hardly know where to acquire); and there certainly is more supply than demand. I am the first to admit that I haven’t read most of the other poets’ work in the few journals I have been published in; and I am sure I’m not alone. There is an ever-increasing plethora of little venues for poetry (or shall we just call it “self-expression”?): from the myriad literary journals littering the shelves of bookstores (and those are the ones that do make it to the shelves), to blogs and the infinite variations of online publication. But is anyone reading? The Poetry Foundation tried to answer this question with an admirable “scientific study”, the conclusion of which was, basically, what we’ve known all along: that almost nobody reads poetry, but those who do are essentially “better” people than the rest.

And yet, we are all here obviously for more than our love of our voices. We are here for a love—a perhaps idealized one (as all the best kinds of love are)—of a medium that we believe in, one with an ancient and profound history in perhaps every culture on the face of this slowly-simmering earth. We are here because, obviously, poetry has worked, at least for us, at one point in time. All of this reminds me of an excellent essay by Dana Gioia titled “Can Poetry Matter?” The essay is published in Gioia’s book of the same title (and which I have yet to buy/read). If you haven’t read the essay, I highly recommend it (and you can find it online at the link above). It is a very coherent and ambitious essay, and ultimately very optimistic (with its suggestion of a work plan and all). I first read it two years ago, and I don’t know if I was simply in a better mood, but the bulleted recommendations at the end of the article seemed feasible, if hopeful. Now… I obviously don’t feel that way anymore. Yes, it was a historic moment when poetry made it to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in the form of Robert Pinsky; but it was also, to say the least, severely cringe-inducing. Maybe poetry is more at home on NPR, and in poorly attended readings at cafes and bookshops. Maybe that is why we are into poetry in the first place.

In conclusion, and in the spirit of true cynicism and self-absorption, here is my poetic riff on the matter, if anybody cares…

Yes, there are events

May 4, 2007, by No comments yet

As I was reading G Emil’s most excellent interview with Samantha Barrow, I noticed the events calendar in my periphery and that it erroneously reads “No Events.”   This is my fault.  A few weeks ago I started a really exciting new job, and the pace has been pretty nutty.   I’m almost settled in.  I’d like to promise that I’ll update the events calendar this weekend, but in case I don’t, rest assured there are events.  Just check out the Mad Poets’ main page.  Pick a series, any series (right there in the left hand menu), and you’re likely to find a Mad Poets event coming up in a matter of days.

Thanks for your patience.