Archive for the ‘Stephen Russell’ Category
Entry 811 — Monet & Minor News and Thoughts
Thursday, July 26th, 2012
Below is Monet’s Regatta at Argenteuil. It’s from a calendar I’ve had hanging in my computer room for several years because I like it so much. I now have a second interest in it: using it in one of my long division poems. I want to do that because of an event the local visual arts center I belong to (which has a building where it has classes and puts on exhibitions, one of them a yearly national one, albeit none of them are what anyone would call close to the cutting edge) is sponsoring. Many of its painters are painting copies of Monet works, and poets have been invited to submit poems about Monet works to be show with the paintings. There is probably a reading, too. I thought it would be amusing to submit one of my poems, and I’d love to be able to use Regatta at Argenteuil. I have another couple of months I’ve just found out. I thought I needed to get it done by August. Which is why I scanned my copy of the painting a while ago, making it available for this entry, one more that I had nothing much else for.
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I can’t think of anything to go with the painting. I haven’t had very few ideas for the past three or four months, and none I was interested in to do more than jot down somewhere. Last years bout this time I found out about a contest the magazine Rattle has every year. One can submit up to 4 poems to it, and I knew it had published some visual poems at one time, so was inspired to make a set of four long division poems for the contest, four that I still think are among my best. They never arrived because I didn’t put enough stamps on the envelope I sent them in, unaware of the latest cost of sending. I wish I could try again–this deadline is 1 August–but no ideas. And the poems have to be unpublished. I should be saving poems for contests, especially for one like this that I know will occur yearly, but I tend either to post them here, or send them to the latest editors who have invited work from me. Another problem for me is that I’m often unsure whether or not a particular poem of mine has appeared anywhere. The main problem, of course, is that I’m so unprolific. I could do a bunch of Poem poems at just about any time, I think, but I don’t consider them good for contests because so dependent on my main character, whom I believe hard to take to until exposed to a number of times. If even then.
Entry 727 — Analysis of One’s Own Poems
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
From Stephen Russell, at New-Poetry: “Occupy mainstream poetry. I bet Grumman would be on board.”
Me: “Not quite. Too many differences, one being that I consider that otherstream poets are the one-percent—the less-than-one-percent, actually–and that they are superior to mainstream poets whereas I consider the political occupiers inferior to the “one-percent” they are concerned with. Another is that I believe in attacking groups I have differences with, with arguments, not crowds: it’s who has the better thinking that counts for me, not who has the most votes, or the equivalent.”
Me: “I’ve been thinking along those lines the past few days, too—because of a current project of mine, writing analyses of each of my poems. A lawyer friend giving me extremely helpful layman feed-back seems to like my analyses but wondered if a poet analyzing his own poems might not be a tad narcissistic. I do think I’m more self-involved than many, but in this case involved with my vocation, not really my self. One defense I used was that no one else was analyzing my poems. They seem to need it, too, because of their unusualness. Also, I analyze lots of poems by others , too. Later, I realized that all poets must analyze their own poems to some degree, even if they don’t necessarily do so formally, or even write out their analyses. All writers—even lawyers writing position papers—must analyze their own writings.
“Immediately I questioned that: I have trouble imagining a writer simply composing something without looking it over to see what he’s done and if there’s any way he can make it better, but I suppose there must be some who do. A more interesting question is to what degree various poets analyze their own poems. I doubt that many analyze them anywhere near as much as I analyze mine. Is that good or bad? Or neither: a matter of to each his own? My own compulsion to analyze makes it hard for me not to believe those significantly less analytical than I deficient as students of poetry, and that their poems suffer a lack of depth due to it. Not that the over-analyticals’ poems don’t likely suffer from an excess of Important Meaning.”
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