Tag: poetry

Missing Noah’s Ark: an ekphrastic poem adapted from the painting “The Flood”

Erika Bell Leave a comment

I go under.

Water rushing into my ears,

bubbling out of my nose,

eye sockets overflowing with its saltiness

my body sinks

deeper.

As the black dye pinned to my skin

for the past 43 years

seeps off

dissipating into

tendrils,

creating a dark, hazy atmosphere

above my heavy head

My body, feather-light, floats lower,

lower.

I become the black

clunky dye,

drifting higher,

higher,

to the surface then

Spreading.

I am lies

contorted truths of passion and empathy for our family’s downfall.

I am greed

thirsting, devouring, licking clean all the wealth of my life.

I am anger

slapping, spitting, singeing, done to those I know best.

Tunneling down

ricocheting against the green waters,

I become numb to my senses.

I see cloaked darkness,

hearing the grain of dust fall in,

tasting the liquid that consumes my molecular structure.

I hit a wall.

I think my back feels

the splintered wood of a boat.

-Erika Bell

Nikky Finney: Living in the Folds of Poetry

Erika Bell Leave a comment

Sitting down for my first poetry reading, I was overcome with nerves. Shifting in my seat, switching my legs back and forth, I began to realize that I wasn’t completely sure of what kind of audience member I was supposed to be at a poetry reading. At basketball games, I’m the obnoxious, overtly analytic member, and at plays I become the characters, I’m lost in the story, I sincerely don’t know who I am. So going into my first live poetry reading at the UMMA of Nikky Finney’s work, I was a little apprehensive of how I was going to react. What if she would look out into the audience and see my face mixed with unexpected, unrecognizable emotion, and I could ruin everything for her!

Luckily, what occurs in my mind is an overdramatized, yet very entertaining conglomeration of thoughts. As Finney was given an introduction gratifying her creative, opinionated, and humbled personality, I began to warm up to the reading. This was a real person who just happened to have written some incredible award-winning works, no big deal. Nonetheless, Finney began her readings, conversationally opening up about her moments of intrigue, and feelings of repression and progression, that brought her to relinquish her thoughts into words.

Most of her writing was so experiential. An interaction with a woman looking her in the eye telling her that “she writes like she’s never been hit before”, an affectionate love for her Uncle Freddie’s astrological beliefs, the connection to the mother and baby penguins after a viewing of March of the Penguins at the cinema, all became experiences transformed into poems about two women understanding each other’s journeys, developing an appreciation for the sheer luck of life, being the nurture that feeds nutrients to someone you care for.

By this point I was floating from my chair, no longer was I flipping rigidly from side-to-side, I was hanging on to every word Finney was saying hoping to absorb who she is as a writer and a poet, so I could revitalize who I was in return.

The poems read by Nikky Finney were complex, historical in their own right, and thought-provoking. I recommend picking up one of her collections this upcoming break and really look to take in the feelings brought on by each one, you might even float away like I did.

Smile Baby

Erika Bell Leave a comment

Gurgling in my stomach

making its way up through my chest

until its clenched in the back of my throat,

wanting a new location knowing there’s only one way out.

Starting off as a cackle it grows depth

it grows deep

it becomes as loud as the bell

interrupting much-needed sleep,

it has rhythm, soul, grit.

It escapes with a vengeance

searching for its heartless victim,

yet it will come out long, hard, strong, peaceful.

It pulsates, strengthens from the inner glow

lined with dreams and hope within the core of my body

connected like an invisible string.

It will flourish, when I flourish

Let’s be honest,

sometimes it takes every inch of every bone

in my carelessly contorted body to hear it again.

It tries.

Starting from the back of my throat,

a meek squeak escapes,

sucked clean of all soul,

a dry towel looking to quench another’s

dying desire for it’s presence.

My mouth brick ups, I tell myself

“just smile baby.”

Let’s Talk About Poetry

Erika Bell Leave a comment

I’m taking a creative writing class that is focusing on the creative side of poetry, and it got me thinking about the vastness of poetry, and what it gives us as readers. Now, I’ve been a poetry reader for a good chunk of my life, but I wouldn’t say I understood everything I read. I then took a class a year ago where our focus was analyzing poetry and prose for it’s deeper meaning, what was this writing trying to say and why? Going from an analytic mind in regards to poetry to a creative one is kind of scary. The world of creative writing is a large one, and it can entail some of the weirdest facets of a person’s mind and soul, as well as some of the greatest.

Sometimes it seems that the best poets are those who have come before us, from the 18th-20th century, and let’s not forget Shakespeare. Never forget Shakespeare. Poetry from the past has become so relevant to the present it’s scary. Poems about anger, joy, love, heartache, washing dishes, just about any topic of life and death has been covered somewhere in the realm of poetry.

Poetry from the past has lined up a set of expectations for poets in the 21st century to reach and overcome. It has to be creative, witty, meaningful, and somehow inconspicuous so you don’t know exactly what they’re saying, but then again you do.

I read poetry because it reminds me of the romantic connection that I have with writing. It sounds silly, but when I read poetry, I feel like I’m reading a personal piece of something in someone’s mind, and some deeper connection about life and its many ups and downs is brought to light. With it there’s a rhythm, a power, that a novel can’t always get at, and a song can’t always thoroughly explain. Find a favorite poet or a favorite piece and thrive on the energy that either brings to you.

To delve into the repertoire of poets then and now would be to wide a margin to cover, but I do encourage the practice of reading poetry for the sole reason that it allows its readers to take a quick and, I’m not going to lie, effort-filled journey, through a story they’ve had yet to experience. Collections of poetry are like personal notes addressed to you that open up the crooks of someone’s imagination just for you to enjoy.

Here are some poems from a couple of my favorite poets:

Homage to my Hips by Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

Dover Beach  by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.


Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.


The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Internet Poetry is Revitalizing

Mark Buckner Leave a comment

“I don’t think that people, like, think that people still like poetry”

—

Me neither.

Probably you don’t read poetry often.

But do you browse Facebook / Twitter / Tumblr often?

If you do, you may be digesting poetry without even realizing!

—

Enter “internet poetry.”

Video: Everything Here Now – Internet Poetry (I tried to embed this; it wouldn’t work T_T )

I came across this short documentary covering the “internet poetry” phenomenon while browsing Tumblr. It’s really pretty good. It has images of poems, interviews with ostensibly knowledgeable people, discussion regarding academia, distribution, minimalism, new media / forms, etc.

If you want to just go ahead and watch the video, that’ll probably be better than reading my post, at this point, if you’re at all interested.

But, if you’re still here, ya, I think internet poetry’s great:

It’s recontextualizing rather mundane things, like tweets, Facebook statuses, and memes, and making them into art. Ask yourself if you want your social media newsfeeds filled with ‘news’ regarding what your friend ate for lunch or ART.

Internet poetry is sorta doing what that light bulb ‘art piece’ in the art museum is doing: via the same way placing a light bulb in an art museum makes an artistic statement, internet poetry uses social media / new media / etc. to make poetic statements.

E.g., this image, from Internet Poetry, the Tumblr:

http://internetpoetry.tumblr.com/post/37052166167
http://internetpoetry.tumblr.com/post/37052166167

Normally, you wouldn’t consider poetic a search engine’s telling you that there are no results. But here, the context of a “poetry” blog, as well as the humorous choice of search words, makes the piece poetic.

Poetry like this, which makes the mundane aesthetic, isn’t exactly new. The internet is what’s new. The method of distribution, it turns out, matters a whole lot. It’s changing the game.

If your tweet can be a poem, and it can get published on Internet Poetry (I’ve gotten stuff published there; it’s easy; I encourage people to submit!), then the gatekeeping on poetry publication is being broken. What does that mean, for the gatekeeping on poetry publication to be broken? I don’t know, because it’s just started and it’s still happening, but it seems exciting.

—

“It’s encouraging people to write, because they don’t think like, ‘Oh I’ll write this but no one will ever see it, and if I send this in to literary magazines–like traditional ones, print ones–I won’t hear back for months and months, and no one’s ever going to see my work.”

I resonated with that sentiment from the video a lot^, because I’ve submitted to UofM’s literary magazines for years, and I’ve only ever heard back from Oddslot Xylem to say that I didn’t get chosen.

On the other hand, with the internet, I’ve been published by Internet Poetry a lot, and I’ve been able to self-publish to an online audience I earnestly believe to be significantly larger than Xylem’s.

Something seems cool, about that.

from http://livemylief.com
from http://livemylief.com

I feel like I kinda wrote about all this a couple weeks ago, in a post about vlogging (as poetry).

Idris is Coming! Idris is Coming!

Aislinn 1 Comment

Tomorrow is a very exciting day for me.  Really, for all of Ann Arbor.  For myself, I get to see my good friend Idris Goodwin for the first time in nearly three months. He will be coming from Iowa City, where he’s pursuing an MFA in playwriting, to read from his New York Times acclaimed book These Are The Breaks.  He has been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, has produced some rap albums, and his latest play, How We Got On, about three suburban kids who find their identities and forge friendships through hip-hop in 1988 was produced by the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.  That is where we met, and I think we both had one of the best summers of our lives.  For the benefit of the rest of Ann Arbor, tomorrow night he’ll be joined at the Tea Haus with friend and fellow author Kevin Coval.  I don’t know much about Mr. Coval, but if he’s a friend of Idris’s, I’m sure he’s worth checking out.  His website says he is an educator, poet, the co-founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival, and a regular contributor to Chicago Public Radio (you caught me, I’m an NPR nerd).  I’m sure this will be a great night at a small venue in one of my favorite parts of Ann Arbor.

It still kind of amazes me that I am lucky enough to call Idris a friend.  I had one of the best internships available to theatre students this past summer.  I was privileged enough to work in the literary office of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.  The O’Neill presents four conferences during the summer: the National Playwrights Conference, National Music Theater Conference, National Puppetry Conference, and National Cabaret and Performance Conference.  I realized it was a big deal as it was happening, but it wasn’t until I got back to school that I realized just how big.  Just as a quick idea of the caliber of plays and musicals presented at the O’Neill, here are some notable alumni: Fences by August Wilson, Uncommon Women and Others by Wendy Wasserstein, Fuddy Meers by David Lindsay-Abaire, In the Heights by Lin Manuel-Miranda, Avenue Q by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and [title of show] by Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen.

I was a literary intern, a position that I will cover when I do my overview of dramaturgy, but most importantly for our purposes today, I was assigned as the literary representative to How We Got On, as well as Quiara Alegría Hudes’s The Happiest Song Plays Last.  The team I worked with on How We Got On absolutely changed my life.  I know that sounds like such a beginning career 21-year-old thing to say, but it is 100% true.  The respect that I received throughout the process meant the world to me and has given me the confidence necessary to work in a field as tough as theatre.  Am I still terrified to graduate in May?  Absolutely.  But do I feel worlds more prepared than many of the other people trying to pursue the same career I am?  You bet.

Idris is a playwright.  At the O’Neill, playwrights are demi-gods.  At some theatres, they worship the actors.  At others, the directors.  At the O’Neill, the text is what is sacred.  Idris could have very well written off this teeny non-hip-hop girl from the middle of nowhere, but instead he embraced the idea of a lit rep immediately.  We bonded over our Michiganian heritage—Faygo and Better Made chips, “I don’t have an accent,” and Bell’s brewery.  Rather than being his assistant, we worked as a team.  The same can be said of the wonderful director and brilliant dramaturg.  I’m still not sure what I did to deserve such a creatively satisfying work environment.  One of the first days at the O’Neill, the interns were told that everyone there wanted to help them become the next generation of theatre professionals.  I smiled but on the inside I sort of rolled my eyes.  It seemed cliché and just a nice thing to say.  I never expected the love, friendship, and respect that I left with in August.  My experience altered me not only as a dramaturg but also as a playwright and reader.  On top of what I learned about myself as an artistic individual and the field more broadly, due to the nature of the play I also got to learn about fun things like hip-hop and rap in the 80s, WWF, and watertowers.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned that summer was from Idris.  I learned how to rap.  But he still does it better.  Come see him do his thing tomorrow night at the Tea Haus.  I know I will.