“Build What You Love”: The Search for the Perfect Poetry App
August 13, 2011
City Lights Books' Pocket Poets Series made poetry portable.
I started this post back in October, before becoming aware of quite a number of Poetry Apps for smartphones — that’s what I get for being stuck with a BlackBerry Storm, which sucks at storing apps and is so bad that no one in their right mind would write an app for it much less have one…er…ah…yeah.
Anyway, I’ll amend this post at the end with a few links to good lists of apps, which you can try if you are an iPhone or iPad user or perhaps even an HTC or Android user. At some point, I’ll join you. Here’s what I wrote in October:
My pal Andy Swan had a lively dialogue recently that I overheard on Twitter. He was talking about letting innovators innovate and not be beholden to some altruistic standard that dictates what they should work on.
(Microlending site Kiva.org is wrestling with this question, too, as they recently admitted their main competitor is, well, “Farmville,” the game where you can waste time tending a virtual farm instead of helping Kiva build real farms.)
Anyway, one of Andy’s points was about whether innovators should focus on solving societal ills or focus on solving problems that gnaw at them.
“What if Edison[‘s] not being able to read at night is not a legitimate problem while others starve,” Andy wrote.
He went on to say, “Innovators should build what they love. The market will distribute.”
I wondered what I would build if I were to just build what I love. And it got me thinking. I would love to build a new way of distributing poetry; one that makes it easy, portable and enjoyable for people.
What I’m thinking is something between and app and a book. As transformational as City Lights Books‘ Pocket Poets series, only with better design and more consistent, high quality poetry.
Of course — like my idea from over a decade ago for a poetry cable TV channel — there’s no money in it. Would that my interests were more like the virtual corruption you can participate in on “Mafia Wars,” but there it is.
I mentioned the idea to a dear friend of mine who said that perhaps I’m wrong; maybe there is a market for it. Not a huge market, perhaps, but certainly more than just a handful.
What features would you want in such an app, device, or “book”? Searchable index by poet, title, first line, assumed first line, theme, occasion, time-period, style?
It wouldn’t have to be a huge amount of storage on a device or would it? Could it be in the cloud and accessed via the cloud? Would you have to build in incentives for people to continue using it, contests, triva, etc.?
I’m just throwing this out there and will wrestle with it down the road. I may even pull together a Survey Monkey to gauge the interest need for features, and where the money is going to come from.
Well, it turned out there are quite a few apps out there already, so my idea was a little late in the game. Here are some links to some lists of apps you may want to explore:
Quick Access to Poetry in the Age of Technology (NY Times)
An essential poetry app as addictive as raspberries (Poetry Foundation)
Poetry Apps (Randall Weiss blog)
Poetry Apps (Emerging Writer blog)
Apps for Poets (App Advice b log)
A New Poetry App for the iPhone (Brian Spear)
I like what Spear, a poet and editor of The Rumpus, says in that last post about his ideal poetry app (back in May of 2010!):
The poetry app of my dreams is an aggregator, one that scans the web daily for new publications and then pulls them into a reader. It would need to push traffic to the online journals of origin and would have to include a way to limit the places you receive poetry from–maybe set it up so that the user gets a poem from a place and then decides whether or not to receive future updates from that journal. Swindle is a start toward that on the web, but I haven’t found anything like that for the iPhone yet.
Has that need been met? Do you have a poetry app you recommend? Do you want to build one with me? What would you build if you could build what you love?
Calvin as we found him, October 2009
My pitbull Calvin was adopted a year and a half ago from the PSPCA.
When we asked about his story, we heard a horrible tale of abuse and abandonment followed by rescue and recovery and, ultimately, his second chance.
I composed a poem out of Calvin’s story for Jessie Lendennie’s wonderful book, Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology,![""](http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=1907056505&camp=217145&creative=399349")
Here is my poem,
“Calvin’s Story”
“Make it stop, make it stop,”
was all I kept thinking;
my eyes closed, some
bully biting my body, limbs,
tearing flesh and hair—
Boys pinned me to the pavement,
each one holding a leg, holding
me down on my back.
Another boy – so there were 5?
–pressing the bully into me
head lashing at anything
it could grab with canines.
I’m surprised I didn’t black out—
Then, I remember a scuffle.
I was almost unconscious,
drifting in an out—
Two men freed my limbs,
but still I couldn’t move.
One chased the boys
while the other lifted me,
cradled me, into a van.
I’ll never forget the smell
–camphor, maybe, almost
lavender, medicinal.
The gentle one dabbed my
wounds with a wet cloth,
stroked me slowly, dabbed
–there was a lot of blood;
were there sirens? I don’t
remember sirens. (Should
there have been sirens?)
The next thing I remember
is being on a cold, metal
table – a nurse or doctor
looking me over – another
shaking her head. The first
mumbles something (all I hear
is “Dog,” that word they have
for us), then I’m sure she said,
“This one’s a keeper, let’s give
him a second chance…”
I wake in a crate, damp towel
beneath me, head swirling.
I must be in the “pound,”
there are others barking.
(I wish they would be quiet;
my head hurts.) Then
the pretty nurse or doctor
comes in, mumbles to me;
I look up, try to smile
(this seems to please her),
and I slip in and out of sleep.
Months later,
I’m sitting on a street corner,
leashed, with some of the nice pound
people. A lot of people pass by,
they pat my head, mumble
in that way they do, until one
couple lingers (a child or two
are with them, I can’t recall).
They mumble to the pound people;
one of them (Alpha, I’ll call him)
walks me; he has a firm hand,
but is gentle, in control.
Oh how I wish for a forever
family…but I don’t
want to get my hopes up.
Then, the day is over,
back to the pound – sigh –
guess it wasn’t meant to be.
Next night, however, there
is Alpha, and he’s brought
some others. (Oh, let me be
on best behavior so they will
take me home.) They seem
to like when I snuggle, listen,
take commands, lick the cute
young ones – they are salty sweet!
Days go by after that night,
the pound people tell me
to get ready. Maybe, just maybe,
this is a good sign. Oh, I get so
excited my butt wiggles faster and
faster. Finally, the day comes;
Alpha arrives with the others,
and I think, This is it. I’m going home
with my forever family…to a home;
home at last for my second chance.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Image by *Kid*Doc*One* via Flickr
I love a poet with a sense of humor and who delights in wordplay, especially when she achieves her poem’s aims while making the reader smile.
Those who know me or read my poetry blog or follow me on Twitter or have been on my National Poetry Month email list for some time know that Elizabeth Bishop is my favorite poet. And you also know that this year marks the centennial of her birth (born 8 February 1911). I’ve been celebrating this important centennial in a variety of ways.
I’d like to close this year’s National Poetry Month with a poem by Ms. Bishop called “Filling Station.” I suggest you read it out loud and pay attention to the alliteration and internal rhymes.
It starts with an observation of a “dirty” family filling station, run by a father in a “dirty,/ oil-soaked monkey suit” with “several quick and saucy/ and greasy sons.” They are “all quite thoroughly dirty,” which creates an incantation of “oily” and “dirty,” evolving into almost a portmanteau of dirty and oily in “doily.”
Bishop is playful in this poem and when she concludes with the final stanza by repeating “oi” and “so” and “-y” sounds, culminating in that brilliant arrangement of oil cans, I can’t help chuckling no matter how many times I read it.
Somebody loves us all, indeed. Happy Birthday, Ms. Bishop.
Here is Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Filling Station”
Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO—SO—SO—SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
–Elizabeth Bishop
Here’s a recording of Ms. Bishop reading this poem from Poetry Foundation/Bishop
Czeslaw Milosz, Miami Bookfair International, 1986
This year marks a couple of important centenaries in poetry, which I will celebrate this week and next. The first is the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who was one of the giants of 20th-century Polish literature.
Miłosz was born in Lithuania, where his parents escaped the political upheaval in their native Poland. Late, as an adult, he fled Poland and the oppressive post-war Communist regime. He could not have picked a place of greater contrast in which to settle: Berkeley, California in the 1960s.
As Seamus Heaney wrote recently, Miłosz “was poised between lyricism and witness.” Indeed, as Miłosz himself wrote in The Witness of Poetry, “A peculiar fusion of the individual and the historical took place, which means that events burdening a whole community are perceived by a poet as touching him in a most personal manner. Then poetry is no longer alienated.”
But Heaney sums up the poet’s lasting power. “What irradiates the poetry and compels the reader is a quality of wisdom,” wrote Heaney. “Everything is carried and feels guaranteed by the voice. Even in translation, even when he writes in a didactic vein, there is a feeling of phonetic undertow, that the poem is a trawl, not just talk. And this was true of the work he did right up to his death in Kraków in 2004.”
Probably one of Miłosz’s most famous poems, “Dedication,” was written in 1945 in Warsaw at the end of World War II. That is, as Stephen O’Connor wrote in an excellent essay on sentimentality in Miłosz’s poetry, “after more than six years of Nazi occupation, after the bloody suppression of the Warsaw uprising, the subsequent deportation of the city’s more than one million inhabitants, the destruction of all its remaining buildings, and its liberation by the Soviet army… under such circumstances, the notion that poetry might help ‘save nations and people’ takes on a rather different character than it had for me when I first read ‘Dedication’ back in 1973.”
Here is Czesław Miłosz’s “Dedication,” in his own translation:
You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.
What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;
Blind force with accomplished shape.
Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city;
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.
— Czesław Miłosz,Warsaw, 1945
##
On my poem “A Pantoum for Aceh”
April 21, 2011
Photograph by Ernest Goh
The world is rarely an ordered or orderly place. Poetic forms often seem to try to impose order or uncover it by using rhyme and repetition.
Repetition especially indicates an order that may, in fact, not be in our experience of the world, yet it can be one of the most comforting uses of language.
When the tsunami of 2004 hit coastal Aceh, Indonesia, it turned their world upside down — in some very profound and powerful ways. So much destruction was left in its wake, yet the tsunami also brought rebuilding and healing to that region. Where there had been strife and conflict, the people came together in the wake of the disaster.
Ernest Goh‘s photographs of the post-tsunami devastation in Aceh were the subject of a competition some time ago, which solicited poems in response to the images. Because the pantoum originated in Malaysia in the fifteenth-century, I thought it a particularly useful form to approach the subject matter.
The pantoum is composed of four-line stanzas with the second and fourth lines of each stanza becoming the first and third lines of the next stanza, and the last line of the poem repeating the first line.
Here is my poem, “A Pantoum for Aceh”:
Think of the world turned upside down,
The boat on the mud simulating the sea.
The wave beating down on the coast was brown.
Two-hundred-thousand swept into the sea.
The boat on the mud simulating the sea;
Remember the baby doll rising out of the flood.
Two-hundred-thousand swept into the sea.
The mosque, still standing, is covered in mud.
Remember the baby doll rising out of the flood?
Think of the houses, each righted by mercy;
The mosque, still standing, is cleaned of its mud.
Can you ever get dry after soaking in sea?
Think of the houses, each righted by mercy;
Building back better, lifted up from the ground.
Can you ever get dry after soaking in sea?
Rebuilding a land that was altered and drowned.
Building back better, lifted up from the ground.
The wave beating down on the coast was brown.
Rebuilding a land that was altered and drowned:
Think of the world turned upside down.
–Scott Edward Anderson, 2009
Rebecca Schumejda, her Dad, and a friend.
Her poems are about loss and longing, gardening and dishwashing, motherhood and marriage — and not a few of them are about the seedy side of life. (Rebecca once co-owned a pool hall.)
Rebecca Schumejda is the author of Falling Forward, a full-length collection of poems (2009); and several chapbooks, including The Map of Our Garden (2009); Dream Big Work Harder (2006); The Tear Duct of the Storm (2001); and the postcard poem “Logic.” She received her MA in Poetics and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and her BA in English and Creative Writing from SUNY New Paltz.
You can read more about Rebecca’s poetry at http://www.rebeccaschumejda.com/
Schumejda’s poem “In This Picture” was written after she found a photograph of her father some time after he died and her own daughter was born. The photo of Rebecca and her father was taken at the end of a fishing trip. I like the simplicity of this poem and the short lines, which calls to mind the shortness of breath one gets when faced with loss.
It also made me think of a dear friend whose father passed away ten years ago today; so this is for her, and for Rebecca who wrote the poem, and for everyone who has lost a parent or loved one.
Here is Rebecca Schumejda’s poem
“In This Picture”
Never will you
bait the hook
for the child
floundering
inside me.
In this picture
we sandwich
a blue fish.
In this picture
we both wear
stubborn noses.
In this picture
you smell like
saltwater.
In this picture
is all I have
left of you.
I am seven
and in love
with you, forever.
In this picture
your heart
was not weak.
In this picture
no tombstones,
just fishhooks.
Someday, curious,
your grandchild
will ask
who you were
and I will say
in this picture
you were Neptune,
god of the sea.
–Rebecca Schumejda
Poem in Your Pocket Day: “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
April 14, 2011
Today is “Poem-in-Your Pocket” Day and the poem in my pocket is Elizabeth Bishop‘s villanelle “One Art.”
This is perhaps the most famous of Bishop’s poems, touching as it does on the loss of love. It is also a poem about writing poetry, as has been asserted by a number of critics, and about giving up control for the sake of art. There is a kind of mastery in losing control that I think both frightened and emboldened Bishop.
In the end, the poet (and the speaker) is not in control and the poem ends (almost) in disaster, with a stroke of poetic mastery in that last line.
Here is Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
–Elizabeth Bishop
A Cento from The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound
April 12, 2011
Pound in Pisa
I am really enjoying John R. Keene’s run at the helm of the Poetry Foundation’s Twitter moniker @harriet_poetry. He regularly talks about forms of poetry and offers examples — famous and not so famous — and asks poets to submit their own versions.
Last Friday night, John was talking about centos, which the Academy of American Poets describes as “From the Latin word for “patchwork,” the cento is a poetic form made up of lines from poems by other poets. Though poets often borrow lines from other writers and mix them in with their own, a true cento is composed entirely of lines from other sources. Early examples can be found in the work of Homer and Virgil.”
I composed a cento using several lines from several sections of Ezra Pound’s “Pisan Cantos.” Pound wrote this section of his long, incomplete poem, which totals 120 sections, while incarcerated in Italy during World War II.
Here is my cento,
A Cento dei Cantos di Ezra Pound[1]
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
a man on whom the sun has gone down
and the wind came as hamadryas[2] under the sun-beat.
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
nor is it for nothing that the chrysalids mate in the air
color di luce,
green splendor and as the sun through pale fingers.
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage—
I don’t know how humanity stands it
with a painted paradise at the end of it
without a painted paradise at the end of it
the dwarf morning-glory twines round the grass blade
whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
Nothing matters but the quality
of the affection—
in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind;
dove sta memoria?
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
The mountain and shut garden of pear trees in flower
here rested.
What thou lovest well remains—
–Scott Edward Anderson
[1] Composed of lines from “The Pisan Cantos” by Ezra Pound; specifically Cantos LXXIV, LXXVI, LXXXI.
[2] May refer to Hamadryas (mythology), the daughter of Oreios and mother of the Hamadryads in Greek mythology, or to Hamadryas argentea (also called Silvery Buttercup), a species of plant in the Ranunculaceae family.
Jo Shapcott. (Image by Getty Images via @daylife)
Another poet from across the Pond for this week. British poet Jo Shapcott was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. She once described how the treatment left her feeling “reborn as someone slightly different.” Last year, she published a collection that emerged from this experience, Of Mutability.
“The body has always been a subject for me,” she told The Guardian in an interview. “It is the stage for the high drama of our lives, from birth to death and everything in between. When you observe your own body under physical change like that, there’s a new kind of urgency. I had a lumpectomy, my lymph glands out, chemo and radiotherapy. You go through several different stages, so you don’t know how ill you are for a while, and the verdict keeps getting worse and worse, until you can actually take action, start treatment.”
The concept of mutability has a long tradition in English poetry extending back as far as Chaucer. Mutability points to the transience of things and of the inevitable changes of life.
Wordsworth spoke of “the unimaginable touch of Time” in his poem, “Mutability.” Shelley ended his poem of the same title,
It is the same!–For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
Shapcott is no stranger to life’s mutability. Her parents both died unexpectedly when she was 18. She found solace in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, who had also suffered early loss and dramatic change throughout her life. Shapcott went to Oxford to pursue a PhD on Bishop’s poetry, but left for Harvard to study with poet Seamus Heaney when she received a scholarship. It turned out to be a fortuitous mentorship.
Her books include Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992), My Life Asleep (1998), and Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (2000).
Shapcott writes with a “‘rangy, long-legged’ brio,” as one critic described her tone. Her language is equally intellectual and sensual, enigmatic and direct, which makes for poetry of breadth and range. Consequently very few poems feel alike in the way you can tell the work of certain poets, a Gary Snyder poem or a Billy Collins poem, for example. (The one exception in Shapcott’s work is her “Mad Cow” persona poems.)
Like Bishop, Shapcott is rarely overtly personal, even when writing about her illness from which she is now, thankfully, fully recovered and working on a new book.
Here is Jo Shapcott’s poem, “Of Mutability”:
Too many of the best cells in my body
are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw
in this spring chill. It’s two thousand and four
and I don’t know a soul who doesn’t feel small
among the numbers. Razor small.
Look down these days to see your feet
mistrust the pavement and your blood tests
turn the doctor’s expression grave.
Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets,
angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye,
join them if you like, learn astrophysics, or
learn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality,
flying, fishing, sex without touching much.
Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.
–Jo Shapcott
On Sestinas and “Second Skin”
April 5, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
The poet John R. Keene was tweeting about sestinas on Saturday under the Poetry Foundation’s @harriet_poetry moniker and I sent him one that I tried back in 1994. It started from an actual scene I witnessed at the time in my garden in Garrison, NY.
According to The Academy of American Poets, “The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction.”
The Academy description lists some tour de force sestinas, including Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte” and John Ashbery’s “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” along with “Sestina” and “A Miracle for Breakfast” by Elizabeth Bishop, and “Paysage Moralise” by W.H. Auden.
Here is my sestina, which pales in comparison like the flaking sloughed-off skin of the snake it describes:
Second Skin
In the yard by the barn was a snake
resting on a leaf-pile in the garden,
nearby his old shod skin
limp and lifeless under a noon-day sun.
Abandoned on the blades of grass,
like an untangled filament of memory.
The sight of him fired my memory,
which cast a shadow on the snake
(who now slithered away in the grass).
He lent a curious aspect to the garden–
aspect being its relation to the sun
–not unlike his relation to the skin.
He seemed to remember the skin.
(Do snakes have that much memory?)
Or was it a trick of the sun
that he mistook for a female snake?
When he made his way out of the garden,
I crept along quietly in the grass.
As I followed him there in the grass,
he stretched ever closer to the skin;
his path leading out of the garden,
as if tracing the line of a memory.
How strange, I thought, this snake,
disregarding the late summer sun.
Later, over-heated in afternoon sun,
I lay down to rest on the grass.
I watched again as the snake
tried to resuscitate his discarded skin,
perhaps to revive its dead memory
and lure it back home to the garden.
Cutting the lawn by the garden,
I must have been dizzy with sun,
or dozing in the haze of a memory.
Translucent flakes feathered the grass:
it was then I remembered the skin;
it was then I remembered the snake.
I sat by the garden dropping fresh-cut grass
onto my arm and its sun-baked skin,
clippings of memory snaking through my mind.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 