#poetrypressweek

[backwordsblog]

The night at @poetrypressweek's 5th season is very impressive. Some great emerging and talented poets! #poetrypressweek #ppw16 (at DISJECTA)

[poetrypressweek]

Poetry Press Week is coming to the O, Miami Festival in April! Submissions open to Miami-area poets. Send us your unpublished work and show concepts by December 31. 

[annmarieomalley]

Thanks for the great picture of my show last night @marthagrover #poetrypressweek #ppw15 #hautepoetry (at DISJECTA)

[annmarieomalley]

Hey guys #poetrypressweek (at DISJECTA)

[poetrypressweek]

Poet Spotlight: Robert Lashley

We like to ask the current season’s poets about the conversation between their work and the process of creating a runway show. Here’s what Robert has to say:

How are different elements of your work (subjects or forms) showing up in your stage concepts?

Though Sean Bowers has hinted that he will touch on aspects of the blues, jazz, and funk, I am going to find out along with everybody. Bowers is my literary soul brother: I have complete trust in him. I also believe that there comes a point in the creation of a poem where it isn't yours anymore. I'm excited to see what he does with my work.

What most excites you about showing your work at Poetry Press Week? What’s most terrifying?

The most exciting and terrifying aspects of this are the risks that I’m taking. I'm beyond proud of The Homeboy Songs. It was the book I needed to write before I could write anything else. I had to name and make sense of my home turf and do it in the street and lyric languages inundated in my head growing up.

Up South is different in a lot of ways and has to be. I'm not a political writer, but current events shocked my imagination into a sort of surreal state. I have less rights and am in more danger as a conscious black person than any time in my life or my parents’ life. The voting rights acts is gutted, stand your ground is the law of the land in over half the states in the union, and the right wingers and moderate liberals who make excuses for the deaths of Trayvon and Eric Gardner, sound EXACTLY like the right wingers and moderate liberals who made excuses for the death of Emmett Till.

My response to this was to go inward, create art about grandparents, great aunts and great uncles, and try to understand the rituals and coping mechanisms they had to make it in society. My political act wasn’t to make poems that served as rhetorical statements but to center my imagination around the world of my ancestors and the complex ways that they affected the community that they lived in. These poems have called for a different style than the “Street/Schooled Lashley Voice”. My primary fears is getting out that voice, that comfort zone, and whether or not the poems succeed or fail away from it.  I’m scared. But I’m also excited.  

What elements of the fashion industry do you most identify with in planning your show or choosing the work that goes into it?

I don’t know as much of the fashion industry as I should, and I apologize for that. However, I am sure that Bowers being himself—an artist, a unique fashion dandy, and person of integrity—will be a worthy person on that stage.

How would you like your show to challenge public and critical opinions of what poetry can be?

By showing that creating art-something that lasts, something that isn’t just a lecture-is a way of speaking truth to power.  And that being a good brother should mean something.

I have been an outlaw in some black PNW circles. I don’t think that the only thing a black poet should do is hit a white person in the head. I don't think hip hop is above questioning. I believe the Black Arts Movement was fraught with racism, sexism, anti semitism and homophobia, and I hate the fact that there are so many respectability politics policemen trolling women of color. Like all thinking men, I am not perfect and am working through my own issues with machismo; and anyone can feel free to call me on my bullshit when I slip in it. I also do not think that sexism is the province of black men. However, I am sick of creepy militant cat daddies, fake conscious brothers, and respectability politics poets shaming black women and then holding up and ideal sister as someone who has no life except to cook, clean and fuck them. Those men don't love black women: they love body parts and free labor.

I don't want to ask for a cookie in what I’m saying. No one is obligated to like me for speaking things that pass a rudimentary level of decency. The only thing that matters and will truly matter is my actions. What I want to show-in my conduct and the aesthetics of my art-is my actions as a thoughtful artist and black man.

What are the trends you see emerging in American poetry? What should we be watching for this season and beyond?

I don’t know what’s hot right now, but I read a lot and there are a lot of contemporary poets that I like very much. I am very moved by what Terence Hayes, Jamaal May, Joshua Mehigan, and Tarfia Faizullah are doing with lyric, language and form. Claudia Rankine has been a needed disruptive force in American poetry, a complex poet who brought experimental aesthetics uptown and connected them with the immediate foundations of the African American experience, all while challenging constructs in relation to voice, point of view, narrative and style. I love a lot of what University of Hell press is doing and think Leah Noble Davidson is the most underrated poet in the Pacific Northwest (Bowers has a superb book on U of H’s press).  Also, I believe there are a lot of very promising poets who are writing excellent work and deserve more attention and exposure: Kris Hall, Dee Dee Chapman, Elizabeth Vignali, Jessica Lohafer, Graham Isaac, and McKendy Fils-Aime to name a few.

What else do you find intriguing or challenging about presenting at Press Week that you’d like to share?

The only other things I can say is that I was honored to be invited to read with this lineup, and really worked hard to make the new poems worthy of their class. Thank you for the interview, and a thank you to Poetry Press week for inviting me to read.

[poetrypressweek]

Poet Spotlight: Andrea Hollander

We like to ask the current season’s poets about the conversation between their work and the process of creating a runway show. Here’s what Andrea has to say:

What most excites you about showing your work at Poetry Press Week? What’s most terrifying?

Will my work fit? That’s a question I ask myself. After all, I’m 68 years old, therefore probably the oldest of the poets invited to present my work during Portland Poetry Press Week, and I take the invitation first of all as a real compliment. Compared with the majority of the work I witnessed in December 2014 at PPW, my poems will seem tame.

What elements of the fashion industry do you most identify with in planning your show or choosing the work that goes into it?

If I were to compare my work to that of the clothing presented at New York’s annual Fashion Week, I’d state that my design team (composed only of my muse and me) relies mainly on fabric—the textures of language—and on function (a dress is a dress and should be recognizable as a dress)—but not on sensationalism. My muse and I want the poems we create to attract and sustain an audience, but in order to do so, the poems must be accessible enough on first listen to make the audience feel welcome. In terms of fashion, one could say that my muse and I aim for the amazing three-piece suit whose jacket has been replaced by a cape, rendering the suit wonderfully unusual and versatile but at the same time practical. Or perhaps the suit’s chartreuse collar will attract attention, or the unusual shape of the skirt made from antique brocade that has been cut on a bias. But the suit is still a suit. And one that audience members can picture themselves wearing. When our poems are modeled on the runway, they may not shock anyone, but neither will they be forgotten.

Or at least that is my muse’s goal and my own. I create suits, not costumes.

How are different elements of your work (subjects or forms) showing up in your stage concepts?

Next Wednesday is the final 3-hour session of Fixed and Open Forms, a 5-week workshop I am conducting at the Attic Institute. In the workshop, we examine not only tradition-based fixed forms (sonnet, abecedarian, ghazal, villanelle, to name a few) and also less common and more recently popular fixed forms (the erasure, the cento, the lipogram, to name another few) but we also discuss ways of bending or breaking such forms—opening them, as it were. More than bending and breaking, it's essentially about freeing oneself to invent new forms. But the important word here is form.

Good clothing design is based on good form. And I do not believe there exists a good poem that is formless. Poetry is an oral/aural art (even when readers hear a poem only in their own head) and the poet must guide readers’ experience of the poem so that there is a sense of journey—beginning, middle, and end—a sense not unlike the journey experienced within that other related oral/aural art, music. While we listeners are listening, we may not recognize the specific parts of the journey, nor even the fact that we are within a kind of spell that removes our conscious awareness, but if the poem is to be successful, it must pull us along satisfactorily but not predictably.

What else do you find intriguing or challenging about presenting at Press Week that you’d like to share?

Some forms rely on the breaking of expectation. And I welcome the experience of being in the audience of such offerings. But I also appreciate even more the poet who can bring me something that is invitingly described on the menu and that tastes delicious when it enters my mouth yet contains mysterious ingredients I cannot immediately identify. I want to want more, just as the poet wants me to want more. But I will eat slowly. Because I want the experience to last. The key here, in other words, is to savor.

Okay, I have fallen from the analogy of clothing to that of food. But maybe this is appropriate. If poetry is an oral/aural enterprise, the mouth is certainly involved. To read a poem aloud is part of the experience of enjoying it. Words have texture, their arrangement in phrases and lines and sentences creates rhythm. Read aloud Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating,” in part a kind of ars poetica, and you’ll understand firsthand what I’m getting at here. (The poem will also make you want to eat blackberries. Note: don’t read the poem on the Poetry Society of America website, as it contains an unfortunate typographical error.)

In fashion or not, my goal is to compose poems that are both entertaining and useful—entertaining in that they are grounded in the human traditions of making music and telling stories (not that they rely wholly on either), and useful in that they might disturb our lives enough to reinforce our humanness.

[poetrypressweek]

Poet Spotlight: Stacey Tran

We like to ask the current season’s poets about the conversation between their work and the process of creating a runway show. Here’s what Stacey has to say:

How are different elements of your work (subjects or forms) showing up in your stage concepts?

Prompting. Parsing. Assembling. Breathing. Generating. Weaving. Layering.

Jeanne Claude & Christo’s “Wrapped Trees” in Riehen, Switzerland are these huge time-based and temporary filters of light. Cy Twombly’s immense gestural strokes the size of a room evoke the sense of looping, repetition, collage. Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit is a metronome. Hans Haacke’s “Blue Sail” at the Venice Biennale is a reminder that the conjugation of simplicity and complexity is a necessary balance. Kengo Kuma’s tea house architecture and Grimshaw Architects’ Cutty Sark Enclosure are examples of human-made environments for preservation and ceremony. Troels Sandegård’s “Bodies and Bodies” translates as a lung, an inhalation of breath.

What most excites you about showing your work at Poetry Press Week? What’s most terrifying?

Exciting: If it was anything like last year, hundreds of people will be in the room for this. What’s presented is an immediate invitation to the senses. I think for some of us, the work presented at Poetry Press Week could easily exceed a certain internet reach. The room will be lit up in real time. The poets presenting will have to deal with the reaction of the audience in real time. It won’t be a post or shared link that gets pushed down to the way way bottom of one social media feed after another. Anyone who wants to be there can be there; anyone there can decide to walk away. That assertiveness is possible. I want people to walk away from an experience if they don’t want to be there. Poetry is boring. People don’t want to stay for the whole thing, but I think Poetry Press Week keeps people charged and wanting to stay. In that case, the presenting poets will be incredibly vulnerable - no take-backs! What happens on stage unfolds into a life of its own in front of an alive, engaged, reactive, decision-making audience. It will be a very candid experience embossed in our muscles and memory.

Travis Meyer helped me think about how to create an environment or stage that would not distract the audience from the p o e m (s). His advice really helped me think through how to focus on the work, and how the stage element would play faithfully in parallel to the writing portion. I’ve been working with Lindsay Ruoff to craft a structure that would have a life of its own on stage, but (hopefully) won’t be a hindrance to experiencing the pleasure of the poems.

Terrifying: Some of us depend on technology and the flawed material world to make this event happen. Something could go really wrong (sorry, but I had to say it out loud!). Something that is very real about performance is that it could unravel on stage. If so, hopefully gracefully. “That was on purpose” is like an emergency parachute in performance…but I don’t like using it as an excuse or cover-up for an art accident.

What’s presented on stage might seem unwieldy, which is true to my process of generating ideas and producing a text. The structure we are creating for the stage is intended to be a visual cue, representing the process of creating the poems, which I did with Lindsay Ruoff (outside on my patio, daytime), Rachel Springer (in my apartment, daytime), Amy Bernstein (in my apartment, nighttime), and Leena Joshi (outside a coffee shop, daytime), respectively. The writing process itself was multi-layered: we wrote these poems sitting across the table from each other. We were being naked with language. The structure on stage represents the porousness / layering / weaving / transparency / intimacy we experienced while creating the work. I hope what I’m sharing can invite the audience to ask questions that I cannot answer for them, that they will have to keep searching out by producing their own works.

What elements of the fashion industry do you most identify with in planning your show or choosing the work that goes into it?

The geometry. The structure. The proportion. The form. The relative scale to the body. The application and association to the body. The repetition. The precision. The measure. The putting pieces together of it. The seams.  The body without the body. The space for looking. The perfectionism. The neutral. The androgyny. The materiality. The timelessness. The baring it all. The read into it.