POETRY MONTH : Inspiration, Community, Tradition :: Week 2 :: Editorial Recap
HO! TRIBE!
April 1st brought us poetry month, and on that day of inauguration and celebration many members of this community came together for POTLATCH 2012 to share and co-create. (Photos, updates, and CoCo content to come -- follow link above for gallery). We read, we shared, we sang, we broke bread, we laughed, and we felt -- well, I'll speak for myself -- I felt in my very cells a shift towards what can be possible when a community commits to themselves and each other, and the work we make individually and together.
The elation, the purity of relaxation into common purpose, the love and mutual respect has carried on not only from this event but from this week's posts, kicking off Exit Strata's wholehearted effort to serve as a platform for this love-in and value creation via virtual space.
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition: Day 4 :: Tishon Woolcock on Orhan Veli Kanik
I’m going to level with you; I know nothing about Turkey and I know even less about Turkish Poetry. Luckily, I have Buké, my sole Turkish friend. Buké is tiny, smokes cigarettes, and speaks with a directness that can sometimes be mistaken for rudeness. It is she who introduced me to the Turkish poet Orhan Veli Kanik (1914-1950). I can’t speak to Kanik’s stature but, like Buké, his poetry is about as direct as a poet can get. Like the work of William Carlos Williams or, more contemporarily, Billy Collins, Kanik’s poems have been described as the kind of poetry that convinces readers they, too, can write a poem. Take, for example, “The Hill”.THE HILL
Poetry Month 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition: DAY 3 :: Bill Considine on Elinor Nauen
Elinor Nauen: An Appreciation
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition :: DAY 2: Pete Reilly on Mary Oliver
Today we begin the community portion of our Poetry Month: Inspiration, Community, Tradition series with Peter Reilly writing on Mary Oliver's poetry and its influence on his work.
PR: Mary Oliver's gift is to describe the natural world simply, in a way that reveals the deepest secrets of our human heart. She is grounded in the reality of survival - life and death - predator and prey; yet never loses her eye for the eternal, for amazement, and for the magic of transformation.
From "Wild Geese"
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
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But little by little
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save.
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition :: Overview and DAY 1: Lynne DeSilva-Johnson on Mina/Traver Pam Dick
Mina/Traver Pam Dick (commence drooling) is, per her boiler-bio-plate, "a writer, artist and philosopher living in New York City. She's a native New Yorker. She received a BA from Yale and an MFA in Painting as well as an MA in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared inTantalum, BOMB and The Brooklyn Rail, and is forthcoming in The Portable Boog Reader 4 and Aufgabe#9; her philosophical work has appeared in a collection published by the International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria)."
Reviews of her first book, Delinquent, are smattered with praise like this apropos nugget: "Like a gender-errant Benjamin, Mina Pam Dick constellates recombinant philosophies, aesthetic forgeries, and the intertextual detritus of the big slithering city. The poems and prose that pack Delinquent’s sucker punch are weighted with the freight of excess baggage, which means they are the very work of today" (—Vanessa Place)