POEM

210.
I am in the habit of saying: “Every poem is an opportunity to destroy my career.”

211.
When I say it, I imagine completely new work. Maybe I abandon the typographic experiments of The Black Automaton in exchange for a more traditional sonnet crown. Or I leave behind my investigations into manhood for poems about birds. I mean to surprise readers who have come to expect a particular kind of poem from me. I mean to surprise myself as well.

212.
I want it to mean that I am not afraid of trying something different, that I am not privileging my previous gestures, hiding behind what I know.

213.
But what it doesn’t mean, necessarily, is that I write the poem that demands to be written. You can spend a lot of time not writing such a poem.

via Craft Work : POEM : Douglas Kearney : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation.

POET

178. The four classes of play—if I can recall, I no longer own the book: competition, make-believe, chance and vertigo.

What a coincidence! I was just discussing these ideas with the students in my Information Society class. I wish I could remind Kearney that these ideas are from Roger Caillois, who uses the Greek terms: respectively, agon, mimesis, alea, and ilinx.

(And that link has a great set of explanations of the terms, including its relationship to improvisatory paidia and structured ludus.)

POET : Douglas Kearney : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

COST

On a morning when I wake up with a crisis of faith, a crushing fear of failure, here comes Douglas Kearney:

Struggle presents the risk of failure. Loss can be a kind of failure. Contrast can intensify loss. If failure compels me—both in process and subject—to write a poem, establishing stakes is vital. There must be a cost. At some level, the rigor I aim for when composing a poem is a way of raising the stakes; the poem’s potential failure becomes a source of sweat I’ve sweat over. But that’s a matter of process. In subject, failure needs a thing to rupture, then deflate.

This is why public history is so important to my work. It comes with its own setup.

 

And with regard to my Heidegger project:

140.
Still: what is the cost? What do I risk? I think the risk in the poems as poems is the chance that I could be grossly misunderstood. That my poems might be seen as merely making light of a tragedy. That I might have failed in my reckoning of cost and that in the end, I might have only heard what I wanted to hear.

The poems are ironic in intention, sure. But if they read/sound ironic, they fail. Which leads me back to cost as it relates to process.

141.
The cost in the process—the aspect of poetic endeavor we can most control—was that in order to manage the voices of the animals, I had to occupy subject positions I disliked. I had to engage in a kind of cruelty that forced me to acknowledge my own capacity for it. My ability to disregard others’ suffering for my benefit.

I had to know something of myself and then ourselves. The bits that are the monster sometimes beat out the bits that are the hero. At terrible cost.

 

via Craft Work : COST : Douglas Kearney : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation.

MAST

I was wrong, but Douglas Kearney’s “MAST” is great reading, continuing his aphorisms with much wit and insight:

52.
Here’s a writing exercise. It’s called “Titles for Poems I’ll Never Finish.”

Yowch!

Poetry Plus

Douglas Kearney already has two pieces on the Craft Work section of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. Both gather aphorisms on his poetics.

The first is “Mess”:

My poetry is often guided by an impulse to fail.

When this is the case, writing is an attempt to salvage something from the mess.

The second is “Mass”:

In effect, the poem may perform an attempt to master amassed mess.

Since he’ll be posting for the next two months, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing “Miss,” “Muss,” perhaps even “Moss” next. I, for one, am looking forward to the rest of his pieces.

 

Just as interesting is Brian Kim Stefans, who talks about the Surrealist Fortune Cookie in a lecture on “the Holy Grails of electronic literature” and “seven varieties of crisis.” He’s also written “A Manifesto for Video Game Developers” and a freeware “anthology” or “syllabus” that serves as an introduction to electronic literature. Had I known about that last one, I would have taught a class with it.