Final Day of Mom's Challenge! Well done
Here’s is mom’s last assignment to us. Congrats if you’ve managed to do this all month! Congrats if you only wrote one. And if you simply read these for a little jolt of inspiration I hope a few of these words will stay with you. In particular I find myself thinking about Mary Oliver’s words, “be ignited or be gone.” Have a lovely spring. The entire month of assignments will stay up on this page under the April Archive section. I’m thinking I may start again. May the windows keep opening
The Poetry Blurb Poem
Look back over the poems you have written this month. Pretend that they, even in their rough-draft imperfection, comprise a chapbook. The prompt is to write cover blurbs or a short review of your supposed chapbook in the form of a poem. Separate blurbs might become stanzas, or a longer review might fill a number of stanzas.
The blurbs or review, if credited, can be credited to “anonymous” or to your own aliases or perhaps to obviously imagined or long deceased poets or critics. I suggest not making up blurbs and crediting them to living individuals due to obvious potential for confusions and legal repercussions. Your poem commenting on your other April poems can be earnest and sincere or over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek. The poem can be a joke, an apology, or a careful analysis of your April poems’ strengths and weaknesses. The trick here is that whatever you write has to become somehow a poem in its own right.
Peruse the backs of your poetry books. Imitate tone, borrow language and transform it into your own.
Poetry critic David Orr, in Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry, refers to an anonymous review that Whitman wrote in which he describes himself as: “[o]ne of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded…”
Ron Rosenbaum wrote:
“Let me explain the roundabout way it came to me, the discovery that the praise of contemporary poetry, either in blurbs or reviews, is itself a neglected form of poetry, meta-poetry. Even if it comes from the most corrupt and sordid favor-trading, grant-grubbing, academic back-scratching sources, it’s clear that those who are good at it are so verygood at it that their work rises above its origins and deserves special recognition. It is not some degraded adjunct of contemporary poetry but perhaps its very apotheosis. It would be a tragedy to lose the poetry, of course, but to lose the even more brilliant blurbs! Sometimes I wonder whether in fact the poetry being praised even exists or has been dreamed up to provide the rationale for the praise.”
Here are some two-liners Rosenbaum collected
From <http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2008/09/new_literary_art_form_discovered.single.html> (9/5/2008) culled from: <http://thepagename.blogspot.com/>
“James K. Baxter can be crabby, difficult, bombastic, tortuous and tricky. He is, in nearly equal measure, astonishing and heartbreaking.”—Rebecca Porte, Contemporary Poetry Review
“Juan Felipe Herrera’s worst poems seem disorganized, excessive, frantic; his best seem disheveled, excited, uncommonly free.”—Stephen Burt, the New York Times
“Matthea Harvey has Stevie Smith’s knack for writing throwaway lines that in the end seem less like Post-it notes than ransom letters.”—David Orr, the New York Times
“If there is one lesson to be drawn from Shelley’s life and work, it is that you can’t trust a man who believes he is an angel.”—Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker
“To test oneself, Oppen recognized, is to know failure. Oppen’s victories are no less great for being small.”—James Longenbach, The Nation
“Only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack.” —David Orr, the New York Times
