June 15, 2014 - Roundtable on Appropriation: Tinker Greene Live!

We were delighted to have Tinker Greene join us once again this past Sunday. Tinker guided us through a kaleidoscopic discussion on appropriation, sharing his thoughts on collage, cut-ups, and using quotes (in several cases an entire quote becomes a poem) from other text sources, mostly prose/non-fiction. Tinker also "appropriates" from his own well of personal memory--his autobiographical past--forming poems with the disjunctive images of his childhood: a bale of hay on a scythed field that's "melded" with a stack of LIFE magazines in an attic during WWII in "My Vermont."

Tinker started off reading "Hoagy Carmichael Reminiscing about Bix Beiderbecke," a poem from his chapbook Funeral Sentences in which he "steals" the words of the "Stardust" composer Carmichael from his (ghost written) autobiography. Also a "photographic image-maker," he explained the process of "framing" prose as a way of forming the poem; every poem is "framed," set off on the page. Williams, Pound, and Eliot were cited as modernist poets who often re-framed found language.

While it's the Romantic period (Poe and Coleridge cited) that Tinker often returns to, it was during the 1960's that he first experienced appropriation while encountering Gary Snyder's "John Muir on Mt. Ritter," a straight quote from Muir originally a section in Snyder's long poem, Myths and Texts. Next, Tinker read from The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes, a work revealing Coleridge's "mind as a well," from "the shattered fragments of memory" to "snake-birds" and "footless birds of paradise and the fauna of polar and tropical seas." We explored what makes things collect inside our memory-wells, acknowledging that much of it is not (nor ever will be) new or original thought being human on a planet full of regurgitated language. "We are born into the world and start picking up and using language," Tinker clarified. "Poetry is condensation."

Next, Tinker read "Pouring Glory" from his recent chapbook, Your Thoughts Are Real. The poem is a direct quote or "made of the words" of astronaut Chris Hadfield's experience in space that is versified and "arranged" on the page. After the break, Tinker read (by request) "Blue Flame Ring," a prose poem "written the day before a reading" and retelling his sublime dread while hiking in threatening weather, getting lost and taking refuge in a small cave. The title alludes to a dropped passage from an earlier draft which remains as a mysterious fragment, a kind of cut-up.

Toward the end of our show, Tinker shared a quote from a book that had a big impression on him as a young poet, Ronald Johnson's Book of the Green Man--a hiking trip poem set in England, studded with quotes: "decayed literature makes the richest of all soils" (Thoreau). Self-taught, Tinker has allowed himself through the decay that begets other decay, reading one piece of writing and following its resources back. "Romanticism is a theme." Tinker then read sonnets LXVII and LXVIII from Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, cut-ups of the poet's own work.

Closing with "My Vermont" (1, 2 and 3), Tinker's sonnet sequence, we were reminded that it's freeing not to tell the truth when appropriating from childhood memory ("like Wordsworth"); readers will garner some form of truth. "I was a horrid child, possessed by the devil...able to travel as an/ ectoplasmic wraith floating through the moonlight..." We are grateful that Tinker floated back into the studio to share with us more from his personal "well," however appropriated! His chapbooks are available upon request at tink@well.com. Click here to listen.

June 1, 2014 Melissa Eleftherion Live!

This Sunday, despite technical difficulties, we were able to air and record a live interview with poet Melissa Eleftherion. We spent the first half of the interview on her chapbook Huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013). Many of these poems originally appeared in her thesis, as she was graduating with her MFA from Mills Collage. These poems include many specific references to insects and their parts, juxtaposed to the human body and the human condition; she sought to examine humans through the lens of systems. The poems vary in form which Melissa explains emerges organically during the writing process. She wants to investigate the 'gaps in language' and this is often reflected in the form. Jay discussed how Melissa's poetry, like a lot of poetry, can use language in a way that is unfamiliar and confronts us with an 'opaque otherness.' From this point, Melissa talked about how she compiled 'a lexicon from the gaps in her education.'
After the break we discussed her latest chapbook Prism Maps (Dusie Press Kollectiv & Quarter Drink Press, 2014). These poems were created during a postcard poem project. The lovely cover has a removable postcard and each poem is on the page facing the image of a postcard (depicting flowers or a map).
Besides these two books, we touched on Melissa's other projects. She started, and single-handedly manages The Chapbook Exchange, through The Poetry Center, which allows poets to share their work online. At this time there are over 50 contributors.
At the end of the interview, Melissa shared new work from her manuscript auto/bio.
Click here to listen