Can Art Be Taught?

Learn to say �Fuck You�
to the world once in a while.
You have every right to.

Just stop thinking, worrying,
looking over your shoulder,
wondering, doubting, fearing,
hoping for some easy way out,

struggling, gasping, confusing,
itching, scratching, mumbling,
scrambling, hatching, bitching,
groaning, horse-shitting, nit-picking,

piss-trickling, eyeball-poking,
finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking,
evil-eyeing, back-scratching, grinding
grinding grinding away at yourself.

Stop it. Don�t worry about cool.
Make your own uncool.
Make your own, your own world.



Letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, quoted in Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece (Penguin Books, 2006). Submitted by Howie Good.

The Noise by Lee Posna

a Sargasso of monologues that were all attracted to the
noise


� Clive James



As
the Great Pacific Garbage

Patch,
gyre of voyaged plastic

Irkutsks
and chemical sludge, most

fecund
upper section and sunniest

of
a deep pelagic cylinder

sea
myriad thousand cubic miles

big
with bright anchovies

is
one lens on a century



so
this rose window�

arabesque
brass tracery

to
which myriad

Spring Drawings

I had had a very minor stroke
and the first drawing afterwards
took me two days to do
(the days are a lot shorter in November).

The stroke only manifested itself in my speech.
I found I couldn't finish sentences, and although
it came back after about a month
I find now I talk a lot less.

But it did not affect my drawing.
I think it even made me concentrate more.
I thought, well I'm OK so long as I can draw,
I don't really need to say much any more;

I thought,
I've said enough already.



Taken from an article by David Hockney about his Spring drawing series, published in the Guardian, 18th April 2014. Submitted by Angi Holden.

Prompt: The Erotics of Gossip

Gossip is that casual conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true. The etymology of the word is from Old English godsibb, from god and sibb, the term for the godparents of one's child who were generally very close friends. And plenty of gossip comes from "friends."

Nowadays, the media is full of gossip with entire companies like TMZ and Eonline built on talking about the lives of celebrities.  Newspapers were the earliest mass media for gossip and famous for their juicy headlines.

But gossip still comes over the backyard fence or is whispered in a classroom and high school hallway or in the workplace.



I was reading about George Green's book of poems, Lord Byron's Foot. Green is a professor at Lehman College (where Billy Collins spent many years teaching) and that is his first poetry collection.

The title is a bit of gossip itself coming from the fact that Byron had a deformed foot that caused him a lot of grief and was one of those celebrity secrets that probably generated plenty of gossip at social events.  The book is, to quote Byron, �a little quietly facetious upon every thing� written in blank verse.


The subject matter is not George Green but the world of celebrity that also interested poet Frank O�Hara. The people of art, movies, big cities like New York, celebrity and the ephemeral.

Green adds some formality to the poems, but the topics are loose and dishy.

Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]
by Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Green works some of the same gossip beat.

Marilyn killed herself because she thought
that middle age began at thirty-five.
In Liz�s case it did, but she kept going,
though Dick went down in flames (Exorcist II).

In a critical study of O�Hara, Hazel Smith says that gossip in poetry is �straddling the realm of the intimate � encourag[ing] voyeurism� and involving the reader in an �erotics of gossip.�

The article points to the tradition of �community portrait� poems and sequences by Thomas Hardy (Wessex Poems), Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology), Edwin Arlington Robinson (various volumes), and Gwendolyn Brooks (A Street in Bronzeville, The Bean Eaters) and going back to party gossiper, Chaucer.

Your assignment this month is to do some poetic gossiping. It can be celebrity-style or the more everyday. You might want to start by looking at some of those gossipy sites mentioned at the top of this post for a headline starter.

Please feel free to dish!

Submission Deadline: May 25, 2014

If You Can't Play

If you can't play,
Don't.

If you can,
Do so quietly.



Sign on a piano in a used furniture store in Charleston, South Carolina. Submitted by Paul Bowers.

Untitled by Ema Saiko

Yabase Shichoku planted a thousand cherry trees on Mt Kinsho and asked friends for poems; I was one of them.





Making flowers your life, keeping your pleasure unchanged,


a thousand, ten thousand clusters you've managed to

Getting the Daily News from Poems

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

   �  William Carlos Williams


I am still writing my poem a day for 2014, and some people have taken on a poem a day for National Poetry Month. But if you don't feel you can write every day, you can certainly read a poem a day. And reading poetry is an important part of becoming a poet too.

Some people use the daily poem at The Writers Almanac or at Poetry Daily.

The Academy of American Poets is another source. They have a new design for their Poem-a-Day and they will now be syndicating Poem-a-Day. This means that the new, previously unpublished poems we are publishing during the week will be available to editors at a wide range of newspapers, news websites, and magazines.

Get out the news in poems!

You might also want to celebrate the month with a donation to Poem-A-Day or help support Poetry Daily or support the Writers Almanac.

The corrugator supercilii

is a
small, narrow
pyramidal muscle

located at
the medial end
of the eyebrow.

Its fibers
pass upward
and laterally.

Regarded
as the principal
muscle of suffering

the muscle is
sometimes severed
or paralyzed with

botulinium toxin
as treatment for migraine
or for aesthetic reasons.



From the Wikipedia entry for Corrugator supercilii muscle. Submitted by Dawn Corrigan.

Supper preferences

When these birds move their wings in flight,
their strokes are slow, moderate and regular,
and even when at a considerable distance

or high above us, we plainly hear the quill-feathers,
their shafts and webs upon one another,
creak as the joints or

working of a vessel in a tempestuous sea.
We had this fowl dressed for supper
and it made excellent soup;

nevertheless as long as I can get any other
necessary food I shall prefer his
seraphic music in the ethereal skies.



William Bartram, in Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Spelling modernised. Submitted by Dawn Corrigan.

Villon in Millerton by James Norcliffe

for Leicester Kyle



1

a plank bed in a gully

and a woman there with

a buckled mouth my hand

plunged deep in her pigfern



turpentine and tea-tree

the sour-smoke smell

of damp coal in the scuttle

and flat beer on the bench



once I stood so tall on

a stolen Triumph

my hair streamed behind

like a thousand freedoms



now I stand two miles

above flatlanders

Sport

About midnight, having fallen asleep,
I was awakened and greatly surprised

at finding most of my companions
up in arms, and furiously engaged

with a large alligator
but a few yards from me.

One of our company, it seems,
awoke in the night, and perceived

the monster within a few paces of the camp,
who giving the alarm to the rest,

they readily came to his assistance,
for it was a rare piece of sport;

some took fire-brands and cast them
at his head, whilst others formed javelins

of saplins, pointed and hardened with fire;
these they thrust down his throat

into his bowels, which caused the monster
to roar and bellow hideously, but his strength

and fury was so great that he easily wrenched
or twisted them out of their hands, which

he wielded and brandished about and kept
his enemies at distance for a time;

some were for putting an end to his life
and sufferings with a rifle ball, but

the majority thought this would too soon
deprive them of the diversion and pleasure

of exercising their various inventions
of torture; they at length however grew tired,

and agreed in one opinion, that he had suffered
sufficiently, and put an end to his existence.



Taken from Travels of William Bartram by William Bartram, published 1928. Submitted by Dawn Corrigan.

Billy Collins on poetry

Some thoughts by Billy Collins on poetry

• The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
• You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite�embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change.
• In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
• High school is the place where poetry goes to die.
• A sentence starts out like a lone traveller heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
• Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
• The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line.
• A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
• A motto I�ve adopted is, if at first you don�t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

via writers-write-creative-blog.posthaven.com

Fleeting

The ocean is empty
again. Here and there

a small galaxy of scales
marks where a bluefin

swallowed a herring.
The victim's scales

swirl in the turbulence
of the departed

tuna now bearing off at
high speed. Then each vortex

slows and stops. The sinking
scales gleam like diamonds

from a spilled necklace
then they dim. Finally

they wink out at depth.



From Quicksilver, Kenneth Brower, March 2014, National Geographic. Submitted by James Brush.

Cocoons: A Fibonacci Poem

We
are
becoming more
and more relaxed
with uncertainty, more and more
relaxed with groundlessness, more and more relaxed with

not having walls around us to keep us
protected in a little box
or cocoon.�Enlightenment
we do
not
have.



From The Bearable Lightness of Being by Pema Ch�dr�n, March 2014, Shambhala Sun. Submitted by Ali Znaidi.

Symbols that make up the breaking girl by Helen Rickerby

First comes feet, on tippy tippy

toe � a stretching, a reaching
for approval, perfection, a cracking
a creaking, a split and a snap, but nothing
that a good length of tape and some newly brokenin shoes can�t fix, shoes with the insides torn
out like an inquisition, then beaten and slashedlittle dancers, little digits, they carry her away



The next, a cliche�, but an oldy and a goody,

The Dilemma

Picture this.
A man spends a
long bus journey
groaning over a very full bladder.
The bus finally pulls into a station
for a brief stop
and the guy rushes out,
leaving his bag on board.

But there�s a problem:
all the toilets are closed.
He runs around,
one muscle-twitch
away from humiliation,
looking for someone to open them.

Then, out of the corner of his eye,
he sees the bus pulling away,
with his possessions.

It�s a dilemma worthy
(well, almost)
of Hamlet:
to pee or not to pee?



Taken from 'Stage Struck: Frankly, my dear, you gotta make �em give a damn' in The Irish Times, 3 April 2014. Submitted by Taidgh Lynch.

Do You Have?

week one:
pattern for knitted
swimming trunks
will pay postage

week two:
Record by The Turtles
She�s Rather Be With Me
willing to pay all costs

week three:
Eye needed for an emu
(Rod Hull�s 70cm/27 1/2 in puppet).
Will pay costs

week four:
knitting pattern for a
lady�s jumper with a
blue and white Chinese
willow pattern on the front

week five:
Aretha Franklin CD
or cassette, The First Time
Ever I Saw Your Face.
will pay all costs.

week six:
Microwave Cookery Books
Will pay postage.

week seven:
Manual or photocopy
for a Sharp QL310
portable memory display
typewriter. Will pay costs.

week eight:
Instructions for a sony
ericksson K7001 mobile
phone. will pay costs

week nine:
Copy of the late Steve Conway�s song,
My Thanks To You.
Will reply to all letters.
Will pay postage and expenses.

week ten:
Hayne�s Ford Focus
LX 2011 car manual.
Will pay costs.

week eleven:
Knitting pattern for
anything using two odd
pins, one small and one
large. Will pay any costs.

week twelve:
DVD of the film, The
Merry Widow.



Adverts from the 'Do You Have?' page of Yours magazine, various issues spring 2012. Submitted by Anna Percy.

National Poetry Writing Month #NatPWriMo

National Poetry Writing Month is an annual project during National Poetry Month that encourages participants to write a poem each day in April.  

Abbreviated as NaPoWriMo, you can find it on Twitter and other social networks with the hashtag #NaPoWriMo. 

NaPoWriMo founder Maureen Thorson will post daily prompts on the NaPoWriMo site through the month and there are also prompts at The Daily Post.

If you�re sharing your poems online, you can submit your site to the NaPoWriMo showcase and allow other participants can find you. Also tag your posts with #NaPoWriMo on Wordpress.

Window in the House of Mirrors, Market Street, 1889

At the top
is a clear-eyed maiden
whose lips smile joy.
Below,
and to the left, framed
in long hair
is a horribly sensuous face,
one
eye closed in a leer
above
thick slobbering lips.

Next, is the stupid fat face
of a glutton. Then comes
the hard cold face
of a woman not much
older than the young girl above,
the fifth
face. In the narrow
ell of the house,
behind her is that embittered
old man with cruel eyes,
his hairy moustache
cushioning bulbous jaws.



A description from a file in Denver Public Library of stone carvings on an old Colorado brothel. Via Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West by Anne Seagraves (1994, Wesanne Publications). 'Cushioned' changed to 'cushioning'. Submitted by Angela Readman.