Inspired by Emmett Williams, a practitioner of concrete poetry, Rob Giampietro has written three poems: Wastebasket, Snowflakes, and Spraypaint.
Giampietro has put out a call for someone to develop a Williams Word Generator. Drop him a line if you can help out...shouldn't be too much different than the many "words within words" generators scattered around the web.
"And know you not," says Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
(via hodgman)
Austin Kleon makes Newspaper Blackout Poems by blacking out all but a few choice words of newspaper articles.
A Woman's bust is the host of Romance, so Don't deplore my fondness for It
The One Day Poem Pavilion uses the sun to display a poem one line at a time over the course of an entire day. (via stingy kids)
The Virginia Quarterly Review analyzed their poetry submissions for use of poetic cliches and found that the cliches do get published more often than not. Also of note is that "darkness" is an undervalued poetic cliche...it was in only 4% of submitted poems but in 17% of published poems. Poets, "darkness" is your way into VQR.
I've gotten totally re-obsessed with Kathy Acker, the East Village writer who died in 1997. It started with this recording of Acker reading a poem [Warning: audio, 2 minutes, 28 seconds, and not really safe for work!] that was released in 1980 on the LP "Sugar, Alcohol & Meat" by Giorno Poetry Systems and recently digitized by UbuWeb. Her New York accent is one that has largely disappeared since; she sounds amazing. Then I found this, which is an incredibly long mp3, the first 3/4s of which is a Michael Brownstein reading. The end, though, is a monologue which then becomes a stageplay by Acker about a woman, her suicide, her grandmother, and her psychiatrist. It is absolutely not safe for work, what with its endless use of a certain word for ladyparts that goes over well in Scotland but not at all (yet!) in the U.S.
Winners of the Helvetica haiku contest I pointed to a couple of weeks ago. My favorite of all the ones listed: "i shot the serif / left him there full of leading / yearning for kerning". Close second: "She misunderstood / When I said she was 'Grotesque' / Akzidenz happen". I am a sucker for puns.
What would happen if poets and playwrights wrote works whose titles were anagrams of their names? Here's one by Basho called Has B.O: "Swamp mist, eyes water- / Why is that monk still wearing / Winter robes in June?"
From a blog critical of typographic faux pas comes this handy rhyme for remembering the difference between apostrophes/quotation marks and foot/inch marks: "Straight up and down you're in foot mark town! / A contraction you say? Use apostrophes every day! / You want to say 'Hi!' to a chum or a neighbour? / Use inch marks and everyone will think you're an idiot!" Guilty as charged.
"It is with mounting nausea that we watch poets race to cast their liberal votes for candidates more conservative than the Republicans they found beyond revulsion twenty years ago -- and indeed not just to feed at this trough but serve the slop."
I'm so glad I'm friends with you
I can see your Flickr pix
and your Vox posts too
Book blog starts Fibonacci poem fad, i.e. the writing of poems where the number of syllables in each line is dictated by the Fibonacci sequence. "Poets are very, very hungry for constraint right now."
The Guardian on spam poetry. I featured the work of noted spam poet Gary Milano (webm@yahoo.com) a couple of years ago. See also Outside the Inbox, a compilation of songs inspired by spam subject lines.
Update: And The Words of Albert Spamus.
Poetry takes more brain power to read than prose. "Subjects were found to read poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with prose."
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