Can Poetry Find New Life Online?
That’s the gamble being taken by the multimedia website PoetrySpeaks.com, which launched yesterday — not so much that poetry might be read again in the old way (the words “dustily perused” come unbidden to mind), but that it has untapped appeal for a postliterate, audiovisual, multimedia culture — that people might even pay for a poem in various formats the way they’ll pay for a song. This strikes me as a very sharp insight: poetry is music — word music — and it might catch the inner ear of musically imprinted people in a way that unstructured prose does not. The launch press release describes PoetrySpeaks.com as both “a social network for poets and poetry lovers” and “a new business model for poetry”:
On PoetrySpeaks.com, poets will be able to manage their own information, blog if they wish, explain and display their body of work to their own choosing, and even post their speaking or performance schedules. […] Both interactive and educational, visitors will be able to create their own “favorites,” plus connect to the poets via Twitter and other social networking sites.
PoetrySpeaks.com will also be a business and marketing engine for poets and poetry presses. There are already three revenue streams, with several others identified and being developed. PoetrySpeaks.com sells individual poems in different formats (audio, video or text), as well as books, ebooks, DVDs and CDs, and tickets to online performances, slams or readings.
That combination of functions makes the site an agora — one of the most ancient human institutions, a place of inseparable social, commercial, and cultural exchange [wish I could use the German word “Geistlich,” which covers both intellectual and spiritual], where performances, transactions, meet-ups, pick-ups and trysts are all going on in the same spacetime. All our favorite ingredients fermenting together makes for a heady and fertile brew. I hope the site takes off and helps poetry reclaim its rightful place among the musics that move us.
And in related news: Reading poetry is a good workout for your brain.
Subjects were found to read poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with prose. Preliminary studies using brain-imaging technology also showed greater levels of cerebral activity when people listened to poems being read aloud. Dr Jane Stabler, a literature expert at St Andrews University and a member of the research group, believes poetry may stir latent preferences in the brain for rhythm and rhymes that develop during childhood. She claims the intense imagery woven through poems, and techniques used by poets to unsettle their readers, force them to think more carefully about each line. “There seems to be an almost immediate recognition that this is a different sort of language that needs to be approached in a way that will be more attentive to the density of words in poetry,” she said. […]
To study readers’ reactions, the research group focused an infrared beam on the pupils of their eyes to detect minute movements as they read. They found poetry produced all the standard psychological indications associated with intellectual difficulty, such as slow deliberate movement, re-reading sections and long pauses. Even when they used identical content but displayed it in both a poem format and a prose format, they discovered readers found the poem form the more difficult to understand. Stabler said: “When readers decide that something is a poem, they read in a different way. As literary critics we would like to think that this is a more thoughtful way, more receptive to the text’s richness and complexity, but in psychological terms it is the same sort of reading produced by a dyslexic reader who finds reading difficult.” […]
The group hopes to use Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans to watch how the brain reacts as people listen to poetry and prose. Early results suggest a larger area of the brain lights up in the scans upon hearing poetry by Byron than prose by Austen. The research has profound implications for the way English literature is taught in schools, and Stabler believes they should consider placing greater emphasis on teaching youngsters poetry.
Both rhythm and rhyme have been found to be intricately linked with making and recalling memories.
It’s hard not to have rap come to mind, as a postliterate return to humanity’s preliterate mnemonic reliance on rhyme (as the above article notes, “the only way rap artists can remember all those lyrics is because they have rhythm and rhyme”), and as a bridge from music back to pleasure in poetry.
Cross-posted at The Compulsive Copyeditor
For Such Fastidious Creatures, Cats . . .
. . . can be awfully messy. You noticed?
They can spend hours rendering themselves immaculate and pristine, yet as Jeremy Rifkin explained in Entropy, the energy it takes to create and maintain order (as in: organisms eat) must come from somewhere, and it is often pulled out of surrounding order, leaving a pillaged zone of mess and midden around creation. (As in: Secaucus, New Jersey. As in: my room when I’m writing.) In the same measure as cats are impeccable, they cast a proportionately long shadow of mess. And although they palpably appreciate a neat, clean environment, they also seem to take a gonzo pleasure in mucking it up.
Of course, it’s not cats’ fault that kitty litter sticks to their paws, or that they shed fur and barf it up in reproach for your neglecting to brush them regularly. If that were all, it would be enough to redouble housekeeping. But I have one (Buzzy) who is very dominant, and likes to advertise it by leaving his crap proudly uncovered, preferably in the bathtub. (I missed my window of opportunity to crack down on this behavior because it was pretty clear that Buzzy got the idea by observing that humans use porcelain appliances for such purposes, and I was loath to punish such an intelligent, if misguided, generalization. After all, from a cat’s point of view, who would ever want to take a bath? So I use a lot of Lysol — and take showers. It’s embarrassing what cats can get us to do for them.) I have another one (Dito), the omega to Buzzy’s alpha, who is a hysteric, and inevitably covers his with wild, drama-queen flinging; he is to kitty litter what Jackson Pollock was to paint. I sweep up his sand mandalas at least six times a day. Only Rainy, the exotic Siamese, has minimally obtrusive bathroom behavior. He is a prima donna about other things.
Oh, cats also don’t like to eat from plates. They regard them as serving platters from which to drag food onto the floor. And unless they are really hungry, they consider it beneath them to clean their plate/floor. So there’s usually a halo of crumbs and smears around the dish. Then there are special occasions like the ritual disembowelment of a roll of paper towel. As for cats and furniture, I’m not even going there, except to say that you can be seriously into one or the other, but not both. Declawing is not an acceptable compromise. A cat without its claws is not a cat.
Before you diss me for letting my cats walk all over me (often literally), consider the lengths you will go to and the nuisance you will tolerate for whatever and whomever you most love.
The “Public Option” in Practice
Florida has had a “public option” for homeowner’s insurance since not long after Hurricane Andrew rolled through the state in 1992. How’s that working out for them? Randall Holcombe at The Beacon gives us a hint:
As originally envisioned, [state-owned-and-operated] Citizens [Property Insurance Corporation] would charge rates above those charged by private insurers, to make Citizens the insurer of last resort.
After two bad hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005 property insurance rates in Florida rose…
Charlie Crist promised voters that if elected he would see that their property insurance bills “dropped like a rock.” [Crist was elected]
One tactic he used was to change Citizens’ rate structure so it was competitive with private insurers.
His idea … is that with a public option, private insurers would have to keep their rates in line or risk losing customers to the government insurer.
That’s what’s happened in Florida.
Today about 30% of homeowners’ policies are written by Citizens, which is the largest property insurer in the state.
It’s about to get bigger too.
We’re all Barbara Bel Geddes to someone
Ok, so they’re working on my toilet. I’d like to think they could finish it, but since Saturday they haven’t done that. My landlord was willing to let me use the toilet in the empty apartment upstairs but…that one’s not working either. So…she gave me the key to her late fathers house two doors over. It’s such a small house that the bathroom is more a Deco Privy then the mini-spas we now expect bathrooms to be.
Now don’t get me wrong, this whole thing pisses me off (ahem) but the comic ineptitude of it all made me smile. I was in a good state as I drifted off to sleep with my Netflix playing in front of me, which was my mistake because I fell asleep to… Vertigo. If it had been Freaks, or Saw XXIV or any Bergman movie I’d have sawed enough logs to make a Pythonesque Lumberjack happy, but nooooooo, I had to let Hitchcock enter my half-awake mind with Vertigo, with nary a john in sight. Through this Freudian dream-fog two, well, three thoughts emerged:
1.) I need to write a psycho-history of plumbing. But some more lucid part of my mind said, “umm…no you don’t.” That part of my brain won.
2.) I need to invent a suit with little tiny sound chips at various points that we could somehow activate with our emotional reactions so that no matter where you are you could have a Bernard Hermann soundtrack to practically anything that might happen in your life. Wouldn’t that make life more enriching? If you hear those Psycho string stings though….
3.) How painful and hard it was to watch Barbara Bel Geddes in her pining for Jimmy Stewart! Yikes, she even paints herself into the painting that Stewart is obsessed with, with just ticks him off! So that’s my question: Have any of you ever had any unrequited love for someone? Or have you ever been the object of someone elses love that you did not return? How did those things go, badly, dramatically, what? Ever stay friends with someone after you’ve both decided that you’re not in love with each other?
UPDATE: Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah! The plumbing, almost a week later, is restored! Boy, you would think “asshole” and “toilet” would work together like hand and glove or butter and cheese…as it were…but no, it’s been a struggle of nothing but cursing and grunting. But now with the king upon his throne, progress will commence.
Goodbye, “My” Tree.
“I’d like to have a tree to look at — is that too much to ask –”
Scrawled — “rather irritably!” — in a journal in June 2006, when we were house- and pet-sitting for Michael Reynolds here in Chapel Hill and hunting for an apartment. You see here my cup-half-empty, superstitious, grumpy daring of the god (yes, no “s” — being Jewish in spite of myself, if there are any I can’t really conceive of there being more than one, and can’t repose in placid trust of that god’s generosity — it is an irritable relationship).
Well, despite the perverse and inverted form of the request, I got precisely that: a tree to look at. And what a tree: a New England-worthy young maple that “burst into flame” — there was no other way to describe it — at the peak of each autumn.
I was eagerly looking forward to looking at it, this fall, to feasting on that radiance fierce as grief that eyes can never get enough of. It seemed to be turning awfully late, but I see from the date of my previous year’s post, November 8, that if anything it was early. I still haven’t gotten used to the southern schedule. The first little spotlit parts of it had begun to turn when our building literally burst into flame and aborted the expectation.
As soon as I got J out of the hospice and into our temporary apartment — probably Sunday the 25th — I got him up and into the wheelchair and pushed him around to the little street behind the apartment complex, a matter of several fairly steep hills. I had to struggle to push the wheelchair up into the last parking lot before Franklin Street, from which, I’d been told, we could see the back of our building with our own eyes. (I nearly lost control of the wheelchair afterwards, coming back down. Should have driven. It was dumb. Dumb luck, again, too. If there is a God, He shamelessly plays favorites, and J is on his A-list.)
Sure enough, the bomb chasm in the back of our building was almost close enough to touch, a temporary chain-link fence and crime-scene tape in between. (They’ll never know what caused this fire, I’ve heard; it ate the evidence.) There was the little hummingbird feeder still dangling intact on our window. Downy woodpeckers were flitting insouciantly in and out of the wreckage — shades of “the world without us.” And there was “my” little tree — though I had not come to see it — burning coolly at the perfect peak of its incandescence.
So I did get to see it this year, just from a quite unexpected perspective. Life’s funny, how it moves you along.
(The new permanent apartment, which I suspect I’m going to become more attached to than the old one — wooden floors! — looks out on even more trees than the old one. But whether it has a Tree, or just some nice pine trees, I have not yet gone to see. Meanwhile, I’m feeling a bit sorry and selfish for being so happy to live in the back again: I’ve discovered that J likes to people-watch out the front, with the village elder’s instinct for keeping an eye on things. There was a moment when the property manager broke the “news,” which turned out to be untrue, that we were going to be living in a floor-through, front to back, their biggest unit, for the same rent. The maintenance man quickly disabused her of that misconception. I didn’t have time to be disappointed, was if anything relieved — that would have been too much. I prefer good fortune form-fitted — not lavish but lagom, “just enough.” The only thing that would have been nice about it is that each of us would have had a window to look out of.)
What Do We Really Need?
Serious question, provoked by moving and discovering with dismay — disgust — how much stuff, junk, crap we still have.
If the fire had consumed it all or I’d just walked away and let it be steamshoveled into a dumpster, some precious souvenirs would have been lost. But those few gems are embedded in a rubble of unmatched gloves, staples to fit lost staplers, multiple winter coats in a climate that never needs them, cheap purses, clothes that stopped fitting J a decade ago, books just for books’ sake, unread back issues of The New Yorker, Christmas labels for an obsolete address …
Every move is an opportunity to throw stuff out, yet somehow there never seems to be less of it; there never seems to be little enough. What would be little enough?
Our volunteer friend from hospice wrote a memoir for his family which he titled I Wish You Enough. In the dedication he explains that the concept
has a special meaning to me and other Swedish-speaking people because of the word lagom. To my knowledge there is no one-word translation in other European languages for lagom. The best corresponding phrases would be “just enough,” “just right,” “just adequate,” or “just sufficient.” Lagom implies that we do not need an abundance or oversupply of anything. “Just enough (lagom) is best” is a very popular philosophy in Sweden.
What do we really need? What is the bare minimum we could live with?
I thought of the Buddhist monk who has taken vows of poverty and owns nothing but his robe and a begging bowl, perhaps disposable palm-leaf sandals, a staff that doubles for self-defense, and perhaps a mala or rosary as an aid to recitation of sutras. Of course to subsist with only a bowl presupposes the existence of a whole society with pots, ladles, and food to put in them.
I asked the question on Twitter:
amba12 What do we really really need? Help me make a list. A bowl, a spoon…well, let’s say a mess kit. 2 pr pants, 2 shirts, 2 undies…a Kindle?
(Moving will do this to you: I’m warming to the idea of having all your books in something the size of one book, and being able to delete the ones that have proven themselves inessential by pressing a button, instead of by lugging them in a cardboard box to a thrift sale.)
Got some provocative answers:
BXGD A knife, a bit of rope, and no fear.
chickelit NEEDS: intangibles: negotiating/bargaining skills; tangibles: clothes on our back, good health.
RuthAnneAdams Mother Theresa had a cardigan sweater, sandals, a well-worn Rosary. I should be so blessed to die with so little.
(She who dies with the fewest toys, wins?)
Michael_Haz A shot glass, a wineglass, a corkscrew. All belong on the list.
This in turn has provoked afterthoughts and branching conversations, which you can follow at the links above: Ruth Anne disagrees that good health is a sine qua non; Michael provides confirmatory examples — Stephen Hawking, late John Paul II. The question ramifies: a kidney dialysis machine could be essential if it is keeping a great light burning.
I still maintain that I want one change of clothes (one to wear while I wash the other), a mess kit (a cup, a bowl, a plate/pan, a knife, fork, and spoon), a notebook and a pen.
(Michael, the cup will double as a wineglass. I’ll depend on the existence of a whole society with bottles and corkscrews. I bought a bottle of wine the other night and then realized that I haven’t yet rescued my corkscrew. But guess what? It has a screw cap.)
Please have at it.
I’ll Know What I Think When I See What I Say.
4 A.M.
“I want to shoot myself.”
“Why?”
“I’m a failure in life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a failure in life.”
“A failure to do what? What’s success in life?
“What do you mean? Make a lot of money?
“You think most ‘successful’ people could have done what you did?”
“What did I do?”
“Rose from the ashes, again and again.
“You’ve inspired a lot of people. More than you know.
“You’re one of a kind.”
But this is old, reheated soup.
. . .
” . . . Don’t be so conventional!”
“What does that mean, conventional?”
“Like everybody else.
“Do you think the universe cares about the standards of some primates dressed in suits standing on their hind legs?
“The universe only cares if you got a glimpse of it.”
“Got a what?”
“Got a glimpse of it. Got your head above water enough to catch a glimpse of it.”
. . .
(Smiling) “What makes me feel good is . . .
“In spite of . . .”
Lend a Hand if You Can
As we have read, our friend Annie has been struggling with the devastating fire that left her and Jacques homeless and J. temporarily in the hospice. They now have temporary housing of a sorts. Some might argue she took J. out too early, but Annie will answer that she saw him quickly deteriorating despite the hospice providing care as fine as can be obtained in an institutional setting. Nothing can replace the one-on-one care and activity found at home.
As is typical with her, Annie buried her request for some small help in the middle of the comments section of the video post on the fire. I was thinking it ought be front-paged:
Annie could use some help. Without a landline for the time being, she has to buy time for the GoPhone she was only using for emergencies. This is a budget buster for someone whose budget had absolutely no room for error. We all know that more phone time is unlikely to be her only unexpected expense.
The best way to help is to drop something via Annie’s hat link to her PayPal account on Ambivablog. It looks like this:
It is on the left side of Ambivablog, under the 74% addicted to internet graphic. Click on it and the PayPal page will open. (Sorry, I can’t replicate it here, as it creates a session ID which times out). They don’t have a minimum (or a maximum) and anything anyone gives will be the most effective, and appreciated, donation made this year, even if not tax-deductible!
Thanks in advance to all of you!
“Love is Interchangeable With Time.”
Said Moshé Feldenkrais. (I think I have his words right.) What you love, you find time for. As our friend Chris told me this morning. And then proceeded to demonstrate.
She came over late this morning, kindly bringing coffee, coffee filters, and milk, which, when she asked, was what I’d said I most urgently needed. (Animals and addictions must be fed first.) She offered to stay with J while I went shopping for necessities that couldn’t wait another day. But then we wound up talking for a while, and then it was too late for me to go shopping because she had a chance to meet her favorite person in the world to go to the state fair. She said she’d keep in touch and would come back this evening to sit with J while I went to an internet café to finish my work, because I haven’t so far been able to pirate or borrow a connection. She, also kindly, took some laundry to do for us, because the landlord here has been so frantic moving fire refugees into not-quite-ready apartments that they haven’t put a washer and dryer in here yet.
Never heard from Chris again.
I’m not complaining. She was wonderful to do as much as she did. I’m observing that it is best to be thankful for what people do give you (above all, of their time) and not to expect more, even when more is promised. In fact, it is best to be aware that people’s “eyes are bigger than their stomach” when it comes to offering help — help that costs time — and that they may offer more than they can actually give without resentment if they then keep their word and guilt (with its attendant resentment) if they break it. (I imagine that Chris never called to tell me she wasn’t coming because she felt bad about not coming.)
In my experience, especially my recent experience (and it’s a signal experience of older people), you can’t expect or ask very much of people unless a) they’re in love with you, or b) they need something from you. Which are somewhat the same thing, except that in the latter case they’re in love with something else that they think you can serve. (Editors get a lot of this kind of bank-shot love.)
I was originally going to say “unless they’re your parent, your child, or are in love with you, or need something from you,” but I had to reconsider even the former as simply a subset of the latter. How many parents wait in vain for their grown children to throw them a scrap of time — until the children need some money or a place to crash rent-free for a while? Generally speaking, parents are in love with their children but children are in need of their parents, not in love with them, except very early and too late. Now that’s a nice epigram, but it’s too neat to be true. “Parents are in love with their children but children aren’t in love with their parents” holds true in much of modern American culture, where children and young people have the power. In traditional European culture, adults, even old adults, had the power, and children were much more likely to be in lifelong love with their parents. But there are also plenty of cases anywhere in the world where the expected “natural” love fails completely on one side or the other of that bond. So much for generalizations.
In case it wasn’t obvious, all of the above is IRL. It’s different OL. Isn’t it? Or is it?
I’ve received, and also organized and transmitted, incredible help from people online. I’m not sure how much time it costs us to do this. Some, for sure. But physical time still is — is more than ever — one of the scarcest and costliest goods we possess, and therefore we reserve it for a very few. It has to do with the fact that a body can’t be in more than one place at a time. But a mind can. The time we spend online actually costs us far more than we know (LOL), but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels light, like flying around in dreams, without a body. (Is cyberspace all we can know of heaven? or a preview?) Clearly, we love this feeling and devote a lot of time to it. It gives us an intoxicating sense of power. It multiplies our knowing and our loving beyond what is physically possible, the way money multiplies our doing beyond what we can do with two arms and one shovel. It’s not surprising that these two forms of broadband shorthand go together, and that (even though still discriminatingly and sparingly) we can more easily help online friends with money than real-life friends with time.
It’s particularly ironic to be mulling over this just as several of my online friends have literally given me gifts of time — cellphone minutes — in the form of money! They say time is money. But old Feldenkrais said time is love. I think he was much more on the money.
If short, catchy communications in advertising and the media are called “sound bites” (who remembers that that was the original term, not “sound bytes”?), maybe what we give each other online are “love bites”?
The only trouble with this online community is that if the plug is pulled, it disappears like a dream.
Ambiance 