Last, next.

77: United States of Letterpress (Erin Beckloff)
78: Nat’l Parks (Great Smoky Mtns)

🔗 Building Ages in NL “A Dutch data engineer wanted to find out the age of the building his son lives in and ended up creating a map, visualising the age of all of the Netherlands’ 10 million or so buildings.” (via)

I was able to determine that my father was born in a house built in 1905.

1977:

2018:

Laurie Anderson, Norton Lecture: Spending the War Without You:

I have to tell you: in these lectures, I’m not going to be explaining my work or describing who I am as an artist. In fact, I don’t care if you know who I am.

I’ve never really tried to express myself through my work. It’s more about curiosity, about how things are, what they are.

Plus, I’ve really made an effort for most of my life to just get rid of the idea of being anyone at all.

(From Pt 1: The River @ ±7 minutes 20–50 seconds)

Last, next.

76: Kraft (graph)
77: United States of Letterpress (Erin Beckloff)

Variations on the 10-Minute Spill

In the months since writing my response to this interview question, I’ve seen several references to extremely similar writing prompts — a typically synchronistic example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

In the Kenyon Review (from 3/2021), Michael Montlack speaks of Dorianne Laux & Joe Millar’s method of “making a list of words, throwing in a quote or fact or phrase, and taking an hour to write a draft.”

And in the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter (from 10/2020), Valerie Coulton describes Edward Smallfield’s process that “consists of a personalized postcard with four words and a quote. He used to pass these out in workshops, and then everyone would write for 15 minutes.”

I’m not surprised to see randomness and chance being integrated into writing prompts, but now I’m curious to find out what the provenance is for Rita Dove’s exercise, which I’ve been using on and off for about twenty years.

Here is the last part of my poetry mini interview.

It’s the shocking season finale! To save our gang’s favorite hang-out from foreclosure, I must perform a thrilling leap on water skis over a shark tank. And in the audio commentary, I talk about what I’m currently working on.

The fourth part in my poetry mini interview is up.

In this week’s musical episode, Hal Holbrook — fresh off his Tony award-winning run as the Mysterious Stranger — joins the cast to sing about adjectives. Performed and broadcast live before a studio audience!

(This reply was part of a conversation on Micro.blog in January 2019 about whether poetry is a skill that can be taught. I’m re-posting it here as a matter of storing it on my own server rather than letting it fade into the haze of replies at Micro.blog. See also this essay, originally written in October 2020. And also this interview.)

The drive to write can be due to the need to express oneself, but I’ve found that over-reliance on “expression” as a motivator plays into the mystical idea that poets are supposed to be “inspired,” which all too often leads to stasis and frustration.

If you wait to be inspired, you’ll be waiting a long time. And when you finally are inspired, you’ll have had no practice, and the product will fall far short of the ideal in your head. No one thinks they can simply be inspired to write a song and, never having played before, just pick up a guitar and boom: a song. So why would writing be any different? Well, I believe it’s because we think we’re practicing all the time, by virtue of using language to, well, talk.

That is, many of us think that writing is the same as talking — and, even more so, that writing is the same as communicating. But poetry isn’t exclusively about communication or expression. (Of course, neither is speech, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

A poem is an event made out of sounds — sounds which just happen to be human language. A writer makes words do things beyond their usual scope, and this takes practice. It also takes a lot of research — that is, reading — to see what other writers have managed to do with words.

If you learn to work the raw materials, you’ll be better prepared for when you are inspired. And you may eventually discover that the joy of working the raw materials is enough.

And here is the third post in my ongoing poetry mini interview.

Grace Paley guest-stars in this “very special” episode in which I wonder how I know when a poem is finished. Animated, in homage to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Last, next.

75: Letterpress (Genghis Kern)
76: Kraft (graph)