I have posted one or two screeds in the past few weeks about poetry that I read online. By way of explanation, I will do something I have so far (to the best of my knowledge) refrained from doing. I recommend reading this blog: Ephemeral Elegies. Tiffany Renee Harmon re-publishes the poets who are being published online and in physical print. At least 80% of it is good (my opinion only), and all of it is better than anything I can write. The times I’ve written this and this, I’ve been speaking to poems read on her blog. This is what decent, modern poetry looks and reads like. This is the standard to which I hold myself and everyone I read.
Tag: poetry
If the medium is the message, what is the device?
Something perhaps has changed with WordPress. I’ve been irritated to see that choosing the “Verse” setting for a block, which I thought yielded the above, doesn’t even come close on some devices. Here’s what my friend received in his email:
I knew that WordPress converted poetry to a monospaced font, rather liked it actually, because I follow a couple of poetry blogs which deliver the entire poem to my inbox. I’m pretty sure in the past that I saw the same thing on the WordPress website when I used my phone. Ah, but now there is Jetpack, newly changed for the…better? This is what appears on my actual blog when using an Android phone:
That’s not “verse,” WordPress, nor is it “poem.” That is called “paragraph” and “prose” and perhaps “simplistic crap” unless one makes a living as a stream-of-consciousness author, and even then one must establish a certain cadence and structure to ‘musically’ signal to the Reader that yes, this is something beyond prose. (Unless one is James Joyce, then nevermind.)
Canadian philosopher and communications theory god Marshall McLuhan invented the phrase “the medium in the message”. I’ve perverted what this means. He meant that content doesn’t really matter, that a children’s cartoon or a vicious slasher movie is all the same when broadcast identically on television. To me he meant the message of any communication effort takes its ultimate meaning from the medium by which it is delivered. Spoken words in a living room conversation take on new meanings when sung in a concert hall. More familiarly, books turned into movies tell a different story and cannot help do otherwise. Even if Peter Jackson had managed to control every reference in his Lord of the Rings movies, visual, aural, or what-have-you, the story still would have been just as vastly different than the books as they turned out to be.
For these reasons, it’s deeply unsettling to oldsters such as me to watch the different devices reformat and repackage the content of what purportedly is the same thing. I see this nearly every day as I follow Major League Baseball. MLB.com presents a side-by-side box score for both teams, but on the phone you must select one team or the other–never can you present them at the same time on your phone’s screen. Baseball-Reference.com displays a wonderfully useful tool when looking at any particular season for a baseball team: a histogram of green and red bars which tell the tale of the entire season, game by game, read left to right. Mouse over any bar and it tells you the date of that particular game, who this team played (and where), and what the score was. It also shows what the team’s Won-Lost record was when the game finished. On a mobile device (tablet or phone) this histogram tool disappears. It makes me wonder if certain features of a website are completely unknown to a majority of the younglings who stare into their phones for 90% of the time they’re awake.
Thus, we come back to my dilemma/consternation and the question posed in the headline. Have I delivered a poem at all when it looks like a short paragraph raising an offhand question? Does the trivialization effected by the mobile presentation indicate my poem lacked substance and can only stake a claim to poetry because of its window-dressed arrangement? (Believe me, I’ve thought some unkind thoughts about other’s postings which, if returned to a more prose-like arrangement, look like the musings of a teenager in a diary. Am I just as shallow?) Did McLuhan not go far enough? Does the message ultimately get defined by how the technology delivers it, even when it lives simultaneously in different media formats?
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
Marshall McLuhan from Understanding Media (as quoted in Wikipedia)
Ultimately I think McLuhan would argue each device configuration represents a medium. But I never signed up for this, WordPress! My understanding of the matter was this: you give me the tools to put my message together, and I pay for it by giving you ultimate ownership of my content (which I cannot believe I did, but there ya go). I expected a bit more, though. I expected a very nuanced difference to my content. Sure, I’ll accept McLuhan’s theory that those who read my stuff on a phone get a different message than those who read it on a big desktop monitor, but I would prefer to be left out of the “definition changing” part of the equation. You’ve made me a partner to it by changing my content not just the medium.
Which leaves me little closer to answering my question but has given me an excellent opportunity to rely on that first college degree and to prove yet again that old age clothes old men in curmudgeonly behaviors as surely as dogs become grizzled and oaks gnarled.
why I poetry
"You know why I poetry?" [Excuse me?] "I poetry because only there unclamps my scheming, planning, anal-fixated Self. It can't get Here, this Here where I poetry. It doesn't like it though, when I'm Here. Can you hear the screaming?"
one of my many pet peeves
if you’re going to post poetry as if you’re a poet, for God’s sake, learn the damn language! It’s pretty easy to do that and still write bad poetry, but it’s impossible for you to write good poetry without a basic understanding of grammar, usage, and mechanics.
an optimist’s view
Universe beneath my feet surreal: optimistically colored.
When we lost Lokisson
We watched, sadly horrified when little human-things took down Lokisson--one fine oak with humors unusual. "I lean over their rock-paths, put down by these silly human-things: they look up fearful, ignorant of my deep-rooted stability." He would laugh at his humor. If only he were stable as his roots! No. Humor's ultimate end: fearful, weak-full, they attack first. Angry, snarling chainsaws bit from all sides, ganged up, velociraptors hunting arboreal prey. We knew their type from so long ago. Elephant-bellows issued from metal contraptions which looked vaguely tree-like, screaming their masters' fears skyward, their cries sometimes oddly resembling bugling elks we heard in times before. Lokisson's beautiful limbs disappeared first, fed into hungry maws, exiting pulverized to bits. Metal sheets rang thunder to our sky. Then...section by section...his segments fell, crashing, loudly cutting off his jokes forever. We cannot laugh through our hurt, perhaps won't for many seasons. For two days afterward our living sky cried and grumbled.
Trains, hunger, and ghosts
Today trains run down Thurmond's rails laid with promises we thought included us, made us integral to those trains, controlling them. Those trains controlled us. Today, trains still run through Thurmond, still sound horns at crossings where tourists gape their tourist-gapes, where grass reclaims what we wrested from this steep slope. Us? We melted into America: most to nearby towns, some to Cincy or places far-flung like bits of coal escaping from tenders serving locomotives. Stocks dove mortally, banks failed. Ours held on: two years, five years... then closed or left. Our hotels burned, fell down. Yet tightly we clung to traditions learned. Progress ushered steam engines into history. Their coal waited uselessly beside steel tracks. It heated our homes, true, but offered nothing more: we couldn't eat coal. We sought regular meals elsewhere, hungry. Federals bought up what we never owned anyway. Thurmond's landed stayed, profited, found new cows from which to milk money.
(All photographs were taken in Thurmond, WV, July 2023. Though Thurmond dried up after steam engines ceased to ply the lines–the last one in the early 1950’s–a few persons hung on. In 2020, the population was five.)
We are not called
or, “To all who run toward the open field”
Not all are called to priesthood; ...to teach, ...to heal, ...to defend, ...to right wrongs, ...to lead, ...to agitate, ...to write The Great American Novel. Some of us pursue not purpose but meaning in being, in "job well done", in talents exercised, in immediate gratification for problems solved, purposes fulfilled, in greasing wheels for others, serving those we do not know to accomplish what we also do not know. To add one rock to the pyramid being built by us all.
i sing the keyboard Selectric
(a first draft with apologies to Whitman lovers everywhere)
I sing the keyboard Selectric, The keyboards which I loved and those few which loved me, They will not keep up with my fingers nor respond to them, But IBM corrupted me, charged me full of longing for the charge of the ball. Who could doubt that once corrupted, we would conceal ourselves? If once defiled, we would not attempt to defile others? If the up-and-back could not salve our soul? If the jittering ball were not our soul itself? The love of its inky black nothingness of a ribbon, we scarcely balk to account, That of the ball is perfect, and that of the ribbon is perfect. The expression of its typeface balks account, But the expression of a well-made page appears not only on the paper, It is in the slight indentations felt on the paper's reverse, it is curiously in the non-smearing type left by supple wrists, It is in the ball's walk, the absence of carriage, respondent to flex of wrists and fingers; cover does not hide it. The strong black strokes jump from the rag cotton carrier, To see it conveys the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see what life it might bring back to dead prose. Bridge from Underwood to cathode ray tube, to green dots pointillistically imbuing meaning in blackness, The thin dark lines of letters stringing meaning, the meaning within you and me, The exquisite realization of print; O I say these are not the parts of prose only, but of the writer's soul, O I say now these black lines are that soul, meaning.
sucked dry
Did I say, "nailed by meaning?" Sometimes your lines suck my lungs dry, replacing my oxygen with amniotic, fluidic meaning, sustaining me more than I knew I needed.
all the voices in my head 