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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Rhyme Time, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
Plus little Rob is sellin’ drugs on the dime,
hangin’ out with young thugs that all carry nines.Maybe rhyme has something to do with the performance aspect of poetry…and this could be why it’s used so […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Gabrielle Calvocoressi Poetry Reading, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
Thanks for posting this! I think I enjoyed Calvocoressi’s book the most out of all the ones we’ve looked at this semester, but it’s different hearing and watching her read it. The way she is reading it distracts […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
I am most interested in three seemingly separate writing disciplines: the creative non fiction genre, the investigation and research put into journalism, and the unique form in poetry. So, when I read Erika […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Iphone age, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
I’m so glad you started experimenting with this, Romy! I always wanted to try a “text bubble poem”. I think you did well with this. I like how some thoughts look like they stem from text messages when they are […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Children’s Books: Poetry? Prose? Narrative? Oh My!, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
It’s funny that you posted this tonight because I just came back from the library, specifically the children’s section, reading Ladybug Girl (definitely a stress reliever). It doesn’t have aligned stanzas the way […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Notes from Our Class with Erika Meitner, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
Awesome, Evan! You might even want to email her and get her approval of the recorded conversation, edit it so that it’s in the format of an interview and then send it in to some journals? Just a thought. First […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, American vs. British Spelling: Why? , on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
This started to really bother me when I published an article to ThoughtCatalog. I realized it was spelt without the -ue, and it brought the same questions to my mind as it did for you.
I just recently read (and […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, A love song for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
It’s always fun to notice how certain writers influence us at certain points in our lives, even the big guys from times we were never apart of, like Eliot. In high school when I read The Bell Jar, my poetry took […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, This is Just To Say I Started An Experiment, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
Funny. This is also a strong statement on what poetry is, and how (or if) it exists depending on the context. I took a Philosophy of Art class freshman year and we read an article on how an artist nailed a bed […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
After reading Amy’s poem for workshop, I realized that the quadruple colon (::::) created a kind of noise for me by the end of the reading. Since the speaker was making a telephone call, the recurring :::: sounded […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Bot or Not? , on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
So cool. This kind of stuff reminds us that even though language has its limits, the language in art is ever-expanding. It’s scary to think that a computer, an unemotional machine, has the ability to produce […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Hairston, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
The fast moving language and density reminded me of Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. I mentioned this book in class while talking during Evan’s workshop, but it applies to Hairston’s poem, too. The narrator is […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
Upon first opening Myung Mi Kim’s Dura, all I really saw were double spaced lines and occasionally separated words in those lines. Lots of the word choice seemed random to me, though I know that most published poets have a reason for their decisions, even if those reasons yield illogic. I continued reading, not understanding most of what was going on (that’s contemporary poetry for you, at times, I guess) but still accepting what was to come. Despite the initial frustrations, I appreciated a lot of the rhythmic sounds. For example, on page 6, the last line just echoes to the beat of some drum playing quietly in the reader’s head: “Lop off the top where the milliner’s wooden box doesn’t reach”
This brought me back to the discussion of rhythm, meters and emphasis in words we had in class a few weeks back. Myung Mi Kim demonstrates emphasis within words and lines perfectly here, as when it is read aloud, it sounds like: LOP off the TOP where the milliner’s wooden BOX doesn’t reach”
The word “milliner’s” is spoken the fastest. It is also the word with the most syllables in the line. Looking at emphasis like this in a book of poetry leads me to thinking about the chapter I read for my Teaching English as a Foreign Language class called “Teaching Pronunciation”. In order to teach a foreign language speaking student how to emphasize the correct parts of a word or sentence, they must learn prominence. Prominence is the focus of the sentence, where the emphasis is placed most. For example: Did you hear that John moved to ChiCAGo? CAG in Chicago is emphasized because where John is moving is the main focus of the sentence. Word stress works the same way, but within a single word. Think of the word economic. We say it like ecoNOMic. There is stress on the NOM. Then there is connected speech, where two words sound like one when they are pronounced in conversation, such as Kim’s milliner’s wooden. Outside the context of her poem, these two words wouldn’t sound connected, but because they are bound together in a rhythmic line, they are spoken faster and sound like they are together.
I found it interesting that my Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language textbook related so much to my reading of Dura. But then I flipped back to the Preface by Juliana Spahr.
First of all, she defines dura for us: an enveloping membrane. But it can also mean “hard mother” in Arabic, “to last” in the French infinitive, “feminine stiffness” in Spanish, or an ancient city that once existed in Syria. The many meanings of one word, the title of the book, open up our language and reveals to us that the context is different, not so precisely defined, and she ultimately tells us that things are not always what they may seem. She discusses the cultural gap in her poetry. Suddenly, her use of white space made sense to me.
Kim confronts the language and cultural gap through poetry, and expresses the difficulty of translating Korean to English, and vice versa. Her poetry in this book is mostly comprised of fragments in order to reflect broken English and a foreigner’s communications.
Learning a new language is hard, especially English. And the entirely new, possibly conflicting cultural aspect makes it even more intimidating. I found Spahr’s words resonating with me when she concluded, “For to write in this ‘America’, is to write with the 38th parallel, the line that separates North and South Korea, the line that crosses the San Francisco bay” (x). According to my Teaching English professor, English is the most desired language in the world (to be spoken, written and used in general). American English demands its own cultural barriers and limits that may sweep foreigner’s values or traditions under the rug. How much of this English speaking continent allows all of that to go lost in translation?
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, The Collectivism of Magnet Poetry, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
I LOVE WORD MAGNETS. They are wonderful for working with a limited vocabulary built by somebody else. It is challenging and fun. They also show us exactly how to use poetry on a white page in comparison to a white […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Finding the Time, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
It’s a shame to say that I don’t always follow the advice I’m about to give, but last semester I got a small separate journal to carry around in public. This way, when a spark of inspiration hits, I can jot down […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Writing about Things that Don’t Interest Us., on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
I do always find myself gravitating to topics I am most deeply interested in–the broad ones being death, love, loss, afterlife, etc. Mostly what any poet or artist is interested in expressing tangibly. But […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
My uncle works for a printing company in Rochester and contacted me one day, asking if I’d like some copies of literary and art magazines from Monroe Community College. I gladly accepted, curious as to what nearby colleges are up to with their poetry.
Cabbages & Kings displays a collection of visual art, interviews and poems, but they also included blackout poetry in the 2012 issue. However, in the 2013 and 2014 issues I have, no blackout poetry had been published. I wanted to know what you guys, poetry blog perusers, thought about blackout poetry as a craft, as a challenging prompt, as a useful tool, or just in general.
Is destruction just another form of creation—Would Donnie Darko support blackout poetry? Or is it not usually done well enough to be worth the time and effort of scribbling out a page in a book? Maybe this is to say something about black space as opposed to white space. Perhaps we can try it ourselves. For now, let’s take a look at some of Cabbages & Kings‘s stuff:
[caption id="attachment_121" align="alignnone" width="225"] There is no title here, but I think the burned edges of the page add an exciting visual element. There are very minimal words but the poem has a fantasy-feel, especially since it ends in dialogue.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_122" align="alignnone" width="225"] Again, no title here. This seems like a pattern in blackout poetry. What do we think of the words connected in pen? Sometimes, blackout poetry allows us to connect words in any order we may read them, but this one’s different in that respect.[/caption]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, The Poetics of Charlie Sheen, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
Lucia raises a good point. When I first looked at Sheen’s clever cover page I laughed, and went on to read some of his stuff. I kind of just pulled away by the third line when I realized how predictably in […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio commented on the post, Poetry in the Classroom: As Students & As Poets?, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
You raise an important point. I feel as though the “outside world” is deprived of good poetry. Yet, in order to appreciate a good poem, you’ve got to be literate, and if you’re literate, you’ve got to be a good […]
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Lauren Sarrantonio wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
I’ve conducted a kind of casual social experiment. I decided to do so in order to get the public’s perspective on what they think poetry is (there are no wrong answers, necessarily: some are academic, some are introspective, some spiritual, some lighthearted jokes). The reason I wanted to ask others, specifically those who don’t study poetry or literature on a higher educational level, is because I feel like the more I immerse myself in poetry, the more I am perplexed by it. So, I was wondering if those who don’t spend as much time thinking about, reading or writing poetry felt similarly as I did or not.
At first, I posted a Facebook status bluntly asking, “What is poetry?” I proceeded to attach the link to our blog, The Contemporary Poem. I posted the status rather early in the day, so I waited until the evening to read the responses. But there was nothing there. Now, perhaps no one saw my status and it got lost in everyone’s BuzzFeed-polluted news feeds, but it could also suggest other possibilities.
Perhaps no one wanted to comment on my status because they were not confident to start conversation on something they didn’t know much about for all of Facebook to see. Or maybe those who did read the status knew I was a writing major and felt intimidated or judged by what I might think. Or perhaps no one cared. Nevertheless, I think this bump in the experiment is a noteworthy one.
So, in order to actually get responses, I tried again. But this time, on my boyfriend’s Facebook. He posted a status reading similarly, but apparently came off more welcoming: “here’s a thinker for you: what is poetry? (input encouraged)”
And, maybe you guessed it already, but he got responses! They are rather interesting:
“Poetry is writing that cuts out meaningless filler. Poetry is difficult to describe because emotions are difficult to describe and it is essentially a way to describe emotions. When you have thoughts and emotions they are better reflected with striking words and imagery rather than story telling and linear forms of writing; not that poetry can’t tell a story.Ideas always seem so clear in your head and I think poetry is an attempt to capture that mental clarity without all of the clutter and fluff that floods everyday speech and thought. Almost like meditation with words. But then again thats my interpretation, there are lots of different styles of poetry and lots of different people that think and express in different ways.Try some Japanese Death Poems. The use of language is simple, and brings a sense of tiredness.” -male, age 22
“Poetry is an aesthetic communication of thoughts/feelings… poetry conveys what gets lost in translation. words sometimes aren’t enough.i think poetry is a lot like empathy… i think we can FEEL what poetry conveys even if the string of words doesn’t particularly make sense to us” -female, age 20
“Poetry is painting with words.” -male, age 24
“Poetry is lyrics without the music.” -female, age 55
“When I write poetry,..rhyming always, I do it to memorialize something or someone that I’ve observed doing/being something that moved my heart and spirit” -female, age 77
Disregarding the cliches, we can find a common theme here. People write when they want to express an emotion, scholarly or not. So, maybe the next time I cannot understand what a poet is trying to say, I’ll instead try to experience what they are feeling. Not all aspects of poetry demand reading comprehension or even logic. But it should always demand one of our most human abilities, to feel.
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