Read the first part here: http://cpoem.sunygeneseoenglish.org/2016/04/05/film-poetry-deforming-the-surface/

And the second part […]

Even poetry that doesn’t heavily focus on the visual has to acknowledge the presence or absence of white space on the page. To be more specific poems have to deal with the di…[Read more]

After I read “Daydream” (http://robinmendozadotcom.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/daydream/) I was so excited, because I finally had a good excuse to share Robin’s poetry on the blog. The poem takes place in a Lowe’s parking lot! I remember having a conversation with him before he wrote this poem about how strange parking lot lighting is, particularly the sunsets and twilights. If only I had done this the weekend before I could have asked Erika how she felt about Lowe’s. Her answer might have been similar to something Robin told me about how the facades of them look in front of the sun.

I began thinking about how Robin really introduced me to poetry, and how lucky I am to have a friend writing such cool stuff (and a little sad because he’s not writing much anymore). If I keep at this poetry thing like I plan to do, Robin could be the most influential person in my life behind my parents, so I was wondering if all of you have anyone like that in your lives? And if not, how did you come to poetry?

I tried to strike a balance between songs that have actually inspired poems with their […]

Not sure how deep you’ve been into that Wikipedia article, but for you and everyone else here is a video of the only scientist who has kept these jellyfish alive in captivity, Shin Kubota, singing a […]

But to stop writing after your first draft is rarely beneficial to […]

It was cloudy around 8pm on Friday, so instead of watching a brilliant Geneseo Sunset™ my friends and I were watching a sort of negative sunset.  As a poet I naturally began to think about how our experiences of art, nature, life in general, etc. can be informed by absence. While huddling together for warmth (because this was a Geneseo anti-sunset, after all) my friend Dave began talking about a website called Garfield minus Garfield which, as you’ve probably guessed, erases Garfield from the comics, exposing Jon as a character full of anxiety and existential dread.

Jon’s heavy lidded looks of malaise and final breakdown are now directed at nothing, instead of at a cat. The cat who gives this comic its name. How the meaning of this particular strip is changed by the deletion of such a crucial element gives a great example of how absence can magnify instead of morph. Without a direct object of his gaze and his breakdown we imagine Jon’s feelings are more intense, deep seated and directed at something more abstract, like the sense of doom he feels when thinking of his dead end job at OfficeMax. It may seem like a complete morphing, but it’s only a jump. Smaller moments of aggravation like getting fed up with a lazy cat sometimes create a nice little door into larger, more existentially charged feelings of frustration.

This doesn’t work for all of these strips, some of the meanings are changed or disappear entirely along with the cat. As poets these are the sort of changes we want to avoid when revising. As much as I may want to, I obviously can’t make Garfield into a direct analog of the line, but in terms of how deletion can magnify an already functioning meaning we can aspire to the example given in the strip above: delete a cat (or a line) and turn a moment of petty aggravation into a nervous breakdown.