Author Archives: thisfrenzy

About thisfrenzy

poet, translator, activist, editor, book seller, dyke, feminist, tattooed, reviewer, explorer, worrier, word lover, rambler

The most diffi…

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The most difficult of all things, the only difficult thing perhaps, is to enfranchise oneself and – even harder – to live in freedom.

Anyone who is in the least free is the enemy of the mob, to be systematically persecuted, tracked down wherever she takes refuge.

I am becoming more and more irritated against this life and the people who refuse to allow any exception to exist and who accept their own slavery and try to impose it on others.

Isabelle Eberhardt, 1902

Isabelle Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was an explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For her time she was a liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam. She died in a flash flood in the desert at the age of 27.

Revisiting Classic Poems and Rediscovering How Good They Are – 13 Blackbirds

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yes, I read it in college, and was told how good it was, but at that age and level of experience I wasn’t remotely ready to love this poem. Now, though–just taste these lines:

– The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds
– With barbaric glass
– An indecipherable cause
– lucid, inescapable rhythms
– Even the bawds of euphony

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

On loathing “The Giving Tree”: a literary historical footnote

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from an interview with editor Phyllis J. Fogelman with Leonard S. Marcus, published in Horn Book in March/April 1999

LSM: One of the books you worked on at Harper was Shel Siverstein’s The Giving Tree (1964). Tell me about that experience.

PJF: Shel had originally submitted drawings for the book in the “scratchy” style of his very popular Playboy cartoons. When I suggested that he might want to redo the art, he said very firmly, “No. That’s how I see the book and that’s how it should stay.” Then, about a month later, he called me up and said, “Phyl, I have a question to ask you. If someone sees something one way originally and then later on sees it quite differently, do you think that that person should stick with the original version or do it the way he’s thinking of now?” Naturally I said, “The way he’s thinking of it now. That brings it right up to date!” And so he redid the artwork in the more pared-down and much sweeter style that everyone now knows, and it was just right for the book.

I must add that ever since then I have had qualms about my part in the publication of The Giving Tree, which conveys a message with which I don’t agree. I think it is basically a book about a sadomasochistic relationship and that it elevates masochism to the level of a good. Of course, millions of readers have apparently felt otherwise.

Traumatic Emplacement

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A great post by Emily Johnston, Sr. Editorial Assistant at Spoon River Poetry Review, on how she’s teaching students studying gender violence to move beyond reading the stats to understanding how the violence and resistance to it lives in our bodies. She’s using an anthology with some of my work in it, Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence. Really great ideas for teaching about trauma!

Traumatic Emplacement: Poetry Emplaces Violence

The Art of Craft Series Spring 2014

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The Art of Craft Spring 2014: A series of craft talks and workshops

The Art of Craft:
A series of craft talks and workshops for poets, poetry fans, and writing teachers
Mentor: Elliott batTzedek, MFA
Location: Big Blue Marble Bookstore

Dates and Topics:
Thursday Jan. 30th 7-9 pm Thinking Like a Poet I
Thursday Feb. 6th 7-9 pm Thinking Like a Poet II
Thursday Feb. 13th 7-9 pm A Density of Sound
Thursday Feb. 20th 7-9 pm Spines and Joints
Thursday Feb. 27th 7-9 pm Forms are a Poet’s Best Friend
Thursday March 6th 7-9 pm Measuring Meter
Thursday March 13th 7-9 pm Walking the Line
Thursday March 20th 7-9 pm Case Study: The Persona Poem

Welcome to the Art of Craft, an ongoing series of craft lessons and workshops by Big Blue Marble Writer-in-Residence Elliott batTzedek. Each week we’ll take on a different element of the poet’s craft through learning, discussion, and hands-on work with poems by many of the best contemporary poets.

The Art of Craft is for poets, for poetry fans who want to learn more about the art, and for writing teachers who want to bring new tools to their students. An ongoing writers’ workshop will also be available for poets who want to apply these elements to expand and deepen their own work. More information about each topic is below.

Cost: The craft sessions are $40 each, $75 for any two, $130 for any four, or $250 for the series of eight. Philadelphia public-school teachers (or staff who work with kids) may enroll for $15 each or $120 for the whole series. Discounts are also available if you bring a friend; please email me for more information.

Pre-registration and a deposit are required. Please email Elliott at battzedek@gmail.com or register online at: Art of Craft Series Registration The fee includes all handouts and materials.

A writers’ workshop is also available, meeting weekly for 8 sessions from January through March of 2014. The cost is $200 for one poet or $300 for 2 (that is, bring a friend and you each save $50!). Workshops will include reviews of craft elements, writing exercises, and discussions of our poems. Register online at: Art of Craft Writers’ Workshop

About the Topics:

Thinking Like a Poet I—Rather than asking, What does a poem mean? this series asks How does a poem mean?, a question we’ll answer through studying aspects of the poet’s craft. In the first section we’ll be exploring:
Formal/Big Strategies
Music and Clatter
Words, Diction, un-Microwaveable Language

Thinking Like a Poet II—We continue exploring how poems work, focusing on:
Time and Space
Grounding
Movement

A Density of Sound—How does the poem sing? What is the chatter, the clatter, the smooth move, the structure, the improv? How do poets use sound to structure the poem and to convey its emotion, context, meaning, and urgency?

Spines and Joints—What is the central axis of your poem? Where does it bend, rotate, flex? How and when do other voices/views come into the poem?

Forms are a Poet’s Best Friend—While free-verse has been the dominant form of U.S. poetry in English since the mid-20th century, poetic forms have never disappeared as useful poetic tools. Poets use, stretch, modify and bend forms, and even the most free of verses can be built on the echo of very traditional forms.

Measuring Meter—The inherent meters of English live in everything we write. We’ll study how meter control the pace and meaning of poems, and how to use meter as a tool for revising.

Walking the Line—Never again worry about where to put in line breaks—because lines don’t break. Lines end, when their work in the poem is complete. Break the myth of the break, and free your lines to be the great engines of your writing.

Case Study: The Personal Poem—Persona poems, or poems that speak in a first person voice that is clearly not the voice of the poet, have been adapted to many interesting uses in the past decades. We’ll look at some of the most original and most startling voices, while considering structural issues such as how poets enter and leave the persona poem.

The Art of Craft: Some notes on thoughts on the line

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Wednesday night, in the final Art of Craft fall session, we’ll be exploring the line, considering what functions lines serve in poems, and ways poets use the line. A few ideas we’ll be considering:

line is a function of rhyme

line is a function of formal structure

line in blank verse is function of meter

the function of the line is sonic; line is a sonic rather than visual element of poetry (except in concrete poetry and a few other forms/trends)

the line exists because it has a relationship to syntax

line in free verse is the companion and disruptor of syntax, working together to create the poem; line and syntax cannot exist without each other (except in some poems, where line and syntax are always and only companions, and reading the poem feels exactly like reading prose)

the aural pleasure we take in the poem is due to the way lines marshal the language into patterns of assonance and alliteration

line endings can perform the work of punctuation

each line ending is a place where a poem can bend; in poems using rhyme the necessity of getting to a rhyming word by the end of the next line can steer the poem into another direction or another point of view, and in unrhymed poems the end of each line is a potential jumping off place where the poem can continue forward or, as your eyes sweep to the left, reverse, turn, spin.

Deciding where the line should end in a free-verse poem might seem mysterious, but in fact it is not

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Deciding where the line should end in a free-verse poem might initially seem more mysterious than in a metered or syllabic poem, but in fact it is not: whether or not the line ending is determined by an arbitrary constraint, the line ending won’t have a powerful function unless we hear it playing off the syntax in relationship to other line endings.
James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line

Tonight in the Art of Craft: Measuring Meter

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Tonight in the Art of Craft workshop at Big Blue Marble Bookstore we’ll be exploring meter and rhythm in poetry, centering on these questions:

How does meter construct the sonic richness or density of poem?
How do poets use meter to create deep emotions, such as incantations or elegies?
How do poets use varieties of “feet” to pace the poem and to make the rhythm serve the poem’s purpose?

These are the poems we’ll be investigating:

Terrance Hayes, “Sonnet”
Gerald Stern “The Dancing”
Theodore Roethke “My Papa’s Waltz”
Joan Larkin “Inventory”
Etheridge Knight “Feeling Fucked Up”
Patrick Rosal “Despedida Ardiente”
Elizabeth Bishop “One Art”
Jane Mead, “Lack, the memory”

and some Mother Goose – where the metrics are so much more complicated than the sing-song-iness we remember!

The magic of vestigial metrical features in unmetered poetry

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Alfred Corn on stanzas in contemporary poetry:

If we look at unmetered poetry being published now, the last vestige, apparently, of traditional prosody to be given up is regular stanzaic division. It’s often true that contemporary poems with no iambic feet to speak of and lines of varying lengths will nevertheless divide the text into distichs, tercets, or quatrains. It’s as though the poet were suggesting that some basic principle of quantification had been applied to the poem, even in an inaudible one. Without meter we have trouble hearing stanzaic divisions, especially when stanzas have been enjambed. If a poem keeps this vestigial metrical feature, it probably does so in order to invoke the mysterious power of number, which inspires unconscious respect in both poets and their audience. When poems are divided in uniform stanzas, spontaneous utterance is being made to encounter an abstract numerical principle, which lends something like magic or impersonal authority to the text.

A Few Sunday Love Letters

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Dear Toyota,

The traction control on my 2009 Scion XB 5-speed is amazing! Kept me safe all the hilly way home!

Love,
Elliott

Dear Crackle of Birds Feasting Greedily on the Berries on the Tree in Front of the Bookstore Window First Thing in the Morning,

Thanks for your weather forecast, much more accurate than my computer. The reminder to fill my belly and settle in somewhere warm until the storm blows over is deeply appreciated.

Love,
Elliott

Dear Book Lovers Who Braved the Weather, Entered the Store, Pushed Back Your Hoods, and Smiled Broadly Because We Were Still Open,

Because of you I go home happy every day, even holiday rush days with no time to rest or to sit to eat, cranky credit card machines, people needing both wrapping and book advice in the same time slot, B&T software that keeps signing me out, and even the lovely old building’s wooden floor that today installed a splinter under my fingernail. You, and the books, and the staff, are a stunning symbiosis that make me grateful for having accidentally arrived in Philadelphia years ago.

Love,
Elliott

Dear Staff at Toto’s Pizza,

Thanks for coming in to work in the snow so I could get a delicious South Philly Style pizza on my way home from work in the same snow. Walking from the dark and cold and slippery world into your warm and steamy and bright shop was such a gift.

Love,
Elliott

Dear Critters of 6369 McCallum St,

Thanks for curling up with me to watch Star Trek, even though my work day meant your dinners were 2 hours late. I hope the pizza crusts and chin scratches conveyed my apologies and my deep gratitude for your steady affection.

Love,
Elliott