Reading Poetry

Reading Poetries

We are reading the poetries. Reading = an activity [  of the intellect ]possessed of many denotative and connotative dimensions.

[insert: of the emotions that have full agency without the intellect/ of the body’s splendid and satisfying aesthetic productions]

What is a man to tell

A woman

Whose

Silence is an encyclopedia

 [remove “tell,” silence his voice, arrive at the core

What is a man to

A woman

Whose

Silence is an encyclopedia]

((If you remove “to,” the relationship dissolves and the leap ends in a plural singular or a singular plural))

They (a woman, a man)

 are reading the existing narratives

and critical commentaries

 on the poetries from 1900 to the present.

They are reading and reflecting on how to make choices that increase the ability to deal with an enormous* amount of material without being paralyzed or throwing up the hands in defeat.

*at last count, enormous  = infinity

Yes, reading to make choices based on historical consciousness of change.

Reading they are how some  (highbrow without volition) print poetry hangs out with its noisy cultural cousins ---the blues and jazz and vernacular remixes, and how the free and funky cousins often (and especially lately) turn up their noses at the conservative, constipated antics of ultra-intellectual kin who, despite denial, are begging something from the powerful somebodies.

Was June Jordan the only poet to notice ------

Whitman was right long before Pound went wrong?

Was (fill in the blank) the only poet to notice ----

(fill in the blank) was lef long before (fill in the blank) turned right?

Are all the messages in the family equal?

All messages in the family are equal!

 It is poetry as a cultural family affair over an eternity that has not denied the authenticity and legitimacy of innovations (deformations and reformations from a debated and debatable black  hole command center of  antiquity, modernism, post-modernism, and the unnamed identities of now); of  departures (i.e., diversity in practices, ideologies , performance ---swings between the poles of the oral/spoken and thought/written); of ordering the chaotic process of poetry.

Language, like nature, does not violate the logic of its chaos.

This exercise is about reading with a furious discipline.

 Reading is decoding, trying to understand how poetry demands a sense of history and of the people who have made/make/ will make certain kinds of poetry, a sense of aesthetic as perception and aesthetics as a theorizing of perceptions, and a sense that poetry in the United States is dynamic and is definitely not a limited number of monuments before which people must kneel and worship.

Technologies make the eyes squint.

The exercise  is about reading so as not to deny the necessity of using technology to transmit (as in the humanistic imperative) a total process of knowing, interpreting , using selected traditional as well as digital humanities  insights from  critical thinking about poetry for the purposes of public humanistic pedagogy;  and doing---whether one is a maker of poems or a receiver of poems or a both.

From Brenda Marie Osbey's website

I do wish more people would read her works, learn from her poetry, and comment on her genius.

Brenda Marie Osbey is an author of poetry and of prose nonfiction in English and in French. Recent work appears in Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing; Poet Lore; Planète Ovale; Southern Literary Journal; and Atlantic Studies: Literary, Historical and Cultural Perspectives. From 2005 to 2007, she served as the first peer-selected poet laureate of Louisiana. Osbey is the author of All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press) now in its third printing. She is the author also of Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (Story Line Press, 1991), In These Houses (Wesleyan University Press, 1988) and Ceremony for Minneconjoux (Callaloo Poetry Series, 1983; University Press of Virginia, 1985). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies and collections including: Callaloo, Obsidian, Essence, Southern Exposure, Southern Review, Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, 2PLUS2: A Collection of International Writing, Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, Epoch, The American Voice, and The American Poetry Review. Studies of her work appear in such reference works as Contemporary Authors, the Oxford Companion to African American Literature and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Oxford, 1997), as well as such critical texts as Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women by Lynn Keller (U. Chicago Press, 1997) and The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (Oxford, 1996). Her work has been the subject also of such literary conferences as the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) and the Modern Language Association (MLA), as well as masters and doctoral theses and dissertations. Her essays on New Orleans appear in The American Voice, Georgia Review, BrightLeaf and Creative Nonfiction. Her column on race and culture in contemporary France was published in Gambit Weekly.

For more than twenty years she has researched and recorded the history of the Faubourg Tremé, a community founded by free Blacks in New Orleans. She served as a consultant and commentator on New Orleans Black culture and history for Faubourg Tremé: the Untold Story of Black New Orleans (Serendipity Films, 2007) and Claiming Open Spaces (Urban Garden Films/ PBS, 1996). Osbey is the recipient of fellowships and awards, including: the 2008-09 Louisiana Board of Regents Award to Artists and Scholars (ATLAS); the 2008 Manship Summer Research Fellowship; the Camargo Foundation Fellowship (Cassis, France 2004); Louisiana Division of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1993); New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation Maxi-Grant (1993); National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship (1990); Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Poetry Award (1984); the Academy of American Poets Loring-Williams Prize (1980). She has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University. Osbey has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and Loyola University. She has twice been appointed Visiting Writer-in-residence at Tulane University and Scholar-in-residence at Southern University. She has conducted seminars and colloquia in literature, creative writing and New Orleans Black Culture at Dillard University; and has taught at Louisiana State University since 2005. In Fall 2011, she was appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Brenda Marie Osbey is a native of New Orleans.

On a criticism of a presentation of poetry

In response to Helen Vendler's review "Are These the Poems to Remember?" (New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011), Rita Dove provided civil justifications for her choices in editing The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.  Dove's "Defending An Anthology" (New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011) was, however, not accorded equal civility by Vendler's curt reply: "I have written the review and I stand by it."  Vendler owes Dove and the readers of NYRB more than a laconic sentence.  On the other hand, given what Vendler said in her review about the Black Arts Movement and Amiri Baraka, I suspect that Vendler's teeth are cracked and her locution is reduced to a whisper.