Watch out for Found Poems!

Just a few words on found poems.

Do not ever use source material that is under copyright unless you know the author and have a good relationship with that person.

Recently the Steiny Road Poet spent several months trying to find out who held the copyright to the letters of Paul Bowles as published in In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. It turns out, the copyright was granted by Bowles to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. It took a couple of months for the copyright contact at the publishing house to get around to reviewing the request and when the Poet got her letter of permission, it said, “We have no objection to your use of the material listed above in your unpublished manuscript, on condition that the material is printed without alteration…”

Are you laughing out loud? If not, maybe a definition of found poetry is needed.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines found poetry:

“Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original.”

So how does one remedy this situation because clearly the permission the Steiny Road Poet got was completely useless? She sits down and does a whole lot more research. Then she replaces the eight found poems with brand new poems. So far there are four!

A Word or Two on What I Saw But Didn't Write About

While the Steiny Road Poet has not really emerged from her winter funk, she is feeling burdened by plays and films she saw in recent months that she made no comment on. Here is her top down list.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by monologist Mike Daisey





Daisey is an amazing performer whose face can tell any story. The Poet is into Apple computer products as he is and she gets his shtick about Apple using cheap Chinese labor to line the pocketbooks of Apple's Steve Jobs and company. Because she has been to China recently and she has been reading the modern accounts of Chinese workers, she says Daisey didn't really give that story as much umph as he needed to. Does he really think American audiences can't handle what deprivations those Chinese workers suffer? And why didn't he suggest bringing the work back home to the States? Still, if you have the time and the money,  the Poet says don't miss Daisey at DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre. The Poet saw him in The Last Cargo Cult and she thinks he knows what he is talking about but most of all he is an outstanding performer.







Photograph 51

Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51 explores the unrewarded life of British geneticist Rosalind Franklin. This play at DC's Theater J is a story that will appeal to feminists and anyone who believes in ethical workplace practice. The Poet doesn't believe Republicans will sympathize with the protagonist in this male dominated cast where mostly what the men want from Rosie or Ms. Franklin (they refuse to call her Dr. Franklin which is what she prefers) is her sexual favors since it was much easier to steal her painstaking work that led to Nobel Prizes for others. In real life Franklin perished from cancer and her so-called colleagues got the Nobel after she died. Nobel Prizes only go to the living. The Poet thinks Ziegler is quite inventive with how she keeps the audience engaged in a play with many talking heads.




Probably you will have to wait for the DVD appearance of  the Korean film Poetry directed by Lee Chang-dong and starring the long absent, but formerly well know star, Yoon Jeong-hee but keep this at the top of your list. The Steiny Road Poet saw the film when it opened in NYC and with a Korean scholar who explained the joke scene and how many of the performers are local people and not professional actors. Even so, the film hardly needs the extra gloss. It's a story about a grandmother raising a teenage boy who gets into very serious trouble with his friends and how she if forced to handle this.





Other Films (good for Friday night entertainment):


The Lincoln Lawyer -- The Poet loved this street-smart bad-ass lawyer played by Matthew McConaughey who shares a daughter with a district attorney Marisa Tomei.


Limitless -- Who doesn't want to be the smartest person possible? This movie starring Bradley Cooper with a more secondary role by Robert de Niro shows the pitfalls of finding the magic smart pill.

Getting Ahead of the Curve

The questions are these:

Is it better to know ahead of every other rejectee that your work was not selected in some competition you entered

or

Is it better to sit blissfully in the dark and hear the news when it is officially announced?

The Steiny Road Poet has accidentally, not once but twice, within the last two months learned ahead of the curve the outcome of competitions where her work was under consideration.  The only advantage she can see is that she, unlike other artists not selected,  did or will recover from her disappointment well before the announcement was or will be made public.

Life for the artist after all is one rejection after another. Some of us, because we came from dysfunctional families where we were loved imperfectly or not at all, have lots of rejection training. Still, we want our creations, our artistic babies, welcomed into the world and given the opportunity to be loved.

So how do the beans get spilled in advance so that someone like the Steiny Road Poet finds out without trying to know the outcome? In one case, she was discussing business with someone she has never met before and they start telling each other personal details that led to the do-you-know-my-friend-so-and-so game which then innocently led to the info that so-and-so just had her work selected by a big New York City performing group. The Steiny Road Poet knew exactly what was being said without losing a beat on the business conversation. However, she immediately called the NYC performing group and got verification that their selections had been made. Of course, they wouldn't say more but it was a fact that no communication had come across to the S.R. Poet. In the second case, she was having a conversation with a friend. In talking about about recent non-selections, the friend mentioned casually that a small piece of hers was selected by a DC area group and oh, it was really nothing but it made her feel good anyway. Again, the S.R. Poet recognized instantly that her own work had been passed over but not officially rejected since no announcements have been made yet. The Poet is very happy for her friend and told her so.

Now back to the drawing board and maybe the Poet needs to start practicing how to throw a curveball.

Who Stole Langston & Is This News?

The Steiny Road Poet meant to post yesterday February 8, 2011, when The Washington Post finally made mention of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Convention and Bookfair in what basically turns out to be a gossip column called "The Reliable Source. The Poet had been thinking what a big oversight The Post had made in not covering any aspect of this writers’ gathering where prominent writers from across the world, but particularly American writers gather to discuss ideas, literature, politics, and more as well as present new and old books of importance.

In case you, my Dear Readers, do not subscribe to the venerable institution of print news and, in particular The Washington Post, in a nanosec, here is the story that continues to unfold, two days running, into a polemic against the always generous Andy Shallal, owner of Bus Boys & Poets, a restaurant in Washington, DC. Poet Thomas Sayers Ellis says he stole the cardboard cutout of Langston Hughes that Shallal had had made for Bus Boys, which is named after the poet who had been a restaurant bus boy in Washington, DC, when his first book The Weary Blues was accepted for publication by Knopf. After highjacking the Langston cutout, Ellis paraded it through the AWP Bookfair at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Ellis accuses Shallal of not paying poets fairly for their public readings at Bus Boys.

The Steiny Road Poet stands firm behind Andy Shallal and is OK with the gossip column "The Reliable Source" because it is fun but she takes The Washington Post to task for not giving appropriate coverage to the AWP Convention that included such writers as 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri (Conference Keynote speaker), 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan as well as such topics as the revolutionary changes involving print into digital formats for books, journals, and newspapers. 

Finding Happiness at 2011 AWP DC

If anyone mentioned that he or she had never seen the Steiny Road Poet happier than the four days she spent at the Associate Writing Programs (AWP) Convention & Bookfair, this would be absolutely true. She has found that passing The Word Works scepter to Nancy White, a former winner of the Washington Prize, has made this literary organization suddenly leap into the future -- we are now taking manuscripts for the Washington Prize electronically. We have a gorgeous new logo. We updated our Internet name to WordWorksBooks.org. We are sending electronic newsletters. We are saving money with print on demand production of our books. And we bought an expensive piece of real estate at AWP -- a booth with two big tables -- and covered all the costs by selling lots of of our beautiful books!

One particular high point was the celebration reading of selected Washington Prize winners as a scheduled event of the AWP catalogue. There were around 60 people in the audience to hear Nathalie Anderson, Peter Blair, Fred Marchant, Brad Richard, Jay Rogoff, and Enid Shomer. Fred moderated and created a warm community feeling for the program that included more than the usual nods to Nancy and the Steiny Road Poet. And it was February 3, 2011, Gertrude Stein's 137 birthday! Fred chose to read poems by both Nancy & S.R. Poet, including Karren Alenier's "Stein Writes It All Down."



The last day of AWP, the Steiny Road Poet paused for photos with friends Deborah Ager and Reb Livingston, with whom she also had photo opps at the 2009 AWP Conference in Chicago.  How things come full circle.