Month: October 2012

Baroqueify! Assignment # 4: Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

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We read poems by K. Silem Mohammad, Julian Brolaski, and Brandon Brown that combine anachronisms with the hyper-contemporary.

The assignment for this week:

~ Merge anachronism of form or vocabulary (possibly using a poem from a bygone era as a “trellis” (Nicole Blackman’s term) or transformation point)with something of-the-moment (such as pop culture or political references). [OLD + NEW]

~ Incorporate at least three words from your “quarry sheet” (each participant had a unique sheet of ornate spam language). [BORROWED]

~ Affect or admit to, at least at moments, an air of melancholy. [BLUE]

Baroqueify Assignment #3: Warp Out

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 In the third meeting of the Baroqueify! workshop, we read and discussed two poems, paying special attention to how syntactical choices create baroque effects.
The two poems we read were John Donne’s “The Extasie” and the first section of Lisa Robertson’s “The Men.” In Donne’s poem we looked at the nestedness of the phrases and the archaic (to our eyes) word order inversions. We lingered a bit also on the bizarre imagery of the poem without actually trying to fully explain it. Reading “The Men,” we noted how it moves through various modes, sometimes vulnerable/expressive, at other times anthropological, sometimes tender, sometimes heady, sometimes mocking. There was some resistance to this poem among the readership, and someone said she felt it was inaccessible. Later that reader compared it to Tender Buttons; I said I saw the influence, but also that words in “The Men” seem less thingified. I suggested that we might think of the poem in a painterly sense.  The words “The Men” are the key color (we decided it was a kind of cobalt) around which all of the other colors arrange themselves, in myriad variations.  I gave the example, as I always do, of the 39-minute Mayada el-Hennawy song that has so inspired me in thinking about poetic structure: “Akher Zaman.” It has a catchy chorus to which it always returns, but only after looping into different stylistic modes – classical Egyptian orchestra, 60s guitar, and so on.
Assignment: Write a poem in which you pay special attention to syntax and punctuation as warping devices, to better serve the baroque.

Baroqueify! Assignment #2: Seed it with Flaws

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Kaffir 
In the last Baroqueify! meeting, we spent a bit of time discussing Adolf Loos’ notorious “Ornament and Crime,” and then set about the task of articulating a working  definition of the baroque.
We brainstormed our own associations with the term.  Mine is transcribed here. It is informed a bit by the background reading I’ve been doing:
lushness
nestedness
intricacy
organic/natural forms
“taste” (highlighted as either “good” or “bad”)
manneredness:  archaisms, coyness:
conceit (concettismo): in particular of love, the boweer, pastorality
meraviglia: the marvelous/horrible
“exotica”
the feminine [although I rethought that, later, in discussion – the baroque is not so simply gendered]
extremes of scale and relative scale
apocalypse
excess (“too many notes”)
flaw/distortion/ the bizarre
rhythm: what do I want to say about rhythm? a sense of abandoning to it – pre-psychedelic – loops, looping, curling, irregularity
grottos and dioramas
trompe l’oeil
labyrinths
complexity of pattern
We looked into Vernon Hyde Minor’s “Baroque & Rococo: Art & Culture, and lingered over some choice passages:
 
I was especially struck by the relationship of baroque-ness to flaw and irregularity.
Here, then, is the second assignment for Baroqueify!:
Take a poem that you have written previously. Seed it with flaws and distortions.
(I didn’t say this in the actual workshop, but I might append to that:  “…to make it, in your mind, even more beautiful [awkward].”)

Baroqueify! Assignment #1: A Sort of a Song (transformation)

Nada Gordon1 Comment

Taking the rhetorical position for the moment that the credo of imagism was repressive, transform WCW’s admittedly beautiful little poem into something baroque. Do not remove any word or letter.

WCW’s original:

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A Sort of a Song
Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
— through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
William Carlos Williams

and my version: (I broke my rule for the assignment just a little. You know why? Because I can.)

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A Shunt of a Song
Pleather. The snark ­– red ­– feathery crimson –
waltzes his usual underthings as unruly weirdness
and there, writhing: beasts of words, slippery
owls, sands, quizzical lock of shrapnel’s harp.
Torrid stricken quim, its fettered undertow
and broken plaints. Slatternly it creeps, less
its servile thrum – tough Metamucil ™ as restive
anaphor. To reconnoiter cilia! Eating theatre
as polymorphous ecru, or ontologic pleather!
Sand, theatre, stonehenges. Capricorns! Omphalic
poses! (No ideas ­– balloons and butter in things.)
Invert! Saline axioms, afro rage: kiss my flower
sparking littoral sound that ends, that sluices,
that spits, that rocks.

Update:  Three more versions from Anne Boyer, Shanna Compton, Maurice Burford!

http://anneboyer.tumblr.com/post/33162285086/may-the-perverts-follow-assignment-1

http://blog.shannacompton.com/2012/10/baroqueify-1.html

http://whaleace.tumblr.com/post/33164742419/baroqueify-assignment-1-response