How to Avoid Fleeting Poetry Trends

Nada Gordon8 Comments

Step1
Develop and keep your own style. Trust your instincts about what sounds best with your education, theories, influences and place in the poetry hierarchy.

Step2
Adopt what you truly like, but recognize that it may not be the last word forever.

Step3
Understand the process. Be aware of why, as well as when, a poetry trend is cooling. Poetry trends and fads can happen because a style is cool (spontaneous bop prosody) or fun (flarf) or even shocking (the gurlesque).

Step4
Adapt the style you want to adopt. For example, is everyone writing short short poems but you just can’t? Add an extra stanza to your poems so you can write them short but not as short as everyone else.

Step5
Mix trendy words with classic ones.

Step6
Break some rules; bend others. If the poetry fashion is proceduralism, try writing eight poems of eight lines each instead of retyping the whole goddamn newspaper. If slow poetry is in, use long vowels and dying metaphors before you actually opt to O.D. on barbituates.

Step7
Develop confidence: Take a class, read poetry magazines, get a poetics lesson, get your MFA done.

Step8
Learn about poetry, style, tips and tricks, then go out and make your own poetry news.

Tips & Warnings

  • Take a long look at yourself before you go on a poetry safari. Will those politics go with your voluptuous sensibilities and your weakness for beatnik paraphernalia?
  • Realize that a stylish writer with purple prose can carry it off if he’s confident.
  • Impulse poems are for gratification in haste and repentance at length.

Vogue 2267

Nada Gordon3 Comments

OK, so I made this pattern:


but added godets and petite-ified it (it’s shorter than the one in the pattern pic). The fabric’s from Japan and has a beautiful linen-y slub texture, tho it’s cotton:


I know I should just set up the damn tripod, but I’m worn out from hemming.

Aggressive, Baroque and Esoteric

Nada GordonLeave a comment

I’m wondering if Aase Berg is my Swedish sister. Our writing isn’t similar, but our poetics are:

From “It’s Not Acceptable to be Fatso”:

“… I hope for poetic expressions that are aggressive, baroque and esoteric; I prefer ridiculous and embarrassing to perfection. On the literary market, which is dominated by the aesthetic and social ideals of the upper middleclass, it is unacceptable to be excessive in any way – one adjective too many and you’re out. There’s a stubborn cliché that the sober, quiet and elegant, the so-called “simple” is categorically more informative than the noisy. The fleshy, screamy and overdone, the vulgar, desperate and pathetic are so taboo in our culture that there must be dog buried in the phenomenon.”*

Huh.

Nada Gordon1 Comment

My horoscope today:

August 05, 2008

  1. CapricornCapricorn (12/22-1/19)

    This is a wonderful day to expose yourself to new art, especially if it’s from a different culture. Turn the dial on your radio or television to a channel where they’re not speaking English. Leave it there for a few minutes and you’ll be surprised how intriguing you find it. There are many ways of journeying through life, but you will only ever know the path you choose to travel. Every now and then, it’s wise to travel down an unfamiliar side street.

Project Dreamway

Nada Gordon2 Comments

Dreamed last night I was a contestant on Project Runway. Problem: the instructions were confusing. Maybe there were no instructions. I think the first outfit I made was a very 80s tunic & leggings in black jersey; I decided I hated it and ripped it up, started making a scallopy layered dress out of the same fabric… but then I heard or remembered or realized or something that the judges didn’t want to see black, that it wasn’t “risky” enough. I was not on the usual set, it was in some half-abandoned institutional building in the country. There was some issue about shitting, I don’t remember what it was. But I do remember that one of the other contestants made this amazing Marie-Antoinette style dress out of peacock feathers, and I was trying to do this totally amateur thing in black jersey. It was very anxious-making, this dream.

Anyway, I am working on a dress, in real life. And NOT on Project Runway time. How do they do it? And why didn’t Jerrell’s AMAZING gown even get in the top three?