Bob Dylan’s Draft of Lyrics, Once Tossed in Trash, Sells for $500,000. Typed and hand corrected, these analog artifacts offer an insight into the creative process that digital means cannot. The article says Dylan tossed the lyrics in the trash. Apparently, he must’ve kept a copy.
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Leave a CommentSan Francisco’s Angry Poet
One of my favorite poets, August Kleinzahler, uses a Smith-Corona typewriter exclusively, and sometimes while sitting on the toilet. In the photo, the bad boy of American poetry has a drink at one of his hangouts, the Zam Zam bar in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
If we’re going to assert that poetry is work, we need to go beyond the semantics and difficulty and consider how it’s valued alongside other types of labor. The movie Paterson and Jim Jarmusch give us the opportunity to compare the work of making poetry with material forms of creative work and the waged work of bus driving. By highlighting the contrast between Paterson writing at work and his wife Laura making things at home, we’re immediately confronted with the historically lopsided and gendered division of labor that takes place in the public and private spheres.
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that the division of public and private realms is partially linked to the prioritization of intellectual over manual labor in classical Greek society. Arendt saw poetry, which is made purely of language, as the most human and least worldly of the arts. On the other hand, Richard Sennett saw craft as a merging of mental and manual labor, with the products representing the intimate connection between the hand and head.
However, the American philosopher Richard Sennett acknowledges that not all crafts are seen as equal, with parenting being viewed as different in character than plumbing or programming. Jarmusch defends the character of Laura against accusations of regressive gender roles, pointing out that she lives how she wants and is entrepreneurial, even if it’s in a domestic set-up. Jarmusch sees domesticity as a fact of how social structure works, but he also emphasizes the essential difference between the approaches to their respective crafts of the two main characters.
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Caleb Femi’s family lived in a housing estate where the walkways were swabbed down every Monday. His imagination transformed the space into a wonderland. In his debut poetry collection Poor, Femi explores the North Peckham Estate, described as a “paradise of affordable bricks, tucked under / A blanket, shielded from the world.” The poem contrasts the lofty ideals of its architects and the reality of a boy found stabbed to death in a stairwell in November 2000.
The bespectacled 28-year-old from South London is astonished that readers have found the collection dark, and says it’s a celebration of fantasy. The estate he grew up on fed his imagination in unexpected ways; the mural that appeared on the wall was the catalyst for many of the things that happened on the estate. Taylor, the young boy who was stabbed, was a close friend of his, and his death was a source of guilt.
Caleb Femi — poet, filmmaker, and photographer — became London’s first young people’s laureate in 2016. His pictures provide a different perspective of urban youth and challenge the discourse about them shaped by news photography. His poems use street language and imagery to amplify how urban boys are just as delicate as raindrops. In many ways, Femi is still that little boy who found a wonderland in the smell of detergent.
After moving schools for sixth-form, his teachers taught him a love of poetry, sparing him from the fate of many of his peers. Femi studied English literature and teaching at a Tottenham comprehensive school but quit after two years due to the strict “Gove curriculum.” For someone who loved Yeats and Pope, a rigid curriculum in a government school was a bitter disappointment. In 2015, his poetry career took off, and he made film-poems to order. In 2017, he was included on the Dazed 100 list.
A young people’s laureate’s tenure coincided with the Grenfell Tower fire. “In the future,” he wrote in his diary extract from the time, “every time I write grief on my phone its autocorrect asks if I mean Grenfell: have I written Grenfell so many times that it has registered it as a familiar word, or is this how collective mourning works?”
The Covid-19 crisis has yet again drawn attention to the disadvantages of being poor and urban. He lives in a Deptford flat with a cat called Dennis Adeyemi and dreams of making films and writing poetry. Femi, a guy obsessed with laughter, leaves the shop and walks through the rain towards an underpass, with the word “FANTASTIC” printed on the back of his coat.
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The Lincoln Journal Star reports that Nebraska poet Matt Mason won national attention for his poem “The Start,” which appeared in the New York Times. He drafted the poem three years ago when he wasn’t comfortable with the political climate, later realizing the poem’s relevance last month as an angry mob swept the Capitol. The phrase “probably started” conveys that small remarks or acts of hatred can lead to violent behavior.
“It’s seemed like we were going more and more with the (hateful) language and never hitting the point of saying, ‘This is too far,’” he told the Lincoln Journal Star. “And if that point never gets hit, the violence is inevitable.”
It probably started
in a whisper, a murmur,
a low tone hardly caught by the papers,
a sticker, a poster,
a brick wall with slogans in fresh black paint
Mason hopes to challenge people’s perception of the partisan environment. As state Poet Laureate, he has organized poetry events in every county.
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The older I get the more I look like the poet Robert Lowell. If I could write poetry like Lowell, I’d be set.
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This is the only filmed interview I’ve been able to find of the great poet Karl Shapiro. It’s sourced from a 16mm film by Karl Shapiro and Arthur Hoyle, Santa Monica, CA: Pyramid Films, 1976.
Billie Nardozzi writes poems every week for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It’s for love, not money: He pays for the privilege of getting them into print.
Claremont Graduate University is handing out a couple of huge poetry prizes here in Claremont, California.
Earlier this month in a press release, CGU announced Marianne Boruch won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her book The Book of Hours. The prize, given to a mid-career poet, is one of the largest cash prizes a poet can win in the United States. Boruch teaches creative writing at Purdue University and is also involved in the low-residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Heidy Steidlmayer of Vacaville, California, won the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her book Fowling Piece. The annual award is given for a first book of poems. Steidlmayer’s poems have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and in other prestigious poetry journals.
“We are delighted to honor these poets and celebrate their achievements,” Wendy Martin is quoted as saying. Martin, who is vice provost at Claremont Graduate University and director of the Tufts Poetry Awards program, goes on to say, “These Awards will help them gain wider recognition and will sustain their continuing commitment to writing outstanding poetry.”
The press release describes The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards as having been established in 1993 at Claremont Graduate University by Kate Tufts to memorialize her husband, a Los Angeles shipyard executive who had a passion for writing poetry. The goal of the award is recognize a poet who is no longer a beginner but is very much in mid-career.
A ceremony will be held at Garrison Theater (231 E. 10th Street in Claremont) on Thursday, April 18.
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