Monthly Archives: June 2019

10 posts

How Goodreads Uses Its Readers As Ad Tools

poetry

tool

Some of the “Good” has been lost from Goodreads since the Amazon takeover, as you might have guessed given the nature of the Bezos Beast. For one, advertising on the web pages is more prominent and persistent. And for two, you, the user, are being used more and more as an advertising tool without your permission.

Well, I should rephrase that. Anytime you use a website, you are subject to its conditions, which are usually spelled out in a long document of legalese that no one can be bothered to read. Thus, if you are used, it is with your “permission” with a heavy accent on the air quotes.

The biggest change of late has been in the feed. It used to be that you read updates strictly made by your Goodreads friends and people you are following (if any). Chances are pretty good that you would miss most of these updates because there are so many that they quickly become buried under the moving thread on the screen.

No more. Advertisers now pay Goodreads/Amazon to highlight users’ actions so that they are mentioned multiple times. The two chief actions that make you a marketer’s tool appear to be the “Wants To Read” button and the “Like” button.

Now, second in every feed line-up and then even more periodically throughout, you’ll see a “Sponsored” post. Usually it takes a book one of your friends “Wants To Read” or “Likes” and heralds it as such. Thus, others may see more and more of you because a book’s publisher is using you, free of charge, to promote their book, even if you only made a random click and have little intention of really reading the book.

One way around this new advertising device is to ditch the “Wants To Read” button. Goodreads has hardwired it in, so you can’t actually take it out, but you can neglect it, leaving it at a perpetual zero and making yourself worthless to GR/Amazon’s advertising game plan.

I created a shelf called “Ordered,” and if I like a book enough to either get it from the library or buy it, I place it there. Because the shelf has a unique name, however, it avoids the advertising puppet strings.

For me, there’s double pleasure in this small protest. The “Wants To Read” button is pretty much a joke, anyway. As an author, you learn this quickly. Hundreds upon hundreds of readers are happy to “want to read” your book, but very few of them actually will. It’s as empty as gesture as “Have a nice day” from the bored cashier at the supermarket check-out.

Imagine if that button were taken to mean what it really means! Imagine if “Wants To Read” actually placed a book in cart at a bookstore website and then purchased it for mailing purposes to the user. Now we’re walking the walk and not just talking the talk!

But I digress. And it may be that you use GR and are bothered not a wit by the increased presence of ads and your pawn-like place on the behemoth company’s chessboard. But if you do care and still want to use the website, you can make a few simple moves to reduce your helpless role in the increased advertising gambit.

Empty your “Want To Read” shelf. Create and label a new one unique to you. Only place books that you will actually will read into it. It’s a small protest, yes, but everyone loves the big boys’ tea when it’s floating in Boston Harbor.

Nature, the Present Moment, and Other Gifts to Poets

poetry reading poetry

marsh marigold

We’ve been told more than once that we’re dying. Living, the learn’d astronomer tells us, is nothing but a long and inevitable walk toward our deaths, after all.

Bummer. And do you mind stepping aside, Sir Astronomer, so I can enjoy that starlight, maybe?

Sometimes a poem is a capital-R Romantic chance to strike back at logic and the gloom that leavens it, compliments of the capital-R Realists who take their jobs too seriously. The poet David Budbill took such an opportunity in the following poem.

 

The First Green of Spring
David Budbill

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

 

I’ve always enjoyed Budbill’s poetry, chiefly because he is so attuned to nature. The tide has turned against nature poetry (as my rejection inbox attests), but I still think celebrations of simplicity (or should I say, of complex simplicities) are a key reason for poetry.

In the words of the Buddha, focus on today and the world around you. Tomorrow and the much-ado’s about human interactions will take care of themselves.

If you are interested in reading more about David Budbill’s (1940-2016) work, you can leap down this rabbit hole.

Extended Metaphors? Wash and Fold ‘Em.

poetry reading poetry

laundry

Extended metaphors can be like a marathon, positively breathless to maintain in equal measure, but it’s worth it when you cross the finish line. And really, if your poem isn’t terribly long then your metaphor isn’t terribly extended, so why shy away from them?

For an example of a good “starter” extended metaphor, what about the natural parallels between love and laundry? But of course! We often think of the pair as similar. Or not.

But you will after you read a poet do it. You’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I see the connection. Why didn’t I think of that?” The short answer: Because you’re thinking of your own extended metaphor once you’re done reading this post.

 

Static
Barton Sutter

Well, Old Flame, the fire’s out.
I miss you most at the laundromat.
Folding sheets is awkward work
Without your help. My nip and tuck
Can’t quite replace your hands,
And I miss that odd square dance
We did. Still, I’m glad to do without
Those gaudy arguments that wore us out.
I’ve gone over them often
They’ve turned grey. You fade and soften
Like the hackles of my favorite winter shirt.
You’ve been a hard habit to break, Old Heart.
When I feel for you beside me in the dark,
The blankets crackle with bright blue sparks.

 

In this case, the “extended” in Sutter’s metaphor is a sonnet’s length, is all. You can do it, too, in 14 lines or less. Rub your muse against a balloon or something, then touch it with your writing finger and see if there isn’t some static. Creative static extended till the end.

The Tyranny in Novelty

poetry revising poetry submitting poetry writing

ferrari

As a writer, it can be liberating to no longer feel the pressure to create something new. You know the voice: “Hey, you. Mr. Writer. It’s been a few days (weeks, months) since you wrote anything new. What kind of writer do you call yourself, anyway?”

A smart one, if you plow more writing time into revision. Writing is revision, they say, yet, too often, we heed the siren call of creating the new instead. It’s flashy and cool like a red sports car. It’s what makes us “writers,” a name easier to assume than live up to.

Compared to the red sports car, constantly revising the old looks like Dad’s Buick. You’re tired of that poem, story, essay, or chapter. You’d prefer not working on it anymore. You crave the sound of screeching wheels and the smell of burning rubber as the new little sports car fishtails once and jumps forward — forward into the future!

Here’s a hint about revision: the need is heralded by any given work’s rejections in the market place. Once it comes home to Daddy five or more times, it becomes a symptom instead of a piece of writing. An object of need.

Think of the market as a physician trying to tell you something: Stop creating new when you’re not quite done with old. Open your myopic eyes. Seek the imperfections that others are clearly seeing.

Revision can be leavened with “new,” too. Try novel ingredients by adding. Note a new look by deleting. Move words and sentences around. Make a sports car of yesterday’s wheels through the gentle art of reconsidering.

Liberate yourself from the tyranny of constant novelty. Think of revision as the color red, then, and — who knows? — maybe it will be read, then accepted by the notoriously negative marketplace.

Vroom-vroom.

 

 

 

“The Sugar Was Sweet Snow”

poetry reading poetry

If ever you need a reminder of the lot of women, of how much it has changed, of how much it has yet to change, you can read a poem like Marge Piercy’s “The Scent of Apple Cake.”

Such an attractive title. Under its cover, what could go wrong? Well, there’s more than cake and cookies baking in a mother’s kitchen. Definitely true of a generation ago and beyond, but often still true today. Think of that the next time you ask Mom to whip up a batch of her specialty.

Note how Piercy leavens a simple bread of imagery with some harsh realities:

 

The Scent of Apple Cake
Marge Piercy

My mother cooked as drudgery
the same fifteen dishes round
and round like a donkey bound
to a millstone grinding dust.

My mother baked as a dance,
the flour falling from the sifter
in a rain of fine white pollen.
The sugar was sweet snow.

The dough beneath her palms
was the warm flesh of a baby
when they were all hers before
their wills sprouted like mushrooms.

Cookies she formed in rows
on the baking sheets, oatmeal,
molasses, lemon, chocolate chip,
delights anyone could love.

Love was in short supply,
but pies were obedient to her
command of their pastry, crisp
holding the sweetness within.

Desserts were her reward for endless
cleaning in the acid yellow cloud
of Detroit, begging dollars from
my father, mending, darning, bleaching.

In the oven she made sweetness
where otherwise there was none.

 

Yes, we learn in S1 that cooking is a “drudgery,” but it really begins to hit home in S5, where “Love was in short supply,” in S6, where we see her “begging dollars from / my father, mending, darning, bleaching,” and, of course, in the two-line envoi.

The two-line envoi about says it all.

Vuong Song

poetry poetry books

This week I picked up Ocean Vuong’s new book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s listed as “a novel” on the cover, but you know how genre goes these days. I can say with some confidence that it is not straight-up poetry like Night Sky with Exit Wounds, but I’d peg it more memoir than novel. Call me traditional.

The conceit is a series of letters from a young Vietnamese man to his mother, who cannot read. Proceeding chronologically, it starts when the letter-writer is a young boy in the familiar (to me) city of Hartford. (And how neat to see Franklin Avenue appear on its pages!)

Novel, memoir, hybrid, there’s no denying this is prose. But it is poetic prose, so if you’re hankering for a book of poetry, you should have no problem diving into an ocean of this kind.

For example, here is a paragraph taken from p. 12 in the text:

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the firs snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

If you’re thinking these lovely lines of prose could easily be rearranged into a short stanza of poetry, you’re thinking like me. Whoever thinks of an eye as something god cares about, much less as his “loneliest creation,” is thinking in a novel way. No, wait. A poetic way.

And it’s almost aphoristic when Vuong writes “the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing.” Antithetical wisdom, that.

Then the bit about the other eye, unaware of the first, “just as hungry, as empty.” Nice. And finally, in a concrete example of all this poetic abstraction, his mother opens the door to the first snowfall so his young and hungry eyes can fill their emptiness with wonder.

Two pages later, the end of this chapter features a one-line, one-word paragraph—the word “Look.”

We may be briefly gorgeous here on Earth, but our prose can be gorgeous much, much longer. But don’t take my word for it. Read for yourself.

The Power of Lists

poetry reading poetry

crow

The humble list poem. It is not to be underestimated. As your cue, writer, consider Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s memorable words, “Let me count the ways.”

That was love, but love isn’t the only thing worth counting. Everything that resonates is fair game. As an example, we have the late Tony Hoagland’s “Example”:

 

Examples
Tony Hoagland

Aspirin,
crack cocaine,
the poetry of Keats,
Kathleen’s big beautiful face,
and The Communist Manifesto
— these are all pain relievers.

Death from cancer of the mouth
of the tyrant Joseph McCarthy;
the blue crow sliding over the arroyo, cawing;
the baby taking the lima bean from his mouth
and pushing it between the lips of his mother
— these are examples of justice.

The moment when you step away from the party;
the sound of the eighty-foot spruce tree, creaking;
the hour in the waning afternoon
when the attorney stands beside her car,
removes her sunglasses, and looks up at the sky
— these are examples of remembering.

The metaphor that makes you laugh out loud.
The warm breast of the dental hygienist
pressed against your ear
as she leans to get access to your plaque.

The dream in which you find yourself at sea,
at night, with water under you so deep
you weep with fear. And yet the darkness
does not take you into it
— these are examples of fortune.

 

Let us count the counted: pain relievers, justice, remembering, and fortune. But you can create any category you wish. The key is to list concretes which illustrate your abstractions.

For example, in S1 here, pain relievers become aspirin, crack cocaine, the poetry of Keats, Kathleen’s beautiful face, and The Communist Manifesto. If your list creates odd bedfellows, all the better. Your reader will stop and wonder why or how, and we all know that wondering and readers make for a heady match.

Note, too, how the crow in S2 is blue. A black crow will not do. It is expected, and writers should always respect such inferences on the part of the reader. Press adjectives into duty only when they fly against expectations. Thus, the beauty in “a blue crow sliding over the arroyo, cawing.”

Note, too, imagery, such as “the sound of eighty-foot spruce tree, creaking.”

Note, too, the specificity we can relate to, even if we haven’t personally seen it: “the baby taking the lima bean from his mouth / and pushing it between the lips of his mother.”

And finally, the last item on your list, which assumes a position of power, much like the first Canada goose in a V flying south:

The dream in which you find yourself at sea,
at night, with water under you so deep
you weep with fear. And yet the darkness
does not take you into it

These are examples of your good fortune in reading a list poem that works. Now you write, too.

“The Body Is Nothing but a Map of the Heart”

poetry reading poetry

Leonard_R_Roberts

You need only read the first two lines of the late Len Roberts’ poem “Acupuncture and Cleansing at Forty-Eight” to realize it was 21 years ahead of its time. Forgoing meat and dairy? Forswearing sugar? All that’s missing is the banishment of gluten.

Still, there’s more than a little acupuncture going on in this poem. There’s a life being revealed, many pains being traced, and Dr. Ming working hard, against all odds. If you’ve never tried acupuncture, here’s your chance—a poem that makes its vicarious points, one by one:

 

Acupuncture and Cleansing at Forty-Eight
Len Roberts

No longer eating meat or dairy products or refined sugar,
I lie on the acupuncturist’s mat stuck with twenty
needles and know a little how
Saint Sebastian felt with those arrows
piercing him all over, his poster
tacked to the wall before my fourth-grade desk
as I bent over the addition and loss,
tried to find and name the five oceans, seven continents,
drops of blood with small windows of light strung
from each of his wounds, blood like
the blood on my mother’s pad the day she hung
it before my face and said I was making her bleed to death,
blood like my brother’s that day
he hung from the spiked barb
at the top of the fence,
a railroad track of stitches gleaming
for years on the soft inside of his arm,
blood like today when Dr. Ming extracts a needle and dabs
a speck of red away, one from my eyelid, one from my cheek,
the needles trying to open my channels of chi,
so I can sleep at night without choking,
so I don’t have to fear waking my wife hawking the hardened mucus out,
so I don’t have to lie there thinking
of those I hate, of those who have died, the needles
tapped into the kidney point, where memories reside,
tapped into the liver point, where poisons collect,
into the feet and hands, the three chakras of the chest
that split the body in half, my right healthy, my left in pain,
my old friend’s betrayal lumped in my neck,
my old love walking away thirty years ago
stuck in my lower back, father’s death, mother’s
lovelessness lodged in so many parts
it may take years, Dr. Ming whispers, to wash them out,
telling me to breathe deep, to breathe hard,
the body is nothing but a map of the heart.

 

Waves of anaphora and repetition of all sorts. And why not? Pain repeats and, through repetition, builds. Writing about it is akin to Dr. Ming. It gets the chi flowing!

Some Poetic Wisdom from Kahlil Gibran

poetry

gibran

In between books, I happened to pick up a copy of Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran, a man who had his day in the 60s and 70s and, I’m sure, is still read by many. I noticed, as I read through his aphorisms, that some had to do with poetry, art, history, philosophy—all of those abstract distractions that have fascinated me over the roiling years. Here I share a few:

  • The poet is he who makes you feel, after reading his poem, that his best verses have not yet been composed.
  • Poetry is the secret of the soul; why babble it away in words?
  • Poetry is the understanding of the whole. How can you communicate it to him who understands but the part?
  • Poetry is a flame in the heart, but rhetoric is flakes of snow. How can flame and snow be joined together?
  • Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.
  • History does not repeat itself except in the minds of those who do not know history.
  • Sayings remain meaningless until they are embodied in habits.
  • Poetry is a flash of lightning; it becomes mere composition when it is an arrangement of words.
  • Art began when man glorified the sun with a hymn of gratitude.
  • Philosophy began when man ate the produce of the earth and suffered indigestion.
  • To be closer to God, be closer to people.

Although you might lament the fact that inspiration is like lightning while words are mere composition, you can at least take hope in the first saying. No matter what you write, the best is yet to come!

A great thought to start any Monday, I think.

The Complication in Simple Truths

poetry reading poetry

sleepdog

Simple truths. They abound out there. Put them to paper, though, and they may play like clichés, fast and loose. You need an angle, then. You need your own way.

Pretty much, that’s the simple complication to writing. Everyone holds any given truth to be self-evident, but only one can put it in a certain way—one that makes readers nod and say, “Yes, this illustrates that truth perfectly.”

For example, let’s see how Marjorie Saiser angles in on a simple truth with the following poem:

 

Weekends, Sleeping In
Marjorie Saiser

No jump-starting the day,
no bare feet slapping the floor
to bath and breakfast.

Dozing instead
in the nest
like, I suppose,
a pair of gophers

underground
in fuzz and wood shavings.
One jostles the other
in closed-eye luxury.

We are at last
perhaps
what we are:

uncombed,
unclothed,
mortal.

Pulse
and breath
and dream.

 

Visually, the poem keeps whittling itself down to basic truths, and those basics are delivered in two final stanzas that amount to one- and two-word lines. That’s all. People like gophers in wood shavings “uncombed, / unclothed, / mortal.”

Better yet, the final word of the final stanza, so different than the physiological ones that precede it: “Pulse / and breath / and dream.” This time the short waves come without punctuation or hesitation, but we are more than just autonomous pulse and breath. We are the stuff of dreams.

A basic truth about a lazy day with a loved one. Terribly uncomplicated, really, until you tackle the complication of saying it your own way.