After the conference and all the jawing on about poetics I want you to think about the conversations you found memorable. The inspiring and the insipid, the boasting and the boring, the gut busting guffaws and the disheartening gaffs. If you remember it, it is important.
Moonlit Guttery Team performing for ScratchPDX (2011)
A. Molotkov, John Sibley Williams, Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk
What if the brain uses the same regions to create a character’s drawl as it does to bombard someone with paranoid ranting? The key difference between the auditory hallucinations of reading and schizophrenia would be in the ability to differentiate the source and reality of the voices. Schizophrenic hallucinations with their paranoia, fear, and derision may be coming from another part of the brain and passing through the synaptic voice box. Malfunctioning parts of the brain may be pumping the unfiltered chemicals and electricity like a fire hose through the same region or regions used to create voice from writing. So when someone with schizophrenia reads are they occupying the part of the brain that gives voice to the paranoia and using it to create the written voice?
I can say confidently that subjecting my work to peer review is the best thing I have done in the last 10 years.
Got this email from Writer's Digest selling critique services with the heading "Polish Your Writing with a Professional Critique from Writer's Digest!" I thought they had mispelled "Publish" or that it was making fun of the Poles. I sent them an email asking if the Polish joke was intentional. This was while I still thought it was a mistake. Laura from customer service wrote back, "Are you kidding?" Here is Laura's phone message on my voicemail. The greeting for my phone says "Hello you've reached David Cooke The Lawn Guy..."
A. Molotkov–Producer, poet, vocals, handsonic, duduk, percussion Bruce Greene–poet, percussion Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk–poet, vocals David Cooke–poet Ragon Linde–Music Director, music Shawn Austin–poet, percussion
I am certain that everyone has stories. I’m equally convinced that everyone is capable of writing these stories up into novels, short stories, articles, letters, notes, emails, blogs, texts, bumper stickers, billboards, songs, or graffiti. Writing is the legacy of our opposable thumbs and our ridiculously labyrinthed brains. However, just as not all runners are equal, nor all athletes, all writing is certainly not equal. At some point during my college years I promised myself to never, ever waste my precious time reading junk. Never. Unless it’s a magazine. Then it’s all bets off. For several years I only read the classics. Only the names bound in those Literary Anthologies you read in college: Hardy, Whitman, Woolf, Shakespeare. Under my definition of “classic”, Steinbeck was a bit of an upstart. Then after living in Nepal, I went through a long bout of only reading Indian writers—preferably ones who used magic realism. Do you know how difficult it was to make a steady diet of this writing? Salmon Rushdie hasn’t written that many things, nor has Gita Meeta, nor Tagore. It was like eating a very limited diet of only orange vegetables. Yummy, but limiting. My creativity, like a body on
Recently I wrote a list of books that influenced my writing and I thought it would be interesting to pose a question to this writing group. Tell me about a book or author that inspires your writing. The Guttery responses were (not) surprising. Bruce Greene‘s writing scratches like fingernails down the vertebrae of class and culture. Listen to the performance, Love Outlives Us, and you’ll appreciate that the writers who influenced Bruce were Kenneth Patchen and John Steinbeck. Bruce claims that he likes them both because they tackle “big ideas and are thought provoking.” Bruce does too. His “Goldfish” piece read in the Moonlit Guttery’s reading of Love Outlives Us uses the metaphor of a harmless goldfish to pry open the box of the Vietnam war. My mother, whose brother’s life was shattered by his three tours in Vietnam, could not sleep after listening to Bruce read his piece. She told me that Bruce’s story gave her a new perspective on her brother’s life and the cultural forces that led to his decision to do three tours. Bruce has published his memoir of his Vista years on the web, Above This Wall. Here is an excerpt from Bruce’s memoir. It
It’s happened again. Another best selling memoir exposed as a fraud? We don’t know all the details yet, but according to reputable sources like “60 Minutes” and writer John Krakauer, the blockbuster <Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortensen may be full of lies. If not complete falsehoods, then some very questionable facts. Did Mortensen’s chain of events happen as detailed in his two books? Are the schools he claims to have built all up and running? Was he really captured by the Taliban and detained in a cell or are the “captors” he’s pictured with in the book just friends. And then there is the money? 23 million in contributions that include $100,000. from President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize money. Troubling. Very troubling. As Krakauer writes in a recently published essay called “Three Cups of Deceit,” The first eight chapters of Three Cups of Tea are an intricately wrought work of fiction presented as fact. And by no means was this an isolated act of deceit. It turns out that Mortenson’s books and public statements are permeated with falsehoods. The image of Mortenson that has been created for public consumption is an artifact born of fantasy, audac- ity, and
David Cooke starts the discussion which will continue at The Last Monday Reading Series. It begins at 7pm at Influence Music Hall 134 SE 3rd Street in Hillsboro. Using the analogy of a Necker’s Cube Cooke illuminates the dynamic use of language by poets. Readers are often turned off to poetry because of the perception that poets are creating a code that needs to be broken. That poets load their poems up with obscurity and ambiguity to make it a poem. Poems are cryptic, dense, and obtuse on purpose to confound readers and make the poet seem more intelligent. Cooke posits that some of this confusion is a result of attempts to harness the ambiguity of language. Ambiguity being the primary and defining characteristic of poetry. “Often poetry is like Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I believe poets do not do this on purpose. They don’t write poetry as if it is a page out of Where’s Waldo or the hidden pictures of Highlights Magazine.”
