Henry Miller Died Happy//Poets' Forum/Swede&Haiku/DiPrima (scroll down to see everything)

Flash: Congratulations to our good friend Amy Trussell selected as a finalist in the Crazyhorse Linda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize competition.
Henry Miller On Painting
The more I paint, the more I appreciate Henry Miller and his philosophy of painting. These are 3 of his. What follows are some of his remarks and those of others in his great essay "Paint As You Like and Die Happy."

"Usually what is taught in school must be unlearned...life is the teacher, and one of the first questions thrown at one is 'Who influenced you? That one looks like a Chagall.'....another looking at the same painting says 'I see that you have been influenced by Paul Klee' (Ed: I've gotten both of these)...certainly I (Miller) have, but there are hundreds of painters who have influenced me."


And Lawrence Durrell in his preface says "If you wished to draw the arm of a chair or an airplane, you closed your eyes and wished for it to form under your brush. Also you used whatever resources you had of memory or drawing... but the main effort was just to will the image...this image would form itself...without all the effort of building it by rule or precept but taking it as one...not a life class...one had short circuited all the drudgery of practice by this immoral and low down procedure...but I must not pretend that it was infallible...it did not always fall out as you might wish...sometimes obstinacy set in, and, instead of what you wanted, you got an unwanted Japanese umbrella or a runaway horse or a forest fire...in this instance, nothing could be done but to have good humor and fall in with the inevitable ...you entitled the work "Fire At Night" and people praised your 'savage realism'...but what's to be done, you just nodded gratefully and walked away. Henry and I consoled ourselves with the realization that many of the masterpieces of this world were accidents or at least semi accidents and that even the expectations of the great artists did not match their works...Sometimes too, haphazard work deviated into sense dropping the original intention....

"I never had formal training, and the lessons I took from artist friends convinced me that I am incapable of learning through instruction, that I must find out for myself through trial and error. In other words, I learn as I go along, absorbing only what I need for the time being. I alwaysread with glee that certain painters I adore were failures at the academy -- sometimes pronounced "hopeless" by their instructors. And who were their instructors? Their names are unknown or forgotten. One thing is certain: they never became great painters (Even a great painter like Gaugin, who was also a great teacher, could get nowhere with Van Gogh.) Usually what is taught in school must be unlearned, life is the teacher.

"Naturally in the work of self taught artists there occur what might be called "monstrosities" -- monstrosities that are accidental, not willed-- in such paintings, all the canons of art seem to be violated (Now, David, you understand why I shrink a bit from you and Harris attempting to emulate the "canon" something like Harold Bloom, who, by the way, is a valuable critic) One might imagine that such products are the work of an insane person but if one is really familiar with the work of the insane, one would not make such a mistake.


"In the case of my own work I must confess that these monstrosities often grow on me, that I get to like them and appreciate them more than the more successful ones. (Success, of course, as judged by my own standards of realization.) I have friends who request me to save my 'failures' for them. Months later, when I see these failures framed and hanging on their walls, I realize that they have qualities that I never dreamed of when I tossed them aside. What I regarded as the bad elements in them suddenly acquire charm and distinction. No real artist could make such mistakes, such meaningless forms or patterns, as these failures reveal. The very wrongness adds spice to the painting, it would seem. After one has acquired some mastery over the medium it is obviously difficult to do the wrong thing. To my amazement it has often happened that another artist, a good artist, looking at one of my failures has spoken warmly of it. Sometimes I have even heard them murmur, 'I wish I had the courage to do one like that!' Which makes me think about why we are so often bored with so-called good people, or with artists who are perfectionists. Or why, sometimes, we have to admit to ourselves that a touch of evil in an individual lends him a magnetic quality....

"...What I am trying to point out is that these failures, or monstrosities, are a result of my faith in the virtue of letting things happen. When looking at these products many individuals think that I am expressing my sociological views. They look for ideas, for signs of protest, for rebelliousness. They do not want to believe that the painting in question just happened. Or, if they concede this, then they begin to talk about the subconscious or such-like twaddle. There must be a reason for everything, even the accidental, they think. Perhaps there is; perhaps the spectator is capable of telling things about one's work that the creator himself does not know. But my quarrel with these analytical individuals is, why can't they accept what they see without trying to explain it? After all, the truest thing one can say about creative work, in whatever field, is that there is an element of magic in it. Pure reason leads nowhere, unless it be to the analyst's couch. The necessity to analyze, to understand, to categorize, answers to some basic need in the onlooker. He cannot rest suspended in thin air. He must know,know the reason why, and in doing so he kills what he sees. How much more interesting and instructive it is to ask a child what he thinks of one's work. Often, after a session with intellectual individuals I feel like saying, 'It's your problem. Don't ask me what it means."

Now try this on from Jean Dubuffet as quoted by Miller:

This much is sure, a picture interests me to the degree I succeed in kindling in it a kind of flame -- the flame of life of presence, or existence, or reality, depending on what we take these words to mean. To be sure, it often happens with me that my picture lacks this quality...In any case, I go on working, I add and I take away, I change, I revise (notice that I work empirically, like a blind man, experimenting with every kind of means), until a certain extraordinary release occurs in the picture, and from then on it seems to me endowed with this very life -- excuse me, reality. How can this be accounted for ? I have no idea. I never know how I produced it, or how to repeat the same effect. It is a mysterious happening, and because of its very mysteriousness it drives me again and again to renew the experience each time I make a picture....

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Poets' Forum (water color by Ed Coletti)

If you're a poet and missing, take comfort that so are Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton.

fyi - Diane DiPrima is San Francisco's New Poet Laureate

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George Swede's Guidelines for haiku:

Swede makes it abundantly clear what he thinks constitutes a good haiku. In the Global Haiku intro, he outlines eight commonly used haiku guidelines, then eliminates a few to come up with his five ultimate rules of good haiku.

1. haiku must be brief: one breath long

2. haiku must express sense of awe or insight

3. haiku must involve some aspect of nature other than human nature

4. haiku must possess sense images, not generalizations

5. haiku must present an event as happening presently, not past or future

As long as the haiku gives the reader short yet sensual images, a haiku can be effective.

A few examples of Swede's work:

on the face
that last night called me names—
morning sunbeam

almost unseen
among the tangled driftwood
naked lovers

Young widow
Asks for another
fortune cookie

first warm spring day
I take my shadow
for a walk

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Madgalene's Kali/Herron's Osiris/ 7 Coletti Paintings

Kali by David Madgalene published by Round Barn Press April 2009 (cover art Ed Coletti's Streetcar)


























Mattie Sue
(from Kali)

Say I never knew a gal like you Mattie Sue.
Say you sure knew how to do the do.
No, I never loved a gal like I love you,
but, Mattie darling, no, you couldn't do right.
You had to go and pull out your knife.
Didn't have no money for the funeral home,
so me and my brother, yeah, we did the job.
We took you on down to the burying ground.
We dug us a hole and we laid you down.
Then we threw the mud all in your pretty face,
but not before I got me one last kiss…
Couldn't find no preacher say a prayer for you,
so I got me a Bible did the best I could.
Say “Jesus, sir, Mattie Sue didn't please you,
but I got something I want you to do.
Hear me, sir Jesus, Lord, hear me well—
If you can't take Mattie Sue in Heaven,
Send me straight to Hell.”
Then I went home and I got my shotgun.
I went and shot the white trash that shot you.
Say I shot his mama, shot his daddy too.
Aint no white trash mess with my Mattie Sue.
Say the posse gonna string me up tonight,
but, Mattie baby, I don't care to fight.
Sheriff leave me hanging but that's all right—
cause my brother he know what to do.

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Elizabeth C. Herron's If Osiris









If Osiris

As if he had been dismembered
and reassembled by a team
of drunken surgeons, his skin ridged
with red welted scars reminded me
that once a god lived and died each year

in the round of earth’s growing cycle,
his severed limbs -- his feet and hands
and head and guts, his fingers and knees
thrown to the fields that the soil might be fertile.
You could take my heart and cut it into giblets

if you could make something of it,
if you could cast the twisted pieces of your own
with all that is salt and sunder between us,
if you could gather our dismembered lives
and make as good a harvest as the earth we eat.

elizabeth c herron

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8 Ed Coletti Paintings

I've decided to post these here because No Money In Poetry is not updated as frequently as the P3, and therefore constitutes a less changeable place to send folks who want to view my paintings.




""Quetzalcoatl," "Rare Bird," "Firebird," "Rose Window XII," "Paddle," "White Spaces" and "Nafisa"

Ocean/Two by Lu/ Jack Foley on Inaugural Poem

Painting "Ocean" by Ed Coletti (watercolor and archival ink)

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Two Poems by Luis Garcia





(Photo of Lu Garcia reading in Santa Rosa
at Ed Coletti's SoCoCo at the Toad series 1-11-09)



STILL

I still love to walk in the sun
with a story on the tip of my tongue.

I still love to walk in the sun
with a song on the tip of my tongue.

I still love to kneel
in the presence of the sun

with a blossom on the tip of my tongue.
I still love to seek out

those sacred times,
those sacred places.

THIRSTY

Trying
to write poetry
for me

has always been
and I think
will always be

like trying to squeeze
the last drop
out of a forgone conclusion

or the word ill
out of the word
illusion

or water
from the dry mouth
of a thirsty bone

or speech
from the empty mouth
of a rolling stone.

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The following letter to inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander was written by notable Berkeley poet Jack Foley on January 27, 2009 and is reprinted with his permission. It will also be published in Contemporary Poetry Review--an online magazine.

Dear Ms. Alexander,

I have long considered whether to write this note about your inaugural poem, “Praise Song for the Day.”

It may well be better to let the matter (and the poem) be forgotten, as I believe they will be. Or if remembered, remembered only as still another dull poem written for still another presidential inauguration. I wondered whether you showed the poem to anyone before you decided it was “finished.” Surely a clumsy line like “We need to find a place where we are safe; we walk into that which we cannot yet see” might have been improved. From a purely musical point of view, didn’t you have difficulty saying “we walk into that which we cannot yet see”?

Nobody sets out to write a bad poem, yet, unfortunately, many bad poems have been achieved. Just about any poet of any distinction is guilty of writing badly at times. And I realize that you’ve written far better poems than the one you displayed for the entire nation to see.

But that is what is depressing about it.

Here was an opportunity to show millions of people—millions of people—what an exciting thing poetry is. Look at what you gave them. Look at what you gave all those people who think poetry is dull, genteel, a form of little interest—a dead thing. You gave great affirmation to their opinion; without meaning to, and I’m sure with the best of intentions, you drove still another nail into the coffin of poetry.

I'm sorry to be writing this because I think you are basically a good poet. But now a bad, banal, rhetorically dull poem will be presented to the American people as an example of the high reaches of the art. What a shame.

Sincerely,

Jack Foley

P.S. If you wish to find out anything about me, there’s a Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Foley_(poet)#Biography

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Madgalene's Response/Whalen Tribute/SoCoCo At the Toad

Reminder: SoCoCo Reading Series Resumes 2PM Sun. Jan 11th as "SoCoCo At the Toad" Toad In the Hole, Santa Rosa with Lu Garcia, Gwynn O'Gara, Ed Coletti, David Madgalene, Mark Eckert, and Centa Theresa.



San Francisco Bay Area Poet David Madgalene Responds

November 6, 2008

Dear Ed,

I want to respond to Joseph Bednarik’s lament, “The Law of Diminishing Readership,” which you posted on your blog. I can’t help thinking about a recent concert I attended by South African drummer, Baba Shibambo. Shibambo asked us all to dance, to clap, and to make noise. He said, “In my village, there is no audience. We all participate.” With Shibambo’s encouragements as my touchstone, I should like to counter Bednarik’s argument that the fact more people are writing poetry while less people are reading it is a bad thing. I have to believe that the more people writing poetry, regardless of readership, or lack of it, is all for the best. Because that means that more people are attempting to enunciate their own experience for themselves rather than to have others do it for them. While it truly is a shame that many good poets, such as most of my friends, and, I might as well say, with no false modesty, in my opinion, a good poet such as myself, will never get the audience that we think we deserve, isn’t it better for us that we are at least trying to write poetry rather than just to live in sycophantic adoration of someone like Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost? And by the same token, if I believe that, must I not likewise extend the same courtesy to some young poet (or perhaps not-so-young poet), and believe that they, too, must be better off writing their own poetry, however humble, rather than to merely in live in sycophantic adoration of my own humble efforts? I am not Robert Frost, and I may not have one iota of his poetic gift, yet nonetheless, is it not a good thing that I write poetry anyway? Should indeed there be some misbegotten young sonneteer out there who has not one iota of my poetic gift, is it nonetheless not a good thing that he or she is writing poetry anyway? If nothing else, is not an act of true courage for someone like me, a mere pygmy at the feet of Robert Frost, to nonetheless, utter, “I AM…?” Is it not nonetheless an act of true courage for a mere pygmy at my poetic feet (if such a thing were even possible, I’ll grant you) , to nonetheless utter, “I AM…?” True poetry, I believe, is written for the self, regardless of readership, or lack thereof, while I am still generous-hearted enough to empathize with anyone, who bitten by the poetry bug, honestly thought, encouraged by family, friends, or teachers, could possibly write poetry to a world that had even the slightest trifling interest. However, I, for one, will never, never bemoan that fact that more people seem to be writing poetry than reading it. I’d prefer to echo the words of Baba Shibambo, and declare that I should rather wish to live in a world where there is no audience for poetry, because we are all poets!

David Madgalene

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Santa Rosa Philip Whalen Tribute Reading/Word Temple/Copperfield's Books/Nov. 7, 2008

If You're So Smart,
Why Ain't You Rich?

I need everything else
Anything else
Desperately
But I have nothing
Shall have nothing
but this
Immediate, inescapable
and invaluable
No one can afford
THIS
Being made here and now






(left to right Gail King, Phyllis Meshulam, Pat Nolan, David Bromige(sitting), Clark Coolidge, Terri Carrion, Bill Hawley, Michael Rothenberg, Brian Howlett, Katherine Hastings, and Ed Coletti)



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Avanti Popolo

Avanti Popolo (Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus) Manic D Press, San Francisco, 2008. Includes writing by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Ed Coletti, James Tracy, Gil Fagiani, Lawrence DiStasi, Thomas Centolella, Kim Nicolini, Kim Addonizio, Giancarlo Campagna, and many others.





Columbus, the Mafia, & Denial

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the Ocean blue.

1.

Columbus Circle
June 29th 1971
Joe Columbo
shot into 7-year coma
not by
Laughing Otter
nor by
Green Rock Woman
not even Crazy Horse
or
Crazy Joe Gallo
but by
an African-American
Jerome Johnson.
It was about
Columbo’s thing
not our thing
as in my thing
but Cosa Nostra as in
Mafia’s Thing
as in
Christopher Columbus’s
thing, that made-man who
dwells among us ever since.

Joe Columbo
only 40
youngest mob boss ever
maintained to the press
“There ain’t no mafia
no cosa nostra!”
And that Christopher Columbus
was a “great Italian role model.”
Today we might call him
A made-man
by those
Cappi di Tutti Cappi,
somehow Spanish
Cabezas de Todas Cabezas
Jefes de Todos Jefes”
who kissed Cristobal
on each Italian cheek
The naming is the creation:
“Let there be
Cristobal Colon
from Cristofero Columbo,
And there was.
Hence forth this
Made-Man
to make our History!

2.

Indians! Indians! Columbus cried;
His heart was filled with joyful pride.

Columbus announced,
“When you ask for
something they have,
They never say no.
Give me, give me
Gold, Gold, Gold!
Give me, give me
Slave, Slave, Slave!”
And I seriously doubt he ever said,
“Please.”

3.

He made the trip again and again,
Trading gold to bring to Spain.

Joe Columbo and the Gambino gang
Traded in heroin all over Harlem.
They didn’t bring it to a king or president.
They just brought it along with
Protection, prostitutes, and numbers rackets.
“Their ain’t no mafia, no cosa nostra,”
Columbo cried, but La Cosa Nostra
Sails on and on like those
Three little ships...(that) left from Spain
(Columbus, this poor excuse for an Italian)
Sailed through sunshine, wind, and rain.


by Ed Coletti in Avanti Popolo, 2008

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Shnozzes &Knowing/Poetry Bailout/ Foreleg Eardrums/

Fewer & Further Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ed's son John Coletti's Same Enemy Rainbow. Same Enemy Rainbow is 30 pages, hand-sewn, and printed on laid paper in an edition of 200 copies, 40 of which are special editions.

Copies can be purchased for $8, postpaid.  Please visit the Fewer & Further Press site for an excerpt and cover image.  Payments can be made through the site with Paypal.

The special editions are signed by the author and include a small double-sided broadside, for $10. If you would like to purchase a special edition, please contact the editor for availability.

If you would like to pay by check, make check payable to Jess Mynes, and mail it to:

Jess Mynes
121 Lockes Village Rd
Wendell, MA 01379

Thank you very much.

Jess Mynes, editor

Schnozzes and When We Know by Ed Coletti














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Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers


By Charles Bernstein in Harper's September 26, 2008


From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008, held last night at The New School, in New York City. David Lehman is the series editor of Best American Poetry, and Robert Polito is the director of the writing program at The New School.

Chairman Lehman, Secretary Polito, distinguished poets and readers—I regret having to interrupt the celebrations tonight with an important announcement. As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.

Charles Bernstein’s most recent collection of poetry is Girly Man. His poem “Pompeii” appeared in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine; his essay “Wet verse at The New Yorker” appeared in the November 1989 issue.

Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.

Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems.

The risks poets have taken have been too great; the aesthetic negligence has been profound. The age of decadence must come to an end with the imposition of oversight and regulation on poetry composition and publishing practices.

We are convinced that once we have removed these troubled and distressed poems from circulation, our cultural sector will stabilize and readers will regain confidence in American literature. We estimate that for the buyout to be successful, we will need to remove from circulation all poems written after 1904.

This will be a fresh start, a new dawn of a new day. Without these illiquid poems threatening to overwhelm readers, we will be able to create a literary culture with a solid aesthetic foundation.

I’m Charles Bernstein, and I approved this message.

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Foreleg Eardrums
by Amy Trussell


Stop and put your shirt on the fence and look heavenward.
They say there is a hexagon at the top of Saturn’s pole,
though your naked eye doesn’t register it. Trust it anyway,
like your affection for another person, embedded
with a type of gem not found inside the earth’s dark muscles.
You cannot bear it away to keep forever.
It will not melt away on the tongue like mousse from Maison du Chocolate,
But softens the blow of any tumble and pops the rib back into place
when the heart is large and broken.
It sets sail with a full mast,
and it’s anchor does not break coral.
Listen, the grasshoppers hear your tale of survival
with the delicate eardrums on their forelegs.
They invite you to come through the wormwood,
the sprouting hemlock, and the wreckage of Fall still
lying in the yard.
Release strife and be glad of the bees’ return,
their hives oozing with royal jelly, oblivious to cell phones.
Dig the afternoon when the gods of light come on like honey,
nodding at your delicate capture and release fishing.
When you get home, throw the black drape off of the piano
and pound the keys as if it were your last song, or your first.

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Oblivious / More On "Glut "/Petaluma Poetry Walk, City Lights, etc.

Oblivious by Eddie C.


Petaluma Poetry Walk
& 2 Other Readings

Ed Coletti will be reading at

Petaluma Poetry Walk - Sept 21st
with Michael Rothenberg & Terry
Carrion at the Apple Box 6 Petaluma
Blvd N. at 1 PM.
Diane DiPrima
will read at Apple Box the following
hour. Here's a link to the full
2 pg Poetry Walk Brochure.

City Lights Books - SF - October 13th at 7PM - Avanti
Populo Reading - In addition to
Ed Coletti, also the great Diane Di
Prima, James Tracy, Kim Nicolini,
Cameron McHenry and Giovanna Capone.

Arrividerchi Restaurant - San Rafael - Monday Nov. 3d - 6 PM - Ed Coletti and great Italian Food!



Triolet On Time

“For boys add to their woe by sitting still”
Was the best line of my youthful poem.
Now age and illness ask again why will
Such boys add to their woe by sitting still?
You’d think of this they’d had their awful fill
And, dreaming dreams of life they’d finally sow them.
“For boys add to their woe by sitting still”
Was the best line of my youthful poem.


(October 13, 1985 - uncovered July 08)

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More On So Called "Glut" Of Writers

It took awhile, but I finally got Poets & Writers to get me the following very interesting article on our recent subject of supply and demand. By the way, many of you believe (correctly) that it's better to have lots of artists rather than lots of almost anything else. I, of course, agree. And none of us is going to stop writing just because there are so many of us, however...


The Law of Diminishing Readership

by Joseph Bednarik
As marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, the thirty-four-year-old independent publisher of poetry in Port Townsend, Washington, I am required to read a lot. While most of the titles on my reading list are poetry collections, I recently read two nonfiction texts that got me thinking about the "economics" of creative writing.

So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance (Paul Dry Books, 2003), by Mexican poet and business consultant Gabriel Zaid, and Reading at Risk, the sobering report published by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 2004, articulate the challenges faced by the swelling legions of creative writers longing to find a readership. Consider the following statements extrapolated from Zaid's book and the NEA report:

1. Production of creative writing far exceeds consumer demand.

2. Accredited MFA programs in creative writing continue to proliferate, while the practice of literary reading is in steady decline.

3. Many publishers require underwriting to produce and distribute literary titles because sales do not support production costs.

4. Publishers can, with relative ease, attract a thousand manuscript submissions-plus reading fees-by sponsoring book contests.

What's wrong with this picture? If you're running an MFA program, a book contest, or a writer's workshop, or selling other goods and services that support the writer's life-absolutely nothing. If you want your book published and read by an audience other than friends and family-everything.

In a statistical mood, I once estimated how many "good poems" were being produced by recent graduates of MFA programs. Keeping all estimates conservative, I figured there had to be at least 450 poets graduating nationwide each year. If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems-not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate. New poems, poets, and manuscripts are added to the inventory every year.

Read Complete Bednarik Article

Here's someone attempting to disprove the title of this site -- "No Money In Poetry"

POETS REFINE MONEY

after reading in Baltimore, photo credit Michael Ball

There are thousands of Americans everyday who are looking for a safe place to invest their money. Poets are the best source for removing negative charge from your wealth, and raising the collective conscience of the planet. You can change your life FOREVER by sponsoring a poet today! CAConrad is one such American poet serious about making poetry a lifelong quest, ready and willing to refine your money! If you are interested in sponsoring this poet, call (215)563-3075, or write to CAConrad13@AOL.com. You won't believe the difference a poet will make!

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