Piece Work

Winter, and the loom
of the sky has been
picked to wire.

Light etches its memories
through the long strands
of twilight.
We inhabit
the shell of the world,
and carry it gently.

It carries us too,
the echoing stairwell,
the empty glass aflame.

Look what I have brought–
sand from a bullet-pocked
beach, ribbon from a dead
girl’s hair.
It reaches
through shadow play, gesture,
the conspiring laughter
of birds strung high overhead.

We dwell here, suspended
in ether, vibrating
the strands of the web.

Watch all film-poems in order

Having recently moved to North London and joined the Highgate Poets, I seized the opportunity to help them put up their new website soon after being accepted into the group. What took weeks of custom programming to create the content management system for the Ojai Poetry Festival only took a matter of hours this time, owing to advances in the WordPress blog software.

Thanks also to a host of software plugins, the site not only features member news, but has a calendar of events, newsletter, integration with the group’s Twitter account, and much more. Going forward, options for selling anthologies on the site or enriching the list of members with more detail is just clicks away.

It is a pleasure to be associated with such a fine group of poets, actively writing and publishing in the UK, and remarkable to see how open source software such as WordPress makes setting up a dynamic website easier all the time.

“Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.”

I have been previewing Facebook’s upcoming Timeline feature. It turns one’s profile into a scrapbook-style autobiography, arranging multimedia posts in a chronology from birth to present. It is part of a larger strategy to promote information sharing that has been intelligently criticized in general terms. But it was a specific moment in my exploration of Timeline that pulled me up short. Clicking on the small heart icon for “Relationships”, up popped a menu item for marking one’s timeline with “Lost a Loved One.”

Though we have memorialised our son in many ways, the thought of posting his photo on Facebook beneath the small flower icon to make it part of this music-video-all-about-me of a web application struck me as painfully absurd. He is deeply and irrevocably part of my life. But a biography is not a life, much less an online profile. We have become a society obsessed with crafting our image–so much so that we almost believe, and sometimes attempt to inhabit, these spun self-tales.

The antidote to the future we now inhabit, wherein everyone has their own Wikipedia page for fifteen minutes, is art. Mark Twain called biographies “the clothes and buttons of a man,” deciding, “the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But something approaching what it feels like to be a man can come across in the literary arts, and especially poetry. Poetry is the anti-wiki, striving for truths that need no citation, encompassing contradictions rather than devolving into fact-slinging “flame wars.”

And so, when it is released next month, I will use Timeline. But for matters that transcend time, and excavate the inmost reality, I’m sticking with poems.

“O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!”

This past weekend, I accepted the role of Chief Technology Officer for BraveNewTalent, a social recruitment startup based in London. At the David Allen Company, I have been using technology to help bring the GTD^® methodology to millions of people worldwide, freeing them up from organizing tasks in their head so that they can focus on doing their best work in any context. BraveNewTalent seeks to help the workforce of the twenty-first century find, not only ideal new workplace contexts, but the relationships and aptitudes that will unleash the best work of an entire upcoming generation.

Led by visionary young entrepreneur Lucian Tarnowski, the company has already assembled a fine team and is rapidly accumulating blue-chip clients and media attention. It is an exciting time to be bridging the gap between baby boomers in corporate leadership and an inherently digital generation, who hold the promise of a new way to work. Doubly exciting is the opportunity to join not only a well-positioned startup in a high-potential emerging marketplace, but to do so in London–which is itself emerging from the ashes of the financial meltdown as a technology innovation powerhouse.

I am looking forward to doing interesting and meaningful work, with talented people, in one of the greatest cities in the world.

Although the timeline is not yet clear for our move, we decided that it was important to reach out now to our community of friends for support. Also, this gives us the opportunity to start to say “goodbye” to so many wonderful people on this continent.

We are especially fond of Ojai, the small town in California we have called home for the past several years. The word “ojai” means “nest” in the language of the Chumash Indians who first inhabited this area. Indeed, it has been a nest for us in which to be nurtured and grow strong. Now we fledge.

I will miss the wonderful friends we have made here, as well as the ten-minute ride to work on my bicycle, along the oak-lined Ojai trail with the California sunshine beaming through. But we have wanted for some time to have more access to Europe, and London itself is one of my favorite cities in the world. I look forward to getting to know both the poetry and technology communities there.

Our plan is to relocate as soon as we reasonably and responsibly can–making a graceful transition from my roles at the David Allen Company, and having time to say goodbyes to so many remarkable people here.

For now, I leave you with the news of our intentions, and the following short video:

E-books are harder to burn...

I asked for an Amazon Kindle for my birthday. Like Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” I have been haunted ever since. In my dreams, I visit the destitute families of the former owners of small, independent book stores. The youngest, a cripple, gives thanks before a paltry meal, declaring, “God bless us, every one–even that mean old Mr. Peake, the last person on Earth we thought would betray the printed book!” I wake in a sweat.

And yet, it is precisely because I love literature that I decided to try buying it digitally. None of the typical reasons for e-books really tipped me over the edge. Nor did the counter-arguments counteract the most compelling reason I have to take the plunge. Our small cottage is lined with book shelves. We moved five times in five years during the U.S. housing boom, when landlord after landlord decided to sell at the end of our one-year lease. That meant schlepping dozens of bankers boxes full of books–heavy books!–from one home to the next.

As a teenager, I watched “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” repeatedly. This 1970s Zeffirelli bio pic of St. Francis, complete with a soundtrack by Donovan, features the overacting of Graham Faulkner as the crusader-turned-saint. The scene that stayed with me is the moment of Francis’ enlightenment, when he strips naked and begins flinging his worldly possessions–and those of his rich father–out the window, into the arms of a receptive crowd of peasants below. That’s pretty much how I left college (though I kept my clothes.) And, while I miss my record collection (and my parents could have used the futon), the idea of simplifying my possessions–if not to enlighten myself, at least to lighten my stance–remains compelling.

And so, far from an argument against books, I have convinced myself that I love books so much, I want to (easily) take them with me wherever I go. My English wife tells me one of her greatest regrets about emigrating to America was leaving behind reams of piano sheet music. We are now investigating the feasibility of an iPad as a music-reading device. To me, just about everything else in the e-books-versus-real-books debate is a wash–you save a few trees, but perpetuate the hazardous metals in e-waste (and not just in the reading device, but in the “cloud” that supports it); you can search and share, but give up the real-world feel of books; you accelerate the demise of indie book shops at the same time you usher in a new era of ubiquitous accessibility to literature.

In short, it seems less a question of “whether” I would go digital, but more accurately “when?” In pursuit of simplicity and freedom, that time is now. Friends and family chipped in, and the new Kindle, appropriately colored black like my heart, is now on back order. I may hate the thing. But I doubt it. Like any new development in literature, I approach the Kindle with an open mind. And to those who think I should do otherwise, I say, “humbug.”

The first poem, “The Language of Birds” is a kind of love poem to my wife; the second, “To Friends Not Knowing What to Say“, is dedicated to the memory of our son; and the third poem, “Yellow“, explores the subterranean, and can also be heard read aloud on this website.

Besides my delight that these poems can now reach a wider audience through the web, this project to round up the disparate poetry journals of the past two centuries and archive their contents for posterity seems, beyond noble, absolutely necessary. Twenty-first century publishing is a fragmentary mess. Who needs barbarian hordes to burn your libraries to the ground? These days, a single mis-click of the mouse can obliterate whole swathes of our literary heritage.

Given all this, surely the U.S., with a GDP of over five times that of the UK, must have five times as many government-sponsored poetry digitization projects in progress, right? Not according to the online Registry of U.S. Government Publication Digitization Projects. Search results for poetry: zero. [Oops! As someone kindly pointed out, I got this wrong. This is a site for government-sponsored texts. Still, a more broad search turns up largely projects by or about the British. If the U.S. Government is archiving contemporary poetry journals, it remains top secret.]

Here’s one area where I have to say our friends across the pond have simply got it right. Poetry is not best served by a laissez-faire marketplace–especially a fragmented one–but must be championed, like any minority. If “We, The People,” do not protect and preserve American literature in its latest, digital incarnation, it is all too likely to be lost. In the absence of greater support, we Americans may well end up being repaid by a written tradition that meticulously archives news clips and statistics at the expense of the great humanizing tradition of poetry.

The implications of this technology for poetry, however, remain to be seen. I was contacted at the start of this month by Laura Often, Public Relations for Text Flows, the company that partnered with The Academy of American Poets to bring Poem Flow to life. She was interested in having me blog about their project. I’m not sure if she found me as a former technology blogger or a current poetry blogger, but nonetheless I took a look. Unfortunately, at that time, I could only see a brief Flash-based demonstration on their web site.

Holding my iPod Touch in my hands while it runs this application is a different experience. The font is lovely. The transitions between lines (and parts of lines) are thoughtful and well-executed. In fact, the deliberate slow-down of the reading experience seems to be one of the few actual enhancements I’ve seen technology make to literature–perhaps the only enhancement in this regard, since mostly when it comes to reading, technology encourages us to speed up.

So why do I feel hesitant to herald this as the great game-changer for poetry? I suppose some curmudgeonly part of me still remains of the opinion that literature, and poetry specifically, doesn’t need smartening up through gadgetry. And yet, such gadgetry does, indeed, hold our eyeballs hostage–in some cases for most of our waking day. So perhaps I should be happy that poetry has a chance to greet those eyeballs.

Text Flows has certainly done a nice job. Ultimately, as a word-artist, the reading experience is paramount to me. And as much as I love the feel of turning a crisp page, Poem Flow does bring something new to my reading experience. Time will tell if this “new” will become the norm.

For now, you can see for yourself. iPhone and iPod touch users (and soon, no doubt, iPad users too) can download Poem Flow from the iPhone App Store. You can also demo the application in any Flash-enabled web browser on the Poem Flow site.

I spent the day redesigning my website. What may appear to be just a simple visual touch-up was actually a major overhaul. I ported my site from Serendipity–which I began using when I first transitioned to a blog format in 2006–to the more popular WordPress platform. The template is my own custom design built on sandbox.

I have had a personal web presence for over ten years now, and interestingly enough, when I look back on previous sites, it seems I have upgraded the site look-and-feel about every two years.

For your amusement, here are some screen shots from the past (click the thumbnail or year to see a larger image):

1999

2001

2003

2005

2007

2009

In the radio show, I essentially came out as a naysayer about the idea that technology presents a golden age of opportunity for poetry itself. That is, while I have found tremendous value in being able to connect with fellow poets and poetry aficionados through the web, I see poetry itself as an antidote, in so many ways, to what this technology does to our attention span, our relationship to language, and our understanding of ourselves. Still, my views on technology and poetry, having spent most of my adult life immersed in both, are far more subtle than can be expressed in a few short audio clips.

It is a topic, in fact, that I would love to see given the treatment of, say, the half-hour BBC 4 radio program “The Atheist and The Bishop.” Fortunately, however, this brief segment does bring up some interesting points on all sides–and, thanks to new media, this dialog can now continue–in blog posts, comments, and tweets. So, what did you think of the show?

Sadly, this is what so many Americans have come to believe is poetry: expressing the banal (“no rain, no rainbow”) with gravitas and, preferably, an upright bass and bongos in the background. This bizarre fusion–of beatnik hauteur, the self-indulgence of Twitter tweets, and the incoherent, wink-to-camera narcissism of Sarah Palin–symbolizes so much of what has gone wrong with our society’s appreciation of the four-thousand-year-old tradition of making art from words.

Entertainment, and especially humor, is virulent online. As the competition for our attention increases, forms of increasingly immediate gratification would seem to be winning out over art. After all, art asks something back from us in precious attention. And, while poetry may well be one of the shortest formats in the literary arts, good poems, unlike good jokes, do more than make us laugh. Often, they emphasize the uncertain and contradictory nature of human existence. At minimum, they challenge our perceptions in some way. And, like most salarymen on a Friday night, I can understand just wanting a good laugh.

However, in a world of increasing fragmentation, poetry also promises to be one of the most coherent forms of address. It is this coherence that I crave, like nutrition. And it is because I believe such a craving to be as fundamentally human as seeking out something green to eat after a long stretch of gorging on junk food–that the propagation of mental junk food in modern times actually encourages, rather than disheartens me.

Such coherence is an antidote to, for example, cheesy politics. What makes Shatner’s sketch funny is the disparity between the trite tweets and the self-seriousness with which he delivers them. Yet there is some degree to which we are expected, by the Palin campaign, to take this same disparity–between Palin and her words–totally seriously. And so, the piece becomes a threefold parody: a caricature of Palin, a send-up of beatnik culture, and a dig at self-importance in the digital age.

Clearly, simply calling a collection of words “poetry” does not make it art, any more than Shatner’s posturings convince us of his seriousness. Yet the term is bandied about online as an ever-cheapening currency–largely, because it seems to be viewed as a form of self-expression. But the poetry that matters, to me anyway, goes beyond that. It speaks to us in ways sound bites, or reality-television-style confessions simply can not. It gets past–not only our email filters and learned habits of incessantly scanning text–but past our perceptual filters as well. A good poem can speak into us in ways that a million tweets can not. And it doesn’t need bongos behind it to make its deep rhythms felt.

• Receiving two rejection slips on the same day.
• Being asked to participate in a stimulating round-table discussion about the art of words for a local lifestyle magazine with a travel writer and a painter who incorporates words into her work. (Fascinating people!)
• Having three poems appear online.
• Giving a local reading to a highly receptive, standing-room-only crowd.
• Getting a request to conduct a poetry workshop for local teens. (Sadly, I had to decline.)
• Getting a request from someone organizing a conference on immigration and human rights at a respected law school, who wants to print my poem, “Road Sign on Interstate 5″, on the back of the program. (“Yes, of course!”)
• Having a conversation with a reporter for a fascinating new segment on KFCC about how technology shapes our lives. We spoke about the relationship between poetry and new media. (I’m not sure where it will go in terms of the radio show, but it was a fun conversation.)
• Being asked to respond to questions by email for an alumni magazine article [an article for Poets & Writers] about Marvin Bell, one of my MFA mentors.
• Significantly revising my manuscript this weekend to send out to first book competitions.

Phew! Time to get back to my day job, so I can get some rest.