I've been telling you for years to get stoked...

We are proud to announce the release of our first issue of Stoked Journal. The issue features new work from Amber Sparks, Brian Oliu, Daniel Bailey, J.A. Tyler, Mike Young, Ryan Ridge, and Sarah Carson, as well as reprinting of stories by Roxane Gay (originally published in Gargoyle 56) and Matt Bell (originally in Drexel Online Journal). Big thanks to all these authors for making this first issue such an excellent and enjoyable one. Please check it out and spread the word; we are sure you'll be just as stoked as we are.

READ THE FIRST ISSUE HERE

It's All Gotta End Sometime

A large theme of the discussion last week between Todd and I was purposefulness. More specifically, we started talking about choices in poetry. I believe I was the catalyst for such a discussion, contemplating the idea of spacing in poems. A trouble I often have is reasoning or justifying my choice to indent a line or word, or to otherwise make the page “more busy.” With left aligned poems, the majority of what I write, linebreaks themselves come to me for reasons of sound or emphasis, typically. But, the whole business of pushing a certain word over to the one side or excessive tabbing has yet to find a place in my style, if it even should.

I’m reminded of a sentence towards the end of Pinsky’s book, where he says, “What must be pointed out is the horrible ease with which a stylish rhetoric can lead poetry unconsciously to abandon life itself.” It seems more in the context of language use, but with this statement, Pinsky is also making a point about purpose. Where does a choice overtake the reason and become a stylish element?

I’ve heard the question raised about the aforementioned Daniel Bailey and his choices with the Drunk Sonnets, especially in terms of writing his versions of the sonnet and the use of capitalization. For me, these choices are justified because of the tone, lonely and angsty, that Bailey utilizes. Frankly, they are love poems written while drunk, hence sonnets disobeying many of the “rules” of sonnets written in all caps.

Todd mentioned the poem “America” by Claude McKay. I’d read it in the past, and after re-reading it, I find great depths in his choices as well. A black man writing about America in the form of a sonnet certainly has a special agenda behind it. Similarly, his language evokes thoughts of strong purpose and statement. As Todd pointed out, it is as if McKay is pointing out how he can play America’s game, writing solid traditional poetry.

I’m not sure how unconscious or conscious these types of decisions are or should be in poetry. Rather, I’m pointing out that in one shape or another, they’ve come to work. In my writing, my aesthetic as taken me towards discursiveness in my poems, a focal point of discussion as Pinsky’s book comes to a close. The problem I’ve encountered lately is turning it on and off, finding the purpose in my actions. As I progress forward in this study, I’ll continue to keep in mind these types of main ideas Pinsky has imparted.

IMPATIENT POETS?! NO WAY?!

Poem
by Frank O’Hara

The eager note on my door said “Call me,
call when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and

headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was

there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.

In the first section of “Conventions Of Wonder,” Pinsky takes to task the descriptive styles of Louise Bogan and Frank O’Hara. More specifically, the two poems, one from each, seem to do a flip-flop of typical modes of description, as Pinsky says, “both avoid the convention of words telling-about a physical reality…each deflects our feelings…away from wonder, and towards impatience.” Bogan’s poem “Simple Autumnal,” as her poems often do for me, strike as flat because of their method of putting themselves on a pedestal of sorts before attempting to reach back down to the reader, so to speak. O’Hara’s poem, to me, does a much better job accomplishing what Pinsky says both do, in a way that is accessible, purposeful, and poignant.

Sure, the emotion is less defined by words, as Bogan uses words like “sorrow,” but O’Hara puts himself on the page in other ways: with the action, with the speaker, with the voice. While Bogan’s undoubtedly has those elements, O’Hara’s uses are, for me, more aligned with an aesthetic of approachability and engagement. Where Pinsky claims that this poem “quarrels with our sense of how poetry treats experience,” I certainly agree, but I’ll also point to that quality as one of the major contributors for the engaging quality of the poem, as in much of O’Hara’s writing.

Such a trait, I might add, could be one of the reasons O’Hara continues in popularity with my generation of writers and poetry readers. As Pinksy does so well to point out, O’Hara uses phrases and specifics that “insist upon the unique, unpredictable character of experience…warning the reader that his generalities and expectations are likely to prove irrelevant to these irreducible particulars.” In this quote and in O’Hara’s poem, I see a point about my developing view of poetry that at once points at my extreme preference of O’Hara over Bogan and my deep affinity with indie/small press lit.

This element of broken expectations and approachability adds energy and emotional movement to O’Hara’s poem that I don’t find in Bogan’s. Additionally, my favorite pieces of indie literature ride on similar mechanisms. I’m reminded of Daniel Bailey’s Drunk Sonnet 14 because of it’s refusal to be anything expected or emotionally worded:

Drunk Sonnet 14
BY DANIEL BAILEY

IF ANYONE KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON EVER THEN HEY
I AM HERE IT WOULD BE NICE TO TALK SOMETIME
INFOMERCIALS HAVE STARTED AND I KIND OF WANT TO DIE
I’M PRETTY SURE THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY FOR A MORGUE

OK SO ACTUALLY IT’S FOR THE BIBLE OR SOMETHING
SO IT’S A COMMERICAL FOR TRYING TO BE HAPPY OR SOMETHING
BUT I AM NOT HAPPY TONIGHT NO I AM NOT JUST HERE
IF HAPPINESS EVER WORKED THEN HOW—I DON’T KNOW

HAPPINESS IS A LIZARD IN THE SUNLIGHT GETTING WARM
AND THEN IN THE NIGHT BENEATH A ROCK EATING FLIES
AND SWALLLOWING THE MEAT OF THE TRASH OF THE DIRT

AH, SO TONIGHT IS A LITTLE DRUNK AND OK OK OK
THAT IS GOOD SO LET ME BE—THERE IS NO LOVE TONIGHT
GOD IS LIKE BONO—SOME DICKWAD NO ONE WILL EVER MEET OR LIKE

While it uses words like “happiness,” this poem takes that abstract word and other emotions and puts them onto the page, a page that steamrolls over itself. That third stanza is a great example of this. The poem starts with the speaker, the situation, the direct address of the openness. Then, boom, the turn in the third stanza pulls the poem, and more importantly the feeling, into description, but beyond that it busies its way through the image. The ending, for me, seems like a fuck-you to this whole discussion, going from “THERE IS NO LOVE TONIGHT” immediately to the last line, a seemingly unrelated commentary on both God and Bono. This last part is a good example of both this poem as a even more modern example of Pinsky’s thoughts on description going beyond wonder to impatience and the idea that my favorite kind of poems don’t hide behind their language but reach out for the reader and their true selves.

Two Lines About Two Lines I Love

"IF ANYONE KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON EVER THEN HEY
I AM HERE IT WOULD BE NICE TO TALK SOMETIME"
- DRUNK SONNET 14, Daniel Bailey, The Drunk Sonnets

I keep returning to this line in my quest for writing honest lines,
because this is honest and cool in a way I'd never seen before this poem.