Say it in a Shade of Succint: Cell Poems

You can buck the system and resist the un-filtered verbal onslaught of a new and frighteningly social world, or you can embrace the fascinating and fantastic possibilities it may create.

Take for example a site I heard mentioned in a recent Poetry.com podcast: Cellpoems.org

I love the idea of super-condensed poetic license  where the poet is constrained by but flourishes within 160 characters.  Also adding to the appeal is the amusing addition of poem notes and author bios that far, far exceed the length of any of the works themselves.

Below are the two most recent submissions to the site:

DIY FML Daymare Mnemonic

Dora Malech

I do it the old-fashioned way tie string around the finger except instead try rope-to-throat though the last word’s still “remember.”

 

And the moon

Erika Meitner

shut in cold blue light, in blown snow, my son’s breath a forgiveness a road- side x a windshield a tunnel a handful of pebbles.

 

Sign up for the poems as an RSS feed or to of course receive via your cell phone…

 

SCRIPPS Oceanographic Library goes public

As part of Google’s effort to digitize information and make it available to everyone, SCRIPPS Institute of Oceanography Library is going online. SCRIPPS is accordingly excited as is apparent in their recent press release:

“Approximately 100,000 volumes from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, the world’s largest oceanography library, have been digitized and are being made publically accessible as part of a partnership between Google, the University of California and the UC San Diego Libraries.

In 2008, UC San Diego became the first Southern California university to partner with Google in its efforts to digitize the holdings of the world’s most prominent libraries. Since then, approximately 300,000 volumes and other materials have been digitized from UCSD’s International Relations & Pacific Studies Library, the East Asian Language Collection and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library. The University of California was an early partner with Google, joining the Google Book Search Project in 2006 and agreeing to provide several million books from UC libraries for digitization. To date, more than 2 million books from UC libraries have been digitized.

Image from “The Echinoderm Fauna of Torres Strait: Its Composition and Origin,” 1921, Hubert Lyman Clark.

“Partnering with Google in this global effort will lead to much greater scholarly and public access to the rich, diverse and, in many cases, rare, materials at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library,” said Brian E. C. Schottlaender, The Audrey Geisel University Librarian at UC San Diego. “Making this treasure trove of materials accessible to anyone with Internet access is a tremendous boon for scholars, students and interested members of the public.”

….

The digitized materials include numerous research expedition reports documenting scientific observations and discoveries dating back to the 1800s. These works, which laid the foundation for modern oceanography, include a report on crustaceans (The Stalk-eyed Crustacea, Walter Faxon, 1895) collected on a U.S. expedition to central and South America and the Galapagos on the famous ship Albatross. The Albatross, a ship built by the U.S. government specifically for marine research, was a precursor to today’s U.S. oceanographic fleet of ships. Another report (The Fishes of the Swedish South Polar Expedition, Einar Lonnberg, 1905) documented the fishes collected on a famous Antarctic expedition, the Swedish South-Polar Expedition of 1901-1903 led by Otto Nordenskjold. Although the expedition was a great scientific success, resulting in the collection of many species new to science, their ship was crushed by ice, forcing the crew to build and live in a stone hut on an Antarctic island, subsisting on bird’s eggs and penguins, until they were rescued by a ship from Argentina. Other digitized works include: The Medusae, (1909) by the pioneering ocean researcher Henry Bigelow, the founding director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; The Land and Sea Mammals of Middle America and the West Indies , (1921) by Harvard zoologist Hubert Lyman Clark; and The Land and Sea Mammals of Middle America and the West Indies by zoologist Daniel Giraud Elliot, one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the American Ornithologists’ Union.”

To read the rest of the full release, click here.

To search Google’s digital holdings, click here.

Reposted From Wired.com: “Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA”

The below posted is content copied directly from this recent and fasincating post on wired.com that was too fascinating not to share:

By Bryan Gardiner March 22, 2010  |12:00 pm  |Wired April 2010

Illustration: Nishant Choksi

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem. Here’s a peek at the hellish task this DNA Dante has condemned himself to.

Devise a cipher
Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.

Foresee the reply
Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

Write the poem
After using hand-coded software to determine which ciphers will give him the maximum two-way potential, Bök will finally start composing. He says his poem will probably need to have a “repetitive, incantatory quality.” We can imagine.

Insert the DNA
Once the poem is complete, lab technicians will string together the nucleotide polymers, creating a DNA fragment to insert into D. radiodurans. It’ll probably take several attempts to get the bacteria to accept the genetic info. Talk about publish or perish.

New Gulf of Maine Times Issue

I’ve been a bit lax in my posting lately,  but the newest Gulf of Maine Times online issue came out a couple weeks ago and I thought I’d share. I wrote an article on ocean acidification, an issue receiving a lot of current attention, called The Chemical Mysteries of Carbon. The whole issue with articles on intense weather patterns within the Gulf, as well as highlights on several key organizations working within the region can be accessed here.

Distilling It Down – Six Word Memoirs

This is such a clever idea.

So I’m cheating. I saw a post about this on the wordpress homepage, so credit where credit is due:  Entertainment Weekly: Tell us your six word memoirs!

You do however need to trace back a bit further to know where this starts. Smith Magazine , devoted to the art of storytelling, started the six word memoir project, recruiting really interesting personalities to contribute. The results have been compiled into several themed books. There is now a podcast, and the magazine invites readers to submit their own six word stories. Much to my delight, you can even create t-shirts with your favorite succinct life stories (or design your own).

But, Smith Magazine borrows from a concept originating further back. According to the original post:  “The six-word memoir is said to be rooted in a bet between Ernest Hemingway and a friend — supposedly, the author claimed he could write a short story in just six words. (He won with “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”)”

Check out the great promo for their newest book : “It All Changed In An Instant”

I like their other previews including the six word memoirs for teens:

So leave your own six word mark somewhere. I have a feeling like mine right now is something like “Many Fish, Rest Still in Progress…”

My New Favorite Poetry Anthology – From the Fishouse

Firstly the word “fishouse” didn’t seem strange to me until I tried to type it and realized I would have assumed it was spelled “fishhouse”.  I digress…

At any rate, this book was purchased w/ a Barnes and Noble gift card, part of my holiday “loot”. First off,  I was already in a small sort of ecstasy when found that the poetry section had not just one short set of paltry shelves, but four.  But I saw this book – it’s full title being “From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great” (Fiona, put that title in your pipe and smoke it) – and everything just clicked.

The book is divided into 10 sections with alluring titles like “To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire: Poems that Make Various Sorts of Address” and “Spangling the Sea: Poems with Convincing Consonance and Chimes of Internal Rhyme.”

The book plays to the truth of its title and comes with a cd containing author readings of many of the poems. Also, I really enjoy the addition of author’s comments on different aspects of the writing process that are provided at the end of some poems.

The book is borne out of a non-profit foundation called From the Fishouse (their about section actually comments on the spelling as well), dedicated to the oral tradition of poetry. They host a website with an audio archive of work from up and coming poets. They also host a youtube channel, a facebook page, and an i-tunes podcast (these folks really know how to exploit the social media!).

There’s so many I’d like to share, but I chose to include two short poems from the anthology, to give a taste of the book’s invigorating content:

Christian Barter
The Phoenix

Being ash, being dust,
being what’s left on the plate
being the bungalow with a moss eaten roof
a stone’s throw off from the new glass house,

being bone and gristle,
being biomass,
being something stuck to the fridge floor
whiffing of a long-turned tide,
being shredded, un-sought secrets,
being car exhaust,
being half-buried rusted-out bed springs,
sleeping it off in the woods,

being what was washed from the photo by the years,
being what will never wash,
being what’s in the storm drain hurrying off,

the dust flaring up in the comet’s tail,
the toe-nail clippings feeling around under the rug,
the sticks laid out on the highway after a storm,
the pennies on the dashboard short of a dollar,
the hollow core of an old swamp cedar,
the crumpled butt of the sweetest cigarette
you ever had, I am

everywhere and demand my wings.

Mark Conway
The Past Described, As A Figure

What were those days like? Remembering
is like remembering

white, or water. It’s another resemblance,
the libraries packed

with broken metaphors, book after book filled
with “water is like …,”

“white as…” When Alexandria caught fire,
the librarians burned like candels,

like suet. As for the manuscripts and their similes,
nothing was lost – it was like a fire.

Say It Out Loud (On Paper) – A Little Poetry in Your Everyday Things

I wrote a post about the poetry that inspires me, but I’ve also have written much of my own over time and taken a handful of workshop classes during college. I’ve always kept series of blank notebooks with unlined pages that can leave my mental workings almost torn asunder by the possibilities for filling all that empty space. I’ve had significant dry spells in my life where what I wrote was subpar at best. But one of the things I learned in one of my most enjoyable classes was it is best to not just write when the mood strikes but to write, write, write in regular practice. We kept a journal and noted something we saw every single day. What that allows you to do is to start bringing new perspectives to the mundane little happenings we are all part of – the poetry in every cup of coffee and forlorn stranger. I’ve often heard the 90/10 “iceberg” rule applied to productive writing. Supposedly the portion of an iceberg visible above the ocean surface represents only 10%  of the entire mass of the thing, with 90% of it seated below the surface. Writing often is structured by 90% of what isn’t said – the work, or discarded writing that has gone into producing the final product.

I’ve always benefited however from trying new things, new styles, new concepts, etc. There are some really thought provoking poetry books and exercises out there that have inspired some of my strongest writing and keep me creatively fresh.

I highly reccomend the book “The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach”. You generally can find a used copy on half.com for $4-5. There are also some great websites with poetry exercises, my favorite so far being the writing exercises listed on the Poetry Resource Page website. Some example exercises:

Function Exercise

Choose one object in your room and make a list of all of the ways you could use it, or all of the things you could do with it. For example, a glass can be used to drink from, to pour from, to collect rain water, to turn upside town and catch a fly under, etc. Turn your list of functions into a lyric poem, using the object as the title.

(by Jack Myers, from The Practice of Poetry, Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, eds.)

God Exercise

Write a poem to God. Make it a tirade, a complaint, a request.

OR

Write a poem as God. Let God explain, refute, deny, defend.

OR

Write a poem in which God is a traffic cop, a new anchor, a porn star, a grocery clerk.

The point I think, it to keep re-working how you approach writing, to step outside the way you “know” how to write and to do it differently. Wonderful things can be found littered about the messes…

Poetry is a Sickness – A Thrilling, Wonderful Sickness

"Message In A Bottle" - Harmony Becker, published in Mimesis: International Journal of Poetry, Artwork, and Opinion

I’ve had a love affair for quite some time now with poetry, from classic to contemporary, from unstructured to delightfully wild… My mom read a lot of it to me when I was younger, as did her grandfather to her, and it decidingly just…stuck. I have eclectic tastes in poetry ranging from Pablo Neruda to Allen Ginsburg. I love certain authors – Zora Neal Hurston, Saldam Rushdi, Jonathan Safran Foer – because the words and images almost vibrate with energy in their stories and novels. But the common thread between them all is this ability to wrangle the slippery images and sounds that allude most of us, all while speaking to some important expression of experience.

Thought I’d share some of my favorites:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines
– Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example,’The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Haiku
by Etheridge Knight

1

Eastern guard tower
glints in sunset; convicts rest
like lizards on rocks.

2

The piano man
is stingy, at 3 A.M.
his songs drop like plum.

3

Morning sun slants cell.
Drunks stagger like cripple flies
On jailhouse floor.

4

To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.

5

A bare pecan tree
slips a pencil shadow down
a moonlit snow slope.

6

The falling snow flakes
Cannot blunt the hard aches nor
Match the steel stillness.

7

Under moon shadows
A tall boy flashes knife and
Slices star bright ice.

8

In the August grass
Struck by the last rays of sun
The cracked teacup screams.

9

Making jazz swing in
Seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job.

“Green Memory” – 1951
-Langston Hughes

A wonderful time – the War:
when money rolled in
and blood rolled out.But blood
was far away
from here –

Money was near.

Epigram
-Langston Hughes

Oh, God of dust and rainbows, help us see
That without dust the rainbow would not be.

The Listeners
– Walter de la Mare

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest’s ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:–
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

These are just a handful of the poems that have captured by attention. I will likely share others as I track them down or stumble upon them. I’d welcome any comments on poems or poets that awaken something in you.

Resources:

• Mimesis: International Journal of Poetry, Artwork, and Opinion
• Poem Hunter Blog – filled to the brim with excellent poems from excellent poets
• The Allen Ginsburg Project – Wonderful In-depth Resource on the Beat Poets, that will lead you further down the rabbit hole
• Poetry Foundation – an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture

Gulf of Maine Times – Winter Issue

So This is certainly a bit self serving as I have two features in this online only issue:

Sounding the Alarm: The Emerging Threat of Noise Pollution

It Takes Two To Tango – A Watery Dance of Life and Death Between Two Species (This is about the intimate connection between the very endangered North Atlantic right whale and its minute copepod prey, Calanus finmarchicus)

but I want to promote the entire issue of the Gulf of Maine Times. There are some excellent features in the current issue including a look at marine spatial planning and a look at research, past and present, in the Gulf. To access the current issue, click the banner above or click the following link: http://www.gulfofmaine.org/gomt/?p=27

The Gulf of Maine Times is associated with the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment, specifically their Public Education and Participation Committee. The publication contains features about issues of interest concerning the Gulf of Maine, book reviews, recent news items, etc.  Old issues are also archived online and are well worth the time to browse through.

Enjoy!

The Whale That Ate Jaws

Nat Geo clip:

The Farallon islands are a group of jagged islands off the coast of California. They’ve become an area of great interest to shark researchers as great whites choose to spend time aggregating there. Author Susan Casey wrote a book about this called Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks (the book is well worth a read but take heed that the story is just as much about the author as about the sharks). Peter Pyle, a shark biologist on the islands, is referenced in the book as well as the clip.

I find this incident interesting on a couple different levels. First, we don’t often think of great whites succumbing to other predators, which seems to have fed into our fear of this creature.

Also, if you watch an associated clip: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/wild/4669/Overview#tab-Videos/07504_00, it appears the orca may have exploited the phenomenon of tonic immobility, which I wrote a blog entry on previously. I’ve also written on the differing hunting behavior of orcas. Nature likes to keep us guessing….