“Oblique Strategies” for Reviving Creativity

Lately, in the midst of promoting our Ralph Munn Creative Writing Contest, I’ve been thinking about all of the aspects in a teen’s life that can impede creativity. Is the impulse just not there? Perhaps its there but is just being diverted? I wonder if any of these seem familiar:

• Being overscheduled.
• Not enough sleep.
• Depression.
• Wasting time on the phone or social media.

Enter Brian Eno…

(b Woodbridge, 15 May 1948). English composer and producer. While attending art school in Ipswich and then Winchester he developed an interest in ‘systems’ music, and much of his work can be seen as continuing the work of composers such as John Cage. He first worked professionally from 1970 to 1973 with the seminal art-rock band Roxy Music, lending their first two albums, Roxy Music (Island, 1972) and For Your Pleasure (Island, 1973), a quirky surrealist edge. By treating the group’s live sound electronically with a tape recorder and VC5 3 synthesizer, he defined a role for himself as an ‘aural collagist’. After leaving Roxy Music in 1973, Eno developed this interest in the timbral quality of music further with the albums No Pussy Footing (Island, 1973; with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp) and the seminal Another Green World (Island, 1975), the latter a brilliant combination of quirky songs and pastoral instrumentals. In 1975 his interest in aleatory music led him to produce with Peter Schmidt ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards, a collection of ‘over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas’, which formed a sort of musical tarot, each card containing a directive on how to proceed to the next creative stage. He then collaborated on three of David Bowie’s most innovatory albums (Low, ‘Heroes’ and Lodger), produced new-wave bands such as Talking Heads and Devo, and released two important ambient instrumental albums, Music for Films (EG, 1978) and Music for Airports (EG, 1979).

Info from our Grove Music Online database of music.

Basically, Brian Eno is a creative genius who is one of the most important musical artists of the seventies. And he’s a critically important part of making the following scene happen (you might remember it).


What I want to focus on today are the “Oblique Strategies” cards, which are a great legacy to leave to people of any creative persuasion.

Brian Eno and his artist friend Peter Schmidt had discovered that they both developed a set of working principles for whenever they were getting creatively stuck under pressure. They mixed, matched, meditated, and ultimately developed a deck of cards with ideas designed to move the creative process forward.

Whenever you’re stuck within a creative activity, draw a card, read it, and trust it.

While the original cards are long out of print, and while recent reincarnations are fairly expensive, some Eno historians have made electronic copies available to any creative adventurers. Check out this colorful web recreation. And, of course, there’s an app for that (and for Android, too).

Happy creating!

~Joseph
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Main

Presidential Poetry

REUTERS/Win McNamee

If you caught any of the coverage of the presidential inauguration ceremony on Monday, you might have noticed poet Richard Blanco joining the lineup of super VIPs like Barack Obama and Beyoncé. Blanco stood before the crowd of one million to read his poem “One Today,” which he composed just for the occasion.

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,

peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces

of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth

across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.

One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story

told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

Although several presidents have commissioned inaugural poems in the past, Richard Blanco is only the sixth inaugural poet in U.S. history. The first president to include poetry in his inaugural event was John F. Kennedy, who asked Robert Frost to read his poem “The Gift Outright” during the 1961 ceremony.  In 1977, the poet James Dickey shared “The Strength of Fields” during the inaugural ball for Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton invited poets to participate in both of his inaugural ceremonies—Maya Angelou read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” in 1993 and Miller Williams read “Of History and Hope” in 1997. For President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, he invited his friend Elizabeth Alexander to write and read her poem “Praise Song for the Day” during the ceremony.

Occasional poems like these are meant to commemorate a significant event or occasion by invoking the emotions and impressions of that moment in time. Many inaugural poets have used the opportunity to reflect on the last four years and look ahead to the future. Intrigued by this literary challenge, Yahoo! News recently asked six poets (including movie star James Franco) to compose a new poem for the occasion of Obama’s second inauguration. The resulting poems represent an array of unique viewpoints and reflections on the President and the nation’s past and future. You can check them out here.

If perusing this presidential poetry has moved you to try your hand at some occasional poetry of your own, inspiration is all around. Write a poem to commemorate a birthday, a break-up, or the inauguration of the weekend. Need more ideas or poetic guidance? The library is packed with poetry-writing resources!

 

 

 

 

 

Ancient philosophers with dangerous ideas! Lucretius and De Rerum Natura

For the last four months, I  very slowly was reading through one book of poetry. Admittedly, this is a long book, comprised of six smaller “books” (or chapters, if you will), and I wanted to take my time and not rush through it.

De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things was written by a poet-scientist-philosopher by the name of Lucretius, sometime in the 1st century BC. Very little is known about Lucretius: when exactly he was born, when he died,  when he wrote the poem, who exactly he wrote it for, etc. etc.  What we do know from his writing is that he was a disciple of the philosopher Epicurus. You may know him by the word that was derived from his name/philosophy – epicurean, meaning “fond of or adapted to luxury or indulgence in sensual pleasures; having luxurious tastes or habits, especially in eating and drinking.” (Also the inspiration for recipe-aggregator Epicurious)

Only a bit of what Epicurus wrote remains in the world, which makes De Rerum Natura extra important. Even more important is that it’s beautiful to read, and still moving as a piece of writing. While Lucretius explains the way the world is made of atoms, how that relates to the soul, and now-wacky theories about how the sun rising comes from a collection of “fire seeds” and how earthquakes are caused by collapsing caves on the inside of the Earth, he’s also paying close attention to metaphor and language, and making it something that one would want to read.

In fact, the original discovery of the manuscript of De Rerum Natura was made by chance, and a re-discovery in much the same way led to its reader, Stephen Greenblatt, writing a book on how he was affected and why the ideas in the poem are still important. That book is called The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and this is some of what Greenblatt has to say about Lucretius

“Lucretius, who was born about a century before Christ, was emphatically not our contemporary. He thought that worms were spontaneously generated from wet soil, that earthquakes were the result of winds caught in underground caverns, that the sun circled the earth. But, at its heart, “On the Nature of Things” persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern understanding of the world.” -  from an interview in The New Yorker.

“It’s a theory of everything. That is its glory and perhaps its absurdity. It tried to say what the nature of everything was.

And it had at its center an ancient idea, wasn’t invented by the poet, but actually by philosophers before him. But the whole theory was, in effect, lost, except for this poem. And the theory is that the world consists of an infinite number of tiny particles.

The ancient Greeks called them the things that can’t be broken up, and the word for that was atoms. …these were dangerous ideas, especially as Christianity took hold.” – from PBS

Why would his ideas be dangerous? Because they went against established (or what were beginning to be established) religious ideas – “. …Epicurus taught that all things were made of atoms, including the human soul, which was consequently as mortal as the body. He taught that though the gods exist, in a blissful state to be imitated by mortals, they neither created the physical world nor intervened in it. The clear aim of these teachings, together with the injunctions to avoid public life and cultivate moderate pleasure, was the elimination of all anxiety regarding human life and all fear of death and the supernatural. Little wonder that both the Roman political establishment and later the Christian church regarded Epicureanism as a dangerous threat.” – from Poetry.com

But don’t take my word for it – sample some of De Rerum Natura‘s wonderfully dour explanations of death, from Anthony Esolen’s really great translation:

“And now, so crippled is our age, that the earth,
Worn out by labor, scarce makes tiny creatures–
Which once made all, gave birth to giant beasts.
For I find it hard to believe that a golden cord
From heaven let living things down into the fields,
Or they were made by the stone-splashing waves of the sea;
The same earth gendered then that now gives food.
What’s more, at first she made, of her own prompting,
The glossy corn and the glad vine for us mortals,
And gave, of her own, sweet offspring and glad pasture.
Yet these now hardly grow for all our work:
We sweat our oxen thin and the strength of our farmhands
We crush; for our fields the plow is not enough.
So full of labor and so spare of birth!

Now the old plowman shakes his head and sighs
That all of his hard work has come to nothing,
Compares the present days to days gone by
And over and over touts his father’s luck.
Disheartened, the planter of stooped and shriveled vines
Curses this bent of our age, and rattles on
With his reproach: our elders, full of reverence,
managed to live with ease in narrow bounds,
With much less acreage to a man; he doesn’t
Grasp that, slowly, wasting away, all things
Go to the tomb, worn out by the long years.” (II, 1149-1173)

Don’t want to read the whole thing? Check out an illustrated excerpt in The graphic canon. Volume 1 : from the epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous liaisons, edited by Russ Kick.

 

- Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

Spruce Up Your Bookshelf with Book Spine Poetry

Order makes libraries run smoothly. Thanks to classification systems like the Library of Congress, we can ensure that books are on the shelves exactly where you expect them to be, in addition to being as browseable as possible.

Outside of the library shelves, however, sometimes we like to add a little bit of art to the way we organize the books. The other week, the CLP – Main Teen Poetry Workshop grabbed items from the shelves and configured their spines to make a poem.

Are You Going to Kiss Me Now?
by the Teen Poetry Workshop

Unwind
a coming evil
after midnight.
Pretty is
why I fight,
scrawl
fury
of sound mind.
Don’t shoot!
Bait–
shift–
bloom–
and then things fall apart.

The farther you run–
trapped
in the forests of the night,
the dark
total chaos
traces
mist
after
something happened.

Then
without warning:
deadly
looks
crazy
lies,
flawless
chaos–
everything I was.

Listen!
The singing
behind the curtain–
going, going–
out of shadows
into the dark.

While I guess we could have assigned stanza and line numbers to the catalog, a volunteer did put them back on the shelves. But if you happen to create art out of the chaos–or out of the order–of your own bookshelves, why not take a picture and post it in the comments?

~Joseph
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Main

POW: Natasha Trethewey is poet laureate!

Image credit: Associated Press

What’s the Poet Laureate?

“The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress serves as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans. During his or her term, the Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.” - loc.gov

How much does he or she make per year?

$35,000

What does the position entail?

Each Poet Laureate makes the position their own, according to their particular interests–as long as they’re promoting poetry, it’s cool.

What other people have had the position?

See the list here.

What’s good to know about Natasha Trethewey?

She’s one of the younger people to be appointed Laureate. She grew up in Mississippi in a bi-racial family and much of that experience, along with a fascination with history, informs her poetry.  Her New York Times profile notes that she is “the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993. “  Check out “Flounder” at the Poetry Foundation site to get a taste of what she writes. On the surface, it’s the story of a girl fishing with her grandmother, and just below the surface, a reflection on one family’s attitudes to daily navigation between the worlds of black and white.  It’s filled with vivid images and a rhyme scheme that sneaks up on you:

“Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down

around each bony ankle,

and I rolled down my white knee socks

letting my thin legs dangle,

circling them just above water

and silver backs of minnows

flitting here then there between

the sun spots and the shadows.”

flounder photo by TenSafeFrogs on flickr

Where can I read more about Natasha Trethewey?

The Library of Congress has an online web guide here, with a very complete bibliography.

And our own library system has books for you to check out:

Bellocq’s Ophelia

Domestic Work

Native Guard

Is there a Pennsylvania Poet Laureate?

There was–from 1993-2003, Samuel Hazo was the Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania, until he was told that Pennsylvania did not need that position anymore.

Which means you could crown yourself Pennsylvania’s Poet Laureate today!  Or compete in the Young Steel Poetry Slam for similar glory.

-Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

POW: Censorship Poetry

Welcome to Poetry On Wednesday!

Today I’m going to be self-promoting and share a poem I made by censoring the work of another author — okay, it’s not really censorship, but that sounds more fun than “Selectively-Editing-With-Sharpie Poetry”

I took a page from a withdrawn library book, in this case Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward, and I selectively edited it using a Sharpie, until it became my own work. Here’s a picture of what it looks like with the text following:

God

he had been

God’s-Chosen,

abandoning the sleds.

Later

he has no idea

The people are behind him,

underleaders, understand

tending crops like laborers.

The astrologer sticks are right

in some way. Disrupting,

hungry, swift, has

this rabble-rouser spell

the powerful east Priest of any blessing.

A sharp ripple, pale, turns, passed

less than half a Temple. As

Empire thronged, finally God held

an eastern orifice

once again.

This is a fun writing exercise because it lends the flavor of the original text to the finished poem. I’d never normally write such a sci-fi piece, but Robert Forward allowed me to go beyond my boundaries and think about the exciting possibilities of the genre. And I really do think it’s a writing exercise, not just an erasing exercise – to make a poem out of a page definitely requires creative thinking as well as grammatical maneuvering.

There’s a whole literature of erasure out there, conveniently profiled in this article, “Absent Things As If They Were Present” from the January 2012 issue of The Believer (and unconveniently not available in full online, but check out the library for a copy).  Jonathan Safran Foer, famous for writing Everything is Illuminated & Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, just made a whole new book out of one of his favorite books, and had it published in an amazing edition where all the words he didn’t use were cut out of the original work.  Thus, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz becomes Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Want to try your hand at this stuff?  It’s one of the activities available at tonight’s Teen Open Mic Poetry Slam at The Zone in Lawrenceville. Join us from 4-6 pm to read work, hear others read, and hang out.  More info is at the  previous link, or read about the Zone here.

-Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

Writerly Writing Habits

If you’ve ever obsessed over an unfinished story or spent hours trying to perfect a poem or English class essay, you know how tricky and tedious the writing process can be. To master the craft, many professional writers develop their own quirky working strategies to help them stay productive and keep their ideas flowing.  Readers have always been curious about the physical process behind great works of literature. When it comes to the development of your own unique writing habits, you might want to take some tips from the pros.

Some writers work during very specific hours, and others simply wait until inspiration strikes. Stephen King gives himself a strict daily output requirement—ten pages every day, even on holidays. Then there are writers like James Joyce, author of mind-boggling 20^th century novels like Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who often worked for hours just to complete a sentence or two. John Green (who wrote An Abundance of Katherines, Looking for Alaska, and other awesome YA books) has confessed that he ends up deleting about 90% of everything he writes.

Ernest Hemingway at his standing desk.

Do you sit at a desk when you write? Ernest Hemingway preferred to stand. He perched his typewriter on top of a high shelf and eventually designed a standing desk for himself. Then there was Truman Capote, the eccentric writer of the infamous true crime novel In Cold Blood, who said “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down.” He preferred to work from bed.

Some writers need peace and quiet; others can’t think without music playing. When Junot Diaz is working on a particularly tricky passage, he locks himself in the bathroom and sits on the edge of the bathtub. Author Jonathan Franzen believes the Internet is the most productivity-killing distraction of all, so he writes on an old laptop with no wireless card and has actually destroyed his Ethernet port so he will never be tempted to connect to the web. When J.K. Rowling was finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she checked into a hotel room so she could write for days without distraction.

Nowadays, most writers use a computer, though some still prefer to draft their work on paper, from college-ruled notebooks to multi-colored moleskines. Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novels in fragments on index cards, in no. 2 pencil. He liked to shuffle the cards around to decide what order worked best. Legendary Beat generation writer Jack Kerouac glued pages and pages of paper together into long winding scrolls and fed them through his typewriter so he never had to stop writing to change the paper. And don’t forget the necessary refreshments. Coffee, tea, Code Red Mountain Dew, beef jerky…whatever keeps the words flowing.

Maybe you only write between the hours of 4:00 and 5:00 o’clock in the morning, in a special writing fort, on Post-It notes, with your eyes closed, while spinning around in circles. No matter the method, it’s the work that counts! Don’t forget to submit your original poetry, short fiction, or creative blog post to the Ralph Munn Creative Writing Contest. The deadline is May 7^th, so there’s still plenty of time to hone your writing process and get to work. And be sure to check out one of the teen writing workshops happening at various CLP locations this month—you can find all the dates & times here.

Happy writing!

POW: My new favorite poem about Nancy Drew

Whilst perusing Flavorwire’s list of the best new poets of 2011 I took a look at the work of Nancy Reddy and was blown away.  She’s written a poem about Nancy Drew that goes into the legendary sleuth’s life using the usual associations:

You’re Nancy Drew and you drive a blue coupe.

You drive fast. Your mother is dead.

You’re solving mysteries that stump the cops.

You sass them back. You’re flip-haired and eagle-eyed.

And gradually  turns into something darker:

You’re on vacation in the snow-stunned Alps

when the innkeeper comes to you for help.

He’s getting threats from a dark-wigged woman

who claims that she’s your twin. You’re snowed in.

He tells you all the town’s most handsome men

go missing after dark. You wear a borrowed mink

and sleuth by candlelight. You smell Ned’s soap.

She’s a false wall. She’s a trap door.

(from anti-)

photo by flickr user Marxchivist

Of course, re-making an idea and using literary allusion is nothing new in poetry or in other creative endeavors (anyone want to make a bet on when The Hunger Games will be remade?) Here’s a list of 50 movie remakes coming up, posted in January. Reddy’s poem is an example of how it can be electrifying to read what you remember as reinterpreted in someone else’s brain.

Another poetic term that’s related to this is looking at a piece of art and writing about it. It’s called ekphrasis, and it’s really fun.  The next time you’re wandering around the Carnegie Museum of Art, try your hand at some ekphrastic poetry.  Take the atmosphere of your favorite book and turn it into your own thing–part of your personal  imaginative world.

After all, next month is National Poetry Month and time to submit to the annual Ralph Munn Creative Writing Contest. Check your local library branch for upcoming writing workshops!

Here are some books to check out if you prefer your poetry in physical rather than digital form:

Heart to heart : new poems inspired by twentieth-century American art / edited by Jan Greenberg.

Mirror, Mirror: A book of reversible verse / Marilyn Singer

A collection of short poems which, when reversed, provide new perspectives on the fairy tale characters they feature.

Side by side : new poems inspired by art from around the world / edited by Jan Greenberg

POW: Ardency, A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels by Kevin Young

Kevin Young was a player for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1992-2003, but there’s another Kevin Young you might want to get to know. He’s a poet from Nebraska and his poetry has been called “compulsively readable” by the New York Times Book Review. He writes about subjects and figures from American history, ranging from the Civil War to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I’d have to agree.  Although he’s most famous for his National Book Award-nominated collection of poems about jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton (called Jelly Roll), I’ve only read his most recent book, Ardency: A chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, published last year. I’d heard about it through the Adult Books 4 Teens blog from School Library Journal online, and felt like it was time to read some more poetry.

       

 

Ardency is an interpretation of a real event:

“In the summer of 1839, fifty-three Africans illegally sold in Havana mutinied on the schooner Amistad while being taken to Puerto Principe. The rebels, mostly men from the Mendi people of Sierra Leon, killed the captain and the cook but spared their masters to help steer toward the rising sun and Africa. For nearly two months, the would-be slaveowners rerouted by night until a navy brig captured the ship. …Authorities quickly threw the Africans in Connectiut jails while deciding either to return the men to their Spanish masters or award them as ‘salvage’ to the U.S. sailors.” (from the Preface)

Young takes on the voices of the Africans and imagines their thoughts, anger, and desire in four different sections. He starts with traditional poems, moves on to an imagined journal,  then swerves into a libretto encompassing the whole group of Africans on Amistad, then ends with seven different monologues from a deathbed confession to a progress report, to a captain’s log.  His language is lyrical and nimbly changes to fit the section and the speaker.

The poems in here cut to the heart of history and give you the immediacy of a primary source document with imagination and detail to take you even further into what it could have been like, as in the opening of “Broadway”:

At Broadway Tabernacle the abolitionists charge

half-dollar a head to view your Mendi zoo.

After the slideshow of Sierra Leone, they hold

spelling bees to show how far you’ve come.

I wish for a word I could become. If just one letter

would shift, worship turning warship . . . But little

Kale spells it right: –Bless-ed are the pure at heart.

 

The best part about the variety of Ardency is that you can pick a section and start there without reading the others, depending on your mood.

 

More information on Kevin Young can be found at poets.org and The Poetry Foundation.

 

Happy poetry reading!

-Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

Jim Picks the Best Books of 2011

One of my favorite things to do around New Year’s Day is look at different lists to see what people think are the best books of the past year.  This always ends up giving me lots of great titles to read in the first part of the year.  I also like to look back at my favorite books of the past year to see if they are on anyone else’s lists.  The lists that I looked at this year included Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, and Amazon.  Some of the books on these lists that I really enjoyed last year were:

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai – Lai’s first published book won the National Book Award and I think it was well deserved.  She tells the story of a ten year old girl who has to leave her home in Vietnam in 1975 and move to Alabama.  The story is told through short page or two long poems that describe her journey.  The characters are so real in this book that you will feel like you know them when you are finished.  I thought it was fabulous, and it’s also a really quick read (I started and finished it on my bus ride to and from work).

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy- Jaine Scott’s parents work as Hollywood writers in the early 1950s.  They are forced to move to England when they are threatened by the Red Scare that took place at that time.  Jaine doesn’t want to leave Los Angeles or move to London, but once there she meets a cast of fascinating characters who lead her on some amazing adventures.  This is a very evocative book that makes you feel like you are standing in a foggy London street.


Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick- Brian Selznick won the Caldecott medal for The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which was made into the Hugo movie released earlier this year).  His follow-up, Wonderstruck, presents two stories- one told in pictures and one told in words.  The stories are different, but similar.  They both concern young children who feel alone and are seeking something, and both of the main characters are deaf.  Both stories are wonderfully told and they end up coming together for a touching conclusion.

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt- Both funny and tragic, Okay for Now is the story of Doug Swieteck, a 14 year old who moves from Long Island to a small town in upstate New York during the late 1960s.  There are lots of books about kids who have to move to a new environment and don’t fit in, but Schmidt separates this story from the others by creating complex characters who face numerous realistic problems.  He also presents some great minor characters and the small wonders that get people through their everyday life.

Some of the other books that I would include as my personal favorites from 2011 were not YA books, but might have appeal to some teen readers.  They were George RR Martin’s Dance with Dragons, Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.

One book that was on almost every “Best of” list that I was not a huge fan of was Maggie Stiefvater’s Scorpio Races, the story of Sean Kendrick and Puck Connolly.  They are both trying to win the annual Scorpio Race, in which the horses are actually bloodthirsty creatures who arise out of the sea every year.  Both Sean and Puck have a lot to win (and lose) in this year’s race and must compete against each other just as they are becoming friends.  Maybe other people will really like it, but it was kind of a struggle for me to finish.  It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t think it was one of the year’s ‘best’ either.

So that’s my list!  Did you read any of these titles?  Do you agree or disagree with me?  What were some of your favorite new books from 2011?  I hope everyone has a great year in 2012, and gets to read a lot of great new books!