road trip in 4 simple words! [going to the dodge poetry festival]
she wants to write,
all bodies look good
by candlelight, the mood is right,
pen in margins, pen all night.
The delight of having friends who are poets is they always surprise you with their wonderful work and new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. My friend Melanie goes under the pen name of Writergal76 recently introduced me to dithyramb poetry, Ancient Greek praise to glorious Dionysus! I had never heard of this form before, but I am very grateful to have been shown it. She wrote a very interesting dithyramb herself, the above lines being a sliver of it. One poetic phrase she used was, a ten karat bling. That got me thinking about our use of pop culture and I wrote to her the following:
I am always amused by pop cultural references that subliminally trickle down through our work. I cannot recall ever making a conscious decision to use "bling, bling" in my poetry too but it certainly does shows up now and then. Ah pop culture! It is everywhere and I keep thinking I might be the most out of touch white guy in America. Still, since I am running with this idea for a second, an interesting poem-cycle might be to dig through the lingo of different decades of popular music. You could have an Old School hip hop poem. I am sure someone has compiled a dictionary of Run DMC-speak, you could have odes to "Sucker MCs" and refer to everything bad as "illin'" … then go back 10 years and use Disco mummery … well, there are entire languages out there in one form or another waiting to be tapped into.
Right. It's an idea. Anyway, speaking of pop culture entering into poetry, tomorrow I will be off-line and gone for a long weekend. It's road time to the Dodge Poetry Festival! Quote:
Nearly 20,000 people are expected to welcome the 11th biennial Dodge Poetry Festival back to Waterloo Village. The Festival will return to a completely new Concert Tent, more spacious satellite performance tents, and expanded free parking facilities in the restored 19th-century canal-lock and riverside village. Join more than 60 poets ―including Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, Taha Muhammad Ali, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Mark Doty, Jorie Graham, Linda Gregg, Tony Hoagland, Linda Hogan, Kurtis Lamkin, Andrew Motion, Taslima Nasreen, Grace Paley, Linda Pastan, Gerald Stern, Sekou Sundiata, Brian Turner, and Ko Un―and dozens of accomplished musicians and storytellers for four days of poetry and music beside the Musconetcong River and among the Village’s lawns, trees, and historic buildings.
If anyone is also going please drop me a line before 7 p.m. Thursday (when I take off … yes, all night driving) and we can finally meet in that large crowd. I will take photos and get gossip and tell you all about it when I get back!