Speech Writing

I stumbled across this article on the Time website about how Barrack Obama writes his speeches.

“When you’re working with Senator Obama the main player on a speech is Senator Obama,” Axelrod said. “He is the best speechwriter in the group and he knows what he wants to say and he generally says it better than anybody else would.”

I think this is a powerful way to view Obama, I’m not much for political talk but he is clearly an exceptionally literate person. If Obama does win the election it’s going to be a huge shock for American’s to go from President Bush, a figure head who most of us have taken to ignoring, to a well-spoken Barrack Obama.

Poems

I’ve been writing a lot of poetry this past summer, for some reason I’ve always been drawn to poetry, even before i properly knew what poetry was i would write poetic verses. My poetry is purposely very ambiguous, I don’t ever mean to talk directly about anything within them but yet they have meaning. I find myself reading back over my poems and finding a meaning in them when there was no intended meaning. I guess the best way to explain it is that i am exploring a situation or a feeling using poetic form and i focus consciously on the aesthetic of the words. I like to make puns with common phrases in my pieces and I like to make references to other peoples work as well as my own past poems a lot. If you bring in a discourse from another poem or a novel you’re adding that much more meaning to your work as it is then in a conversation with that piece. I thought I’d post a few of my recent poems to give a sense of the technique I’m working on developing.

Philadelphia Today

Two mice found dead
in downtown Philadelphia this morning
it happened on the corner of 9th & Pine
at around 10 o’clock

Witnesses say,
“A trippy TRAP click clacked em up!
Momma mice, baby mice…

Sounded like a big CLAP!”

and then birds and cars
and planes and air.
Still, hot air…

i know how to make something
out of nothing
i know what i see

Over this past summer I spent a lot of time in Philadelphia so I wrote this one about the many perceptions I’ve made over spending time there. I have two friends, Rachel and Esther, who are twins and had alot of mice in their appartment so there were always mouse traps going off all the time and then the huge ordeal of dealing with the bodies. And then my other good friend Chris just got his degree from St. Joe’s in Psychology so he just began a job where he works with tormented war veterans. From his sad stories about some of these guys I got a sense for their rythmic language and it made its way into the piece in the form of the witness. And lastly there is an overtone of Philadelphia having the highest murder count in the country, more Americans were killed in Philly last year than in the war on Iraq. So that is where the news caster form comes from and the whole idea at the end about making something out of nothing ties into that in a contrasting way. So as you can see I formed this piece from many experiances and though it’s a very short piece I think it communicates a lot. Obviously no one is going to share these exact experiances with me but i think it stands well enough on its own as a structure of my summer in Philly.

New Age Spoken Word

I got in an argument with one of my creative writing teachers today over poetry. He claimed that poetry, at large, has become a lost art. He attempted to blame authors like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound for the arts decline in popularity stating that they were lost to obscurity and that the only people who could understand their works were their close friends and colleagues. I personally think that poetry has simply evolved into an even more powerful art through music. I also think that Eliot and Pound were two of the greatest writers ever and the idea of a writer being lost to obscurity is an absurd notion in itself.

This is a music video by the Philadelphia based band “mewithoutYou” for their song “January 1979″. mewithoutYou has one of the most unique sounds I’ve ever heard and I cannot think of a single other example of spoken word poetry being intertwined with music on this level. If you are a fan of rock music and poetry i suggest you get mewithoutYou’s latest album, “The Sun and The Moon,” and rejoice as you listen to it straight through because poetry is not dead, it is only just becoming realized.

UPDATE

I found this acoustic video of them playing one of the new songs. This is live and it’s called “O, Porcupine!” I think this live video shows their art in the medium it is created for.

The Wasteland

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,	25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

When i find myself hitting a brick wall in my writing I scour the internet for recordings of my favorite writers reading their pieces aloud. There is undoubtedly something inspiring about hearing a writer read the words in his own voice.

If you give a class of highschool seniors T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” to read they may cringe and laugh at his language, but if you play them the recording of Eliots grim voice hacking through the burial of the dead… well they might still laugh in honesty, but the imaginative among them will undoubtedly feel a shiver through their spine.

Anyway, it’s all very inspiring.

Of Sinking Ships…

“The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”- From Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think”

The bank of knowledge which man has created in the internet and other forms of publication and record have essentially taken to drowning him. You would be hard pressed to find a student who hasn’t felt the weight of the information super highway bearing down on him or her at times. Just look at the craze blogging has begun, I have no way of knowing how many blogs have been created to this date but I’m sure it’s a heavy number, too heavy a number for any one person to make sense of.
The sea of blogs is a tough thing for me to get past as I try to think of topics to write about, I find myself caught in the ebb and flow of millions of bloggers across this country, and further more, around the world and in different languages. Knowing how vast the worlds blogging community is almost corrupts the entire idea for me. As a writer it’s just a matter of ignoring that big picture, supposing things are ideal, and praying for the actualization of that idealism.

As Vannevar Bush writes in the passage posted above, “publication has extended far beyond our present ability to make any use of the record.” As a writer I find myself very conscious of a certain anxiety, it feels like I’m waiting for my ship to come in, for something to help make some sense of the sea.