Zombie Poetry

Nobody who knows me could be surprised to learn I have an interest in Oulipo, the crossroads between mathematics and poetry (according to the Academy of American Poet's website Poets.org). However, in general I've found the processes of Oulipo more interesting than the products. And now I've discovered at Mad River Anthology a podcast by Brent Jenkins in which he sets up an Oulipo project and walks the listener step-by-step through the process of applying constraints to a system to force a result. Have you ever wondered what happens when the formal constraints pre-established for an Ouilipian  project suddenly don't cover an unanticipated occurrence in the creative process? Turns out there are rules for these oversights, which this podcaster happily walks you through.


Jenkins began with a 4-CD collection called Poetry on Record,  98 Poets Read Their Work from 1888 to 2006. He decided to make a mash up of these recordings, choosing excerpts based on the following rules:

1) Using the run-time clock of the movie Night of the Living Dead, he noted every onscreen appearance of a zombie, and using the initial time and the length of the zombie's appearance, he sampled from the CDs at the same beginning time and length of recording. Since he noticed that the running time of the movie was shorter than the running time of the CDs taken together in order, and that the rule strictly applied would mean disks three and four (and thus the entire 20th Century poetic canon) would never be used in the mash up, he made an amendment to his original rule:

1a) Jenkins allowed himself to sample from all four disks (at the correct initial time of zombie appearance and running the same length of time as the zombie was on screen), and at his whim (already somewhat violating the strictness of Oulipo) chose which sample or samples to include in the mash up.

2) Eventually he ran into the problem of multiple zombies appearing on screen simultaneously. To deal with this, he didn't want to run multiple poetry reading samples at the same time, as an Oulipian purist would argue was the proper interpretation of the first rule, because that resulted in cacophony. Instead, Jenkins decided to have the same number of voices as zombies (in the first instance, 3 zombies, so 3 voices from 3 of the disks) but to allow one of them to be dominant, while the others receded into the background.

3) But what happens when there are more than 4 zombies, you ask? With only 4 CDs, that's a seemingly insurmountable problem. Luckily, Oulipians have a provision for extreme circumstances called "the Clinamen," which allows the constraint to be broken within the following parameters: only if the project can proceed without it. In this way, Jenkins considers the fifth zombie voice to wrap around to the 1st CD again, and since it has the same time constraints as the 1st zombie since both 1st and 5th zombies appeared as part of a zombie mob, it doubles the first zombie excerpt, making Jenkins' job more manageable.

4) What to do when zombie hands appear onscreen before the entire zombie? Are zombie hands enough to invoke the first rule? The consideration of this questions leds Jenkins to consider what it is to be a zombie, which he decided is really a rephrasing of what it means to be human....Listen to the podcast to hear the entire philosophical discussion.


When 16 zombies appear simultaneously, Jenkins gave up, invoking "the Canada Dry," a well-known Oulipian Clinamen, a huge surprise, and I'll let you find out what that is, if you want to listen (hint: it confirms my observation that the process of Oulipo is often more interesting than the product). He does suggest an arbitrary rule that could be used to deal with zombie hordes though: for example, he says that whenever a zombie horde appears, a 100-second sampling could be taken from the 100th minute of the recording, in 10-minute increments for successive zombie mobs. Obviously it's a completely arbitrary rule, but that's fine, as long as the constraint is well-defined and strictly followed.

Does this inspire you to try "ZombiePo," or any kind of Oulipian experiment? I'm thinking about trying the famous N+7 technique (which is discussed in the Poets.org link about, if you are interested). Long live Oulipo (and especially the Canada Dry)!

Circus Circus

We went to the circus this weekend in Himeji, my husband's hometown. My brother-in-law told me that Kinoshita Circus was one of the world's three greatest circuses, the other two being Ringling Bros./Barnum & Bailey (they are teamed up now) and the Bolshoi Circus. I found this rather incredible, but decided to wait and see.

The circus was under an actual big top, a tent, in the middle of a park. Or a parking lot on the edge of a park. I felt like I was in Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, or something similar from the Depression era. There were fewer seats than in my high school gymasium bleachers. Which you think might have reflected badly compared to my last experience at the circus, in the Honda Center in Anaheim, a place that seats 8400 or something like that. But actually, it was amazing: I could see everything. I mean everything:

Both clowns.
All three motorcycle riders who rode inside the "Wheel of Death" ball (got to admit Ringling Brother's 8 riders in the ball at once was a magnitude more impressive).
All 7 trapeze artists (could see them well enough to have opinions about their makeup).
Both elephants.
The lion trainer and his 8 lions.
The solo tightrope walker, who actually walked on a bamboo beam suspended from ropes, swinging back and forth as she walked on it. She fell off once, into her spotter's arms, but she jumped right back up, in her long-sleeved kimono, and kept on balancing.

Well, I saw all of it. It was small. But it was charming. I loved it. As did my kids and their cousins.

Was it one of the three great circuses in the world? While I'm not sure about that, it's one of the three greatest circuses in my life. And among the one-ring circuses I've been to...well, it's the only one-ring circus I've actually gone to...so it was the best.

Call for Essays about Asia and Parenting

Here's a call for essays about how your relationship with Asia affected your upbringing, your decision to have children or not, or how you are raising your children. It's for a forthcoming anthology Tao of Parenthood: An Anthology of Essays.

The following comes directly from the above website:

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This literary anthology of personal essays by and about writers of Asian ancestry will try to capture the multitude of perspectives on the impact of Asian culture, heritage, and identity on your experience as a child, on raising children, or on deciding whether to have children.

Who Should Submit An Essay:

Writers from various perspectives are welcome to submit essays of all forms. Anyone self-identifying as Asian or mixed heritage Asian in any way is invited to submit their first person essay. This is an inclusive collection and seeks to highlight as many true stories as possible. We hope to hear from various generations, parents, grandparents, extended family members, nontraditional families, and biological and adoptive adult children. Also, those who are considering parenthood or those who have chosen not to become parents or those experiencing fertility challenges. We would like to hear from as many voices of experience as possible.

The essays must be true stories exploring some aspect of Asian culture and parenthood.

Kinds of Essays We’re Interested In:

Tell us a unique story about growing up Asian or raising Asian children. Break a silence. Speak a truth. Our primary criterion is that the narrative be engaging, true, and well-written. Were you raised or affected by an Asian parent? Are you an Asian parent today? Are you raising an Asian child(ren) from an adoption? In what ways has Asian identity, culture, or heritage influenced your perspective towards parenthood?

We also welcome those who are not of Asian descent, but are raising children of Asian descent.

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See the original website for submission details. Deadline is April 1st.

Interviews with Two Poets

Here are a few terrific interviews with poets.

For the first I have to give a shout-out to poet extraordinaire Mari L'Esperance, who told me about this interview with Kundiman fellow Janine Oshiro at Lantern Review Blog. One of the most interesting points for me was when Oshiro talked about forming a manuscript from her poems and thinking about it as a single work with an arc, and how this larger perspective showed her new poems that she could write to complement the ones that existed. I was also cheered by her statement that poets need to be comfortable with their own processes, and not focus on quantity of output.

Another interview I enjoyed this week was a New Letters on the Air podcast by Angela Elam, talking with James Richardson.  Richardson talks about how the mood necessary for writing poetry is the opposite of the feeling of being productive. He says that when he makes himself write, he ends up writing the same old stuff. He explained that "it takes vast amounts of space" in order to come up with something new. Later he reiterates that particularly when ending up a book, "when everything you are thinking about is coming together...and you know everything, or think you do...", you can sit down and write a poem and get three lines into it and realize it is an old poem, which is why you need free time to "get back to your ignorance, back to your sense that you don't really know." "It's possible to be new just by your ignorance again," he says when comparing writing to the process of recent research in physics. Isn't that comforting?

Well, I've been a big fan of James Richardson for awhile, which is why I've posted about him one, two, three times in the past. And now I can't wait to get familiar with Janine Oshiro's work as well. Enjoy these interviews.

Free Posters

Check out poet Karen Weyant's blog The Scrapper Poet and learn how you can get the 2012 free National Poetry Month poster offered by the Academy of American Poets. Visit their website as well to see the design of this year's poster featuring work by Philip Levine, and also peruse posters from previous years.

Thanks for the heads-up, Karen!