second post

poetry and image-making

dan hoy wrote a good article comparing poetry to Duran Duran,
the link being The Pin-Up Stakes,
these stakes more or less being the stakes you put into art.

The connection between image and poetry can be this stake, like,
the things you say, the things you're willing to show.
You put your face (an image) on your words.

I'm willing to market poetry with an image,
indeed, with the advent of online,
images-of-text have become an efficient way to share text.

An image of text with a picture behind it,
considerably, a meme.
Image memes, with text.

It's not that fair to call a meme poetry, though.
If you put a poem on it, maybe, but how many "poem memes" do you see?
Dan Hoy actually has a tendency to make short poems that could fit on a meme.

These, he contains in short videos.

I find the effect of these videos as dialogical, more than the usual entrancing effect of youtube.

That is, they're still entrancing, but only for a brief period.
So it's more of a verb or noun.
One complete idea-- a meme.

At the same time, they fail to, as memes, go viral.
They're mostly used in Dan's essays as a kind of word.
They don't self-sustain.

Poetry memes are supposed to self-sustain.
Hopefully they'd go viral.
Here we get into tumblr poetry, which is usually something like this:

This is a quote, possibly a part of a larger poem, self-attributed by the author.

It's sort of a distillation of popular poetry:

one moment, with attribution.

They're really not that different from Dan's written poems, which are like:

The day
is a measure

of what it
takes the Sun

to forget us.

These fit pretty well into the tradition of, you know, short poems.
Dan's kinda have more self-sufficiency for being self-consciously short and well-stated.

You would say for Lukas W.'s poem above, that the impetus to be a quote has kinda overtaken the poem.
Then again, there's no line breaks, it's just a quote.
So a poem it will be, and a text/picture one too.

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Lukas W.'s poem also is noticeably trim for being viral:
it contains one significant, appealing idea.
Rebloggable by romantics.

For me, though, searching on tumblr for "poetry",
it's this kinda stuff I don't like. Because it's saccharine.
Or it just brazenly puts forward this idea of poetry I don't like at all.

I deduce it was the case that quotes of poetry became more salable than full poems,
and thus eventually poems were written to be quotes.
That's popular poetry, on tumblr.

Not exactly challenging,
although it does challenge, by format,
the standard kind of poetry you'd see in a book (which wouldn't be a quote).

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I'm more of a fan of blogs.
I really love Dan's blog posts.
These great compelling works of criticism--

The Pin-Up Stakes, which is a primer
on how to be a poet. An alternate world.
With lofty goals. And the promise of fame.

The criticism itself slips slowly, through a kind of academic coil,
into poetry at parts. So it's distanced
from a needs-to-work kinda vein (it's idealistic)

You can see my own idealism in this piece,
to develop a criticism/poetry,
use poetry for something critical; criticism.

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The viral poem-image
of our time probably was the self-conscious one
the vegan hotdog one:

"seven syllables of a haiku obscured by a vegan hotdog"
which is a joke, an image,
and a poem, all in one.

It went viral! It's on imgur.
It got posted to my feed, multiple times.
You know how it is.

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I have an idea for popular image-making
which I'll try to implement in Pittsburgh
in a couple weeks to a month
once I get the plan for it.
I have a few collaborators.
I've told a few in the city about it already.
It's a bit offensive.
This is how I usually am.
~