Poet Mouth & Poetic Conversations
POETIC CONVERSATIONS: An Introductory Blog!
My sixth grade teacher, Lisa Rauschart taught the class how to write poetry alongside the keyhole-shaped five paragraph essay form. I learned that one could corset any thesis/argument, unpacking stories and interpretations via the essay shape, and we practiced poetry via writing replies in the style of Walt Whitman’s “I Celebrate.” I found one could don any writer’s voice in an earnest, celebratory tribute piece! One could reply — in poetry. In college Olga Broumas called this being “under the passing angel,” of a poet/poem. Everything I read as a teen and onward became available for conversation. Every poem and its voice are part of an infinite costume rack to be shared, the possibilities of poetic drag, masque for the literary soirée.
I have a habit, “poet mouth” which is my sincere wish to microdose, charm conversation with as much meaning and zeitgeist as I can, often in personal “terms of art” and neologism.
When Addie Tsai invited me to edit Poetic Conversations, I felt my composition book-filling life spiraling to center. As a book review writer I take the Patti Smith approach; I read in an interview that she never felt the need to do a particular sort of music review criticism — there are so many more kind, interesting ways to interact with others’ art. When I write reviews it inevitably drifts into a book diary, lyric essay, and being a bit of a Hype Poet.
I’m excited to continue The Great Conversation with Anomaly. I’m looking forward to interviewing writers I am inspired by, radical poets, and giving platform to minority voices. I want to spotlight teachers on social media doing Punk Rock Unity efforts, I’m inspired by Teaching Poets doing incredibly uplifting work within the arts-deprived US school system. I hope to interview such generous souls, share some of the books that have changed my life and craft-approach, and solicit others’ book reviews, essays, manuscripts, and poetry from other folks interested in visual poetry, cut-up method, and anti-gatekeeping “art-enabling!”
Poetic Conversations is open for submissions of “personal essay explorations of poetry books, regardless of when they came out,” and poetry written in conversation with — or in the style of other writers.
Email: jojo@anomalouspress.org
With gratitude, psychedelically,
-jojo Lazar
