My weekly steps to becoming a writer....

There were a few things I promised myself I would do in order to work on becoming a writer...

1) I would go to more readings from other authors
2) I would become less shy about my writing
3) Join a writing community, so as not to forget how much I love it
4) Always journal, always blog
5) Work on writing...duh

So what did I get done this week?

On Thursday, March 18 I traveled out the the MOCAD- Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit where there was a poetry reading by K. Silem Mohammad, he was described by the MOCAD as "a modern outlaw, a controversial figure crafting art, in the form of poetry and prose pieces, from stolen moments of conversation, fragments of advertisements and procured bits of arcane apocrypha. One of the leaders of the “Flarf” poetry movement, K. Silem Mohammad’s work has succeeded in reigniting interest in the form by inviting equal amounts of praise and scorn for it’s use of phrases and terms culled directly from Google searches and the lowliest of cultural forms. Blogs, chat rooms, and long-since forgotten and discredited texts become finely rendered anti-forms in the hands of the craftsman, Mohammad."

This description did do him justice, in the sense that his poetry produced many shout outs to bands, pop culture and items people would be familiar with a google search. He started his reading by doing a few random poems, including one that was published in poetry magazine, that he himself announced as a random publication. Specifically from this poem I remember the words "Some poems are shaped like trees, kids are stupid," which I was a little taken aback by, but the name of this poem was "Poems about Trees" and questioned why we bothered to write about trees and it is true that kids are known for knowing less than adults and might think a poem is a good poem if it is shaped like a tree. However, perhaps my poetry skills still need work, but I fail to see what poetry magazine saw in this poem as genius to publish it.

He also read a few poems from a book he completed where he took Shakespeare's sonnets and mixed up all the characters and created new sonnets in Iambic pentameter, using any left over letters as the title which he informed us was his way of cheating. I was impressed more with this concept than the actual poems themselves, though I did find he was able to scramble up Shakespeare's beautiful sonnets into words of modern day pop culture, where every poem he read basically had a band name in it. I am a Shakespeare fan, but a friend of mine, named Jon, has me questioning whether we credit people who build off of Shakespeare too much when I told him about the event and I somewhat agree with Jon. If this poet had decided to build off of someone else's poetry would he be given as much credit.

Later that night the group of people at the reading went with the poet to a cafe in Detroit. I sat at the other end of the table from Mohammad, who did not really prove himself to be a people person, and found that much of this crowd were ambitious writers such as myself. One girl that I sat next too, had applied to nine graduate schools and only was admitted to one, which goes to show how competitive the field really has become.

However, my lesson that night was one way to learn the field and make connections within the field is to observe it and I will look for future poetry readings at the MOCAD.