This essay was originally published on August 8, 2013. It is being re-shared in support of LPR’s 10th Anniversary celebration.
A journal such as ours requires a vibrant literary and artistic environment to thrive—and even survive. In appreciation of the various cultural entities around us, we present “Meet the Neighbors,” a series where we provide you with personal introductions to a diverse assortment.
Rebecca Oppenheimer
Little compares to a well-tended bookshop. Whether traveling alone or with friends, it seems that in every city I explore, I explore my way into a bookshop. Today Rebecca Oppenheimer offers you a peek into The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore. Rebecca maintains The Ivy Bookshop’s blog, keeping visitors up to date about news in and beyond the literary world of the shop. Here’s what she had to say about the place:
Founded in 2001 as a more intimate alternative to the big chain stores, The Ivy Bookshop has grown from a beloved neighborhood fixture to a major presence across the Baltimore metropolis and beyond.
Our mission as Baltimore’s literary independent bookstore is to serve as a bridge between writers and readers – on a large scale by hosting and participating in author events and other literary happenings, and on a smaller scale every day by offering our customers the best literature of all types and genres.
The Ivy Bookshop’s storefront located at 6080 Falls Rd., Baltimore, MD.
This essay was originally published on February 13, 2013. It is being re-shared in support of LPR’s 10th Anniversary celebration.
Music starts with sound and silence. As such, music and literature likely arose as a single entity. Even as the two drew apart, they maintained a continuum, causing Alphonse de Lamartine to state, “Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.” And continued to influence one another in both form and content, causing Ezra Pound to pronounce, “Poets who will not study music are defective.” Be that as it may, literary figures as disparate as William Shakespeare, TS Eliot and Ralph Ellison have made music an essential part of their works.
Join us in exploring this ageless theme and its contemporary variations through poetry, prose and the visual arts in preparation for our Summer 2013 Music issue.
Lorraine Whittlesey at the piano (Photo: John Dean)
A few words to set the stage, so to speak. Music has always been an integral part of my life. Family legend has it that I sang my first sentences to the popular tunes of the day. The combination of words and melodic line continues to be a powerful force in my life.
This essay was originally published on May 13, 2014. It is being re-shared in support of LPR’s 10th Anniversary celebration.
Jesse Paris Smith and Patti Smith at The Noguchi Museum (Photo: Patrick McMullan Company, 2012)The subject of intergenerational performers has been dear to my heart since I learned that my maternal grandmother’s family had broadcast a live AM radio show on Saturday nights from New York City in the Thirties and Forties. I was inspired to explore the topic further while attending Patti Smith concerts in NYC and Baltimore, where her son Jackson and her daughter Jesse joined her onstage. Since I am a musician and the theme of the upcoming LPR issue is music, I wanted to share what I learned. To get it right, I enlisted the help of Jesse Paris Smith, Patti Smith’s daughter.
This is a reminder that Little Patuxent Review’s 2016 Winter issue submission period ends on Monday, October 24th. The Winter issue is themed around “Prisons” and eligible work can be submitted through our Submittable page. Guidelines for submitting can be found here.
Jesse Paris Smith and Patti Smith at The Noguchi Museum (Photo: Patrick McMullan Company, 2012)The subject of intergenerational performers has been dear to my heart since I learned that my maternal grandmother’s family had broadcast a live AM radio show on Saturday nights from New York City in the Thirties and Forties. I was inspired to explore the topic further while attending Patti Smith concerts in NYC and Baltimore, where her son Jackson and her daughter Jesse joined her onstage. Since I am a musician and the theme of the upcoming LPR issue is music, I wanted to share what I learned. To get it right, I enlisted the help of Jesse Paris Smith, Patti Smith’s daughter.
Jesse, whose guitarist father is the late Fred “Sonic” Smith, notes reverberations of Patti’s polymath persona in herself. Growing up in Michigan, Jesse recalls picking out melodies on the family piano. She never took it seriously until she heard her music teacher play Scott Joplin’s“Maple Leaf Rag.”Soon she was taking lessons, and music was becoming increasingly important. But she never intended to become a musician, considering environmental science as a career. In a college essay, she acknowledged the difficulty of deciding. Then she received an acceptance letter that asked, “Why choose between music and science? Maybe you can find a way to combine them and do both?”
Jesse says that her mother never planned a music career, either. “I think she believed that as she was following a path to be an artist, poet and writer, it happened that way by chance and fate. Music became the common voice that allowed her to carry her thoughts in a broader way and to reach people in a more accessible manner.” Jesse acknowledges envying those who have one dominant capability that they master but concludes,
There are all different kinds of people, and finding your clear path and purpose sometimes includes following a lot of different paths, a lifelong pursuit of learning and ever expanding and growing. My mom has never stopped learning, expanding her mind and knowledge and following through with her creative endeavors and projects. She loves to be busy and loves to work and create. And that is very admirable.
When she was 16, Jesse collaborated with her mother on the album Trampin’:
…she wanted to do a version of the old gospel song where the title comes from. She had a vinyl of Marian Anderson singing it, accompanied by piano, but we didn’t have any sheet music. My piano teacher worked with me, transposing the vinyl to sheet music, working out a lovely arrangement for me to play. So our piano lessons for a while were focused on learning “Trampin'” in time to record it for my mom’s album. When I was ready to play it, we went to Looking Glass, Philip Glass’s recording studio in NYC, and played it for the first time together, and that first take is what is on the Trampin’ album. I’m not sure it was a take that my teacher would have been very proud of and maybe if we would have tried it a few more times it would have sounded better, but there is something very human and humble about going with that first take, especially since I was so young and it was a mother-daughter recording, our first meeting at the song after having our own journey with it.
Listen here and judge for yourself:
Jesse subsequently collaborated with other musicians in the Detroit and NYC areas and has been involved in many multimedia events, especially those in art galleries and museums. In particular, she has been working with Eric Hoegemeyer, a multifaceted musician, composer and engineer whom she met in Detroit and who eventually relocated to NYC, where Jesse now lives. She and Eric share Tree Laboratory, a studio in Brooklyn.
She considers the Patti Smith Band to be family, since she’s known the members all her life and feels she that she has learned so much about musicianship through watching and working with them. During her summers as a teenager, she was involved in behind-the-scenes aspects, learning about production, staging and touring. One summer, there was a change in the lineup. A keyboard player was needed, and she was asked to fill in. She still remembers the first song that she played with the group: “Pissing in a River.”
She describes working with her mother by saying, “She is a true performer, and it’s amazing to watch. The stage presence, confidence and energy she has is remarkable.” She credits her mother with helping her dive into new worlds.
She will do something like bring some poems, part of a book or stories or a letter to me, and we will talk about what is happening in it, what it sounds like, the mood of the different lines and parts of the text. And through looking at that and talking about it, write a piece of music that corresponds to it. Another way we will work is that I will write a piece of music and bring it to her and she will think of a piece of writing or look for something that she thinks fits with the music, and we will try it out. If it doesn’t quite fit, we will find another text that suits it better.
An annual event where Jesse and Patti present is a performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. They select an exhibit and create a musical program in response to the subject matter. Jesse also composes pieces, and her mother reads a variety of texts appropriate to the subject matter. In 2012, her tenth performance there, Patti paid tribute to Andy Warhol, her fellow traveler in the Seventies.
Jesse, Jackson and Patti Smith playing at the Detroit Institute of Arts with a Diego Rivera fresco as the backdrop. (Photo: Michelle Pesta Culkowski)
Jesse also performs with her brother Jackson, a Detroit-based guitarist. “When I play music with my brother and my mom, it feels even more like family. My brother is such a technically advanced and gifted musician, and when we all play together we just laugh and have fun.” She says the same about performing with Eric, who will join her and Patti in an upcoming Met performance this fall.
Making multigenerational music has worked well for Jesse:
My family and I, as well as Eric, have developed a rapport working and playing together, developing our language and collaboration skills. This has helped teach me to relax, breathe properly and find the right notes. It’s so wonderful to work with people who believe in you. Music helps you to develop in so many areas of your life. It helps you with your brain functions, with developing your creative mind and exploring different facets of the world, which leads you in all directions. Just like how on an instrument there are so many songs and pieces just waiting to be written and found. It’s the common language of the world. It is a pretty remarkable thing.
And what does Patti Smith herself feel about the future of her musical family? She says,
I feel very optimistic about our future, collectively and individually. We are all healthy, positive and diligent workers and have a loving and communicative relationship. Professionally, I believe we will continue to evolve. I look forward to recording and performing with both of them. The three of us together really magnify the memory of their father. Jesse and I are planning our own album. So, as Elvis Presley sang, “The future looks bright ahead.”
Note: For information about upcoming releases and events, check Patti Smith’s website. And keep an eye out for Jesse’s new site (jesseparissmith.com), which will go live soon.
Last week’s post about the DC Science Café‘s endeavor to foster meaningful discussion between scientists and non-experts explored the challenges in finding a common language between two populations with differing relationships with the same words and phrases. This week’s post, brought to you by Ned Prutzer, builds off this theme by examining the substantial gains that some writers and researchers have found in trying to inhabit these junctures, and extrapolating what the language that heals the false rift between the sciences and arts might look like.
Ned Prutzer
I met Ned at the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House at the University of Maryland. Ned is now a Communications and Media PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where serves as a Seeing Systems Fellow in a pilot fellowship program supported by the INTERSECT initiative. His research focuses on new media and cultural memory in relation to conceptualizations of knowledge, art and resistance.
When I attended a Q&A session featuring renowned poet Arthur Sze, he asked us, as a writing exercise, to generate a list of five of our favorite words. His next step was to conjure up another five-word list – this time, comprised of words associated with a hobby or skill of ours. Once the lists were finalized, he asked us to write a poem containing all of the words we included.
The beauty of the exercise lies in how it engages divergent thinking. It confronts us with the challenge of finding ties between different images and practices. As writers, we accept this challenge constantly. We cherish the capability to make meaning out of the happenstance, to elevate the power of a simple image into a telling artifact, and to create realities from fragments, worlds out of words. This makes creativity an alluring and mysterious process.
To ruminate on creativity and writing successfully, both scientific and artistic perspectives are helpful. I find myself doing this often in my own writing, whether I borrow from the language of coding to discuss world-making in a broad sense, from the language of network science to decipher our relations with others and our surroundings, or from the language of neuroscience to analyze the cerebral action of writing.
I have been especially ruminating on this stance in re-reading Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. The narrator, whose gender and name are concealed, recounts an affair with a married woman, Louise. Louise is later revealed to have cancer and the narrator leaves her, hoping Louise will return to her husband, a renowned cancer researcher. Following the affair, the narrator enters a reclusive phase studying anatomy to learn about the cancerous body in an unconventional attempt to remain close to Louise. The narrator assumes a clinical language to deconstruct the body and create what s/he describes as a love poem to Louise.
The undertaking critiques the notion that a body can be described solely through the interaction of its components yet incorporates that very mechanical language to create a more accommodating descriptive vocabulary. The narrator deconstructs the human anatomy in order to deconstruct the operations of an abstraction, an ideology – love. Thus, the narrator seizes the poetry of the scientific to achieve a creative mode of representation.
Similarly, two of my favorite books, Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mindand Alice W. Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease, show why fusing the scientific with the poetic is productive and aesthetic. Both are eloquent, autobiographical explorations into creativity through psychological case studies. While the former focuses on bipolar disorder, the latter, among other afflictions, investigates hypergraphia, a disorder compelling the afflicted to write compulsively. In these explorations, Jamison and Flaherty borrow from the language of their clinical expertise to analyze creativity.
In dissecting the creative mind, one learns that creativity is in part a complex neural network. Flaherty traces the interaction of such neural regions as the limbic system (the seat of emotion); the temporal lobe (the seat of processing sensory input); the hippocampus (the seat of memories); and the basal ganglia (the seat of motivation). Several neurotransmitters (notably, norepinephrine, dopamine, and endogenous opiates) also provide a sense of motivation and the creative rush with which we are all familiar.
Creativity scholar Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about this sense of rush, which he refers to as “flow.” As Howard Gardner defines Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow in Creating Minds, “[i]n one sense, those ‘in flow’ . . . feel that they have been fully alive, totally realized, and involved in a ‘peak experience.’ Individuals who regularly engage in creative activities often report that they seek such states” (pp. 25-26).
Here is where we return to the realm of abstraction in detailing the anatomy of creativity. Creativity and flow cannot be defined solely as the product of an intricate configuration of stimulated neural regions. There is an undeniable poetry and spirituality involved that requires a more holistic sense of the individual and the social networks in which he or she is embedded. Creativity, after all, is a networked enterprise, whether one is looking at its neurological underpinnings or the environments and social groups through which an artist’s work is fully realized.
Investigating creativity requires a fusion of perspectives that may seem disparate to some, but such fusions can supply powerful hybrid vocabularies encouraging new insights. However, inhabiting these junctions of deeply developed languages and cultures of thought remains precarious. C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures is infamous for playing into a popular misconception surrounding the humanities and sciences in purporting an inherent and impassable chasm between the two. We can and must respond to this false dichotomy, but it will require our most creative and carefully crafted language. It could even begin as a playful exercise with two lists of words; a poet making a small contribution to demystify creativity through a simple intervention and innovation of language, inviting us to re-imagine the scientific.
More of Ned’s writing about the intersection of technology, cultural values, and social networks (on- and off-line) have been published by gnovis, an online academic journal at Georgetown University, available at http://gnovisjournal.org/author/esp34/.
Just so you know. This is what can happen when you submit your work to LPR:
Dylan Bargteil (Photo: Colleen Napolitano)
Your poem gets published, say in the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue. You get invited to present your poem at the launch reading. The online editor, seated in the audience, is intrigued. She likes your mastery of metaphor. And that you use it to say something. She asks you to write about how you came up with the poem for the blog. And to include an image of yourself, if you don’t mind, that isn’t boring. You comply on both counts, and she posts something that looks like “Concerning Craft: Dylan Bargteil.”
Time passes. The online editor is deep into doubt—the upcoming Winter 2013 Doubt issue, that is. She cites Voltaire, references epistemology. Then she remembers how much damn fun doubt can be, especially when one is young. So she writes about that and adds images. And, recalling that you actually are young, asks you to prepare a post, too. And to include an image of yourself, if you don’t mind, that isn’t boring. You do all that, and she posts something similar to “Delving into Doubt: Worship No Idols.” There, you reveal that you are a musician as well as a poet. But the pertinent fact that you are now pursuing a doctorate in physics—the uncertainty principle and all that—seems to slip your mind.
Time passes, and the sausage-making mechanism that serves as the guts of many a lit mag grinds on at LPR. And exacts the occasional ounce of flesh. Reminding you that the upcoming Summer 2013 Music issue is in the works, the online editor requests tracks of your tunes. You send some. (See “Scene II [Rough Mix]” in the sidebar.) Then vault into the vat on your own, providing lines from physicist Richard Feynman to tout the Winter 2014 Science issue. And start to develop a sense of what we’re about while you’re there. Responding to our editor’s recent post on what sets us apart, you state something like:
At the readings and online, it’s clear that LPR has fostered a literary community that is genuinely interested in developing the role of the arts in society and our own lives. More impressively, the conversations among members of this community truly do span not only geography but also fields of study, socioeconomic background, gender, age and other borderlines along which too many communities become insular.
Now, all that’s required is a twist in the plot. The online editor, a fiction writer in her free time, rises splendidly to the occasion. Being sufficiently experienced to skip the tedious expository stuff that no one reads anyway, she types the simple declarative sentence “I resign.” And omits more–though elements of her thought process can be inferred—to ask you, the poet-musician-physicist submitter-contributor who also happens to have been the editor-in-chief of the University of Maryland literary and arts journalStylus and has since started a delectable beer-brewing and pizza-making blog, to serve as her successor.
Now, all she needs is an answer. Instead, you elect to quiz her. She replies, Jeopardy! style, with a question as well, albeit a rhetorical one. “So what?” she asks and asserts that unfamiliarity with the LPR community might matter less than you imagine. That when she started this site, many in that community looked a lot like her. That she wanted to make it look more like America and, in some respects, succeeded. That you, as a young man, can address an untapped audience. And, moreover, do the same as a musician, a physicist, a beer-brewer, a pizza-maker (and more). That there are untold opportunities to explore what “LPR community” can eventually come to mean. You respond by stating:
I’ve decided to accept the position. It sounds like an exciting experiment! I share your concerns and aspirations and look forward to being in a position to tackle them.
LPR applauds your decision. And the online editor is delighted to pass the baton to you right after the launch. Now, let’s get back to that other “you,” the one left wondering in the wings. Both present and future online editors suggest that YOU buy (and read) our Music issue, study the guidelines in preparation for the August 1 opening of our Science issue submission period, do the work required to dazzle LPR with your style and savvy and stick around to see what happens. Here’s some music to get you in the mood:
Dylan Bargteil is a PhD student in the NYU Physics Department. He studied poetry with the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House at the University of Maryland, where he also served as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Stylus. His poetry has been published in Little Patuxent Review and Poetry Quarterly and has received the Jiménez-Porter Literary Prize. He is also a recording musician, is currently working on multi-media and anonymous public art projects and will soon start serving as the LPR online editor.
