Louise Glück, 1943 - 2023

Louise Glück's death was reported in the New York Times today.  I am one for coincidences, I marvel at them.  Here's one: just last evening I finished reading her last book of poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective, a very thin volume of 15 poems in 43 pages.  It's a classically tough read (I don't know where her reviewers get the idea that her work is accessible - maybe they spend a lot of time reading truly opaque verse), and I was happy not to have to slog through more of it than was there.  

Anyway, good-bye to our generation's Nobel Laureate.

A Note on Form and the Transgression of It (3.29.23)

Here Is the Thing

mundi carmen

Here is the thing about the rhymed couplet:

You make a line of verse and then you double it,

And suddenly your world of Costco, cable and assault gun, 

The ball of shit you inhabit, Babel relation 

That rolls one ugly day into another

Relaxes, if only for a minute, into a zephyr

Of inconsequence: your broken world, if only

For a minute or two, isn’t broken and lonely.

Introduce as well syllabification,

Meter, stress, and end-of-the-line ligation

That favors rhyme and you can hardly claim

Disaffection from too much chaos or pain.

The case of couples, two by two, is why.

Equation, Orderliness, Law is why.

As for your constantly subconscious churn of mind—

Muddle, mess, morass, the daily grind—

Here is the thing that the double-hemmed hand-cuff

Of the couplet saves you from: you, yourself.

And today I wrote something again . . . (3.18.23)

Here's a tip for new writers, or any writer struggling with a poem: recast.

Let's say you are trying to write a poem, have developed a complete draft of it that has shape and movement, form and development, but it doesn't satisfy. The poem sounds forced, insincere, derivative (even of your own way of thinking and feeling!), unbelievable. And you don't believe it.

This is where I left off with the draft of a poem described in the previous post (3.17.23) in this blog. That draft was written as a villanelle and adhered pretty much to the form's requirements (in English) of 5-foot lines of largely iambic pentameter and an a-b-a rhyme scheme with repeating first and third lines.

I realized that I was committing the same error that I used to lecture my W@1 cohorts about, regarding rhyme: I was writing to complete the rhyme, not the sense; I was sacrificing the art to the figure. This affected content development in turn, effectively blocking me from any fresh thinking about where to take the next line: I worked to get to the line-end rhyme, no matter what the line actually said in relation to the lines before or after.

This predicament occurs often when I am trying to develop content through some device or other: a rhyme scheme, a stanzaic progression, a metrical footprint. I force myself into a framework that works against thought and feeling.

When you're caught in this kind of bind, all the drafting and redrafting in the world won't do a thing to break you and your poem free. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that if you continue writing the same formula that produces a weak poem, you will only arrive at that weakness. The same track leads to the same destination again and again.

How to break free of this? Get off the old track. Take a new track. Get off track altogether and go off-road for a while. It always works!

So over the past 24 hours, I dispensed with the idea of writing a villanelle. I jammed all the lines of the draft together into a block of undifferentiated "prose" without end-stopped lines with rhymes and without the affectation of meter or syllable count. I dispensed with "form," for a draft or two, anyway.

The result? I now have a new draft that has "form," but a more organic form than before: two stanzas of equal length whose lines are roughly the same syllabically and rhythmically for the most part, though with occasional short lines and two somewhat longer lines. I italicize to emphasize that this draft avoids strictness in the sense of a traditional form. It assembles more organically, according to the rhythms, pitches, images, and ideas unfolding as the draft builds. It's possible, maybe even preferable, that a further draft will de-emphasize even the two equal stanzas or the roughly equal line lengths. Or this may not be necessary.

I found that by dropping the formal requirements, I was able to generate new information in the poem, and especially to develop a closing line that doesn't feel forced or "arrived at," even though it is. It's just that the content and voice now dictate where the poem begins (same as before), flows, turns and ends, not the strictures of the villanelle form.

So, for you writers who are stuck drafting a poem, are you doggedly trying to stick to some format (a rhyme scheme, a stanzaic structure, a line length, a metrical footprint, a repetitive pattern), hoping that that will deliver you to the art you want to create? Are you finding that the same ideas, thoughts and feelings that haven't been cohering for you keep coming up as you re-draft? STOP following the form! Drop the technical braces (or step off the technical path) and walk free. You may stumble or teeter or even fall flat. You may become lost for a spell. But you might also find the voice and the idea(s) and the art that your insight, eye or ear (or all these) has been looking for.

Instead of redrafting, revise - revision meaning exactly what it says: seeing things differently.

I wrote something yesterday (3.17.23)

Recently, I stepped away from Wednesdays@One, leaving it in good hands and with a full complement of writers who still attend weekly to work on projects and to share poems and readings.  It took me a long time, two years, to decide to move on, and now that I have, I am feeling either an obligation to read and write more poetry and poetry criticism/history/theory, or renewed energy for doing these things, because I've written almost every day over the past month, either here, in my journal, or in my word processor.  

Several new poems have been born as a result, a couple of which I think are good to very good, and several continue to form in my mind and on my laptop, where I tinker and toy, try and tease out new lines, phrases, breaths, images, figures. Two I am having particular trouble advancing, for two related but probably different reasons. I'll discuss only one of them here, and very superficially at that.

It's a villanelle and it's tormenting me.  I began it yesterday and, in a single sitting, drafted a complete version: five stanzas of a-b-a rhyme with a closing quatrain of a-b-a-a.  As I often do with this form, I struggled for an hour to compose the first and third lines, that is, the alternating refrains, these being the engine that powers the poem. The opening line I had created early in the day during a long walk, which I had finished more or less by the time I returned home. The third, a-rhyme, line was partly conceived by then as well and needed only a half hour's work to fit together. The middle line of the tercet, the b-rhyme line, took a little more time and, as it often does, created an obstacle because of its quirky rhyme requirement: fertile.

I say obstacle, but only because in choosing it I declined any easier close or masculine rhyme. At the same time, the word "fertile" opened up possibilities for near, slant, off and rhythmic rhymes, which turned out so far to be:

fertile

riddle

fiddle

apple

fickle

paddle

Which is all to say, the whole thing has turned into an exercise in formalities. Yes, the poem has a theme (God's contribution to Original Sin), and yes, the argument is developed logically beginning to end. But that's just the problem with the poem, it's very Audenesque, so to speak. It strives for cogency overlaid with irony and a bit of tongue-in-cheek. It wants to be read seriously but it doesn't want to appear Poetic and Sober. It's a poor hash of modernist trope upon modernist trope.

So now I may be back to the real effort of writing, to cast a cold, critical eye on what I write . . . and to push on with the drafting, hoping that eventually I'll find a way to drop the posturing and write a real poem.

I say this poem is tormenting me. That's an exaggeration. I am not tormented by poems; annoyed sometimes, dissatisfied, but not tormented. And in this case, the best word for it is probably unbelieving. I haven't yet brought the poem to a state where I can believe in what I am doing, that what I am doing is of much value as craft or art or feeling. I don't know that I'll be able to get it there.

New Scholarship on the Life of Phillis Wheatley and Her Poetry (3.7.23)

This book review appeared in today's New York Times. I think we are witnessing a renaissance in Phillis Wheatley's poetry, including this biography by David Waldstreicher, a 2011 biography by Vincent Carretta, The Age of Phillis, by Honorée Fanone Jeffers and published in 2020, plus this essay linking Fanone Jeffers' work to a concept called "critical fabulation."  Not to forget the critical essay and close analysis of her poem, "To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works," in Edward Hirsch's new book, The Heart of American Poetry. *

Which is all to say, it's past time that those of us who were introduced to Phillis Wheatley's poems ("On Being Brought from Africa to America") in our sophomore American Lit survey courses (Norton, vol. 1) as somebody to pass over on our way from Anne Bradstreet to Ralph Waldo Emerson to get reading and (re)assessing. 

* Accorded a place of high estimation: the second of 40 poets/songwriters presented in the book whom Hirsch considers formative in the history of American poetry.

I read something today . . . (3.6.23)

I'm reading Edward Hirsch's new book, The Heart of American Poetry, which is his take on formative American poets from Anne Bradstreet to Joy Harjo.  He describes language as a "structured system of communication, the poet's toolbox." And immediately I am thinking, poet's toolbox? That doesn't sound quite right.

Is language a tool, our tool, we writers of poems?

I've mused with my W@1 cohort that language is more like the stuff of poetry.  It is the material which we work into art, just as stone is the sculptor's material and sound is the composer's.

You can argue, I suppose, that experience is the poet's material. After all, we do say of a writer's work, "Her material is the family she grew up in"; or "He shapes his material (i.e., his experience at Normandy in 1944) into an epic story of struggle and heroism."

But language is the poet's material because poetry is language that calls attention to itself as material; poetry foregrounds the materiality of language, its organic characteristics, its physicality. 

Poets don't write grammar. Grammar - systems of linguistic structure - is the tool that poets use when working with their material.

If you made a sliding scale of these things, from the most abstract to the least, it might look like this:

Grammar ---- Experience ---- Language ---- Words ---- Sound

The farther along the scale you go, the more you enter the world most conducive to poetry, where words and sounds leave meaning behind to foreground their physical being . . . and the more deeply they penetrate the ear, and the more intimate your relationship with them becomes.

More thinking about descriptive poetry (2.28.23)

I've been reading two books of poetry criticism and theory that converge on the subject of descriptive poetry, or description in a poem, its role, effect, affect and poetic function.

One is Edward Hirsch's new book of essays and criticism, The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022), which traces the history of poetry in this country from Anne Bradstreet to Joy Harjo. The other is a much older book, Poetry and Mysticism, by Colin Wilson and published in 1969 by City Lights Press.

I am reading at the moment Hirsch's piece on a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room." He says of her poetry, "Bishop observes everything with such minute and patient attention - objects, creatures, landscapes - that it all starts to seem more foreign and improbable." You might ask, why would any poet want to render the observable, presumably the daily observable, foreign and improbable? Isn't the poet's job to hold a mirror up to nature and to describe what she sees faithfully, that is, to capture its "reality," what it really looks like? And the answer to your question might lie in another question: What reality do you have in mind - that of the very first time you encountered a thing, or that of the thousandth time you've seen a thing, the thing you're "used to"?

I've written somewhere else in this blogspot how one day my father and I were driving somewhere along an interstate highway through a downpour. The car in front of us was ploughing through water standing on the pavement, nearly hydro-planing, and throwing out spectacular fantails of spray. "Now that's beautiful," he declared. "Why don't you write a about that?" He meant describe it. I bit my tongue, partly because I was not about to let a man with only a high school education (I was in a graduate writing program at the time) suggest subjects, themes, styles or technique to me. But also partly because I knew, inchoately, that a poet would write about his own experience seeing such a phenomenon, that his poem would be about his relationship to a thing of this world, as viewer. A good poet would not try to report what was already there. What would be the point, after all? 

Wilson's book offers up a rationale for not being the reporter. His term for this mechanical "seeing" is "the robot": a state of mental efficiency that enables you to drive your car without thinking about the incredible number of functions, operations, and decisions that occur nearly simultaneously as you go along. The same robotic state of mind also enables a native English speaker to think in French, perhaps even to dream in that other language. Let me quote him:

When a human being learns anything difficult - to talk, to write, to calculate, to drive a car, to type, to speak a foreign language - he has to begin by concentrating on the details of what he wishes to learn. Even when he has learned a basic French vocabulary, he finds it difficult to read French, because he is still thinking in English, and he has to translate each word into English. But gradually, the 'remembering' process is passed on to a deeper level of his being [the sub-conscious], a kind of robot in his subconscious mind, and the robot can read French without having to translate it back into English. It is in every way more efficient than his conscious memory.

Wilson goes on to relate the story of the centipede who, when attempting to explain how it can manage all its hundred legs into forward motion, gets all twisted around itself and stumbles. We've all experienced this, including us writers of poetry, whenever we try to "explain" how we do what we do.

What does this have to do with the purpose of description in a poem, or with a "descriptive poem"? A passage from Wilson again takes us in a useful direction:

This is the great disadvantage of the robot: that it not only drives your car or talks French, but also takes the excitement out of skiing or listening to a symphony. The robot has taken over too many of our functions.

Like witnessing the very strange and foreign beauty of a raindrop fantail along a super-highway. Simply seeing it "as it is" is the functioning of the robot which sees and asserts that's beautiful. Which for the poet ought to lead to two important questions: what is that, and, what is beauty. Or, what am I actually seeing (as opposed to interpreting from my subconscious)?

Which brings me back to Elizabeth Bishop. She was known for taking the most mundane or uncomplicated of subjects - a blossom, a dentist's waiting room - and reclaiming them from our robot minds, our subconscious reception/processing of them, returning them to conscious objects, literally, objectifying them. And this act makes the mundane seem foreign, even improbable, the way they seemed the very first time we saw or heard or tasted or felt them, before we "got used" to them.

Bishop does this through what Hirsch calls "minute and patient" description.  So does William Carlos Williams in poems like "Spring and All," which Hirsch also critiques in his book; as does Theodore Roethke in his two-part poem, "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)."

As we writers of poetry should try to do as well. Rather than try to describe a thing as it appears to our robot - in outline form, with its minutӕ obscured, glossed over, blurred out - let us look more minutely and with greater patience. Why? Why should poetry do this rather than the other? One of the important functions of poetry, particularly in our homogenized, commodified and pre-packaged age, is to return us to our conscious selves, those selves that say to the world, "What is THAT," and that forces us to slow our pace, to feel and think what we are doing here or anywhere.