The habits of poetry: practical observation (1.23.19)

Let’s get back to some of the basics of writing poetry, which I will call the habits of poetry.  There are many[1]—habits of observation, habits of practice, habits of envisioning, habits of revising, habits of interpreting or seeking meaning, habits of reading, habits of speaking, habits of responding to inspiration and poetic ideas—some of which are more basic than others.  The more basic the habit, the less it has specifically to do with the writing of poetry, but the more important it may be to writing accomplished poetry.

Habit: Practical observation

One of the most fundamental writing habits for poets is to observe minutely.  Remember Wordsworth’s famous dictum about emotion recollected in tranquility?  Your body is a sensing machine bombarded throughout its waking hours.  This constant bombardment has implications for your emotional and mental life, which can be amplified if you’re a writer of poetry.  Consciously observing elements of that bombardment, separating them out, so to speak, can be a form of recollection in tranquility.

What is “practical observation,” what does it look like, and how does it work?  Some perspectives . . .  

1. The practice of observation means putting yourself physically in position to observe.  This means, in turn, disconnecting from other activities, like texting, checking your calendar, listening to cable TV (and even to your favorite music!), reading headlines, thinking about what’s for dinner, running errands, drinking coffee, reading, removing the lint from a lapel.  WORRY.  The practice of observation begins with the art (and maybe science?) of just sitting still.  So go somewhere and sit.  It can be a busy-noisy place or a quiet spot.  It can be in your house, at your desk, or in a coffee shop or even a street corner.  This “action” doesn’t have to last all day, or even an hour.  Just a few minutes each day will do, so long as they are an honest few minutes.
2. The practice of observation looks from the outside like you’re meditating or in a reverie.  You’re sitting still and your eyes may have that far-away gaze (not glaze, mind you, but the look that says you’ve tuned out the daily).  But you are by yourself and “in conversation” with the environment, not tuned into the conversation going on next to you other than to hear that one is underway as part of the totality of sound and gesture of the environment you’ve placed yourself in.  
3. Beyond just sitting still, the practice of observation is actual, and quite active.  It is focused.  You pay attention to the ambient sound of the room, trying to separate out each component (ticking of a clock, your own breathing, a distant siren, your pen on paper, etc.); you listen for the sounds beneath the sounds you’re hearing.  Or you pay attention to the smells of your immediate environment, good, bad or indifferent; you note fragrances, yes, but you mainly want to note all smells, even the neutral ones.  Or you pay attention to what you see: motion, color, volume, shape, near/far, and the relationships between or among these things.  Or you pay attention to tastes: what’s on your tongue, your lip (could be food, could be balm, could be something foreign, like the eraser of the pencil you’re chewing on).  Or to feel: air pressure in your ear or on your skin; subtle changes in temperature from moment to moment, body part to body part; the feel of the clothes you’re wearing; the pen you may be holding; or the weight of one hand in the other.

Simple in theory and a breeze to describe.  Hard to do.  But with practice, you’ll get better at it, you’ll feel more attentive, more open to the sense data all around you.  You’ll become a field recorder, literally.

Why do this?  What’s in it for you as a writer of poetry?  Paying attention.  If the writing of poetry is a form of that, then actively paying attention to your physical environment is good practice!  Also, by simply sitting still for a few minutes every day, you may begin to establish new “spaces” for yourself where creativity can enter.

Should you write while doing this?  Not necessarily, and probably not first thing.  Leave your notebook closed and your pen on the table.  Don’t do something, just sit there.  This will be strange at first, then weird, then annoying, then boring.  You’ll find your mind wants to wander off to stray thoughts, stuff you need to do, a conversation you had with somebody, the government shutdown, the two people near you talking about their aches and pains.  When you feel this happening, that’s okay.  Try smiling at your mind in a kindly way.  Then focus on a single sense input (not the music playing over the PA system, but something farther away, the sort of stuff that goes on all the time but that we tend to tune out): perhaps how your hand feels when you lay it on the table or desk top—trying feeling each fingertip separately.  

The clock in my library, on top of a wooden book cabinet, resonates through the wood: tick-tock, tick-tock.  It produces this little music all the time, though I don’t always hear it.  Except when I want to focus.  Then I listen for it and it alone.  It rarely intrudes.  I have to invite it.  Maybe it’s a muse.  It’s certainly a musing.

Eventually, you may want to start noting down what goes on around you.  If you do, do so in as unembellished a way as possible.  Just jot down in list form what your senses are delivering to your conscious mind.

Try this exercise for a few minutes every day.

Next week we’ll discuss the process.  If you want to bring a poem in—especially if the practice has led you to a new poem or a revision of an older one—do so, and we’ll share.  Have a good week!

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[1] It should be obvious that there are bad as well as good habits.  Our goal should be to minimize the former, maximize the latter.

Adelaide Literary Magazine just published five prose poems

Adelaide just came out with its January issue, with five poems from my manuscript of prose poems, "The Weather in Bluffton, Ind."  Here's the link Adelaide Literary Magazine.  Awfully glad to share space in this issue with Tim Suermondt, Mary Shanley, Dane Myers, and others.

Adelaide is co-edited from New York and Lisbon, Portugal.

Correction: in the author bio, the credit for American Poetry Journal should read The American Journal of Poetry.  

The American Journal of Poetry published "Change of Fortune" this month

Thanks to the editors at http://www.theamericanjournalofpoetry.com/v6-holtzman.html for publishing my prose poem, "Change of Fortune," earlier this month.  I am especially honored to share an issue with such poets as Walter Bargen, Norman Dubie, Stephen Dunn, Annie Finch, Gary Fincke, William Logan and Bruce Weigl.

If you haven't checked out this online journal, do so.  It's eclectic, generous with space, and well-designed.  Its editors clearly work incredibly hard to put out a substantial amount of good work each month.

What only the poets can imagine (1.12.19)

This poem appeared in Epistle to a Godson, a late-life book of poems by W.H. Auden.  The speaker asks an enticing question toward the end, “What can Leo have actually said?”, and then challenges poets (i.e., you and me) to imagine it.

I thought it might make a worthwhile project.  Please answer the question, in a poem, for Wednesday.

An Encounter

                                ─W.H. Auden

The Year: 452. The Place: the southern

bank of the River Po. The forelook: curtains

on further hopes of a Western and Christian

    civilization. 

For Attila and his Hun Horde, slant-eyed, sallow,

the creatures of an animist horse-culture,

dieted on raw meat and goat-cheese, nocent to

    cities and letters,

were tented there, having routed the imperial

armies and preyed the luscious North, which now lay

frauded of mobile goods, old sedentary 

    structures distorted.

Rome was ghastly. What earthly reason was there

why She should now not be theirs for the taking?

The Pope alone kept his cool, to the enemy

    now came in person,

sequenced by psalm-singing brethren: astonished,

Attila stared at a manner of men so

unlike his. “Your name?”, he snapped at their leader.

    “Leo,” he answered, raising

his right hand, the forefinger pointed upwards

the little finger pressed to the thumb, in the

Roman salute: “I ask the King to receive me

    in private audience.”

Their parley was held out of earshot: we only 

know it was brief, that suddenly Attila

wheeled his horse and galloped back to the encampment,

    yelling out orders.

Next morning the site was vacant, they had vanished,

never to vex us again. What can Leo have

actually said? He never told, and the poets

    can only imagine

speeches for those who share a common cosmos:

all we can say is that he rose to the occasion,

that for once, and by His own standards, the Prince

    of this world showed weakness.

Light verse - it's about the commitment, not the laughs (1.9.19)

Hello all.  To whoever suggested light verse for next week . . . thank you!

I’ve purposely steered away from this topic for some time now because, well, I don’t really have a good reason.  I have a few bad reasons: light verse is not serious poetry; light verse is facile; anybody can write light verse, it’s done for greeting cards and Instagram all the time.  None of these is a good reason because none is exactly true.  I’ll take the fallacies in order.

Fallacy: light verse is not serious poetry

This is the most serious of the bad reasons, so to speak.  It signals what some might think of as poetic snobbery, or high-brow-ism.[1]  Much light verse isn’t serious, whatever “serious” is in poetry, this is true, and we can all point to verse that doesn’t set out to accomplish much poetically, doesn’t challenge the reader, doesn’t stretch the poet, doesn’t seek to offend, dwells in the trivial, doesn’t “take itself too seriously” as poetry.[2]  However, just in the way that play can be serious (and work can be a form of play), light verse can be a serious undertaking.  But since we often think of seriousness in poetry as an instance of gravitas, let me quote W.H. Auden at length about what constitutes light verse:

Light verse can be serious.  It has only come to mean vers de société, triolets, smoke-room limericks, because . . . it has been only in trivial matters that poets have felt in sufficient intimacy with their audience to be able to forget themselves and their singing-robes.[3]

That is, Auden goes on to say,

“Lightness is a great virtue, but light verse tends to be conventional, to accept the attitudes of the society in which it is written.  The more homogenous a society, the closer the artist is to the everyday life of his time, the easier it is for him to communicate what he perceives . . .”

There are several points of view on display in this statement that you should think about.  The first is that light verse “tends to be conventional.”  The second is that light verse is conventional because it arises from the society in which it is written—it assumes the same things about poetry, poetry’s purpose and value, even what a poem is and what it can be about.  It values accessibility over “difficulty.” 

Another point of view in Auden’s statement that is worth noting is that light verse generally can be written only from within a society that is more or less homogenized—that is, of the same or similar views of what poetry is, can be about, etc.  He argues that most poetry before the Elizabethans and the Renaissance was/is “light” for this very reason—art and the artist depended on being accessible to the society that supported it.[4]  He reminds that “light verse” became the verse of the day again during the English Restoration,” and cites Pope’s The Rape of the Lock as a leading example.  No one, I don’t think, would also describe Pope’s poem as “non-serious.”  Before the Renaissance, other examples of famous “light verse” might be Edmund Spenser’s “The Shepheard’s Calendar” and The Fairie Queen, the latter of which one scholar once described in a lecture I attended as an instruction book for young gentlemen on how to behave at court.  Both are “light” in that they reflect the mores, assumptions, opinions, and expectations of the times in which they were written.  If you’ve ever tried to read either one of these great poems, you’d have a hard time describing them as “non-serious.”[5]

Fallacy: light verse is facile; anybody can write light verse; it's Instagramish

Light verse is not facile.  Facile verse is facile.  And not just anybody can write light verse.  Writing light verse that is Auden’s kind requires certain expertise, beginning with the sensitivity to, and recognizing the sensibility of, the “song of your time,” with your ability to recognize and make something artful out of the common words, expressions, worldview, beliefs of the culture and the society in which you live.  It is accepting that milieu as your métier!  Auden’s kind of light verse also presupposes a vast knowledge of the history of verse, light and otherwise.

But it’s written more or less consciously.  For by doing so consciously, you commit to the world in which you write and you commit to making the poem (or finding in the poem, or letting the poem find in its own way) the particulars of that social common understanding.  You can poke fun, as Pope did 400 years ago, and as Billy Collins does today; but your commitment to the poem is still quite serious.

And that is where you should focus your writing for next week’s project—a serious commitment to lightness.  Be your own bell weather.  If you sense the piece you’re working on is slipping into the needlessly comic or nonsensical; if you find your internal editor working a bit too hard to justify a word choice or image or metaphor that’s really not up to the demands of the poem; if you wear the hat of a “disinterested” (that is, in your evident skills and broad erudition) reader and sense . . . er . . . bullshit; revise.  Your objective is to make a poem that “speaks to our time” without flippancy, without being facile (easy, predictable rhymes, clichéd metaphors), and conversely, without melodrama or other forms of false emotion and gravitas. 

You are a citizen of the 21^st Century; you are of a certain race or religion; you have been educated to a certain degree in a particular pedagogy and learning philosophy; you define the world in a fairly “reasonable” (that is, unsurprising or un-revolutionary) way.  Your poem will in some ways be about you and the world you live in (that made it possible to imagine in the first place).

Here are some examples.  Have fun!

Boston

I come from the city of Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where Cabots speak only to Lowells,

And Lowells speak only to God.

—Samuel C. Bushnell

John Stuart Mill,

By a mighty effort of will,

Overcame his natural bonhomie

And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy’.

—Edmund Clerihew Bentley

John Milton

Never stayed at a Hilton

Hotel,

Which is just as well.

—W.H. Auden

Don’ts

Don’t earn golden opinions, opinions golden,

or at least worth Treasury notes,

from all sorts of men; don’t be beholden

to the herd inside the pen.

Don’t long to have dear little, dear little boys

whom you’ll have to educate

to earn their living; nor yet girls, sweet joys

who will find it so hard to mate.

Nor a dear little home, with its cost, its cost

that you have to pay,

earning your living while your life is lost

and dull death comes in a day.

Don’t be sucked in by the su-superior,

don’t swallow the culture bait,

don’t drink, don’t drink and get beerier and beerier,

do learn to discriminate.

Do hold yourself together, and fight

with a hit-hit here and a hit-hit there,

and a comfortable feeling at night

that you’ve let in a little air.

A little fresh air in the money sty,

knocked a little hole in the holy prison,

done your own little bit, made your own little try

that the risen Christ should be risen.

—D.H. Lawrence

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man,

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

—Philip Larkin

The Roses

One day in summer

when everything

has already been more than enough

the wild beds start

exploding open along the berm

of the sea; day after day

you sit near them; day after day

the honey keeps on coming

in the red cups and the bees

like amber drops roll

in the petals: there is no end,

believe me! to the inventions of summer,

to the happiness your body

is willing to hear.

—Mary Oliver

My Valparaiso

Or, The Fish

—for Carlos, Camila, Claudia & Ryan at the Neruda house, Valparaiso, Chile

This Pacific could not be bluer

if we waved a wand, or

this snail’s shell more green

or more certain of its greenness.

This stair could not labor so sensibly

up the hill of the poet’s dream

or these windows carry us

farther to paradise.

A minute here passes

like the cargo ships on the bay,

eternally, at ease, like the cat

licking itself in strong sunlight

on the funky garden bench.

I am caught by it, a fish in time,

surprised by the hook, the sharp,

startling wound of happiness.

—Me

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[1] Am I a poetry high-brow? Who knows? I prefer high-brow film, high-brow novels, high-brow art.  In jazz music, I prefer composition over improvisation and improvisation over jamming and jamming over just goofing around with notes and rhythms—instrumentalists should play from a script (score), so that, if they depart from it, they have something to return to.  This leads to the question, What is high-brow, anyway?

[2] This last example, verse that apologizes for itself, is the worst kind of light verse.  Worst because it shows a lack of confidence or commitment or need on the part of the writer; it still wants to be read. 

[3] W.H. Auden’s Book of Light Verse.  Chosen by W.H. Auden originally as The Oxford Book of Light Verse, 1938; revised with preface by Edward Mendelson.  New York: New York Review Books, 2004.

[4] Cf., the Broadway musical.

[5] Laughable bucket list item: reading the entire Fairie Queen; I was subjected only to its 550 page version in college.

Pantoum (1.2.19)

Greetings all!  Let’s begin the new year with a pantoum. 

A bartender told me the other day that he’s been reading the poems of Victor Hugo (as well as Swann’s Way!).[1]  Then, this morning, as I thought about what we might explore next at W@1, I came across a reference to Victor Hugo, who introduced the pantoum to Europe in his book of poems, Les Orientals (1829). 

I am a “believer” in coincidence, or “correspondence,” which I try to capture in my journals whenever it occurs.  Correspondences are basically two things experienced at random, though within a short period of time, and which are related in some small way.  So stumbling across references to Victor Hugo over the space of a couple of days, one of which involves this reference to pantoums, et voilá, our first project of 2019!

The pantoum is a verse form written in quatrains that proceed somewhat as the lines of a villanelle.  It derives from a Malay song form, according to The Academy of American Poets.  That is, lines repeat in an orderly fashion.  A pantoum is not necessarily rhymed (though, it certainly could be!), which for we writers in English must be a kind of blessing.  Here is how a pantoum works:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . today

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . always 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . more 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . November

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . always

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . palace

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . November

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . rained

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . palace

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . waterfall

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . rained

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . horizon

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . waterfall

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . time

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . horizon

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . joy

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . time

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lasting

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . joy

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . slight

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lasting

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . more

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . slight

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . today

A pantoum can be as long as you want it to be (that is, as long as the poem you are writing wants it to be), but anything short of three quatrains will not fulfill the form.  Lines can be of any length, meter, or rhyme scheme, including none at all. 

Pantoums, like other forms with repeating lines, often have an incantatory quality, a lilt that lifts you out of the daily and into the eternal.[2]  How does it do this?  A hint comes from a comment on the form by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, in their book, The Making of a Poem, and quoted in the Academy of American Poets’ www.poets.org pages: “the reader takes four steps forward, then two back . . . a perfect form for the evocation of a past time.”

Of course, no form is without its variations.  The one below, by John Ashbery, is known as an “imperfect pantoum.”  This simply means that the final quatrain varies from the rules of the traditional pantoum.  As you can see in Ashbery’s poem, the first and third lines of the poem—“Eyes shining without mystery” and “Through the vague snow of many clay pipes”—do not conform.  They are used in the final quatrain, but in the same order as they appear in the opening quatrain.  In a true pantoum, this order would be reversed.

Pantoum

Eyes shining without mystery,
Footprints eager for the past
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes,
And what is in store?

Footprints eager for the past
The usual obtuse blanket.
And what is in store
For those dearest to the king?

The usual obtuse blanket.
Of legless regrets and amplifications
For those dearest to the king.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

The usual obtuse blanket.
Of legless regrets and amplifications
For those dearest to the king.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

The usual obtuse blanket.
Of legless regrets and amplifications
For those dearest to the king.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

Of legless regrets and amplifications,
That is why a watchdog is shy.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,
These days are short, brittle; there is only one night.

That is why a watchdog is shy,
Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.
These days are short, brittle; there is only one night
And that soon gotten over.

Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying
Some blunt pretense to safety we have
And that soon gotten over
For they must have motion.

Some blunt pretense to safety we have
Eyes shining without mystery,
For they must have motion
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes.

Here’s a shorter pantoum (also imperfect), by the poet A. E. Stallings . . .

Another Lullaby for Insomniacs

Sleep, she will not linger:

She turns her moon-cold shoulder.

With no ring on her finger,

You cannot hope to hold her.

She turns her moon-cold shoulder

And tosses off the cover.

You cannot hope to hold her:

She has another lover.

She tosses off the cover

And lays the darkness bare.

She has another lover.

Her heart is otherwhere.

She lays the darkness bare.

You slowly realize

Her heart is otherwhere.

There's distance in her eyes.

You slowly realize

That she will never linger,

With distance in her eyes

And no ring on her finger.

And in case you’re thinking that pantoums are the poet’s turf alone, try the lyric below, from Neil Peart, drummer for the progressive rock band Rush.  As a song lyric, of course, it has to rhyme, and the closing quatrain is again “imperfect.”

The Larger Bowl

If we're so much the same like I always hear
Why such different fortunes and fates?
Some of us live in a cloud of fear
Some live behind iron gates

Why such different fortunes and fates?
Some are blessed and some are cursed
Some live behind iron gates
While others only see the worst

Some are blessed and some are cursed
The golden one or scarred from birth
While others only see the worst
Such a lot of pain on the earth

The golden one or scarred from birth
Somethings can never be changed
Such a lot of pain on this earth
It's somehow so badly arranged

Somethings can never be changed
Some reasons will never come clear
It's somehow so badly arranged
If we're so much the same like I always hear

Some are blessed and some are cursed
The golden one or scarred from birth
While others only see the worst
Such a lot of pain on the earth

I am quite sure that you can write something in the pantoum form.  You can try the true form, the imperfect form, or even a kind of modernist handling of the form, which might mean simply a gesture of repetition (e.g., using one key word from a preceding line in a follow-up line at the appropriate position), or using synonyms for some of the words of one line in the appropriate succeeding line.  Have fun!

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[1] The same fellow has also read Finnegan’s Wake, all of Shakespeare’s plays, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

[2] For better or worse.  Let’s think about writing incantation-like poems for a future project.

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