Monday, August 19, 2019

How to critique a poem II (8.19.19)


In March, we talked at some length in Wednesdays@One about how to critique a poem, someone else's or your own.  Since that is part of what we try do week in, week out at W@1, everybody thought it would be a good idea to have that discussion.  I wrote a kind of short primer for the subject (posted here on 3.5.19) that I'd like to expand on now.

Something I've noticed at W@1 over time is that we tend to respond to a colleague's poem by trying to re-write it for the author.  (I have been as guilty of this as the next W@1-er.)  We suggest a different topic or a different take on a topic.  We point out certain aspects of punctuation that we'd change, or line length, choice of words, syntax, usage, grammar, rhyme or lack thereof, meter and rhythm, stanza format, tone, point of view . . . you get the idea.  Everybody responds somewhat differently to any given poem and, with the best of intentions, advises the poet how to rewrite it.  Sometimes, we even debate among ourselves how best to rewrite somebody's poem while that somebody sits on the sidelines and watches!  (I know I have been guilty of that.)

To a certain extent, this kind of critique can be helpful, especially if it's delivered at the right time.  It's the standard approach for most writing workshops I've experienced.  The poem is read aloud, there is a moment or two of silence as the hearers gather their thoughts, and then bam!  The threads are pulled until the whole poem unravels in a kind of shoulda-coulda-woulda critique.  I can't think of them at the moment, but I've read some pretty good poems by some pretty well-thought of poets about this very subject--enduring a workshop shark attack.

So long as the writer of the poem in question maintains a kind of esprit de corps with the critiquing group, and a thick skin, he or she can use what's useful in this kind of critique and ignore what's not useful.  But it's not always easy to separate the useful from the not useful when you're deep in a thicket of suggestions for rewriting what you've already spent a good many hours thinking about and revising.

Which is what leads me back to this subject.  How can W@1, as a group and a cohort, avoid the steady drumbeat of the pile-on, the "nice-effort-but-this-is-how-you-should-write-the-poem" comment?  First off, I'm not sure I want to suggest that we abandon even the picayune criticism, for nitpicking can help a writer see his or her poem through other eyes in ways that can sometimes be helpful--sometimes.  And every reader at W@1 (or in any workshop or salon) should feel not just free, but obligated to share his or her point of view in this respect.  Writers need the feedback whether they acknowledge this or not.

What I want to propose is a small change in how we critique each other's work.  I want to propose that we hold off telling a writer how to rewrite his or her poem to suit us personally; in fact, hold off telling the writer what we think the poem means or how we experience it or why it doesn't work as written (or, for that matter, why we think it DOES work as written).  Hold off, that is, long enough to ask the writer about the poem, how the writer conceived it, what obstacles or other difficulties the writer experienced trying to compose the piece, when and how the writer felt the poem begin to gel, why a certain image or word order or adjective or verb or other part of speech was chosen.  Indeed, hold off long enough to hear the writer tell why the poem was written in the first place!

What I am proposing is that we start by interviewing the writer of the poem we've just heard, so we can dig below its surface (the draft brought to W@1) for the writerly soil in which it came to be.  To that end, here are some questions that might help us all move in that direction in our next sessions.

  • Ask about the experience of writing the poem.  Did it unfold in one sitting?  Is this version a second, third or later draft?  Did a line or phrase come first, or a rhythm, or an image, an idea? Was it easy to write, was the writing stop-and-go?
  • Ask about the writer's understanding of the poem.  Did your "intent" change as the drafting progressed?  That is, did the creative process become a discovery process, too?  (Another way to ask this question: Did the poem turn out the way you expected?)
  • Ask how the writer feels about the poem now.  Now that you've read it aloud, and then heard it read back to you, are there any aspects of the poem that sound especially "right" to you?  Any that sound like they might need more work?
  • Ask about the origin of the poem.  Aside from the project in question, why did this poem (or subject) occur to you to write?
  • Ask about the form and figures of the poem.  Ask how or at what point certain figures (metaphors, similies, expletives, interjections, rhymes, modifiers, etc.) revealed themselves during the writing process.  Ask how or at what point lines, stanzas, paragraphs, meters, etc. began to take shape and to inform the writing of the poem.
You may have ulterior motives for asking such questions--perhaps you noticed an ambiguity, a difficult metaphor, a misaligned rhythm, an inconsistent tone, faulty grammar or usage.  Maybe you think the poem isn't yet a poem or that a line or stanza is unnecessary or detracts from the poem.  The writer needs to know your concern; but you need to know how the inconsistency or strange image or uneven rhythm or change in tone got there in the first place--because it's possible that you are misreading the poem!

Finally, before you tell the writer how to correct his or her work, consider two things:

  1. Does the item really need correcting (i.e., is it wrong, given the poem), or am I just insisting on what I think makes for a good poem?
  2. Would my suggestion improve the effort appreciably?
A big part of writing of any kind is the writer's motive--not necessarily what he or she or the poem "means," but what the writer is trying to accomplish.  When critiquing, it's better to start by trying to understand the writer's motive and experience before we suggest improvements.


Monday, August 12, 2019

Making room for ambiguity (8.12.19)

At last week's Wednesdays@One salon the poem I shared--"Everything About This Moment"--has an interrogative in the first stanza . . . 

Who knows but it will be a fine script,
maybe the greatest poem I shall ever write?

. . . but, someone noted, both I and the companion reader spoke the lines like a declarative statement.  This led me to think about ambiguity and its role in a poem.

What I'm talking about here is not the unintentional ambiguity we sometimes find in our writing or speaking, vagueness or impreciseness, in other words, when we seek to be specific and straightforward.  I mean the conscious (at least marginally), meaningful ambiguity that seems possible only in poems and jokes.  (Though having just written that, I immediately think of the prose of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov.)

The English literary critic William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930, a book whose ideas went on to influence literary criticism and the way poems are approached at least through my college years.  (Most of us who studied poetry in college were taught by a New Critic.)  The main point of Empson's book, and why it became formative for the New Criticism, is that the poem is a product of the poet's intent and should be interpreted so; any reference to the poet's personal biography, psychology, faith, politics, gender, is beside the point, or at least secondary to a legitimate reading of a poem.  You don't understand the poem through the poet's background; rather, you understand the poet's mind through a close reading of the poem.  The poem is a puzzle of intent, and the only fair reading is to solve the puzzle.

In Seven Types, Empson identifies . . . er . . . seven ways that a poem can produce multiple, often conflicting readings, or, if you will, puzzle pieces.  No need to go through those here--you can look them up yourself.  The thing I'd like you to think about is this: ambiguity in a poem relates to multiplicity of meaning; a conflict between thoughts and feelings that the poet attempts to resolve through a single image or word use; evidence of a divided mind, as in, "being of two minds" on a subject; and, most importantly, simultaneity.

This idea that an image or use of a word in a poem can mean two or more things at once (simultaneity) seems fundamental to the idea of poetry itself.  Or it once did.*  Empson argued that this "at once-ness" of a poem reveals the complexity of the poet's creative mind, which in turn constitutes the poem's worth or value.  The more subtle or inventive the complex of meanings, the better the poem.  Note that "complexity" never meant "vagueness," lack of clarity, to Empson and his cohort.  It meant depth.  New meanings might be discovered with each re-reading of a poem.  It came to mean, by the time I attended college, "hidden meaning."

By the early 1960s, the notion that complexity equals quality in poetry began to give way to its opposite: simplicity, straightforwardness, "honesty," directness, and "authenticity."  Read "The Wasteland" and then Donald Hall's famous short anthology, Contemporary American Poetry (1961) if you want to get a sense of the sea-change.  This is when ambiguity became a knock on a poem and an otherwise well-written poem could be faulted for not being "clear," "authentic," "immediate," or "accessible."**

In Shakespeare's plays and poems, as in those of many of his contemporaries, the very idea was to let multiple meanings compete or spill out or, most often, emerge slowly.  The word "mortal" could mean "human," "subject to death," and "deadly" all at once in an expression, and Shakespeare would have been aware of all the meanings in play.  "Crown" might mean "king," "state," "head," and/or "money," if understood as a noun, and a "blow to the head" or "to be anointed" if understood as a verb.  And nobody could make a word function as both a noun and a verb in a single expression and simultaneously quite like Shakespeare!

Most of the time, in our poems at W@1, we seek the opposite of ambiguity: we expect absolute clarity of language, and by this we often mean mono-signification: each use of a word in a poem constitutes a single meaning for that usage.  For us, as for the vast majority of casual writers and readers of poetry, mono-signification is a sign of a well-made poem or image.

We think of poems as reductive engines that boil words down to their "essential meanings," that clear away the imprecisions of everyday language like so much debris.  And so, when we write poems, we aim for the simpler term, the more straightforward syntax, the unambiguous, and we often fault a poem whose language is not simple enough, whose word order is not S-V-O straightforward, and whose meaning is not unambiguous.

But regardless what some poetry may have become in the last 60 years in American writing, poetry historically celebrates the richness of language, its multiples of meaning, its layered quality.  Language is much more slippery than mono-signification allows.  Here's an example of layered-ness:

Wilfred Owen's hunched
Over his shovel,
Muttering about
Corpse-stench, mustard gas.

And no matter how loud
I shout, he won't look up.

His ears are ruptured;
His brain, concussed
From gigantic artillery
Explosions.
                    He's dug
Enough trenches
To fill the entire
Twentieth century,
Yet no line is deep enough
To save a single one of us.

Is this poem, by Gregory Orr ^, about the futility of the trenches dug in WWI and of trench warfare, or about the inefficacy of poetry in the face of human catastrophe?  Well, these two interpretations depend on how you read the last two lines of the poem and what you take "no line is deep enough" to mean.  The device of literary ambiguity invites you to understand both meanings at once: the depth of a trench along the front, the deeper meaning of a line of poetry.

So, to return to the example I began this piece with, when we see a question mark at the end of a sentence, we expect that sentence to be formulated like an interrogative (verb precedes subject), and the sentence to be uttered with rising pitch, as our voices do ordinarily when we ask a question.  What happens to our critical eye and ear when a question mark comes at the end of a sentence that is otherwise structured like a declaration (subject precedes verb) and/or is uttered in a falling or level pitch (as I read the line above at last week's W@1)?  You know what I mean?  You know what I mean!  Ambiguity happens.  Is this a good thing in a poem or a bad thing?  Does it lend meaning to the poem or the line, deepening it intellectually or emotionally, or does it merely confuse?

Let's try an experiment for our next project.  Let's use a word "pluri-significantly" in a poem.  That is, let's each find a word in the language that can have multiple meanings and try, consciously, to exercise its many meanings.  Bless you if you can make like Shakespeare and deploy a word once in a poem in such a way that its different meanings can be understood all at once!  But here are some easier options.

Option 1: select one of the following words and use it in a poem in as many ways as you can find meanings for it, so that it has one meaning in one line or stanza, another meaning in a second line or stanza, and so on, until you run out of possible meanings.  (Note: the meanings you deploy should be fairly recognizable to your audience.  No fair making up meanings or creating new "portmanteau words.")

mortal, crown, dispatch, fair, cleave, quick, buck, foil, loose, true, spirit, cell, hot, queen, mark, butt, rag, tattoo, walk, line, sing, hatch

Option 2: write a poem that contains a phrase or an image in which a word or words can have two different meanings (within the context of the poem).  Length of the poem is not the issue, but you should write something involved enough to provide context for a term or phrase that can be read differently.

To help you get a sense of what I am suggesting, in the passage below, take a look at the use of the words "accept" (in the seventh line), and such phrases as "face of the water," "the glacial calve," and "the muzzle in thirst."

By the time I came upon him, it was late in the day,
he was pounding water near the rock-walled well,
standing over the bucket of water so black in that December light,
so like a mirror, one hand gripping its rim, the other, a fist,
a hard pink fist raised over the back bent to the thing
he was so earnestly about.  The fist came down and down
onto the face of the water which seemed to accept it,
the pummeling, as water accepts all things--
the diving sea-hawk, the sea wreck, the suicide,
the fly-cast, the glacial calve, the tea bag, the muzzle in thirst,
the test finger, the leaf released, Narcissus' gaze . . .

What are some of the many ways that water "accepts" things?  The last three lines of this stanza list them.  In this poem, these are all possible meanings of "to accept" at the end of the seventh line.  Listing them all together tends toward ambiguity--the water is more than just a reflective surface.  In this case, the ambiguity of meaning is emphasized.  But also note the ambiguous terms or phrases "the muzzle in thirst," "the glacial calve," and, at the start of line seven, "the face of the water," where key words can have two meanings.  The additional meanings of these are not so emphasized, yet they are there to be understood, should you pause long enough to consider them.

------------
* Ambiguity was an expression of High Modernism in poetry--think T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens.  You had to be erudite to write great poetry, and erudite to read it.  (The New Critics came along after WWII to help the rest of us--veterans attending college on the GI Bill, but also working-class people like me in the 60s--make sense of poetry.)
** Take this a step further into Confessional Poetry, and the authentic poem becomes a cri de coeur.  Keep going, and here you are, Instagram Poetry!
^ In The Last Love Poem I will Ever Write, Norton: New York, 2019.  

Friday, August 9, 2019

Another poem by Angelaurelio Soldi (8.9.19)

Schooldays

A day goes by
nothing unforeseen happens
another day changes your life.
That way day after day
year after year we learn
to appreciate joy
to navigate misery
to reassure the memories
our affections and loves.
They live longer than
life would concede.
They fill even empty days.
They soften sad days.

---

It seems pretty clear to me that a poem like this can't be written without some aging in the barrel.  You know what I mean.  Okay, it skirts sentimentality, but what is aging if not the advent of the sentimental?  What is memory if not sentiment?  Those opening lines, though--A day goes by / nothing unforeseen happens / another day changes your life.--couldn't Milosz have written this?