Resisting the authorial voice in a poem (10.20.19)

Recently I listened as a poet read her work at a poetry reading.  The setting was a book store, and specifically, it was near the one narrow set of shelves set aside for the store's poetry collection (mostly themed anthologies, heavy on Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, with a few volumes by people of color).  The hush was a little like church.

One of the poems the poet read to us was what you might call a "true life" poem.  It was lyrical, packed with emotion, deeply personal, relatively unadorned and direct.  It was determinedly unironic.  It was a poem about suffering survived and adversity overcome, about being true to oneself.

And I didn't believe a word of it.  

Before we go further, let me clarify something.  I am not a complete cynic.  That is, I am no more or less cynical than the next person about life or people or the role of government or religion or the value of literature or ideas of community, fairness, integrity, etc.  I get as misty eyed as the next moviegoer when the lovers finally admit their love and the villain acknowledges his humanity at last, even when it's obvious the screenwriter, music director, film director, editor and actor have conspired to bring that tear to my eye.  

When I say I didn't believe a word of it, "it" is not the poet who wrote the poem and who read to our little coterie of book store poetry devotees.  Nor is "it" the event described in the poem or the feeling that description was meant to express and evoke. 

What she read certainly sounded like a poem, or at least the reading of it sounded poetic, flowing, full of a heightened use of language.  And she read it well, with ample eye contact, sonority where sonority sounded right, rhythm, meaningful pauses, stresses, etc.

So what was it about the poem (or maybe the experience) that I didn't find credible?  It was the poem itself.  Or, to be more precise, it was the authorial voice of the poem--not the reader's voice or the reading of the moment, mind you--but the voice built into the poem as literary effect.

This got me to thinking about voice in poetry, what it is, how it works, why it is important.  Actually, thinking about it has only raised more questions . . .

• What is voice; what do we mean by it in relation to poetry?
• Do writers of poems actually "write in their own authentic voices"?
• What is authenticity of voice?
• Is voice "style" or vice versa?
• When we write, do we / should we write with one voice?  Is it wrong to mix voices?
• If we write using more than one voice, which one is "real" and "authentic" and to be believed?
• Is there an "American voice"?  A "Southern voice"?  A "Yankee voice"?  A voice of color?  

I could go on with the questions, but the first one above, I think, is the one most worth beginning with, though maybe a little further reflection and reading would be a good idea before taking up the question.  So, later, then.

Letter poems (10.14.19)

Let's try writing a verse epistle. Make your letter poem Horatian or Ovidian, whatever sparks your imagination. See below for what this means, for background, history, and my own thoughts about letter poems.

But write it to someone, some group or coterie. Your recipient can be very personal or remote, concrete (flesh and blood) or abstract.

Your subject can be anything--love, sex, death, art, poetry, politics, technology, work, daily living, conscience, belief, loss of faith--anything.

Your treatment of the subject can be how you feel about it, how you think your recipient feels, what you believe to be true and/or false, or an exploration of what the subject means.

For convenience's sake, and to get your motor running, I suggest you open with "Dear . . ."

Before you start making a poem, I also suggest that you take some time to think about your recipient. Analyze your audience. If it's a person, make some notes about the person, your relationship, what you know about him or her and how this person thinks, what she believes, etc. Consider why you are writing to this person, just as if you'd sat down to jot a normal letter--what news do you have to share? why do you want to share it? what are you asking the recipient to do, if anything, besides read your letter? This process will help you determine how intimate your verse letter is going to be, or how communal (for example: W.C. Williams' note to Flossie about eating the plums vs. Walt Whitman's letter to the generations of Americans to come after he is gone and is grass under our feet).

Some Background on Verse Epistle

The website of The Academy of American Poets defines "verse epistle" as "poems that read as letters." The Academy goes on . . .

"The appeal of epistolary poems is in their freedom. The audience can be internal or external. The poet may be speaking to an unnamed recipient or to the world at large, to bodiless entities or to abstract concepts."

For the Academy's discussion, plus examples, click here, verse epistle.

Historically, there are two kinds of verse epistle: the Horatian and the Ovidian. Read these names as placeholders for "moral and philosophical subjects" and "sentimental subjects," respectively. The implication is that there are two reasons to write a letter poem. The first is to explore a subject deeply, in a kind of thinking out loud to a correspondent. The second is to write a love letter. Ovid's approach was popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; think courtly love poetry, the troubadours, the great love sonnet sequences. Horace's innovation had traction in the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods. Pope, for instance, wrote his Moral Essays in the form of verse letters, as well as Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

The letter poem can be lengthy and developed into an extended argument--see Pope, and Sydney's Astrophel and Stella--and it can be shorter, more lyrical, as in individual sonnets within a sequence (see especially the first 18 of Shakespeare's group).  To be clear, though, the Sonnets are not voiced as letters, though they are messages/entreaties to a specific person.  Like letters, they imply an expectation that the recipient will take some kind of action--read the message, do as the message directs . . .

You'll recall that we touched on similar forms of direct address, like apostrophe (see my blog entry for 1.31.18), and poems written "in conversation with" or in reply to other poems (see entries for 6.13.18 and 1.20.19). But though these forms are similar, they are not identical, and for one very good reason. A letter not only points to a recipient, a specific reader, but to an action--a private reading--and possibly to another action--a reply. When you've written letters before, were they intended for a specific recipient and not to be shared? Paul's letters to the Corinthians were intended only for them. Love letters are troved away, then discovered decades into a marriage that did not create them, and we are injured (or entertained) on both sides.

Certainly, you have written a letter in anticipation of a reply? Common closings to a letter--"I await your reply . . ." "Please let me know . . ." "If I don't hear back from you . . ." "Write back and let me know how all are doing."

And even if no reply is expected, letters aren't one way communications (Dear John letters and letters to the editor aside). They may bring news, but they assume the recipient will be interested to know the news, will likewise find it informative, fascinating, funny, infuriating, odd, uplifting, tragic, etc. The writer will understand, or believe she understands, that her reader will react, and even imagine how the reader will react to what is put into the letter. These assumptions insure the two-way communication even if the recipient doesn't or isn't intended to reply.

But letter poems are not just personal letters with news to share. They are works of art and, as such, ask for an audience, not merely a recipient. An audience of a letter poem--even an audience of one--will read beyond the content to the form in which it is written, to its emotional affect, to its engagement with language. As works of art, letter poems are as much about themselves as made things as they are "about" their content, like any other poem. Speaking of emotional affect, a letter poem, because it's a poem, will express and try to communicate an emotion via all the tools and techniques we've studied at Wednesdays@One: image, metaphor, rhythm and meter, syntax, line, rhyme or its absence, allusion, point of view, voice, etc.

When I read a letter poem, I like the feeling that I'm listening in or that I am the one being written to: the lover, the cohort, the enemy, the friend . . . Reading a letter poem puts me into a unique position with regard to the poet, the persona represented in the poem, and to myself.

So, before you begin writing your letter poem, read through the examples below. Put yourself in the role of the person or concept to whom the letter poem is addressed (I am Flossie; I am America). Consider the subject, of course, but also give thought to how it is presented, the techniques, figures, cadences, stresses, etc. that are employed, and what tone of voice and emotion are elicited through these devices.

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The poems that follow are "letters" in their several ways.  One or two aren't actually offered as letters, like the section from Song of Myself.  Some are formally so, opening with the standard salutation of "Dear . . .," and are equipped with a closing.  Others are simply messages, notes, postcards, like the Williams poem, which you'd imagine finding taped to the refrigerator door.  But they read "as letters" in that each is aimed at or addressed to someone or some group in an implied correspondence.  The Williams poem is simple, unironic, almost unadorned, as you'd expect from him.  The Bishop poem is deliciously nuanced and full of implication and sub-text.

This Is Just to Say 

--William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums 

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably 

saving 

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

from Song of Myself (section 52)

--Walt Whitman

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place, search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

A Letter to William Carlos Williams

--Kenneth Rexroth

Dear Bill,

When I search the past for you,

Sometimes I think you are like

St. Francis, whose flesh went out

Like a happy cloud from him,

And merged with every lover--

Donkeys, flowers, lepers, suns--

But I think you are more like

Brother Juniper, who suffered

All indignities and glories

Laughing like a gentle fool.

You're in the Fioretti

Somewhere, for you're a fool, Bill,

Like the Fool in Yeats, the term

Of all wisdom and beauty.

It's you, stands over against

Helen in all her wisdom,

Solomon in all his glory.

Remember years ago, when 

I told you you were the first

Great Franciscan poet since

The Middle Ages? I disturbed

The even tenor of dinner.

Your wife thought I was crazy.

It's true, though. And you're "pure," too,

A real classic, though not loud

About it--a whole lot like

The girls of the Anthology.

Not like strident Sappho, who

For all her grandeur, must have

Had endemetriosis,

But like Anyte, who says

Just enough, softly, for all

The thousands of years to remember.

It's a wonderful quiet 

You have, a way of keeping

Still about the world, and its

Dirty rivers, and garbage cans,

Red wheelbarrows glazed with rain,

Cold plums stolen from the icebox,

And Queen Anne's Lace, and day's eyes,

And leaf buds bursting over

Muddy roads, and splotched bellies

With babies in them, and Cortes

And Malinche on the bloody

Causeway, the death of the flower world.

Nowadays, when the press reels

With chatterboxes, you keep still,

Each year a sheaf of stillness,

Poems that have nothing to say,

Like the stillness of George Fox,

Sitting still under the cloud

Of all the world's temptation,

By the fire, in the kitchen,

In the Vale of Beavor. And

The archetype, the silence

Of Christ, when he paused a long

Time and then said, "Thou sayest it."

Now in a recent poem you say,

"I who am about to die."

Maybe this is just a tag

From the classics, but it sends

A shudder over me. Where 

Do you get that stuff, Williams?

Look at here. The day will come

When a young woman will walk

By the lucid Williams River,

Where it flows through an idyllic

News from Nowhere sort of landscape,

And she will way to her children,

"Isn't it beautiful? It

Is named after a man who

Walked here once when it was called

The Passaic, and was filthy

With the poisonous excrements

Of sick men and factories.

He was a great man. He knew

It was beautiful then, although

Nobody else did, back there

In the Dark Ages. And the

Beautiful river he saw

Still flows in his veins, as it

Does in ours, and flows in our eyes,

And flows in time, and makes us

Part of it, and part of him.

That, children, is what is called

A sacramental relationship.

And that is what a poet

Is, children, one who creates

Sacramental relationships

That last always."

    With love and admiration,

    Kenneth Rexroth.

A Poem to Galway Kinnell

--Etheridge Knight

Sat., Apr. 26, 1973

Jefferson City, Mo. 65101

(500 yards, as the crow flies,

from where I am writing you 

this letter, lies the Missouri

State Prison--it lies, the prison,

like an overfed bear alongside 

the raging Missouri river--

the pale prison, out of which,

sonny liston, with clenched fist,

fought his way, out of which,

james earl ray ripped his way

into the hearts of us all . . .)

dear galway,

   it is flooding here, in Missouri,

the lowlands are all under water and at night

the lights dance on the dark water,

our president, of late of Watergate,

is spozed to fly above the flooded areas

and estimate how much damage has been done

to THE PEOPLES . . . .

dear galway,

    it is lonely here, and sometimes,

THE PEOPLES can be a bitch

dear galway,

    i hear poems in my head

as the wind blows in your hair

and the young brown girl

with the toothpaste smile

who flows freely because she has heard OUR SOUNDS . . . .

dear galway,

    OUR SONGS OF LOVE are still

murmurs among these melodies of madness . . . .

dear Galway, and what the fuck are the irish doing/

and when the IRA sends JUST ONE, just one soldier

to fight with say the American Indians, then i'll believe them . . . .

dear galway,

    the river is rising here, and i am

scared and lonely . . . . . . 

Mary and the children send their love

to you and yours

                          always

                          Imamu Etheridge Knight Soa

Letter to N.Y.
--Elizabeth Bishop

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear.  I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Letter to Bell from Missoula

--Richard Hugo

Dear Marvin: Months since I left broke down and sobbing

in the parking lot, grateful for the depth

of your understanding and since then I've been treated

in Seattle and I'm in control like Ghengas Khan.

That was a hairy one, the drive west, my nerves so strung

I couldn't sign a recognizable name on credit slips.

And those station attendants' looks. Until Sheridan 

I took the most degenerate motels I saw because they seemed

to be where I belonged. I found my way by instinct

to bad restaurants and managed to degrade myself

in front of waitresses so dumb I damn near offered them

lessons in expressions of disdain. Now, it's all a blur.

Iowa. South Dakota. Wyoming. Lots of troublesome deja vu

in towns I'd seen or never seen before. It's snowing

in Missoula, has been off and on for days but no fierce winds

and no regrets. I'm living alone in a house I bought,

last payment due 2001. Yesterday, a religious nut

came to the door and offered me unqualified salvation

if I took a year's subscription to Essential Sun Beam.

I told him I was Taoist and he went away. Today,

a funny dog, half dachshund, waddles through my yard.

A neighbor boy, Bud, poor, shovels my walk for a dollar

and on the radio a break is predicted. A voice is saying,

periods of sun tomorrow, a high front from the coast.

For no reason, I keep remembering my first woman

and how I said afterward happy, so that's what you do.

I think of you and Dorothy. Stay healthy. Love. Dick.

The Letter

--W.H. Auden

From the very first coming down

Into a new valley with a frown

Because of the sun and a lost way,

You certainly remain: to-day

I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard

Travel across a sudden bird,

Cry out against the storm, and found

The year's arc a completed round

And love's worn circuit re-begun,

Endless with no dissenting turn.

Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen

The swallow on the tile, spring's green

Preliminary shiver, passed 

A solitary truck, the last

Of shunting in the Autumn. But now,

To interrupt the homely brow,

Thought warmed to evening through and through

Your letter comes, speaking as you,

Speaking of much but not to come.

Nor speech is close nor fingers numb,

If love not seldom has received

An unjust answer, was deceived.

I, decent with the seasons, move

Different or with a different love,

Nor question overmuch the nod,

The stone smile of this country god

That never was more reticent,

Always afraid to say more than it meant.

Letter from an Institution

--Michael Ryan

I have a garden here, shaped

like Marienbad, remember?,

I lose myself

in, it seems. They only look for me

sometimes. I don't like my dreams.

The nurses quarrel over where I am

hiding. I hear from inside

a bush. One is crisp

& cuts; one pinches. I'd like to push

them each somewhere.

They both think it's funny

here. The laughter sounds like diesels.

I won't move because I'm lazy.

You start to like the needles.

You start to want to crazy.

A Letter from Tegucigalpa

--Mark Strand

Dear Henrietta, since you were kind enough to ask why I no longer write, I shall do my best to answer you. In the old days, my thoughts like tiny sparks would flare up in the almost dark consciousness and I would transcribe them, and page after page shone with a light that I called my own. I would sit at my desk amazed by what had just happened. And even as I watched the lights fade and my thoughts become small, meaningless memorials in the afterglow of so much promise, I was still amazed. And when they disappeared, as they inevitably did, I was ready to begin again, ready to sit in the dark for hours and wait for even a single spark, though I knew it would shed almost no light at all. What I had not realized then, but now know only too well, is that sparks carry within them the wish to be relieved of the burden of brightness. And that is why I no longer write, and why the dark is my freedom and my happiness.

Farewell, John Giorno, So Long, Good-bye

In the New York Times' obits today: John Giorno, free poet, friend of the Beats, lover of Robert Maplethorpe and Andy Warhol, husband of Ugo Rondinone, dead at 82. Check it out here: John Giorno obituary

And here's a piece of a poem he wrote in 2006, titled "Thanx4Nothing," quoted in the obit:

May every drug I ever took
come back and get you high
may every glass of vodka and wine I ever drank
come back and make you feel really good,
numbing your nerve ends
allowing the natural clarity of your mind to flow free,
may all the suicides be songs of aspiration,
thanks that bad news is always true,
may all the chocolate I’ve ever eaten
come back rushing through your bloodstream
and make you feel happy,
thanks for allowing me to be a poet
a noble effort, doomed, but the only choice.

The habits of poetry - regular practice (10.1.19)

This is the fourth in a series titled "The Habits of Poetry . . ."  For reference, take another look at the entries for July 23, 2019 (honesty), March 28, 2019 (revising), and January 23, 2019 (practical observation).

This habit has to do with practice; I don't mean just the general activity of writing poems, as in "the practice of poetry," but rather and more pointedly, practicing writing.  And what does this mean?  Emulation.  It means mimicking other writers' styles, tones, line construction, rhyme schemes, diction, themes, and so on.  Or at least trying to write similarly to the styles, forms, terms, vocabularies, etc. that you encounter in your reading.

Why mimic?  For one thing, poetry has a long history of mimicry or emulation.  So called "schools" of poetry involve at least some emulative writing.  Think of the Metaphysical School with its emphasis on conceit.  Somebody wrote a poem that developed a difficult metaphor that was logical, balanced, subtle, extended, tightly controlled, rhetorically pure, and clever--a conceit.  Somebody else tried his hand at it and, with practice, produced another nice conceit.  Others followed suit, practicing, practicing, practicing.  Sooner or later, a School!

There is the Surrealist/Dadaist School where poets to this day write apparent "nonsense" (or so it seems to the Classically minded of us).  They are emulating what Baudelaire and Apollinaire did originally, who had practiced with the poems of Poe in mind.  But even the nonsense takes practice--an accomplished and practiced writer of the surreal knows how to use the unconscious to get to the poem.  The un- or under-practiced still tend to produce . . . nonsense.

The New York "school" of poets emulated one another through "action writing," that is, capturing the instant while still in the instant (think Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch) or through "meta" writing--that is, poems that are all about themselves as works of art made without revision or second thoughts (think John Ashbery, Barbara Guest).

Nearly every generation of poets produces a clique that emulates the poetry of Walt Whitman--messianic voice, extended line, blocky paragraph structure, repetitive diction.

For another reason, though, mimicking the work of other poets, periods, schools and so on helps you to (eventually) develop your own peculiar style.  Some writers might object at this point that no one needs to mimic other kinds of poetry writing; all you need to do is to "look in thy heart and write"--as Philip Sidney advised.  Maybe.  But even he didn't really do that.  Sidney knew the old forms because he was trained (practiced) in them, and so used them.  One of these was the Petrarchan sonnet sequence that he used (emulated) in Astrophyl and Stella.  Where he innovated, that is, didn't emulate so much, was in how he sourced his work: "look in they heart and write" is the same admonition as write about what you know.

Let's say you want to write a sonnet.  Okay, you can put SOMETHING on paper that has 14 lines.  Sonnet?  Probably not.  Probably, you've written 14 lines.  Let's say you advance your thinking and your experimentation a little by organizing those 14 lines into two sections: one containing eight lines followed by one having six.  Sonnet?  Maybe, maybe not.  You practice some more, stepping farther into the form: the eight line section establishes a problem or a theme or a question of some sort, and the six line section resolves the problem, comments on the theme, or answers the question.  Now you are in the zip code at least of "sonnet" in braces.  Then let's say you really warm to the emulation experiment and add rhyme: two quatrains for the eight-line section and two tercets for the six-line section.  And from there you practice with different types of rhyme: masculine, feminine, off, internal, rising, falling.  As you go, you're getting better at the plasticity of a supposedly strict form.

Are we there yet?  Maybe so.  Maybe you've arrived at a good approximation of a Petrarchan sonnet. But not unless the poem's theme is love--distant, unrequited, soul-killing, tear-jerking love.  Now we're talking Petrarch!  But then there is the Shakespearean/English sonnet, which takes on all kinds of subjects, including love, and which is built out of three quatrains of rolling rhyme followed by a couplet which delivers a kind of stinger, as country songs do.  Master that through practice, and then move on to the Spenserian sonnet, which also is built out of quatrains and an ending couplet, but the quatrains interweave the rhyme from stanza to stanza.  Next, try on Milton for a change in theme and topic, like the individual's role in the state.  Then move on to Shelley, Keats, and across the Atlantic to Poe (who mimicked the British, especially Spenser, in an early sonnet) and flash forward in time to Robert Lowell for a radical change in theme (himself and family history), form (unrhymed or near-rhymed) and line (sometimes metered, sometimes interrupted).

AND THAT'S JUST PRACTICE WITH A SONNET.

I can guarantee this much: if you practice writing all these kinds of sonnet, when you're done you'll be a sonneteer with your own unique understanding of what makes the form work, and have developed your own style and voice for sonneteering.

The point is practice, practice, practice.

If you want to become a better poetry writer overall, you'll commit to this kind of practice regularly if not often.  Plus, you'll practice working in other forms, including so called "free verse."  You'll practice adjusting lines and line length to rhythms and cadences by trying to write like Whitman, then Emily Dickinson, then Horace, then maybe Coleridge.  And you'll wind up knowing what emulative practice must have been like for Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, C. K. Williams, Albert Goldbarth, maybe others.

You can even practice tone, style, theme.  Try reading a half dozen or so poems by W. H. Auden, then emulating these.  You'll find yourself commenting politically and philosophically and emotionally on famous people, current events, and using personal local events (a marriage, a birth, a death, a retirement, a commencement, etc.) as springboards into deeper, grander social and civilizational topics and themes.  You might even begin to write ruminatively, as Auden often did.

All of this mindful practice will make you a better writer of poetry.  I guarantee it or your money back.