Blocked! (2.26.20)

Two people have confided to me recently that they are wrestling with writer's block.  They are facing blank pages and, like John Prine and his bowl of oatmeal, they are losing the stare-down contest.

I feel "blocked" every so often.  The feeling used to worry me that maybe I can't write any longer, I'm washed up.  Over time, though, it has come to mean that, for the nonce, I have nothing to say or no way to say poetically what I'm feeling and thinking.  Over time, I have learned to recognize that there are periods when I'm not feeling or thinking anything.  Experience has taught me that this will pass, like a cold or a charley horse, maybe in the next few moments, maybe by next week, maybe a month from now.  So I've learned to not treat creative blocks as The End.  I don't disregard them--they're aren't trivial in my writing life--but I no longer fret over them.

Instead, I prepare for their end.

What do I mean by this?  I read.  I experiment more in my journal, trying out new tropes or images or figures, new forms, new subjects.  (I do NOT write about my block.  I've tried that before and it just makes me feel worse, more blocked.  And whiny.)  I go back to certain books of poetry or lyrical writing that in the past have given me a jolt back into the creative.  I tackle a style of writing or a certain poet's work that has always been difficult to understand or connect with, and I read it extremely closely, and then write about it in my journal.  I listen to recordings of poets reading their work.  I own a marvelous set of CDs of Seamus Heaney reading every one of his books, first to last.  I paid a dear price for it on a trip to Dublin years ago and have never regretted the outlay.  That voice and those poems together . . . I am almost always brought back to earth.

My journals from the late '90s through the early 2000s are filled with practice writing.  Blocks seemed to occur more often in that period.  But by that time I'd learned to look at a block not as a problem but as an opportunity.  Those journals contain page on page of half-lines and other kinds of fragments; lists of possible poem titles; experiments with stream-of-consciousness; rhyming exercises; and, most useful, aphorisms, hundreds of them.  Nobody needs to read this stuff but me, and, I have to admit, much of it is pretty lame.  But equally much of it provides material for new poems even today.

I listen.  Have you ever experienced a work of art that "speaks" to you?  I mean not so much that it expresses a shared emotion or opinion, but that you hear its voice as high-toned or low, shrill or serene, edgy or mellifluous, direct or ironic?  I hear such voices from paintings sometimes, and in the movements of a dance.  I hear rhythms and melodies, pitches and stresses that, sometimes, approximate lines of a poem, a cascade of verbal images, a cadence which might turn into a phrase that itself might produce a flow of thought and feeling.

If all else fails, I accept the block for what it is, a forced hiatus (sometimes, even a respite!) during which my imagination can roam other byways or, simply, rest.  Another common metaphor for this is lying fallow.

The point is, I try to embrace my writer's block, let it have its day, but use the space to prepare for writing's return.

Rejected. Rejected. Rejected. Accepted. Rejected. Rejected. Rejected. Rejected. Rejected. Rejected. (2.20.20)

What does it mean to have a poem accepted for publication?  Or to finally see your efforts in print, or as is most likely these days, online?

I ask myself these questions every so often, like when I receive another heartfelt rejection in the mail.  I've kept a running tab of rejection slips from The New Yorker for about 30 years now--perhaps 25 of them.  Is that all?  Just 25 in 30 years?  Well, maybe I'm not all that committed to seeing one of my poems in those famous pages after all.  I mean, that's not even one submission a year, on average!

The other day, I received a message in my inbox that a poem was accepted for an upcoming issue of an online journal named War, Literature & the Arts, published at the US Air Force Academy.  I had forgotten that I'd sent something to them--one of our Wednesdays@One projects, titled "Passage."  My first thought was, oh no!  Not a military magazine!?  Why did I send THEM something?  Am I that starved for attention?  But I re-read some of the journal online and refreshed my memory why I thought it'd make a good home for this particular poem.  It's not that, or just that, the subject of my poem (a descent into Hades alongside slain warriors) seemed to fit the editorial philosophy of the journal, but also the quality of the writing there is really quite good.  In fact, an old friend, Bert Hedin had some work in a previous issue.  I've always admired his work.  The novelist Thom McGuane has published in those pages as well.  So the company is good.

Which leads me back to my first question, what does it mean to have a poem accepted for publication?  Validation for one thing.  But validation of what, exactly?  Of the poem in question, of course, that it was a valid and quality effort in the first place, as confirmed by the editors' choice.  But also, maybe, of my self-image as a writer of poems, even as "poet."  I spend a lot of time--I mean a LOT--writing poems, thinking about poems, writing about poetry, thinking about the craft, studying its history, keeping up to date with its latest trends and schools.  And I want to be a writer of poems.  As a brother once told a bemused business colleague of mine about my somewhat subversive pastime, "He's pretty serious about that stuff."  So it is good when a poem is recognized, especially by people I don't know and will never meet, and who preside over a publication of quality work.  I feel what's being validated isn't just the poem, but the commitment to writing poems altogether, to putting in the work and the study and weathering through the false starts.

A poetry friend recently sent me an S.O.S. for help with a chapbook she had written and was shopping around to various publishers.  Rejected here, rejected there, rejected everywhere.  She complained that the rejections bounced back so quickly that probably no one even read the submissions.  What to do?  Would I read the manuscript and offer some advice?  Heretofore, all of her work had been self-published and marketed (such as through Lulu or Amazon), but no interest showed by "people I don't know and will never meet."  I know exactly how she felt.  No writer in my experience, especially among writers of poetry, has ever NOT felt that sting of rejection and questioned, at least for a few hours, why she puts in the effort.  Shortly after I got my friend's S.O.S., and before I'd found time to look over the manuscript, she posted another message that the chapbook had been accepted by a fairly reputable press.  Not the big New York publishing house she'd initially set her sights on, but a press with a decent stable of poetry writers all the same.  The clouds parted, the skies cleared, the sun shone!

Let's face it.  Much of what we do as writers of poetry is driven by ego.  We want our voices, ideas and craft to be heard and recognized . . . and liked!  We want our 👍's to far outweigh our 👎's.  That's assuming we don't live in a cave and write on the walls by firelight.  And we want those 👍's coming from people we don't know and will never meet.  We want our poems to appear alongside the work of better known poets and work that we admire.  We want the validation.  We are creatures of want.

Do we care about the craft, the art of it?  Of course!  We made the choice to write poems.  Wanting validation isn't a bad thing or a cheap thing.  It drives us forward, or should.  Not taking our cues from both 👍's and 👎's, NOT letting those signals encourage us to write better, with more resolve and commitment, THAT is a cheap thing.

And this is what I hope from my friend whose manuscript has just been accepted for publication, that she will take this as a sign that she is on the right track, and so will renew her commitment to the art and redouble her efforts to make better art tomorrow than she made today.

That is what I hope for my own writing.  As a matter of fact, now that I've got myself all worked up over this publishing thing, I think I'll send a poem off to The New Yorker. 🙏

The habits of poetry - daily reading (2.13.20)

I was sweating bullets in my MFA Poetry seminar one afternoon.  

(This would have been in 1974.)  

Our guest author, Prof. Willis Barnestone, a well-respected and widely published scholar and poet on the Comparative Literature faculty at my university, had just asked a crucial question of us would-be professional poets: Which poets are you reading regularly?  He meant "professionally," as part of our training.

And each of us, in front of our assembled cohort, was expected to answer, in turn, around the seminar table.  About a dozen of us were enrolled in the program and, since the first to respond sat more than half way around the table from me, I had time to listen to my classmates' lists of read-worthy poets, but also time for my stomach to work its way up my throat.

You see, I hadn't been reading any "poets."  Of course, I read poems by those required in the syllabus of my other graduate courses (and not even all that many of them!).  But I didn't read "the poets."  I had enrolled in the MFA Poetry program to write poems, not read bodies of work.  The thought, until Prof. Barnestone asked that question, hadn't even occurred to me.

My classmates were "reading" Ginsberg and Corso, Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez, the New York Poets and Amiri Baraka and Clarence Major and Anne Waldman and Derek Walcott and Donald Junkins and Robert Bly and Maxine Kumin and French poets (in French) and South American poets (in Spanish).  As the show & tell proceeded around the table toward me, it became clear that my classmates had been studying the careers of these writers, how they'd begun, how they'd learned and developed their art, how they'd become the successful writers they were at the time.  My classmates were mapping careers.

And so, I sat there sweating bullets, because my turn was coming inexorably round the table and I was going to have to reveal my slacker self, my clueless self.  Who was I going to say I'm reading as part of my poetic-artistic training?  Robert Frost?  T. S. Eliot?  John Crowe Ransom?  The dead writers in my Norton Anthology.  And not even "them," really, but highly edited and proscribed samples of their work.  I was going to have to show my ignorance and admit that I had no idea what I was doing in a graduate level creative writing program at a major midwestern university, that somebody had made a mistake letting me in the program.

Prof. Barnestone's question was a good one, all right.  No better question has ever been asked, I don't think, of any poet-in-training, or of anyone who takes the writing of poetry seriously.

DAILY OR FREQUENT READING OF POEMS IS VITAL TO YOUR OWN WRITING.

This statement seems obvious, doesn't it?  But I wonder how often how many of us make it a habit.  And I wonder whether we make it a studied habit: this week, I'm going to read lyric free verse poems so I can get a sense for voicings and rhythmical qualities that I might use in my own work; today I'm reading poems in translation so I can understand better the unique difficulties of diction; this month, I plan to read everything by this poet, in chronological order, to get a sense of how a poet develops.

But you might argue, Those classmates of yours read "for work," not for pleasure, which qualifies the experience.  That might be true.  Once you've begun to think about poems as something other than personal expression, it's harder to read others' work uncritically.  You keep a mind, an eye and an ear open for topics that resonate through poetry, for music and rhythm, for detail, for voice . . . and yes, for innovation, the off-note, the clashing image, the surprise tonic, the predictable finish, the thematic error, the weakness, the triumph . . . all things that make up a style and a voice that in turn make each poem and each reading an education.  Once you commit to Poetry, you approach poems not just to learn about life but about how to make better poems.

The habit I am describing is two-fold.  One, read often, read repetitively, and read critically, looking out for craft and technique as well as content.  Look for all the things we touch on in our Wednesday salon (you'll find the various elements in the blog entries here).  Ask yourself how the poems you're reading came to be--not what the writer experienced, necessarily, but what kinds of choices the writer likely made to bring the poem to the finished piece you're reading.  Two, read widely.  Read your W@1 mates' poems.  Read or re-read your Norton Anthology for historical perspectives (Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Bradstreet, Dickinson, Dryden, Milton, Baudelaire, Hughes, Brooks, Morrison).  Read "schools" and "movements" like the New York School, the Newyorican Poets, the Beats, the Southern Agrarians.  Read Feminist poetry from the '70s and Black poetry from the decade we just departed.  Read New Yorker poetry and the poetry of The American Poetry Review, and Poetry Magazine.  Read issues of Jubilat, Prairie Schooner, Field, Boulevard.

I have on a shelf several decades' worth of back issues of Sewanee Review that I take down from time to time and leaf through.  I forget how I came by these.  I find there poems by, yes, T.S. Eliot and H.D. and Marianne Moore and others written and published during their prime; as well as poems representing the conservative "Fugitive" school of the '40s and '50s.  And I find in these issues poems by people I've never heard of, who never made it in the poetry world--academics, probably--but whose poems are an education to read at this three-quarter century remove, if not always a pleasure.

My point can be stated more directly, I guess.  You write only as well and as widely as you read.

So get to it.  :-)

Ornament (2.6.20)

What is "ornament," or ornamentation, in poetry?  The use of figurative language?  Is it a rhythmical element, such as the use of a strict meter?  Or maybe ornament is found in repetitions, rhymes, exotic diction?  Or how about complexity, as in sentences compounded with modifying clauses, ellipses, appositives and the like?

Does the topic even warrant much discussion in 21st Century America?

I've been thinking about it lately partly in response to some of my own poems' use of all of the tools referenced above, partly because I've paid a little more attention than usual to the different styles and voices I encounter among the poems shared each week in our Wednesdays@One salon.

Maybe we can get at ornament and ornamentation negatively--what its opposite is.  So . . . that would be plainness, right?  Or a more or less uncomplicated sentence structure (like a "straightforward" subject-verb-object structure), or blank verse, free verse, unaccentuated verse . . .

One poet (Dickinson) advises us to "write it slant."  Does that mean with ornamentation?  Another (let's say, Dr. Williams) counsels to write it plain.  But what is "plainness" in poetry?

William Wordsworth famously declared that "modern" poetry should be written in common speech--a practice that he ignored in his own poetry.  Whitman did much the same thing, claiming a common voice using common American speech in poems that rang even in his own day with the music of a symphony.

Speaking of music, perhaps we can find some analogous notions there.  Ornamentation is a technical term in music.  It's something added or improvised, like vocal trills and sustains in an aria or in some sacred music.  Ornamentation is a flourish, an emotive element, or a "heightening."  We tend to think of it as an embellishment.

In music, ornamentation has been codified historically into "vocabularies," styles, rhythmic modifications, and "accepted language(s)" and phrasings that performers can access to "fill out" the "skeleton of the melody."  Coloratura!  Remember all those trilling contestants on American Idol?

The Homeric tales--Iliad, Odyssey--are records of this kind of codified vocabulary in poetry.  Rhapsodes (tellers)--the rap poets of the ancients--delivered from a memorized storehouse of epithets, catch-phrases, memes, standard tropes ("the wine-dark sea" is maybe the most quoted of these today) that they strung together in inventive ways to repeat a well-known story of heroes and gods and glorious battle.  The phrases were like ornaments hung on the limbs of the tale, in different configurations and clusters, depending on the teller and the contest.

How do you reconcile Whitman's or Wordsworth's advice with their practice?  Well, what Whitman set out to do was not to write poems in plain speech or plain style.  Rather, he tapped a whole new vocabulary--plain American speech--for his poetic material.  The result remains poetry, ornamented and highly musical.  Think of the Divine Comedy in this respect as well.  Dante wrote in the vernacular of the day instead of the Latin of the Church, thereby freeing poetry from centuries of assumption and expectation about what a poem is and what it should be made of.  He Italianized it.  Allen Ginsberg and his literary cohort did the same thing for us in post-WWII American poetry.

Ornament is an element of poetry, poetry is ornamental, no matter how plain the speech deployed in a poem.  For poetry is, in its most technical sense, language put to artistic use.  Edmund Spenser did something interesting with ornament in The Fairie Queen (looking at you, Bennett!).  He rescued certain outdated words, words that in the 16th Century had already fallen out of use not just in spoken English but in poetic English, too.  These were words of dialect, local expression, colloquialism, regional flavor and meaning.  His project was partly to preserve the words and the traditions from which they sprang, even while creating a new kind of epic poem for the England of his day.  But it was also to refresh poetry and peoples' sense of poetry.  Read Spenser and you can't feel that you're not feeling the weight of ornamentation.

You can deploy ornament in a heavy- or ham-handed way (here's looking at you, Joyce Kilmer), or you can use it more deftly to enrich the poem and a reader's experience of the poem.  Here's another example of a poet--and another Irishman, like Spenser--who salvages language for making poems that are highly ornamented, individual and fresh.

Encheiresin Naturae

Not for the first time would we rest the heavy door
of the barn from its jambs.
The door had been painted the red of iron ore,
the posts daubed with the blood of a lamb

to protect us from the Angel of Death.
It all had to do with two interpenetrating cones.
One of the pillars of the sons of Seth
was built of brick, the other of dressed stone.

No wonder almost everything did pass over us--
passed us over or by--
wealth, fame, true love. For now we would astound

ourselves with a pig hanging from a roof truss
as if it might be making a half-hearted attempt to fly
before falling hard to the ground.

This sonnet is the first in a sequence Paul Muldoon wrote as part of a collaboration with the artist Barry Moser.  The sequence is a grouping of sonnets called a sonnet redouble, or "crown of sonnets."  (If you have $5,700 lying around, you can see the full effect of engravings and sonnets in the art-book edition published by Nawakum Press between 2014 and 2017.  Or you can get a taste of it here .)  From the allusive, enigmatic title (from Faust, meaning "manipulating nature") to the variable line lengths to the rich rhymes (jambs/lamb, Death/Seth), the alliteration, and indeed the sonnet form extended to a " crown," what could be more ornamental than this poem?  Ornamental as in heightened and closely controlled language and the richest of reading experiences.

Regardless what figures and tools a poem contains, one thing is sure about its ornaments: they are language calling attention to itself.  And so, they are elements specific to poetry.