Persona (3.16.20)

All, regarding this week’s project, let’s not stress ourselves about having anything ready for Wednesday, necessarily, though if you find you have extra home time this week due to social distancing (oh, dear, new vocabulary!) then get busy.  As you write a draft that you’re comfortable sharing, email it to me and I will post it here where others can read and add comments.

Regarding commenting: please, no rewriting of anyone’s work.  If you have a question about a poem, a line, an image, a structure, a word’s meaning, a word choice, etc., then put the question to the group without further comment.  This will help the author to reflect more productively on revision.

I will record each poem you send to me and post to the blog as well, so everyone, author included, can get a soundscape of the work.

Here’s the approach Bob has suggested:

Choose a speaker you’d like to explore through a poem—not “yourself”

(whoever that is), or at least not your “whole self.”

(I think the point here is to take on a persona, adopt a “mask”

and not write from a perspective that strikes you or your reader as

“the real me speaking directly to the reader.”)

Develop a single event or moment—an action, something observed,

a reflection upon some thought or fact—that is important

to the speaker of your poem; then center

the poem in that moment, on that reflection.

Try to get into your speaker enough

to develop the rhythms, cadences, pitch,

stresses and so on of that character’s voice; let these factors

influence the rhythm and form/structure of the poem.

Ideas and examples:

I am thinking you could try writing a poem

from the perspective of a much younger you or,

alternatively, a much older you.

You might write a poem that adopts an animal persona,

a fictional character, a historical figure,

an inanimate object!

To my clever, multi-lingual self . . . (3.16.20)

I am writing a song.  I want it to be partly in French because I like chansons, French folk songs.  I adore Piaf and Brel.  I dig Villon.

The song plays on the word "ball," generally, "boule" but sometimes "balle."  Ball of this, ball of that: snowball, fastball, curveball, ball of something else.  Its title (so far) is "Si c'est l'amour . . ." if this is love . . . what is it but a ball of tears, ball of laughter, ball of cries?

Suffice it to say, I'm feeling French today.  Which leads me to my topic: using other tongues in your poems.

Which leads me to our next project: write a poem that incorporates at least one phrase from at least one language other than English.  Colloquial southern, mid-Atlantic, New England, mountain or other regional Americanisms DO NOT count.  Ethnic and racial dialects DO NOT count.  Personal languages, made-up-isms, DO NOT count. The phrase does not have to be something that's "untranslatable," like an idiom, though if you have one in mind, go ahead.  Nor should it be a "naturalized" term in English, like claire de lune, or doppelgänger.  It should be integrated into the poem, not used merely as an epithet.  Your reader should be able to translate the phrase or term into standard English with some degree of accuracy (excepting the idiomatic expression, perhaps).

Why this project?  Read on . . .

Some time ago, we attempted translation (see "Translation 9.12.18") partly as an exercise in understanding how we write in our native language, the many decisions we make when selecting words, placing them in a line, and so on.  But what I'm addressing here is multi-lingual-ism on a spot basis, as in integrating a foreign idiom, witticism, phrase, meaningfully in the middle of a thought expressed otherwise in your own style and language.

The English are addicted to this.  Maybe it's their (formerly) classical, public school educations.  Harry Potter and all that Latin & Greek.  Auden certainly was fond of dropping a French or German expression into a line of poetry, not to mention his weakness for Latin.  American poets of a certain artistic class like using foreign words, too.  Gary Snyder often drops Japanese and Chinese phrases, sometimes even ideograms (a la Ezra Pound) into his poems.

Why do we do this?  Speaking from experience, I can say that I'm motivated in more ways than one.  Just to show off is one motivation, I'll admit.  Another, and related motive, is to be cute or clever, delivering that je ne sais quoi insight, incorrectly, at just the right time.  Indulging the occasional "untranslatable" expression from French or German or Portuguese or Latin (for me, a veteran bourgeois American, that other tongue must always belong to a Romance language) is an act of self-regard, no?

But there is another motivating factor for me, and especially when I borrow from the Romance languages: the music that can be produced in a poem.

I prefer listening to Italian and German opera because I don't understand what's being said-sung.  I also love listening to Brazilian bossanova and samba and Portuguese fado for the same reason.  When I listen to these musics, I hear voices as musical instruments; I hear the music of the languages the songs are sung in.  I hear mellifluousness, stress, pause and staccato.  I hear pitch and trill, crescendo and resolution, tempo and cadence.  I take meaning from out of the physical utterances, not the abstractions of reference.  Of course, I "hear" these elements as well in English, but that hearing is always accompanied by (adulterated by?) "plot" or "development" of the story line, that is, more dramaturgical aspects.  For me, emotion is communicated more intimately and immediately through sound, music, than through plot.  (Visual imagery is another matter--emotion communicated through other senses.)

Inserting a foreign language word or phrase into a poem has the same effect.  It is as much an aural-musical addition as a plot-driving device.  I may wish to understand what the word or phrase "means" in my native language, denotatively, but first I get to experience what it "means" musically in the context of the line or sentence or stanza in which it appears.  (Note: it had better "make sense" logically within the poem eventually; otherwise, it's just a toss-off, a gesture.)

And that is the challenge of this project, to insert a foreign phrase or word that excites some music but also adheres to the story you are telling, the meaning you are making.

So as they say, mes amis, vaya con dios.

Lisel Mueller, 1924-2020

The Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Lisel Mueller, died in February, 96 years old.  She had been living in a retirement community--an odd detail to absorb.  I don't think of poets retiring, even less living in such places.  They're artists.  Artists age in place, surrounded by amanuenses and admirers, their every need anticipated and accommodated.  

I spent part of the day last week after reading the NYT obituary, searching my shelves for poems by her or mentions of her work.  I looked through anthologies of work published in the last forty years, particularly in the mid- to late 1990s, around the time Mueller received the Pulitzer.  I looked through the tables of contents and indexes of critical studies.  I searched my memory for poems by her.  Nothing.

So how is it that I recognize the name so readily?  Why did that name feel so familiar in the obit's headline?  Most likely, I've seen the name and the books among various book stores' poetry selections, and passed over them for other poets' books.  A name so immediately recognizable, but a life's work so unknown, overlooked.  Maybe that's on me.

Maybe that's on the poetry establishment, just a little.

At any rate, it's not too late to fix the ignorance.

Ernesto Cardinal, 1925-2020

Ernesto Cardinal, 1925-2020

All,

Above is a link to the NYT's obituary on Ernesto Cardinal, the Nicaraguan poet who died yesterday in Managua.

He put a human face on geopolitics and this country's interference in Latin American life, culture, government, and freedoms.

Appropriation (3.1.20)

Curt had an idea for a project that will be fun to take on . . . not for this coming Wednesday, but for the following week (March 11), to give you time to think and feel it through. That is, to write a poem of your own from a favorite first line of someone else’s poem.

This will be an interesting exercise in appropriation.

But before we get into the project, a few words about what I hope this project is not: misappropriation. Appropriation has often been a sensitive topic among writers and artists. I read a piece recently taking certain famous art movements (Cubism, Fauvism) to task for appropriating indigenous art and culture for their own artistic purposes. (Not to be confused with the formal concept of appropriation, especially in painting, where the artist incorporates objects into a composition "as is," as in Duchamps' famous "ready-mades.")

The sensitive form of appropriation I'm talking about here is really expropriation--lifting a cultural element out of context without understanding or "earning" it. Last year, a young poet was accused of appropriating (expropriating) not just black culture, but a man's homelessness, by adopting a "black voice" and "black" locutions in a poem. He is, of course, a young, white Midwesterner. He was admonished by some in the press to "stay in his own lane." He was later defended by an African American scholar who argued that the locutions the poet used were all accurate and current; technically, the poem was spot on, even if written by a Midwestern white dude.

The appropriation this project wants is of a different, and less freighted kind, I hope.

Have you ever read a poem and thought, “If I had written that line, I’d have taken it in a different direction”? Or maybe you simply admired the line for what it is, a memorable piece of sense and syntax! 

Well, now is your chance to play with that memorable line. So try this: 

• Re-read a poem that you admire. Note how it begins, builds, then arrives at its final line, how it is constructed (sense and syntax), the music it makes from line to line, its word choices, its cadence, point of view, and so on, as well as the theme it develops.
• Using this poem’s first line as your own, write a new poem. You can try to mimic the original in terms of form and meter and/or theme, or you can depart from the original and let the borrowed line take your poem where it wants to go.
• At our Wednesday, March 11 session, bring both poems, the original and the new. No need to make extra copies of the original, but do bring one copy that can be passed around the table.

The temptation, I imagine, will be for humor or some other easy sentiment, or maybe for a clever rhyme scheme or turn of phrase. But don’t just go there automatically. Think about this project: given the first line of the poem you select to work with, where would you take a poem from there? Is there something in that line—a modulation of voice, a style of image, a syntax, a level of diction, a potential theme—that suggests to you where to go?

Your poem need not become a comment on the original, though that’s certainly an option. It can simply be a new destination from the same beginning.

Have fun!  Write better!

-C