Sicko poet (4.30.20)

Is writing a kind of illness?

I wonder what makes me think of this subject today?

It's a cliché of literary history that writers, poets often enough, are head cases, mentally or emotionally unstable individuals who turn to writing perhaps to expel their demons, or, perhaps more truthfully, to engage them.

When you think about it, writing poetry--I mean seriously--is kind of a sick thing to do.  There's no money in it.  Nobody reads it, except others who do the same sick thing.

A friend and poet once observed that poems can't be fun or funny, that even a frivolous line of it conceals some pain, some personal disaster.

Hmm.

Sylvia Plath.  Anne Sexton.  Robert Lowell.  John Berryman.  Deborah Digges.  Weldon Kees.  Hart Crane.

What makes a person withdraw into verse rather than explode into it?  Poetry and the Dark Night of the Soul!

Sicko poets.

Just kidding.  I think.

Bird watching, poetry writing, and our pandemic-induced solitude (4.29.20)

I read this little piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.  It caught my attention because birds often grab my attention as well.  Birds and bird images are staples of my poems.  My bricked-in courtyard, with its protective maple, overhanging crepe myrtles and bushy archipelagos, is a bird sanctuary of nests, baths, forage, and feeders.

Over the years, my wife and I have stood transfixed at one window or another as hawks, buzzards, grackles, owls, jays, robins, sparrows, turtle doves, cardinals, finches, redbirds, bluebirds and hummingbirds compete for water, roost, nest materials, seed, and whatever else birds require, not to exclude privacy, security and space.  We've watched as pairs of cardinals and turtle doves build nests and produce families, then as predators descend on the vulnerable young.  We've enjoyed countless hours watching birds of all stripe and hue frolic (do birds frolic?) in the bird bath that is the altar of our courtyard's design.  We've surrendered the space to them when it was clear they had more claim to it than we.  And we've chased off the offenders, the marauders, the thieves with not a little hesitation, knowing that even the jay cruelly raiding the robin's nest is driven to it by nature and the same need to eat that we have.

So what does the Magazine's essay on bird watching have to do with this blog on poetry?  As the above paragraph may imply, observation.  Seeing the details.  (Related: see the blog entry on observation for 1.23.19.)  Which is the one thing that I try to impress on my Wednesdays@One cohort every week and in every poem.  Write as broad brush as you like, thematically speaking.  But get down to the detail.  Only through significant detail can you access or express meaningful thought and feeling, the kind of thought and feeling that makes reading your poem worthwhile.

As a practice, I tend to overwrite first drafts of poems, to go heavy on imagery and the minutae of a scene, a field of perception (visual, oral-aural, gustatory, prehensile, olfactory).  I put down on paper far more than the poem I'm trying to write can support.  I know what I'm creating is a mini-encyclopedia of material from which I can make a poem in successive drafts.  I make, in a first draft, a large block of granite or marble that successive drafting will chip away at until the shape emerges that the material and the heart "see" in potential.

It's this cataloguing approach that demands patient observation, like seeing and hearing the behaviors of the birds on my courtyard, and that stills me.  This wild pandemic, that has harmed so many of us already, also offers opportunity.  We can sit bored and restless, constantly at our screens following the latest tidbits of viral gossip and sniping, watching the graphs climb and fall and flatten, or we can embrace our enforced isolation, make something of it.  We can slow our minds and attend to the worlds we live in, however constricted they may seem.

Eavan Boland, 1944 - 2020

She will not receive the attention that was showered on Yeats or Heaney at their passing, but she deserves as much and more.  She crashed the canon.

Like so many Irish writers, she had to leave Ireland to write, to find an audience.  But as this NYT obituary reminds us, she spoke of and for an audience of women and mothers -- "outsiders" in an outsider country -- when few others did.

Transport of the Senses (4.21.20)

We've taken on a project at Wednesdays@One that is at once too close to our dailiness and too peculiar to talk about easily.  I had to think for a moment or two to put a title to this blog entry.  Transport of the senses?  What does that mean?

What I hope it means, and what I hope this little project clarifies for us--or teaches us--is how a sensory perception can immediately, sometimes forcefully, remove us to another place and time.  In this regard, think Proust and madeleines.

So already I can see the inadequacy of my title.  We're not talking about the senses, exactly, or sensory perception, but memory.  Still, what I've challenged you, colleagues, to write about isn't so much what you remember (as in, a place, a time, a thought or feeling about either), but that surprise slippage, sometimes jolt, into a past that a certain sound, smell, cast of light, touch or taste precipitates.  I've asked you to think and write about the evocation of a familiar world via some cookie dipped into your tea.

I believe this happens to all of us every day.  We encounter a certain aroma or fragrance, a measure or two of a melody, a brush of a particular fabric, that reminds us of a time and a place.  "Reminds" might not be appropriate, either.  "Re-feel" might be the better descriptor.  That brief, almost inconsequential encounter takes us out of our day, our task or thought of the moment--it takes us out of the moment!--through a rent in time to another us, a former us.  It brings an extinct version of us back to life, if only for a few seconds.

But we ignore this brief transport, as inconsequential, a distraction from more urgent things.  Reverie is good for poets, but the rest of us have our day to get through.  This project asks us to be poets once again, to set aside whatever chore or care we may have at the moment, and to try to focus on that something that does it for us every time, that very intimate something.

Intimate is the key word here.  We can all think of a piece of music, a popular song, a melody that evokes an earlier time and place for us.  But really, how intimate is that?  I sometimes hear a song by a 60s Brit folk rock band named Fairport Convention and am taken back to the wooly 1960s.  But that's not really what this project is about.  That's too common, too public, too . . . communal.  Nothing truly personal there!

The kind of transport I'm talking about is brought about, abruptly, by that madeleine that launches Proust's world.  In my case, a certain olfactory sensation has always done the trick; and that is the smell of a dusty, long-closed up space, that musty fragrance that transports me instantaneously to boyhood and a particular cottage on a channel leading to a lake.  That smell evokes the colors, textures, sounds, rhythms, as well as the excitements and boredoms of the summers spent there in childhood.  I come across that smell in irregular places, like sometimes when opening a book that has not been taken off the shelf in many years.

And that's what I'm trying to write a poem about, or for, or to.  I hope that's what you're trying too.

Plastic language (4.2.20)

The title of this blog piece ought to suggest where it's headed: syntax.  That is, the relationship between or among words and grammatical constructions in a sentence.  Sounds pretty dry, doesn't it?  Yes, okay, but think about what mastery of syntax can mean for your writing.  Think what an improved appreciation for and sensitivity to the plasticity of language can do for your art.

Massaging the elements of a sentence, moving thoughts and modifiers, relative clauses, phrases and such around from first place to last to intermediate positions, affects tone, mood, pace, rhythm, pitch and voice.  And because it affects these, it affects meaning as well--how it is delivered to your mind as you read: in small bites, broad brush strokes, forwards or backwards, haltingly or in a torrent or with balance and precision, a light or a heavy touch.

Our project

Write a poem in which you move sentence parts around, in an initial position, a medial position, a final position, to hear (and see) how these movements affect your poem's tone, pacing, release of information, etc.  Bring the version you are most intrigued by or satisfied with to our next salon for sharing; be prepared to share also your experience, to explain how you interacted with the process and built toward the version you've brought to show us.  For more guidance, read on . . .

Here's the part of the poem I have just been reading in the current issue of Rattle that put me in mind of this topic and for our next project:

Let's say: we never made love in the dune shack--
We kissed and walked away, dunes glassy around us.
We gazed out to sea, we never looked back.
We tell ourselves: we never made love in the dune shack.
We stopped short, where the weathered driftwood found us,
And turned away in the lee of the dune grass.
We never made love, we say, in the dune shack.
We kissed and walked away, the dunes glassy around us.

This poem, by Carolyn Wright, and titled "Triolets on a Dune Shack," is exactly what its title announces.  It's a triolet poem, which is usually made of eight-line stanzas rhyming ABaAaBAB, where the capital letters represent lines repeated verbatim.  This might make a fun project sometime, but let's say: save that for another project.

For now, just focus on lines 1, 4 and 7 of the stanza above.  Note that these are repeated nearly verbatim, but not quite verbatim, and it's the "not quite" parts that I want to draw your attention to.  Line 1 opens with "Let's say:", to get the stanza off to a suitably situational or hypothetical tone, as if saying, "for argument's sake, let's say . . ."  (This is the second and completing stanza of the poem.  The first posits the opposite: "we made love in the dune shack.")  That opener, with its colon, is meant to focus attention.  It also establishes a rhetorical framework, that of argumentation, of a proposition being laid down.  And as you know, all propositions invite you to read on for the inevitable conclusion(s) to be drawn.

In a triolet, you expect that lines 4 and 7 will simply repeat this opening statement.  In this example, you should also expect that the repetitions will help to advance the proposition toward some concluding remark or observation.  And they do, after a fashion, a more modern fashion: they repeat but not with exactitude.  They riff off of the opening line.

But the opening attention focuser changes in line 4: "We tell ourselves."  The position of the proposition remains the same: initial.  The context of the proposition changes slightly.  The implied "we" of "Let's say" becomes more explicit; and rather than debating a point among some unknown others, we are now talking to ourselves.  Are "ourselves" the two lovers who never made love in the dune shack?  Who exactly is being addressed here, and what is your situation, as a reader, vis a vis the action or unfolding information of the poem?

This argument for argument's sake tone remains in line 7, where again the post-colon statement is rendered verbatim.  But in this case the arresting or pointing colon has disappeared and the framing proposition ("Let's say:" and "We tell ourselves") has moved.  It now is inserted into the middle of the statement--you, the reader, are made to wait for it--and its conditionality has been replaced by something more declarative: "we say."

Why am I going into such detail with these three simple lines of poetry?  Mainly, it's to highlight the plastic quality of the constructions, how parts and pieces of a statement can be plucked from one grammatical position and dropped into another, with corresponding effects on tone, pacing, meaning.  What caught my eye immediately upon reading this poem the first time was how deftly the poet used the rules of English grammar to enhance these aspects of her poem.  She treats each line as a series of highly interchangeable, malleable grammatical elements that can be moved here and there for effect.

Did the poet set out to do this sort of thing?  Maybe.  Without inquiring directly, how are we to know?  Maybe she "arrived" at this shape through pure experimentation, as in, "I wonder what the effect would be on this line if I moved this part of it to the middle . . ."  Maybe she tried tacking the proposition onto the end of the line and decided that was a tack too far.

But she had the options, because English provides them, within the rules of its grammar.  And experienced poets will take advantage.  Which is exactly what I'm challenging you to do, my worthy colleagues!  Give it a try.  Move stuff around.  See what happens.  See you next Wednesday.