But that's what I wish my poem to mean . . . (5.31.20)

I'm always fascinated by statements like this one.  Its "but" opening gambit indicates not just a defense of whatever the writer of a poem has written, but an attitude about criticism and how an author handles it.  The "I wish" portion of the statement, duly couched mid-sentence, expresses not just desire but authority; that is, the authoriness of the author's authored thing.  It's as if to say, I wrote it and that alone makes my poem meaningful.  And then we come as we must to the end of the statement: "to mean."

Often, you'll hear this statement after someone--a reader, a workshop cohort, a critic--questions someone's use of language, diction, image, tone of voice, persona, and so on.  The poet has labored over the poem for some amount of time, has made some critical decisions here and there about what to put down, what to take out, what to leave in, and what to replace in the drafting process (assuming there has been a process).  And now the poem says (means) what the author wishes it to mean.

The problem with meaning is not just whether it is valid and acceptable or whether it is the result of deep thought and feeling or hard work:

"This really happened.  I deserve an 'A'!"

"This really affected me.  I deserve an 'A'!"

"I worked hard on this.  I deserve an 'A'!"

In some ways, the problem with meaning is its ownership and, beyond that, how that ownership is established (I would say, earned).  But most importantly, the problem of meaning in a poem has to do with recognition: knowing what I actually mean in any poem I have written.

I can tell you from long experience that often enough I don't know what a poem means, what I wish it to mean, until I've written the poem.  And even then what I mean (in the poem) emerges only slowly, in pieces, through multiple re-writings and re-readings, and may induce me to revise yet again the better to amplify that emerging meaning.  This, for me, is true of even the simplest poems that I write.

I find that my weakest writing is the result of starting out with a specific meaning in mind, a meaning I wish the poem to get to.  When I've stated that meaning, revealed it in lines and images, voila!  A finished poem!  This approach--which is intellectual as well as procedural--handcuffs the writing process.  It closes off, artificially, possibilities and opportunities for the poem to become a poem. It makes the poem less art, more rhetoric.  It is the intellectual equivalent of paint-by-number.

And it is cheating (the poem).

So how does a poem come to mean anything?  It will tell you how and when it begins to mean.  More importantly, a poem will tell you what it begins to mean . . . if you're paying attention to it. You're job as the poet is to follow where the poem leads.  It will give you a pathway here, close one off there, if you're paying attention (and being honest with yourself and your process).  In a very Aristotelian fashion, the poem you are writing will come to be; it will move from what was possible to say and to mean at the start of the process to what is likely or probable, finally to what it must mean.

And this necessary meaning may look nothing at all like the meaning you had in mind at the start of the process, though it may be traceable to that original intent.  After all, it was the intent that set you down at your desk with the will to write something.  But the great art of writing poetry depends on the poem arriving at a meaning as the result of actual writing, not of intention.  You follow whatever path the poem presents, and if the poem offers more than one way through, you choose.  And that's you being the author.

Then and only then can you rightly say, that's what I wish my poem to mean.

The Six-Word Poem (5.29.20)

We have dabbled in haiku and other Eastern forms, as well as in limerick and “Instagram-verse.”  But we haven’t tried to write a complete Western-style poem in as few as 6 words.  

So, our project for next Wednesday: write a poem in six words.  

What do I mean by "Western-style poem"?  For one thing, I mean a poem that does not attempt a radical ellipsis, that does not, like haiku, follow strict rules, such as "seasonal," "surprise," "nature," elided parts of speech, or "numbers" (that is, strict syllable counts, as we tend to perceive haiku here in the West).*

What we should strive for here is a complete poem—a poem that tries to deploy as many of the tools, techniques, figures that we have studied at W@1 as you can put into it.  Like the poems you ordinarily write for W@1.  What?  For a refresher on many of those tools and techniques, scroll back through the various topics and projects in the blog archive to the right of this text block.

Personally, I'd love to see poems that do any or all of the following:

• Use standard English grammar and punctuation: articles, conjunctions, subordinating pronouns, commas and semi-colons, periods.  
• Tell a story with a beginning, middle, and an end; that is, a narrative poem.  
• Turn on a volta (thus creating a "before" and an "after," a propositoin and a conclusion, or a generalization followed by an illustration or vice versa).  
• Unfold in stanzas and/or rhyme scheme.  
• Incorporate a strong voice, a persona or "speaker."  
• Establish a point of view and perhaps comments on that point of view (see volta above).  
• Develop (perhaps, extend?) an image or a metaphor.

Now, your first temptation will be to eliminate what you think are extraneous parts of speech, in order to get to your six-word target.  HOWEVER, DO NOT DROP ARTICLES, PRONOUNS, RELATIVE PRONOUNS, CONJUNCTIVES OR OTHER GRAMMATICAL DEVICES THAT YOU WOULD NORMALLY DEPLOY IN A LONGER LYRIC, NARRATIVE OR CONTEMPLATIVE POEM.  You needn't go out of your way to incorporate every part of standard speech into your poem; only, don't write a voiceless snapshot of your back yard that is all nouns and adjectives.

One of our guiding principles at W@1 is Bennett's dictum: poems must move, they must go somewhere.  

Write a poem in six words that does just that.  In fact, you might want to write a handful of them, first to get the hang of the brevities of this project, then to have something to choose from for next week.

Have fun!

*Of course, you can put season into your poem, you can make nature its subject or locus, you can introduce a surprise or a twist, and you can count syllables, if you wish.  What I'm saying here is, no haiku, haibun or anything "snap-shotty" like those forms.

Why a draft poem "feels right" (5.28.20)

I know you've experienced this phenomenon.  You've been working on a poem--first draft, second, maybe a third--making changes as you add new lines, images, paragraphs or stanzas, ideas.  Eventually, and sometimes suddenly, everything about the poem "feels right."  You can't explain why, except in the vaguest or most general of terms: now it has a beginning, middle and end; it moves; the poem arrives somewhere.  Beyond that, it just feels right.

Your poem, finally, reads and moves and makes the kind of sense your mind and body inchoately knew it would when the idea or the spark for it first happened.  Almost as if its present form had been there all along and all you had to do was unearth it.  You're an anthropologist!  An excavator!

But why does a draft of something you've been working on begin to feel right at some point, and what does this mean?

Well, a poem starts to feel right because you've begun to recognize certain elements as you work with it.  These elements are literary conventions.  You are starting to make your poem conform to a tradition that was established long before you took up the pen.  And no matter that you never bothered with earning a Ph.D. in Literature or even took a few courses in poetry writing in high school or college.  Somewhere along the line, you absorbed the conventions you've now begun to see in your poem, that make it "feel like a poem."

My senior year at university.  I am taking a course in the history of literary theory from Professor Gross, a man whose intelligence and erudition I not only admire but am in awe of.  It's as though he's in constant personal conversation with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Thomas Aquinas, right on up to Jacques Derrida and Frank Lentricchia.  He is a generous man and patient teacher.  I'm not the only student who reveres him.  One day after class, I present to Prof. Gross a small packet of poems I've written, thinking that a man of his intellect and learning ought to be able to tell me whether I've actually written some poems, whether they are any good.  I have no idea whether they are any good, but I want them to be.  Prof. Gross leafs through them briefly and then hands the sheaf back to me.  "Well, they certainly look like poems."

What?  Was?  He?  Saying?

He said exactly this: my efforts fulfilled, on the page, some of the major conventions of Western poetry.  They looked like poems (lines, left justified, stanzas, a title).  Beyond that critique, Prof. Gross was not willing to go.  Workshops were not his thing.  And that is why they "felt like" poems to me.  As to their quality as poems--were they any good--well, that's another matter, one of taste and currency.

A draft poem begins to feel right because it takes on some of the forms and characteristics of all the poetry that has ever been written in your particular tradition.  For our Wednesdays@One cohort, this must mean Western poetry from Homer to what you read in the Sunday New York Times or whatever poetry journal you've subscribed to . . . and also to what your W@1 colleagues bring to the salon each week.  You are steeped in the Tradition of Western poetry; rather, you are waist deep in that Tradition and, like quicksand, you can't extricate yourself from it, even if you try.

And you do try, sometimes.  Trying is what advances poetry and what lends it currency.  Sometimes you only gesture toward the Tradition, as perhaps with a "sonnet" of 15 lines of mixed trimeter.  Sometimes you write what others might call gibberish but what you prefer to call "experimental" poetry.  But experiments are necessarily understood in relation to expectations.  I once overheard a poetry dilettante say of another poetry dilettante's poem, perfect! not a word too much or too little and every word in its proper place!  What Dilettante #1 meant was that Dilettante #2's effort fulfilled, exactly, her expectation of what makes a poem, that is, of the Western Tradition of poetry.

Your poem feels right--feels like a poem--because it deploys the figures, the voices, the meters and rhythms, the points of view, the syntax, the structures, even the themes and the attitudes toward those themes, as well as the emotions you associate with them, that have been handed to you one way or another, formally or otherwise.  That inchoate sense you have of rightness comes from Culture.

How far you stray from what's given, or how hard you try to stray from it, is your business alone--and that is the business of the poet.  The more you're able to do so consciously and conscientiously, the better your writing experience will be, and maybe the better your poems will be, too.

Further thoughts about weeding your garden (5.21.20)

The title's a slant, a misdirection, a feint.  That is, it's a metaphor.  Of course this blog isn't about gardens and weeds.  It's about making poems without extraneous elements.

What follows is a continuation of the blog for May 17, 2019, "Why They Tell You Not to Use Adjectives in Your Poems."

Certainly you may deploy modifiers in your poems.  Stretching the concept, you could say that any figure of speech, like a metaphor for instance, functions as a modifier of whatever thought you're trying to convey.  It highlights the thought, or foregrounds it, or conceals it, or dresses it up or down; it defines your thought or it redefines it; a metaphor, like any other modifier, limits the sense in which you wish your thought to be regarded, understood.  The red barn says something meaningfully greater than the barn.  And here's a paradox for you: it says something meaningfully less as well, something more restricted.

But you can overdo the modifying thing sometimes.  And the less experienced writer will almost always deploy more modifiers, usually in the form of adjective-noun clusters or adverb-verb pairs than a poem can bear.  Here's what that looks like:

The red barn
stood in the green field
under a blue sky
mottled with fluffy white clouds.

Beyond, an aging shepherd
drove home a lowing herd
over a gurgling stream
and around a grassy knoll.

The bucolic prospect
was like a beautiful painting,
something for a grand museum,
but it was not a painting.

It was real life.

I don't trust you, my reader, to see what I see in this "bucolic scene."  And so I insert modifiers--adjectives--like nails, to fasten the meaning.  I don't trust you to see that the barn is red or the field green.  Though nothing in my poem quite reveals why this should be important to you or to me.  I don't trust you to look up and see that the clouds in that blue sky aren't just clouds, but fluffy and white.  I want you to know, though I never say why, that the shepherd is old.  And just in case you never learned that streams gurgle and museums are grand structures full of beautiful things, that country scenes like I've just over-described are also known as "bucolic," well . . .

The operative word here is trust and, as a writer you should understand that the reader will feel that lack of trust.  This is not (always) the relationship you should want to establish with your reader!

If the above poem were a garden, it would be a pretty weedy affair--not much room for fruits and vegetables or shoots and blooms.  Virtually every noun is led by an adjective meant to limit the meaning of that noun to the writer's sense of it, that is, to recreate as nearly as possible what the writer (thought he) saw in that country prospect.  But was the barn really red?  What kind of red?  I grew up in the Midwest where the barns are decidedly a tired red.  What does that mean?  And since most of us think of red when we think of barns, do I even need "red" in my image?  What if I just wrote "the tired barn"?  And what might that say about me, that I'm tired?  And is being tired or coming to the end of things (like the end of a shepherd's day) what the poem is really about?

What if I just removed the modifying material?  Let's see.

The barn
stood in a field
under a sky
with clouds.

Beyond, a shepherd
drove a herd
over a stream
and around a knoll.

The prospect
was like a painting,
something for a museum,
but it was not a painting.

It was work.


What I'm dong in the paragraph above is what you should be doing as a poet every time you come up against a noun that you want to modify (limit, expand, undermine, exaggerate, amplify) with a preceding adjective.  (Alert: sometimes the adjective doesn't precede; sometimes it follows, as in, "the barn is red"; but to much the same effect).  What you should be doing is thinking more deeply about the nouns and verbs you write into your poems.  You should be asking yourself whether these parts of speech actually need to be modified and, if you decide they do, then to what effect?  You should explore how they work without any modifiers, and what effect this has on the poem.  You should be thinking about options, such as synonyms for the nouns and verbs you're working with, and how these might be more effective (emotionally, vocally, rhythmically, visually) than the nouns and verbs you presently have in place.

Admittedly, doing the above is hard work.  That's writing!  This kind of decision-making or exploratory word-choosing is what craft is all about.  Next time a poem leaps or flows out of you in a single sitting, without much head-scratching or sighing or you pacing about stuck for a word, phrase or image, take a look at the product.  How much of it is easy nouns choked off by easy adjectives?

If the answer is too much, get up (at least metaphorically) from your desk and pace for a while.  Go in search of a hoe and a rake and start pulling out the weeds.

Acrostic poetry 5.13.20

My Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics includes a short entry on acrostic poetry.  The form is as old as the Psalms (119), and older perhaps.  Acrostic has been used to encrypt a message, especially if the acrostic part of a poem comes in the middle of the line; and it has been deployed to celebrate a loved one, a ruler or patron.  It has been used by poets to self-identify, without actually having to write I am here and I wrote this! the way painters sometimes paint themselves unobtrusively into a scene.

Acrostic poems make for fun but challenging exercises (alert!) that require us to hue to a technical formula while still making a work of art.  The form isn't taken all that seriously by most writers; it is light verse, usually.  A quick google search of "acrostic poetry" yields mostly games for kids.  A search of the Poetry Foundation this afternoon turns up one poem labeled as an acrostic.  You can find discussion and examples of acrostic here on the Academy of American Poets web pages.

Acrostic poetic structures are various.  The most common, of course, is the initial acrostic where the first letter (or word) of each line is part of a word, name or expression when spelled out vertically.  The poem linked above at the Poetry Foundation site is an initial-letter version that spells out ELAINE IN AUGUST.  Other versions include mid-line letters or end-line letters (or words); the first letter (or sometimes word) of a stanza.  (The same can be done in prose; for instance, the first word or letter of each paragraph.)

Acrostics are, basically, linguistic and textual problems to solve; they are puzzles to build and to discover/interpret.  For us at W@1, they're just fun and challenging--a good poetic exercise.  So . . .

I will send to each of you a name spelled out vertically.  Each letter in the name will represent the first letter of each line of the poem you will write.  You will recognize the name.  In fact, you will know the person whose name you receive.

Your challenge will be to write a poem--a truly serious poem, not a clever rhymer or a piece of fluff--using that name as your launch pad.  The poem can be about whatever you wish, about the person whose name you are working with, or anything else that stirs your imagination.  When I say yours should be "a truly serious poem," I don't necessarily mean a piece of melancholy or high philosophy or polemic or metaphysic or even that it should be "sober."  I mean that it should be a poem--your best effort to render language artistically, lines that move and are moving, images that reach out and grab, metaphors that kickstart or arrest, and so on.

Have you ever read
A poem that invites you to
Veer off in strange,
Enticing directions

Fearlessly, and puts you
Under no obligation
Necessarily to return?

Dorian's Poem (5.10.20)

Anne Sexton once described a finished poem as "last year's cold."

We can take at least a couple of messages from this odd statement.  One, writing is akin to sickness--fever, aches and pains, snot, coughing, boiling guts, depression--that must be suffered through, an ague that that returns each new effort and must be suffered again.  And two, a finished poem is  . . . finished.  There's no going back to it.  What "finished" means, of course, is a subjective thing, all in the writer's head but also a part of convention, for most of us consider our work "finished" when it has achieved what looks and feels like a poem.

Some poems, though, are not finished.  We write drafts, give up, come back to them, give up again, slip them into a manila folder marked "DRAFTS," and file them away in a desk drawer.  They aren't "done," but we are "done" with them.  For the time being.

I'm not talking here about fragments, stray lines or images that we jot down throughout the day as these come to us unbidden and that we keep in a journal or on scraps of paper for later use (like the strips of proto-poems in Bennett's sewing basket).  Nor do I mean those failed "exercises" that we save, hoping to mine them at some later writing of some other poem.

I mean those formalized efforts--the bidden--which we begin with every expectation of producing a full-fledged work of art sooner rather than later, but which resist us.  The poem-in-progress whose basic form, message, tone, voicing we mean to preserve pretty much as we first imagined it, however inchoately.  These are the poems we wrestle to a draw but believe we can still pin to the mat.

Maybe this is just stubbornness, or our neurotic inability to walk away from an investment.  It sure feels that way to me about some of the poems I've kept filed away in a two-drawer metal cabinet for, in some cases, 40 years.

There is one poem, titled "October Abstract," that has nagged me since at least the early 1980s.  I labored over it through maybe 50 drafts in the first months, each draft changing only cosmetically from the previous.  I kept writing and then copying it, first in longhand, then on a typewriter, over and over, hoping, I guess, that one of those copies would be the poem I was after.  How pathetic is that?!  Eventually, I produced and saved so many nearly identical drafts that I entered the entire set into a book-art show, as a comment on the narcissism of art and creativity: all the drafts were crumpled up and tossed into a waste can with the title "October Abstract" taped to the outside.  But the truly creepy thing was that after the book-art show was taken down, I smoothed out each crumpled draft as best I could and refiled the lot.  This was in the early 1990s.  They lurk today in that filing cabinet, calling me back to into the ring.

The poem mocks me.  It's that cold that I never quite got over.  Like a virus, it has been with me for most of my adult life, returning from time to time to my imaginative consciousness as a kind of flare-up.

That poem has stayed there unchanged all these years, even while I've changed, as a person, a writer, a poet.  I haven't looked at it in seven or eight years now, but as a part of the project I'm about to propose, I'm going back into the ring with it.  As always, I'll go back resolved to settle things once and for all with this piece.  If I give myself the space to think about it, though, I'll have no confidence that anything will change: this poem is a living example of the business canard, insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.  But I'm going to pull that thing out today and take another crack at it.  Who knows, maybe this time . . . ?

---------

And so this project.  Go to your files.  Find a poem that you wrote so long ago that you're no longer the same person who wrote it.  Like the story of Dorian's Picture, one of you has moved on, aged, while the other has remained unchanged.  Pull that poem out and re-read it.  Maybe you believed early on that it was "finished," and maybe upon re-reading it you still believe so.  Or maybe you'll see something different.  Bring the poem to our next session.  We'll talk about who you were--or thought you were--when you wrote it.

This will be weird.