Discipline and indiscipline in poetry writing (8.26.20)

Just this past week I had a conversation about craft with a fellow writer of poetry.  We talked about style, tone and voice; about the work of drafting and revising; about converting experience from raw thought and feeling into cooked art, through the medium of language.  We talked about mistakes and the problem of recognizing when a poem is finished and "good," and, in this context, about intention and outcome.

The subject of discipline came up several times, explicitly and implicitly--discipline and its mirror opposite, indiscipline.  That idea has stuck with me.

Discipline is the same in any human endeavor, be it poetry writing or dribbling a basketball.  Skill comes from it.  Mastery never comes without it.  No matter how talented or precocious you are--and there have been many, many precocious poets (Rimbaud, Paul Muldoon)--discipline determines how good you really become, how you improve, even if you start out writing from a higher plane of capability than most.

What's discipline exactly?  There's nothing exact about it.  Discipline is as various and personal as every writer, like voice and style.  Your discipline may be my deathly writing process.  Mine may be your stone wall beyond which you can never go.  Another's may be our slippery slope to mediocrity.

If you scroll through the many entries of this ongoing blog, you'll find I am sure that discipline is a frequent subject by some other name.  I've written about the importance of making a commitment to writing poetry.  I've written about the need, or at least benefits, of making poems internally consistent.  I've written also about revising a poem especially when you think that first draft is the one.  I've done a series on the "habits" of writing poetry.

One thing poetry writing discipline is is simply getting down to the task of it, sitting down at your desk and doing the work.  If you want to write poetry, then get busy writing poems.  

But I think I am talking now about a different sort of discipline.  It's the discipline of keeping your poem aloft while gravity constantly pulls its parts and pieces down around your feet.  (I like this metaphor because I once taught myself how to juggle!)  How does one do that?

Discipline means understanding, eventually, what your poem tries to be, then channeling everything in that direction: diction, image, tone, voice, line, figure of speech, detail, point of view, persona.  Discipline can also mean not overdoing these things, concentrating too much on mechanics and technique so that your poem starts to feel bolted together rather than something grown organically from an idea and a feeling.  

Above all, discipline means recognition: seeing in your draft that this line contradicts the sense of the earlier line; that this image isn't quite appropriate to the feeling, or is cliched; that the flow you achieve in the draft makes for pretty sound, but not much else; that a reader who is not you might not hear or see or feel what you do when you reread this passage or that sequence of words. Discipline means recognizing that your poem has achieved its becoming, it has become, and it is finished, and any further editing will only detract.

This kind of discipline is hard; it's the hardest work of writing poetry and the part that most weekend poets abandon with abandon.  If what you want is to be a weekend poet, more power to you, so long as you don't believe that you're writing real poetry, that is, making art.

I can always tell when I'm writing in an undisciplined way--I'm paying close attention to everything but the verbal icon at hand, or to its possibilities and limitations, at least.  A voice inside my head tells me this is good stuff, that's a neat way of putting it, this obscure reference is okay because it's the only one in the draft, that lazy locution is acceptable (because I am too lazy to think up a better one), this draft is good enough, or, worst of all, THIS IS HOW I FEEL.  I am a poet.  I get to break all the rules, or, the rules don't apply.  It's how I feel.

I don't have to show such work to too many people to confirm what I think is true about my draft.  It's clear in their reactions: either they find the poem "perfect," "beautiful," "n'ere so well express'd" without having taken more than a few seconds to scan it; or they say something like, "Well, I never understood this stuff anyway."  Of course, I knew this before I handed the draft to these readers.

Is there some conclusion here?  Not really.  Well, maybe.  Discipline is not peculiar to poetry or even to art.  But it is vital.  Indiscipline is fatal.

Inter-art collaborations (8.15.20)

If you've never collaborated with an artist who works with forms outside your own (say, painting, dance, music, sculpture), you're missing joy and discovery.  I highly recommend giving it a try.  In fact, let's do a project!

A friend and long-time inter-art collaborator, Barbara Nathanson, sent me an email with a link to an interview she gave recently about her art and career.  The interviewer asks about her process, and in answering, Barbara explains:

"I like to work with the serendipity of chance. It keeps presenting new imagery to work with and an excitement of discovery. I layer a texture mix, let it dry, paint it, sand it, add another layer of texture mix, dry, paint, repeat until the imagery/surface “becomes” what it is meant to become."

This statement virtually jumped off the page at me!  Accounting for the analogy of layering textures as a repeating process, I can say that Barbara describes my own writing process perfectly.  So often in Wednesdays@One commentary, I and my fellow poetry writers confirm how a poem builds "until the imagery/surface 'becomes' what it is meant to become."  Only, we don't put "becomes" inside quotation marks--we accept that poems will become what they become, that our skills and talents as writers of them lie mainly in our ability to nudge and prod, shape and direct, but otherwise get out of the way of that becoming.  Our creativity has as much to do with "letting" the poem become as it has to do with "making" the poem.

All of this "letting," of course, says something about our relationship to art, and particularly to poetry.  We are as much midwife as progenitor.  (What should go without saying here--but I'll say it anyway--is that the more experience we garner as midwives, the better we understand the tradition of midwifery and its history, the better midwives we are.)

Barbara and I worked together from about 1993 until 2003-4 on a poetry-to-painting project that resulted in more than 150 poems and dozens of paintings.  Here's how it worked.  It began with a shoebox full of old plastic microfiches used to catalog a bookstore's inventory. (A bookstore in downtown L.A. was converting its inventory to electronic digital files from thousands of these microfiches.)  Barbara, ever the enterprising worker of materials, wanted to repurpose some of these cards as an art installation for an upcoming show and asked me to create a "found poem" from some of the contents, that she might post as part of the installation.  

Well, I failed miserably, after a weekend of trying to come up with something I'd feel comfortable sharing with an art public.  I'd gleaned over 150 "lines" of text from these microfiches that just read like a list of words, hardly like lines of a poem.  Sleeping on it, I realized however that what I'd actually created was not a poem of 150+ lines, but a list of 150+ titles of possible poems, poems to be written . . . somehow, someday.  With apologies, I admitted my failure to Barbara but proposed a new project--to begin making poems from some of those titles, poems from which she might find inspiration for new paintings. 

Lucky for me, Barbara a) had already given up on the first idea of an installation, and b) was intrigued by the idea of a longer-term collaboration.  And so I got busy.  And so Barbara got busy.  And so a long and fruitful collaboration was born.  I don't know whether Barbara maintains any of the original collaboration on her website (check it out under the link provided to right, in the "Take a Look" section of this blog), but you'll at least get an idea of the style and breadth of her art.

All of which leads me to a new project for W@1: collaborations.  This project likely will take a while, so let's put a deadline on it of December 15, 2020 (in time to produce holiday gifts?).  Find an art and an artist with whom you'd like to work and who'd like taking on a small art-to-art project.  Propose a way of working together, such as exchanging existing work and responding to it via your particular art; prompting each other with a theme or an image; or some other approach.

The catch is this: your collaboration must produce something new on both sides.  So, for example, you can't just go out to some friend's web site, find a painting, then write an ekphrastic piece about it.  No, no, no, no, no!  Both you and your collaborator must produce something new from the collaboration.  (This is why we're giving ourselves the rest of the summer and all of fall to complete this project.)  

You might have a collaborator in mind already and might be able to get a jump on things, and might even produce something by next week!  But my suggestion is this . . . give it some thought.  Take your time.  Invite some back and forth between you and your collaborator--collaborate!--see what happens.  Sometimes, Barbara's painting would respond to a single image, even a musical phrase in a poem I'd sent to her.  Sometimes, after seeing a painting, I'd write a different poem influenced by color or line or image or material.  A color might evoke a memory or a feeling or a sensual experience that would serve as the starting point for a poem, and the finished product would appear to have nothing to do with the painting at all.  My poems were not "about" her paintings, nor were her paintings "about" my poems.

In an area like RTP, you shouldn't have any trouble finding an artist with whom you can work.  Have fun!