Disturbed . . . and writing poems (10.30.20)

This is not a blog for Halloween, despite the blue moon we're expecting tomorrow evening!

I was reading here a review of a new retrospective collection (Vol. 1) of the music of Joni Mitchell.  Recalling her earliest life as a song writer, she says, 

“I think I started writing to develop my own private world . . . and also because I was disturbed.”

I want to say, "Well, heck yeah!"  Especially of that latter statement, because I was disturbed.  But what a curious way to describe the creative urge.

Now, Mitchell was speaking at least partly of being abandoned by the father of her first child, which she gave away at adoption when starting out in cold, cold Canada.  (He packed off to California, where "everything is warmer.")  But it got me thinking about how much writing gets done out of some form of disturbance or other.

I'm not going into any essay about poetry and madness.  That's for somebody else to ponder.  What I have in mind is a much less debilitating kind of "disturbed-ness," albeit a kind that certainly interrupts your day without warning. For me, and I think for my friends at Wednesdays@One, and for just about every writer of poetry I've ever encountered, something happens to get me to take a note, write out a line, begin a poem, stay engaged through a first draft.  It might be a memory.  It might be a recognition or an epiphany.  It might be an overheard remark or a rhythm in someone's speech.  

Once, I discovered a black, black house fly on a windowsill.  It was winter and a foot of snow had fallen overnight.  The sill had recently been painted a brilliant white so the fly stood out from this background of whiteness in three glorious dimensions.  It had died there in all that whiteness, just inside a single pane of glass that didn't do much at all to keep out the cold, perfectly balanced and triangular.  It cast a voluptuously small shadow in the sunlight.  It so disturbed my morning's routine that the image imprinted itself, apparently permanently so, if this blog note is any indicator.  And it demanded a poem, which I wrote some weeks later, made of wide, prosy lines and fashioned into three slab-like stanzas of equal length.

Someday I'll explore how that poem's blocky but regular shape reflects the encounter with death it describes, or rather, tries to counterweigh it.  But for here, let it suffice to say I wrote because I was disturbed by that image of black on white and the thought of a mighty event--a creature's death--happening there on the windowsill.  Out of which, a poem must be made.

It's the business of an artist, poets included, to be continually open to disturbance.  I think the rest of the world depends on artists being so.  And there lies one of the commitments we make to art: to be disturbed, and then to make art.

Diane di Prima, 1934 - 2020

So . . . how can Diane di Prima be such a household name in my house and be totally absent from my library?  How can I have most of William Bronk's books on my shelves but nothing by her?  I can't even find an anthology in my collection with poems by Diane di Prima in it!

This says something about me, of course, i.e., the big holes in my reading of American poetry.  It also says something about American publishing of the past sixty or seventy years.  Plenty of Ginsberg out there in the mainline presses.  Not much readily available by or about Ms di Prima, though.

Anyway, Diane di Prima, 1934 - 2020.

The LA Times obituary

Topic sentences . . . (10.13.20)

First things first.  Pretty cool news about Louise Gluck, ay?  I wonder what winning a Nobel does for your artistic psyche?  I'd think it would offer more burden than anything else.  Apparently, Sartre did, too.

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Recently, we discussed a poem in a Wednesdays@One salon where everyone felt the author had lost the thread of the making.  A pattern seemed to be laid down early in the poem which then was abandoned, or in this case simply neglected.  Or maybe just never recognized.  The poem wandered away into thickets of pretty words, and never found its way back.  The author initially tried to justify the errancies, but ultimately was as unconvinced by the poem as the rest of us.

Now, I've said before that poems begin in sound.  Much of their power resides in the spoken word, in rhythm and pitch, in the acoustics of art.  Meaning arises from there, often.  But there is "sound," and then there is sound.  "Sound" is noise.  Almost everything following the opening stanza of this W@1 author's poem veered toward noise.  Sound is form and intention, however illogical or chaotic it may seem at first hearing.  Prettiness usually falls into the "sound" category, art into the sound category.

Before I lose the thread myself, here is our project for next week . . . 

Scroll down to find an assortment of stanzas and/or passages from poems I chose at random from my own library.  Select one of the passages and follow its lead to write a new poem.  Study the passage.  Read it through several times.  Then read it aloud.  Try memorizing it and then reciting it into a mirror.  If you keep a poetry notebook or a journal, write it out there and then break it down, analyze it.  Consider its "statement" and its potential context(s).  Can it be paraphrased, that is, if someone asked, could you say, "This passage is about/describes, introduces, takes us to . . . "?  Ponder its grammar and construction (lineation, syntax, punctuation, subordinations, verbs and tenses).  Note its figures -- metaphors and similes, analogies, personifications, slangs, heightened speech, alliteration, rhyme.  Hear its tones, such as irony, guile, clarity, simplicity, evenness, flourish, grandness or sublime-ness, colloquialism and other folksiness.  Is it a cry?  A shout?  A whisper?  A plea?  Is its language aggressive or dismissive or "healing" or admonitory or analytical or questioning or something else?  Does the passage suggest a rhetorical approach, in addition to the poetic; that is, does it suggest an opinion, a preferred point of view; is it attempting to teach you or convince you?

What I'm asking is that you internalize the piece of poetry you select, in part to make it your own, in part to get a sense of its poetic possibilities -- that is, of your poetic options.  So read through them all and then, if one strikes you as something you can work with, go for it.  But don't just start writing!  Do what I describe in the paragraph above.  Each segment comes from the beginning of a poem that some poet has already written and published.  I've chosen relatively obscure poems to discourage you from looking up the completed original.  You are to make your own original, using this beginning as your "topic sentence."

Which brings me back to the title of this post and that poem we discussed recently.  I believe the author of that errant poem failed to recognize the path suggested by the first stanza he'd/she'd composed.  A common error, by the way, even among the professionals.  I don't think this was intentional.  I do believe that had the author paused once in a while to re-read that opening stanza and consider its form, "statement," lyrical quality, specificity (or gauziness), diction, word choice and order, figures, concreteness, etc., that a different and more coherent poem would have emerged.  This might have taken more effort, more thought and feeling, and more time.  The writer's process might have been more recursive and tentative.  But I think the result might have been superior.  

So what I'm suggesting here is a writing technique, which is to treat an opening stanza or paragraph of a poem like the topic sentence of a prose paragraph.  I recall helping my Freshman Comp students devise topic sentences for their 500-word essays and for individual paragraphs, then advising them to write the topic sentence onto a piece paper and to tape that piece of paper somewhere above their writing desk, right where they could look at it again and again as they developed their material.  I suggested series of questions they could put to themselves as they worked: 

• Does the paragraph or essay in some way develop the thought of that topic sentence?
• Does the material in the paragraph/essay explain, question, illustrate the thought expressed in the topic sentence?
• Is the tone of the paragraph's/essay's language consistent with the tone of the topic sentence, or is it implied by the topic sentence?

Not all poems can be written like they are five-paragraph / three-subtopic expository essays.  Often enough, I've decided that the opening stanza of a poem I've been working on doesn't work in that position, and so the poem doesn't work either.  But almost always, when I write a poem, there is one stanza or set of lines that contains the DNA of the poem, that functions as the coordinate I need for making the particular map that is that poem.  As I compose, I continually return to that segment as a way of checking the compass, of making sure I haven't wandered away from what it promises.

This technique doesn't always work, that is, doesn't always result in a good poem, at least not at first writing.  But sometimes, if I come back to that passage months or years later, it still serves as a guideline or a pointer, saying, "go that way," which I can see more clearly.  And I'm not saying the poets who wrote the poems from which the passages below come followed this technique.  Everybody deploys different techniques at different instances for different purposes.  But try writing a poem with one of these passages as your opening "gambit"; get to know the possibilities the gambit offers.  Tape that passage, if you like, above your writing desk.  Keep referring back to it as you write.  Let the passage lead you -- don't try to force it into something else you'd like to write.

Then, next week, show us what you've composed.  Have fun!  The openers follow.

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Wind rocks the car.

We sit parked by the river,

silence between our teeth.

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The leaves, though little time they have to live,

Were never so unfallen as today,

And seem to yield us through a rustled sieve

The very light from which time fell away.

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It is all a rhythm,

from the shutting 

door, to the window

opening,

the seasons, the sun's

light, the moon,

the oceans, the 

growing of things . . .

---------------

America, I know I could do better by you,

though I stoop conscientiously three times a day

to pick up my dog's waste from the grass

with black biodegradable bags. And lest you suspect

that this is more pretension than allegiance, know

my dog was the one at the shelter no one else

would take.

---------------

The garden admires you.

For your sake it smears itself with green pigment,

the ecstatic reds of the roses

so that you will come to it with your lovers.

---------------

O tulip, tulip you bloom all day and later sway

a deep-wasted limbo above the dinner table,

waiting for a coin to drop into your well,

for the stars to pin your stem to their lapel.

---------------

I take off my shirt, I show you

I shaved the hair out under my arms

I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair

on my legs with a knife, getting white

---------------

I move the curtain back,

and something has gone wrong.

I am in a smoky place,

an Algerian cafe.

Why am I surprised to be surprised about being published in Oddball Magazine? (10.3.20)

I discovered that a poem of mine, "Affliction," was published in Oddball Magazine at the end of July.  It should be embarrassing to admit that someone my age googles his own name, but there's a lesson here . . . oily as it feels to look for yourself online, it's probably a wise thing to do if you're a writer who actively submits material to various outlets.  Since nobody at Oddball informed me that they'd accepted a poem of mine, and since I'd forgotten I'd sent them poems (in January), I was surprised to see they'd actually published the poem.  Oddball Magazine.  Maybe I should be surprised I'm surprised.

Well, I am gratified that one of those poems found a home!  Oddball seeks work from writers and visual artists with the idea of matching individual pieces--a poem to a painting, a piece of fiction to a photograph.  My poem is paired with a slightly disturbing photo of people wearing gas masks.  Hmmm.  The name is Oddball, after all.

Anyway, go take a look.  And if you like the magazine, try submitting something yourself.  Or maybe supporting them with a subscription.  Imagine letting that slip out at your next virtual reading . . . how you gave money to Oddball.