"What moves you most in a work of literature?" (11.30.20)

Evidently, I spend a lot of time reading the Sunday New York Times each week.  I am looking forward to, though doubting it will come about actually, a year of Sunday reading that is not merely about tribal politics and a rundown of the week's smelliest tweets.

The title of this blog I quote from this week's Book Review, the regular "By the Book" interview, this week with poet Claudia Rankine.  This is one of the questions the interviewer puts to Ms Rankine.  Her response is enlightening (reassuring? confirming and validating?) for us writers of poetry: "When I'm held by the beauty of the language, first and foremost, as opposed to simply being carried along by the plot."

Now, she may be speaking of reading novels and other forms of prose literature, which is the interviewer's focus, but Ms Rankine's remark comes from poetry.  To the extent that a poem is a work of art, it is NOT a plotline or an essay or a history (this last including all those forms of history: memoir, autobiography, biography, events current or distant).  It is language given shape, and in that, artistic meaning.

If you've not yet read any of Claudia Rankine's poetry, you should probably do so, just to make deeper sense out of the last bit of the paragraph above.  Artistic meaning.  Her poems are at once direct and emotional, but incredibly dense, layered, voiced.  They usually are not "linear": this happened, then this, next this, finally this.  I am still trying to understand (i.e., interiorize) most of the poems I've read by her.  Race is probably one barrier to my understanding.  Another is artistry, or that tendency in works of art to resist interpretation, re-statement, paraphrasing.

"What's it mean, what's it about?" applied to a poem doesn't yield a paraphrase or a discussion of referents.  Not first and foremost.  The only answer is "itself."

And "itself" is shaped language.  First and foremost, as Rankine says, of course, though she never says clearly what secondary or ancillary aspects of works of literature move her.  She implies these are indeed such things as plotline (being carried away by a story, a narrative, characters and relations among them), theme or subject matter (e.g., "whiteness," biography, voice and point of view).  But the language first and foremost.  

That's how a poet would understand the act of reading, right, as complement to the act of writing?

Poetry writing and solitude (11.29.20)

Just reading in this morning's NYT an editor's pick story about a couple living in the woods in the mountains of North Carolina, 18 miles from Hot Springs, the nearest town.  The story is about choosing the eremetic life, that is, the life of a hermit, again, a life of spiritual and actual solitude.  Obviously, in this time of mandated social distancing, the Times's editors felt this would be something readers would find readable . . . and I did.  

Maybe you will, too, given your love of poetry and poetry writing.  Writing, as we all know, is a solitary thing, even when done in the context of workshops, salons and other groups like Wednesdays@One.  What we haven't talked about so much is the spiritual inward-turning aspect of the art we practice, how much like prayer and meditation it can be.  Not talking about it is probably wise.  We might murder to dissect.  

But it's always good to know that we come together each week as members of a community devoted to one of the most introspective of the literary arts.

And by the way, you will be interested to know that W@1 has been convening now for over three years.  We began our little experiment this month in 2017.

American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, by Robert Bly (11.29.20)

I mentioned this book during last week's salon and thought a link to where you can pick up a copy might be of interest.  So, here it is American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, on Amazon.  There's something ironic about ordering a book of this title & subject from the global ameba-cite, but if you follow the irony, maybe that's instructive in and of itself.

Anyway, it's now a venerably older book on contemporary American poets and poetry, published in 1990.  Bly gathers together under this title a lifetime of writing about King Culture and the resistance to it.  One half of the book is devoted to his many essays on the art and its place in American society & culture.  The "old King" is his term for "the conservative mind-set inherited from Eliot and Pound and the triumphant flatness inherited from Descartes and Locke."  By 1990, this "inheritance," and the rejection of it, was a subject of retrospective, career-lookback books like American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.  So just remember if you get a copy, that was 30 years ago!

The other half of the book is a selection of essays Bly had written by 1990 about various poets whose work either represented the essential wildness of his title (true American poetry) or the inheritance from the old King.

Well, I've forgotten the discussion last week that led me to recommend this book.  But it can't hurt your general poetic education to pick up a copy and read it.

Apropos of Pronouns (11.27.20)

We talked last Wednesday about how some writers use pronouns in their poems to draw the reader in, to establish some space between artifact and consumer, or even to ignore the reader altogether.  One of our writers shared a poem that began by distancing itself from the reader (3rd person plural), then inviting the reader into the group (1st person plural), and ending by turning to face the reader directly (2nd person singular).  The writer couldn't have done that by mistake.  That was strategy.

I tried to make the point stick: when you write a poem, pay attention to what you're doing and have a reason for doing it, for the effect it's likely to have.  Of course, I am not about to discount the vast and revealing world of unintended effects, out of which so much good poetry comes.  But I wanted to exhort my fellow writers not to get caught up in the beauty of their own flow--that is, to be aware of audience (even if that audience is no more than you yourself at a later reading of your own work!).

And then today I come across David Orr's review of That Was Now, This Is Then, a new book of poems by Vijay Seshadri, in today's New York Times.  Orr doesn't focus so much on the grammar of what Seshadri is doing, his deployment of pronouns, but he does describe how this poet involves the reader "directly in whatever the poem is up to.  Often this is a subtle matter of convincing readers that they're part of a 'we'." 

So, I invite my fellow writers at W@1--and you, reader--to think about the pronouns you use in your poems and the effect these may have on your readers (again, even if that reader turns out later to be only yourself).  I also invite you as readers to pay close attention to how poets use pronouns in their poems.  These are potent rhetorical tools in the hands of experienced writers (poets, speechwriters, sales writers, writers with an axe to grind, etc.).  And to do so especially when a writer uses that all-inclusive "we," the most dangerous, conniving pronoun in the toolbox.  Make sure that you want to be a part of "whatever the poem is up to" each time you encounter a "we." 

What is a public park? (11.12.20)

Our new project has to do with public space.  I challenged W@1 to find lesser known, out of the way public parks around town and to write poems in honor of them.  The idea came to me because of Alice Ingram Park, a tiny gem of a public space about half a block from where I live.  It is situated on the corner of Elliott Road and Franklin Street, in front of the neighborhood fire station.  I've skirted or walked through this park dozens of times on my way up Franklin Street or across Franklin to Whole Foods Market.  For a public space, it certainly has a private, almost spiritual feel.

I know nothing at all about its namesake, Alice Ingram, but I'll take a stab and guess that she was a gardener, and had lots to do with the Chapel Hill Garden Club.  It was the Garden Club that funded the creation of the Park, in 1990.  A brass plaque affixed to a brick knee wall says the Park was dedicated in 1998.  I reached out to the current President of the Chapel Hill Garden Club for more information, who put me in touch with Bitty Holton, a long-time club member.  Ms Holton has no idea, either, about Alice Ingram.

The intersection there is busy and noisy, as Franklin Street leads west to NC 15-501 and I-40, east to downtown and campus.  Across the street are Village Gate Plaza and just up from that, Eastgate Shopping Plaza.  Besides the fire station, nearby are three banks, a nursing home, and law office.  There's also a mysterious business named "Japan Tobacco Co., Inc." as well as a dentist.  I imagine people walking the streets of Tokyo and Yokahama yellowing their teeth with fine imported North Carolina tobacco.

In the midst of all this commerce and traffic is little Alice Ingram Park.  Go ahead and map it.  It's there.  I've searched online for information about the park and its namesake but haven't found much.  Other than that name on the brass plaque, it's all a bit of a mystery.

Shade is provided courtesy of a large willow oak, a tree that I thought might be an American elm but which my wife says is something else, and four redbuds.  A cement walkway runs diagonally through the center, from the corner southwest to the knee wall just in front of the fire station.  Another path curves around the inside edge, from Elliott Road to Franklin Street and the city bus stop.  Someone etched a hop-scotch into the concrete of that one while it was still wet.  I've hopped it many times.  But I've never seen anyone else do that.  

The park has a single trash can that says linger . . . but recycle.  Recently, I noted it was lined with a fresh plastic trash bag.  Good to know the city still drops by to check on things.  My wife reminds me that there used to be a little pond as well, but that was filled in long ago.  She speculates that homeless people were bathing in it.  More likely, it just became a nuisance and expensive to keep clean and in good repair.  In fact, the park could use a makeover: new beds of flowers, some tree trimming, some brick work.

You can sit there, too, and people sometimes do.  There's no bench, but the brick knee wall is often occupied by somebody who's come there to wait for a bus on a hot, sunny day.  Noisy as traffic can be at this intersection, Alice Ingram Park somehow retains a cloistered feel, maybe because of its ample shade and border of redbuds, holly bush, and wrought iron fence.  It is a bowl, sloping slightly down from the edges toward the center, offering even more of a sense of privacy and remove.  (Actually, the bowlish design is common around this part of Chapel Hill, which rises as you go up Elliott Road to Coker Hills.  Thunderstorms almost always wash downhill toward East Franklin Street.  At the bottom of the bowl is a big drain, like in a sink.  The bowl is designed to capture runoff when it gets too much for the surrounding street sewers to handle.  The single drain slowly disperses water under Franklin Street, likely toward Booker Creek.)

Why would I suggest a project like this?  I mean, besides having something for W@1 writers to write about?  This little park's attraction for me, for one thing.  I'd like to think that the writers of W@1 also have their own private-public-sacred spaces.  Poetry often wants the out of the way, the overlooked, the neglected for subject matter.  (Looking at you, Emily Dickinson!)  But I thought it'd be a good idea for our writers to consider community as a subject to write about or out of, to examine what it means to have a physical space set aside for citizens.  In this year of social distancing, political unrest, and cultural upheaval, pondering community through a poem might be a useful project to undertake.

Not at all sure what this project will net, but we all might at least learn of some new parks around town that we hadn't visited before.