David Waggoner, 1926 - 2021

In today's NYT, news of David Waggoner passing.  

Ask anyone familiar with his work in the least way, and it'll be confirmed: he was a poet of nature, a Midwesterner (Indiana!) transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, and a protege of Theodore Roethke.

And the next time you sit down to write a nature poem, make this one your model for how to do it . . .

The Poets Agree to Be Quiet by the Swamp

They hold their hands over their mouths

And stare at the stretch of water.

What can be said has been said before:

Strokes of light like herons' legs in the cattails,

Mud underneath, frogs lying even deeper.

Therefore, the poets may keep quiet.

But the corners of their mouths grin past their hands.

They stick their elbows out into the evening,

Stoop, and begin the ancient croaking.

The Times' obituary quotes Waggoner: "Poets change the nature of reality for everyone."

Hear, hear.

Thomas Kinsella, 1928 - 2021

Thomas Kinsella passed earlier this week.  Not one of my favorite poets, I began reading his work while in graduate school but never could warm to it.  His poems struck me as unnecessarily dark, dreary and defeatist.  I say that even though I count Geoffrey Hill among my favorite writers of poetry!

But where Hill's poems sparkle in their darkness, Kinsella's give up no light at all.

There always seemed to be something about Kinsella's work that wasn't quite honest, at least what bit of it I could read before throwing the book aside or turning the page in the anthology or magazine.  His poetry never seemed to truly believe in itself.  I hesitate to say this of such a celebrated poet, but his work forever struck me as . . . sentimental and adolescent.  Like the writing of a sullen teenager.

If you get the opportunity, though, you should find his poems and read them.  Maybe you'll have better reading than I.

Image IV (12.24.21)

I had this notion about "radical imagery" at the end the of my previous post, so I went looking through my library for an example.  I could have found a brighter poem for this post, but this one struck me as illustrative . . .

DECEASED

it comes back

unopened

why open 

to see what I said

there was

much to tell you

now there is nothing

to say

The poem was written by Cid Corman, once the editor of Origin magazine and press.  I was leafing through my much-thumbed copy of The Voice That Is Great Within Us, edited by Hayden Carruth (If you want to write poetry seriously, this book should be among your collection.), looking for a short poem that presents an image that grabs the reader and voilá, "Deceased."

So, what's the image?

What struck me upon reading this little poem is how it presents an image so obliquely, so rooted in suggestion, that you can't really describe it head on.  Is it a visual image?  A tactile image?  An aural?  A sonic image?

Well, every poem, every utterance, presents a sonic image.  This series on imagery isn't about how you make a poem sound.  This series is about how you make a poem feel.  It's about the emotional content of images, or rather, the emotional responses certain images elicit from us. 

What I pick up on in this poem is first a visual image, and a very precise and particular one at that.  It's of an unopened letter in a man's hand.  I see the hand, I see the rectangle of the envelope.  That's quite an image . . . and nowhere in this little poem is a hand mentioned, or even a letter, except obliquely: "it."  Also, I see a certain cast of sunlight into a hallway or foyer inside a front door, where a man might receive the day's mail.  It's the cast of light one gets in the late afternoon.  The man has returned from a day elsewhere, at work, maybe, to find his mail.

I know what the man holds isn't a post card; it's unopened.  It can't be a note of thanks or hello or congratulations or concern; there was "much to tell" in it.  And like all letters to which we give deeper thought, this one went out bearing news to its recipient.  None of the above is explicit in the poem.  But that's the image I see in my mind's eye.  A good image well-made should encourage me to extrapolate, within reason: what the sender had "to tell" might have been news of himself after a long hiatus; or it might have been an apology (as in an explanation or a begging for forgiveness); or might have been some timely advice.  The poem is not giving me this information.  I infer it and I could be wrong; no doubt I am.  But the image ferries me toward these emotional possibilities.

I can infer from the poem, again because it never is explicit about it, a tactile image.  I feel the envelope's weight in the hand, its heavy, news-bearing ounces.  (News going both ways, by the way: news to the recipient, news back to the sender.)  I feel its edges and corners against the fingers of the hand that holds it.  For me, this tactile-ness is the strongest image of the poem, while the least explicit.  I feel its size and weight and its geometry all at once.  Its pressure is what stays with me.

As for the poem's aural imagery, by this I mean what I hear in the "drama" of the moment (as opposed to the beat, cadence and music of the language).  What I hear is silence, or perhaps a clock ticking in a quiet house, or a refrigerator motor whirring, or some outside traffic noise that I wouldn't have paid attention to, wouldn't have "heard" otherwise.  I hear a man standing in a foyer who has just stopped sorting through his mail.  He is speechless and the house is silent.

The title is the news that has come back, of course, which makes possible all the emotional power of the implied images.  Under it, the poem brings together a complex of responses.  I see a man in the foyer of a quiet house who was sorting his mail a moment ago but who now stands still, holding in his hand the letter full of news that he'd sent to someone who is dead.  And I feel the weight of his moment.  I hear the silence of it.

If I say that images drive poems into us like nails, I mean images like these.  A good poem, a good writer, needn't even spell them out.

Image III (12.23.21)

For poetry, my dear, is not

Things other people said & thought,

      Nor what you're thinking. *

                                      -- Theodore Roethke, Notebooks

I leafed through my copy of Roethke's On Poetry & Craft and stuck at this entry.  It sticks to me because I'm thinking . . . about image and its power over us in a poem when the poem is well done and the poem's author is committed to making a good poem and not just saying something, expressing his or her thoughts in verse.  (Don't just say something, stand there!)

Image is what poetry is.  A sonic image a visual image a rhythmic image a tactile image a geometric image.  A gustatory image.  A taste in your mouth, familiar or foreign, pleasant or foul, arresting or soothing, sweet or sour, hard or mushy.  It's a knock upon the eardrum, a slap at the stirrup, a chime in the timpani.  Image is a wave a stumble through rooted paths a two-step a waltz a jitterbug a twist like we did last summer, a rest and a breath.  Image is burlap on your cheek, an emery board on a knuckle, a bee in the grass under a bare foot, silk on shoulder, a starched collar, a comb through tussled hair, a stone cool in the palm of your hand.

Right, poetry is not things other people thought nor what you're thinking.  Whether you're its writer or its reader.  It is all these sensations brought to you or imparted by you through the medium of language.

So, should we not count on what other people have said and thought about poetry when we write and read it?  Of course, we should!  Our experience of poetry is that much more robust, rich, for the context we bring to it and wring from it.  It is tapestry.

But poetry must be image and nothing but, if it's to be art.  We don't read or write it for its historical value--not radically--or for its therapeutic application, or for its logic.  We read it for the emotion that resonates to it.  Only images do that: sound, sight, touch & feel, taste, smell.

Radical imagery . . . something to think about next time . . .

* So, are these lines poetry?  Better question: what are the poetic elements of the lines?  Hint: not the lines themselves.  But the sonic image, maybe, of the rhythm of the lines, or the locution, "my dear," that expresses an emotional relation between the writer (Roethke) and the poet (Roethke).  Nope, they are not poetry.  They are "note to self."

Image II (12.21.21)

Think of the image in the opening lines of The Fairie Queene of the Red Cross knight riding across a plain.  He is riding fast, "pricking" or spurring his horse onward.  Can you see it? -- a silver shield glinting in the sun, a red sash billowing behind.  Can you hear? -- the thunder of pounding hooves, the snorting of the horse in full gallop, the clash of shield on armor.  Can you feel, can you smell? -- the earth shaking, the sweating horse flesh, the divots of turf. 

Spenser elaborates so much with just a couple of lines of the image:

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plain,

All clad in mighty arms and silver shield,

Wherein old dents of deep wounds did remain,

The cruel marks of many a bloody field . . . 

and of his horse:

His angry steed did chide his foaming bit,

As much dismaying to the curb to yield:

Full jolly knight he seemed, and fair did sit,

As one for knightly jousts and fierce encounters fit.

I can't count the number of times this remarkable image has surfaced into my mind's eye since the first time I read it (which would have been in a course in Renaissance English literature).  

Narrative imagery like Spenser's has always moved me.  And for me, nobody does it better in poetry than the Elizabethans.  Except maybe Homer.  Or Virgil.  Or Dante.  Well, too much to go into on that score.  But I'm thinking of this particular image and its power to excite for a particular reason: placement.  It is Spenser's opening gambit.  

There's a clue, in the fifth line of the opening, that this narrative image is false: "Yet arms till that time did he never wield."  I remember reading the line the first time through, pausing, then rereading a couple of times, because it didn't make sense.  What's all the dented armor about then, if not "many a bloody field"?  And why would the poet undercut such a spectacular opening image with this idea?

It turns out that that's what The Fairie Queene is about, being tested and coming up short, until you've been tested and survived enough to earn those dents.  It's about being worthy of what you seem.

Now that's a message, an intellection, borne of an image!  One that I've carried with me through the many years since I first encountered those opening lines.  I want to say this image and how it plays out in The Fairie Queene have formed me in some fundamental ways, intellectually, emotionally.  Maybe that's going a little far.  But my point, I think, is this: images can be powerful things, emotionally and intellectually.  They'll stick you, and then they'll stick with you.

Image I (12.19.21)

I want to begin a series of ruminations about image.  I'll plan for digressions, which is to say, I know they'll happen because I'll try not to resist them or to edit them out.  I want this to be an exploration of one of the most fundamental tools of poetry, for readers perhaps even more than for writers.

Begin by rereading my blog post on 2.20.18, on deep image.  But that won't carry me far to where I think I'm headed, or hope to, because that piece links deep imagery and the surreal, the fabulous.

Step back and start out again from a passage by Proust, in Swann's Way.  The narrator digresses into a meditation on art vs. reality and the role that images play in helping us confuse (or understand) the difference between these two notions.  Impossible, says the narrator, to know the real person but only through one's impressions of another.  So, what we know then is only our sense of the other, not "the other" itself.  I say "only."  I should drop that modifier, really.  

What we know of the world, even and especially what we call the real world, is the image of it formed in our minds.  Our senses may perceive something, but through the process of perception an image is formed in my mind that is more or less different from the one formed in yours, even if we experience the something we perceive at the exact same time and from the exact same perspective.  It's definitely not the same as the thing it is formed of.  This is because experience informs perception informs its product, an image, and your experience is not my experience.

I realize, of course, that image-making isn't as straightforward and mechanical as what I've just described.  How we perceive influences our every experience--the world's ideological echo chambers are proof enough of that--and images, especially symbols, icons and emblems, bend our perceptions toward things like "established wisdom," convention, preconceived ideas and the court of public opinions.  

Proust's narrator, a budding artist, has an insight: the images are real, that is, they are our reality.  They are more real, that is, more meaningful to us, than the things they "stand for" because they are knowable and intimate with us, within us, in ways nothing else can be.

This should be enough to bring me to poetry.  What makes a poem emote and mean are its images.  Every week someone in our Wednesdays@One salon at some point exclaims of a poem that we're discussing, Its images are so real and powerful!  I usually like to pursue this line of inquiry, trying to get the group to dig deeper into the poem's imagery and how it imparts "reality" and the power it possesses over us.  (Power in a poem is meaningless to me unless it's understood as power over the reader's emotions.)

I want my W@1 colleagues to be able to distinguish better between images that arouse the emotions, that pique one's conscience or memory or belief, and images that merely reinforce stereotypes.  And I'll stop here to let that disjoining thought settle in for the next post . . .

Poems that answer a question (12.12.21)

At our last Wednesdays@One salon, I suggested a new project: write a poem that answers a question.

Specifically, what I'm thinking is the following:

• make your title a question
• write the poem as an answer or series of replies to the question
• the interesting challenge will be to answer the question using as many of the tools of poetry as you can: image, metaphor or simile, descriptive figure (like an image or a brief narration), rhythm and/or meter, page real estate, and so on.

You're familiar with some well-known examples already, in English at least.  "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" asked Shakespeare at the start of his famous sonnet.  He did two things that you might consider when writing your own.  One, the first line is the question--the poem was, as most sonnets were at the time, without a title--and thus integrated into the structure of the poem.  Two, his approach was, as that first line announces, comparative.  "Thou art more lovely, and more temperate," came the first line in reply to the question.  And the rest of the poem proceeds along this line of answer: how the object of the poet's ardor compares to things in nature (the weather, sunlight, mortality, the passage of time), that is, to changeableness, because his poem is answer to impermanence.  

Here is another famous "reply" poem:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning did the same thing with this poem as Shakespeare had before her, left it title-less, incorporating the crucial question into the opening line and making the entire poem an answer to that question.  Her approach is definition rather than comparison: it's a kind of "how-to" poem, or, specifically, "how-I."  She builds momentum, and force, through the repetition of "I love thee," as her means of "counting" through the answer to the most powerful expression of the poem: love even in death.

And notice this about these two poems, and keep it in mind as you write, everything about the question is high gain.  No yes/no or rhetorical questions here!  These questions demand some deeper thinking.  It's the need for a deep response that drives each poem.

Now imagine this.  Suppose either poet decided to answer the question more or less obliquely or metaphorically, that is, not so directly and point-by-point, that is, rhetorically, as Shakespeare and Barrett Browning do.  But what if you wanted to stick solely with the poetic, what might that look like?  

Shakespeare might have simply described a summer's day, without the comparative language.  Or he might have moved his answer still one more step away from rhetoric and described someone having a picnic on some grassy knoll or taking a walk alongside a stream, noting the faults of summer--hot and buggy and sweaty; storm-tossed; blinding; unpredictable weather--only implying through the question that the someone of the poem "compares" far better.  

Barrett Browning might have only described a man actually "turning from praise," or "doing right"; or a child demonstrating blind faith in some childish activity; as an oblique means of implying, "the way he resists praise (that is, with integrity), I love you." 

Granted, to respond this obliquely is a challenge!  But we moderns are Modern partly because we do things--like talk, think, imagine--in the oblique.  I wonder if you can do this in your poem?  If not, don't worry about it.  Do it the old-fashioned way, if you like.

But write a poem whose purpose is to address a question that is either its title or its first line.

And have fun!

A note on Thanksgiving Day, 2021

Everything, Everyone

I think this year you are going to ask me again

to tell you something I am thankful for,

this being Thanksgiving again, like last year,

or was it the year before that we all sat in the living

room, some with kids in their laps fidgeting

and not really getting the point and some with a beer

or a glass of wine on their knees and some,

just one or two, nodding off into a sofa

and a family all around and a long, long life behind,

the last of the debts paid, the arrangements

already made with the church, the will updated

one last time, the important private conversations—

you know which ones I am talking about,

the ones where they look you in the eye as if it’s

for the first time and take you so gently by the hand

as if you were ten years old again, the conversations

they’d meant to have with you all along—

finally over and done with so that now they can just

nod off, which is, or was, their version

of something to be thankful for,

and knowing how much there really is

to be thankful for—my own family, for instance,

meaning everyone, everyone in this living room and

many who are not, the world really, and some

who will never be again, and for my own life

lengthening like a shadow in the afternoon,

every year longer, a shadow to be thankful for.

I think you are going to ask me again to say it,

that thing that I am so thankful for, so that I

should sit down for once with pen and paper

and make a list and from that list choose that one

thing for which I am most thankful,

but I can’t, honestly, I can’t, because honestly

there’s too much on the list and I am thankful for

everything on it, for all of it and for you.

Blinkered, Part 3: exploring on your own (11.24.21)

We've read and heard some new voices over the past couple weeks that I hope will help tune our ears to a broader spectrum of poetry.  With thought and application, and time of course, maybe these new reading experiences will broaden & deepen our own voices, too!

This next week's project is the final part of our three-part series on discovering new and divergent voices in poetry.  Now, though, do your own sleuthing and plan to show us what you've found.  As before, when/if you find a poem that moves you, send it to me so I can incorporate it into a file for all to have afterward.  Please be kind to me and send poems that are easily formatted and not too long!

You can choose writers living or dead, but please select one who's not an old favorite.  Preferably, you'll stay with the theme and choose a poet whose heritage is significantly different from your own.

I plan to use this opportunity to introduce myself to a poet who is completely new to me, and who writes from a very different point of reference.  Who would that be?  I can't wait to find out!

Robert Bly 1926-2021 (11.22.21)

Sad this evening to post this death notice about Robert Bly.

I met him during his anti-Vietnam War heyday, when I was a graduate student at Indiana University.  As the obit in the NYT says, he traveled the USA visiting campuses to stir protest against the war.  His main contribution for us at IU was to give us the language to speak against the war, words more robust and meaningful than our heretofore sloganeering and shouts of BULLSHIT!  BULLSHIT!  BULLSHIT! whenever someone in authority tried telling us how things were, especially with regard to that war.

I remember him wearing masks and reading to us of the Teeth Mother, which, afterward, some people branded as anti-feminist.  But some of us didn't hear it that way.  Maybe we weren't listening correctly, or with ears we were yet to develop.  This was when the American War (as the Vietnamese call it still today) was the first and last thing on many of our minds, even though by the time I met Bly, the whole thing had wound down to just getting people out of the country.

Later, I attended a small gathering for him at the home of Ruth Stone (1915-2011).  Bly had helped her secure a year of poet in residency at IU.  She worked to get him on campus and threw the party for him in thanks.  I had been an MFA in Poetry during Stone's year on campus.  I remember people sitting in a circle with Bly and listening to him tell stories from myth and folklore . . . all of which had some bearing on our lives and our aspirations as poets.

Blinkered Part 2: fresh eyes (11/19/21)

Let's continue our journey toward seeing poetry with fresh eyes, again by introducing ourselves to poets we may not have read or even thought to read.  As before, the links below will take you to writers of poetry who hail from very diverse backgrounds and life experiences, most of which are likely to be quite different from yours.  These poets are represented in such places as the Academy of American Poets poets.org pages, Poem Hunter, personal web pages, and specific journals where you can find still other new and interesting writers to engage.  (In fact, you should bookmark this site and/or this site on your device and visit them regularly.)

But please read from only these poets this week while continuing to explore any poems by Kevin Young that you can find in bookstores, magazines, or online.  He'll remain our "reference writer" for poetry from worlds outside our own.  And again, if you find a poem you'd like to discuss on Wednesday next, send it to me and I will incorporate into a common file.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Sean Hill

Noor Hindi in Cosmonauts Avenue

Noor Hindi in poets.org

Noor Hindi in Cotton Xenomorph

Noor Hindi in Diode Poetry

Noor Hindi in Flock

Jackie Wang in poets.org

Ada Limon in Poetry Foundation

Ada Limon on Poem Hunter

Hazem Fahmy

Blinkered: writing from our cloistered points of view (11.10.21)

Wednesdays@One poetry has gotten lazy over the pandemic.  That may be my fault.  I've been lax in devising new projects that might excite folks to try new styles and to take some risks with their writing. 

I'm going to start fixing that with this next project:

Project

Take a trip, metaphorically speaking.  I want you all to stop writing for the remainder of November and explore poetic lands that you've never visited or may not have visited recently.  I want you to put down your pens, so to speak, and pick up a book (or a few web pages) and read from among the following:

Kevin Young

Kenzie Allen

Moncho Alvarado

Glenda Bailey-Mershon

Elizabeth Ruth Deyro

Michael Stalcup

Richard Georges

Youssef Alaoui

Charif Shanahan

Steve Benson

Mary Gililand

Above are links to the web pages of poets reflecting a wide assortment of interests and backgrounds, styles and poetic inspirations, from writers who identify as Native American (Kenzie Allen, Moncho Alvarado) to Caribbean (Richard Georges), Arab American (Youssef Alaoui) and Buddhist (Mary Gililand).  Don't assume that each writer's work is "Arab" or "Buddhist" or "Native American" per se.  But try reading as much from each of these writers as you can find online, hoping to expose yourself to themes, points of view, styles, traditions that aren't white, Anglo-Saxon, and "Norton Literature."

Read liberally from Kevin Young's poetry, for general discussion purposes. BUT SELECT ONE POEM FROM ONE OF THE OTHER AUTHORS LISTED ABOVE THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS WITH THE GROUP.  READ IT CAREFULLY--IN FACT, STUDY IT--AND LET ME KNOW WHICH POEM YOU HAVE IN MIND (you might copy and paste it into an email to me so I can insert it into a file for sharing).  

We will complete this exploration over the next three W@1 salons (November 17, 24 and December 1), rather than share our own work.  I am asking you NOT to select your own writers but to work from those in the group listed above.  If you're having trouble accessing any of this work, let me know and I will select some poems for you to read.

The poem as field of negotiation (10.29.21)

It happens every week at Wednesdays@One.  We read a poem, twice through, ask a few questions of the author, then negotiate--sometimes debate--what we think of the poem's quality, technique, subject matter, form, style, figurative language, and of course, meaning.  Sometimes we negotiate its "poem-ness."

We all start from a place of rough agreement about "poem-ness," what poem-ness is.  Poem-ness means language is foregrounded in some way and is in some way the whole or main point of the poem.  Used to be, language was foregrounded through end-rhyme and meter, but these haven't been reliable (or definitive) indicators of good work for a hundred years of Western poetry.  In fact, end-rhyme and meter generally indicate bad or "old-fashioned" poetry for most of us--the kind of poetry we feel we have to apologize for when we trot it out in workshops, readings and other kinds of sharing.

We can tell easily when we are in the presence of language calling attention to itself, and we understand implicitly that this is the very stuff of poetry.  This much we agree on when we share poems at W@1.

But then we start negotiating the rest of it.  We negotiate the poem's quality, its value, its purity.  We negotiate even how we're going to talk about the poem before us . . . and the terms keep shifting with every poem we share.  Some poems we agree to discuss in largely technical terms, how their images work or the way they deploy certain verbs or modifiers.  For some poems, we agree, more or less, to focus on endings or shifts in tone or how they echo certain styles.  Sometimes our negotiations fail (or there's not much to negotiate after all) and we have at a poem willy-nilly or not at all.  

Whenever we come to the issue of quality--is this poem good?  do I like this poem?  should this poem be revised?--we negotiate not just with a poem's author but among ourselves.  We "bargain" over & whether a poem is a draft or complete.  If the case can be made that it's a draft, and a good candidate for revision, then we negotiate among ourselves the kind and degree of revision we'd recommend.  These "poems" may need cutting, or they may benefit from restructuring.  Sometimes, a good draft will be overwritten--the poem that will arise from the draft will be shorter, tighter, more clearly focused, that is, will pay closer attention to its material, language.

How do we negotiate the idea that a poem is unfinished but worthy of further work?  By pointing out internal inconsistencies, for example: the poem may begin in one tone or mood but then suddenly shift to some other; the poem may force rhymes that draw attention to themselves not as language, but as cliché; or the poem may emphasize a moral instead of or before it emphasizes language.  All of these inconsistencies can be remedied in one or two revisions, once they are pointed out to the author.

Regardless, each of these "suggestions" needs to be negotiated with the author, with each other, and, importantly, with our own individual understandings of the history and currency of "poetry."  Sometimes, we at W@1 are so sure of our "bargaining position" (ahem, I'm talking to YOU, Mr. Holtzman!) that we force an assessment onto or into a poem.  But this is all part of negotiation in the end . . . the most forceful or forcefully put argument.

Wednesdays@One has instituted a few guardrails against mere forcefulness, however.  We've negotiated, over much time, what we agree constitutes "poem-ness" in our group if not broadly elsewhere:*

1. Poems, to be poetic, must foreground or otherwise privilege the language they are made from.
2. Poems must move in the sense of some type of progression, either by steady logic or by leaps and bounds and cuts and turns, but they must move.  This movement must be internally consistent.
3. Poems must "arrive somewhere."  Movement is not in itself enough.  Internal consistency means movement from a place/notion/feeling to a place/notion/feeling.  Poems can do this thematically and technically, but they must do so in both content and in form.
4. Poems, to be "good," must show some awareness of their place in the history of poetry.  They must show that "they" are aware (even if the writer isn't) of the conventions they recall--including dead forms and cliché--even if that awareness is expressed as "rejection" or "innovation."

And as always, the above four agreements are open to negotiation and revision.

* And let's not discount the importance of "over time" in the above statement.  For conventions/agreements are arrived at only over time and extended rounds of negotiation, in politics, governing, personal relations and poetics.

Doing something about it . . . writers at risk in Afghanistan (10.19.21)

The Sunday New York Times ran a story on Zohra Saed, an Afghan-American poet who teaches at the City University of New York, who is helping a fellow Afghan poet leave Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover.  Secular writers in that country, including poets, are targets of the new regime and their lives and their families' lives are in danger.  

Ms Saed is doing something about it.  That's an understatement.  For doing something about a life and death problem ten thousand miles away is a thorny, multi-layered challenge.  First there's communicating with the writer in danger.  Then there's accounting for the writer's family.  Getting into the U.S. right now, no matter who you are, involves getting past one big obstacle after another in the pandemic.  Visa applications are backlogged.  Visa administration staff are depleted and overworked.  Urgency is always an issue.  In this Afghan poet's case, it's taking not only Ms Saed but her City University colleagues, friends, donors and agencies all working together just to get one writer and his family out of the country and into the U.S.

I'm going to try to do something about it.  I'm reaching out to Ms Saed today to offer whatever assistance she needs and that I can provide.  Not just because I am a poet, but because I am a human being, and an American with means.

I post the link to this story today because you might want to know and to help yourself, especially if you too are an American with means.

Personification (10.17.21)

Looking back through four years of blog posts from our ongoing W@1 projects, I'm surprised to find nothing about personification.  While we've done projects focusing on related figures of speech, nothing at all about personification itself, which is a form of metaphor and a close cousin to apostrophe, allegory and, the third "a," anthropomorphism.  So it's time for a project on personification!

This project came about last week as I listened to some of my colleagues at W@1 read poems with elements of personification in them.  Margaret's poem, "The Sun," is unabashed personification at work:

shirt pinned to rope drips droops

sun massages the day

uplifts the shirt

and prods AC to hum

In fact, her wonderful poem is a short history of how the sun has been personified by various cultures and civilizations, from the ancient Greeks to the builders of Stonehenge and, these days, to someone sitting in a Carolina yard on a warm morning.

June's poem, "Love Letter," is a classic apostrophe, a personal address to a thing (New York City), written as if that thing could listen and reply.  Since we've experimented with apostrophe before at W@1, albeit a while ago now, I'll just mention it here as a relative of personification--our project for this coming week:

Personification Project

Write a poem using personification, in other words, applying human characteristics to a thing or an abstraction (such as an emotion or an idea).  Don't confuse your effort with apostrophe; that is, don't address your subject directly as in a letter or a conversation.  (Margaret's poem, see above, is exactly the ticket here: it portrays the sun in third person, not second.  Nor should you try a first-person point of view, in which your "character" speaks directly.  More on this below.)  The idea here is to go for something a little more complex and nuanced, not for a poem that is cute or overly clever or too facile.  (Again, see below.)

Ancient literature is full of personifying.  Think Poseidon, Venus, Pan, Vishnu, the Holy Ghost.  Storytelling involves personification, as in Ovid.  Stories of animals or trees that speak, raise families, build houses and towns, govern and so on, are built upon personification and its sub-form of allegory.  Think Animal Farm.  Fairy tales and children's stories depend on personification for their power to teach lessons about character, good and evil, right and wrong, obeying your elders.

Personification has been employed to explain the unexplainable: eclipses, floods, earthquakes, war, birth, death and decay.  Omen stories often rely on personification.  It's a way of confronting and controlling our fears.  Personification has been used to control people: the horror stories we once told our children to get them to behave; the biblical tales that clerics tell their parishioners about heaven and hell to get them to behave.  The novelist, Richard Powers, just published Overstory, a novel about a community of trees meant partly to alert us to global climate calamity in the making.

There are degrees of personification.  A glancing kind, or a kind that merely suggests, lets the reader fulfill the human connection without resorting to too much detail: money talks, the debutant moon.  The most detailed kind of personification bends to allegory.  Think of the figures of Death we recount around this time of the year as Halloween approaches (Netflix & Turner Classic Movies are trending this sort of thing right now).

Somebody asked at last week's W@1 whether personification is different from anthropomorphism.  Well, not really.  Generally speaking, both concepts involve applying human characteristics to the non-human.  In practice, though, I treat personification as a tool of literary art--it's a non-subjective device.  Anthropomorphism, to me, has its agenda.  I haven't read it yet, but I suspect that Richard Powers' novel leans far into anthropomorphism.  Recently I read a news feature about scientific "proof" that trees "talk" to each other through the intricate root systems developed beneath any community of trees.  The idea of trees "talking" is anthropomorphic in a rhetorical way: somebody wants to convince you (and for the record, I am convinced) that forests are vital in and of themselves, not merely as "lungs" (another anthropomorphism!) for "our" planet, or as stock for our lumber yards.

About personifying from the first person point of view.  I'm asking you not to take this approach with your poem because the temptation for you will be to moralize instead of poeticize.  Using the first person, you surely will feel the pull of the anthropomorphic as I've just described it above.  I want you to remember that you're writing a poem here--that is, creating art--and not delivering a sermon.  Okay?  So stick with the third person, as Margaret does in her poem.

As for making "cute" or "clever," which to me goes too far in the other direction from anthropomorphizing, please avoid that as well.  Here's an example of cute that I've pulled from an old textbook: *

Hark to the whimper of the sea-gull;

He weeps because he's not an ea-gull.

Suppose you were, you silly sea-gull,

Could you explain it to your she-gull?

--Ogden Nash

That's just a bridge too far into the facile world of meter, rhyme and funny.  Not that your poem can't engage any of those elements, but remember that you're making art, not a greeting card jingle.  While your subject can certainly be humorous, your treatment of personification as a poetic device should be dead serious.

* Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, by Laurence Perrine.  Harcourt Brace and Co.: New York, 1956.

What we mean we we tell you to revise this poem (10.15.21)

This post should make for a good counterpoint to the previous one of September 20 (Another look: editing a poem again [and again] 9.20.21).  Each week, we dive into each others' poems at Wednesdays@One.  Each poem is read aloud twice, first by its author, then by someone else in the group so that the author (and the rest of us) gets to hear the poem in a different voice.  Sometimes that difference is enough to spark discussion of all kinds of poetry writing topics, from pacing to syntax, persona, line, and other technical matters.

Then we discuss.  My practice is to encourage discussion through question-asking, rather than preference-telling.  We should want to know how the writer of a poem proceeded through the draft, how many drafts, how each draft may or may not have furthered the poem toward its best self or at least the version we share on any given Wednesday.  

Inevitably, someone wants to know "where it came from," a question that I try to discourage for its fruitlessness (too often, the author tries to belabor for us where his or her poem "came from," which usually ruins our experience of the poem).  Poems, like all other art, come from our experience--what we've lived through, what we've read, how we've felt, and so on.

Eventually, though, our discussion of a poem turns toward ways it might be improved.  I approach every poem shared at W@1 as unfinished, as art that can be better or more realized through more drafting.  I insist on this even when I feel the poem we're talking about is near-perfect (for the writer who wrote it).

It occurs to me that this approach might be discouraging to some of our writers.  Can't they ever write something good enough to pass muster at W@1?  No matter what I write, people in our group tell me I should revise.  How do I know when I've written a good enough poem?

So, what do we mean when we tell you to revise this poem?  I can't speak for my colleagues, of course, so I'll tell you what I mean and what I hope everyone in the group means.  I don't care whether you revise any particular poem shared with W@1 or with anyone.  If you're ready to walk away from the poem, then by all means walk away!  But you should understand that unless and until you become the Perfect Poet, you will never write the Perfect Poem, no matter how many drafts you write or how good you think the poem is.  

To often, W@1 writers show up with a poem that they believe is that perfect poem, or close to it.  They are proud (as they should be) of the effort and the product.  They enjoy the praise they get when they get it, and suffer the criticism.  Not very often do they take another look at the poem.  And why should they?  Been there, done that.  On to the next poem.

And I don't disagree with this walking away from the poem . . . as long as a writer understands that is exactly what he or she is doing, abandoning the effort in this one instance.  Who has the time and the patience to keep revising the same poem day in and day out?  And in fact, doing do probably won't make you a better writer.

You see, it's not about the poem you just brought to your colleagues at W@1 or whatever workshop you're attending.  It's about you, the writer, and how you're progressing along that lifelong curve of improvement, becoming with each new effort a little better as a writer than you were the day before . . . and with the implicit understanding that through effort, sharing and listening, you'll be even better the next day.  Read that again: lifelong curve of improvement.  That's what you sign up for when you join Wednesdays@One.

So, our critique of your poem, no matter which poem, and no matter how new or old that poem is in your library of compositions, is not really aimed at that poem, but at your ongoing development as a writer of poems.  We're just using the poem you share with us as a stalking horse, an illustration.  Whether you revise or rethink a particular poem is your business.  Our critiques are not aimed at what's done, but at what's yet to be done, and, hopefully, done with greater skill and confidence.

Another look: editing a poem again (and again) (9.20.21)

Is it okay to re-edit a poem just to do it?  Or should we leave a poem alone, let it be whatever it is?  That depends on what you plan to do with the poem.  Sometimes, you might want to keep tinkering with a poem just to see where the tinkering takes the art of it.  Sometimes you want to keep editing just for the practice of editing, or re-imagining the art of it.  Sometimes you won't be satisfied until you've chiseled and sanded, buffed and shined until the poem is as good as you can possibly make it.

This morning I reread a poem I wrote several months ago and thought was finished.  I should know better.  Several months is not a very long time in the life of a poem or even a draft of a poem, but in this case it turned out to be long enough to give me some distance.  I could reread with a measure of objectivity that wasn't available when I finished the previous "last draft" of it in June.

What I saw, immediately, was how overwritten the poem is.  I had written it as part of a "word prompt" project in our Wednesdays@One salon.  The words meant to prompt me were clouds, bravery, patience, and boulder.  Here is the poem composed to that prompt and shared with the group:

The Visiting Hour
 
Try as I will, I will not
anyhow make you understand
night is not now upon us,
not darkening the bloom
of the newly leafed-out trees
that sway outside your window,
and not penetrating to here,
where we sit trying to communicate.
 
The time is two o’clock in the afternoon,
whatever that means to you now,
on a day of overcast—thunderclouds
blossoming one from another
and threatening rain—
and not night, though you are right,
probably bravely, to think so:
 
it is darkness coming on,
a boulder, and night,
as you try a third time
to make me understand.

105 words, including the title.  As I recall, it got a fairly positive review from the group and generated some good discussion of its merits.  Rereading it, though, I see nothing but words, words and more words; more words in fact than the subject and the art warrant.  As I say, it's overwritten.

What is the point of the first three lines of the poem?  Well, it's to begin.  The poem begins by establishing a voice (an "I" speaking to a "you") and setting or scene (a conversation happening in a room with a window).  The lines also establish tense (present) and mood (negation--not what is, but what is not), and purpose: what's going on is more than a conversation; it's an explanation and possibly a disagreement.  There's some tension, as well, as you can tell by the frustration of the speaker of the poem: "try as I will" and "make you understand."

What else do the first three lines tell you?  You're entering a story, or a moment in a story, with characters, dialogue (potentially), and plot or at least a narrative line (first this happens, then that).  This story element puts you, the reader, into the role of observer, like a theatergoer.

The remainder of the stanza indicates spring, and an inside and outside view where the initial hint of a disagreement is refined to a simple question: is night falling?  A look back up at the title of the poem should clarify that the characters are someplace that has visiting hours, a nursing home maybe, or a hospital, a ward.  

So I get the story and the treatment, but it's just too wordy.  I see that the poem wants to be accessible.  Its grammar is standard and its syntax is pretty straightforward.  It doesn't want you to dwell on the language but instead on the story.  Or does it?  Actually, the poem wants to show off its language.  Look at these lines:

night is not now upon us,

not darkening the bloom 

of the newly leafed-out trees

that sway outside your window,

and not penetrating to here

The whole sequence emphasizes the word "not" as a way of suggesting not just something negative, but a cancelling: a point of view (the other person's, whose room we are visiting) is methodically dismissed as if we're overhearing a debate.  And what about phrases like "now upon us" and "the darkening bloom"?  The usual term for such language is purple.

Same goes for much of the rest of the poem.  Listen to these purple phrases: "this day of overcast," "blossoming one from another," and to the unnecessarily repeated "and night" of the final stanza, set off by two commas for emphasis.

The story, if I may paraphrase, is about two people having a chat in a room that has suddenly grown dark under an approaching storm.  One of them thinks night is coming on and the other, the frustrated speaker, is unable to explain.  In the end, though, the speaker realizes that it is he who misunderstands.  I still think that's a great premise for a poem.  But I wonder if I might get to that story more artfully, with less purple (i.e., emotionally overcharged) language.  

So I tried rewriting the poem again this morning.  Here's what I did . . .

The Visiting Hour

Night’s upon us?
New leaves shake in it,
you and I sit in it
trying to communicate.

Two p.m. ticks on
on this overcast day—
thunderclouds blossoming
and threatening rain—
stubborn and not
worth mentioning now.

Yes, darkness coming on,
a boulder, as you try a third time
to make me understand.

From 105 to 55 words.  That's a start and I think I've retained the idea.  I've converted the content of the first three lines of the version earlier to the three words of the first line, adding a question mark.  The speaker, now not so (or at least not yet) sure of himself, merely reacts to some observation.  I abandon the negations for something more positive: two men sitting and talking but possibly not communicating much.  And I've kept the idea of spring through the mere suggestion of "new leaves."

In the second stanza, I want to keep the idea that it's not nightfall darkening the room but something else, and I've replaced that lazy verb "is" with one more active, "tick," which should suggest the sameness and boredom of a day in the life of a man who's lost his memory, if not his mind.  For I decided that I don't want to be too upfront about the sick man's condition; it's the product of it--a misplaced sense of time--that is the important thing here.  More than this, though, 2 p.m. may be a stubborn fact, but in the larger context of a man's failing mind, hardly material; that is, "not worth mentioning." 

So in this new version of the poem, we have two men miscommunicating about the time of day and the cause for the room growing darker, both unable to convince the other of the truth of it.  All by suggestion through images.  This makes the poem a poem, in my mind.  It gestures rather than explains.  Which makes the closing stanza that much more poignant, I think.  And which is why I chose to open it with an assenting word, as if the speaker hasn't merely given up on the facts of the matter, on his argument, but has come round to the sick man's larger meaning: I'm dying.  The poem is helped in this respect by the wonderful word, boulder, from our word-prompt project.  By the end of the poem, the fact of impending death is as plain as a boulder.

So I think what I've done in re-revising this poem is to see it again or anew, which is what revision means, and to make better art of it.  Have I cut too much?  I was happy, imperfectly maybe, but still pleased with the earlier version.  That one itself was the result of several drafts of cutting and eliminating.  But what I like about this new version is its suggestiveness.

Sometimes it feels like drudgery having another look and another at a poem that has already been looked at, looked over, looked upon numerous times.  It feels like maybe you're about to cut into bone.  But if you get to a better outcome, as I think I have with this version, that drudge is worth doing.

The self and poetry: who's really speaking here? (9.16.21)

The New York Times Book Review (last Sunday's edition) includes a review of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor and the Search for Meaning, a book of essays by Megan O'Gieblyn.  It's worth reading the review if not the book (I plan to get a copy of the book soon) for those of us who write poetry regularly and who, like the cohort at Wednesdays@One, are committed to "writing better poems today than we did yesterday, and better poems tomorrow than we write today."

It's worth reading because what we do when we write a poem is an act of selfhood, however obscure the voice or persona of the poem we are writing may be, to ourselves, to others.  After all, it's not somebody else who sits at our keyboard or writing pad when we start a poem.  It's us, or some version of us that we've adopted in order to compose.

I'm making a leap here from the subject of technology and humanity in this book to the idea of a self practicing an art.  But here goes.  As writers, we attempt qualitative acts--creation of poems--in a world that increasingly values mainly the quantitative: what matters can be measured.  It was a maxim at one of my former employers, an accounting and consulting firm, that what can't be measured doesn't matter.  All well and good for an accountant.  But when that kind of value creeps into our personal spaces, perhaps not so good.  

The reviewer of this book, Becca Rothfeld, observes, "many of the most powerful forces in the contemporary world conspire to deny the value . . . of experience that evades quantification."  Strong statement.  Overwrought thinking, maybe.  I don't believe Facebook and Google "conspire" to do any such thing.  I prefer to think that these companies' business missions have evolved beyond their founders' original visions, which, given the tools they depend on to work--algorithms--was inevitable.  They conspire no more than any other business that wants to understand what we want and will pay for before they expend time and energy and risk making it.  

But that doesn't mean we're no longer capable of being poets, much less complex human beings.  For as complex human beings, we live in the moment, even when we're writing about or from a memory; when we write, we are in the moment of the writing, of the poem.  I offer Wednesdays@One as evidence.

Against the quantifiable self, the self that "browses and buys" stuff, is pitted what Rothfeld calls the self that "feels: the embattled, anachronistic and indispensable self."  It's this self that writes our poems, yes?  To be embattled, anachronistic and indispensable is to be outside of time, in the moment.  The self is timeless in its self-ness.  And that is where poetry begins, develops and ends, for readers as well as writers.  And it's why, maybe, nobody makes a living writing poetry.

Rothfeld, quoting O'Gieblyn through this passage, refers to the ghost in the machine--that human presence that can never seem to be erased or cancelled, no matter how sophisticated the technology:

The self resists exile, creeping back into even ostensibly materialist theories. Many of the tech-utopians who congratulate themselves most vociferously on their affinity with the Enlightenment subscribe to quasi-religious worldviews — a phenomenon that O’Gieblyn, who grew up in a Christian fundamentalist family, is well equipped to analyze. Take, for instance, transhumanism, according to which “the evolution of the cosmos comes down to a single process: that of information becoming organized into increasingly complex forms of intelligence.” For those who see “processes as disparate as forests, genes and cellular structures” as forms of computation — as means of transmitting information — our world is re-enchanted. Everything is potent with significance, and history is a “process of revelation,” culminating in the elevation of humans into “‘post-humans,’ or spiritual machines.”

Despite the fact that I do not believe there is a God (cap G) and an afterlife in the conventional sense, I hope that I never come to feel "post-human," that I am somehow a "spiritual machine."  I am human, and mysterious for all that, even to myself.  I never feel more this way than when I am writing a poem that suddenly becomes a work of art.  In fact, I never feel more myself than when the verse I am writing tips or veers into the truly poetic, and the poem takes control and I become its scribe.  Now that is a moment of mystery to be cherished!

Hmmmm.  Now that I've thoroughly piqued my interest, I must go find a copy of this book.

Riddle me a poem! (9.9.21)

Several years ago, you may recall, we took on a "riddle poem" project . . . see my blog post for August 26, 2018.  That was kind of fun, I remember.

Well, check this essay out, by Adrienne Raphael, in today's digital edition of the New York Times (it will be in next Sunday's print edition, too).  She writes that although the crossword puzzle is a recent invention (1913, in the New York World), the "crossword brain" is as old as . . . Old English riddle poetry.  And so, I send you back to my post of August 26, 2018.

An addendum.  Raphael, in the essay I refer to above in the link, observes:

Riddles tap into crossword-brain from all angles. First, you have to figure out how the riddle is asking you to think — Is this a straightforward definition? A double entendre? A wordplay-based web? — and then you try to solve. 

Same could be said for the poem in front of you when you sit down to read.  You have to figure out how it asks you to think--or that's what the relationship should be between you and a successful poem.  Sometimes, unlike in a riddle, the poem's "ask" is straightforward and uncomplicated.  Sometimes, not.  

And as we discussed in our most recent Wednesdays@One salon, any good reading of a poem demands that you engage in multiple ways, "from all angles": emotionally, stylistically, technically.  The more a poem asks you to do, generally speaking, the better it's likely to be.

This Just In . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning Apparently a Pretty Good Poet! (8.28.21)

Lately, I've assumed a lot of things about things that I shouldn't have.  No need to go into the details.  I am an experienced assumer.  Sometimes, it's a wonder how I get through a day without injuring myself or worse, I assume so much so often.  That driver is going to respect the crosswalk I'm crossing on foot.  That sort of thing.

Here's an assumption: Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a minor English poet of the 19th Century, a footnote to her more famous and deserving husband.  

She wrote one really famous poem ("How Do I Love Thee") and one famous book (Sonnets from the Portuguese) and that was that.  That footnote part isn't the assumption, though; it's a fact, for that's how she has been treated in anthology after anthology, survey course after survey course.  A one-hit wonder.  It's the "deserving" part that constitutes the shaky assumption.

A new biography, Two-Way Mirror, by the scholar and poet Fiona Sampson, reviewed in The New York Times today, wants to undermine that assumption and place Barrett Browning back on the pedestal she occupied in Victorian England at the climax of her career, when Robert Browning was second fiddle.

So, another book to add to my reading list!

The shaky assumption is dead!  Long live the assumption!

What is "regional poetry"? (8.27.21)

This subject comes up from time to time in our Wednesdays@One salon.  One of our cohort, a Southerner born and bred, takes his Carolina upbringing as subject matter for nearly every poem he writes (and has written in the past 25 years).  It's not just that he writes about the South in which he grew up.  He claims and aims to "preserve" a way of speaking and of being in the world that is fast vanishing in his view.  It's a way, I suspect, for this writer to hold on to something familiar and formative as he ages and as the world shrinks and homogenizes.  

And so one of our group suggests that we all try to write a "regional" poem, that is, a poem that captures or, as our colleague would have it, "preserves" something of a regional language, outlook, custom, or way of being in the world.  We take this project on with some sense of hopelessness for a number of reasons.

One is that the Southern writer I refer to above is quite good at this sort of "preservationist" writing.  He's practiced it for a quarter century and longer.  He comes from a colloquial America, the rural South.  And he is part of what his poetry confirms is a tight-knit, almost incestuously close family of grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins and near-cousins, neighbors who are at barely one remove from family . . . and all the customs, traditions, expectations and stories this closeness manufactures.  His is, apparently, a Southern family thing that few of the rest of us are as steeped in, no matter where we're from or what type of family we grew up in.

Two is that, well, don't we poetry writers of a certain age always write about where we came from?  Our towns, our families, our experiences . . . in other words, our remembrance of things past?  And, in fact, doesn't poetry (at least the way we write it here in W@1) seek to preserve the cadences, shortcuts, idioms, efficiencies and musicality -- in other words, the speech patterns -- we grew up hearing and using every day of our lives?  Without exception, everyone who comes to W@1 each week has a story to tell through a language (again, speech pattern) that wants to capture something of his and her pasts.  Poetry, in our reckoning, preserves.  So then, since we all already write this way, or aim to do so, how would we approach a project dedicated to what we already have been doing week in, week out?

All poetry, as we understand it at W@1, is local.  Even our individual takes on History are localized to how we were raised to engage with, to understand, the wider world.  So how might we structure a project around "writing regional"?

A third consideration: regional takes can become homey-jokey.  In all likelihood, a project of this sort will produce funny poems, or what passes for funny among poetry writers of a certain age.  We'll poke fun at some regional speech pattern or some local or family custom.  Distance gives us some perspective, we might feel, on the shallowness or misbegottenness or backwardness of the places we left never to return.  We left!  We aren't like that now!  Or an adjunct to comedy, pathos.  We'll write with maudlin abandon about a way of life lost forever, except in our memories, which of course must smooth everything out to a cliché.  

So, no, I don't think we can expect much from writing from our "regional roots."  My guess is, we never understood those roots so well in the first place.  We were too embedded in them or they in us.

But hey, I've been wrong before.  So let's give it a try.  Here's the project . . .

Write a poem that captures the "essence" of a region of the country, such as its local patois, custom, worldview, "flavor."  This might involve food, since dish and recipe are some of the most localized of cultural stuffs.  Example: corn on the cob; potluck suppers, rhubarb pie, pickle sandwiches, roadside fruit stands, sweet tea, Clark's Teabury gum, Stroh's Beer . . . you get the idea, right?  Or it might focus on expressions, colloquialisms, dialects, accents, idiomatic expressions, ways of saying things, like ways of saying "soft drink": pop (where I come from), soda (where you might come from), co-cola for Coke.  Or it might be an emblematic setting, such as a family affair, a community or school event (that says something about your region of the country, not about small towns or neighborhoods in general that could describe any place). 

Or it might even be the way people relate to one another in, say, New England or the Rocky Mountain West, or northern Indiana.  This is the kind of material that inspired many a Frost poem.  How they speak to one another or dress or the music they make/listen to.  What strikes you as peculiar to this place but might be passing away with time, that ought to be preserved somehow?

The poems we've seen at W@1 that do this sort of "preservation work" are meant to document in some lyrical way a uniqueness that is passing or has already passed in every way except the writer's memory.  Thus the idea of preservation.  Be mindful here, though, that something like letter-writing giving way to emails and texts does NOT fit the project.  Why not?  Because that's not peculiar to a region of the country; it's general.  

So what to write about?  Well, that's your problem to solve!