The Sponge and the Library (7.31.21)

Closing out July with a post on something that I've been asked many times by non-writers: Where'd you come up with that? or something like this question.  I sometimes answer maybe a little too glibly, Life, of course! or I say vaguely, I dunno, it just comes to me.

Our heads are jammed with images, visual, aural, tactile, and so on.  We add images continuously to our mental libraries, and while we may forget some of them consciously, I'm convinced that no image ever gets deleted.  The older I get, the more images are stored in my memory bank, my personal image library, for use in a poem at some point.  That's why I have more material to draw from today than I did when I was 25, much much more, and why there'll be more tomorrow.

I don't have to go to Timbuktu to find more images for my library.  I  barely even have to get out of bed.  As long as I'm awake, I'm gathering them and storing them away and, somewhere, somehow, preparing them for use in a poem or some other writing.  I do believe that I have to be awake to take images on board.  I once tried learning Portuguese by playing a language CD for a week each night while I slept . . . I got nothin'.

So when someone asks me where I get my material for a poem, that's where.  Usually.  

Sometimes I help the image-storage-and-retrieval process along.  I overhear a conversation on a commuter train; somebody uses a phrase that sounds like the first line of a poem which I try to make a draft of later that evening.  The person in the apartment above my London flat paces back and forth, from window to kitchen (hardwood floors, no rugs, heavy shoes), and I get a sense of a rhythm that serves a measure of poetry that weeks later produces the thud/scuff/tap of a poem about fretfulness.  The man at the next table is reading The New York Times with his coffee; I spy a headline on the page he's not reading that suggests a theme and a title for a poem that I write months, even years later.

Some of the images that I grab from my personal library are recent additions, as in, just saw that or heard that or smelled that, etc.  Some were logged there last week, months ago, when I was a boy.

My brain (yours too, o poet!) is a sponge that's never full.  I can't entirely control what it sponges up from the world I walk around in.  Yes, I can try to focus my attention on this, that and the other.  I can try to look out for, and sometimes do find, "poetry" in that world.  But that's usually the suspect material, the beautiful prospect, the lovely face, the spectacular event, that I trust the least for poetry.  Most often, my poems draw on those mundane images that my brain has been sponging up continuously since I woke up, that have been filed away without much notice on my part, but that are there for me to use when I get down to the business of making a poem.

For it's in the making of the poem that this library of images unlocks, throws its doors wide, admits me to the stacks for browsing.  The older I get, the more I count on that library for material.

Here's what I love most about "materializing" a poem in this way: the act is highly associative.  Even when I try wracking my brain for that thought or fact or image of an image that would go nicely, thank you, in this or that passage, that might introduce a turn or bring this poem to closure, my creative mind drags or dredges other images back into consciousness, back into the world, as it were.  Often, what comes off the library shelf is loaded with ancillary images that have little or nothing to do with the poem I thought I was trying to write.  Sometimes I'll reject these tag-alongs and keep looking.  Sometimes I'll let them take over the poem and drive it somewhere unexpected.  Sometimes I'll try them out in different phases, passages, lines, organizations, keeping only a piece of an image.  And sometimes they'll lead me on, again by pure association, to "just what I've been looking for."  Even if I didn't fully understand that I was looking for it.

Of course, if and when this pandemic subsides enough that I can get out of the house and go somewhere like Timbuktu, I'll go.  I'll take my sponge and my library with me, too.

Leaping poetry - working with ellipsis (7.29.21)

Note to all in Wednesdays@One: this is a project posting.  You'll find the project directions at the end of the post, but do read all of this piece for context.  

You've experienced this before, I'm sure.  You're reading a poem and come to a line or a phrase and something's missing.  You stop and back up, read again.  Something's missing.  You can still make sense of the poem, of the thought being expressed, but . . .

What you just read "past" is an ellipsis, in this case a typographical representation of a thought that has not been spelled out for you.  Yet you know the elided words: "but something's missing."  You know these are the correct words to follow the ellipsis marks (. . .) and can therefore supply them yourself.  You know them because of context: they are repeated.  

So why not just repeat them, especially in a poem?  Repetition is a pretty good poetic technique, after all.  Sometimes, though, you get more impact by not repeating this kind of phrase, by letting the thought "hang" from the end of the ellipsis for the reader to complete.  I suppose there are fascinating psycho-linguistic reasons for doing this in a work of art.  The reader gets to contribute to the poem, by "finishing" the thought.  Or the writer can write a thought more economically by not adding words and phrases that the reader can supply.  Either way, ellipsis helps writer and reader connect in a poem, giving them both something to be responsible for, together.

Here are a couple of non-poetic examples of what I mean, cadged from my copy of the Prentice-Hall Handbook for Writers:

He is older than I.

Our house is small, his large.

There's an implied "am" at the end of the first statement, which would complete the thought grammatically, but which is unnecessary since we all know that's the correct grammatical construction, and we know the writer knows that too.  In the second example, "house is" is implied in the second half of the statement; it repeats what's in the first half.  In both cases, the meaning remains clear despite the left-out wording.

Okay, so you already know this stuff; why (do I) belabor the point?  (I belabor the point) Because poets can do some fun, interesting, powerful things with ellipsis.  Even with ellipses that are "incorrect," grammatically speaking.  And in fact, especially when they are ("incorrect," grammatically speaking).

Some years ago, I set out to write prose poems and wound up writing a book of them.  A number of those poems were based on sentences that committed errors in elliptical clauses, called "dangling ellipticals."  An elliptical clause works on the same principle as an ellipsis, but it makes a thought confusing or ambiguous.  Words that would make the meaning clear are elided, sometimes to comic effect.  Here's an example from my Prentice-Hall Handbook:

Clause-subject relationship stated clearly: 

When I was a baby, I was given a silver cup by my grandfather.

Elliptical clause-subject relationship implied (but still clear):

When a baby, I was given a silver cup by my grandfather.

Elliptical clause-subject relationship "dangling":

When a baby, my grandfather gave me a silver cup.

The full clause is "when I was a baby."  The elliptical clause is "when a baby."  And you can see in the third example how ellipses can lead you astray of a "grammatically correct" expression, and maybe into some fun.  Here's one of the prose poems I wrote that begins with a dangling elliptical clause:

Uncle Fred, the Barber

 

When at the age of six, my Uncle Fred gave me my first haircut. He said to me, “Let’s play barber. I’ll be the barber.” And that was that. He started in with shears that seemed too big for his little boy hands. But I didn’t worry. My Uncle Fred’s hands have always surprised people. When at the age of four, my Uncle Fred could hold me in the palm of his much smaller boy hand. He carried me around the neighborhood concealed behind his back and then sprang me upon anybody we met. Mrs. Parrott nearly had a heart attack. Before long, snip, snip, snip, one side was done, but once the bleeding stopped we lost interest in the barber game, and so the other side never got a haircut. The thing I’ll never forget and for which I shall always be grateful is that first haircut. They don’t give haircuts like that anymore.

Now imagine this poem if the words "I was" were inserted (correctly) after its first word!  My point, and our next project, is this: a dangling elliptical is a good place to leap out of the ordinary in a poem, to launch you into the realm of the unconscious, and of course the fun(ny).  So here is your project . . .

PROJECT **

Adopt one of the following elliptical clause errors as the opening gambit in a poem.  Let its absurdity or grammatical confusion mis-direct you into a new poem.  Go where the error invites you to go!  You do NOT have to write a prose poem, or even a narrative poem.  You DO have to have fun!

If attacked, the maneuvers planned last week can be used.

When well stewed, you drain off the juice.

If lost, we shall pay a reward for the ring.

While picking flowers, it started to rain.

My bicycle tire became flat while hurrying to the dentist.

While attending the theater, the apartment was looted.

** This project doesn't address that other kind of leaping poetry, the Lorca kind that Robert Bly writes about in various places, and that has to do with our ability (really, our modern inability) to "leap" into the mysterious, the veiled side of the human psyche.  If you're interested in that, buy his book here: Leaping Poetry.

How much detail in a poem? (7.23.21)

This detail was incorporated into a poem that I read recently:

". . . a tree trunk angles 45° toward sun . . ."

It made me wonder how much of what kind of detail is right for a poem, how much is too much (that is, overwritten, or unnecessary)?  I no longer have the poem, so can't provide context for the passage I just quoted.  But within the passage itself you can see there's more detail than a poem might need to make a simple descriptive point: a tree leans into the sun.

And so I have questions about the content of the passage:

• Why the granular particularity of 45° ?
• Why the geometrical language of "angles"?
• Why the attitudinal language of "toward"?
• Why the focus on the tree trunk, and not the tree in totality?

And another question: Is this a case of amount or appropriateness?  Answers will depend, of course, on that missing context, the poem from which this passage is lifted.  The context might tell you whether the writer is thinking about science and technology in relation to nature, for some rhetorical purpose; about objective fidelity to a visual image, a camera-like rendering; or an interest in technical jargon as material for poetry.

You'll recall the great conceit in the Donne poem, "The Compass," where two lovers are compared to the legs of the map-drawing instrument, one still at the center, the other in motion around it.  Or the wonderful reference in the Herrick poem, "Upon Julia's Clothes," to the scientific process of liquefaction, a novel technical concept in the 17th Century, and certainly a novel word for a poem.

But I preserved the passage probably because it appeared to serve no special rhetorical or art-material purpose.  It likely answered a desire to be specific, particular, as we are schooled in the writing of poetry.  As I recall, the poem was not composed as a catalog where the sheer piling up of detail is part of the plan.  Nor was it a conceit that somehow linked mathematical concepts/jargon to thought and feeling, again, not a plan.  Other instances of concrete language--that is, what the writer had seen in a landscape and wished to convey descriptively--probably offered only their individual concreteness, but did not connect with each other through some plan or idea about the overall effect of the poem's imagery and language.  The poem was, I seem to remember, an accumulation of poetically unrelated figures.

"A tree leans into the sun" is clearly more musical than "a tree trunk angles 45° toward sun."  The first image is not less particular than the second.  So what is the value of the extra, specifically technical language?

I suspect (but only suspect) that the writer "heard" concreteness of detail in that choice of words . . . a good thing to hear, generally, when you're crafting a poem.  But the writer did not revise for "wholeness" or "unity" or "integration" of idea, image, thought and feeling, language.  He or she merely wandered from one expression to another, one image to another, in an attempt to describe a scene "objectively."  That may be nature, but it is not art.

Find the rhythmic line (7.19.21)

Here's a writing issue that surfaced during a recent Wednesdays@One salon: finding the rhythmic line on which to hang a poem.

Even seasoned writers of poetry commit the occasional clunk line, the line that trips over itself or that falls on the ear like a sack of flour dropped to the floor.  Musically, sonically, the clunk line doesn't thud down so much as it falls out of step with everything around it.  Imagine, then, if you will, a series of clunk lines, an entire poem of clunk.  Who wants to read that?  Who's likely to retain the thought embedded in that?

But isn't this just a case of conversational style rendered into lines, normal English speech covering a crucial topic?  Lest we all jettison contemporary speech and conversational rhythms for the Popian couplet, the Frostian quatrain, let me explain myself.  You don't have to choose between 

Whose woods these are I think I know

and 

two-dimensional grid of colors in relation to its perception

(simultaneous), reversal of thought back to thinking mind

left hand's weight on grey-white plane of table for example,

which isn't itself the feeling but pictures it (physical)

(line) between a person's left shoulder and the blue of her back . . .

Not that this set of couplets * is especially clunked.  It deploys some poetic figures other than a tight rhythm: a flow of narrative description and an absence of identifying pronouns, which creates a sonic as opposed to a rhythmic pattern.  The extreme of clunked would be the printed instructions for assembling your new TV wall mount, or most peoples' Twitter and Facebook posts.

What brought this topic into our discussion was a poem, or proto-poem, that begins like this:

Can we balance our scales in time? 

We humans are like kids in a free candy store making ourselves sick - the whole world too.

Continually grow the economy - tip.

Populations exceeding sustainability - tip tip.

Pesticides, plastics, herbicides, fossil fuels - tip tip tip.

Flora and fauna extinctions, sea levels rising - tip tip tip tip.

From here, the poem descends the page piling up a catalog of human arrogance and disregard for the environment.  It's not the preachiness of the content that offends.  To teach is one half of the Horatian poetic ideal.  It's the prosey listing, the lack of song, or maybe more to the point I'm trying to make, the lack of expressiveness, that hurts the ear and confuses the mind.  To "delight" is the other half of Horace's formula; in this case, that would mean to "move" or to affect.  That's what expressiveness does, affect, and what this draft fails to do.

Now, you might argue that the desecration of Mother Earth is not to be told in song, is not a beautiful thing, and therefore should be told "straight."  In this sense, "straight" means an emphasis on rhetoric, at the expense of the poetic.  If that's your position, then you might argue that the polluted world is no place for poetry.  Not even the satiric kind.  The subject belongs to Rhetoric.  I might not argue with you, either!  Not every subject is automatically suitable for poetry.

But what if you decided to make a poem (i.e., art) from the lines above?  How would you go about it?  One solution would be to look for the rhythmic line, the musical and sonic component--that is, the art component--and build from there.  So let's look at that opening line:

Cǎn we bálance oŭr scáles in tíme?

I have marked the syllables with heavy (á, í) and secondary (ӑ, ǔ) stress, leaving the unstressed syllables unmarked.  Try it out loud.  You may read the line with slightly different stresses, but however you read it, it's clear the line unfolds with a measured beat.  And that's where to look (or hear, or feel), if you want to balance out the poem's rhetorical and poetic qualities.

What if you rewrote the second line this way:

We're kíds in a cándy stǒre, máking oursélves síck,

And the wórld síck tóo.

I've performed two major edits here: 1) one long line becomes two shorter lines; and 2) extraneous syllables (and sense units) are eliminated.  The idea is to capture the sonic brevity of that opening line.  But does this operation then cut out the sense (the sense) of the statement?  Well, to answer that question, I'll ask another: Is it important to the poem's meaning that we are "like" kids?  What's gained by the simile?  What's lost by not using the simile?  Or put another way, what's gained by not having the simile?  Similarly, is it really all that crucial to the meaning that the candy store be "free"?  The point is the old cliché about kids in a candy store: uncontrollable desire meets endless supply, with the inevitable result: the kids get sick.  By eliminating the sense-units (e.g., "like" and "free"), I've also tightened the beat, continued the rhythm and melody of that first line, as the marked syllables indicate.

Maybe more importantly, my revision highlights the real meaning of the original: that we're destroying our world.  The idea now gets its own line, as opposed to being tacked on at the end of line two, a change which also brings out the sonic quality of the phrase "world sick too" with three strong beats in succession.  It's like a lecturing finger jabbing at my (guilty) chest!

This poem goes on for a full page, center-spaced, with wide and wider lines that make it look like a poem but read like an environmentalist's screed.  Which, as I say, is perfectly acceptable, if screed-ness is what you're after.  But if it's poem-ness that you want, and therefore expressiveness, then go for the rhythm, the music of that jabbing finger.

* From "Portraits & Repetition," by Stephen Ratcliffe, in New American Writing (20), eds. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover. OINK! Press, 2002.

Bias (7.9.21)

Reading poems is a matter of applied bias.  Always, I look for something that says "poem" to me, when I sit down with a verse, that depends on an assumption, an expectation, a predetermination, a bias.  How would I recognize "poem-ness" otherwise?

Now, these statements are problematic, of course.  For bias acts most often as blinders, forbidding us to "see" in a poem all of what's there.  Or, conversely, to see only what we are "trained" to see.  We have names for bias that functions this way: gender bias, race bias, class bias, cultural bias and so on.

There are other kinds of bias, less dangerous, but just as limiting.  There is the kind of bias that a fellow writer, a non-native speaker of English, once shared with me in a workshop.  A poem must follow the rules of grammar (i.e., of Standard English); otherwise, it is "less than" a poem, or certainly not a "good" poem.  She objected to poems that use sentence fragments because she learned her English in a classroom and from a textbook only, that is, by sight more than by sound.  She also objected to using conjunctions and articles as line endings (she understood the poetic line as a complete unit).

How often have you heard a dabbler poet or occasional reader of poetry insist that poems must rhyme?  Or that iambic pentameter is the only poetic beat?  Or that a "poem" must record a complete thought?  Or that it conclude something?  Or "be about" something (besides itself)?

So to the kinds of bias listed above, we should add literary bias, or what might be called "English Lit Survey Bias (ELSB)": the insistence that poems fit the models collected in your Norton Anthology (Vol. 1).  ELSB . . . otherwise known as The Canon.  

Still, everybody writes and reads poetry with bias of some kind or another, and in fact with a complex of biases: cultural, gender, race, class, literary.  That's what makes unfamiliar poems unfamiliar--that they come from some other understanding--and such a rewarding experience.  They call our biases to the surface, in the form of value judgments, misreadings, forced readings; they puzzle us; sometimes, they escape us altogether.  We can't avoid bias when we write or read a poem; we can only try to be aware of the bias that we bring to a poem.

One way to make ourselves more aware of our biases is to read outside our normal range.  To read poems that confuse or perplex us, that might even anger or annoy us.  And of course it does no good just to become aware of ourselves in this way, unless we also interrogate our responses, as opposed to passing judgment on what we're reading.  Why is this poem so difficult (for me) to understand?  What's the point the poet is trying to make?  How does this image make me feel and why?  What does this word or expression mean (to me & why do I take that meaning on board)?  What's the effect of the line endings, line length (on me, as I read)?  And then to ask ourselves, is this poem really poorly conceived or written, or am I just not "there" yet in terms of understanding and accepting it as a work of art?  If I am finding fault, where does the fault lie, in the poem or in me?

And THEN, maybe you'll start to see or hear the biases in your own writing, how you "lean" toward certain themes, expressions, images, tones, rhetorical devices, cultural tropes, meanings.  Which is all part of growing as an artist, expanding and deepening your understanding of your art, how it works and how you make it, what you make with it.

This is not a prescription for ridding yourself of bias as a reader or a writer.  Not only would that be impossible, it probably would be undesirable, for writing/reading without bias means to experience art without belief and personality.  No, what I am suggesting is that you work to expose your biases to yourself as a means of deepening not just your literary experience, but your life.  Including your life as an artist.  If you harbor a bias that really should be got rid of, like a race bias, then shouldn't you want to expose it?  How else to rid yourself of it, or at least to defend yourself against it, than to bring it to your attention, to call it out?

Now, go, friends, and find some poems that heretofore have left you "cold" or annoyed or confused or feeling attacked or whatever . . . poems that are outside your normal reading comfort zone.  Read them.  Read them twice.  Re-read them.  Internalize the images, the tones and voices, the turns of phrase, the very words of them.  Ask yourself why you respond to them the way you do (even if, and maybe especially if, you respond positively).

Then try to write differently the next time you sit down at your keyboard or journal.  Try to write with those biases exposed.