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!

Jean "Binta" Breeze 1956 - 2021

In today's NYT, an obituary for Jean Breeze, known as "Binta," the first successful female "dub poet."  See the Times obit for an explanation of dub poetry, but it's basically poetry rooted in performance, that is, sound and motion.

Janice Mirikitani 1941 - 2021

San Francisco lost a poet, Janice Mirikitani, this past week.  So did we.

The habits of poetry - lazy reading (8.21.21)

For reference to this post, see the following . . .

• Discipline and indiscipline in poetry writing (8.26.20)
• The habits of poetry - daily reading (2.13.20)
• The habits of poetry - regular practice (10.1.19)
• The habits of poetry - honesty (7.23.19)
• The habits of poetry - revising (3.28.19)
• The habits of poetry - practical observation (1.23.19)

For the most part, these posts address good habits, habits every writer should want to cultivate.  But now I want to talk about bad habits to avoid . . . if you want to improve your writing and develop greater confidence when you sit down to your work.

Let's concentrate on lazy reading.

Each week during our Wednesdays@One salon, someone will say of a poem, "I like it!  It flows."  And this suffices for analysis of the poem and of the reader's response to the poem.  To which I sometimes probe, "Tell me more about why you like this poem.  What do you mean by 'It flows,' and why is flow so important?"  Which generally results in a "I dunno.  It just does."

This "I dunno-ness" is a bad habit not just for reading a poem, but for writing one, too.  Often enough, I sense my W@1 colleagues' boredom (or even contempt) for over-analyzing a poem.  And I agree with them: over-analysis leads to creative paralysis.  Or is borne of it.  And none of us wants to think we've lost our creativity in experiencing a poem either as writer or reader.

But if our goal is to write better poems today than we did yesterday, better tomorrow than today, then we should be open to ourselves as consumers of an art.  We should try harder to understand why we like or dislike a poem.  We may murder to dissect, but for a practicing poet, ignorance of how poems get written and understood can be very limiting.  A little dissection is a necessary thing.  More than necessary, it's vital.

If we want to become better writers, we must become better readers as well.  And we must work hard to understand and articulate our responses to what we read.

Now, there are tools for this sort of analysis, beginning with the critical terms that are available to us.  We've talked about them often at W@1, and you can find posts related to them in this blog:

• Syntax, lineation, enjambment, meter, rhythm and cadence, onomatopoeia, rhyme and its various guises, alliteration, juxtaposition, caesura and ellipsis
• Figure, image, metaphor, analogy, comparison and contrast, allusion, symbol
• Style (that is, personal, the writer's "signature"), voice, breath, tone, point of view, persona
• Formal verse, free verse, accentual-syllabic verse
• Consider style above, but in a more topical sense: lyric, narrative, dramatic, episodic, epic
• Structure, repetition, how poems and their parts begin and how they end
• Movement, in the sense of the progression or development of a thought or a feeling
• Wholeness, unity, coherence

You get the idea: the tools for reading (and writing) a poem are many and have been handed down to us through the millennia.  

Lazy reading neglects these tools.  It skims and moves on.  I do this sort of thing myself, often, and it can be pleasurable.  I don't quite know why this poem moves me or leaves me cold, but it does and that's enough.  Let's move on.  That's okay.  Not all reading must be analytical or "academic," if you have to use that shopworn epithet.  Sometimes, like when I'm reading in bed, it's enough just to be entertained or to dwell in the rhythm of a "good" poem.

But if I want to understand why I feel what I feel, how the poem I'm reading elicits an emotion or complex of feeling and thought and wonder, then I have the tools for doing so.  And if I participate in a forum like Wednesdays@One, my interest lies there, in greater understanding.  For I know from experience that the more deeply I understand my response to a poem, the better I am as a writer of poems in turn.

And this takes work.  It takes, patience, curiosity, practice, consciousness (self- and otherwise), openness, and a framework of reference to other poems, traditions, cultures.  

Not explaining to yourself how and why a poem works for you easily becomes a bad habit.  It's lazy.  So, develop the better habit whenever you encounter a poem--one of yours included--of investigating the art of it.

Commonplaces and poems (8.12.21)

We at Wednesdays@One frequently invoke commonplaces in our poems, those "sayings" and turns of phrase that are "common" to us all and that we collect for ourselves throughout our lives.  We use them to launch our writing, to underpin our poems, to add a flourish to some thought or feeling we're trying to convey through a poem.  We sometimes "borrow" the thought they express without actually quoting the expression itself.  A commonplace is just about what the portmanteau word says it is: a commonly expressed and/or understood passage or phrase, in other words, a "saying."

I started thinking about commonplaces and how we use them in poems just this week during our W@1 salon.  One of our writers, in a poem whose title itself is a commonplace, wrote this:

The Moon is My Sister 

Above us
She watches mutely
no judgment or tears
as we act without method
gamble without strategy
 
Nothing new under
yet endless
green incarnations
drop without
consent into dark limbo . . .

I'm referring specifically to the expression, "Nothing new under."  It is, as others in our salon reminded us, a Biblical commonplace (from Ecclesiastes 1:9) referring to the sun and assuring us that "what has been will be again."  In the poem above, the writer borrows the part of the commonplace we're most likely to connect with and applies it to the sun's "opposite," the moon.  That's pretty clever!

Commonplaces are a way of organizing our experience or our memories, and of conferring upon them something more universal than our personal take.  Besides that, commonplaces can help us lift our poems out of the mundane, investing them with insight or even wisdom--because the wisdom belongs to Humankind, not just to us alone. *  They're like ready-made gravitas.

Commonplaces historically make up "commonplace books," basically journals of nuggets of wisdom or good writing that we pick up in our reading and copy down for ourselves to return to later.  I have journals full of such phrases and passages.  Even when they come from relatively obscure writers and texts, they "ring true" in a way that says to me this was written for the ages.

Look.  I just used a commonplace: rings true.  Or maybe that's just a cliché.  Or maybe a cliché is a commonplace by another, less charitable name.

You can use commonplaces in a poem in a variety of ways and for a variety of effects and meanings.  Sometimes our W@1 writers append an epigram to a poem that's meant to expand upon, comment on, reflect upon or illustrate the thought expressed by that commonplace.  Sometimes we insert a commonplace for tonal effect (irony, for example) in the middle of an idea we explore in a poem, or as a prop for a persona (the wise owl, the imperious autocrat, the spurned lover, etc.).

Sometimes we take issue with the thought expressed through a commonplace.  Imagine a feminist writing "a woman's place is in the home" in a poem.

My point is that commonplaces are, as the word suggests, loci of agreed-upon thought or wisdom or truth, places where we meet each other in understanding.  They aren't facts, like, "the coronavirus is real," or "Joe Biden won the election."  Facts are "truths," as we've seen over our adult lives, that can be manipulated by anybody for any reason.  Even if they appear to be self-evident to us, others may see them as maneuvered and provisional.  They can be argued with.  No, a commonplace is an idea expressed in a way that most if not all people might say, "I can't argue with that."  Like this:

A man sits as many risks as he runs.  

Thoreau wrote that in Walden, along with many other ideas that have stayed with us as commonplaces of good thinking and good writing.  

The world could use more commonplaces in its thinking right now, don't you agree?  And maybe it's up to we poets to make that happen.  So let's give it a try.  

Below are commonplaces I culled more or less at random from my bookshelves.  (I suppose it's a commonplace to suggest that I could pick anything "at random" from a library I've spent a lifetime building, carefully and consciously.)  Choose one of them and use it in a poem, as an epigram appended to the beginning, as an opening line or passage, as a theme for an idea you develop in a poem (that is, as a rhetorical device), as a metaphorical device on which you build a series of images and associations, as a poetic device which you deploy rhythmically and figuratively.

THEN, think of somebody you know personally who doesn't seem to share your ideas about the world.  Who might have a different politics, faith, understanding of knowledge and/or science, or who might subscribe to a different set of facts than you.  Share your commonplace-derived poem with that person.  Your goal is NOT to berate, educate, shame, convince or otherwise try to bring this person round to your way of thinking.  Instead, it's to find common ground, to write a piece about which this person might say, "I don't need to argue with that."  Another way of putting this is, opinions are tools for staking out personal ground.  Commonplaces are tools for finding . . . ahem . . . common ground.  Try to do this without platitudes (which admittedly may be another form of commonplaces, just commonplaces that no one trusts anymore).

Here are your options . . .

I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. **

Every advantage has its tax. **

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets.  **

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one.  The faith that stands on authority is not faith.  **

Avoiding self-delusion: here's a useful life lesson for all of us. +

Consider the 'unwanted sexual advance': what tangled tales of backfired desires, bristling umbrage, and mutual misunderstanding lurk behind this sterile little phrase. +

There are certain men who just like getting women mad at them, for reasons that are open to speculation. +

Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without noticing whether the women are attractive or not. ~

It feels true only in a trivial sense to say I make my books.  What I really feel is that they are made, through me, by literature; and I'm their (literature's) servant. ~

To describe oneself as young is to face that one is no longer young. ~

To seek God is to seek reality.  And this must be something more than a flight from images to ideas. The interior life is not merely what is not exterior. #

There is something you cannot know about a wren by cutting it up in a laboratory . . . # 

* Right now, I'd argue that we lean on commonplaces for this purpose, even when we're writing about mundane things, like the cup of coffee we're sipping as we write.  Commonplaces give us a pass into wisdom that we may not feel we have on our own.  But sometimes we lean on them too much.

** R. W. Emerson, Essays, First Series.

+ Laura Kipnis, Men, Notes from an Ongoing Investigation.

~ Susan Sontag, "A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?", "Singleness," and "The Wisdom Project," respectively, in Where the Stress Falls.

# Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude (Journals, Vol. III).

Hey there, look at me! or, How to write a very bad poem (8.3.21)

I know how to write a bad poem, but I can't do it consciously, at least not with any consistency.  But I can write bad poems one after another when I'm in the zone for it, that is, when I'm writing on auto-pilot.

By auto-pilot I don't mean that I'm not paying attention to what I'm making, but that I'm paying the wrong kind of attention.  I'm listening to the voices of The Moderns or The Victorians or The Beats.  I'm listening to The Poet in me, making grand verbal gestures and figurative flourishes that'll get 'em when they read this.

Poems that I write when on auto-pilot make big statements about big subjects.  They're ornamented with Symbols and Seriousness.  They want so badly to be in a Norton Anthology of American Literature, to have term papers written about them!

Here's a recent example:

The Dance Card
 
She dances toward the flickering hearth
in the arms of a knight and a fool,
a glass of champagne tipping in one hand.
 
A bottle dance, she is combustible.
The dance will draw her to the fire
and the fire will eat tonight.
 
The music is slow, and the dance, a waltz,
quick over the floor, interests us, the hot spinning
holds our attention though we’d do more
than watch, if more were to be done.
 
The portraits of the fathers look down
from under the ballroom’s starry ceiling.
 
If more could be done, we’d see it done:
the tables and chairs not tumbling past us,
the champagne not spilling through
the brilliant, delirious night.
 
We take an interest before turning back
to the news of the day and our questions,
to the imperatives of the evening, its music,
to the smoke, the knight and the fool.

The title has possibility.  Beyond that, and from the very first line, the poem indulges every wrong impulse a writer can think of.  Let's start with that flickering hearth.  Seriously?  Can you imagine a more 19th Century way of saying fireplace?  Well, at least I didn't write "lambent flame."  

Then take a closer look at the moldy imagery that is the first stanza: woman, dance, knight, fool, champagne glass.  You're meant to hear Music in these images, preferably Waltz Music.  And if you don't pick up on Allegory too, then you're just not reading.  Or paying attention.  But I'm paying attention.  I'm channeling The Bard.

"The dance will draw her to the fire, / and the fire will eat tonight."  Now what does that mean?  The lines sound like they mean something.  The rhythm rises and falls with Meaning.  Hmmm.  This must be so profound that it escapes even me, the writer.  Deep!  Rough paraphrase: a drunk lady almost stumbles into an open fire.  I might have explored what it means to be drunk and dancing too near a hearth big enough to "eat" you, what's brought a woman to such a place.  Or I might have pondered what the speaker's doing there, nothing much actually, just watching a partier make a fool of herself (as the next stanza confirms, without irony).  But instead I stop at Meaning, or rather, I stop short of meaning anything, hoping that you, reader, will make something profound out of this.

Then the portraits of the fathers . . . etc.  The poem is back to Allegory.  But what's allegorized here?  Nothing.  This is Allegory meant to hide the obvious: the poem has nothing to say other than and here is where Allegory would go in a better poem.

The rest is, well, puffery.  "The brilliant, delirious night," "the news of the day and our questions," "the imperatives of the evening" . . . until we're back at the knight and the fool.  Obviously, when your poem has nothing to say and means little, you hit the repeat button.

A bad poem isn't bad thought or feeling.  It's the absence of thought or feeling.  It's self-regarding in the worst way: Hey there, look at me!  It's like that fool at the dinner party who thinks he can sing and dance, or worse, thinks you think he can.