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.