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!