. . . and on a somber note . . . (12.29.22)

I wasn't planning to write here again this year, but this essay on the death of poetry prompts me to one more posting. You may not agree with the author about the idea that poetry's not only dead, but it died 100 years ago, with the publication of "The Wasteland," but you ought at least to think about it.

Yes, many people still write poetry, and much of that poetry is so-called nature poetry, but the author's point isn't that we can still write a poem "about" nature; rather, it's that nature no longer fills our poems, because we are so disappeared from Nature ourselves (into science and technology - we know too much and our tools for knowing are too pervasive). Even the insatiable campers, hikers, environmentalists, naturalists, and backpackers among us are no longer "a part of" nature; even they are just tourists, spiritually and imaginatively speaking.

I wrote this poem some years ago:

Slowly We Move Toward Our Dreams

We think about our environs

because we aren't of them

or in that way environmental.

What wild thing, rat or bird or reptile,

knows it's in a corn field

when it is the corn field?

We move about in our thinking, slow to get

how much of it's a dream, how much us, our words

like a sea lying eternally between.

The thought occurred to me one day how utterly apart from nature I really am, as a modern human being. Sure, I can get outside, take a walk (without ear buds even), go camping in the Great Dismal Swamp, canoe down the Pee Dee River, sit on some prospect and take in the natural view. I can write about these experiences. I can even celebrate them. And sure, I can study Buddhism, Mysticism, become a shaman, believe in the Holy Ghost and the mysteries of creation. But none of this makes me a part of the natural world, intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually. I am neither natural nor supernatural. I am Knowledge (i.e., scientific) and technological.

You cannot know the world and be of the world. "Of-ness" requires a lack of self-awareness. Knowing the world means knowing myself in the world, and by definition, separate from it.

Lest you think I am describing a tragedy here (as the author of the linked essay, a Millennial, seems to think this separateness is), let me say that the wonder of the world, it's great beauty and mystery, is exactly that knowing separation. At least, that's what it is for me. As I say in another poem that I wrote in the same manuscript that contains the above poem, "We make the world perfect with our intellect, / a perfect place to be, and have no home." Long live our homelessness.

T. S. Eliot didn't invent this rupture; it happened long before, with the invention of writing and the alphabet, and then accelerated through the development of print and print culture. When you reduce (or technologize) the spoken word to marks on paper, you have already crossed over from Nature into Knowledge. Eliot* merely sealed the deal in poetry for Modern Mankind. What began as pure sound - its nature, or natural state - became Self-Expression, via the technology of writing.

So, don't go read "The Hollow Men" or "The Wasteland" as documents in the Second Fall of Mankind, as the writer of this essay seems to encourage you to do. Instead, read them as great poems that finally express the world to us in our own language, an event that was itself at least 100 years overdue. For poetry didn't die 100 years ago, and, no, you're not writing in a dead art or a dead language. On the contrary, it was reborn, for us.

Which means, ignore the title of this post. There's no somber story here!

*To repeat, sealed the deal for Modern Man. The scribe who wrote down the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey, the scribe who first recorded the tale of Gilgamesh - these Writers were the first evidence of that separation. A writer like the author of the linked essay at the top of this post, a columnist for The Lamp, a Catholic literary magazine, would of course describe this splitting off as the cast-off from Eden.

Moron (12.22.22)

This post requires some self-reflection. (On my part and of me, not of you, reader.)

We all benefit from honest critiques of our poems, and by paying attention, we can also benefit from critiques of others' poems. (Which is why it's always a good thing to read literary theory and criticism, if you're a writer, especially when the criticism provides concrete examples.)

But a critique, like honesty, can turn sour and counterproductive when applied at the wrong time or too zealously or without careful consideration. 

A case in point.

Today, during our Wednesday discussion of a poem, I was too strident in my critique, more specifically, of one figure in the poem. I noted, as others had during the discussion surrounding this poem, that the poem suffered a weak closing, ending on a couple of short lines that, in my opinion (and this is important - it was only an opinion) undercut the rest of the poem.

We've discussed often how poems end and, more to our purposes at Wednesdays@One, how to end poems. (See this post in 2018 for some of that discussion.) Bringing a poem to an end can be a hard thing to do because we tend to think of closing lines as a summing up, a kind of re-statement of what (we, the writer, think) the poem means. It's hard sometimes to know when to leave off. Should the poem culminate? Should it conclude? Should it sum up? Is it okay to just stop, as if in mid-thought? Should our ending raise new questions or introduce new information of some kind, and then end there?

The answer(s) to these questions depends on what kind of poem you're writing. Are you writing argumentation divided into lines? Shakespeare did that, and so did the Metaphysical poets. In fact, a whole lot of Modernist and contemporary poetry is really argument in verse. 

Are you making un objet d'art, that is, a verbal icon, a work of art that happens to be built from words? In which case, rhetoric (i.e., rules of argumentation) hardly applies; you can end the poem any way you like. (Some people who think of poetry as rhetoric cast into rhythm and rhyme, sometimes call these kinds of "art poems" "fragments.")

When you're creating a work of art in words, where the emphasis is more on sound, rhythm, association, juxtaposition, stress and rest, relations among words and between words and their sounds (that is, less on idea, argument, reportage), it's not always easy to know how or where to end. At what point is this kind of poem complete?

I've suggested a technique for ending poems, especially these more "poetic" poems, in the link to the 2018 post above, and on Wednesday afternoons to my colleagues from time to time. Keep reading "back up" the hill of the poem you're making, toward the first line or first significant image and consider returning to that language or set of verbal cues, echoing it as a way of closing your poem.

And this is exactly where I went wrong in my critique of this writer's poem at today's salon. For he did exactly as I've suggested: he simply repeated the title of his poem as the last two lines . . . with an exclamation mark, no less!

The effect, I meant to express to this writer, was a kind of melodrama, not because of the exclamation, necessarily, but because of the Big Reveal. This ending was the writer's way of telling the reader what the poem is about, the "meaning" of its title, which he meant to make meaningful by repeating it at the end, just as if he'd brought you, the reader, to the pot of gold of his poem.

There's an aspect of power relations in a poem, developed usually through point of view, in which the writer directs your readerly attention through the poem to its conclusion. That directing can be quite sensual and concrete (and satisfying for the reader!), such as when the visual imagery of the poem invites your mind's eye to look up, look down, look far, look near, look broadly, look minutely, and so on. The poem provides perspective, and you read along. And the writer controls it. That is communal.

But there's also an aspect of power relations in a poem in which the writer tries to tell you what his poem means as he's telling you the poem. He inserts himself between you and the language of the poem, just in case you're not "getting it," incorporating his paraphrase of the poem into the poem. This kind of power relationship betrays a lack of trust either in the reader or in the poem. That's autocratic.

And that offends me when I sense it in a poem.

And THAT is where my critique of my writing colleague's poem went off the rails. I even said, in critiquing the poem, that this writer must think I am a moron not to "get" the point he's making in the poem, so much of a moron that he feels he has to repeat the title in the last two lines. And add an exclamation for emphasis! Of course this writer does not think of me as a moron. The ending to his poem may be nothing more than the Big Reveal to himself. (!) No, what made me the moron in this discussion was my own critique.

The poem was a bit clumsy. My critique was clumsier.

Read. Your. Work. Aloud. (12.20.22)

Okay, so let's start with a couple of acknowledgements.

One: I spend too much time reading The New York Times. 

Two: this story in today's Times, isn't about writing poetry.

As for the first, let me at least argue that I also read the Los Angeles Times about as often (I subscribe to both online), and every so often take a look at The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor, as well as the home page for API.  They're all favorited on my laptop or my smartphone.  I remember reading that John Kennedy read these particular papers every day of his too-short presidency, as well as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, ostensibly to get a picture of what America was thinking and feeling. Either he skimmed headlines, like I sometimes do, or he read fast, or he spent the greater part of his presidency reading the newspaper. (Some former presidents can't read, I understand.) And in my defense, no daily covers the arts, literature and writing especially, quite as thoroughly as the NYT.

And now for the second acknowledgement. This is what we try to do every week at Wednesdays@One. Not only do we read our poems aloud, but someone else in the group reads our poems back to us, aloud, so we can hear ourselves through other voices. Often, we discover what the writers featured in the Times story say they uncover in their own drafts: dropped articles, misplaced modifiers, clichés, logic gone awry,  wonky rhythms, convoluted statements, and so on.

Not everybody always accepts (or wants to accept) the gaps and rough spots in the drafts they bring to the salon for reading. Sometimes we just want some confirmation that we got it right and that the poem sounds to others as it sounds to us inside our heads. And sometimes we get it. The confirmation, that is. And sometimes we don't get it. The actionable insight. 

But there's nothing quite like hearing your own construction read back to you, out loud, for helping you hear more effectively the music you're trying to make. So I hope this reading aloud keeps us moving forward, toward that better writer tomorrow than we are today.

Anyway, another year almost written down in lines and metaphors. Great job, everybody, and a very merry holiday to you all!

Columnist Gail Collins on Allen Ginsberg and Same Sex Marriage (12.14.22)

An oblique path into a discussion of poetry, maybe, but this column by The NYT's Gail Collins is worth the obliquity.  I was too young to be there for the reading at UW-Milwaukee, and still too young even to understand the issue, but I wish I could have seen Ginsberg at that particular event.

I did see him many years later, in the 1990s, at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, which blazed a path for the city by instituting a first-class visiting poet program for a few years. By then, of course, Ginsberg was a rock star, almost literally (he was like a front man for the Clash), and drew a SRO crowd for the reading. Except in that venue and thanks to the Center's hip egalitarian thinking, SRO meant Sitting Room Only -- they cleared their largest gallery, no seats, no VIP passes, no patron boxes, and let everybody camp out on the floor, with Ginsberg up on a raised stage, sitting lotus.

Cool! I estimated 500-600 people in the audience. And, man, it was a ruckus! And raucous! And Ginsberg loved it.

Anyway, I'm with Columnist Collins: kudos to Congress and the President for creating a Supreme Court-proof law. Finally.

Now, onto poetry and guns . . .

NYT's best poetry books of the year (12.11.22)

It's that time of the year for various New York Times columnists to feature their favorite book covers, rock music, jazz projects, art books, movies and books of poems which they've encountered over the past twelve months.  So, here are the favorites of this Times writer: NYT best books of poetry 2022.

I get the first on the list, along with our columnist, who digs the intersection of language, text and print, all apparently foregrounded to message. Or perhaps, as McLuhan said so fondly of literature: the medium is the message? Anyway, I look forward to reading a book of poems where language calls attention to itself even at the expense of sense.

And I applaud the last on the list (the "list" is just that; it's not a ranking), which is a collection of one poet's translations of some 200 poems from ancient China. It's the ancientness that I like, and the foreignness too. That sort of thing also foregrounds language, in my experience, and makes for much more interesting reading.

As for the rest, well, there are the usual suspects of books built on messaging: of loss and grief (in this case, of a child); of change and memory (yawn); about me (i.e., the poet, which reminds our columnist of Sylvia Plath's poems; I'll skip that one this year); and of "knowledge" the author either celebrates or denigrates (I can't tell from the synopsis: "Everything I learned, I wished I hadn't." Really?).

So if you're looking for some poetry to expand your reading or your sense of the art or with which to fine-tune your ear, this year's columnist's favorites list is as good a place as any to start.

How do you know you're making progress as a poet? (12.5.22)

Our motto at Wednesdays@One is "A better writer today than yesterday, and better tomorrow than today." Progress is what we're after, no matter the starting point.

But I've never addressed the question, How do you know you're making progress? Here's a story that suggests an answer:

At a recent W@1 salon, as we worked our way through the week's submissions, we came to a poem by a writer who has struggled to break out of her comfort zone. I don't need to name the writer or describe that zone. We all know our comfort zones exist and, as writers, our goal at W@1 is to try things with language that we may not like, that require some bravery on our part, or at least some curiosity, so we can add facility to our "writing kits."

But TRYING requires awareness. And awareness demands that we open ourselves to self-reflection every so often, about our skills, our preferences, and our fears as writers. Workshops are supposed to help us do that. They're supposed to offer the safe space where not only can we experiment with styles and subject matters we are not familiar with, but we can open ourselves to criticism and encouragement, where we can absorb input and readers' reactions.

Workshops don't always give us that help. Sometimes they are nothing more than enabling mechanisms, praise fests, critique-free zones. Or they are fraught spaces where people tell us exactly how to fix our poem--i.e., write one that better suits their prejudices about good poems. A good workshop will seek only to help a writer understand the decisions she has made in writing a particular poem, and those she has avoided making for whatever reason, to promote awareness. In turn, that awareness, over time, should help her to make better, more informed decisions as she writes. 

But she has to be open to this process. 

A good workshop will help a writer recognize himself along the long arc of development that every poet travels his entire writing life. He has first to be willing to travel that arc, and then to walk it with eyes and ears open.

If we are really committed to bettering ourselves as writers of poetry, that's what we want of ourselves and our fellow writers at W@1.

Well, I am especially happy to say that the writer whose poem we read recently has started to take that deeper look into her writerly soul. Before reading her poem to us, she acknowledged that it was a backslide. She had been TRYING to write differently (And if I may, now I'll try to describe her "zone." Over time, her writing has calcified somewhat into narrative storytelling of her days in New Jersey--a sometimes sentimental journey.), more lyrically and against a richer backdrop of subjects. She had been working to drop the go-to narrative voice of this happened, and then that happened and then I realized something and isn't that a fond memory? 

She has wanted to write more intellectually and also in a more nuanced fashion where her emotions are concerned. She has wanted to explore her world, or maybe I should say The World, not just her memories. She has wanted to approach her poems more as verbal icons, linguistic works of art, less as little memoirish vignettes broken into lines.

But as I said, this poem reverted to the old way, and our colleague knew it. And acknowledged it. You might argue that one way of measuring your progress is to regress once in a while. So this poem was perfectly fine with all of us, so long as its author understands its place in her development.

That's step one in becoming a better writer, self-awareness. Kudos to her.

Bernadette Mayer, 1945-2022 (12.4.22)

NY poet Bernadette Mayer died late last month at her home in upstate New York.  None of her 30 books is  on a bookstore's shelf anywhere in Chapel Hill, so far as I can tell. Of course, that doesn't surprise me.

Humbled to acknowledge that none of her books is on a shelf in my library, either, because I've rarely seen any of her books on any shelf in any bookstore outside of Grolier Poetry in Boston and City Lights on the West Coast.

Good-bye, Bernadette.

Reading the unreadable (11.26.22)

I'm trying to reread a book of poems that I read cover to cover last weekend. I don't do this ordinarily. There are just too many books of poetry waiting to be read for the first time. But this one begs a second reading, maybe a third, too.

It's titled a Year & other poems and was written by Jos Charles. It's her third published book of poems. She's won some prestigious awards with her work, has an MFA from the U of Arizona, and, as of the publication of this book, is in the PhD program at UC Irvine. This book was published by Milkweed Editions, in hardcover with a dust jacket.

Quite a resume of accomplishments for somebody who's still in school!

I am trying to read it a second time because its poems are nearly unreadable to me. I take that back. As far as the content goes, the poems are completely unreadable. I don't get even an inkling of what her blurbists say contains "a universe of meaning," whatever that means. The poems are "measured in event and situated in survival," whatever THAT means. They express "gratitude made wise by grief, grief made whole by joy." I think I understand that, though I don't see the movement from one to the other in the book.

It pisses me off when I can find neither gratitude nor grief nor joy in a book of poems where these emotions are said (by a blurbist) to be what the book is about. I get pissed off because someone (a blurbist, an editor, a publisher) is trying to make me feel dull and stupid for NOT seeing these emotions in the poems. A blurbist (the same one who says the book is about gratitude > grief > joy) writes of the book, "time is the subject, time is the beloved, time wraps its arms around us to soften our pain, diffuse our suffering." That annoying plural pronoun usage aside, we might want to ask, so is it time or gratitude or grief or joy or suffering that this book's poems are about?

(Two of the four blurbists quoted on the jacket also deploy the noun "lyric" as a verb: "the poems lyric and listen with thoughtful grief-rage." What? Jos Charles, says another of her blurbists, is "a maker of silences that speak, of grievances that lyric us." WHAT?)

But enough about the blurby hyperbole. What about the poems? Here is the first poem, or possibly the first three poems, of the book, just to give you a sense of what we're dealing with here.

LIKE YOU

I looked for arbors to bend beneath carried circuits

countless in the blood myself from room

to room to see a city

square pin calendars to walls

& hear, I have heard, of inventories of

names dead unspoken

as if the first

I'D CLIMB TO SEE

but having climbed a little on

you reached a mountain cut out the sky

To say nothing of before how

words might sculpt sculpt midair

When I'd heard rustling I inched

slower down the colder mountainside

WHERE out from under story or

carriage pooled to the floor it's pressed to

new growth a mushroom up from bathroom tiles

of a house where xmas lights loom still togethered a yoke

of violet overhead & it could not matter less if you look

where up from floors restingless plotless shelterless green

I've double-proofed my typing here and there are no mistakes. What's above is what's in the book.

My sense of narrative flow wants to read these three poems together into one, but the table of contents insists that they are separate. I feel less lyric-ed or song-ed by this kind of writing than confused, frustrated and annoyed. Annoyed because the built-in difficulty (what one of the blurbists characterizes as writing that "teaches us to pay attention to language again"), strikes me more as performative, show-offy, than truly artful. But I guess they said that about Emily Dickinson, too. They said it about John Ashbery.

And look where we've put those two in the pantheon of American poetry! 

And am I not the one who insists that the poetic is always language calling attention to itself? The one who claims that poems begin in sound, no matter where they go from there?

Still, I don't feel positively lyric-ed by word sequences like "floors restingless plotless shelterless green." I feel almost embarrassed, for the poet, for the blurbists trying to spend praise there, for the publisher, for the craft itself. This is poetry? 

Yes, this is poetry.

What is rhythm, exactly? (11.25.22)

I asked this question today during our Wednesdays@One salon. Blank stares all around.

Is it meter -- da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA? Is it "the numbers" in a line? Is rhythm "the line"? The closest anyone could get to an answer to my question is this: rhythm is "flow." 

Given the poem we were discussing when this question came into the conversation, I'd guess that my fellow writers understand rhythm as propulsion: a beat that carries you forward from beginning to end, from the first syllable of a line to the last, from the first line to the last. 

The first poem we discussed today was all about meter, the specific meter of a Protestant hymn (and of course Emily Dickinson came to mind). The strict metrical pattern of this poem--three beat lines, iambic non-stress/stress syllabification, abab rhyme structure.  

The subject matter of the poem involved the chaotic world we must live in, with its contingencies and irregularities baked into our daily lives, designed to be in contrast to the strict regularity of the poem's meter. It's hymnal meter of surety, fulfilled expectation, the opposite of the world described by the poem. That was the writer's point, this tension between our desire for certainty (expressed through art) and our experience of provisionality. 

The second poem we discussed unfolded in long lines, six beats each at a minimum, but not Alexandrine lines; that is, not metrically exact lines. The lines were grouped into quatrains or, more appropriately, four line paragraphs, and while the lines were not tied to any patterned meter, they were rhythmical. What's more, many of the lines of this poem scanned into nearly equal halves, like lines of Anglo Saxon poetry with their left and right verses separated by a caesura.

And so I asked the group, what is rhythm, exactly? What do you mean when you say a poem "has rhythm"? What they felt in the poem was its propulsiveness, how the stressed and unstressed syllables pushed through each line to create a satisfying beginning-middle-end effect. 

So that's one thing we mean by rhythm: propulsion, movement, forward movement. In the poem in question, this "flow" or propulsive effect was created by series of stressed syllables separated by unstressed. No line scanned to the iambic, or to any formal meter for that matter. Nor did any of the lines scan to everyday speech--there was more architecture to each line than the jumble of ordinary speech.

Another thing we can mean by rhythm is pacing, or how quickly or deliberately a line pushes forward. pacing depends on syntax and the aural function of a syllable in a sequence. pacing can be anything from ponderous to staccato, crashing wave to tide, so to speak, involving ebb and flow. There's that word flow, again. Pacing depends on word order which itself produces syllables that come together fast or slow. We sometimes tend to think of "small" words like articles, prepositions, and conjunctions as having less importance to a poem or to a line, which we think of as its nouns, adjectives and verbs. But these smaller words, aside from their function of directing the action (near/far, intense/relaxed, ordinate/subordinate), provide for faster or slower pacing or, more importantly, for changes in the pace of a reading, variable pacing. 

Finishing things (11.23.22)

Not random thinking, but not formal thinking, either. This morning I finished reading Lydia Davis's Essays One, a volume of 30+ pieces of writing over 40 years, gathered into a single volume. Fell asleep last night with barely 15 pages left to read; fell asleep with the pleasurable anticipation that I'd finish reading this 500 page book in the morning. And so I have.

Coming through. It's how I feel when finishing any book or project or piece of writing. The feeling of having come through something, a task, a commitment, a construction in writing or reading. (For reading is or can by just as constructed as writing; you build your way through a novel or, in this case, a book of essays.)

Always, no matter what I am reading, I experience endings nostalgically, with a "looking back" over what I've just read (however long that reading took to come through) as I approach the last paragraph or line. There's nothing unique in that experience, of course. Looking back, summing up, is what endings are all about, and any writer worth her salt sees to it that the story or the poem or the play/act/scene comes to a satisfying end, meaning, a summation, a place where we can review what we've just experienced.

My mind resists the completion when I read a poem or a story. My eye slows across and down the page to "take in" every subject and predicate, phrase and clause, word, comma, semicolon, period. As I approach the end of a reading, everything about it becomes expensive: word, phrase, sentence.

Finishing a piece of reading, a whole piece, and closing the book, I experience a sense of forever, forever-ness. I mean, I shall never read this text for the first time again. When the book goes back onto the shelf from which it came, there is a finality to it, the book and its stories. Thus the nostalgia, and even some melancholy of finishing things.

Finishing a book, a poem, as a kind of death, a separation. 

But a read poem is never finished. I will read the poem again and discover something else, additional. Another poem, maybe, for the poem will be different then. I will be different. Knowing this, as I finish reading a poem through for the first time, I know that I will never have that experience again with this poem.

And that is something I have to give up, that newness. Thus the nostalgia, the melancholy.

Trust the verb? (11.20.22)

An insightful comment from one of our poets during this week's Wednesdays@One salon:

Writers use adverbs when they don't trust the verb.

How true, I thought at the time.  But I wonder how true that statement really is? The occasion for the comment during the salon was a somewhat clichéd application: leaves flutter gleefully.

The pathetic fallacy aside (can leaves be gleeful?) and in this writer's defense, it's sometimes hard for any writer, novice or experienced poet, to avoid this kind of error.  I mentioned Matthew Arnold to the group, forgetting that it was the cultural critic, John Ruskin, who coined the term.  (Maybe that's because Arnold, definitely an accomplished poet, veered dangerously into PF territory in "Dover Beach.") Applying human emotions to things not human always puts us on the cusp of sentimentality and/or pathetic fallacy.

Another writer asked about the difference between personification and pathetic fallacy, and this is it: PF is a form of personification. It just takes the figure a little too far into sentiment, on the one hand, and reverses the emphasis on the other. Personification generally is meant to isolate and illustrate a human feature--an emotion, a physical state, a frame of mind, a motive--by applying it where it doesn't belong. PF, on the other hand, seeks to invest the inanimate with human traits to enliven the inanimate.

Whatever.  The error got me thinking, once again, about the parts of speech and the poet's toolbox of figures and how these influence our writing, whether we're aware of it or not.

It's never a bad thing that we choose verbs with enough concreteness and punch to stand on their own in an image or a statement, without the aid of modifiers. We've discussed this before at W@1, as a scroll through the archives of this blog will show.  Verbs are the precious gems of the poet's vocabulary. A serious writer should always be on the lookout for verbs that express on their own.

But that doesn't mean we should shun modifiers all together, not even adverbs. Adverbs and adjectives can intensify a verb or even an entire predicate. They can limit a verb's meaning in a thought or an image. They change or limit another word's meaning relative to place (where), time (when), manner (how) and degree (how much, to what extent). That other word can be a verb, an adjective, and even another adverb.

While we poets ought to work a little harder for that verb that does its own heavy lifting in a thought, an image, a line of verse, we needn't avoid modifiers like adverbs at all costs. Sometimes, those costs are too high and our poem loses out.  But consider the following four statements where the adverb modifies the how of the verb:

The sun shines brightly.

The sun shines dully.

The sun shines dutifully.

The sun shines happily.

The first two applications describe a physical characteristic: the intensity of the sunlight. The first example might work without the adverbial modifier, if you're looking to economize or compress the language of your image. It might be enough simply to say "the sun shines." The second example, though, introduces a new idea to one's sense of how the sun shines. How can something "shine" and be "dull" at the same time? Well, that would be for the poem to work out.

The second two applications above are problematic because the adverbs in them mean to apply human traits or emotions to the inanimate sun: responsibility or obligation and happiness. Does this mean their associations are both "false" (i.e., pathetic fallacy)? Maybe, maybe not.  The fourth example is sentimental and a cliché; for how long in human history have we associated a sunny day with happiness? For ever! So, been there, used that . . . too many times. But the third example, though it applies a human trait to the sun, offers a new take on how we might think about the sun's purpose in the universe: it has no choice but to shine because that's what bright objects in the heavens do. But to think of that function in terms of obligation is a new idea (so far as I can tell) about the sun and the universe and, ultimately, our relation to both.

As a poet, I might even seek a more provocative verb than "shines" to express the thought on example number three. I might write that the sun "labors" or the sun "grovels" or the sun "complies," thereby avoiding the modifier thing all together, while injecting some very curious imagery into my poem (and, once again, bringing the language of the poem to the surface of your experience, dear reader).

The point, I guess, is twofold. One, know your language and its history well enough to know a cliché when you see one, and overdone sentiment as well, so you can get rid of it. And two, modifiers are every bit as valuable to an image, a thought, a line of poetry as any other part of speech, so long as you treat them artfully.

A note on easy sophistication, facile sententiousness and idle chatter (11.4.22)

I've been reading pieces from Essays One, a fat volume of the reviews and criticism of Lydia Davis. Davis is a short story writer and translator. She participated in the grand Proust project of a few years back, providing the translation of Swann's Way.  She has also translated Flaubert, Foucault and Michel Leiris, among other great (and hard to read) French writers. Her short story metier is the Really Short Story - what we call today micro-fiction.  

You can guess from this last fact that Davis favors robust language and figures, not just in her own work but in the larger world of arty literature.  She writes admiringly of Rimbaud and John Ashbery, Raymond Roussel, as well as high-art writers I'd never heard of before opening Essays One: Samuel Menache and a poet named "Sparrow."

I've just been reading her reviews of two books of poems by Rae Armantrout, the West Coast Language poet; and while I can't say that I agree with her opinions and assessments of this writer, I am grateful for what she says about the poet's style:

". . . there is no such thing as glibness about her [writing]. Glibness is a town thousands of miles away from San Diego. As is Easy Sophistication, Empty Lyricism, World-Weariness, Facile Sententiousness, Idle Chatter.

I like the world-weary, facile glibness of this statement. And I can use it sometimes at Wednesdays@One. For this group's poems can often veer into the glib, the easy, and the empty. Not because we are egotistical writers or are lying to ourselves about our own writing, but because we are, to a poet, largely unlettered in the art.

What we know, what we think we know, about poetry comes mostly from each other (and too often, alas, from me), from the internet, and from our own narrow reading histories. I don't mean to denigrate my fellow writers' poems, or my own literary eye and ear, for that matter.  We're all much better at this stuff than any of us was five years ago, when W@1 launched.  But even a glance through Davis' essays shows how narrow our readings really are in comparison to the broad and deep (and voracious) literary education of a writer like Lydia Davis.

Essays One is just a reminder of how much groundwork there is to prepare for anybody who wants to become a good writer.

Five Titles, Five Poems (10.29.22)

We've talked about titles before at Wednesdays@One. They're important and they should be more than just afterthoughts, even if you write the title before writing the poem! New project: 5 titles, 5 poems. See the project description at the end of this blog post, especially the important caveat at the very end.

The last time we put any effort into this titling business was in 2019 (see the blog post for 5.26.19), when I compared titles to the flags we fly above our poems.

Sometimes, titles are the first line of a poem. In some cases - there seems to be a whole sub-sub genre of this type of title - the first line of the poem IS the title and the first line of text is therefore the second line of the poem. That's one way to do it, for in that case, the title takes on slightly more meaning: it's more than a flag announcing the poem; it's actually participating in the body of the poem, as another unit of meaning connecting to the following line.

But usually we make titles separate from the body or text of the poem, as something that "flags" or announces the poem. A title in this sense suggests context for the reader. It says, "the poem you are about to read is about this . . ." It says, "what follows will explain me." Sometimes titles are so slant in relation to the poem, so suggestive, that it's like reading a riddle or a joke. You have to read the poem carefully, imaginatively, perceptively, to get what the title "means," and vice versa.  Sometimes titles are just descriptors, telling you the poem's theme or subject matter: "The Sick Rose," "Dawn," "The Pisan Cantos." 

My favorite kind of title evokes a mood or frame of thought, grabs your attention: "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump," or one of my favorites of all time, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World."  Some titles repurpose a genre or cast an old trope in new light: "Elegy for the Monastery Barn." This title, by Thomas Merton, applies the notion of elegy not to a person but a thing, and a very homely thing at that, the barn at his Kentucky monastery burned to the ground. Here are the opening lines:

As though an aged person were to wear 

Too gay a dress

And walk about the neighborhood

Announcing the hour of her death,

So now, one summer day's end,

At suppertime, when wheels are still,

The long barn suddenly puts on the traitor, beauty,

And hails us with a dangerous cry,

For: "Look!" she calls to the country,

"Look how fast I dress myself in fire!"

Perhaps this title wasn't all that hard to come by. Merton felt something profound for this barn, a warm, human compassion, so the leap to "elegy" would not have been that great for him.

But he made the leap nevertheless, as did all the other writers of the titles I just listed above. And just as many of you at W@1 do each week. You put some thought into it, trying to gather up the material, movement and meaning of your poem into a single or just a few words.

But what if you have only the title and no poem? What if you reverse your usual process (most of you, anyway), and write the title first, then try to build a poem from there? In this case, you'll try to intuit the Material, Movement, and Meaning from the hint of a title so as to write the poem.

I have done just this with two entire manuscripts over the past 25 years (with a twist of this process in a third manuscript). I once wrote "found lines" for a 150 line poem that never worked. Not until I converted the "lines" into titles for poems to be. I worked on these titles for 10 years, and finished with 150 poems! I can't say they were good poems, but the experience was eye-opening: what can be "read into" or "imagined out of" a few words that will serve as the flag flying above the poem?

A few years ago, I outlined an entire book of poems with a "table of contents" of titles, then created the poems from the outline. The titles were arranged alphabetically, "My Absence," "My Barbentane," all the way through to "My Zero."  Here was an odd twist: throughout the year it took me to write this book, I had no idea what to title IT! But as I approached the x, y and z portion of the manuscript, it came to me: I titled the book "Selfiedom."

More recently, I wrote an entire book over six months (getting a pattern here? book writing sped up for me!) using the following formula: Write Poem Number One. Select a line or a phrase from Poem Number One as the title for Poem Number Two and then write Poem Number Two. Choose (almost at random) a line or a phrase from Poem Number Two as the title for Poem Number Three, and write the poem. And so on until I felt I'd exhausted the formula. (Of course, this could have gone on indefinitely, though I certainly couldn't have.) I quit when I got to about 80 poems. But I did come up with the title before finishing Poem Number Two: "Weave." And from that book title I concocted an entire book.

My point, and your next assignment, should you choose to accept the challenge, is that there can be a lot to learn from reversing the normal process of putting titles to poems. Start with the title. Think about its implications, sounds, syntactical suggestiveness, potential for imagery and metaphor, for figures of speech, points of view, voicings, moods and so on. Then follow those implications through to a completed poem. 

The follow-through might turn out to be an exploration of all that the title implies. That's fine, and could be rewarding, too. 

Create five titles. Try to write a poem for one of the titles in time for next Wednesday's salon (and that means, in time to submit to me by Tuesday around 4 pm). Share all your titles with me as well so we can all get an advance look into the problem (challenge!) you've created for yourself. That will create some anticipation for everybody.  Then write a poem for one of the remaining four titles for the following week, one for the remaining three titles for the week after that, and so on, until we get through all five titles.

Note: in this project, do not simply make your title the first line of the poem. The title should stand apart from the poem itself. 

 

Just call me repressed, okay? (10.15.22)

Here's a feature on Sharon Olds in a recent NYT Book section.  (She's just published a new book, Balladz.) It's pretty lavish with the praise. Then again, that's pretty much how poetry criticism functions most of the time.

Call me repressed, but I've never read her work comfortably. TMI, is what I have always thought of a Sharon Olds poem, many of them, at least. Her voice has always, to me, been like that of somebody who just can't share the pleasantries of the day and be done with you, but has to sink into PERSONAL STUFF I'd rather not know. I like a conversation that stays on the surface. If you're going deep, at least where a mask.

No amount of hauling in the authorities--in this case, Ocean Vuong and Terrance Hayes--is going to convince me that the work of Sharon Olds is anything but Confessional in that way that makes me want not to turn the page but toss the book. Her co-faculty at NYU insist that she's not doing anything other poet celebs have done themselves (examples: Ginsberg, O'Hare) but gotten away with as innovators, even as cool. "Ode to My Clitoris," or whatever, is not the same kind of read as "Lana Turner Is Dead." There's poetry as personism, and there's over-sharing.

Well, maybe you'll like it. But as for me, call me repressed and pass the condoms.

Rose, Rosier, Rosiest - the burden of a flower (10.14.22)

Let's write about roses, or The Rose. That is, let's investigate the rose trope in poetry. It's been plucked, paraded, parodied, blasted, rained upon, likened to, analogized, symbolized, budded, withered and bloomed to beat the band in Western poetry since Chaucer at least. It has pricked fingers, graced bosoms, crossed palates, withstood hail and snow, succumbed to hail and snow. It has been sweet and bitter. The rose has been in bud, in full, and sick.

Rose, where'd you get that red?, wrote a kid in one of Kenneth Koch's famous poetry workshops for children. "What's in a name?" asks Juliet. "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."  And "Roses red and violets blew . . ." wrote Spenser in The Fairie Queene (plus every grade school kid in the history of public education in America, with Valentine's Day approaching). Gertrude Stein very nearly settled the argument with her quotable, "A rose is a rose is a rose."

The rose is a lover's messenger:

Go, lovely rose!

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung

In deserts, where no men abide,

Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired;

Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee;

How small a part of time they share

That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

This poem's by Edmund Waller, an early version of the "go, lovely rose" sub-sub-genre in English poetry. So many speakers of famous poems, from the Metaphysicals to the Romantics, directed their roses to intercede for them (always, as far as I can tell, in the men-seeking-women section of the want ads).

But the women aren't to be out-budded in this department:

Hope is like a Harebell trembling from its birth,

Love is like a rose the joy of all the earth,

Faith is like a lily lifted high and white,

Love is like a lovely rose the world's delight.

Harebells and sweet lilies show a thornless growth,

But the rose with all its thorns excels them both.

"Hope Is Like a Harebell" is by Christina Rossetti. I have no idea what a harebell looks like or even how to pronounce the name, but no matter. I know the rose. And I agree, it excels. 

Now for one of my favorites . . .

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves and hills, and fields

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,

Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow Rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,

Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool,

Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and Ivy buds,

With Coral clasps and Amber studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

The Shepherds' Swains shall dance and sing,

For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me, and be my love.

. . . by Kit Marlowe, a master of flower imagery in love poetry, and of urgency in the affairs of affairs. There's something pretty darn desperate about this kind of poem, and a helluva a burden for a flower that's prone to pests and diseases, can be easily over- and under-watered, and wilts fast. I'll let you google for Robert Herrick's timeless, "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" - "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may . . .," but you get the idea. If you're feeling desperate, press a rose into action.

Browning had his blasted rose-acacia, in "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," a characteristically sardonic/ironic sinister kind of rosy desperation; go read it again! But William Blake was not to be out-melancholied by anybody when it comes to roses:

The Sick Rose

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

I recall reading somewhere that he cultivated roses. Easy to believe from the above that he made a lousy job of it, but he sure salvaged the carnage into good poetry.

When you think of a rose, it's always a red one . . . go ahead, admit it. But there's also the yellow rose of Texas (they gotta always be different down  there, don't they?), and the pale pink of the knock out rose, and the white rose and the blue rose and, if you talk a walk around the Gene Stroud Community Rose Garden in Chapel Hill, you're going to find all kinds of colors.

But when it comes to poetry, nothing beats the passionately red rose.

Anyway, here's your project for next week:

Write a poem featuring the rose. It can be about the rose, it can use the rose as a metaphor or an illustration or simply a starting point to a poem about something else. But your poem should contain a rose. If you plan to use your poem to describe a rose, then be forewarned, we're going to look for something fresh, a rose seen from a fresh point of view; a rose described in minute detail from the inside out or the outside in, from top to bottom or vice versa, for some reason beyond just mere description. Or maybe, just maybe, a rose described as what it is, a flower.   

If you're feeling more adventurous, do some background reading on the rose in poetry (just Google that) and see how others have treated it, used it, historically, then try the same yourself. I dunno, maybe a "go, lovely rose" poem of your own.

Chaucer studies (10.13.22)

I should be embarrassed to admit this, but until now I was completely unaware of this Chaucer controversy among Medievalists.  To be sure, I majored in Modern English and American literature, but I took enough classes in medieval lit to have been made aware of the status "Chaucer as rapist." But I wasn't made aware.

And this goes to the heart of the NYT story linked above: Medieval Studies, like so many other university disciplines in the humanities, was dominated by male scholars when I attended university. The feminist critique of English literary history, like the social critique and the psychoanalytical critic and any number of other critiques, wasn't given much breathing space in my education. There were NO female faculty that I can recall at my university when I studied the medieval period. And if there were, no one ever brought the critique into any of my classrooms. Nor did any of my fellow students.

Does that exonerate me? Hardly. The feminist critique existed. Had at least since the mid-60s and the feminist second wave. I simply hadn't read those books or took classes with those scholars--hadn't even thought to. That was my loss, and one illustration of that loss was an entire graduate level seminar on Chaucer that failed to mention what, apparently, entire books had been devoted to by then: Chaucer was a rapist.  And besides, this claim had been made based on a discovery of a legal document in the later 19th Century.

Read the NYT story, which is about new research that appears to prove that the original 14th Century legal document on which this rape claim has been based was misinterpreted and did not involve the crime of rape but of poaching labor.  

But what really strikes me about the story is that it actually reinforces the feminist critique about power relations between men and women, gender rules that assume male superiority, and so forth. A critique that remains as vital today as always. It's the assumptions, largely unexamined generation after generation, that are the point, and how they undergird "facts" and narratives of power and powerlessness, how they enable whole groups of people to be classified and defined (and managed accordingly).

And this is what I really missed out on in my entire undergraduate and graduate study programs. I am partly to blame, for being incurious or naive or myopic enough to miss the critique altogether.  I am partly a victim of a pedagogy that was, during my years at university, still driven by those same assumptions.

What's that got to do with this poetry blog? Well, Chaucer was a poet, right? One whom I can not now read in the same way that I read him 40 years ago or even last year. Which raises a whole other kind of literary/social/political issue: how does one absorb and apply new information about writers that may totally undercut one's long held, unexamined assumptions about them? What does the new information say about the writer . . . and about the reader? What does it say about the poetry?

Two Truths and a Lie (10.9.22)

Out of desperation, maybe, I thought up this project for Wednesdays@One. We've been stuck sharing "whatever you're working on presently," which in itself isn't a bad thing, of course, but too much of the same . . . you know the rest. So we are in need of something more structured, that everybody works on together so each gets to see how others approach the same subject or writing problem. 

I used to use this "game" as an ice breaker when facilitating large workshops, as a way to get those reluctant to talk, to talk at least a little at the beginning, and to learn to trust the others in the group enough to share something about themselves. Didn't always work out the way I hoped, but usually people played along and we'd develop a baseline for communicating with one another.

Since poetry writing is such a solitary thing, I thought "two truths and a lie" might be a kind of communal effort in mining the truth and lies.  As I said to my group, creative writing is the art of telling lies skillfully, to paraphrase Aristotle, so a poem with a fib in it might not be a bad thing. From some perspectives, in fact (and now I'm selling you a kind of truth), all art is lies, which is to say, edited and shaped. This project will give us a chance to talk about "truth" in a poem, what it is, how to recognize it, and how to attach value to it.

Two truths and a lie. Write a poem in which you tell two true things and one lie about yourself, your biography, your outlook on or opinions about the world, or about some event, prospect, idea, scene. It doesn't have to be biographical, much less confessional. You can point the lens outwardly, to the world, if you like. Our objective as readers is to determine which are the truths and which the lie, and then to look into how successfully you incorporate "truth" and "falsehood" into a poem.

Some questions we might address as we go through these poems include:

• What is "truth" and "falsehood" in a poem (i.e., art)?
• How do notions of truth and lies affect the writing of a poem?
• Are poems--is any art--beholden to "the truth"?
• Is it okay to lie in a poem? When? Why?
• What does it mean to lie in a poem?
• What is the relationship between "truth/untruth" and "fact"?
• Discounting truth as mere fact, is there such a thing as universal truth? Self-evident truth?
• When is a lie "bald-faced"?

I can tell you this, in writing my own two-truths-and-a-lie poem, I've struggled to decide whether to stick mainly to facts or to try to address more subjective matters. I've edited and re-edited to see how a "story" (the lie in Aristotle's sense of writing) might tell the truth, or a truth, and whether that truth applies across the board or is merely my own truth. I've pondered, in turn, the nature of truth, whether it's "relative," as they say, and if so, is it really truth or just opinion or belief. And what in the end does truth have to do with belief? With facts? With reality? With community? With selfhood?

A ponderous project indeed!

Have fun.

How to talk about a poem: a poem by Bob Cumming (9.30.22)

We had a rewarding discussion of a few poems at this week's Wednesdays@One. I say this because we got through only five of the eleven on tap. This happens often enough because of our approach to talking about the poems: we tend to dwell on how a poem works, the decisions the writer made in composing, as well as decisions the writer either failed to make or declined to make. And a poem is always a record of choices made and options chosen or not. 

I especially valued the discussion of this short poem by Bob Cumming:

Directions for the Day of My Death

Something swimming in the lake.

Kids shouting.

My close people in a circle

swopping lies.

Wind still roughing up the trees.

We looked at it from several angles. Its use of verbs in the present participle form, for instance. And how the speaker draws your attention (literally, what you see and hear) to the far and the near, the high and the low.  We talked quite a bit about that enigmatic first line: what's swimming in the lake? Does it matter that we aren't told anything specific? What would be the effect on the poem if the poem were more specific--a duck, maybe, or a person, or a fish? 

We didn't talk about planes. This idea occurred to me later on. By planes, I mean images of surfaces and depths. There is the lake and whatever is swimming "in" it, which offers an image of what can be seen on the surface and what swims beneath it, out of sight. There's also the image of the circle, closed, we can assume, to outsiders, where lies are being told. What kind of lies? Well, family stories, perhaps. But more likely, given the nature of this poem, interiors that are threatened with exposure and vulnerable. So, the kinds of family myth that, in a time of loss and mourning, might shield the family members--the family itself--from scrutiny. And finally, there is the visual plane of wind in the trees. The wind seen only in its effect on the trees, a roughing up, like the effect of an event or a change in fortune on a psyche.

So we have in these five brief, almost terse lines, a series of images of surface and depth, admittance and exclusion, interior and exterior lives, and the invisible accessible only through its effects.  

Bob acknowledged that this poem was composed in response to a seminar on Jung and poetry. Which leads me to what is probably the main plane: that separating the living and the dead, as the title suggests and as the present participle form of the verbs confirms. In the event of my death, life goes on.

Quite a poem!

How to talk about a poem: a Charles Simic poem (9.26.22)

Another installment in the series, "How to talk about a poem." 

Let's say that the poet Charles Simic visits our Wednesdays@One salon with a poem to share and discuss. Simic has published some 25 books of poems, starting with 1967's What the Grass Says. He's published at a 2-4 year clip, so, a pretty steady output of single volumes, collected editions, and has won the Pulitzer Prize. 

The poem he's brought along today is from his latest book, Come Closer and Listen, published by Ecco. You can be sure that, to Simic, this poem is "last year's cold," as the poet Anne Sexton used to say of her published work. That is, he's over it. Any advice we're likely to give him about improving this poem will fall upon deaf ears.

Still, he's brought the poem along for discussion, so the least we can do is to discuss it.  Here is the poem:

Some Birds Chirp

Others have nothing to say.

You see them pace back and forth,

Nodding their heads as they do.

It must be something huge

That's driving them nuts--

Life in general, being a bird.

Too much for one little brain

To figure out on its own.

Still, no harm trying, I guess,

Even with all the racket

Made by its neighbors,

Darting and bickering nonstop.

Where to begin a conversation about this little poem? Do we talk about it in technical terms? Or maybe in terms of style? Or perhaps even more literary terms, as in how the poem arises from/shows an understanding of literary history? Maybe we should talk about it as art, that is, as a "making" made from words that moves from a beginning through a middle to an end? That would be the conversation Aristotle might encourage! Or maybe we could talk about this poem as a social construct; you know, taking into account the race, gender, politics, religion or creed implied in the speaker, of the author and/or the reader (i.e., you, in particular).

Each of these is an "approach" to the poem that lies on the page before us or reverberates into the air around us as it is spoken aloud, twice, through the voices of two readers, as we do at W@1.

What we won't do is to talk idly about the poem. We won't let ourselves rest on statements like:

I really like this poem!

I've seen birds behave just like this in my own yard!

I can relate to this poem!

This poem has nice page real estate!

Spare!

Every word contributes, and not a word out of place!

Funny!

But WHY do you like this poem? So WHAT, you've seen birds behave this way? HOW do you relate? What do you MEAN by "nice"? WHY is "spare" important? HOW does the word "with" contribute to the poem? What MAKES the poem funny?

What I mean is, we should talk about the poem not through vague impressions of "like" or "dislike," but in terms of its parts, how it works, its literary lineage, the figures it deploys, its "voicings," its plot (or, if you prefer, not THAT it moves, but HOW it moves from beginning to end).

Suppose we begin our discussion with the poem's figures and how they are deployed throughout, for this is a poem of figures of speech, as many of Simic's poems are. In fact, somebody in our group, who has read many of Simic's books and maybe an essay or two about his writing, might contribute that Simic is not American by birth, that English is his second language, that, like Nabokov before him, Simic has gone to great lengths to Americanize his speech and vocabulary, even if he still speaks with a distinctively Serbian accent (he was born in Belgrade). As you will no doubt hear when our visitor reads his poem aloud. So much is his commitment to language, all language, as a poet. And given this personal history, it won't be a great leap to infer (and so much of our discussion of any poem will depend on the quality of the inferences we make!) that Simic is attracted to American speech patterns, colloquialisms, sayings, ways of speaking, and often builds these into his poems in the form of figures of speech.

The birds of this poem "pace," nodding their heads as they do. Something's driving them nuts. Maybe it's life in general. Whatever it is, it is probably too much for one little brain. Still, no harm in trying, I guess. The speaker watches the silent birds "try" even with all the racket made by the birds that do sing (or bicker). 

Each of these phrases/words derives from common American speech. Even translated into Serbian, they will not ring with the same flatness that they have in common speech or this poem. They come across, in their flatness of tone, as idle chatter. And so there you have it, a poem built of the idle chatter (thoughts) of somebody observing birds "trudge" about before him on the ground. You have to admire expressions like "life in general" and "I guess" as Simic uses them in this poem. Outside of the construct of the poem, these are expressions that any one of us will use at any point in any conversation in which we are not particularly invested, are unwilling to devote much thought to, haven't the time or the energy or the interest to think more deeply about.

And yet. In this poem these markers of idle chatter carry the artistic load! Idle thoughts about birds that chirp and birds that don't. Now who would write a poem about that? Charles Simic, that's who. He is a poet of the idle, workaday consciousness beneath which lurks comedy and terror and a very deep unease. Simic is a Surrealist. His poems acknowledge that we live on two planes: a quotidian and a dream world, a world of logic and a world of disconnection, and they find irony, humor, tragedy . . . humanity . . . in that dual existence.

So now we have talked about one part of Simic's poem, its figures. We could dive in another direction or go deeper. We could talk about the poem's metaphorical structure: how the birds are like people, described in terms of people we've all seen and heard (or not heard, ha-ha) at one time or another. No doubt, some of us have already made this connection between pacing people and birds walking around on the ground while other birds sing in the trees. And no doubt at least some of us have noted that there seem to be two kinds of people in the world, those who trudge around with heads down and those who seem to celebrate, lifting their voices.

We could go on and talk about point of view as a key element of the art of this poem. Who is seeing all this drama unfold among the chattering and silent birds? From what vantage point is the seeing done? A park bench? A window? And, given that the speaker dwells on the subject especially of the birds that (seem to) pace, might we infer (there we go again!) that the speaker identifies with these birds that "have nothing to say"? That the speaker's thoughts are fulfilled through such idle chatter suggests so. Ironic!

And there you have it. An hour and a half nearly used up talking substantively about Charles Simic's poem. And we haven't even talked yet about how "good" the poem is, or whether it might be improved, or how it reveals a certain style of writing, thinking and feeling.  

That's for another ninety minutes.

Marvell's Upon Appleton House (9.8.22)

Today, during a discussion of surreal or hyper-real or just plain heightened imagery in one of the poems shared (thanks, Shoshana, for your wonderful poem!), I mentioned this famous poem by Andrew Marvell. I confused its title and subject with a poem in the same sub-genre (the country-house poem) by Ben Jonson, "To Penshurst."  

Marvell's poem, "Upon Appleton House," is a marvelous piece of work. He wrote it in 1651, a couple of generations after the Jonson poem, but in the same vein or sub-genre of complimenting a person, perhaps a benefactor or potential benefactor, i.e., somebody in position to do a writer some good at court or among the publishers, i.e., somebody with money, connections and, of course, an estate, complimenting a person through a glowing description of his or her digs in the country.

You can read the Wikipedia entry on Marvell's poem, but I recommend that you go and read the poem.  It'll go slow in the beginning, due to the 500-year old English, but it's worth the time and effort. 

What made me think of this poem were the lines in Shoshana's poem about the fish tattoo and the fish imagery in general.  (If you don't have the time or the patience to read the whole poem, go to stanza 60, where the fish imagery comes in. But you should know that the passage is best read in context of the developing argument of the poem.) The imagery is so striking, "arresting" was the word that I used this afternoon, as to be, as I say above, hyper-real.  Realer than real.  Air-brush real.  Too-bright-for-the-light-of-day real. In other words, surreal. For in Marvell's poem, you'll find a wonderfully hyper-real description of fish swimming in air, seemingly. The estate had endured a serious flood just before Marvell visited, or perhaps as he visited, as I recall from the poem. So, a fish swimming across a field seemingly through the air would of course had been a fish in a flooded field.

I remember first reading that image and thinking how perfectly Apollinaire of Marvell!

Talking about poems , Part 3: we come to it as art (9.4.22)

If we mean to talk about a poem, we have to come to it as art, not as statement. And if we mean to come to a poem as art, we have lots of tools and frameworks at our disposal for talking about it.  Part 2 covered one of those tools, the most foundational of them: language as both the medium and the material of the art.  Others, which I'll develop in following blog posts, include figures of speech, syntax, rhyme and meter, repetition; voice and persona and their close cousin, tone; style, both personal and historical; intention; appreciation and its close relative, reception.

One way to talk about the art of a poem we're reading is to ask ourselves not What is it saying? but What is it saying to me? Which can also be put this way: What is this poem's effect on me? Which, when we come down to it, we're asking . . .

How am I responding to this poem?

For when we talk about art, we don't talk just about the art object, which is a merely technical discussion or description, but about our experience with the art object. We always include ourselves when we talk about a work of art.

Now this doesn't mean that we can get away with statements like "I liked it very much!" upon reading a poem. Or "It moves me." Or "Oft thought but ne'er so well expressed!" These are impressions, but hardly discussions of a work of art.  Nor can we "read" ourselves, our opinions, our prejudices "into" a poem, if we mean to talk about it as a work of art: "This passage reminds me of the time when I . . ." You know what I mean.

When I ask myself how I am responding to a poem (as a work of art), I am interested in how my mind and my emotions engage with it, are focused, aroused, suspended, engaged, confounded, titillated, confirmed, denied as I read phrase by phrase, line by line, stanza by stanza down the page of text (or, even more interestingly, as it's uttered into my hearing). Has the poem led me to expect the next image or line or figure of speech or rhymed ending? Has it teased with an expectation only to deliver something else? Has the poem violated everything I've learned to expect about a poem and how it works? If I am surprised by a poem - its language, images, structure, cadences, beginning or ending - why am I surprised. What was I expecting that didn't happen?

You see where I'm headed with this. One way to talk about a poem as a work of art is to examine my own assumptions about what a poem is and to measure the success of the poem against those expectations, on the one hand, and the appropriateness or adequacy of those expectations against the poem, on the other.

When I come to a poem as art, I come to myself as a Reader of Poetry and not of an opinion piece, a letter to the editor, an expository essay, a story (merely), a piece of reportage, a speech (especially!), an instruction, a proposal. 

Art engages and moves us in deep ways. To the extent that it is presented to us in the form of words, our interest remains: What is our engagement, precisely, and toward what are we moved? How does that engagement or movement begin, develop, and fulfill itself in the poem as we read, image by image, line by line, stanza by stanza, beginning, middle and end?

The less we talk about what we think a poem "means" or "what it's about," or at least the longer we hold that interest at bay, and the more we try to talk about our own engagement with the poem, the better we talk about a poem.

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Here's an interesting reading exercise. Choose a poem you've never encountered before, so you don't know what to expect as you read from line to line. Have a notebook and a pen handy as you read. 

Jot down in the notebook your impressions as you go through the text phrase by phrase if you like, or image by image, line by line and so on.  Try to note where you are surprised by the text, where your expectations for what comes next are fulfilled, how you react emotionally, even physically, and intellectually.  How much head-scratching are you doing in one portion of the text compared to another? What parts of the poem do you tend to skim, and what parts force you to reread the text? 

Then reread it. Does the text of the poem remind you of any other poems you've read in the past? Is the poem completely new to you? How does the poem begin and end? Does the poem "speak" with a voice? Whose voice is it? Whose voice could it be? Does the look of the text on the page (assuming you're reading and not listening) seem to have anything to do with how the poem affects you as you read?

In doing the above, you are approaching the poem as art. Why? Because you are interested not (yet) in what the poem "says" but in your own engagement with it, how you absorb new information, how the text encourages you to absorb new information, when and how you get bogged down, read more slowly or rapidly, and so on.

Talking about poems, Part 2: poetry and its materials (8.31.22)

We had a lively discussion of poems and poetry today at our weekly salon. One topic of discussion, the materials of the craft, is a good place to start a series on how to talk about poems. It has to do with perspective - how and whether you see poetry as a mode of personal expression, for instance, or as an art.

The fact is, poetry is both and more. Like other art forms - sculpture, painting, music, dance - poetry has its materials that poets must work with in order to make the art. Those materials are not words, per se, but language (words and grammar, competencies, figures of speech, idioms and colloquialisms, usages). But the difference between language as the material of poetry and, say, stone as the material of sculpture, is that words come pre-freighted with meaning - denotative and connotative - and history. Words' meanings, usefulness, value and eligibility change over time, so the history of a word, its etymology, complicates its use in a poem. As writers of poems, we must keep both these characteristics in mind when we write.

So in very real ways, the material you use when you write a poem is dictated to you. Your understanding of language and the words of which it is made are not yours alone. And this is why, in my opinion, making poems can be a much more fraught experience than making a sculpture or a piece of music.

But when we talk about a poem at Wednesdays@One, we should all start with this perspective: poetry is art before it is anything else, and the chief material of that art is language, not what the words of that language "point to" in the world, but the language itself. And when we begin there, we can then talk about a poem materially, that is, whether and how apparent its material is in the finished product and the role that material plays in our experience of the product.

So, rule No.1 in talking about a poem:

A poem is poetic to the extent that its language calls attention to itself.

There are degrees of language calling attention to itself, as there are degrees in just about everything. The language of a poem can "call attention to itself" to the point of being so opaque that you cannot read beyond it or through it to anything else.  Think gibberish or hermetic poetry or otherwise extremely experimental writing in which writers push and pull the language to its acceptable limits (as communication). At the opposite end of this spectrum is language that virtually disappears, that is so transparently deployed as to be invisible, completely unobtrusive in your experience of a poem. Reportage and expository writing usually seek this level of transparency of language. These types of writing want to make words disappear. Poetry wants to make them visible to you, the reader.

How to put this perspective into practice when we talk about a poem? I'll be writing some follow-on blog posts exploring some of the tools that poets use to emphasize the language of their poems. Reminding yourself of these tools from time to time will not only help you write more poetically, but also equip you with better ways to read poems . . . and to talk about them.

How to talk about a poem (8.30.22)

Related to today's topic are two other posts in this blog: How to critique a poem I (3.5.19), and How to critique a poem II (8.19.19).  You might also want to reread these posts as well: How to scan a line (3.15.21), What we mean when we tell you to revise this poem (10.15.21), Why a draft poem "feels right" (5.28.20), But that's what I wish my poem to mean . . . (5.30.21), What moves you most in a work of literature? (11.30.20).

We've talked about how to critique a poem, and we've talked about how to scan a line, how or when to revise a draft, but we've not talked about how to talk about a poem.  In fact, it never occurred to me that we should do this, since that's what we do every week during our Wednesdays@One salon.

But it occurs to me now, especially as a follow-on to last week's aggression (well, my aggression) about critiquing poems more vigorously.

Two things that writing workshops often fall victim to are 1) cheap praise and 2) cheaper advice.  Writers too often congratulate one another's work in poetry writing workshops, as if everybody has mastered the art, in every poem and in every utterance of every poem.  The "thought" is "perfect," the imagery is "exactly right," the meaning is "right on," the words are "correct."  Couldn't have been said differently.  And none of this "criticism" means anything, by which I mean, none of it is useful to the writer or to the reader.  Or, writers too often instruct a fellow writer exactly how to fix his or her poem, what line to add here, what word order to insert there, which images to create, what word to use to replace the offending word in the present draft.  Again, none of this advice means a thing to either writer or reader.

We do both of these things at W@1 from time to time.  We also can't explain very clearly what it is that we like or dislike about a poem or its parts.  When I ask a follow up question of a vague critique, replies begin with "It's just a feeling . . ." or "I can't really explain . . ." or something like that.  When I ask the writer of a poem to explain where a line comes from, how she arrived at a particular structure or syntax or word choice, what I often get in reply has everything to do with the real life event the poem is meant to capture, and nothing at all to do with the process of making the poem.  Sometimes I even get a refusal to explain, as if the spirit of Blake has entered the conversation and I am murdering to dissect.

Nobody wants to be the one to say a poem's not working, not making sense (or making too much sense), and why.  Conversely, and ironically, no one seems able or willing to explain why a poem IS working or making sense.

This all tells me that we are not comfortable talking about poems as works of art.  We approach them (our own poems and others') too much as personal expressions, cris de coeur, and therefore off limits to critique.  Everybody wants an A and everybody wants to give an A to each effort, for to do otherwise might discourage a fellow writer or, worse yet, oblige us to explain what we mean when we talk about our poem or somebody else's.

And so last week I determined to change course at W@1, to push the group back toward the art that we practice, and to our mission:

To write better poems today than I wrote yesterday, and better poems tomorrow than I am writing today.

So.  Let's talk about how to talk about poems.  Stay tuned for a short series of posts on ways to think and talk about poems that we can use to help each other write better.

The Shepherd's Calendar - it's finally out! (8.29.22)

Nearly three years in the making.  Envisioning.  Collaborating with a painter.  Writing poems.  Refamiliarizing myself with a classic from the Renaissance.  Writing songs into the poems.  Rereading that classic again.  Hiring a book designer.  Musically arranging the poems and the songs.  Recording the poems and the songs.  Hiring a printer.  Releasing an album of the recording of the poems and the songs.  And now the book!

And now for the selling of the poems and the songs . . .

Ruts? I dunno. (8.28.22)

I am not in a writing rut.  I don't think.

Or maybe I am and I just can't see that I am.

Yes, okay.  I am in one helluva rut.

Maybe I'm in a rut so deep and so wide that it feels like the world.  Maybe I just haven't thought to stand up and take a look at what's outside the rut I'm in.  Maybe nobody else has come along to tell me to stop rolling around in my own mud, to stand up and take a look around . . .

Nah.  Ya think?  Hell, I dunno. 

And that's the problem.  I dunno.  

My W@1 cohorts haven't critiqued my poems very deeply for some time now. That could be because my poems have been perfect and irreproachable.  Ha!  Or it could be because my cohorts, too, are in ruts.  Creative ruts.  Poetic ruts.  Critical ruts.  Talking-about-poems ruts.

How am I supposed to know, really, whether my poems are better today than they were yesterday if nobody challenges what I'm doing?  

You know why I think I may be in a writing rut?  It's all coming too easily to me.  Writing's felt a bit facile over the past few months.  I feel no agon, no struggle with the art when I write a poem.  Give me a topic or a line or a beat and presto digito, a poem!  It looks like a poem.  It sounds like a poem.  Must be a poem.  It's swank and self-confident, too, full of finely turned metaphors, my writing of late.  And it flies out of the laptop like confetti.

And that bothers me, the confetti of it.

Hell, I should set up on a street corner somewhere and busk poems for passersby.  "Tell me yer story, missus, an' I'll write your poem . . . $5, singles accepted, change made."

So.  This past week I resolved, "I am sick and tired and I am not going to take it anymore!"  I beat down the weekly contributions of a couple of writers in the group and put the others on notice that I shall now wield the sword of critique, coldly and objectively, upon every poem shared, going forward.  Mine included.

I. Am. Not. An. Autocrat.  I owe them an apology for the beat down.  But the threat stands.

I shall give credit when it's due, e.g., when one of us has tried something different, innovated, stuck his or her head above the rim of the rut.  Even when the result is not so good, as it's likely to be.

For the thing is this: you've got to know your ruts so you can work your way out of them.  So you can make new ruts.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just blowing a tune up the giraffe's ass here.

Maybe not.

House Where People Dance, by Robert Cumming (8.7.22)

You think you know something about a man, some things about him, and then you read the book of poetry he has written, and you understand that you know next to nothing about him at all.

House Where People Dance is a new book of poems by Robert Cumming, published just this summer by Horse and Buggy Press, a small fine press in Durham, North Carolina.  Forty-nine poems; 91 pages; a thousand or so splendid images and figures; countless voices, cadences, pitches, and tonal modulations; and not a single, not one, missed note.

Cumming has been a faithful cohort in our Wednesdays@One salon for several years. He brings us poems he's struggling with along with poems that he's nearly finished off. Some of those appear in this fine book. We read them once, twice aloud, then ask about this or that line, image, word choice, tonal shift, this use of italics, that interrogative. Inevitably, somebody wants to know whether the poem is autobiographical (and rarely gets a definitive answer!). Always, every week, we know that the hour and a half we spend together on Wednesday afternoons aren't nearly enough to get next to one of this writer's poems, let alone the eight or ten minutes that we actually have time to spend on any given poem.

And this is why I'm so surprised by House Where People Dance.  As good a writer as I know Robert Cumming to be, I had no idea he is this good.

This book is as well composed as any book of poetry I've ever read.  In fact, it puts to shame just about every book of poems I've come across in the past five or ten years.  Anywhere.  By anybody.  Its poems are fresh, taut, and resistant to facile reading.  They make you work. I'm not a fan of "difficult" poetry. But I'll tell you this: any poem, image, line or phrase that makes me smack my forehead and cry what the . . . ?, is a work of art.  Whenever I feel I've got to wrestle the thing, I believe I'm reading true art.  

And that's exactly what happens with every poem in this book. So reader beware. If your idea of a good read is a skim-and-a-nod, or even an afternoon of oft-thought-but-ne're-so-well-express'd verse, this is not the book for you.  But read it anyway. It'll be good for you.

One of the great accomplishments in House Where People Dance is its near-impenetrable depths.  The poet doesn't give them up to you freely or without conditions. You've either got to cast your line in again and again and hope something strikes, or you must strip down and dive into the thing, get below the bright surfaces of the images. 

Cumming describes his book as a "collection," which surely is an oversight. He says, "each poem is a separate exploration," which may be true or it may not, depending on how you write and read books of poems.  But eventually you'll come to the conclusion that though, like trees in a wood, each poem may appear separate, it's hardly independent of the others around it.  Like all forest trees, in all healthy forests, the poems of House Where People Dance connect underground through a vast network of shared images, harmonic sound, common themes, echo, figural root and inter-twining of diction. They speak to one another. Learning that language, what they're saying together while "exploring separately" in the bright sunshine of line and diction above, is what makes reading this book work and rewarding at the same time.

One passage into that language is through questions.  Nearly every poem turns on a crucial question (no toss-offs here), some are nothing but questions.  I know from years of experience with this poet in our Wednesdays@One salon that the interrogative is his modus operandi.  It's almost a stylistic tic.  And where some poets might ask the occasional rhetorical question, or the question that actually expects an answer, Cummings' interrogations--all self-interrogating, by the way--are largely unanswerable. They are another way of saying something and they do not crave responses.

There are other ports through which you can go to get into the language of Cummings' poems in this book, all of which take you down, down down, into the root-mass under the woods (or the floorboards) of House Where People Dance. I'd quote some examples, but that might ruin the experience. If I were you, I'd buy a copy soon.  I'd take a weekend away somewhere where you won't be disturbed, preferably with a decent dictionary in your luggage (what is sciamachy, anyway?), as well as patience, and read.  Then read again.   And one more time.

It'll be worth the time, the effort.