Some reading for all you poets (1.25.22)

Two books of interest for you practitioners and readers of poetry:

Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 45 pages).  and Joe Moshenska, Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton (Basic).

Glück's book, reviewed in the NYT by Elisa Gabbert, is a welcome slim volume of 45 pages (though only 15 poems), which attracts me immediately because it's not 145 pages, as so many books of poems must be these days.  But more interesting, and worth exploring sometime in our Wednesdays@One salon, is what Gabbert admits about herself as a reader of poetry:

Glück’s intensity repelled me when I first encountered her work, as a student . . .  At the time I was attracted to playfulness, irreverence, anti-poetry. Now that I’m older, have suffered more and realize my life is likely more than half over, it’s her seriousness, her coldness, that appeals. 

First, to acknowledge that your reading tastes change over time is a refreshing thing to read from a critic.  (Growing, becoming more complex as a reader, may be another matter.)  But you get the sense from this self-observation that the critic has swung maybe too far the other way?  Playfulness ought to continue to appeal, even as one gets older and crankier, if only to forestall the inevitable.

But my point here is that we all should ponder how our reading tastes and powers do change, not only as we read and write more, but as we are more read and written, that is, as we mature.  There are benefits to examining how we change, from time to time.  That's one reason to keep a steady journal of what we read and write, so we can revisit our old selves in all their literary glory.

As for Moshenska's "life" of Milton (apparently, he fictionalizes where biographical facts are scant, like throughout Milton's later life), I shall add the book to my "to read eventually" list, and hope that I get to it.  But maybe not before I re-visit Lycidas, Samson Agonistes, and the two Paradises.  Which is to say, not anytime soon.  Still, there is something for this 21st Century writer of poems to learn from England's No. 2, so I should make a plan for re-engaging.

On oranges and pipes . . . (1.21.22)

Our next project is such a strange one that I'm having trouble thinking of a good title for this post.  😁

Not to mention what to say about it that might help my Wednesdays@One colleagues make some headway with a poem.  But here goes . . .

The project

Write a poem using these lines:

There are no oranges in this poem.

There is no pipe in this painting.

You can separate the lines, if you like, and you can place them wherever you wish in the poem you write, at the beginning, at the end, in the middle.  Some caveats: do NOT use them as an epigraph, and do not change them otherwise.  Your poem is not "about" these lines, but rather an outgrowth of what you make of the lines' meaning.  Part of the idea of this project is for you to write a poem using language as is . . . what you make of that language will be something else, and entirely up to you!

The first line I came across in a critical essay by Linda Gregerson, "The Rhetorical Contract in the Erotic Poem," in Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, eds. David Baker and Ann Townsend.  (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2007).  Gregerson writes it in reference to her discussion of the various voices or presences in a poem--author, persona/speaker, hearer, reader--and how consciously and willingly all these presences interact in the poetic experience.  To say "there are no oranges in this poem" is to acknowledge that a poem might refer to and describe an orange, and the speaker, hearer and reader may agree to "act as though" the orange is real and factual when of course it is only an abstraction, a figure.  That "agreement" is the rhetorical contract the various parties make with one another in the poetic experience.

The second line, of course refers to the famous Magritte painting of a tobacco pipe, C'est ne pas une pipe.  I merely re-phrased the painting's title to align it with Gregerson's expression.  (Obviously, she was messing with Magritte when she wrote her line about oranges!)  Because I want you to use both lines in a poem of your own.

So, what do you make of these two statements?  First, think about what they actually say and how they say it.  As statements, they are straightforward and un-ironic, if a bit bizarre.  They are strange little statements of fact, or to be more precise, statements stated as facts.  But facts of what?  Think about this last question for a bit and I guarantee you, you'll be on your way to developing ideas for your poem.

Read in certain contexts, these two statements take on meanings that you ought to be able to make poetry out of.  What was Magritte up to when he painted a tobacco pipe and then gave it that title?  Was he saying something about the nature of art and reality?  About the relationship between what is and how it is represented?  Was he trying to make a point about culture and how we perceive art, how we talk about it, and what we consider "the real" to be?  Is his painting a reference to Plato's argument about Idea and Copy, the real and the image of the real and the image of the image of the real?  

In Plato, there is the general idea of "bed," something one lies upon, which is "real" because it is permanent and unchanging: the idea is timeless.  Then there is A bed made by a furniture maker, either from what she sees in her mind's eye (the idea, "bed") or from a set of instructions (which are another copy of the idea), and thus is one of potentially countless versions of the idea, "bed."  This version of "bed" you can lie in.  And there is a visual image [or a verbal description] of a bed made by a painter or photographer [or by a poet or a technical writer] that you can't sleep on but which means "bed" to you.  This version will vary by description, and by the language it is expressed in.  It is ephemeral in that sense.  The painting or the literary/technical description is thus at two removes from the "real" bed, the idea of it, and as I say, ephemeral, impermanent.  Put another way, there is only one IDEA, bed.  There are countless and various KINDS of bed that come and go: the physical and the even more ephemeral "composed" beds of our world. *

Okay, I am belaboring the point here.  Which is: an orange in a poem is not an orange, a pipe in a painting is not a pipe.  They are images of text and brush stroke.  And so what then?  Why should these versions of "bed" be important to us?  Try answering this last question and you'll also be well on your way to developing material for your poem!

It's possible that you'll come to the conclusion, as Aristotle did, that these "beds" at one and two removes from the idea of "bed" are just as real as the idea, and in fact are even more real BECAUSE they are changeful.  After all, life is change, is it not?  Life itself, yours, mine, is ephemeral and that is the reality we know.  So, who's to say my written description of a bed is any less real than the bed I sleep in or the idea of "bed" I have in my consciousness?  Or the orange?  Or the pipe?  Plato?  Magritte?  Linda Gregerson?  Pish!

I think I'll write a poem about what all this means.  You write one, too.

* Well, perhaps not "more" ephemeral in our writing and print culture.  Plenty of physical object beds have come and gone since the beds made famous by John Donne in his morning poems!

Hey, You . . . (1.15.22)

Is poetry just another way of talking to yourself?  Is prayer?

No matter what my mother tried to tell me about prayer, somehow, I always knew it's how we speak seriously to ourselves.  And no matter how semi-conscious I am of an external audience "receiving" or listening in on a poem as I write it, I shall always feel that the act of writing, too, is auto-chat.

Elio shared a lovely poem with us last week in which he addresses himself directly, even going so far as to call himself by name.  If that doesn't make you feel the least bit self-conscious, you are a rock.

So, I thought upon hearing Elio's poem that it'd be a good project for us all . . . to speak directly to ourselves in verse.  I've written of myself in the past, meaning, poems about me in the third person: 

That Clark, he's a curious boy,

 A little bit rash, a little roy.

(Don't ask me, it's just a rhyme . . .)

But this isn't what Elio did, and it's not what I am proposing for this week's project.  For this week, speak directly to yourself.  You can do it any way you like, but I can see as I write this what dull conversations we may have together, us and we.  In fact, they may not be conversations at all, but one-way prescriptions for living better lives.  You'll be tempted, I have no doubt of it, to give yourself advice.  You'll find it hard to resist delivering a little lecture . . .

Now, Clark, don't you think

you've wasted enough of your pasture

on development projects, on 

building The Tower, like Mr. Jeffers?

Stop with the lugging of stone

and pounding of shapes into place,

old man, leave off the hod & mortar

and the eye on the sun you'll

someday mount like a prince of Babel.

Husbandry, my fellow fellow!

Let the land lie and the mown grass

revise to wild seed, to a late afternoon's

dreamscape of eh, whatever . . .

Honestly, I tried to steer this little self-address away from the giving of good advice.  It's not easy to do.  It's easy not to do!  And as we all must know by this time in our lives, all advice is bad anyway, except for good advice, which is often fatal.

Well, give it a try for next Wednesday and see what you can come up with.  Maybe you won't have a conversation; maybe you'll speak to yourself and get no response in return (that happens to me more often than I'd like to admit).  Maybe you'll just have a silly chat with yourself about the snow we're about to get, or so they say, tomorrow, or, depending on when you get started on the project, the snow we dodged or survived the other day, tomorrow.

 

Image VI (1.13.22)

For some reason this afternoon, an old image flashed back into my conscious brain.  It was of a young man riding a bucking horse at a rodeo.  This image is not from personal, but vicarious experience, through a poem that was read at a poetry gathering in the late 1970s.  How long ago was that?  Jimmy Carter was President!

To be more precise, the image that sticks with me is not of the bronco ride, but of its finish, when the rider finally loosens his grip and lets go and the horse throws him off.  

A little background.

I was in graduate school at Saint Louis University.  Cupples House, an architectural and cultural institution on campus, hosted poetry readings periodically, intimate affairs attended by a few faculty, some students interested in poetry, and two or three poets.  I read there once, but mostly, as a student, I attended to listen to more experienced writers share their work.  

I can't remember the poet's name.  But I do recall that poem.  Strike that.  I recall the drama of the poem and how expertly it built toward its surprising and satisfying and encouraging (to a young poet like me) ending.  

Here's how the drama unfolded . . .

• The set up: the speaker (our poet) who, as a young man, once toured the rodeo circuit, competing as a bronco buster.  
• The opening: explosion from the pen, man and horse together, out into the center of the arena. People screaming, cheering in the stands.
• The ride: a union of horse and man in common struggle - one to throw off, one to stay on.
• The detail: a gloved hand strapped to the nape of the surging horse's head; a free hand flailing back and forth like a rag above the rider's head; the humped back of the horse and the arched back of the rider; the kicking hooves and the digging boots; the receding of the crowd noise in the rider's mind as he and the horse become a single, bucking, thrashing thing.
• The denouement: a bell ringing, the loosening of the rider's grip.
• The climax: the jettison into the air above the horse's back, rider and horse becoming two again.
• And the conclusion: what the poet wants me to take away from this drama.

Okay, I've made up all but the penultimate item on this list, because this final, exciting image is what comes back to me every so often, even today, some 45 years on.  I'd say it's one of the grabbiest images I've ever encountered in a poem.  And I can't even remember the poet's name!

That image grabs, has stuck to me for all these years because the poem is not really about rodeos or lost youth and virility, but total and complete oneness . . . and how rare such oneness is, how momentary and self-effacing, how fulfilling to a human being who's paying attention.  And when that human being is a practicing poet, well, how lucky for the rest of us, for me!  

When I say that this poem came to me "for some reason" this afternoon, I'm not telling the truth.  It resurfaced for a very specific reason.  At today's Wednesdays@One session, we talked again about how hard it can be to end a poem, to find the appropriate last line or lines that don't undercut the rest of the poem, that don't just end the flow of words but genuinely bring the poem to rest.  My advice to the group was that, if you're stuck trying to close out a poem, look back up the lines for some thought or image or figure or rhythmical effect or theme or emotion (often found in an image).  You'll find there, almost invariably, one or two keys to your poem's ending.  It might be another go at some lyrical pattern, or a different take on a metaphor used earlier, or an extension of an idea or a logical outcome, or a "surprise" ending (for which there might be subtle clues above).  In other words, read your own poem.  What's it trying to tell you about how it should end?

This doesn't always work.  But often enough, when I'm stuck trying to write an ending line or image, I find clues to it earlier in the poem.  And this difficulty made me think of this old poem and its fantastic and fantastical ending that I was so unprepared for, but which is so proper to the poem, and so satisfying.  Grabby, as I say.  I wonder whether the poet began with that image in mind, or if he, in writing out a memory of that event, looked for and found the ending, and thus the poem.  It hardly matters.  What he found that "the poem" wanted to say is something of the fleeting quality of our best experiences . . . and how permanent they really are.

Image V (1.8.22)

Gathering Sea-Drift at Rodanthe 

 - for AWH 

Shorelines never seem so far away 

as when we come to them in grayness.

Whatever watches from the coastal forest 

must be gray-eyed and gray-minded.

The sea rolls landward in slow heaves of humpback, 

shell nacre, carcass and bone, stink,

and what it carries participates in the light

of everything that is horned and membranous, 

rubbed down to shard, stars reduced smooth 

for a bowl on an end table, a pocket of secrets.

Breast plate, claw armature, drift 

and stone heaving with a sea-swell forward, 

failing back in troughs of gray exhaustion,

lifted again, another attempt at giving.