They have a way with words . . . and they kill people (2.27.22)

"I loved that I was finally seeing a production that was examining people who are beautiful and light and whimsical with words, and they kill people."

--James McAvoy

This is the Scottish actor, James McAvoy, commenting on his enthusiasm for the Jamie Lloyd play, Cyrano, which opens in April in Brooklyn.  He's talking, of course, about Cyrano de Bergerac, of the Edmund Rostand story.  McAvoy plays the title role.

He's NOT talking about the new film out now with Peter Dinklage in that title role.  But it's curious, isn't it, that two versions of Cyrano are presently vying for attention?  I wonder what that means, culturally?  Maybe that in our big dumb, hunky fake-it-till-you-make-it world (the Christian we are), we could all use a little honest passion and beauty (the Cyrano we want to be).

But anyway, my Wednesdays@One friends, Cyrano, as we know, is one of us, a poet, a maker.  Which says what about poetry, about us?  That making art is compensatory?  That poetry conquers all resistance?  That we who make poems make love, too?  THAT WE ARE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE, YES, DESPITE APPEARANCES (big noses, small stature, whatever)?  That even if we were killers, there'd always be the poetry?

I'll take all these explanations.  Well, maybe not quite that last one.  😉

Kid Poetry (2.22.22)

I've been asked by the North Carolina Poetry Society, for the second year, to judge a poetry contest for young writers.  I am to select three "winners" and three "honorable mentions" from a group of some 30 or 40 poems written by students in the 5th through the 9th grades.

The spread from 5th to 9th graders seems a little unwieldy to me--there's a world of difference between a 5th and a 9th grader.  But, as my experience with writers of Wednesdays@One shows, you never know where the next good poem is going to come from, or from what level of experience.  Besides, last year's competition produced quite a few surprises from kids you'd think are too young to write poetry as good as the poems I read.

So, I plowed into my assignment over the past two weeks with high hopes.  

Sure enough, this year's group of young poets wrote some very fine poems, overall and all things considered.  There are short lyrics and long narrative poems, personifications and apostrophes, rhyming verse and blank verse, hip-hoppy stuff and the more traditional metrical pieces.  Some devised quick, two-beat lines, others let it all hang out with lines that unfurled across the page.  Several students wrote concrete poetry!

I can honestly say that every effort was genuine, thoughtful, and indeed poetic, the product of artistic verbal choices confronted and made, as all good poems must be.  

But alas, I have been invited to judge a contest with "winners" and "winners not acknowledged" (If a kid sits down to compose art from the material of language, she's a winner in my book!).  I can't share my selections here, but I can tell you they are special poems.  Several are beautiful lyrics that show a level of literariness I don't remember when I was a 5th or even a 9th grader.  A few show great promise for more and better things to come . . . perhaps an inaugural poem at some future president's swearing in on the steps of the Capitol?

For the second year, I feel grateful to have the opportunity to witness what's being written by people much, much younger than I.  It's a learning experience.  I get to see what kids think poetry is, and what language is, for that matter.  I get to watch as each writer encounters obvious problems of composition--word choice, line ending, opening and closing gambits, rhythm, sustaining an image, and all the other etceteras of poetry--and then finds solutions or, at least, chooses a path.  I'm also grateful to have a little insight into how poetry is being taught in the classroom, even if I have to infer a good deal from what I've been reading.  The fact that kids are still being encouraged to make art out of words is very, very reassuring to me, even if most of them grow up to be accountants or store managers.  

This year's young poet contest comes with a theme: the environment.  Most of the poems want us to know that the sky is falling, has already fallen . . . and that "polluters" are responsible.  And when polluters are called out in many of these poems, they are invariably "them," never "me."  The vision is so dark and apocalyptic that I couldn't help marking many a poem with "Who's teaching these kids this stuff?"  The answer isn't simply their teachers, unless you include among that group the mainstream media, parents, civic leaders, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense League, and Greta Thunberg.  Not only are our children awash in a sea (literally) of plastic straws and leaked diesel fuel, but their smart phones, too.  Which devices, ironically, contribute to the problem, no?

Does this mean I'd like to see some climate denial in the mix of these poems, to provide a more "balanced" view of our global predicament?  Of course not!  But what I 'd like to see more of is a call to action, a sense that ours is a world worth preserving, conserving, defending, making more habitable for all creatures great and small.  I'd rest easier knowing that kids are being encouraged to develop a worldview that, bad as things are, something can, should, and must be done . . . and not by "them" but by "me."  And I would have liked to see this sense in more than just one or two of the poems given to me by the Poetry Society.

As I say, the poems I've been reading for this year's young poet contest are quite good, each in its own way, sincerely written, "believed by" each writer, and a welcome addition to our poetic conversation.  And it's never too late, Ms or Mr. Teacher.  If you're reading this, I hope you give some extra thought to helping your charges get beyond the "disaster-denial" dichotomy of our current climate conversation, at least in their poetry, and give some thought to what "I," "we," all of us are going to do to make the world a better, healthier world.  With a good turn of phrase, if possible.

About that next line . . . (2.10.22)

Here's a review/essay in the New York Times Book Review that ought to reconfirm for you what we've often said about poems: they are records of decisions made by the writer, of options chosen.  (And, if you read them carefully and creatively enough, they are records of options considered but rejected, that remain in the poem as ghost choices.)

It bears thinking about again and again.  How DO you write that next line?  

I think this reviewer puts a little too much faith in the "whatever" of the next line, as if writing were ever that arbitrary.  Just as I think too much contemporary poetry, or contemporary poems too often, resort to the non-segued line, the anti-logical or constructivist follow-on line.

Yes, the writer is in charge (more or less, depending on things like skill and experience and honesty) of the decision-making aspect of a poem during composition.  But we've argued frequently in Wednesdays@One that poems eventually "fall into place" or move where they "must" as we compound them with images and ideas.  As the writer of our poems, we always have options, to make them make sense, to make them make nonsense, to make them make a hybrid of the two.  When we say, though, that a poem leads us to its making, what we mean is that the poem is a product of our own subconscious thinking as well as our conscious and conscientious intent.  It is never a "thing in itself," but rather a record of us, however surprised we may be to see what we have written.

So, how DO you get down that next line?  Partly, you do it by listening to yourself, or reading back over yourself, what you've just said or written.  You guide yourself into and out of yourself.  In this sense the poem you're writing writes itself.  Right?  Right!

We were rapping about rap one day and . . . (2.4.22)

I haven't read What's Good: Notes on Rap and Language yet, haven't even read the review of it in the NYT Book Review, but judging by its title, I'm guessing it's a must-read.  For me, for you, for anybody practicing the art of poetry today, in English at least.  So, I give you the link.

In fact, I think I'll order the book and figure out how to use it at Wednesdays@One.  After all, it hasn't been that long ago that I staked the future of American poetry on hip-hop and how thoroughly language can be refurbished through that sub-genre.  

If poetry is the working of the material of language into art, then rap or hip-hop is the leading edge of what we're up to today in poetry, and one of those innovations that keeps poetry current generation after generation of writers.