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.