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.