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.