. . . and on a somber note . . . (12.29.22)

I wasn't planning to write here again this year, but this essay on the death of poetry prompts me to one more posting. You may not agree with the author about the idea that poetry's not only dead, but it died 100 years ago, with the publication of "The Wasteland," but you ought at least to think about it.

Yes, many people still write poetry, and much of that poetry is so-called nature poetry, but the author's point isn't that we can still write a poem "about" nature; rather, it's that nature no longer fills our poems, because we are so disappeared from Nature ourselves (into science and technology - we know too much and our tools for knowing are too pervasive). Even the insatiable campers, hikers, environmentalists, naturalists, and backpackers among us are no longer "a part of" nature; even they are just tourists, spiritually and imaginatively speaking.

I wrote this poem some years ago:

Slowly We Move Toward Our Dreams

We think about our environs

because we aren't of them

or in that way environmental.

What wild thing, rat or bird or reptile,

knows it's in a corn field

when it is the corn field?

We move about in our thinking, slow to get

how much of it's a dream, how much us, our words

like a sea lying eternally between.

The thought occurred to me one day how utterly apart from nature I really am, as a modern human being. Sure, I can get outside, take a walk (without ear buds even), go camping in the Great Dismal Swamp, canoe down the Pee Dee River, sit on some prospect and take in the natural view. I can write about these experiences. I can even celebrate them. And sure, I can study Buddhism, Mysticism, become a shaman, believe in the Holy Ghost and the mysteries of creation. But none of this makes me a part of the natural world, intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually. I am neither natural nor supernatural. I am Knowledge (i.e., scientific) and technological.

You cannot know the world and be of the world. "Of-ness" requires a lack of self-awareness. Knowing the world means knowing myself in the world, and by definition, separate from it.

Lest you think I am describing a tragedy here (as the author of the linked essay, a Millennial, seems to think this separateness is), let me say that the wonder of the world, it's great beauty and mystery, is exactly that knowing separation. At least, that's what it is for me. As I say in another poem that I wrote in the same manuscript that contains the above poem, "We make the world perfect with our intellect, / a perfect place to be, and have no home." Long live our homelessness.

T. S. Eliot didn't invent this rupture; it happened long before, with the invention of writing and the alphabet, and then accelerated through the development of print and print culture. When you reduce (or technologize) the spoken word to marks on paper, you have already crossed over from Nature into Knowledge. Eliot* merely sealed the deal in poetry for Modern Mankind. What began as pure sound - its nature, or natural state - became Self-Expression, via the technology of writing.

So, don't go read "The Hollow Men" or "The Wasteland" as documents in the Second Fall of Mankind, as the writer of this essay seems to encourage you to do. Instead, read them as great poems that finally express the world to us in our own language, an event that was itself at least 100 years overdue. For poetry didn't die 100 years ago, and, no, you're not writing in a dead art or a dead language. On the contrary, it was reborn, for us.

Which means, ignore the title of this post. There's no somber story here!

*To repeat, sealed the deal for Modern Man. The scribe who wrote down the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey, the scribe who first recorded the tale of Gilgamesh - these Writers were the first evidence of that separation. A writer like the author of the linked essay at the top of this post, a columnist for The Lamp, a Catholic literary magazine, would of course describe this splitting off as the cast-off from Eden.

Moron (12.22.22)

This post requires some self-reflection. (On my part and of me, not of you, reader.)

We all benefit from honest critiques of our poems, and by paying attention, we can also benefit from critiques of others' poems. (Which is why it's always a good thing to read literary theory and criticism, if you're a writer, especially when the criticism provides concrete examples.)

But a critique, like honesty, can turn sour and counterproductive when applied at the wrong time or too zealously or without careful consideration. 

A case in point.

Today, during our Wednesday discussion of a poem, I was too strident in my critique, more specifically, of one figure in the poem. I noted, as others had during the discussion surrounding this poem, that the poem suffered a weak closing, ending on a couple of short lines that, in my opinion (and this is important - it was only an opinion) undercut the rest of the poem.

We've discussed often how poems end and, more to our purposes at Wednesdays@One, how to end poems. (See this post in 2018 for some of that discussion.) Bringing a poem to an end can be a hard thing to do because we tend to think of closing lines as a summing up, a kind of re-statement of what (we, the writer, think) the poem means. It's hard sometimes to know when to leave off. Should the poem culminate? Should it conclude? Should it sum up? Is it okay to just stop, as if in mid-thought? Should our ending raise new questions or introduce new information of some kind, and then end there?

The answer(s) to these questions depends on what kind of poem you're writing. Are you writing argumentation divided into lines? Shakespeare did that, and so did the Metaphysical poets. In fact, a whole lot of Modernist and contemporary poetry is really argument in verse. 

Are you making un objet d'art, that is, a verbal icon, a work of art that happens to be built from words? In which case, rhetoric (i.e., rules of argumentation) hardly applies; you can end the poem any way you like. (Some people who think of poetry as rhetoric cast into rhythm and rhyme, sometimes call these kinds of "art poems" "fragments.")

When you're creating a work of art in words, where the emphasis is more on sound, rhythm, association, juxtaposition, stress and rest, relations among words and between words and their sounds (that is, less on idea, argument, reportage), it's not always easy to know how or where to end. At what point is this kind of poem complete?

I've suggested a technique for ending poems, especially these more "poetic" poems, in the link to the 2018 post above, and on Wednesday afternoons to my colleagues from time to time. Keep reading "back up" the hill of the poem you're making, toward the first line or first significant image and consider returning to that language or set of verbal cues, echoing it as a way of closing your poem.

And this is exactly where I went wrong in my critique of this writer's poem at today's salon. For he did exactly as I've suggested: he simply repeated the title of his poem as the last two lines . . . with an exclamation mark, no less!

The effect, I meant to express to this writer, was a kind of melodrama, not because of the exclamation, necessarily, but because of the Big Reveal. This ending was the writer's way of telling the reader what the poem is about, the "meaning" of its title, which he meant to make meaningful by repeating it at the end, just as if he'd brought you, the reader, to the pot of gold of his poem.

There's an aspect of power relations in a poem, developed usually through point of view, in which the writer directs your readerly attention through the poem to its conclusion. That directing can be quite sensual and concrete (and satisfying for the reader!), such as when the visual imagery of the poem invites your mind's eye to look up, look down, look far, look near, look broadly, look minutely, and so on. The poem provides perspective, and you read along. And the writer controls it. That is communal.

But there's also an aspect of power relations in a poem in which the writer tries to tell you what his poem means as he's telling you the poem. He inserts himself between you and the language of the poem, just in case you're not "getting it," incorporating his paraphrase of the poem into the poem. This kind of power relationship betrays a lack of trust either in the reader or in the poem. That's autocratic.

And that offends me when I sense it in a poem.

And THAT is where my critique of my writing colleague's poem went off the rails. I even said, in critiquing the poem, that this writer must think I am a moron not to "get" the point he's making in the poem, so much of a moron that he feels he has to repeat the title in the last two lines. And add an exclamation for emphasis! Of course this writer does not think of me as a moron. The ending to his poem may be nothing more than the Big Reveal to himself. (!) No, what made me the moron in this discussion was my own critique.

The poem was a bit clumsy. My critique was clumsier.

Read. Your. Work. Aloud. (12.20.22)

Okay, so let's start with a couple of acknowledgements.

One: I spend too much time reading The New York Times. 

Two: this story in today's Times, isn't about writing poetry.

As for the first, let me at least argue that I also read the Los Angeles Times about as often (I subscribe to both online), and every so often take a look at The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor, as well as the home page for API.  They're all favorited on my laptop or my smartphone.  I remember reading that John Kennedy read these particular papers every day of his too-short presidency, as well as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, ostensibly to get a picture of what America was thinking and feeling. Either he skimmed headlines, like I sometimes do, or he read fast, or he spent the greater part of his presidency reading the newspaper. (Some former presidents can't read, I understand.) And in my defense, no daily covers the arts, literature and writing especially, quite as thoroughly as the NYT.

And now for the second acknowledgement. This is what we try to do every week at Wednesdays@One. Not only do we read our poems aloud, but someone else in the group reads our poems back to us, aloud, so we can hear ourselves through other voices. Often, we discover what the writers featured in the Times story say they uncover in their own drafts: dropped articles, misplaced modifiers, clichés, logic gone awry,  wonky rhythms, convoluted statements, and so on.

Not everybody always accepts (or wants to accept) the gaps and rough spots in the drafts they bring to the salon for reading. Sometimes we just want some confirmation that we got it right and that the poem sounds to others as it sounds to us inside our heads. And sometimes we get it. The confirmation, that is. And sometimes we don't get it. The actionable insight. 

But there's nothing quite like hearing your own construction read back to you, out loud, for helping you hear more effectively the music you're trying to make. So I hope this reading aloud keeps us moving forward, toward that better writer tomorrow than we are today.

Anyway, another year almost written down in lines and metaphors. Great job, everybody, and a very merry holiday to you all!

Columnist Gail Collins on Allen Ginsberg and Same Sex Marriage (12.14.22)

An oblique path into a discussion of poetry, maybe, but this column by The NYT's Gail Collins is worth the obliquity.  I was too young to be there for the reading at UW-Milwaukee, and still too young even to understand the issue, but I wish I could have seen Ginsberg at that particular event.

I did see him many years later, in the 1990s, at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, which blazed a path for the city by instituting a first-class visiting poet program for a few years. By then, of course, Ginsberg was a rock star, almost literally (he was like a front man for the Clash), and drew a SRO crowd for the reading. Except in that venue and thanks to the Center's hip egalitarian thinking, SRO meant Sitting Room Only -- they cleared their largest gallery, no seats, no VIP passes, no patron boxes, and let everybody camp out on the floor, with Ginsberg up on a raised stage, sitting lotus.

Cool! I estimated 500-600 people in the audience. And, man, it was a ruckus! And raucous! And Ginsberg loved it.

Anyway, I'm with Columnist Collins: kudos to Congress and the President for creating a Supreme Court-proof law. Finally.

Now, onto poetry and guns . . .

NYT's best poetry books of the year (12.11.22)

It's that time of the year for various New York Times columnists to feature their favorite book covers, rock music, jazz projects, art books, movies and books of poems which they've encountered over the past twelve months.  So, here are the favorites of this Times writer: NYT best books of poetry 2022.

I get the first on the list, along with our columnist, who digs the intersection of language, text and print, all apparently foregrounded to message. Or perhaps, as McLuhan said so fondly of literature: the medium is the message? Anyway, I look forward to reading a book of poems where language calls attention to itself even at the expense of sense.

And I applaud the last on the list (the "list" is just that; it's not a ranking), which is a collection of one poet's translations of some 200 poems from ancient China. It's the ancientness that I like, and the foreignness too. That sort of thing also foregrounds language, in my experience, and makes for much more interesting reading.

As for the rest, well, there are the usual suspects of books built on messaging: of loss and grief (in this case, of a child); of change and memory (yawn); about me (i.e., the poet, which reminds our columnist of Sylvia Plath's poems; I'll skip that one this year); and of "knowledge" the author either celebrates or denigrates (I can't tell from the synopsis: "Everything I learned, I wished I hadn't." Really?).

So if you're looking for some poetry to expand your reading or your sense of the art or with which to fine-tune your ear, this year's columnist's favorites list is as good a place as any to start.

How do you know you're making progress as a poet? (12.5.22)

Our motto at Wednesdays@One is "A better writer today than yesterday, and better tomorrow than today." Progress is what we're after, no matter the starting point.

But I've never addressed the question, How do you know you're making progress? Here's a story that suggests an answer:

At a recent W@1 salon, as we worked our way through the week's submissions, we came to a poem by a writer who has struggled to break out of her comfort zone. I don't need to name the writer or describe that zone. We all know our comfort zones exist and, as writers, our goal at W@1 is to try things with language that we may not like, that require some bravery on our part, or at least some curiosity, so we can add facility to our "writing kits."

But TRYING requires awareness. And awareness demands that we open ourselves to self-reflection every so often, about our skills, our preferences, and our fears as writers. Workshops are supposed to help us do that. They're supposed to offer the safe space where not only can we experiment with styles and subject matters we are not familiar with, but we can open ourselves to criticism and encouragement, where we can absorb input and readers' reactions.

Workshops don't always give us that help. Sometimes they are nothing more than enabling mechanisms, praise fests, critique-free zones. Or they are fraught spaces where people tell us exactly how to fix our poem--i.e., write one that better suits their prejudices about good poems. A good workshop will seek only to help a writer understand the decisions she has made in writing a particular poem, and those she has avoided making for whatever reason, to promote awareness. In turn, that awareness, over time, should help her to make better, more informed decisions as she writes. 

But she has to be open to this process. 

A good workshop will help a writer recognize himself along the long arc of development that every poet travels his entire writing life. He has first to be willing to travel that arc, and then to walk it with eyes and ears open.

If we are really committed to bettering ourselves as writers of poetry, that's what we want of ourselves and our fellow writers at W@1.

Well, I am especially happy to say that the writer whose poem we read recently has started to take that deeper look into her writerly soul. Before reading her poem to us, she acknowledged that it was a backslide. She had been TRYING to write differently (And if I may, now I'll try to describe her "zone." Over time, her writing has calcified somewhat into narrative storytelling of her days in New Jersey--a sometimes sentimental journey.), more lyrically and against a richer backdrop of subjects. She had been working to drop the go-to narrative voice of this happened, and then that happened and then I realized something and isn't that a fond memory? 

She has wanted to write more intellectually and also in a more nuanced fashion where her emotions are concerned. She has wanted to explore her world, or maybe I should say The World, not just her memories. She has wanted to approach her poems more as verbal icons, linguistic works of art, less as little memoirish vignettes broken into lines.

But as I said, this poem reverted to the old way, and our colleague knew it. And acknowledged it. You might argue that one way of measuring your progress is to regress once in a while. So this poem was perfectly fine with all of us, so long as its author understands its place in her development.

That's step one in becoming a better writer, self-awareness. Kudos to her.

Bernadette Mayer, 1945-2022 (12.4.22)

NY poet Bernadette Mayer died late last month at her home in upstate New York.  None of her 30 books is  on a bookstore's shelf anywhere in Chapel Hill, so far as I can tell. Of course, that doesn't surprise me.

Humbled to acknowledge that none of her books is on a shelf in my library, either, because I've rarely seen any of her books on any shelf in any bookstore outside of Grolier Poetry in Boston and City Lights on the West Coast.

Good-bye, Bernadette.