Louise Glück, 1943 - 2023

Louise Glück's death was reported in the New York Times today.  I am one for coincidences, I marvel at them.  Here's one: just last evening I finished reading her last book of poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective, a very thin volume of 15 poems in 43 pages.  It's a classically tough read (I don't know where her reviewers get the idea that her work is accessible - maybe they spend a lot of time reading truly opaque verse), and I was happy not to have to slog through more of it than was there.  

Anyway, good-bye to our generation's Nobel Laureate.

A Note on Form and the Transgression of It (3.29.23)

Here Is the Thing

mundi carmen

Here is the thing about the rhymed couplet:

You make a line of verse and then you double it,

And suddenly your world of Costco, cable and assault gun, 

The ball of shit you inhabit, Babel relation 

That rolls one ugly day into another

Relaxes, if only for a minute, into a zephyr

Of inconsequence: your broken world, if only

For a minute or two, isn’t broken and lonely.

Introduce as well syllabification,

Meter, stress, and end-of-the-line ligation

That favors rhyme and you can hardly claim

Disaffection from too much chaos or pain.

The case of couples, two by two, is why.

Equation, Orderliness, Law is why.

As for your constantly subconscious churn of mind—

Muddle, mess, morass, the daily grind—

Here is the thing that the double-hemmed hand-cuff

Of the couplet saves you from: you, yourself.

And today I wrote something again . . . (3.18.23)

Here's a tip for new writers, or any writer struggling with a poem: recast.

Let's say you are trying to write a poem, have developed a complete draft of it that has shape and movement, form and development, but it doesn't satisfy. The poem sounds forced, insincere, derivative (even of your own way of thinking and feeling!), unbelievable. And you don't believe it.

This is where I left off with the draft of a poem described in the previous post (3.17.23) in this blog. That draft was written as a villanelle and adhered pretty much to the form's requirements (in English) of 5-foot lines of largely iambic pentameter and an a-b-a rhyme scheme with repeating first and third lines.

I realized that I was committing the same error that I used to lecture my W@1 cohorts about, regarding rhyme: I was writing to complete the rhyme, not the sense; I was sacrificing the art to the figure. This affected content development in turn, effectively blocking me from any fresh thinking about where to take the next line: I worked to get to the line-end rhyme, no matter what the line actually said in relation to the lines before or after.

This predicament occurs often when I am trying to develop content through some device or other: a rhyme scheme, a stanzaic progression, a metrical footprint. I force myself into a framework that works against thought and feeling.

When you're caught in this kind of bind, all the drafting and redrafting in the world won't do a thing to break you and your poem free. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that if you continue writing the same formula that produces a weak poem, you will only arrive at that weakness. The same track leads to the same destination again and again.

How to break free of this? Get off the old track. Take a new track. Get off track altogether and go off-road for a while. It always works!

So over the past 24 hours, I dispensed with the idea of writing a villanelle. I jammed all the lines of the draft together into a block of undifferentiated "prose" without end-stopped lines with rhymes and without the affectation of meter or syllable count. I dispensed with "form," for a draft or two, anyway.

The result? I now have a new draft that has "form," but a more organic form than before: two stanzas of equal length whose lines are roughly the same syllabically and rhythmically for the most part, though with occasional short lines and two somewhat longer lines. I italicize to emphasize that this draft avoids strictness in the sense of a traditional form. It assembles more organically, according to the rhythms, pitches, images, and ideas unfolding as the draft builds. It's possible, maybe even preferable, that a further draft will de-emphasize even the two equal stanzas or the roughly equal line lengths. Or this may not be necessary.

I found that by dropping the formal requirements, I was able to generate new information in the poem, and especially to develop a closing line that doesn't feel forced or "arrived at," even though it is. It's just that the content and voice now dictate where the poem begins (same as before), flows, turns and ends, not the strictures of the villanelle form.

So, for you writers who are stuck drafting a poem, are you doggedly trying to stick to some format (a rhyme scheme, a stanzaic structure, a line length, a metrical footprint, a repetitive pattern), hoping that that will deliver you to the art you want to create? Are you finding that the same ideas, thoughts and feelings that haven't been cohering for you keep coming up as you re-draft? STOP following the form! Drop the technical braces (or step off the technical path) and walk free. You may stumble or teeter or even fall flat. You may become lost for a spell. But you might also find the voice and the idea(s) and the art that your insight, eye or ear (or all these) has been looking for.

Instead of redrafting, revise - revision meaning exactly what it says: seeing things differently.

I wrote something yesterday (3.17.23)

Recently, I stepped away from Wednesdays@One, leaving it in good hands and with a full complement of writers who still attend weekly to work on projects and to share poems and readings.  It took me a long time, two years, to decide to move on, and now that I have, I am feeling either an obligation to read and write more poetry and poetry criticism/history/theory, or renewed energy for doing these things, because I've written almost every day over the past month, either here, in my journal, or in my word processor.  

Several new poems have been born as a result, a couple of which I think are good to very good, and several continue to form in my mind and on my laptop, where I tinker and toy, try and tease out new lines, phrases, breaths, images, figures. Two I am having particular trouble advancing, for two related but probably different reasons. I'll discuss only one of them here, and very superficially at that.

It's a villanelle and it's tormenting me.  I began it yesterday and, in a single sitting, drafted a complete version: five stanzas of a-b-a rhyme with a closing quatrain of a-b-a-a.  As I often do with this form, I struggled for an hour to compose the first and third lines, that is, the alternating refrains, these being the engine that powers the poem. The opening line I had created early in the day during a long walk, which I had finished more or less by the time I returned home. The third, a-rhyme, line was partly conceived by then as well and needed only a half hour's work to fit together. The middle line of the tercet, the b-rhyme line, took a little more time and, as it often does, created an obstacle because of its quirky rhyme requirement: fertile.

I say obstacle, but only because in choosing it I declined any easier close or masculine rhyme. At the same time, the word "fertile" opened up possibilities for near, slant, off and rhythmic rhymes, which turned out so far to be:

fertile

riddle

fiddle

apple

fickle

paddle

Which is all to say, the whole thing has turned into an exercise in formalities. Yes, the poem has a theme (God's contribution to Original Sin), and yes, the argument is developed logically beginning to end. But that's just the problem with the poem, it's very Audenesque, so to speak. It strives for cogency overlaid with irony and a bit of tongue-in-cheek. It wants to be read seriously but it doesn't want to appear Poetic and Sober. It's a poor hash of modernist trope upon modernist trope.

So now I may be back to the real effort of writing, to cast a cold, critical eye on what I write . . . and to push on with the drafting, hoping that eventually I'll find a way to drop the posturing and write a real poem.

I say this poem is tormenting me. That's an exaggeration. I am not tormented by poems; annoyed sometimes, dissatisfied, but not tormented. And in this case, the best word for it is probably unbelieving. I haven't yet brought the poem to a state where I can believe in what I am doing, that what I am doing is of much value as craft or art or feeling. I don't know that I'll be able to get it there.

New Scholarship on the Life of Phillis Wheatley and Her Poetry (3.7.23)

This book review appeared in today's New York Times. I think we are witnessing a renaissance in Phillis Wheatley's poetry, including this biography by David Waldstreicher, a 2011 biography by Vincent Carretta, The Age of Phillis, by Honorée Fanone Jeffers and published in 2020, plus this essay linking Fanone Jeffers' work to a concept called "critical fabulation."  Not to forget the critical essay and close analysis of her poem, "To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works," in Edward Hirsch's new book, The Heart of American Poetry. *

Which is all to say, it's past time that those of us who were introduced to Phillis Wheatley's poems ("On Being Brought from Africa to America") in our sophomore American Lit survey courses (Norton, vol. 1) as somebody to pass over on our way from Anne Bradstreet to Ralph Waldo Emerson to get reading and (re)assessing. 

* Accorded a place of high estimation: the second of 40 poets/songwriters presented in the book whom Hirsch considers formative in the history of American poetry.

I read something today . . . (3.6.23)

I'm reading Edward Hirsch's new book, The Heart of American Poetry, which is his take on formative American poets from Anne Bradstreet to Joy Harjo.  He describes language as a "structured system of communication, the poet's toolbox." And immediately I am thinking, poet's toolbox? That doesn't sound quite right.

Is language a tool, our tool, we writers of poems?

I've mused with my W@1 cohort that language is more like the stuff of poetry.  It is the material which we work into art, just as stone is the sculptor's material and sound is the composer's.

You can argue, I suppose, that experience is the poet's material. After all, we do say of a writer's work, "Her material is the family she grew up in"; or "He shapes his material (i.e., his experience at Normandy in 1944) into an epic story of struggle and heroism."

But language is the poet's material because poetry is language that calls attention to itself as material; poetry foregrounds the materiality of language, its organic characteristics, its physicality. 

Poets don't write grammar. Grammar - systems of linguistic structure - is the tool that poets use when working with their material.

If you made a sliding scale of these things, from the most abstract to the least, it might look like this:

Grammar ---- Experience ---- Language ---- Words ---- Sound

The farther along the scale you go, the more you enter the world most conducive to poetry, where words and sounds leave meaning behind to foreground their physical being . . . and the more deeply they penetrate the ear, and the more intimate your relationship with them becomes.

More thinking about descriptive poetry (2.28.23)

I've been reading two books of poetry criticism and theory that converge on the subject of descriptive poetry, or description in a poem, its role, effect, affect and poetic function.

One is Edward Hirsch's new book of essays and criticism, The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022), which traces the history of poetry in this country from Anne Bradstreet to Joy Harjo. The other is a much older book, Poetry and Mysticism, by Colin Wilson and published in 1969 by City Lights Press.

I am reading at the moment Hirsch's piece on a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room." He says of her poetry, "Bishop observes everything with such minute and patient attention - objects, creatures, landscapes - that it all starts to seem more foreign and improbable." You might ask, why would any poet want to render the observable, presumably the daily observable, foreign and improbable? Isn't the poet's job to hold a mirror up to nature and to describe what she sees faithfully, that is, to capture its "reality," what it really looks like? And the answer to your question might lie in another question: What reality do you have in mind - that of the very first time you encountered a thing, or that of the thousandth time you've seen a thing, the thing you're "used to"?

I've written somewhere else in this blogspot how one day my father and I were driving somewhere along an interstate highway through a downpour. The car in front of us was ploughing through water standing on the pavement, nearly hydro-planing, and throwing out spectacular fantails of spray. "Now that's beautiful," he declared. "Why don't you write a about that?" He meant describe it. I bit my tongue, partly because I was not about to let a man with only a high school education (I was in a graduate writing program at the time) suggest subjects, themes, styles or technique to me. But also partly because I knew, inchoately, that a poet would write about his own experience seeing such a phenomenon, that his poem would be about his relationship to a thing of this world, as viewer. A good poet would not try to report what was already there. What would be the point, after all? 

Wilson's book offers up a rationale for not being the reporter. His term for this mechanical "seeing" is "the robot": a state of mental efficiency that enables you to drive your car without thinking about the incredible number of functions, operations, and decisions that occur nearly simultaneously as you go along. The same robotic state of mind also enables a native English speaker to think in French, perhaps even to dream in that other language. Let me quote him:

When a human being learns anything difficult - to talk, to write, to calculate, to drive a car, to type, to speak a foreign language - he has to begin by concentrating on the details of what he wishes to learn. Even when he has learned a basic French vocabulary, he finds it difficult to read French, because he is still thinking in English, and he has to translate each word into English. But gradually, the 'remembering' process is passed on to a deeper level of his being [the sub-conscious], a kind of robot in his subconscious mind, and the robot can read French without having to translate it back into English. It is in every way more efficient than his conscious memory.

Wilson goes on to relate the story of the centipede who, when attempting to explain how it can manage all its hundred legs into forward motion, gets all twisted around itself and stumbles. We've all experienced this, including us writers of poetry, whenever we try to "explain" how we do what we do.

What does this have to do with the purpose of description in a poem, or with a "descriptive poem"? A passage from Wilson again takes us in a useful direction:

This is the great disadvantage of the robot: that it not only drives your car or talks French, but also takes the excitement out of skiing or listening to a symphony. The robot has taken over too many of our functions.

Like witnessing the very strange and foreign beauty of a raindrop fantail along a super-highway. Simply seeing it "as it is" is the functioning of the robot which sees and asserts that's beautiful. Which for the poet ought to lead to two important questions: what is that, and, what is beauty. Or, what am I actually seeing (as opposed to interpreting from my subconscious)?

Which brings me back to Elizabeth Bishop. She was known for taking the most mundane or uncomplicated of subjects - a blossom, a dentist's waiting room - and reclaiming them from our robot minds, our subconscious reception/processing of them, returning them to conscious objects, literally, objectifying them. And this act makes the mundane seem foreign, even improbable, the way they seemed the very first time we saw or heard or tasted or felt them, before we "got used" to them.

Bishop does this through what Hirsch calls "minute and patient" description.  So does William Carlos Williams in poems like "Spring and All," which Hirsch also critiques in his book; as does Theodore Roethke in his two-part poem, "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)."

As we writers of poetry should try to do as well. Rather than try to describe a thing as it appears to our robot - in outline form, with its minutӕ obscured, glossed over, blurred out - let us look more minutely and with greater patience. Why? Why should poetry do this rather than the other? One of the important functions of poetry, particularly in our homogenized, commodified and pre-packaged age, is to return us to our conscious selves, those selves that say to the world, "What is THAT," and that forces us to slow our pace, to feel and think what we are doing here or anywhere.

What makes for good descriptive poetry? (2.24.23)

Descriptive poetry, really good descriptive poetry, helps us to see the world as it is by describing it as it particularly is not.  The red of the rose in the Romantic poem is not "red" per se, but the poet's vision of a particular red - no other rose in the world or in the history of the world has that red. Thus, this "poet's red" enables us to see that a rose is a rose of a color, or of many colors, rather, which we must call "near" or "in the family of." The red of the rose in the world is approximate red.  The red of the rose in a poetic description is its own particular red.

When we "see" this rose in a poem, we see an idea of a red rose, and thus we "see" that the red rose of the world is the idea of red and can not be anything but.

We learn this by reading the poems of Marianne Moore, for example, and by looking at the work of the Dutch Golden Age painters - descriptions so particular as to be nearly surreal.  It is in this surreal particularity that we are to see the "real" of our world, or portion of our world, in all its proximity.

A good descriptive poem must insist on this surreal particularity.

Who said poetry ain't sensational? (2.15.23)

Here's a news story about the possible murder of Pablo Neruda, by the Chilean military dictatorship, in 1973.  Possible is the key word, of course.  I worked in Chile for three years or more, mostly in Santiago, got to visit his (restored) Santiago house as well as both his coastal homes in Isla Negra and Valparaiso.  All beautifully quirky places filled with the most curious things that he could find from his travels around the world.

On no occasion during that three years or so did any Chilean ever discuss with me that Neruda might have been poisoned rather than succumbed to cancer.  I knew this history, of course, but the people I knew and worked with never discussed it; and I therefore never felt it appropriate to ask their opinions.  

I guess that's how open secrets work in some societies - what everybody believes but nobody will say.

On the other hand, everybody I knew and worked with in Chile was happy to talk about their national poet, the Nobel Prize winner, as they should have been.  Even those people who didn't read poetry, or even care to read it.  A hero is a hero.  I thought then and still think today that even entertaining the idea that their Laureate had been murdered by the State was too much to bear.

While I'm on the subject, did you know that Neruda isn't the only Chilean poet to win the Nobel in Literature?  Gabriela Mistral won that honor long before.  In fact, she was the first Latin American writer to win in the literature category.  Like Neruda, she was more than a poet.  Like him, she was a diplomat and an educator.  That's one of the things I've always loved about Latin American writers; they serve their countries directly.

The Couplet - the jewel of poetry (2.10.23)

There's many a two-line-stanza poem running around out there.  Not every one of these is made of couplets.  Many are just poems of stanzas rendered in two lines.

Nevertheless, two lines to the stanza, especially when those lines are long and rhythmically languid, make for the prettiest poems, er, the most elegant.  And when they actually form specialized units of meaning, rhythm, repetition, including rhyme, they are especially elegant.  Thinking of Pope here, of course.  It's just something about the horizontal downward flow of the poem that makes it visually beautiful, in my experience.

Beautiful and well suited to love poetry, or at least light poetry; that is, not poetry that asks you necessarily to apologize for something or to march into the streets.

And so, Couplets, a first book, by Maggie Millner, out just in time for Valentine's Day and reviewed in today's New York Times.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1825-1911

Today's New York Times includes a story about the abolitionist poet, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.  I am sorry to say that her name nor her poetry are to be found anywhere on my bookshelves, not even among the collections of Black poetry.  This Times article suggests why - her poetry was largely overlooked until the 1990s - and is in fact written as part of the newspaper's "Overlooked No More" series.

Well, I am pleased Harper's work has been highlighted during this Black History Month.  Now it's on me to find her poems and read them.

Poetry admin blues (2.3.23)

You know when poetry becomes pointless? 

That's a fake question.

Poetry is pointless almost by definition. It doesn't do anything, it makes nothing happen. It's not designed to . . . vive la poesie!

But we convince ourselves otherwise, each time we sit down to write a poem. This time, by God, my poem is going to make something happen, Auden be damned. We want to believe there's a point to the poems we pour ourselves into: we're setting the world straight again; we're making sense of our past; we're exposing all kind of hypocrisy and foolishness; we're making something beautiful and valuable for all that.

Ach! I used to write poetry to get laid. Now that's a good use of it! And now I'm in crisis. A poetry crisis. I've talked my way there, coordinated and managed my way there. I've blogged my way there. I've cast myself as a Poetry Expert . . . and lost the thread of it all.

------

What's driving this poetry crisis is the W@1 weekly discussion group I've led for the past five years. It's all about the administration now -- the so-called assignments, the classroom, the collated files of poems, the paper shuffling. 

(Here's a piece of advice for you poetry MFA candidates out there who hope to grab a cushy sinecure at Colby College or the Iowa Writer's Workshop someday: stop. Think. Imagine what you're courting: a life of administrative dolor. Go get a job in finance or engineering or the law, and write poetry on the side.)

------

So. Time to make a change. Less matter, more song. Pointless as I can make it.

From an "autistic poet" (1.26.23)

This poem featured in today's New York Times, something I rarely see in that newspaper, or any daily, for that matter.  Maybe seven issues out of the year.  But isn't it good to see that some newspapers take the art seriously enough (not to mention their readers) to publish work like this for all to read and ponder?

Speaking of pondering, I am not sure what to make of the feature's repeated editorial qualifier of "autistic" poet.  I respect the multiplicity and diversity on display here.* I am invited to consider a point of view that's worth reading and reflecting on because it is other than mine.

Of course, all poems not written by me are worth reading for the same reason.

I don't get the wavy blue line that the editor inscribed through the text, looping itself around the poem's key word, "pace."  To me, that's a case of not letting the poem speak for itself, of prettifying the autonomous work of art, and worse, of edit-splaining.  According to the editorial text, the poet "collaborated with the editors" to create this visual effect.  Why?

But about the poem, or about my take on it.  "I am the pace of my body, and not language," its title and central image, means something more when I know that the author of it is autistic.  Not being autistic, I can't account precisely what the poet means by "the pace of my body"; but the image helps me consider my own body in terms of "pace" (and that word's many associations), at least as a way to calculate the author's meaning.

* I am using a loaded term here.  There is no consensus, I have read, on the proper term: autistic person, person with autism, person on the autism spectrum (I find this last one particularly awkward).  The debate has to do with whether one understands autism as "central" to a person's identity, one trait among many of a person, like a characteristic, or as a disorder or disability.  This poem suggests to me (and the editorial text reinforces the idea) that it is composed by an autistic person, not someone "suffering from autism."

A knife, a fork, a spoon, my shoes: Charles Simic - 1938 - 2023 (1.10.23)

The news today reports the death of Charles Simic, national Laureate and naturalized American poet. I saw him read many years ago, to a large audience on the campus of Cleveland State University. Do poets still fill lecture halls, I wonder? 

I was in a business suit and sat at the back of the theater. During Q&A following his reading, I managed to get my raised hand acknowledged, and asked Simic whether and how he conceived of audience as he wrote - for whom was he writing? 

"For people who read poetry," he said with that kind of dismissiveness that shuts you up and sits you back down. That's where I learned never to ask an artist a question about the mechanics or the psychology of making, especially not in a public forum. 

It might have been the navy blue suit, starched shirt and necktie there at the back of a theater full of jeans, tie-dyed t-shirts, face piercings, beards and dreadlocks that put him off.

Years after that, he signed a book of his poems for me (I never met the man or shook his hand) at a dinner party in a suburb of Washington, D.C. He was visiting a patron, a spectacularly wealthy lobbyist who liked poetry. You know, one of those people with nannies, au pairs, live-in chefs. 

A neighbor friend, who fulfilled one of those roles for the rich man's children and cooked the dinners for certain of the rich family's entertainments, got Simic to sign my copy of one of his books (I've bought a good number, not all, of his 30 books of poetry).  Just his name in an almost illegible and deeply impersonal scrawl. (I mean, what more did I expect?) My neighbor's assessment of the man of the evening? Not too different from my experience at that poetry reading at Cleveland State.

Which is all to say, people are complicated. The kitchen-sink poetry hailed in the obituary, the plain-spoken voice of the poems, the appealing melancholy . . . we are one thing in the deeper recesses of our writing, another thing in public, and still something else altogether in private company.

Sourness aside, Simic has been a guiding voice for my own development as a writer since the 1970s. Now I will reread his poems in a post-mortem frame of mind.

Beyond that, maybe a project for Wednesdays@One: a knife, a fork, a spoon, my shoes.

Greetings, 2023! (1.5.23)

Just to get us started, here's a link to short reviews of some new poetry included in a review roundup, in today's NYT.

And we're off to a new year of posts!