The poem as list (2.12.18)

One of the most approachable methods for practicing poetry is to make a list. If nothing else, a list encourages another line of language, or image, or other figure, so a writer can propel a poem down the page. The trick is knowing when to stop. Poets have practiced this trick since the beginning of figured language.

"Listing" is an ancient poetic strategy. Open a bible to just about any page and you will find a list of some sort. It's an essential component of the great oral epics. The Illiad is packed with lists, often of warrior lineage, and, in the form of litotes, of war-bragging.  The great sagas (Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied) certainly come to mind. In an oral poetry culture, listing is an aid to memory. More radically, it's one way the ancient mind works. Stylistically, listing emphasizes lyric and incantatory qualities you're not likely to find in more academic, literate composition (that is, in print culture). You won't find it so much among the Scholiasts, and not among the MFA Programs, where it's likely considered a sign of laziness.

Many nursery poems and songs depend on the lulling quality of a list or set of repetitions. "This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb . . ."

Listing, to be sure, can get monotonous. Tonally, a list can sound like pounding sand, or worse, the gavel. Making lists is something everybody does, but not every poet in a poem. Thus, our project for this week at Wednesdays@One, which was to write a "list poem."

The group didn't set out to create a modern saga, of course. Nor did we mean to rewrite the family pedigrees of the Bible.  Our goal wasn't necessarily to tap the spiritual or the mystical or the far-away-and-long-ago. Rather, it was to get some practice establishing rhythm in a poem through repetition . . . WITHOUT REDUCING THE POEM TO TEDIUM OR THE SUPERFICIAL (stuff to pick up at Whole Foods Market).

Everyone found out pretty quickly that making a poem out of a list isn't so easy after all. Doing so involves a delicate balancing of repeated sounds, beats and breaths. Everybody discovered that a good deal of restraint is called for, for a poem that is only a list isn't much of a poem.  But a list strategically inserted into a poem, or a poem strategically organized like a list, when done well, can be a very good poem.

Here are some of the examples we used as entry points to the project . . .

For Every Nail in the Bomb There Was an Act of Kindness

─Martin Ott, 2 River View, Winter 2018 issue

For every song rising above the gathered crowd

there was an edict of night.
For every house missing a door
there was a stranger who held the villains at bay.
For every banned book hidden from the rabble
there was a pyre extinguished by voices.           
For every drone zipping toward its foe
there was a message left for a loved one.
For every outburst of anger billowing to rend
there was a congregation holding on.

from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

─ Galway Kinnell,  1990

When one has lived a long time alone,

one refrains from swatting the fly

and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike

the mosquito, though more than willing to slap

the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad

from the pit too deep for him to hop out of

and carries him to the grass, without minding

the toxic urine he slicks his body with,

and one envelops, in a towel, the swift

who fell down the chimney and knocks herself

against the window glass and releases her outside

and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,

when one has lived a long time alone.

Song of Myself (Section 42)

─ Walt Whitman, 1855

Ever the hard unsunk ground,

Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,

Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,

Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,

Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,

Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,

Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.

from Ash-Wednesday 

─ T.S. Eliot, 1930

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign.

. . . .

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

Apostrophe and other literary addresses (1.31.18)

Wednesdays@One began the new year with a type of poem called an apostrophe, a subgenre of literary address.  Look for poems with titles beginning with the word "To" to find literary apostrophes, though of course they might be odes, too.  The difference between an apostrophe and an ode is one of length and depth--the ode being longer, more in-depth--and occasion, where the ode is celebratory and more of a public utterance.  Apostrophe addresses some person (deceased, often famous) or thing (animal, object, idea, impulse, feeling) as if alive and sentient and able to understand what is said.  It personifies.  And it is often personal.

How does apostrophe work? Well, for one thing, it establishes point of view and audience very quickly, and a very specific audience.  A poem written in the apostrophic mode is "spoken to" a particular (dead) person, a left foot, a cloud, a mood, a time of day, an idea, another poem, an ideology . . . the figure is limited only by your imagination.

Writing in this mode is actually quite liberating.  I've found that the process frees my mind from more standard notions of audience while at the same time focusing my imagination on a very particular audience.  (It's next to impossible to write anything particular when your poem addresses no one or thing in particular.)

Wednesdays@One contributors found that writing apostrophes helped them come up with new things to say in a poem and new ways to say those things.  They also found that the apostrophe can generate intensely personal language and feeling, perhaps because no matter who or what your poem addresses, in the end, it speaks to you, the poet.

To help them get started, I shared a few poems written as apostrophes . . .

To the Evening Star

                                                ─William Blake (1783)

Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,

Now, while the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves; and, while thou drawest the
Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy wet wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares thro’ the dun forest:
The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with
Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence.

Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art

                                                                                       ─John Keats (1838)

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

   Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

   Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite,

The moving waters at their preistlike task

   Of pure ablution round the earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

   Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

   Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,

   Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

   And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

To a Snail

                                                      ─Marianne Moore (1924)

If “compression is the first grace of style,”

you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles,”
In the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

To My Heart at the Close of Day

                                                                   ─Kenneth Koch (2000)

At dusk light you come to bat

As George Trakl might put it. How are you doing
Aside from that, aside from the fact
That you are at bat? What balls are you going to hit
Into the outfield, what runs will you score,
And do you think you ever will, eventually,
Bat one out of the park? That would be a thrill
To you and your contemporaries! Your mighty posture
Takes its stand in my chest and swing swing swing
You warm up, then you take a great step
Forward as the ball comes smashing toward you, home
Plate. And suddenly it is evening.

The line in a poem (12.12.17)

We writers of poetry spend a lot of time making choices about line but very little time thinking or talking about it.  Maybe it's like blinking or breathing.  A lot can be discovered about making poems when you give some thought to lineation.  One of those little discoveries is how choice-driven the poetic line is, even if the choice is unconscious and done by feel.

At Wednesdays@One and in other venues, I have asked writers about their lines.  Why do you write such short/long lines?  How did you come to vary the line length of this poem so dramatically?  Why have you ended your poem with a one-word line?  These are questions about choice, which is to say, about style, and writers often have a hard time answering them.

The power of line

By assigning lines to a poem, you can drive it forward or “down” the page, or you can retard its rhythmical progress, or vary its pace.  You can extend a line across the page visually, even “fold” it back beneath itself.  Line can contribute to flow or choppiness and it can bring a thought to a dead stop.  Visually, you can create a slab of text or a ribbon, or, sometimes, a sprinkling or scattershot effect.  Which is to say, lineation is a matter of choice, every poem being a record of choices made in composition. 

In poems with the strongest “presence” in the ear or on the page, structure and sense often work together to dictate line, and so as a writer of poems you need always to be aware of the line your poem demands (if only so you can violate it).  Conversely, in poems with weaker presence, poems that are inexpert or unpracticed, lines are forced upon the text (perhaps with rhyme-ends, over-punctuation, too-rhythmical beats, or clichéd meter) regardless of sense.

All but one of the following poems is lineated.  As you attempt to restore each to its lined self (and maybe discover the one that is not written in lines), you will likely experience something like this: outside of traditional metrics, lineation can feel arbitrary, provisional, hit or miss. 

By way of example, the three poems dealing with birds are restored to their original lines at the end of this text.

To the Yellow Morning Moon

Three mornings, you make a window out of mullions and glass, bright chip of light, less round, less palpable, each sun’s rising.  Three mornings, I make you a name: maple-snagged kite, tarnished coin, Icarus falling into the pale-blue sea.  You yellow moon floating down the western sky, I abide your losses.  You make good company at such lonely hours.

Looking at a Dead Wren in My Hand

Forgive the hours spent listening to radios, and the words of gratitude I did not say to teachers. I love your tiny rice-like legs, like bars of music played in an empty church, and the feminine tail, where no worms of Empire have ever slept, and the intense yellow chest that makes tears come. Your tail feathers open like a picket fence, and your bill is brown, with the sorrow of an old Jew whose daughter has married an athlete. The black spot on your head is your own mourning cap.

Autobiographia Literaria

When I was a child I played myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away. If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tress and cried out “I am an orphan.” And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

Adam’s Complaint (by Denise Levertov)

Some people, no matter what you give them, still want the moon. The bread, the salt, white meat and dark, still hungry. The marriage bed and the cradle, still empty arms. You give them land, their own earth under their feet, still they take to the roads. And water: dig them the deepest well, still it’s not deep enough to drink the moon from.

The Business Life (by David Ignatow)

When someone hangs up, having said to you, “Don’t come round again,” and you have never heard the phone banged down with such violence nor the voice vibrate with such venom, pick up your receiver gently and dial again, get the same reply; and dial again, until he threatens. You will then get used to it, be sick only instead of shocked. You will live, and have a pattern to go by, familiar to your ear, your senses and your dignity.

Cell Song (by Etheridge Knight)

Night Music Slanted Light strike the cave of sleep. I alone tread the red circle and twist the space with speech. Come now, etheridge, don’t be a savior; take your words and scrape the sky, shake rain on the desert, sprinkle salt on the tail of a girl, can there anything good come out of prison.

The Sparrow

I served a great heart beating This sparrow who comes to sit at my window is a poetic truth more than a natural one. His voice, his movements, his habits—how he loves to flutter his wings in the dust—all attest it; granted, he does it to rid himself of lice but the relief he feels makes him cry out lustily—which is a trait more related to music than otherwise.

The Bird Bath

I served a great heart beating its little drum in the shade of the redbud, in the brightness of a bowl of water in the sun, standing still in the window for as long as it drank, for as long as it visited that oasis  of stone, a soldier in the ranks of attention, a conscript to ordinary beauty.

⇋⇋⇋⇋

The Sparrow

(by William Carlos Williams)

This sparrow

who comes to sit at my window

is a poetic truth

more than a natural one.

His voice,

his movements,

his habits—

how he loves to

flutter his wings

in the dust—

all attest it;

granted, he does it

to rid himself of lice

but the relief he feels

makes him

cry out lustily—

which is a trait

more related to music

than otherwise.

Looking at a Dead Wren in My Hand [1]

(by Robert Bly)

Forgive the hours spent listening to radios, and the words of gratitude I did not say to teachers. I love your tiny rice-like legs, like bars of music played in an empty church, and the feminine tail, where no worms of Empire have ever slept, and the intense yellow chest that makes tears come. Your tail feathers open like a picket fence, and your bill is brown, with the sorrow of an old Jew whose daughter has married an athlete. The black spot on your head is your own mourning cap.

The Bird Bath

(by Clark Holtzman)

I served a great heart

beating its little drum

in the shade of the redbud,

in the brightness

of a bowl of water

in the sun, standing

still in the window

for as long as it drank,

for as long as it

visited that oasis of stone,

a soldier in the ranks

of attention, a conscript

to ordinary beauty.

---

[1] Yes!  It’s a “prose” poem!

Line and metric, a follow-up to lineation (12.12.17)

Wednesdays@One discussion of line led to this follow-up on prosody and metrics.  Contributors wanted to explore the idea of measure in the types of free-verse they write.  Are there rules?  Are there movements or fashions?  They were asking, essentially, whether any rules apply at all in contemporary poetry.  So we looked at a famous instance of measure in modern (American) poetry: the variable foot.

What is a “variable foot”?

• A structural concept “invented” by William Carlos Williams in the 1920s, then coined as a term by him in 1949.
• A literary response to tradition, that is, the perceived tyranny of traditional formal metrics (iambs, trochees, dactyls, anapests) and “required” line lengths (e.g., pentameter) that are somewhat mathematical, notational and mechanical.
• An effort to measure (and foreground) the “American voice,” and thus a kind of literary Declaration of Independence.  The metrical foot in traditional English prosody copies the syllabic structure of ancient prosodies in other languages (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, Latin, ancient Greek).  Williams wanted to emphasize breath over math.
• An emphasis on spacing in terms of “triads” (“Americans speak in beats of three.”) both visually and rhythmically—though not necessarily aurally.

The variable foot is variable in that it can contain one syllable or ten or twenty and still be “counted” (i.e., breathed) as one unit.  (See Levertov below.)  The variable foot can contain two/three/five accented or stressed syllables along with one, two or more unaccented syllables—even a dozen unaccented or lightly accented syllables.  The variable foot emphasizes RELATION between and among uttered syllables/sounds (in other words, BEATS) that is “open,” meaning, not tied to iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic meters. In other words: more like natural speech. 

What distinguishes, then, “poem” from “natural speech”?  LINE.  For Williams, one line = one foot.

Denise Levertov on “Line-Breaks, Stanza-Spaces and the Inner Voice”

“Yes, and the line-end pause is a very important one; I regard it as equal to half a comma, but the pauses between stanzas come into it too, and they are much harder to evaluate, to measure.  I think that what the idea of the variable foot, which is so difficult to understand, really depends on is a sense of pulse, a pulse in behind the words, a pulse that is actually sort of tapped out by a drum in the poem.  Yes, there’s an implied beat, as in music; there is such a beat and you can have in one bar just two notes, and in another bar ten notes, and yet the bar length is the same.  I suppose this is what Williams was talking about, that you don’t measure a foot in the old way by its syllables but by its beat.”

Charles Olson, in “Projective Verse”

“The trouble with most work . . . since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas . . . is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.”

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE

the HEART, by way of the BREATH to the LINE

Common metrical feet of English language prosody[1]

iamb:                 a×WAY                                          (two syllables, rising)

anapest:            in×ter×VENE                                 (three syllables, rising)

trochee:            O×nly                                             (two syllables, falling)

dactyl:               HA×pi×ly                                         (two syllables, falling)

spondee:           BIG×MAC, GET×BACK×JACK         (two or more syllables, all stressed)

---

[1] In the sphere of prosody, there’s a nearly inexhaustible variety of measure—in Chinese, for instance, in ancient Greek—that is inapplicable to modern English.

Using figurative language: similes and metaphors (11.30.17)

Making similes work in your poems

A simile is an equation (“this” = “that”) that uses “like” or “as”: O, my love is like a red, red rose.  Just as in mathematics, in poetry, the “equation” or = sign, states a comparison between two things that, on the surface, or in our normal experience, might seem unrelated.  Therefore, “love = rose.”  But in simile, the difference is always stressed, that is, expressed as obvious: love is SIMILAR TO a rose (but not a rose).

Depending on how similar or dissimilar the items in a simile are, the equation delivers more or less “force” or surprise when you encounter it.  Sometimes that surprise can be comical or nonsensical, as in examples 1 and 2 below; slightly bizarre, as in example 5; or lyrical (example 6); or non-visual (8, 9); or emotive (6, 10).  Sometimes, a simile can be rendered self-consciously, or, put a better way, metatextually, where it expresses not only an image, but a (literary) convention, as in example 11.

Similes can link together abstract and concrete items.  In fact, this is exactly what poets sometimes try to do when they wish to create arresting and memorable images with similes.  Emily Dickinson often made striking images by linking abstract and concrete words, as in examples 12 and 13.

Examples

1. A pencil is like a pantsuit
2. A corncob is like a deck of cards, but a deck of cards is like a cake
3. Bill is like a bull with a bell and a ball of gummy bears
4. My dog is as big as a mouse and as small as a house
5. My dog has fleas as loud as a rock band
6. What was so blue like evenings in the fall or black like a bible
7. The tailor rolling open his fabrics like a field marshal his plans
8. My paper rustles, noisy as crows
9. Rustling leaves—like the shuffling of cards
10. The man under the bed . . . the man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness
11. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
12. Over and over, like a Tune—The Recollection plays
13.  . . .

           The difference between Despair

           And Fear—is like the One 

           Between the instant of a Wreck

           And when the Wreck has been . . .

Figurative language project: writing similes

Before we meet again next week, spend some time in your poetry journal making similes of as many types as you can think of: concrete to concrete, abstract to concrete, (abstract to abstract?), nonsensical, emotive, bizarre.  Make some of your similes non-visual (e.g., describing sounds, smells, textures, temperatures, tastes).

1.      Write at least 10 similes merely as similes, that is, using “like” or “as”

2.      Write one poem of four lines or more that begins with a simile

3.      Be prepared to share your experienced coming up with the similes

Making metaphor work in your poems

Like simile, metaphor is an equation with two or more elements on either side of an = sign, only without the helpful traffic signs of “like” or “as.”  Some metaphors relate two items that normally would appear to be unrelated (like fox and sun in the third example below).  Relations between or among normally unrelated items can be rendered in more or less conventional and “appropriate” settings (the fox and the sun are linked within the larger conventional setting of nature—the brook).  In other instances, metaphor is rendered more subtly and without conventional context, as in examples 1 and 8 below (rain = head/human being, but in what context? An arresting image!).

Metaphor also turns on the associations that we have with words (and therefore depends on cultural conventions that we share and understand more or less).  So, when a metaphor functions like an implied equation (“this” = “that”) between unlike items and uses certain shared understandings to make the equation work, it is a deeper, more complex kind of metaphor.  Examples 1 and 4 below are good examples.

Examples 

1. A bohemia of sluggishness
2. Sandbags gorged with the land
3. The fox that runs behind the brook each evening is the setting sun
4. He went into himself where shame makes its poor home
5. Draco climbs the neighborhood pines and is gone
6. Peabody Coal & Anthracite sleeps on the Illinois side this morning
7. The fence, a scar along the exquisite thigh of this valley
8. Even the rain was throwing back its head

Figurative language project: identifying metaphors

For next week, in addition to any other poetry writing you do, look for examples of metaphoric language in your reading: among the books of poetry you have in your own library, in the newspaper, on your cereal box, in advertisements, even in emails that you send or receive during the week.

1. Write down in your poetry journal at least 10 examples of metaphoric language
2. For each metaphor, reduce the figure to its most basic equation (“this” = “that”)
3. Be prepared to share your findings

Welcome to the revived Clark's Poetry Blog!

I'm reviving this blog because for the past year I've coordinated a weekly poetry salon named Wednesdays@One.  The salon is part workshop, part sharing, part performance, and part inquiry into the nature of poetry, poetics, theory, craft, voice and delivery, and literary history.

Our group is made up of 6-10 writers of all experiences and capabilities. Some are seasoned writers of 25 years and more, some are new to the art.  Some hold MFAs, some are academics, some are former English majors, and some are just people keenly interested in poetry.  Everybody is serious about writing poetry.

Each week we develop a project that emphasizes a technical matter (meter and rhythm, for instance, or lineation), an artistic component (e.g., deep image, deployment of metaphor, how poems end), formal options (sonnet, ballad, short form poems, narrative structure in a poem, lyric, riddle), thematic approaches (ekphrasis, gendered writing/investigation, satire, fabulist), or other topic.

Each project comes with a short backgrounder with examples and a sharing, followed up by a written discussion of each poet's contribution.  These are not so much "assignments" and critiques as ideas meant to exercise certain poetic "muscles" along with my reactions to what I am reading from the group.

Over the past year I've stockpiled a good-sized library of notes, more or less desultory, on the making of poems that I've shared with my cohort.  They appreciate it, I think.  I'd like to start sharing it with a wider audience.

Don't expect this material to be too academic or programmatic.  Wednesdays@One is not MFA Poetry 401, or a standard workshop or a book club.  Or rather, it is all these things (w/o the advanced degree) plus a survey in the history of poetic forms. The best description I can give it is "salon."

If you're visiting this blog through the Program for Jazz web site, know that the poetry is part and parcel of my larger interest of exploring the art's sound and rhythmic dimensions.  I hope you visit often.

Poem: Unused

What a shock to realize

it has all been lying around unused

all this time, waiting for us,

for our attention.