Poetry writing and solitude (11.29.20)

Just reading in this morning's NYT an editor's pick story about a couple living in the woods in the mountains of North Carolina, 18 miles from Hot Springs, the nearest town.  The story is about choosing the eremetic life, that is, the life of a hermit, again, a life of spiritual and actual solitude.  Obviously, in this time of mandated social distancing, the Times's editors felt this would be something readers would find readable . . . and I did.  

Maybe you will, too, given your love of poetry and poetry writing.  Writing, as we all know, is a solitary thing, even when done in the context of workshops, salons and other groups like Wednesdays@One.  What we haven't talked about so much is the spiritual inward-turning aspect of the art we practice, how much like prayer and meditation it can be.  Not talking about it is probably wise.  We might murder to dissect.  

But it's always good to know that we come together each week as members of a community devoted to one of the most introspective of the literary arts.

And by the way, you will be interested to know that W@1 has been convening now for over three years.  We began our little experiment this month in 2017.

American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, by Robert Bly (11.29.20)

I mentioned this book during last week's salon and thought a link to where you can pick up a copy might be of interest.  So, here it is American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, on Amazon.  There's something ironic about ordering a book of this title & subject from the global ameba-cite, but if you follow the irony, maybe that's instructive in and of itself.

Anyway, it's now a venerably older book on contemporary American poets and poetry, published in 1990.  Bly gathers together under this title a lifetime of writing about King Culture and the resistance to it.  One half of the book is devoted to his many essays on the art and its place in American society & culture.  The "old King" is his term for "the conservative mind-set inherited from Eliot and Pound and the triumphant flatness inherited from Descartes and Locke."  By 1990, this "inheritance," and the rejection of it, was a subject of retrospective, career-lookback books like American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.  So just remember if you get a copy, that was 30 years ago!

The other half of the book is a selection of essays Bly had written by 1990 about various poets whose work either represented the essential wildness of his title (true American poetry) or the inheritance from the old King.

Well, I've forgotten the discussion last week that led me to recommend this book.  But it can't hurt your general poetic education to pick up a copy and read it.

Apropos of Pronouns (11.27.20)

We talked last Wednesday about how some writers use pronouns in their poems to draw the reader in, to establish some space between artifact and consumer, or even to ignore the reader altogether.  One of our writers shared a poem that began by distancing itself from the reader (3rd person plural), then inviting the reader into the group (1st person plural), and ending by turning to face the reader directly (2nd person singular).  The writer couldn't have done that by mistake.  That was strategy.

I tried to make the point stick: when you write a poem, pay attention to what you're doing and have a reason for doing it, for the effect it's likely to have.  Of course, I am not about to discount the vast and revealing world of unintended effects, out of which so much good poetry comes.  But I wanted to exhort my fellow writers not to get caught up in the beauty of their own flow--that is, to be aware of audience (even if that audience is no more than you yourself at a later reading of your own work!).

And then today I come across David Orr's review of That Was Now, This Is Then, a new book of poems by Vijay Seshadri, in today's New York Times.  Orr doesn't focus so much on the grammar of what Seshadri is doing, his deployment of pronouns, but he does describe how this poet involves the reader "directly in whatever the poem is up to.  Often this is a subtle matter of convincing readers that they're part of a 'we'." 

So, I invite my fellow writers at W@1--and you, reader--to think about the pronouns you use in your poems and the effect these may have on your readers (again, even if that reader turns out later to be only yourself).  I also invite you as readers to pay close attention to how poets use pronouns in their poems.  These are potent rhetorical tools in the hands of experienced writers (poets, speechwriters, sales writers, writers with an axe to grind, etc.).  And to do so especially when a writer uses that all-inclusive "we," the most dangerous, conniving pronoun in the toolbox.  Make sure that you want to be a part of "whatever the poem is up to" each time you encounter a "we." 

What is a public park? (11.12.20)

Our new project has to do with public space.  I challenged W@1 to find lesser known, out of the way public parks around town and to write poems in honor of them.  The idea came to me because of Alice Ingram Park, a tiny gem of a public space about half a block from where I live.  It is situated on the corner of Elliott Road and Franklin Street, in front of the neighborhood fire station.  I've skirted or walked through this park dozens of times on my way up Franklin Street or across Franklin to Whole Foods Market.  For a public space, it certainly has a private, almost spiritual feel.

I know nothing at all about its namesake, Alice Ingram, but I'll take a stab and guess that she was a gardener, and had lots to do with the Chapel Hill Garden Club.  It was the Garden Club that funded the creation of the Park, in 1990.  A brass plaque affixed to a brick knee wall says the Park was dedicated in 1998.  I reached out to the current President of the Chapel Hill Garden Club for more information, who put me in touch with Bitty Holton, a long-time club member.  Ms Holton has no idea, either, about Alice Ingram.

The intersection there is busy and noisy, as Franklin Street leads west to NC 15-501 and I-40, east to downtown and campus.  Across the street are Village Gate Plaza and just up from that, Eastgate Shopping Plaza.  Besides the fire station, nearby are three banks, a nursing home, and law office.  There's also a mysterious business named "Japan Tobacco Co., Inc." as well as a dentist.  I imagine people walking the streets of Tokyo and Yokahama yellowing their teeth with fine imported North Carolina tobacco.

In the midst of all this commerce and traffic is little Alice Ingram Park.  Go ahead and map it.  It's there.  I've searched online for information about the park and its namesake but haven't found much.  Other than that name on the brass plaque, it's all a bit of a mystery.

Shade is provided courtesy of a large willow oak, a tree that I thought might be an American elm but which my wife says is something else, and four redbuds.  A cement walkway runs diagonally through the center, from the corner southwest to the knee wall just in front of the fire station.  Another path curves around the inside edge, from Elliott Road to Franklin Street and the city bus stop.  Someone etched a hop-scotch into the concrete of that one while it was still wet.  I've hopped it many times.  But I've never seen anyone else do that.  

The park has a single trash can that says linger . . . but recycle.  Recently, I noted it was lined with a fresh plastic trash bag.  Good to know the city still drops by to check on things.  My wife reminds me that there used to be a little pond as well, but that was filled in long ago.  She speculates that homeless people were bathing in it.  More likely, it just became a nuisance and expensive to keep clean and in good repair.  In fact, the park could use a makeover: new beds of flowers, some tree trimming, some brick work.

You can sit there, too, and people sometimes do.  There's no bench, but the brick knee wall is often occupied by somebody who's come there to wait for a bus on a hot, sunny day.  Noisy as traffic can be at this intersection, Alice Ingram Park somehow retains a cloistered feel, maybe because of its ample shade and border of redbuds, holly bush, and wrought iron fence.  It is a bowl, sloping slightly down from the edges toward the center, offering even more of a sense of privacy and remove.  (Actually, the bowlish design is common around this part of Chapel Hill, which rises as you go up Elliott Road to Coker Hills.  Thunderstorms almost always wash downhill toward East Franklin Street.  At the bottom of the bowl is a big drain, like in a sink.  The bowl is designed to capture runoff when it gets too much for the surrounding street sewers to handle.  The single drain slowly disperses water under Franklin Street, likely toward Booker Creek.)

Why would I suggest a project like this?  I mean, besides having something for W@1 writers to write about?  This little park's attraction for me, for one thing.  I'd like to think that the writers of W@1 also have their own private-public-sacred spaces.  Poetry often wants the out of the way, the overlooked, the neglected for subject matter.  (Looking at you, Emily Dickinson!)  But I thought it'd be a good idea for our writers to consider community as a subject to write about or out of, to examine what it means to have a physical space set aside for citizens.  In this year of social distancing, political unrest, and cultural upheaval, pondering community through a poem might be a useful project to undertake.

Not at all sure what this project will net, but we all might at least learn of some new parks around town that we hadn't visited before.

Disturbed . . . and writing poems (10.30.20)

This is not a blog for Halloween, despite the blue moon we're expecting tomorrow evening!

I was reading here a review of a new retrospective collection (Vol. 1) of the music of Joni Mitchell.  Recalling her earliest life as a song writer, she says, 

“I think I started writing to develop my own private world . . . and also because I was disturbed.”

I want to say, "Well, heck yeah!"  Especially of that latter statement, because I was disturbed.  But what a curious way to describe the creative urge.

Now, Mitchell was speaking at least partly of being abandoned by the father of her first child, which she gave away at adoption when starting out in cold, cold Canada.  (He packed off to California, where "everything is warmer.")  But it got me thinking about how much writing gets done out of some form of disturbance or other.

I'm not going into any essay about poetry and madness.  That's for somebody else to ponder.  What I have in mind is a much less debilitating kind of "disturbed-ness," albeit a kind that certainly interrupts your day without warning. For me, and I think for my friends at Wednesdays@One, and for just about every writer of poetry I've ever encountered, something happens to get me to take a note, write out a line, begin a poem, stay engaged through a first draft.  It might be a memory.  It might be a recognition or an epiphany.  It might be an overheard remark or a rhythm in someone's speech.  

Once, I discovered a black, black house fly on a windowsill.  It was winter and a foot of snow had fallen overnight.  The sill had recently been painted a brilliant white so the fly stood out from this background of whiteness in three glorious dimensions.  It had died there in all that whiteness, just inside a single pane of glass that didn't do much at all to keep out the cold, perfectly balanced and triangular.  It cast a voluptuously small shadow in the sunlight.  It so disturbed my morning's routine that the image imprinted itself, apparently permanently so, if this blog note is any indicator.  And it demanded a poem, which I wrote some weeks later, made of wide, prosy lines and fashioned into three slab-like stanzas of equal length.

Someday I'll explore how that poem's blocky but regular shape reflects the encounter with death it describes, or rather, tries to counterweigh it.  But for here, let it suffice to say I wrote because I was disturbed by that image of black on white and the thought of a mighty event--a creature's death--happening there on the windowsill.  Out of which, a poem must be made.

It's the business of an artist, poets included, to be continually open to disturbance.  I think the rest of the world depends on artists being so.  And there lies one of the commitments we make to art: to be disturbed, and then to make art.

Diane di Prima, 1934 - 2020

So . . . how can Diane di Prima be such a household name in my house and be totally absent from my library?  How can I have most of William Bronk's books on my shelves but nothing by her?  I can't even find an anthology in my collection with poems by Diane di Prima in it!

This says something about me, of course, i.e., the big holes in my reading of American poetry.  It also says something about American publishing of the past sixty or seventy years.  Plenty of Ginsberg out there in the mainline presses.  Not much readily available by or about Ms di Prima, though.

Anyway, Diane di Prima, 1934 - 2020.

The LA Times obituary

Topic sentences . . . (10.13.20)

First things first.  Pretty cool news about Louise Gluck, ay?  I wonder what winning a Nobel does for your artistic psyche?  I'd think it would offer more burden than anything else.  Apparently, Sartre did, too.

-----------

Recently, we discussed a poem in a Wednesdays@One salon where everyone felt the author had lost the thread of the making.  A pattern seemed to be laid down early in the poem which then was abandoned, or in this case simply neglected.  Or maybe just never recognized.  The poem wandered away into thickets of pretty words, and never found its way back.  The author initially tried to justify the errancies, but ultimately was as unconvinced by the poem as the rest of us.

Now, I've said before that poems begin in sound.  Much of their power resides in the spoken word, in rhythm and pitch, in the acoustics of art.  Meaning arises from there, often.  But there is "sound," and then there is sound.  "Sound" is noise.  Almost everything following the opening stanza of this W@1 author's poem veered toward noise.  Sound is form and intention, however illogical or chaotic it may seem at first hearing.  Prettiness usually falls into the "sound" category, art into the sound category.

Before I lose the thread myself, here is our project for next week . . . 

Scroll down to find an assortment of stanzas and/or passages from poems I chose at random from my own library.  Select one of the passages and follow its lead to write a new poem.  Study the passage.  Read it through several times.  Then read it aloud.  Try memorizing it and then reciting it into a mirror.  If you keep a poetry notebook or a journal, write it out there and then break it down, analyze it.  Consider its "statement" and its potential context(s).  Can it be paraphrased, that is, if someone asked, could you say, "This passage is about/describes, introduces, takes us to . . . "?  Ponder its grammar and construction (lineation, syntax, punctuation, subordinations, verbs and tenses).  Note its figures -- metaphors and similes, analogies, personifications, slangs, heightened speech, alliteration, rhyme.  Hear its tones, such as irony, guile, clarity, simplicity, evenness, flourish, grandness or sublime-ness, colloquialism and other folksiness.  Is it a cry?  A shout?  A whisper?  A plea?  Is its language aggressive or dismissive or "healing" or admonitory or analytical or questioning or something else?  Does the passage suggest a rhetorical approach, in addition to the poetic; that is, does it suggest an opinion, a preferred point of view; is it attempting to teach you or convince you?

What I'm asking is that you internalize the piece of poetry you select, in part to make it your own, in part to get a sense of its poetic possibilities -- that is, of your poetic options.  So read through them all and then, if one strikes you as something you can work with, go for it.  But don't just start writing!  Do what I describe in the paragraph above.  Each segment comes from the beginning of a poem that some poet has already written and published.  I've chosen relatively obscure poems to discourage you from looking up the completed original.  You are to make your own original, using this beginning as your "topic sentence."

Which brings me back to the title of this post and that poem we discussed recently.  I believe the author of that errant poem failed to recognize the path suggested by the first stanza he'd/she'd composed.  A common error, by the way, even among the professionals.  I don't think this was intentional.  I do believe that had the author paused once in a while to re-read that opening stanza and consider its form, "statement," lyrical quality, specificity (or gauziness), diction, word choice and order, figures, concreteness, etc., that a different and more coherent poem would have emerged.  This might have taken more effort, more thought and feeling, and more time.  The writer's process might have been more recursive and tentative.  But I think the result might have been superior.  

So what I'm suggesting here is a writing technique, which is to treat an opening stanza or paragraph of a poem like the topic sentence of a prose paragraph.  I recall helping my Freshman Comp students devise topic sentences for their 500-word essays and for individual paragraphs, then advising them to write the topic sentence onto a piece paper and to tape that piece of paper somewhere above their writing desk, right where they could look at it again and again as they developed their material.  I suggested series of questions they could put to themselves as they worked: 

• Does the paragraph or essay in some way develop the thought of that topic sentence?
• Does the material in the paragraph/essay explain, question, illustrate the thought expressed in the topic sentence?
• Is the tone of the paragraph's/essay's language consistent with the tone of the topic sentence, or is it implied by the topic sentence?

Not all poems can be written like they are five-paragraph / three-subtopic expository essays.  Often enough, I've decided that the opening stanza of a poem I've been working on doesn't work in that position, and so the poem doesn't work either.  But almost always, when I write a poem, there is one stanza or set of lines that contains the DNA of the poem, that functions as the coordinate I need for making the particular map that is that poem.  As I compose, I continually return to that segment as a way of checking the compass, of making sure I haven't wandered away from what it promises.

This technique doesn't always work, that is, doesn't always result in a good poem, at least not at first writing.  But sometimes, if I come back to that passage months or years later, it still serves as a guideline or a pointer, saying, "go that way," which I can see more clearly.  And I'm not saying the poets who wrote the poems from which the passages below come followed this technique.  Everybody deploys different techniques at different instances for different purposes.  But try writing a poem with one of these passages as your opening "gambit"; get to know the possibilities the gambit offers.  Tape that passage, if you like, above your writing desk.  Keep referring back to it as you write.  Let the passage lead you -- don't try to force it into something else you'd like to write.

Then, next week, show us what you've composed.  Have fun!  The openers follow.

--------------

Wind rocks the car.

We sit parked by the river,

silence between our teeth.

--------------

The leaves, though little time they have to live,

Were never so unfallen as today,

And seem to yield us through a rustled sieve

The very light from which time fell away.

--------------

It is all a rhythm,

from the shutting 

door, to the window

opening,

the seasons, the sun's

light, the moon,

the oceans, the 

growing of things . . .

---------------

America, I know I could do better by you,

though I stoop conscientiously three times a day

to pick up my dog's waste from the grass

with black biodegradable bags. And lest you suspect

that this is more pretension than allegiance, know

my dog was the one at the shelter no one else

would take.

---------------

The garden admires you.

For your sake it smears itself with green pigment,

the ecstatic reds of the roses

so that you will come to it with your lovers.

---------------

O tulip, tulip you bloom all day and later sway

a deep-wasted limbo above the dinner table,

waiting for a coin to drop into your well,

for the stars to pin your stem to their lapel.

---------------

I take off my shirt, I show you

I shaved the hair out under my arms

I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair

on my legs with a knife, getting white

---------------

I move the curtain back,

and something has gone wrong.

I am in a smoky place,

an Algerian cafe.