Cry-baby poetry (1.31.21)

Some of the poems I've seen in response to the attack on the Capitol Building--in the press, in the literary reviews, at W@1--got me to thinking about our next project: sentiment in poetry.  We started talking about it last week in our Zoom salon, talking around the edges of it at least: what is sentiment; is sentiment a good or a bad thing or both; do "sentiment" and "sentimentality" differ and, if they do, how?  The title of this post is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but only partly so.  It bears a kernel of truth, I think, about sentimental poetry.

Cry babies cry for no good reason.  They cry just to be crying or, more to the point, they cry to be heard crying.  They're after your pity.  How loudly and shrilly they cry or scream or whine or how long they stamp their feet matters only if you give them the pity they want.  Often, our recently denied president was a cry baby.  A cry baby poet.

Likewise, sentimental poetry.  A sentimental poem wants you to feel its pain.  Or its joy.  Or its cleverness. Anger.  Melancholy.  Happiness.  Indignation.  Hurt.  Etc.  It doesn't care so much whether you appreciate its artistry or complexity.  Complexity only gets in the way.  Complexity and artistry are "too intellectual" (sneer).  The sentimental poem doesn't try to examine the emotion it expresses; it's satisfied with the expression alone.  

I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!

Certain subjects expose us poets to sentimentality, or at least the threat of it: cats and dogs, of course; grandchildren and daddies; frail grannies and flowers after rainfall; moonlight; trees and honeybees; broken hearts and childhood memories; injustice, unfairness, poverty, under-doggedness; clouds, sunrises, rainbows; angels, Jesus; villains, too, and Good and Evil.  (Note: click on "Read more" below to get to the project for Feb. 10, plus more discussion of sentiment in poetry.)

Writing the American sonnet (1.9.21)

Dear Wednesdays@One colleagues,

Turn the page on the year!  
Poetry will save us!  Yeah, right.
Yeah, right, yeah, right.

No, we won't forget the old

For the old has put its brand on us

With an iron from the fires

Of disaster, burned our foreheads

And our souls and our lips.

But turn!

Veer into the new year.

Make a poem of what's to come,

For a song is coming again.

Raise your voices, song-singers.

Make that poem, save you.

Yes, let's keep talking about poetry and keep writing it, reading it, thinking about it.  Let's write better poems today than we did yesterday, better poems tomorrow than we do today.

Let's return to forms, namely, the sonnet (thanks to Margaret for suggesting it).  In a way, starting out this already dangerous, head-spinning new year with a form perhaps can lend a bit of stability, structure, regularity, predictability . . . at least to some small portion of our daily lives.  Poetry might not save us, but writing it, reading it, thinking about it and talking about it might keep us off the streets (and out of the Capitol Building).

For additional reading, visit the April 10, 2018 (4.10.18) post in this blog.  That's where we last focused on the sonnet form.  Recovering some of that ground might be helpful for this project, which is to write an American sonnet.

A what?

Can there be such a thing as a "national" form of a form?  Apparently, Terrence Hayes thought so when he wrote his book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.  Margaret kindly provided us some samples from the book.  Here's one from the book:

AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

by Terrance Hayes

 

The earth of my nigga eyes are assassinated.

The deep well of my nigga throat is assassinated.

The tender bells of my nigga testicles are gone.

You assassinate the sound of our bullshit & blissfulness.

The bones managing the body’s business are cloaked

Until you assassinate my nigga flesh. The skin is replaced

By a cloak of fire. Sometimes it is river or rainwater

That cloaks the bones. Sometimes we lie on the roadside

In bushels of knotted roots, flowers & thorns until our body

Is found. You assassinate the smell of my breath, which is like

Smoke, milk, twilight, itself. You assassinate my tongue

Which is like the head of a turtle wearing my skull for a shell.

You assassinate my lovely legs & the muscular hook of my cock.

Still, I speak for the dead. You cannot assassinate my ghosts.

There are 70 sonnets in Hayes's book, all bearing the same title.  So  I guess to call this one the "title" sonnet is a bit meaningless.  Or not.  Conventionally, the individual sonnets in sonnet sequences are without title, and so giving every poem the same title amounts to the same thing.  Or does it.  Reading the book means reading 70 takes on the idea expressed by that title; it invites you to link every sonnet to the one before and the one after.  Ingenious.

But what makes the sonnet above "American"?  Is it the subject matter, the voice and tone, the language, the drumbeat rhythm?  Is it the point of view (the present speaking to the past and the future)?  Is it the challenge to the assassin, the barely veiled threat/plea?  The accusatory stance?  The anger?  The violence?

And who, exactly is this assassin?  This past and future agent?  America?  The self?  Whatever it is, this isn't the opening salvo in Hayes's book.  The first poem is this one:

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,

Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.

I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat

Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.

I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold

While your better selves watch from the bleachers.

I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow

You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night

In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-

Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars

Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.

I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.

Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough

To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

It has 14 lines.  Its lines are roughly five-beat, depending on how you voice the poem when you read it aloud.  As I read it, I sense volta or turning, though not just once but line after line, sometimes within a line.  I feel jumble and jangle and heartbeat.  I feel it sing.  

Hard to express any thoughts about Hayes's poems without doing so poetically.  Maybe that's all I've got.  When it comes to sonnets, I expect and in many ways crave setup and turn, rhetorical fulfillment; but (and this is what I find most AMERICAN about the poems in this sequence) what I get are "voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor."  I get jump-cuts and apparent non sequiturs.  

On the other hand, the positive!  Look at the lush language of the first Hayes poem above, the enumeration of the body's flesh: eyes, throat, testicles, skin, breath, tongue, legs, cock.  America's history is the history of the violence upon, the humiliation of the Black body.  Hayes's poem names the history (assassination) while reclaiming the Body for itself, or for himself, for his Black self, in one self-contradictory poetic gesture.  (This art may be as far as I am permitted to see into this poem.)  What could be more American than that, to "contradict myself," as Whitman celebrated.

Regarding the American-ness of an "American" sonnet, consider the opening images of the second of the two poems I just quoted: "I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. / I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat / Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone."  The sonnet form, handed to Hayes from the same Western European traditions that commoditized the slave trade in the Americas, confines yet protects, creates yet destroys.  If he is to write sonnets as a true artist, Hayes must learn to make use of all these competing applications; and that is the American thing about the American sonnet, how it contains multitudes of meaning, even of self-contradiction.

Well, these responses don't help much, do they, not if you're trying to figure out what could be "American" in an American sonnet and then write that sonnet.  So let's do the project this way . . .

• Write a poem that retains some but not all the formal features of a traditional sonnet.
• Choose a subject matter that strikes you as inherently American.
• Write from a point of view that an American might write from (you'll have to ponder what it means to look at the world through American eyes).
• Work in an American diction ("folksy" probably won't count, as one can write "folksy" Irish, English, Chinese, Brazilian, Tahitian poetry as well).  You might "listen to" Whitman or W. C. Williams or Adrienne Rich or Sylvia Plath.

Then let's share next Wednesday.  Good luck!

Signing off . . . (12.31.20)

My laptop's clock says it's twenty minutes until midnight.  Like most people, especially like my W@1 and Program for Jazz cohort, I can't say I'm unhappy to see 2020 in the rearview mirror.  Like them, I fear, neither do I believe there's not ten more miles of bad road ahead.  How's that for a string of negatives?!  How appropriate to 2020!  

In fact, I can't recall another time in my life--not even Y2K--when I and everyone I know, and the whole civilized world for that matter, held our collective breaths for what's to come.  Not the way we are tonight.  What a way to live!

But we can consider the good of 2020 at least.  There were heroes or at least leaders who led: Dr. Fauci, Stacey Abrams, Jacinda Ardern (PM of New Zealand, in case you were distracted by You Know Who), all those essential workers who showed up and worked without complaint or crowing, and, collectively, the Black Lives Matter movement.  I'm guessing there were, still are, people down the ranks in federal and state government who belong in this hero/good leader group whose names we'll never know.  Certainly there are in almost every state's election administration.

Consider that more than 150 million people voted in the national election.  An election, it bears repeating for the rest of my born days, that was secure, trustworthy, and relatively error-free.  In spite of the conspiracy mongering.  Imagine the books they're going to write about the election of 2020!

Closer to home, with 8 minutes left to the year, let me say what a good, good year it has been for poetry, not just for me but for my friends at Wednesdays@One.  We lost one beloved member, Delany Watson, in June, but we made poems, poems and more poems all the year long.  I marveled at how much every writer grew as a writer of poetry even though we met for most of 2020 via video conference.  Not a week went by but that a different member of the cohort stepped up with a new and surprising poem, a genuine work of art.  I grew, too!  I can feel that growth in confidence, in imaginativeness, in understanding of the art, in vision, in ability.  I thank my poetry family for that. Oh, yes, I do.

Two minutes to midnight.  That's enough for one year.

The serendipity of error (12.26.20)

Over coffee this morning, I began thinking about mistakes, fortuitous ones in particular.  We've discussed happy error before in our W@1 salons, how poems sometimes emerge from a misspelling, a typo, a mis-used part of speech, an unintentional locution or expression, a mixed metaphor.  The list of errors can go on and on, at least in my own experience.

Once many years ago I mis-typed a subordinating "that," in a line of poetry, leaving the "t" off.  Rereading the draft afterward, I saw something in the odd "hat" inserted at the beginning of what was intended as a subordinate clause.  The error introduced new (if slightly nonsensical) meaning to an otherwise standard construction.  Art invaded grammar.  For more than five years after that serendipitous error, "hat" served as a kind of totem of the imagination, popping up in poem after poem until it became too programmatic itself, like standardized grammar, and I dropped it.

If you were to read these poems today, you likely wouldn't get the connection between "that" and "hat."  The meaning is more or less hermetic, idiosyncratic, personal, which is to say, obscure.  Maybe even a failure of imagination and feeling.  That would be one way of looking at it.  Another might be through the lens of Derrida (yes, I know how this sounds): a that/hat relational notion, a presence expressing an absence and vice versa, a "this/not this" binary code, a sliding signifier, a packed gesture.  But I get the connection.  I cannot deploy the word "hat" today in a poem without also deploying the relative pronoun (and the demonstrative!).  There.  That.

And because I get the connection, the connection bears big meaning.  Which is?  Well, the title of this post, for one thing.  Poems proceed by accident sometimes.  If we're lucky, by happy accident.  For another, Hats-as-Thats exists in a Dr. Seussian world . . . which is where poetry thrives, right?  

Not every error leads you to new ideas or fresh takes on the art you practice.  Not every "experiment" delivers new insight or knowledge.  Not every mistake is an experiment; it's often just a screw-up.  And not every time do I recognize a meaning-making error.  Happy accidents have a great capacity for going unnoticed, by their authors especially.  By this author especially.  

So the serendipity of error, fortuitous error, depends on my ability to see it.  If I do, a door is opened to me in a poem to avenues of art I hadn't anticipated when setting out to write the poem.  Then all I have to do is accept it for what it is, an open door, and step through.  But that's another problem for another post.

Uncomfortable reading (12.21.20)

I mentioned in my previous post something about reading poetry that's outside your comfort zone, even if you don't especially like reading it.  For reading such poetry inevitably expands your understanding of poetry (not to mention other peoples' experiences, takes and cultural backgrounds).

Each week New York Times Magazine publishes one poem, squeezed between "The Thread" and "Talk" features, maybe as a kind of balancing measure, emotionally speaking.  The editor, always a poet of national reputation, changes from time to time--over the past year, Naomi Shihab Nye has done the selecting; before her I believe it was our new Laureate, Louise Gluck; and before her, Terrence Hayes--and this week's Magazine introduces Reginald Dwight Batts as the poetry editor.  He selected a poem by Afaa Michael Weaver, titled "American Income." 

In keeping with the editorial custom, Batts writes a short backgrounder on the poet along with a thumbnail analysis of the poem, partly to help the average NYT reader get a better handle on the material, partly I suppose, to justify his selection.  Here is the poem:

American Income

The survey says all groups can make more money

if they lose weight except black men . . . men of other colors

and women of all colors have more gold, but black men

are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales,

meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering

of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the

ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life

beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands

working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands

now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon

waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone

up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise

up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite

gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love

anymore, gone down inside Earth somewhere where

women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever

these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts

torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing

until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold

of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway

to Jerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling

keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.

There is no other piece of writing in the weekly Magazine that asks to be read and then re-read and possibly read yet again--which is why you won't see more than one poem in the Magazine each week, and why I am surprised (and slightly gratified) that the Times even bothers.  This poem is typical, for me.  It doesn't give itself up to a first reading, let alone a skim-over.  Its style and subject matter are well outside my comfort zone for poetry.  It is filled with allusions, turns of phrase, syntactical locutions, images, jump-cuts . . . all of which block my mind from the easy read it wants.  It calls upon me to slow down, reread, stop, ponder, wonder about, return, repeat.  It makes me ask, What are you talking about, Mr. Weaver?  and Who are you talking to?

In "American Income" I encounter a cultural point of view that is so not mine as to be opaque, obstinate in its refusal to be "read through" to some paraphrase that an aging white American male can formulate.  Which is why I've read the poem three times now, and typed it into this post as a kind of fourth reading, and why I will read it twice, three times more, I suppose.  Now that I'm invested in the language of the poem, I want to become equally invested in the voice, the situation of it, its "aboutness."  I want to paraphrase it to the extent that I can explain to somebody (me included) who might ask, What's it about?

Does that kill the poem?  Wrong question.  

The question should be, Does that rereading and paraphrasing help me understand a kind of poetry that I do not write, and likely cannot write?  Does it buy me some deeper insight into the possibilities of poetry, so that when I come to write my next poem, I'll write from a deeper understanding of what poetry is and what can be done with it (by me)?  So that I'll recognize more readily that the poem I just wrote is just good enough, and that that's not good enough?

Good enough? Settling for a draft when we should keep pushing (12.19.20)

Have you ever experienced this?  

You write a quick draft of a poem, maybe at a single sitting, and applaud yourself for the effort.  Your poem is ready to share.  One draft and it's a winner . . . Let's get it published!

But before too long--maybe you're waiting to fall off to sleep later that same day--it starts to nag you.  I could have expressed that image at little more tautly.  I might have over-written that narrative passage.  The closing could be, just maybe, a bit "graspy."  Hmmmm . . . that was a weak verb choice in the fifth line . . .

Lying there in the dark, you think maybe you declared victory and walked away from the hard work too soon.  Maybe you settled for a draft that looks GOOD ENOUGH.  

But if you go back to drafting, maybe you'll kill the idea right out of the poem.  Maybe you'll make a mess out of what seemed good enough in the first place.

Or maybe you'll see that the poem you drafted is just a vague imitation of itself, or of the original impulse you had when you started making language and lines.  Nobody wants to admit that!

What do you do when you're certainty begins to slip about the poem you've written?  Your response to this problem is what separates the artist from the sheep, to mix a metaphor.  The sheep hopes nobody else will notice.  The artist gets back to work.

Of course, this all supposes that you have that capacity to see your own work objectively in the first place.  If you don't, then acquire it.  How?  Workshops can help because they are (usually) designed to provide objective points of view of your work.  That is, so long as they aren't too programmatic, ideological, or otherwise bent to some single perspective, agenda or belief about poetry.  A trusted reader of your work--your personal editor, so to speak--is another way to garner external points of view of your work.  But in this case, "trusted" must mean somebody who has the interest, the analytical capability, and the ruthlessness to critique your work that you should be looking for.  "Trusted" means that you trust this reader to give an honest assessment.  

Still another way to become a more objective observer of your own work is to read.  And read widely.  Read poems that are outside your comfort zone, that you may not even enjoy reading.  Make a study of every poem you read.  How did this poem come to be?  How did the writer get from line 1 to line x?  What other options might this writer have chosen for that expression or this image?  What is this poem doing to me as I read it?

Finally, ask what your own relationship to your poem (to your writing) might be.  Are you making art or are you making nice?  Well?

An anthology of poems in lockdown . . . it's inevitable, I guess (12.16.20)

 This in today's NYT, by Dwight Garner: A Raging Pandemic Inspires Poetry with Little Bite.  I won't be running off to Flyleaf to pick a copy of this!

We should all talk someday about the role of the critic in our daily reading lives--serving or disserving?  But I think I thank Mr. Garner for warning me off of a likely bad purchase.