Janice Mirikitani 1941 - 2021

San Francisco lost a poet, Janice Mirikitani, this past week.  So did we.

The habits of poetry - lazy reading (8.21.21)

For reference to this post, see the following . . .

• Discipline and indiscipline in poetry writing (8.26.20)
• The habits of poetry - daily reading (2.13.20)
• The habits of poetry - regular practice (10.1.19)
• The habits of poetry - honesty (7.23.19)
• The habits of poetry - revising (3.28.19)
• The habits of poetry - practical observation (1.23.19)

For the most part, these posts address good habits, habits every writer should want to cultivate.  But now I want to talk about bad habits to avoid . . . if you want to improve your writing and develop greater confidence when you sit down to your work.

Let's concentrate on lazy reading.

Each week during our Wednesdays@One salon, someone will say of a poem, "I like it!  It flows."  And this suffices for analysis of the poem and of the reader's response to the poem.  To which I sometimes probe, "Tell me more about why you like this poem.  What do you mean by 'It flows,' and why is flow so important?"  Which generally results in a "I dunno.  It just does."

This "I dunno-ness" is a bad habit not just for reading a poem, but for writing one, too.  Often enough, I sense my W@1 colleagues' boredom (or even contempt) for over-analyzing a poem.  And I agree with them: over-analysis leads to creative paralysis.  Or is borne of it.  And none of us wants to think we've lost our creativity in experiencing a poem either as writer or reader.

But if our goal is to write better poems today than we did yesterday, better tomorrow than today, then we should be open to ourselves as consumers of an art.  We should try harder to understand why we like or dislike a poem.  We may murder to dissect, but for a practicing poet, ignorance of how poems get written and understood can be very limiting.  A little dissection is a necessary thing.  More than necessary, it's vital.

If we want to become better writers, we must become better readers as well.  And we must work hard to understand and articulate our responses to what we read.

Now, there are tools for this sort of analysis, beginning with the critical terms that are available to us.  We've talked about them often at W@1, and you can find posts related to them in this blog:

• Syntax, lineation, enjambment, meter, rhythm and cadence, onomatopoeia, rhyme and its various guises, alliteration, juxtaposition, caesura and ellipsis
• Figure, image, metaphor, analogy, comparison and contrast, allusion, symbol
• Style (that is, personal, the writer's "signature"), voice, breath, tone, point of view, persona
• Formal verse, free verse, accentual-syllabic verse
• Consider style above, but in a more topical sense: lyric, narrative, dramatic, episodic, epic
• Structure, repetition, how poems and their parts begin and how they end
• Movement, in the sense of the progression or development of a thought or a feeling
• Wholeness, unity, coherence

You get the idea: the tools for reading (and writing) a poem are many and have been handed down to us through the millennia.  

Lazy reading neglects these tools.  It skims and moves on.  I do this sort of thing myself, often, and it can be pleasurable.  I don't quite know why this poem moves me or leaves me cold, but it does and that's enough.  Let's move on.  That's okay.  Not all reading must be analytical or "academic," if you have to use that shopworn epithet.  Sometimes, like when I'm reading in bed, it's enough just to be entertained or to dwell in the rhythm of a "good" poem.

But if I want to understand why I feel what I feel, how the poem I'm reading elicits an emotion or complex of feeling and thought and wonder, then I have the tools for doing so.  And if I participate in a forum like Wednesdays@One, my interest lies there, in greater understanding.  For I know from experience that the more deeply I understand my response to a poem, the better I am as a writer of poems in turn.

And this takes work.  It takes, patience, curiosity, practice, consciousness (self- and otherwise), openness, and a framework of reference to other poems, traditions, cultures.  

Not explaining to yourself how and why a poem works for you easily becomes a bad habit.  It's lazy.  So, develop the better habit whenever you encounter a poem--one of yours included--of investigating the art of it.

Commonplaces and poems (8.12.21)

We at Wednesdays@One frequently invoke commonplaces in our poems, those "sayings" and turns of phrase that are "common" to us all and that we collect for ourselves throughout our lives.  We use them to launch our writing, to underpin our poems, to add a flourish to some thought or feeling we're trying to convey through a poem.  We sometimes "borrow" the thought they express without actually quoting the expression itself.  A commonplace is just about what the portmanteau word says it is: a commonly expressed and/or understood passage or phrase, in other words, a "saying."

I started thinking about commonplaces and how we use them in poems just this week during our W@1 salon.  One of our writers, in a poem whose title itself is a commonplace, wrote this:

The Moon is My Sister 

Above us
She watches mutely
no judgment or tears
as we act without method
gamble without strategy
 
Nothing new under
yet endless
green incarnations
drop without
consent into dark limbo . . .

I'm referring specifically to the expression, "Nothing new under."  It is, as others in our salon reminded us, a Biblical commonplace (from Ecclesiastes 1:9) referring to the sun and assuring us that "what has been will be again."  In the poem above, the writer borrows the part of the commonplace we're most likely to connect with and applies it to the sun's "opposite," the moon.  That's pretty clever!

Commonplaces are a way of organizing our experience or our memories, and of conferring upon them something more universal than our personal take.  Besides that, commonplaces can help us lift our poems out of the mundane, investing them with insight or even wisdom--because the wisdom belongs to Humankind, not just to us alone. *  They're like ready-made gravitas.

Commonplaces historically make up "commonplace books," basically journals of nuggets of wisdom or good writing that we pick up in our reading and copy down for ourselves to return to later.  I have journals full of such phrases and passages.  Even when they come from relatively obscure writers and texts, they "ring true" in a way that says to me this was written for the ages.

Look.  I just used a commonplace: rings true.  Or maybe that's just a cliché.  Or maybe a cliché is a commonplace by another, less charitable name.

You can use commonplaces in a poem in a variety of ways and for a variety of effects and meanings.  Sometimes our W@1 writers append an epigram to a poem that's meant to expand upon, comment on, reflect upon or illustrate the thought expressed by that commonplace.  Sometimes we insert a commonplace for tonal effect (irony, for example) in the middle of an idea we explore in a poem, or as a prop for a persona (the wise owl, the imperious autocrat, the spurned lover, etc.).

Sometimes we take issue with the thought expressed through a commonplace.  Imagine a feminist writing "a woman's place is in the home" in a poem.

My point is that commonplaces are, as the word suggests, loci of agreed-upon thought or wisdom or truth, places where we meet each other in understanding.  They aren't facts, like, "the coronavirus is real," or "Joe Biden won the election."  Facts are "truths," as we've seen over our adult lives, that can be manipulated by anybody for any reason.  Even if they appear to be self-evident to us, others may see them as maneuvered and provisional.  They can be argued with.  No, a commonplace is an idea expressed in a way that most if not all people might say, "I can't argue with that."  Like this:

A man sits as many risks as he runs.  

Thoreau wrote that in Walden, along with many other ideas that have stayed with us as commonplaces of good thinking and good writing.  

The world could use more commonplaces in its thinking right now, don't you agree?  And maybe it's up to we poets to make that happen.  So let's give it a try.  

Below are commonplaces I culled more or less at random from my bookshelves.  (I suppose it's a commonplace to suggest that I could pick anything "at random" from a library I've spent a lifetime building, carefully and consciously.)  Choose one of them and use it in a poem, as an epigram appended to the beginning, as an opening line or passage, as a theme for an idea you develop in a poem (that is, as a rhetorical device), as a metaphorical device on which you build a series of images and associations, as a poetic device which you deploy rhythmically and figuratively.

THEN, think of somebody you know personally who doesn't seem to share your ideas about the world.  Who might have a different politics, faith, understanding of knowledge and/or science, or who might subscribe to a different set of facts than you.  Share your commonplace-derived poem with that person.  Your goal is NOT to berate, educate, shame, convince or otherwise try to bring this person round to your way of thinking.  Instead, it's to find common ground, to write a piece about which this person might say, "I don't need to argue with that."  Another way of putting this is, opinions are tools for staking out personal ground.  Commonplaces are tools for finding . . . ahem . . . common ground.  Try to do this without platitudes (which admittedly may be another form of commonplaces, just commonplaces that no one trusts anymore).

Here are your options . . .

I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. **

Every advantage has its tax. **

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets.  **

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one.  The faith that stands on authority is not faith.  **

Avoiding self-delusion: here's a useful life lesson for all of us. +

Consider the 'unwanted sexual advance': what tangled tales of backfired desires, bristling umbrage, and mutual misunderstanding lurk behind this sterile little phrase. +

There are certain men who just like getting women mad at them, for reasons that are open to speculation. +

Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without noticing whether the women are attractive or not. ~

It feels true only in a trivial sense to say I make my books.  What I really feel is that they are made, through me, by literature; and I'm their (literature's) servant. ~

To describe oneself as young is to face that one is no longer young. ~

To seek God is to seek reality.  And this must be something more than a flight from images to ideas. The interior life is not merely what is not exterior. #

There is something you cannot know about a wren by cutting it up in a laboratory . . . # 

* Right now, I'd argue that we lean on commonplaces for this purpose, even when we're writing about mundane things, like the cup of coffee we're sipping as we write.  Commonplaces give us a pass into wisdom that we may not feel we have on our own.  But sometimes we lean on them too much.

** R. W. Emerson, Essays, First Series.

+ Laura Kipnis, Men, Notes from an Ongoing Investigation.

~ Susan Sontag, "A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?", "Singleness," and "The Wisdom Project," respectively, in Where the Stress Falls.

# Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude (Journals, Vol. III).

Hey there, look at me! or, How to write a very bad poem (8.3.21)

I know how to write a bad poem, but I can't do it consciously, at least not with any consistency.  But I can write bad poems one after another when I'm in the zone for it, that is, when I'm writing on auto-pilot.

By auto-pilot I don't mean that I'm not paying attention to what I'm making, but that I'm paying the wrong kind of attention.  I'm listening to the voices of The Moderns or The Victorians or The Beats.  I'm listening to The Poet in me, making grand verbal gestures and figurative flourishes that'll get 'em when they read this.

Poems that I write when on auto-pilot make big statements about big subjects.  They're ornamented with Symbols and Seriousness.  They want so badly to be in a Norton Anthology of American Literature, to have term papers written about them!

Here's a recent example:

The Dance Card
 
She dances toward the flickering hearth
in the arms of a knight and a fool,
a glass of champagne tipping in one hand.
 
A bottle dance, she is combustible.
The dance will draw her to the fire
and the fire will eat tonight.
 
The music is slow, and the dance, a waltz,
quick over the floor, interests us, the hot spinning
holds our attention though we’d do more
than watch, if more were to be done.
 
The portraits of the fathers look down
from under the ballroom’s starry ceiling.
 
If more could be done, we’d see it done:
the tables and chairs not tumbling past us,
the champagne not spilling through
the brilliant, delirious night.
 
We take an interest before turning back
to the news of the day and our questions,
to the imperatives of the evening, its music,
to the smoke, the knight and the fool.

The title has possibility.  Beyond that, and from the very first line, the poem indulges every wrong impulse a writer can think of.  Let's start with that flickering hearth.  Seriously?  Can you imagine a more 19th Century way of saying fireplace?  Well, at least I didn't write "lambent flame."  

Then take a closer look at the moldy imagery that is the first stanza: woman, dance, knight, fool, champagne glass.  You're meant to hear Music in these images, preferably Waltz Music.  And if you don't pick up on Allegory too, then you're just not reading.  Or paying attention.  But I'm paying attention.  I'm channeling The Bard.

"The dance will draw her to the fire, / and the fire will eat tonight."  Now what does that mean?  The lines sound like they mean something.  The rhythm rises and falls with Meaning.  Hmmm.  This must be so profound that it escapes even me, the writer.  Deep!  Rough paraphrase: a drunk lady almost stumbles into an open fire.  I might have explored what it means to be drunk and dancing too near a hearth big enough to "eat" you, what's brought a woman to such a place.  Or I might have pondered what the speaker's doing there, nothing much actually, just watching a partier make a fool of herself (as the next stanza confirms, without irony).  But instead I stop at Meaning, or rather, I stop short of meaning anything, hoping that you, reader, will make something profound out of this.

Then the portraits of the fathers . . . etc.  The poem is back to Allegory.  But what's allegorized here?  Nothing.  This is Allegory meant to hide the obvious: the poem has nothing to say other than and here is where Allegory would go in a better poem.

The rest is, well, puffery.  "The brilliant, delirious night," "the news of the day and our questions," "the imperatives of the evening" . . . until we're back at the knight and the fool.  Obviously, when your poem has nothing to say and means little, you hit the repeat button.

A bad poem isn't bad thought or feeling.  It's the absence of thought or feeling.  It's self-regarding in the worst way: Hey there, look at me!  It's like that fool at the dinner party who thinks he can sing and dance, or worse, thinks you think he can.

The Sponge and the Library (7.31.21)

Closing out July with a post on something that I've been asked many times by non-writers: Where'd you come up with that? or something like this question.  I sometimes answer maybe a little too glibly, Life, of course! or I say vaguely, I dunno, it just comes to me.

Our heads are jammed with images, visual, aural, tactile, and so on.  We add images continuously to our mental libraries, and while we may forget some of them consciously, I'm convinced that no image ever gets deleted.  The older I get, the more images are stored in my memory bank, my personal image library, for use in a poem at some point.  That's why I have more material to draw from today than I did when I was 25, much much more, and why there'll be more tomorrow.

I don't have to go to Timbuktu to find more images for my library.  I  barely even have to get out of bed.  As long as I'm awake, I'm gathering them and storing them away and, somewhere, somehow, preparing them for use in a poem or some other writing.  I do believe that I have to be awake to take images on board.  I once tried learning Portuguese by playing a language CD for a week each night while I slept . . . I got nothin'.

So when someone asks me where I get my material for a poem, that's where.  Usually.  

Sometimes I help the image-storage-and-retrieval process along.  I overhear a conversation on a commuter train; somebody uses a phrase that sounds like the first line of a poem which I try to make a draft of later that evening.  The person in the apartment above my London flat paces back and forth, from window to kitchen (hardwood floors, no rugs, heavy shoes), and I get a sense of a rhythm that serves a measure of poetry that weeks later produces the thud/scuff/tap of a poem about fretfulness.  The man at the next table is reading The New York Times with his coffee; I spy a headline on the page he's not reading that suggests a theme and a title for a poem that I write months, even years later.

Some of the images that I grab from my personal library are recent additions, as in, just saw that or heard that or smelled that, etc.  Some were logged there last week, months ago, when I was a boy.

My brain (yours too, o poet!) is a sponge that's never full.  I can't entirely control what it sponges up from the world I walk around in.  Yes, I can try to focus my attention on this, that and the other.  I can try to look out for, and sometimes do find, "poetry" in that world.  But that's usually the suspect material, the beautiful prospect, the lovely face, the spectacular event, that I trust the least for poetry.  Most often, my poems draw on those mundane images that my brain has been sponging up continuously since I woke up, that have been filed away without much notice on my part, but that are there for me to use when I get down to the business of making a poem.

For it's in the making of the poem that this library of images unlocks, throws its doors wide, admits me to the stacks for browsing.  The older I get, the more I count on that library for material.

Here's what I love most about "materializing" a poem in this way: the act is highly associative.  Even when I try wracking my brain for that thought or fact or image of an image that would go nicely, thank you, in this or that passage, that might introduce a turn or bring this poem to closure, my creative mind drags or dredges other images back into consciousness, back into the world, as it were.  Often, what comes off the library shelf is loaded with ancillary images that have little or nothing to do with the poem I thought I was trying to write.  Sometimes I'll reject these tag-alongs and keep looking.  Sometimes I'll let them take over the poem and drive it somewhere unexpected.  Sometimes I'll try them out in different phases, passages, lines, organizations, keeping only a piece of an image.  And sometimes they'll lead me on, again by pure association, to "just what I've been looking for."  Even if I didn't fully understand that I was looking for it.

Of course, if and when this pandemic subsides enough that I can get out of the house and go somewhere like Timbuktu, I'll go.  I'll take my sponge and my library with me, too.

Leaping poetry - working with ellipsis (7.29.21)

Note to all in Wednesdays@One: this is a project posting.  You'll find the project directions at the end of the post, but do read all of this piece for context.  

You've experienced this before, I'm sure.  You're reading a poem and come to a line or a phrase and something's missing.  You stop and back up, read again.  Something's missing.  You can still make sense of the poem, of the thought being expressed, but . . .

What you just read "past" is an ellipsis, in this case a typographical representation of a thought that has not been spelled out for you.  Yet you know the elided words: "but something's missing."  You know these are the correct words to follow the ellipsis marks (. . .) and can therefore supply them yourself.  You know them because of context: they are repeated.  

So why not just repeat them, especially in a poem?  Repetition is a pretty good poetic technique, after all.  Sometimes, though, you get more impact by not repeating this kind of phrase, by letting the thought "hang" from the end of the ellipsis for the reader to complete.  I suppose there are fascinating psycho-linguistic reasons for doing this in a work of art.  The reader gets to contribute to the poem, by "finishing" the thought.  Or the writer can write a thought more economically by not adding words and phrases that the reader can supply.  Either way, ellipsis helps writer and reader connect in a poem, giving them both something to be responsible for, together.

Here are a couple of non-poetic examples of what I mean, cadged from my copy of the Prentice-Hall Handbook for Writers:

He is older than I.

Our house is small, his large.

There's an implied "am" at the end of the first statement, which would complete the thought grammatically, but which is unnecessary since we all know that's the correct grammatical construction, and we know the writer knows that too.  In the second example, "house is" is implied in the second half of the statement; it repeats what's in the first half.  In both cases, the meaning remains clear despite the left-out wording.

Okay, so you already know this stuff; why (do I) belabor the point?  (I belabor the point) Because poets can do some fun, interesting, powerful things with ellipsis.  Even with ellipses that are "incorrect," grammatically speaking.  And in fact, especially when they are ("incorrect," grammatically speaking).

Some years ago, I set out to write prose poems and wound up writing a book of them.  A number of those poems were based on sentences that committed errors in elliptical clauses, called "dangling ellipticals."  An elliptical clause works on the same principle as an ellipsis, but it makes a thought confusing or ambiguous.  Words that would make the meaning clear are elided, sometimes to comic effect.  Here's an example from my Prentice-Hall Handbook:

Clause-subject relationship stated clearly: 

When I was a baby, I was given a silver cup by my grandfather.

Elliptical clause-subject relationship implied (but still clear):

When a baby, I was given a silver cup by my grandfather.

Elliptical clause-subject relationship "dangling":

When a baby, my grandfather gave me a silver cup.

The full clause is "when I was a baby."  The elliptical clause is "when a baby."  And you can see in the third example how ellipses can lead you astray of a "grammatically correct" expression, and maybe into some fun.  Here's one of the prose poems I wrote that begins with a dangling elliptical clause:

Uncle Fred, the Barber

 

When at the age of six, my Uncle Fred gave me my first haircut. He said to me, “Let’s play barber. I’ll be the barber.” And that was that. He started in with shears that seemed too big for his little boy hands. But I didn’t worry. My Uncle Fred’s hands have always surprised people. When at the age of four, my Uncle Fred could hold me in the palm of his much smaller boy hand. He carried me around the neighborhood concealed behind his back and then sprang me upon anybody we met. Mrs. Parrott nearly had a heart attack. Before long, snip, snip, snip, one side was done, but once the bleeding stopped we lost interest in the barber game, and so the other side never got a haircut. The thing I’ll never forget and for which I shall always be grateful is that first haircut. They don’t give haircuts like that anymore.

Now imagine this poem if the words "I was" were inserted (correctly) after its first word!  My point, and our next project, is this: a dangling elliptical is a good place to leap out of the ordinary in a poem, to launch you into the realm of the unconscious, and of course the fun(ny).  So here is your project . . .

PROJECT **

Adopt one of the following elliptical clause errors as the opening gambit in a poem.  Let its absurdity or grammatical confusion mis-direct you into a new poem.  Go where the error invites you to go!  You do NOT have to write a prose poem, or even a narrative poem.  You DO have to have fun!

If attacked, the maneuvers planned last week can be used.

When well stewed, you drain off the juice.

If lost, we shall pay a reward for the ring.

While picking flowers, it started to rain.

My bicycle tire became flat while hurrying to the dentist.

While attending the theater, the apartment was looted.

** This project doesn't address that other kind of leaping poetry, the Lorca kind that Robert Bly writes about in various places, and that has to do with our ability (really, our modern inability) to "leap" into the mysterious, the veiled side of the human psyche.  If you're interested in that, buy his book here: Leaping Poetry.

How much detail in a poem? (7.23.21)

This detail was incorporated into a poem that I read recently:

". . . a tree trunk angles 45° toward sun . . ."

It made me wonder how much of what kind of detail is right for a poem, how much is too much (that is, overwritten, or unnecessary)?  I no longer have the poem, so can't provide context for the passage I just quoted.  But within the passage itself you can see there's more detail than a poem might need to make a simple descriptive point: a tree leans into the sun.

And so I have questions about the content of the passage:

• Why the granular particularity of 45° ?
• Why the geometrical language of "angles"?
• Why the attitudinal language of "toward"?
• Why the focus on the tree trunk, and not the tree in totality?

And another question: Is this a case of amount or appropriateness?  Answers will depend, of course, on that missing context, the poem from which this passage is lifted.  The context might tell you whether the writer is thinking about science and technology in relation to nature, for some rhetorical purpose; about objective fidelity to a visual image, a camera-like rendering; or an interest in technical jargon as material for poetry.

You'll recall the great conceit in the Donne poem, "The Compass," where two lovers are compared to the legs of the map-drawing instrument, one still at the center, the other in motion around it.  Or the wonderful reference in the Herrick poem, "Upon Julia's Clothes," to the scientific process of liquefaction, a novel technical concept in the 17th Century, and certainly a novel word for a poem.

But I preserved the passage probably because it appeared to serve no special rhetorical or art-material purpose.  It likely answered a desire to be specific, particular, as we are schooled in the writing of poetry.  As I recall, the poem was not composed as a catalog where the sheer piling up of detail is part of the plan.  Nor was it a conceit that somehow linked mathematical concepts/jargon to thought and feeling, again, not a plan.  Other instances of concrete language--that is, what the writer had seen in a landscape and wished to convey descriptively--probably offered only their individual concreteness, but did not connect with each other through some plan or idea about the overall effect of the poem's imagery and language.  The poem was, I seem to remember, an accumulation of poetically unrelated figures.

"A tree leans into the sun" is clearly more musical than "a tree trunk angles 45° toward sun."  The first image is not less particular than the second.  So what is the value of the extra, specifically technical language?

I suspect (but only suspect) that the writer "heard" concreteness of detail in that choice of words . . . a good thing to hear, generally, when you're crafting a poem.  But the writer did not revise for "wholeness" or "unity" or "integration" of idea, image, thought and feeling, language.  He or she merely wandered from one expression to another, one image to another, in an attempt to describe a scene "objectively."  That may be nature, but it is not art.