What we mean we we tell you to revise this poem (10.15.21)

This post should make for a good counterpoint to the previous one of September 20 (Another look: editing a poem again [and again] 9.20.21).  Each week, we dive into each others' poems at Wednesdays@One.  Each poem is read aloud twice, first by its author, then by someone else in the group so that the author (and the rest of us) gets to hear the poem in a different voice.  Sometimes that difference is enough to spark discussion of all kinds of poetry writing topics, from pacing to syntax, persona, line, and other technical matters.

Then we discuss.  My practice is to encourage discussion through question-asking, rather than preference-telling.  We should want to know how the writer of a poem proceeded through the draft, how many drafts, how each draft may or may not have furthered the poem toward its best self or at least the version we share on any given Wednesday.  

Inevitably, someone wants to know "where it came from," a question that I try to discourage for its fruitlessness (too often, the author tries to belabor for us where his or her poem "came from," which usually ruins our experience of the poem).  Poems, like all other art, come from our experience--what we've lived through, what we've read, how we've felt, and so on.

Eventually, though, our discussion of a poem turns toward ways it might be improved.  I approach every poem shared at W@1 as unfinished, as art that can be better or more realized through more drafting.  I insist on this even when I feel the poem we're talking about is near-perfect (for the writer who wrote it).

It occurs to me that this approach might be discouraging to some of our writers.  Can't they ever write something good enough to pass muster at W@1?  No matter what I write, people in our group tell me I should revise.  How do I know when I've written a good enough poem?

So, what do we mean when we tell you to revise this poem?  I can't speak for my colleagues, of course, so I'll tell you what I mean and what I hope everyone in the group means.  I don't care whether you revise any particular poem shared with W@1 or with anyone.  If you're ready to walk away from the poem, then by all means walk away!  But you should understand that unless and until you become the Perfect Poet, you will never write the Perfect Poem, no matter how many drafts you write or how good you think the poem is.  

To often, W@1 writers show up with a poem that they believe is that perfect poem, or close to it.  They are proud (as they should be) of the effort and the product.  They enjoy the praise they get when they get it, and suffer the criticism.  Not very often do they take another look at the poem.  And why should they?  Been there, done that.  On to the next poem.

And I don't disagree with this walking away from the poem . . . as long as a writer understands that is exactly what he or she is doing, abandoning the effort in this one instance.  Who has the time and the patience to keep revising the same poem day in and day out?  And in fact, doing do probably won't make you a better writer.

You see, it's not about the poem you just brought to your colleagues at W@1 or whatever workshop you're attending.  It's about you, the writer, and how you're progressing along that lifelong curve of improvement, becoming with each new effort a little better as a writer than you were the day before . . . and with the implicit understanding that through effort, sharing and listening, you'll be even better the next day.  Read that again: lifelong curve of improvement.  That's what you sign up for when you join Wednesdays@One.

So, our critique of your poem, no matter which poem, and no matter how new or old that poem is in your library of compositions, is not really aimed at that poem, but at your ongoing development as a writer of poems.  We're just using the poem you share with us as a stalking horse, an illustration.  Whether you revise or rethink a particular poem is your business.  Our critiques are not aimed at what's done, but at what's yet to be done, and, hopefully, done with greater skill and confidence.

Another look: editing a poem again (and again) (9.20.21)

Is it okay to re-edit a poem just to do it?  Or should we leave a poem alone, let it be whatever it is?  That depends on what you plan to do with the poem.  Sometimes, you might want to keep tinkering with a poem just to see where the tinkering takes the art of it.  Sometimes you want to keep editing just for the practice of editing, or re-imagining the art of it.  Sometimes you won't be satisfied until you've chiseled and sanded, buffed and shined until the poem is as good as you can possibly make it.

This morning I reread a poem I wrote several months ago and thought was finished.  I should know better.  Several months is not a very long time in the life of a poem or even a draft of a poem, but in this case it turned out to be long enough to give me some distance.  I could reread with a measure of objectivity that wasn't available when I finished the previous "last draft" of it in June.

What I saw, immediately, was how overwritten the poem is.  I had written it as part of a "word prompt" project in our Wednesdays@One salon.  The words meant to prompt me were clouds, bravery, patience, and boulder.  Here is the poem composed to that prompt and shared with the group:

The Visiting Hour
 
Try as I will, I will not
anyhow make you understand
night is not now upon us,
not darkening the bloom
of the newly leafed-out trees
that sway outside your window,
and not penetrating to here,
where we sit trying to communicate.
 
The time is two o’clock in the afternoon,
whatever that means to you now,
on a day of overcast—thunderclouds
blossoming one from another
and threatening rain—
and not night, though you are right,
probably bravely, to think so:
 
it is darkness coming on,
a boulder, and night,
as you try a third time
to make me understand.

105 words, including the title.  As I recall, it got a fairly positive review from the group and generated some good discussion of its merits.  Rereading it, though, I see nothing but words, words and more words; more words in fact than the subject and the art warrant.  As I say, it's overwritten.

What is the point of the first three lines of the poem?  Well, it's to begin.  The poem begins by establishing a voice (an "I" speaking to a "you") and setting or scene (a conversation happening in a room with a window).  The lines also establish tense (present) and mood (negation--not what is, but what is not), and purpose: what's going on is more than a conversation; it's an explanation and possibly a disagreement.  There's some tension, as well, as you can tell by the frustration of the speaker of the poem: "try as I will" and "make you understand."

What else do the first three lines tell you?  You're entering a story, or a moment in a story, with characters, dialogue (potentially), and plot or at least a narrative line (first this happens, then that).  This story element puts you, the reader, into the role of observer, like a theatergoer.

The remainder of the stanza indicates spring, and an inside and outside view where the initial hint of a disagreement is refined to a simple question: is night falling?  A look back up at the title of the poem should clarify that the characters are someplace that has visiting hours, a nursing home maybe, or a hospital, a ward.  

So I get the story and the treatment, but it's just too wordy.  I see that the poem wants to be accessible.  Its grammar is standard and its syntax is pretty straightforward.  It doesn't want you to dwell on the language but instead on the story.  Or does it?  Actually, the poem wants to show off its language.  Look at these lines:

night is not now upon us,

not darkening the bloom 

of the newly leafed-out trees

that sway outside your window,

and not penetrating to here

The whole sequence emphasizes the word "not" as a way of suggesting not just something negative, but a cancelling: a point of view (the other person's, whose room we are visiting) is methodically dismissed as if we're overhearing a debate.  And what about phrases like "now upon us" and "the darkening bloom"?  The usual term for such language is purple.

Same goes for much of the rest of the poem.  Listen to these purple phrases: "this day of overcast," "blossoming one from another," and to the unnecessarily repeated "and night" of the final stanza, set off by two commas for emphasis.

The story, if I may paraphrase, is about two people having a chat in a room that has suddenly grown dark under an approaching storm.  One of them thinks night is coming on and the other, the frustrated speaker, is unable to explain.  In the end, though, the speaker realizes that it is he who misunderstands.  I still think that's a great premise for a poem.  But I wonder if I might get to that story more artfully, with less purple (i.e., emotionally overcharged) language.  

So I tried rewriting the poem again this morning.  Here's what I did . . .

The Visiting Hour

Night’s upon us?
New leaves shake in it,
you and I sit in it
trying to communicate.

Two p.m. ticks on
on this overcast day—
thunderclouds blossoming
and threatening rain—
stubborn and not
worth mentioning now.

Yes, darkness coming on,
a boulder, as you try a third time
to make me understand.

From 105 to 55 words.  That's a start and I think I've retained the idea.  I've converted the content of the first three lines of the version earlier to the three words of the first line, adding a question mark.  The speaker, now not so (or at least not yet) sure of himself, merely reacts to some observation.  I abandon the negations for something more positive: two men sitting and talking but possibly not communicating much.  And I've kept the idea of spring through the mere suggestion of "new leaves."

In the second stanza, I want to keep the idea that it's not nightfall darkening the room but something else, and I've replaced that lazy verb "is" with one more active, "tick," which should suggest the sameness and boredom of a day in the life of a man who's lost his memory, if not his mind.  For I decided that I don't want to be too upfront about the sick man's condition; it's the product of it--a misplaced sense of time--that is the important thing here.  More than this, though, 2 p.m. may be a stubborn fact, but in the larger context of a man's failing mind, hardly material; that is, "not worth mentioning." 

So in this new version of the poem, we have two men miscommunicating about the time of day and the cause for the room growing darker, both unable to convince the other of the truth of it.  All by suggestion through images.  This makes the poem a poem, in my mind.  It gestures rather than explains.  Which makes the closing stanza that much more poignant, I think.  And which is why I chose to open it with an assenting word, as if the speaker hasn't merely given up on the facts of the matter, on his argument, but has come round to the sick man's larger meaning: I'm dying.  The poem is helped in this respect by the wonderful word, boulder, from our word-prompt project.  By the end of the poem, the fact of impending death is as plain as a boulder.

So I think what I've done in re-revising this poem is to see it again or anew, which is what revision means, and to make better art of it.  Have I cut too much?  I was happy, imperfectly maybe, but still pleased with the earlier version.  That one itself was the result of several drafts of cutting and eliminating.  But what I like about this new version is its suggestiveness.

Sometimes it feels like drudgery having another look and another at a poem that has already been looked at, looked over, looked upon numerous times.  It feels like maybe you're about to cut into bone.  But if you get to a better outcome, as I think I have with this version, that drudge is worth doing.

The self and poetry: who's really speaking here? (9.16.21)

The New York Times Book Review (last Sunday's edition) includes a review of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor and the Search for Meaning, a book of essays by Megan O'Gieblyn.  It's worth reading the review if not the book (I plan to get a copy of the book soon) for those of us who write poetry regularly and who, like the cohort at Wednesdays@One, are committed to "writing better poems today than we did yesterday, and better poems tomorrow than we write today."

It's worth reading because what we do when we write a poem is an act of selfhood, however obscure the voice or persona of the poem we are writing may be, to ourselves, to others.  After all, it's not somebody else who sits at our keyboard or writing pad when we start a poem.  It's us, or some version of us that we've adopted in order to compose.

I'm making a leap here from the subject of technology and humanity in this book to the idea of a self practicing an art.  But here goes.  As writers, we attempt qualitative acts--creation of poems--in a world that increasingly values mainly the quantitative: what matters can be measured.  It was a maxim at one of my former employers, an accounting and consulting firm, that what can't be measured doesn't matter.  All well and good for an accountant.  But when that kind of value creeps into our personal spaces, perhaps not so good.  

The reviewer of this book, Becca Rothfeld, observes, "many of the most powerful forces in the contemporary world conspire to deny the value . . . of experience that evades quantification."  Strong statement.  Overwrought thinking, maybe.  I don't believe Facebook and Google "conspire" to do any such thing.  I prefer to think that these companies' business missions have evolved beyond their founders' original visions, which, given the tools they depend on to work--algorithms--was inevitable.  They conspire no more than any other business that wants to understand what we want and will pay for before they expend time and energy and risk making it.  

But that doesn't mean we're no longer capable of being poets, much less complex human beings.  For as complex human beings, we live in the moment, even when we're writing about or from a memory; when we write, we are in the moment of the writing, of the poem.  I offer Wednesdays@One as evidence.

Against the quantifiable self, the self that "browses and buys" stuff, is pitted what Rothfeld calls the self that "feels: the embattled, anachronistic and indispensable self."  It's this self that writes our poems, yes?  To be embattled, anachronistic and indispensable is to be outside of time, in the moment.  The self is timeless in its self-ness.  And that is where poetry begins, develops and ends, for readers as well as writers.  And it's why, maybe, nobody makes a living writing poetry.

Rothfeld, quoting O'Gieblyn through this passage, refers to the ghost in the machine--that human presence that can never seem to be erased or cancelled, no matter how sophisticated the technology:

The self resists exile, creeping back into even ostensibly materialist theories. Many of the tech-utopians who congratulate themselves most vociferously on their affinity with the Enlightenment subscribe to quasi-religious worldviews — a phenomenon that O’Gieblyn, who grew up in a Christian fundamentalist family, is well equipped to analyze. Take, for instance, transhumanism, according to which “the evolution of the cosmos comes down to a single process: that of information becoming organized into increasingly complex forms of intelligence.” For those who see “processes as disparate as forests, genes and cellular structures” as forms of computation — as means of transmitting information — our world is re-enchanted. Everything is potent with significance, and history is a “process of revelation,” culminating in the elevation of humans into “‘post-humans,’ or spiritual machines.”

Despite the fact that I do not believe there is a God (cap G) and an afterlife in the conventional sense, I hope that I never come to feel "post-human," that I am somehow a "spiritual machine."  I am human, and mysterious for all that, even to myself.  I never feel more this way than when I am writing a poem that suddenly becomes a work of art.  In fact, I never feel more myself than when the verse I am writing tips or veers into the truly poetic, and the poem takes control and I become its scribe.  Now that is a moment of mystery to be cherished!

Hmmmm.  Now that I've thoroughly piqued my interest, I must go find a copy of this book.

Riddle me a poem! (9.9.21)

Several years ago, you may recall, we took on a "riddle poem" project . . . see my blog post for August 26, 2018.  That was kind of fun, I remember.

Well, check this essay out, by Adrienne Raphael, in today's digital edition of the New York Times (it will be in next Sunday's print edition, too).  She writes that although the crossword puzzle is a recent invention (1913, in the New York World), the "crossword brain" is as old as . . . Old English riddle poetry.  And so, I send you back to my post of August 26, 2018.

An addendum.  Raphael, in the essay I refer to above in the link, observes:

Riddles tap into crossword-brain from all angles. First, you have to figure out how the riddle is asking you to think — Is this a straightforward definition? A double entendre? A wordplay-based web? — and then you try to solve. 

Same could be said for the poem in front of you when you sit down to read.  You have to figure out how it asks you to think--or that's what the relationship should be between you and a successful poem.  Sometimes, unlike in a riddle, the poem's "ask" is straightforward and uncomplicated.  Sometimes, not.  

And as we discussed in our most recent Wednesdays@One salon, any good reading of a poem demands that you engage in multiple ways, "from all angles": emotionally, stylistically, technically.  The more a poem asks you to do, generally speaking, the better it's likely to be.

This Just In . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning Apparently a Pretty Good Poet! (8.28.21)

Lately, I've assumed a lot of things about things that I shouldn't have.  No need to go into the details.  I am an experienced assumer.  Sometimes, it's a wonder how I get through a day without injuring myself or worse, I assume so much so often.  That driver is going to respect the crosswalk I'm crossing on foot.  That sort of thing.

Here's an assumption: Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a minor English poet of the 19th Century, a footnote to her more famous and deserving husband.  

She wrote one really famous poem ("How Do I Love Thee") and one famous book (Sonnets from the Portuguese) and that was that.  That footnote part isn't the assumption, though; it's a fact, for that's how she has been treated in anthology after anthology, survey course after survey course.  A one-hit wonder.  It's the "deserving" part that constitutes the shaky assumption.

A new biography, Two-Way Mirror, by the scholar and poet Fiona Sampson, reviewed in The New York Times today, wants to undermine that assumption and place Barrett Browning back on the pedestal she occupied in Victorian England at the climax of her career, when Robert Browning was second fiddle.

So, another book to add to my reading list!

The shaky assumption is dead!  Long live the assumption!

What is "regional poetry"? (8.27.21)

This subject comes up from time to time in our Wednesdays@One salon.  One of our cohort, a Southerner born and bred, takes his Carolina upbringing as subject matter for nearly every poem he writes (and has written in the past 25 years).  It's not just that he writes about the South in which he grew up.  He claims and aims to "preserve" a way of speaking and of being in the world that is fast vanishing in his view.  It's a way, I suspect, for this writer to hold on to something familiar and formative as he ages and as the world shrinks and homogenizes.  

And so one of our group suggests that we all try to write a "regional" poem, that is, a poem that captures or, as our colleague would have it, "preserves" something of a regional language, outlook, custom, or way of being in the world.  We take this project on with some sense of hopelessness for a number of reasons.

One is that the Southern writer I refer to above is quite good at this sort of "preservationist" writing.  He's practiced it for a quarter century and longer.  He comes from a colloquial America, the rural South.  And he is part of what his poetry confirms is a tight-knit, almost incestuously close family of grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins and near-cousins, neighbors who are at barely one remove from family . . . and all the customs, traditions, expectations and stories this closeness manufactures.  His is, apparently, a Southern family thing that few of the rest of us are as steeped in, no matter where we're from or what type of family we grew up in.

Two is that, well, don't we poetry writers of a certain age always write about where we came from?  Our towns, our families, our experiences . . . in other words, our remembrance of things past?  And, in fact, doesn't poetry (at least the way we write it here in W@1) seek to preserve the cadences, shortcuts, idioms, efficiencies and musicality -- in other words, the speech patterns -- we grew up hearing and using every day of our lives?  Without exception, everyone who comes to W@1 each week has a story to tell through a language (again, speech pattern) that wants to capture something of his and her pasts.  Poetry, in our reckoning, preserves.  So then, since we all already write this way, or aim to do so, how would we approach a project dedicated to what we already have been doing week in, week out?

All poetry, as we understand it at W@1, is local.  Even our individual takes on History are localized to how we were raised to engage with, to understand, the wider world.  So how might we structure a project around "writing regional"?

A third consideration: regional takes can become homey-jokey.  In all likelihood, a project of this sort will produce funny poems, or what passes for funny among poetry writers of a certain age.  We'll poke fun at some regional speech pattern or some local or family custom.  Distance gives us some perspective, we might feel, on the shallowness or misbegottenness or backwardness of the places we left never to return.  We left!  We aren't like that now!  Or an adjunct to comedy, pathos.  We'll write with maudlin abandon about a way of life lost forever, except in our memories, which of course must smooth everything out to a cliché.  

So, no, I don't think we can expect much from writing from our "regional roots."  My guess is, we never understood those roots so well in the first place.  We were too embedded in them or they in us.

But hey, I've been wrong before.  So let's give it a try.  Here's the project . . .

Write a poem that captures the "essence" of a region of the country, such as its local patois, custom, worldview, "flavor."  This might involve food, since dish and recipe are some of the most localized of cultural stuffs.  Example: corn on the cob; potluck suppers, rhubarb pie, pickle sandwiches, roadside fruit stands, sweet tea, Clark's Teabury gum, Stroh's Beer . . . you get the idea, right?  Or it might focus on expressions, colloquialisms, dialects, accents, idiomatic expressions, ways of saying things, like ways of saying "soft drink": pop (where I come from), soda (where you might come from), co-cola for Coke.  Or it might be an emblematic setting, such as a family affair, a community or school event (that says something about your region of the country, not about small towns or neighborhoods in general that could describe any place). 

Or it might even be the way people relate to one another in, say, New England or the Rocky Mountain West, or northern Indiana.  This is the kind of material that inspired many a Frost poem.  How they speak to one another or dress or the music they make/listen to.  What strikes you as peculiar to this place but might be passing away with time, that ought to be preserved somehow?

The poems we've seen at W@1 that do this sort of "preservation work" are meant to document in some lyrical way a uniqueness that is passing or has already passed in every way except the writer's memory.  Thus the idea of preservation.  Be mindful here, though, that something like letter-writing giving way to emails and texts does NOT fit the project.  Why not?  Because that's not peculiar to a region of the country; it's general.  

So what to write about?  Well, that's your problem to solve!

Jean "Binta" Breeze 1956 - 2021

In today's NYT, an obituary for Jean Breeze, known as "Binta," the first successful female "dub poet."  See the Times obit for an explanation of dub poetry, but it's basically poetry rooted in performance, that is, sound and motion.