Image I (12.19.21)

I want to begin a series of ruminations about image.  I'll plan for digressions, which is to say, I know they'll happen because I'll try not to resist them or to edit them out.  I want this to be an exploration of one of the most fundamental tools of poetry, for readers perhaps even more than for writers.

Begin by rereading my blog post on 2.20.18, on deep image.  But that won't carry me far to where I think I'm headed, or hope to, because that piece links deep imagery and the surreal, the fabulous.

Step back and start out again from a passage by Proust, in Swann's Way.  The narrator digresses into a meditation on art vs. reality and the role that images play in helping us confuse (or understand) the difference between these two notions.  Impossible, says the narrator, to know the real person but only through one's impressions of another.  So, what we know then is only our sense of the other, not "the other" itself.  I say "only."  I should drop that modifier, really.  

What we know of the world, even and especially what we call the real world, is the image of it formed in our minds.  Our senses may perceive something, but through the process of perception an image is formed in my mind that is more or less different from the one formed in yours, even if we experience the something we perceive at the exact same time and from the exact same perspective.  It's definitely not the same as the thing it is formed of.  This is because experience informs perception informs its product, an image, and your experience is not my experience.

I realize, of course, that image-making isn't as straightforward and mechanical as what I've just described.  How we perceive influences our every experience--the world's ideological echo chambers are proof enough of that--and images, especially symbols, icons and emblems, bend our perceptions toward things like "established wisdom," convention, preconceived ideas and the court of public opinions.  

Proust's narrator, a budding artist, has an insight: the images are real, that is, they are our reality.  They are more real, that is, more meaningful to us, than the things they "stand for" because they are knowable and intimate with us, within us, in ways nothing else can be.

This should be enough to bring me to poetry.  What makes a poem emote and mean are its images.  Every week someone in our Wednesdays@One salon at some point exclaims of a poem that we're discussing, Its images are so real and powerful!  I usually like to pursue this line of inquiry, trying to get the group to dig deeper into the poem's imagery and how it imparts "reality" and the power it possesses over us.  (Power in a poem is meaningless to me unless it's understood as power over the reader's emotions.)

I want my W@1 colleagues to be able to distinguish better between images that arouse the emotions, that pique one's conscience or memory or belief, and images that merely reinforce stereotypes.  And I'll stop here to let that disjoining thought settle in for the next post . . .

Poems that answer a question (12.12.21)

At our last Wednesdays@One salon, I suggested a new project: write a poem that answers a question.

Specifically, what I'm thinking is the following:

• make your title a question
• write the poem as an answer or series of replies to the question
• the interesting challenge will be to answer the question using as many of the tools of poetry as you can: image, metaphor or simile, descriptive figure (like an image or a brief narration), rhythm and/or meter, page real estate, and so on.

You're familiar with some well-known examples already, in English at least.  "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" asked Shakespeare at the start of his famous sonnet.  He did two things that you might consider when writing your own.  One, the first line is the question--the poem was, as most sonnets were at the time, without a title--and thus integrated into the structure of the poem.  Two, his approach was, as that first line announces, comparative.  "Thou art more lovely, and more temperate," came the first line in reply to the question.  And the rest of the poem proceeds along this line of answer: how the object of the poet's ardor compares to things in nature (the weather, sunlight, mortality, the passage of time), that is, to changeableness, because his poem is answer to impermanence.  

Here is another famous "reply" poem:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning did the same thing with this poem as Shakespeare had before her, left it title-less, incorporating the crucial question into the opening line and making the entire poem an answer to that question.  Her approach is definition rather than comparison: it's a kind of "how-to" poem, or, specifically, "how-I."  She builds momentum, and force, through the repetition of "I love thee," as her means of "counting" through the answer to the most powerful expression of the poem: love even in death.

And notice this about these two poems, and keep it in mind as you write, everything about the question is high gain.  No yes/no or rhetorical questions here!  These questions demand some deeper thinking.  It's the need for a deep response that drives each poem.

Now imagine this.  Suppose either poet decided to answer the question more or less obliquely or metaphorically, that is, not so directly and point-by-point, that is, rhetorically, as Shakespeare and Barrett Browning do.  But what if you wanted to stick solely with the poetic, what might that look like?  

Shakespeare might have simply described a summer's day, without the comparative language.  Or he might have moved his answer still one more step away from rhetoric and described someone having a picnic on some grassy knoll or taking a walk alongside a stream, noting the faults of summer--hot and buggy and sweaty; storm-tossed; blinding; unpredictable weather--only implying through the question that the someone of the poem "compares" far better.  

Barrett Browning might have only described a man actually "turning from praise," or "doing right"; or a child demonstrating blind faith in some childish activity; as an oblique means of implying, "the way he resists praise (that is, with integrity), I love you." 

Granted, to respond this obliquely is a challenge!  But we moderns are Modern partly because we do things--like talk, think, imagine--in the oblique.  I wonder if you can do this in your poem?  If not, don't worry about it.  Do it the old-fashioned way, if you like.

But write a poem whose purpose is to address a question that is either its title or its first line.

And have fun!

A note on Thanksgiving Day, 2021

Everything, Everyone

I think this year you are going to ask me again

to tell you something I am thankful for,

this being Thanksgiving again, like last year,

or was it the year before that we all sat in the living

room, some with kids in their laps fidgeting

and not really getting the point and some with a beer

or a glass of wine on their knees and some,

just one or two, nodding off into a sofa

and a family all around and a long, long life behind,

the last of the debts paid, the arrangements

already made with the church, the will updated

one last time, the important private conversations—

you know which ones I am talking about,

the ones where they look you in the eye as if it’s

for the first time and take you so gently by the hand

as if you were ten years old again, the conversations

they’d meant to have with you all along—

finally over and done with so that now they can just

nod off, which is, or was, their version

of something to be thankful for,

and knowing how much there really is

to be thankful for—my own family, for instance,

meaning everyone, everyone in this living room and

many who are not, the world really, and some

who will never be again, and for my own life

lengthening like a shadow in the afternoon,

every year longer, a shadow to be thankful for.

I think you are going to ask me again to say it,

that thing that I am so thankful for, so that I

should sit down for once with pen and paper

and make a list and from that list choose that one

thing for which I am most thankful,

but I can’t, honestly, I can’t, because honestly

there’s too much on the list and I am thankful for

everything on it, for all of it and for you.

Blinkered, Part 3: exploring on your own (11.24.21)

We've read and heard some new voices over the past couple weeks that I hope will help tune our ears to a broader spectrum of poetry.  With thought and application, and time of course, maybe these new reading experiences will broaden & deepen our own voices, too!

This next week's project is the final part of our three-part series on discovering new and divergent voices in poetry.  Now, though, do your own sleuthing and plan to show us what you've found.  As before, when/if you find a poem that moves you, send it to me so I can incorporate it into a file for all to have afterward.  Please be kind to me and send poems that are easily formatted and not too long!

You can choose writers living or dead, but please select one who's not an old favorite.  Preferably, you'll stay with the theme and choose a poet whose heritage is significantly different from your own.

I plan to use this opportunity to introduce myself to a poet who is completely new to me, and who writes from a very different point of reference.  Who would that be?  I can't wait to find out!

Robert Bly 1926-2021 (11.22.21)

Sad this evening to post this death notice about Robert Bly.

I met him during his anti-Vietnam War heyday, when I was a graduate student at Indiana University.  As the obit in the NYT says, he traveled the USA visiting campuses to stir protest against the war.  His main contribution for us at IU was to give us the language to speak against the war, words more robust and meaningful than our heretofore sloganeering and shouts of BULLSHIT!  BULLSHIT!  BULLSHIT! whenever someone in authority tried telling us how things were, especially with regard to that war.

I remember him wearing masks and reading to us of the Teeth Mother, which, afterward, some people branded as anti-feminist.  But some of us didn't hear it that way.  Maybe we weren't listening correctly, or with ears we were yet to develop.  This was when the American War (as the Vietnamese call it still today) was the first and last thing on many of our minds, even though by the time I met Bly, the whole thing had wound down to just getting people out of the country.

Later, I attended a small gathering for him at the home of Ruth Stone (1915-2011).  Bly had helped her secure a year of poet in residency at IU.  She worked to get him on campus and threw the party for him in thanks.  I had been an MFA in Poetry during Stone's year on campus.  I remember people sitting in a circle with Bly and listening to him tell stories from myth and folklore . . . all of which had some bearing on our lives and our aspirations as poets.

Blinkered Part 2: fresh eyes (11/19/21)

Let's continue our journey toward seeing poetry with fresh eyes, again by introducing ourselves to poets we may not have read or even thought to read.  As before, the links below will take you to writers of poetry who hail from very diverse backgrounds and life experiences, most of which are likely to be quite different from yours.  These poets are represented in such places as the Academy of American Poets poets.org pages, Poem Hunter, personal web pages, and specific journals where you can find still other new and interesting writers to engage.  (In fact, you should bookmark this site and/or this site on your device and visit them regularly.)

But please read from only these poets this week while continuing to explore any poems by Kevin Young that you can find in bookstores, magazines, or online.  He'll remain our "reference writer" for poetry from worlds outside our own.  And again, if you find a poem you'd like to discuss on Wednesday next, send it to me and I will incorporate into a common file.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Sean Hill

Noor Hindi in Cosmonauts Avenue

Noor Hindi in poets.org

Noor Hindi in Cotton Xenomorph

Noor Hindi in Diode Poetry

Noor Hindi in Flock

Jackie Wang in poets.org

Ada Limon in Poetry Foundation

Ada Limon on Poem Hunter

Hazem Fahmy

Blinkered: writing from our cloistered points of view (11.10.21)

Wednesdays@One poetry has gotten lazy over the pandemic.  That may be my fault.  I've been lax in devising new projects that might excite folks to try new styles and to take some risks with their writing. 

I'm going to start fixing that with this next project:

Project

Take a trip, metaphorically speaking.  I want you all to stop writing for the remainder of November and explore poetic lands that you've never visited or may not have visited recently.  I want you to put down your pens, so to speak, and pick up a book (or a few web pages) and read from among the following:

Kevin Young

Kenzie Allen

Moncho Alvarado

Glenda Bailey-Mershon

Elizabeth Ruth Deyro

Michael Stalcup

Richard Georges

Youssef Alaoui

Charif Shanahan

Steve Benson

Mary Gililand

Above are links to the web pages of poets reflecting a wide assortment of interests and backgrounds, styles and poetic inspirations, from writers who identify as Native American (Kenzie Allen, Moncho Alvarado) to Caribbean (Richard Georges), Arab American (Youssef Alaoui) and Buddhist (Mary Gililand).  Don't assume that each writer's work is "Arab" or "Buddhist" or "Native American" per se.  But try reading as much from each of these writers as you can find online, hoping to expose yourself to themes, points of view, styles, traditions that aren't white, Anglo-Saxon, and "Norton Literature."

Read liberally from Kevin Young's poetry, for general discussion purposes. BUT SELECT ONE POEM FROM ONE OF THE OTHER AUTHORS LISTED ABOVE THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS WITH THE GROUP.  READ IT CAREFULLY--IN FACT, STUDY IT--AND LET ME KNOW WHICH POEM YOU HAVE IN MIND (you might copy and paste it into an email to me so I can insert it into a file for sharing).  

We will complete this exploration over the next three W@1 salons (November 17, 24 and December 1), rather than share our own work.  I am asking you NOT to select your own writers but to work from those in the group listed above.  If you're having trouble accessing any of this work, let me know and I will select some poems for you to read.