Monthly Archives: October 2017

10 posts

Poems To Be Experienced, Not Deciphered

poetry mag

I’ve been mildly critical of Poetry at times, but today I come to praise its pages. Editor Don Share has started an occasional series called “The View from Here” wherein people from various fields write their personal thoughts on poetry. There are five such essays in the October 2017 issue, and one by Kate Dwyer, a freelance writer, hits a chord that is proven by a poem earlier in the magazine. First, a quote from Dwyer’s piece, “Learning to Pivot”:

“For most of my life, I thought reading poetry was like unraveling geometric proofs. Use a series of facts to solve for an unknown. Find the measure of x to solve for the last angle within a shape. Geometry had rules, and so, I thought, did poetry. The syllables of metered verse fit together like jigsaw pieces; in high school, I thought a poem was something to be solved, that the pieces were supposed to click together at its close. But these solutions never satisfied, and I suspected I was approaching verse from the wrong perspective altogether. How could I get through a creative writing degree if I couldn’t read a poem? Finally, one of the professors explained that a poem is meant to be experienced, not deciphered. He said poetry was short-form prose with line breaks, and the visceral reaction to a poem was often the most truthful. I could work with that.”

Reading thoughts like Dwyer’s is one thing; experiencing them firsthand quite another. I can think of no better proof of Dwyer’s professor’s claim than a poem earlier in this same issue, Dean Young’s “Permitted a Meadow.” Ours is not to understand, ours is simply to experience. The poem is a headscratcher, yes, but the words are oh-so-beautiful to listen to. Listen for yourself:

“Permitted a Meadow” by Dean Young

I like the blue pill best.
Just like a gladiola, its true flower
is invisible.
The rest is holy.
Not like in that Tintoretto
where no one knows god is dying,
just the usual jingle and squawk
from the birdmongers then sudden
downpour, a few of the demons dwelling
beneath the earth tentatively stir.
Not like that. Not tentative. Imploring.
The wound tingles.
A head of foam forms on the mountain.
Into my hand is placed a Mycenaean horse.
Into my hand is placed a waxed hand.
The filament will not break.
The fox gets closer.
Mint barks.
5% of its life, an ant is active.
The rest is holy.
Wolfhowl ringtone is holy.
Sticking out your tongue
in the rearview mirror is holy.
Any song that never leaves the lungs,
all us animals garlanded and belled.

You could, of course, scoff at some of Dean Young’s poems for being impenetrable, but that would be because you were approaching them as math problems, like Kate Dwyer before she had her eureka moment.

What if you just permitted a poem like “Permitted a Meadow” to wash over you? What if you just freed yourself to “experience” it and that was good enough?

I think I answered my own question.

Mommy Dearest vs. Writers Block (Like Godzilla vs. King Kong!)

poetry word choice writing

draft

Just finished John McPhee’s newest collection of essays, Draft No. 4, and though it’s not a writing advice book per se, it does contain its fair share of writerly wisdom, many of interest to poets. Here are some quotes from the book along with comments from the peanut gallery.

“Though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all.”

COMMENT: This is not McPhee, actually. It’s Ben Jonson. I agree, though admit I’ve been only writing poetry the past few years. Jonson must mean “in his lifetime,” then. No, really. The point is well taken. And I do dream of novels still. They wake me up.

“It takes as long as it takes.”

COMMENT: Also not McPhee, but his boss, New Yorker editor William Shawn. McPhee was amazed at how much time Shawn was giving to McPhee’s article as the New Yorker hurtled toward a deadline. Shawn’s coolness under pressure and unrelenting attention to revision and detail sent a message. Don’t rush. Too many writers want to be published more than they want to write–and writing is rewriting first, then doing it right (editing, proofing) second. Hold, hold, hold before you send!

This quote is advice McPhee mailed to a former student, Joel, who was making a living as a writer but claimed to be suffering writer’s block: “Dear Joel: You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than the thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear. “

COMMENT: Brilliant! McPhee’s strategy is to tap into our natural tendency to complain, so why not complain about the project that’s blocking us? If you’re struggling with a poem, it works just as well. You write to Mom and go on and on about the imagery and the word choice you’re trying and before you know it, you’ll be trying new imagery with new words because, well, you’re one eloquent whiner, aren’t you?

“Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material–that much and no more.”

COMMENT: This is from the chapter called “Omission,” where McPhee reminds us that what we choose NOT to write (or choose to take out when revising) is often more important than what we put in. Amen, brother.

Michelangelo: “The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows… Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

COMMENT: Also from “Omission.” For poets, the white page or monitor replaces “block of stone” and the word “poem” replaces “statue.” The more words on the cutting-room (reviser-room) floor, the better.

This quote is advice McPhee sent his daughter, Jenny, when she was a senior at Princeton High School suffering over a piece of writing in class: “Dear Jenny: The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something–anything–out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something–anything–as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again–top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time. You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version–it if did not exist–you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day–yes, while you sleep–but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”

COMMENT: This, from the title essay, is where McPhee tells us that the lion’s share of time in writing goes to the awful first draft. Subsequent drafts go a bit smoother and faster, but only if you suffer through that all-important first draft. My only add would be “I wish” to the “Draft No. 4” part. I feel most of my poems go to “Draft No. 44.” What can I say? They’re attention hogs.

As for poets, too many claim “block” because they’re not brave enough to write a first draft. It’s garbage, they think. An embarrassment. But who’s going to read it? Only the author. And even if it’s three pages of garbage, there may be one twenty-dollar bill in the mix, accidentally thrown out with the overcooked chicken divan. Find it! Cash in! The nucleus of a poem is born!

It’s enough to make even Andrew Jackson smile.

Eye Candy for Revisionists

poetry revising poetry

revise

Revisionist. It’s an ugly word in history and politics, but in the world of poetry? Nirvana! Frankly, I much prefer revising my poems to creating them. Birth from the white womb of blankness, page or screen, can be painful. Tinkering with existing words, lines, even punctuation? Another matter entirely.

Of course, revising must be earned. You can’t revise nothing because, in the words of the prophet, Billy Preston, nothing from nothing leaves nothing. (This is math I can understand!)

If you missed it, I have to share with you a New York Times feature on poets’ revisionary tactics. It was, as the phrase has been sweetly coined, “eye candy” for poets. You look at typed poems and witness glorious cross-outs, arrows, and scribbles. In short, a creative history of brains at work.

In this case, the brains are Eduardo C. Corral, Billy Collins, Jenny Zhang, Marie Howe, Robert Pinsky, and Mary Jo Bang. Which reminds me. Why can’t I have a catchy name like Mary Jo Bang? Holy cow. Where do people get such catchy names? I’ve no idea if it is real or a nom de plume, but either way, I like the sound of it.

You can check out this New York Times feature, called “Poets in Action,” here. Not only do you get to see who’s messiest, you get to read a bit of commentary by each poet below the manuscript. Not that’s a Saturday treat.

Bon weekend, people!

Dying Frogs in High Windows

Lost Sherpa of Happiness my poems poetry

frog

Now there’s a mix! You don’t often get dying frogs in the same breath as a high window, but that’s the case with my poem, “Night of the Dying Frogs,” appearing in the U.K. e-zine The High Window this week.

This poem, like many I write, is based on a rather unreal real-life experience. One day when both the rain and I were driving, I came across a stretch of road that was bubbling in more ways than one. I soon managed to figure out what the problem was–the macadam was alive not only with puddles boiling with rainfall but with frogs jumping for their lives (and no, I don’t live in Calaveras County).

They were all over the place, heavy yet lively, bull frogs leaping con brio, all headed in the same direction. As no one was behind me, I braked, hoping to swerve my way through them, but their numbers seemed legion, and I’m not sure my tires managed the gauntlet, tread as they might.

Frogs or no frogs, that morning made for a difficult drive to work. Darkness. Sheets of rain. Standing water on the roads. Low visibility. In short, drivers were knee-deep in trouble. But hey, I made it, and the polliwog of an idea was born. One tail less and four legs later, the poem from that unusual episode was born.

“Night of the Dying Frogs” will appear in my new book, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, coming soon to an amphibious bookstore near you. Many thanks to David Cooke and Anthony Costello for making it a part of their journal.

Word Up!

poetry writing poetry

dictionary

Aspiring poets always think it’s all about the poetry. Read poetry. Write poetry. Study poetry. Buy poetry (via those expensive stores, M, F, and A). But, no. There’s more to it than that. There’s the simple stuff, often overlooked. Let’s start with words.

I can hear you now: “Words? What do you mean by words. I use words all the time! What do you think my poems are made of–broccoli stalks?”

Well, first of all, that would be pretty cool. And nutritious. But I mean word choice–or, as the French call it, le mot juste–and word choice depends upon a solid store of words, one that has a loading dock out back where trucks marked Brains R Us can bring in more supplies each day.

School didn’t end with school, in other words. You need to boost your vocabulary, mostly so you can understand as many words as possible when you read poetry, but also so you can avoid using these words in your own poems.

Ha-ha. A little curveball for you. I say avoid using them because, like thesaurus-itis (that dreaded disease), strutting-your-vocabulary-itis can be life-threatening to poems. Occasionally you will use a new vocabulary word, but mostly you will take a pass on it, especially if it’s a fancy, Latin-based word.

Don’t get me wrong–the dead language will have its place in your poems now and then, but the lion’s share will be Greek and Anglo-Saxon based. Plus, you want the nuclear option to use any old (or new) word you know because that’s power, the kind found in your pencil or keyboard thanks to the cauliflower pulling the strings (we’re back you your brain via vegetables, you see).

So, how do you do it? One simple way to boost the number of words available to your poems is to sign up for Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day. I look forward to my morning word-in-the-inbox. Yes, it’s often familiar (like today’s “malign”), but its roots, related words, and etymology are often not so familiar. What’s more, M-W gives you two examples of the words from the real (vs. the one in Washington D.C. right now) world.

How cool is that? Ask your air conditioner, then word-up

Jane Hirshfield’s Handout on Revision

poetry poetry books revising poetry writing poetry

Jane H

In their book, The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux share a worksheet Jane Hirshfield created for a Napa Valley Writers’ Conference she taught.

Can you imagine? Being surrounded by both the poet Jane Hirshfield and hundreds of wineries? Sounds inspiring to me (and rated 90-plus by the Poetry Advocate), but I have yet to attend any writers’ conference, much less one in California with Jane Hirshfield, which I mean to change some year soon. (As Shakespeare wrote: “My kingdom for a bucket list!”)

Addonizio and Laux (sounds like a good law firm) claim Hirshfield’s list tackles “the more existential aspects of revision,” so it gets better and better: Hirshfield + wine + Camus. Pass the baguette and ghazals!

But enough word play. Let’s take a look at Hirshfield’s revisionary wisdom for poets and see if the Buddha doesn’t sneak in:

SOME POSSIBLE QUESTIONS TO ASK OF YOUR POEM IN REVISION

What is being said?
Is there joy, depth, muscle, in the music of its saying?
Is there more that wants to be said?
Does it want a more deeply living body of sound?
Is it true?
Is it ethical?
Does it feel?
Does it follow its own deepest impulses, not necessarily the initial idea?
Does it know more than you did when you started it?
Are there things in it that don’t belong?
Are whatever digressions it takes in its own best service?
Are there things in it that are confusing?
Are there things in it that are clichéd or sentimental?
Is it self-satisfied?
Is it predictable?
Does it go deep enough? far enough?
Is it particular?
Is the grammar correct?
If the syntax is unusual, is it for a purpose?
Are the transitions accurate?
Is it in the right voice?
Is it in the right order?
Does the diction fit?
Could any of its words be more interesting? more surprising? more alive?
Do its rhythms work? (i.e. both seem right and accomplish meaning and feeling)
Does the music work?
Does the shape/form work? (line breaks, stanzas, etc.)
Does each image work? each statement?
Does it allow strangeness?
Does each of its moments actively move the poem toward its full realization?
Should it go out into the world?
Is it a seed for something else?
Is it finished?
Six months later, is it still finished?
Six years later, is it still finished?

Maybe the Buddhist leanings of Hirshfield are in there, maybe not, but change is inevitable and personification is apparent. I especially like the finishing flourish. Should your precious child go out in the world? Remember now, as the author, you are blinded by love. Sometimes the answer is a decided no.

And what about that seed of something else bit? A terrific way of reminding ourselves that we often start writing a poem with one goal and accidentally achieve something entirely different. Celebrate! Then start revising.

And the last two points on the list. Sing them loud, sing them clear: Wait, wait, wait! Be patient! Let your poems age in their oak barrels a bit, gain character and fruity notes of currants and blackberries. Look at them again after a few flips of the calendar page. Chances are you’ll see a very different poem: one that requires revision, especially if you initially allowed strangeness that you thought was good strangeness but it turned out to be just weird strangeness.

Time helps you recognize that, kind of like the morning after too much wine brings recognition, too. In that sense, good poems revealed as bad are like the epiphany of Sunday morning headaches. You learn and revise….

A Sunday Stream of Consciousness

poetry

stream

It’s Sunday, but there are no Sabbaths for the monkey mind.
“Monkey mind” being the enemy of Buddha-like meditation and the friend of poet-like brainstorming-without-a-banana.
I kind of like the “free” subscriptions you get when you enter a poetry publication’s annual contest. It kind of makes up for the expense of missing first place by kind of making you deceive yourself about the meaning of “free.”
In poetry, you cut to the bone, taking a scalpel to expressions like “kind of,” for starters.
While drafting poetry, I have found that many bad long poems are hiding good short poems. Ones in the second trimester or so.
I proved this to myself by rewriting a long poem Dickinson-style. All I needed was a few random dashes and capital letters (found in Aisle Emily, bottom shelf, at Ocean State Job Lot).
The cover of the October issue of Poetry reminds me of the Beatles‘ White Album.
Speaking of, I wonder how Jorie Graham feels about being the centerfold.
There’s a new sheriff in town (starring Kevin Young) at The New Yorker. Too bad they had to close submissions on July 3rd. The good news? The market reopens on Nov. 1st, and just because your poems were sent home before doesn’t mean they will again
Which reminds me: Poetry is subjective. A lot rides on particular editors’ eyes. If it gets that far.
Which is not to say there’s no such thing as “bad poetry” (I often send it to its room without supper).
Still trying to get over my prejudice against form poems by reading Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Art of Syntax.
Wasn’t it Ben Franklin who warned about two sure things in life: death and syntaxes?
As usual, the list of National Book Awards for Poetry includes books and authors a.) I haven’t read and b.) I haven’t even heard of. Guess I need to listen better.
Does anyone still write poems with pencil and paper? I do. But it’s ideas for poems only. Once I start writing, it’s on the trusty word processor.
When a poetry manuscript is accepted for publication, the toughest part is starting the next poetry manuscript. Especially with so many laurels lying around, waiting to be rested upon.
Poets need more patience than doctors. Can you say “wait time”? As a submitter of your work, you’d better be good at it. The competition is fierce and the numbers are legion.
My first love in poetry is predictably Frost.
I do not think “Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening” is corny. So sue me.
If you call yourself a reader but don’t read poetry, are you really a reader?
If a tree falls in the wilderness, does it make a sound?
No and yes.

When Your Muse Is the Buddha

poetry

buddha

Like a lot of Americans, I find Buddhism both fascinating and mysterious. Fascination and mystery, it so happens, are great muses, which is why some of my poems speculate on such foreign (to Americans) concepts as dharma, samsara, and moksha.

Buddhist-inspired poems (loosely termed) will appear in my new book of poems scheduled for release this December, but here’s an example from The Indifferent World. In it, I tackle reincarnation as seen through samsara darkly.

Truth is, to western ears, reincarnation–getting second and third and fourth chances (á la Phil Connors in Groundhog Day)–sounds pretty good, but life, coming as it does with struggle, suffering, pain, and death, might not be the comeback bargain we think. In fact, it might be worth an escape (to a Nirvana concert or something).

By way of example, here’s one of my Buddhism-imbued poem from The Indifferent World:

Samsara

After years of meditation, the Buddha found
my problem—I cling to life,
I cannot release, I am no sooner dead
than crawling back, hours or days later,
as apparent man, woman,
fire ant, tiger, pelican, newt, box turtle,
hemlock tree, narwhal, salmon, roadside
weed. Clinging to a new womb, sac, egg, seed.
Thirsty for more warmth, mothers, suns. Crying
for the feel of water, food, breath.

Again and again, the barb of my beetle leg’s clinch,
the proboscis of my mosquito want, the bristle
of my moth antennae’s search. I crave. I need.
I suck from the marrow of my prison. I cannot
recall the womb that recalls me.

The Simul-Sub Dilemma

poetry

NYer1

Simultaneous submissions, like the Internet, are both boon and bane. They giveth and they taketh away. As a writer, you love journals that accept simultaneous submissions because they maximize your poems’ chances for publication. But…

First the little “but.” The niggling problem–a nice one to have–comes when you get an acceptance. You have to go through the courtesy of letting other markets know that the poem you simul-sent is taken. This means record-keeping. And though Submittable is a helpful tool, many markets are still mail-in and e-mail only. They mustn’t be forgotten, lest your name show up on a black list of rogue poets.

And now the big “but” (no cheeky jokes, please). Responses to poetry submissions are notoriously slow. Let’s say you’ve written a batch of poems you have high hopes for. These are your “breakthrough poems,” the ones that will vault you into such heavenly markets (both pay-scale-wise and prestige-wise) as Poetry and The New Yorker. It so happens that both of those publications accept simultaneous submissions. Yay, you say.

But hold on a minute. Yay? Really? If your best stuff becomes a simul-sub and you send it to the big boys, you know and I know that the response time from said big boys will be up around a year due to gazillions of Wanna-Frosts out there. A year! Meantime, if they’re that good, the poems are sure to be snapped up by smaller markets, ones that would not fall into your “first choice” and “greatest hope” categories. (Sound like the college submissions process all over again?)

There’s the rub. And the solution has a “deep blue sea” look to it, too, now that you think you’ve solved the devil. Let’s say you send your five best exclusively to The New Yorker. That market, tighter than two coats of paint, means the odds of slipping a poem in remain minute. Certainly less than one percent!

So the solution of voluntarily making a simul-sub market a “no simul-subs allowed” market could fail mightily and cost you a year in the life. A year in the life! (I repeat.)

What a way to make a living. And a decision.

Of course, if you generate enough poetry, sending exclusively becomes easier, so I guess that is the ultimate solution to this conundrum. Still, time and odds are not a poet’s friend. And who would’ve believed that strategy and playing the odds–such unartistic talents–would figure so prominently in the writing arc of poets’ careers?

But thanks to the odd bedfellows of writing poetry and marketing poetry, that’s just the case. If you invent a solution, let us know. And if not, I hear there’s money in building a better mousetrap….

The Upside of Negative

poetry poetry books

negpos

Negative. It sounds so…negative, doesn’t it? And yet, in the “up is down and down is up” world of poetry, negative can prove a high compliment. Ask John Keats, the wunderkind of poetry. In a December 1817 letter to his brothers, he wrote:

…and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Hmn. Sounds like the exact opposite of Walt Whitman’s Learn’d Astronomer. In fact, I wonder if old Walt used Keats’ quote as inspiration.

This is my last riff on Matthew Zapruder’s book Why Poetry, but instead of commenting on the final chapter, I thought I’d comment on Chapter 7, “Negative Capability,” because, at first glance, it looks like something a poetry editor might write on a rejection slip. But, no. Keats! What Keats would, later in the same letter quoted above, call “half knowledge.”

MZ thinks it akin to a state of reverie (just west of the State of New Hampshire, I think), a place where one can find truths due to being unsure. A Utopian state, then, for both writers and readers of poetry (the former, because the wonder is a siren call to the Muse; the latter, because it opens one up to the possibilities that poetry is famous for exploring).

Zapruder writes, “This is what negative capability means in poetry, to be in the state where you can accept a succession of things, especially if they contradict each other, in order to allow within yourself an experience that you will not have elsewhere in life.”

What I did not know until reading this chapter was Keats’ almost religious preoccupation with Shakespeare. He used the Bard as a constant source of inspiration. (And here I am, resting on decades-old laurels because I took not one but two Shakespeare courses in college–one on the comedies and one on the tragedies. Shakespeare is not a “been there, done that” kind of writer, Keats reminds us. After reading this, I have decided to embark on a rereading schedule that periodically uses the plays as an inspirational interstice between my regular reading. Once a month, or every other?)

Zapruder uses Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” as an example of the negative capability theory. “If in reading the poem you get distracted by an irritable need to come up with a consistent, coherent set of ideas that the speaker has in his feelings about the urn, an overall message about the urn, or silence, or time, or mortality, instead of thinking about the statements of the poem as a series of deeply felt, shifting, even contradictory thoughts, you will miss what is truly great about the experience of reading it. Maybe poems are not to be read for their great answers, but for their great, more often than not unanswerable, questions.”

Luckily, MZ remembers to warn us that not finding a definite single meaning to poems doesn’t mean we are free to believe whatever we wish them to mean. That is a common student overreaction, one many a teacher of poetry bangs his head against the wall over. Rather, we are in middle ground here, hoping to encourage not one and not many interpretations while staying close to the text and accepting the poet’s musings as something triggered within the realm of doubtful possibility. (Clear as muddy water, right?) Bottom line: Personal reactions are OK on a personal level, but should not be wildly and openly declared as the true secret meaning of the poor poet, who might mightily object were she present (or alive).

If the thought of negative capability is liberating, you’ve read Zapruder (channeling Keats) well. Men of Science need not apply. People with all the answers can go directly to jail without passing go. Leave the mysteries to the readers and writers of poetry. And, in the name of Keats, reconnect with your Bard, won’t you? All the truths of human nature are mysteriously there!

(And, as this is my last post on Zapruder’s book, I’d like to personally thank him for the inspiration his book provided. Thanks again, Matthew!)