Yearly Archives: 2018

120 posts

Metaphoric Push-Ups

poetry reading poetry

rosary

Easily the most difficult exercise you can practice in poetry is the metaphoric push-up. Leave your like’s and as’s in the cupboard, why don’t you, and point-blank tell the world how this is that, knowing full well that this isn’t that, but the audacity of saying so works. Somehow. Against all odds. Thus, the burn in your creative muscle.

To start, choose something simple. Or unusual. Does it matter? Simplicity and complexity are each malleable. Silly Putty under the kneading thumbs of a child. Play-Doh with its grainy smells of yellow and red and blue. A floury ball of dough in the fine sinewy hands of a baker. Proteus the Shape-shifter would be pleased with all this. His diet is metaphor with milk, three times a day.

Before you have fun, you can read this William Matthews poem called “The Snake.” How many ways can you describe something you take your eyes off of (and your feet away from) ipso fasto every time you come across it? Or, in Matthews’ case, something you can’t take your eyes off of because snakes are a form of hypnosis?

Rhetorical questions, of course. Many, many ways, as shown here. See which metaphor (or rogue simile) you like best:

 

“The Snake”
by William Matthews

A snake is the love of a thumb
and forefinger.
Other times, an arm
that has swallowed a bicep.

The air behind this one
is like a knot
in a child’s shoelace
come undone
while you were blinking.

It is bearing something away.
What? What time
does the next snake leave?

This one’s tail is ravelling
into its burrow—
a rosary returned to a purse.
The snake is the last time your spine
could go anywhere alone.

 

 

Perhaps he saved the best for last, but Matthews really outdoes himself in the last stanza. You know. That bit about the snake returning to its burrow being a rosary slipping back into a purse.

My God and hers, it reminds me of my grandmother, the last person I know to actually use rosary beads, and use them she did. Each bead. Religiously. Doing praying push-ups, which are something  *like* metaphoric ones: a work out well worth the effort. Or so I like to think, imagining my grandmother in heaven, where she belongs.

Sins of the Fathers (and Brothers)

poetry reading poetry

It’s always amusing to hear people say, “My God. I sound just like my mother.” Or father, for that matter. We grow up vowing that we have learned from what we disliked as children growing up, but sometimes, when cast into the role of parents ourselves, we instinctively begin a shadow dance with our pasts.

The power of childhood is greater and darker than we know. One extreme example lies in the behavior of the aged on their deathbeds. If they are in the throes of pain or delirium, they often call out for long-deceased mother or father. This with a lifelong married partner at their side, even. Such is the powerful imprint of childhood, the wild woods we unconsciously navigate in times of blind stress.

Foreshadowing such behavior are the sometimes unchecked instincts learned in our childhoods not only as sons and daughters, but as brothers and sisters. It is this renegade instinct that the poet Patrick Phillips wrestles with in the following poem, wherein the speaker’s two sons become disturbing echoes of the speaker’s own childhood.

The beauty of the poem? The concrete subject, a wrestling move, lends more than one meaning to its abstract title. It’s one of the things good poetry does. See if you can’t find more than one way to interpret the word “mercy,” as seen through a childhood darkly:

 

“Mercy”
by Patrick Phillips

Like two wrestlers etched
around some ancient urn,

we’d lace our hands, then wrench
each other’s wrists back

until the muscles ached
and the tendons burned,

and one brother or the other
grunted mercy—a game

we played so many times
I finally taught my sons,

not knowing what it was,
until too late, I’d done:

when the oldest rose
like my brother’s ghost,

grappling with the little
ghost I was at ten—

who cried out Mercy!
in my own voice Mercy!

as I watched from deep
inside my father’s skin.

 

Sometimes the “Enemy of the People” Is… the People

poetry

Election Eve Special:

Poetry appears in many places—history, even. Is it not poetic justice, after all, that friends and frequent political jousters John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence?

I am reading Joseph Ellis’s bracing new book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, which has a structure of then (as in, the root of our problems) and now (as in, what flower—or thorns—these roots have wrought since the Founding Fathers’ day).

The first section focuses, appropriately enough, on race and on Thomas Jefferson (then and very much now). And although there is a lot I could say about these fascinating opening chapters, I’m moved instead by what I’m reading in the next pair of chapters (“Equality”), which focuses on John Adams.

But why listen to me? Here is Ellis on a critique Adams offered on Thomas Jefferson:

“…the Adams critique of Jefferson operates at a much deeper level of intellectual and ideological sophistication, involving nothing less than a wholesale rejection of what he regarded as the following illusions of the French Enlightenment: the unfounded belief in the preternatural wisdom of ‘the people’; the naïve assumption that human beings are inherently rational creatures; and the romantic conviction that American society was immune to the class divisions so prevalent in Europe. The political differences between Adams and Jefferson are too multifaceted to be captured in the conventional categories of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ What we must negotiate is the distinction between a realist and an idealist, a pessimist and an optimist, a skeptic and a believer. Both men were rock-ribbed American patriots, though diametrically at odds over the likely shape of America’s future…

“The clear implication of [Adams’] presidency, at least as Adams saw it, was that leadership necessarily entailed not listening to the voice of ‘the people’ when it ran counter to the abiding interest of ‘the public,’ which the president had a moral obligation to defend even more forcefully when it was unpopular… Adams had no trouble endorsing the Lockean doctrine that all political power derived from ‘the people.’ but he could never bring himself to think about popular sovereignty in the reverential fashion that Jefferson embraced with such intoxicating assurance. ‘The fundamental Article of my political Creed,’ he declared quite defiantly, ‘is that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or Absolute Power is the same in a popular Assembly, an Aristocratic Counsel, an Oligarchic Junto and a single Emperor.’

“Adams realized that this creedal statement was heretical in the Jeffersonian political universe, where it was inherently impossible for ‘the people’ to behave despotically. He was attempting to disabuse his old friend of the same kind of magical thinking that had permitted medieval theologians to conjure up miracles. There was in fact no surefire source of political omniscience on this side of heaven, and making ‘the people’ into just such a heavenly creature was a preposterous perpetuation of an alluring illusion about kings long since discredited by Jefferson himself in his indictment of George III in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, if you wanted to know where such illusions about the infallibility of ‘the people’ led, you only needed to follow the bloodstained trail of the French Revolution, which moved through massacres at the guillotine to its inevitably despotic destination in Napoleon.”

I’m looking forward to the “Now” chapter that complements this Adams one. It is called “Our Gilded Age” and will draw lines, I am sure, between notions of “equality” then and today.

In the meantime, we’d all do well to remember John Adams’ stark warning. Sometimes the enemy of the people is… the people, voting themselves to perdition and other places we don’t want to go.

Happy Election Day, 2018, and I hope you pick up Ellis’s book for a look-see at Thomas Jefferson’s, John Adams’s, James Madison’s, and George Washington’s “dialogues” with the present day. It will cause you to think, and thinking is something the Founding Fathers valued very, very much.

 

 

R.I.P. Tony Hoagland

poetry

Wow. Not sure how I missed it until alerted via email today, but we lost a good man and a good poet (and not a bad essayist, thank you, too) over a week ago. Here is a fine tribute to Tony Hoagland in the New York Times obituary pages.

And, from only a month before his death to pancreatic cancer, there’s this must read from The Sun by Tony.

Our hearts go out for this loss, but as our thanks go out, too, for the gains in our reading lives and in our lives as poets and Americans.

Tony, we will miss you but never forget you.

Wind. Rain. Hardy’s Poetry.

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Sometimes you read a poem that somehow comes to be read in its own time. Its perfect time, I might say.

Outside it is still dark before dawn. It is unnaturally warm for November, too, an imperfect “Climate change? What climate change?” New England moment.

Wind. Rain. And me, just in from a dog-walk dreary.

The poem I read is by good old Thomas Hardy. I met Mr. Hardy thanks to Holden Caulfield, protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Holden was reading The Return of the Native while cutting classes at Pencey Prep. If there’s one thing I admire, it’s an educated drop-out.

Anyway, Holden of the Hunting Hat loves that Eustacia Vye, main character of said Return of the Native. And as I loved Salinger’s book, I picked up Hardy’s book, and loved that, too, even though it couldn’t be more different. You know. Mexican enchiladas versus Swedish smorgasbord. Different, but compelling in their own ways.

Somehow the fates cued this morning’s inclement weather for my first read of Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.” Only there’s more than wind and rain going down here. It’s raining years. And time.

Fate chose not only the right weather (outside my house) but the right age (inside my mortal coil) for reading this poem. It bleeds mortality. At an alarming rate, too.

See if your years don’t look like leaves blowing off of life’s trees as you read, and you’ll understand! As Thomas Hardy would say: “O!”

 

During Wind and Rain
by Thomas Hardy

They sing their dearest songs—
He, she, all of them—yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face…
Ah, no: the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss—
Elders and juniors—aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat….
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!

They are blithely breakfasting all—
Men and maidens—yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee….
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs….
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

The Siren Call of Submittable: Part 2

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sirens

Yesterday I wrote at length (for me) about ways Submittable has shifted the playing field for writers and literary magazines alike. Today: How Submittable fosters bad writer habits.

For literary magazines, Submittable giveth (to the bottom line, as magazines keep 62% of reading-fee proceeds) and it taketh away (the ability to staff readers who can keep up with the onslaught of submissions).

And for writers, Submittable giveth and taketh away, too. The “giveth” is convenience and record-keeping and making more markets financially-healthy to send to. The “taketh away”? Mounting costs (what writer keeps track?) from the aggregate hits these submissions make on our savings over time. And competition. Lots and lots of competition. Easy for you is easy for everybody. Eventually the odds begin to look like lottery ticket wins: steeper than steep.

But what I want to wax eloquent on today is Submitta-Mania (a disease caused by the ease of Submittable’s portals). Why are writers of all stripes ability-wise in this headlong rush to get published, ipso fasto. By yesterday, if possible?

There’s the easy answer: affirmation. Hidden in every writer (maybe even the established and famous ones) is a dark voice that says things like “Do I suck?” and “Was that acceptance the exception?” and “Am I capable of doing it again?”

Self-doubt, as we know, is one of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse.

But I attribute the rush to submit to social media as well. It’s the cocaine candy of our times.

Think about it: What makes people constantly check their phones? Why do people crave “likes” on Facebook? Why do egos on Twitter want way more followers than those they follow? Ego, ego, ego. The relentless need to trick yourself into the notion that you are somebody. Not only somebody, but somebody “big.” A player.

Oh, yeah. What fools these mortals be, and all that.

This leads me to the theory that writing for publication, and better yet for paying publication, is part of the drive to submit. Technology feeds short attention spans, which come not only in the form of what we’ll read and for how long, but in what we’ll revise and for how long. The result? We pony up the poetry and click submit, sometimes at $3 a hit, far sooner than we should.

Do you like me, pretty please? the submission wants to know. Ah, no, the first intern says while checking his phone mid-your poem. Thus your precious poetry fails to come within a statute mile of its target editor. And thus it returns like a bad penny in your inbox.

By now you know where this is going. Self-discipline is more important than ever. Writers are part of the problem when they ship poetry only written in the last 60 days to The New Yorker (response time: one year) and Tin House (one year and umpty-eight weeks).

Instead, think “we will sell no wine before its time.” Or, if you’re hosting Thanksgiving in a few weeks, this: Would you take the turkey out halfway through its roasting time and put it on a platter before your guests? (Yes, this makes a big turkey of your poem.)

How about this: Would you put on half  your clothes before going out to work?

Does this work?: Would you paint half your house and look at that side only with admiration for a month or two?

The stuff we write is mischievous as hell. It is a shape shifter par excellence. It beguiles and flatters like an illusion in the desert. Trust it as far as you can throw it. And if it says “no” to further revision, you say “yes,” most likely after you’ve sent it to its room for a month or four. Seeing it again after 120 days will change everything. Everything.

And that, my friends, can’t help but be all for the better. Not only for your art and pride, but for your nickel-and-dimed bottom line.

What Submittable Has Done To Us

marketing poetry poetry

A most interesting article appears in the Nov./Dec. issue of Poets & Writers. It’s called (and pay attention to the subtitle!) “Diving Into the Digital Slush Pile: How Online Submissions Are Changing Lit Mags (And Your Chances of Publication).”

Let’s take a time out before we dive in, shall we? Any writer submitting to lit mags already knows that this isn’t Kansas anymore. For one, most every writer north of Honduras knows that Submittable is addictive for both editors and writers. And if you live south of Saskatchewan, you’ve probably figured out that this thing called “a reading fee” is making itself comfortable like a guest staying past three days.

But what does it all mean? Two things, it appears. One, Submittable is hurting writers’ bottom line while helping magazines’. And two, the easier it gets for everyone (and their sister) to submit, the harder it gets to land an acceptance. In other words, change is not always a good thing.

Still, as the article attests, when you factor in all the costs of snail mail (postage, materials, and that vanishing commodity called time), reading fees might be a deal. Why, then, a dozen submissions later, does one feel like George Washington after his doctor has bled him (again)?

Holdout magazines like Alaska Quarterly Magazine and Antioch Review (editors of both interviewed here) are feeling the heat, too. AQR‘s Ronald Spatz admits that he might be missing cutting-edge  (read: “young, up-and-coming”) writers by sticking with snail mail. So he did an experiment. He played Submittable’s game for a month in Sept. of 2017.

What happened? “In that time [Spatz] expected to receive three hundred to four hundred manuscripts over the digital transom. Instead he received 1,190—on top of the paper submissions that were still arriving via postal mail.”

This is where holy meets Toledo, folks.

The whole experiment might have led Spatz to change AQR‘s policy for good and go all-in for digital, but he resisted for a wonderful reason: “He believes it’s unethical to invite the deluge of manuscripts he would get online until he has enough staff to read all of them in a timely manner.”

Which can only mean that some lit mags are soldiering on under impossible conditions: too many manuscripts, too few readers, too long a response time. Why would they do such a thing? In the language of that plutocracy we call “U.S.A.”: m-o-n-e-y.

Submittable charges magazines an annual subscription fee, then takes a cut of the proceeds when writers pony up for a hearing. Let’s stick with the AQR example: “Those administrative fees can add up to a small but attractive revenue stream for perennially cash-strapped literary magazines. At AQR, Spatz paid $757 for the journal’s annual Submittable subscription and retained $1.86 of each $3 payment from writers using the system, with the remainder going back to Submittable.  With 1,190 submissions, the revenue from fees more than paid for the journal’s Submittable subscription in just the one month submissions were open. Had AQR kept the online portal open for a full year, Spatz says, ‘we would be getting lots of revenue, which we need, but the thing is, that would be unethical [because the journal doesn’t have the staff to handle the added submissions].'”

Meanwhile, John Fogarty, editor of the Antioch Review, has other solutions to the never-rest Everest Submittable creates.  He’s considering a policy of directly soliciting work from a small group of established writers Antioch has already worked with. “The volume is so large that it is almost impossible to manage at this point,” he says.

If you as a writer think the penny ante-financial drain of regular submission fees is rough, consider the fees charged for increasingly-popular contests. $25, $30, $35. While these might not be salad days for lit mags, there is a discernible uptick in their bottom lines, as they can now use writers’ money to pay off judges and readers of the hopeful writers’ wares.

The conclusion seems to be clear: In its innocent way, Submittable might be hurting your chances of publication. After all, convenience equals congestion equals competition at previously unprecedented levels.

Solutions? You can continue to patronize those magazines that shun reading fees, for one. Or, as the article suggests, you can take a chill pill. Read the magazines you submit to first. Narrow down the periodicals you’d like to be a part of and submit to them and them alone. Stop carpet-bombing!

What’s more, the article wonders, what’s this rush to publication all about anyway? Many writers are rushing works to markets before they’re even ready, just adding to the problem. Wait! Get feedback from fellow writers! Let it cook for a year! Then submit to a small group of magazines—ones you personally love.

If that sounds an awful lot like self-discipline, something people are not very good at, you’re right. Still, it’s advice worth trying. We are in a brave new world here, one where more and more writers are paying more and more money for someone to tell them their writing sucks.

Or, in some cases, one where more and more writers are paying for some front-line intern to skim and reject their work because, well, said intern has such a mountainous pile to scale that he or she is not going to bother giving every single piece a fair reading. Rather, it’s check the box. Caught up. Done. Next?

If that sounds unfair, you need only be reminded that digital life, like life itself, is unfair. As for literary magazines, they want to be fair and they’re doing their best, but injustices will happen. It’s all collateral damage, after all. At a $1.86-a-pop profit, Submittable’s way is here to stay, and everyone has to adjust appropriately.

Where Grapefruit Hold Sway

poetry

Where else but in poetry can a grapefruit hold court, however briefly, over your attention.? In Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light, the author brings the point home well enough thanks to a poem by the late Craig Arnold. The poem raises a grapefruit—yes, a grapefruit—to art form.

Reading the neat little details in this poem should inspire you to raise your own humble wonder (be it citrus or any other object, man- or God-made) to a higher understanding. All you need do is spend some time with it. Look at it more closely. Listen a spell. And see this as being very much like that.

Yeah. That’s it. Simple.

If you hadn’t heard of Arnold before, it’s because he has but two works of poetry to his credit. His book Shells was selected winner of the 1998 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition by some poet or other named. W.S. Merwin. And Wiman thinks Arnold’s sophomore effort, Made Flesh, published a whopping 10 years later.

Let’s join him for a breakfast of literal and figurative delight, shall we?

 

Meditation on a Grapefruit
by Craig Arnold
To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
                    To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
              To tear the husk
like cotton padding        a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
                             To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so carefully       without breaking
a single pearly cell
                    To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling       until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
                  so sweet
                            a discipline
precisely pointless       a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause     a little emptiness
each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

The Power of a Moment: What Snakes Can Teach Us

poetry reading poetry

According to Christian Wiman, “the hunger that gives rise to art must be greater than what art can satisfy.” That alone says it all for me: Art as the itch that can never entirely be scratched.

But Wiman keeps going: “The hunger must be other than what art can satisfy. The poem is means, not end. When art becomes the latter, it eventually acquires an autonomous hunger of its own, and ‘it does not wish you well.'”

By way of example, he offers a “simple” (if such exists) poem by A. E. Stallings that reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s narrow fellow in the grass:

 

Momentary
by A. E. Stallings

I never glimpse her but she goes
Who had been basking in the sun,
Her links of chain mail one by one
Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose.

I never see her lying coiled
Atop the garden step, or under
A dark leaf, unless I blunder
And by some motion she is foiled.

Too late I notice as she passes
Zither of chromatic scale—
I only ever see her tail
Quicksilver into tall grasses.

I know her only by her flowing,
By her glamour disappearing
Into shadow as I’m nearing—
I only recognize her going.

 

This narrow fellow has rhyme that a 70s Swedish pop band could love: ABBA, etc. It also is a neat exercise in description. But what I like best is how it could work as a description for a person, too—one with her defenses (“links of chain mail”) always up, one who is beautiful (“aglint with pewter, bronze, and rose”), one who is transient (“Too late I notice as she passes”) and fleeting (“By her glamour disappearing / Into shadow as I’m nearing”).

Indeed, for some people, the beauty and the attraction lie in never getting to know them very well. Their appeal lies as much in mystery as beauty. If snakes were as obvious and common as worm-seeking robins tilting an eye on the lawn, I dare say poets would not write rhapsodic about the rare moment they are seen, exiting stage left.

As a final note, a tip of the hat to snakes’ wisdom. To run when man approaches is not a bad policy to follow in life. I feel the urge to flee myself, each time I read the newspaper.

One Poetry Editor’s Epiphany

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Christian Wiman, former editor of Poetry magazine and a poet himself, has been there and back. Not just the highs and lows that come with the life of a poet who gets hosannas one second (via acceptances) and brickbats the next (via rejections), but the more soul-searching variety—the one that comes with cancer, bone marrow transplants, and an arduous journey back.

I say this by way of explanation. Wiman’s new collection of essays are about poetry, yes, but they are also about art as faith (and faith as art). Thus, the subtitle in his new book He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art. Thus the reason Wiman walked away from one of the most prestigious editorships for other callings: art, love, faith coming in the form of writing, marriage, and Yale Divinity School (how’s that for a career shift of a higher order?).

The mix of art and faith, so seldom seen together in these troubled times (unless you’re in a museum or Florence, say), makes for a bracing read. And Wiman does not go wild with add-in poems by way of example—either his own or others’—instead choosing to fine tune his own prose voice by choosing support more selectively: the poets and the poems who have spoken to him on a transcendent level.

Who are these poets? They are A. R. Ammons (circular, as he appears at both beginning and end), Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Craig Arnold, Susan Howe, Denise Levertov, Jack Gilbert, Wallace Stevens, and Mark Strand (among others). Of this lot, I’d yet to meet Ammons and Arnold, but all that’s changed now, which is the beauty of reading books—they create a new you under the currency of change.

First, though, Wiman tackles himself, namely his youthful confidence that a poem could be written that would outlast him forever (meaning: enter the annals of eternity).  He no longer believes this. Even Shakespeare will face a time when there are no eyes to feast on his lovely pentameters, Wimar reminds us.

A quote I liked: “Poetry itself—like life, like love, like any spiritual hunger—thrives on longings that can never be fulfilled, and dies when the poet thinks they have been.”

In addition to the poetry and the philosophy, there’s a rich vein of memoir running through this little book. Wiman recalls, for instance, reading poems sent to Poetry in Herculean 8-hour shifts. He writes, “An editor…especially one responsible for a monthly magazine, and especially one whose literary predispositions are, let us say, snarlish, quickly discovers that if complete critical approval is the only criterion for inclusion, then either he or the magazine is going under. I became a different kind of reader.

“I started out as a poet believing that greatness will out, as it were, that fate will find and save the masterpieces from oblivion no matter what. A decade of standing in that aforementioned storm, as well as making my way through the collected works of just about every American poet of note for the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement, has convinced me otherwise. Chance and power play a large part, and I feel sure that some genuinely great things fall through the cracks—forever.”

Wow. Your suspicions (and mine) affirmed! And even though you may be kidding yourself, you can’t help but believe that some of your stuff is some of that stuff. You know, the sterling silver being rejected as flatware. Through cracks the size of the Grand Canyon. In a cold, cruel poetry world where Chance and Power share the throne with an iron fist like Ferdinand and Isabella.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll share a few of my favorite poems among Wiman’s favorite poems. And continue writing for the cracks. Until then….