Yearly Archives: 2019

106 posts

Crossing a Divide

starry night

In the Fall 2019 Rattle, in one sense, the shortest poem has the biggest echo. It crosses the divide. Or maybe it joins what was once a divide and is no more.

For me, it’s personal, but the divide thingy works for any reader, I’m sure.

You see, I am part technology wizard, part Luddite. The Luddite half is chiefly comprised of a small pocket of emptiness. I do not own a cellphone. I do not want to own a cellphone. I cherish my un-cellphoned life known as the emptiness in my pocket.

As might be expected, sans the constant rings and texts, I have more time for the natural world. There is no interruption when I see a flight of American Painted Ladies (a type of butterfly that prefers flowers to circuses, thus avoiding Washington D.C.). There is no interruption when I walk the dog under a full moon on a black river of road passing the house. There is no interruption when I walk down to the pond and smell the damp earth and decay of leaves lining the shore.

No. None of that.

So, mistakenly, I divided poetry topics into natural and artificial (read: human-made). Foolish, really, as any dichotomy of black and white ignoring gray is bound to be. I mean, really. Nature poems vs. Human-centric (and often eccentric) poems, and never the twain shall meet?

Enter the shortest poem in the Fall 2019 Rattle. It was written by someone named Rolli, a sobriquet previously unknown to the likes of me. Monomynous people are either famous or ambitious for fame. Madonna. Cher. Sting. Prince. Beyoncé. Drake.

That’s a lot of singers, but there are writers with mononyms, too: Voltaire, Colette. Moliere. Rumi. Bashō.

But back to Rolli and twains meeting. Nature. Man. Natural. Unnatural. You be the judge:

Let Us Not Even Dream

of speaking
no

for the stars are
luminous
phones

in the palms of night

See what I mean? The cellphone gets equal billing with the stars (unnaturally enough). Unless, of course, you read it as a criticism of cellphones, in which case the twains are not only meeting but high-fiving each other.

I leave it to you, reader, as Rolli left it to me, the Last of the Mohicans (read: cellphone-less sorts with empty pockets and yes, that includes money).

“As Dead Now as Shakespeare’s Children”

poetry poetry prompts teaching poetry writing inspiration writing poetry

David Kirby, another one of those poet slash professors (in this case at Florida State University), is known for long-ish narrative poems, often leavened freely with humor. It’s an engaging combination, one I’ve been coming to know better since I picked up two of his books.

As a short intro, I found an unusually (for him) short poem that makes liberal use of personification. It provides insight into Kirby’s imagination, too.

Imagine, reader, that your broken promises came to life, that they dogged you and surrounded you every day. Think: The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. As you’ll recall, she had so many children (another vagrant dad, apparently) she didn’t know what to do.

That’s you. You and your broken promises. Stuck in a smelly Reebok.

Hey, it might make for a great poetry prompt: Pick an abstract thing (like promises) and give it human properties (Boardwalk, preferably). Run with it in a poem.

Here’s what happened when Kirby did:

Broken Promises
David Kirby

I have met them in dark alleys, limping and one-armed;
I have seen them playing cards under a single light-bulb
and tried to join in, but they refused me rudely,
knowing I would only let them win.
I have seen them in the foyers of theaters,
coming back late from the interval

long after the others have taken their seats,
and in deserted shopping malls late at night,
peering at things they can never buy,
and I have found them wandering
in a wood where I too have wandered.

This morning I caught one;
small and stupid, too slow to get away,
it was only a promise I had made to myself once
and then forgot, but it screamed and kicked at me
and ran to join the others, who looked at me with reproach
in their long, sad faces.
When I drew near them, they scurried away,
even though they will sleep in my yard tonight.
I hate them for their ingratitude,
I who have kept countless promises,
as dead now as Shakespeare’s children.
“You bastards,” I scream,
“you have to love me—I gave you life!”

Note how your personification poem won’t fly unless you surround it with realistic props. Concrete props. Dark alleys. One-armed handicaps. Single light bulbs for rotten illumination.

A promise that’s “small and stupid, too slow to get away,” is not only wearing its personification on its sleeve, it’s showing off with a little alliteration to boot (note return to Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe theme).

What gets me here is how the narrator chases broken promises away but knows they will return to “sleep in my yard tonight.” Now that’s a concrete image. Rogue promises that partake of sleepovers in your back yard. Blanket rolled out, I imagine. Sleeping bags and bug spray. An empty bag of chips blowing in the wind.

So go ahead. Promise to write a personification poem. If you don’t, it’s just another broken promise ringing your doorbell at 3 a.m. (Serves you right.)

Mirror, Mirror, in the Wood Chips

poetry reading poetry

Poets have a knack for universal mirrors. The adjective, in this case, is key. Yes, the poet sees himself in an ordinary object and writes about it, but he doesn’t forget the reader. If the reader, too, identifies, and sees HERself, then and only then is the Eureka! moment universal and thus, complete.

This truism struck home while browsing the Fall 2019 issue of Rattle. On p. 21, I came across old friend from the Midwest, Ted Kooser. The title of Ted’s poem is “Wood Chips,” and yes, Virginia, you’d better believe that even wood chips can serve as a mirror.

How so? Here you go:

Wood Chips
Ted Kooser

I kicked them up pruning a rose bush
at the end of October, just chanced
upon them because they were there, by then,

after thirty years there, grown over
by those grasses you find among roses.
You know how when high water recedes

in a pond that’s been flooded by rains
it sometimes leaves an intricate bed
of bark and twigs woven into the reeds?

Those wood chips were matted like that,
and were driftwood gray, gray driftwood,
although I remembered them fresh

from the chipper, the color and fragrance
of slices of peach, or of rose petals
fallen away. I often find myself now

picking up things and looking at them
both as they are and as they were,
as I am, also, both, both pink and gray.

Ted Kooser is one of those rare poets who can still get away with what I call “Frosties.” You guessed it. A “Frosty” is a Robert Frost-like poem where man meets nature, man sees self in nature, reader shoves man aside because she, too, sees herself in nature. It’s a “Hey, that’s me in God’s mirror!” moment that still works even though nature poems are not exactly the rage in our tempestuous times.

Now when I look at last spring’s wood chips out in the flower beds, I can think of myself first in the pink of life and then, inexplicably, in the gray of it (and you can bet I’ll be demanding some answers of my Maker because that was fast).

This is how poetry is done, Grasshopper. Or one way of thousands, I should say.

Football and Poetry: As Natural as Pepperoni and Pizza

poetry reading poetry

If you polled one hundred high school football players, asking how well football and poetry go together, you’d probably find unanimous agreement that they don’t. Emphatic agreement, even. Shut-up-and-pass-the-eye-black agreement, I dare say.

But sometimes youth has much to learn. If you polled one hundred 50-year-old men who played high school football “back in the day” (as everyone says “up in this day”), you’d find a more nuanced response. Some would better understand the poetry in hiking and hitting, rushing and passing, kicking and scoring.

In fact, I’ve traveled this gridiron before, sharing three football-themed poems, including one of my own. Then, upon receiving a copy of Al Ortolani’s new chapbook, Hansel & Gretel Get the Word on the Street, from Rattle, I found another good football poem.

The theme of this chapbook is high school in general, which makes sense when you learn that Al Ortolani taught English for 43 years (eclipsing my record by a whopping 18 years, bless him).

But it’s the 17th poem in the chapbook that gave me pause. In poetry, pause is good. It means a poem is on to something bigger than itself. It means the reader is thinking, “Hmn.” It means the reader is about to become that special being he likes to be — the rereader.

Thus, along with the three you can find via the link above, I’m adding Ortolani’s poem to the Super Bowl Hall of Poetry Fame. (I can because I own it.) In simple terms, it finds a simple truth about football and what the game means to boys who take it seriously. It originally appeared in Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. See what you think:

Game Prayer
Al Ortolani

Maybe it’s the way boys
look at each other before the last game,
their eyes wet and glimmering with rain.

Maybe it’s that I catch them
in these shy moments of waiting,
turning the world like a pigskin,

flipping it nonchalantly, low spiral
drilling the air. Maybe it’s this
moment before the splash of lights

before the game prayer
before you run from the door.
If so, forgive me

for seeing you so vulnerable,
in that quiet moment
before the helmets.

True, football is a team sport and feeds off the energy and will of the group, but it’s bigger than that. It has individual meaning to each player, a meaning each kid would be hard-pressed to put into words. Because words like “shy” and “vulnerable” wouldn’t come to mind. Because they don’t seem to belong.

And yet they do.

Reading Ulysses: Now I Know How Odysseus Felt

humor poetry

Wait. What page am I on in Ulysses? Only 186 with over 500 to go?

You can never be too old for an Irish door-stopper, I realize, but what about the eyes? Here I have this Oxford paperback of the 1922 version, and my eyes are killing me.

What is the font, anyway? Four? I’ll be blind as Joyce himself by the time this is over!

And really. In the head of first one Bloomin’ protagonist and then another (the inventive young Dedalus)? Stream of consciousness can’t help itself. It’s bound to be penny-ante trivial now and again as it babbles through this thought and that. Almost like Twitter.

#whocares?

But, no. Repeat after me (and my English professors): This is clever stuff.

I know because I am co-reading The New Bloomsday Book, a guide to Bloom’s odyssey, if you will (or even if you won’t). It tells me what I should know before Joyce tells me what I don’t know.

Worst of all for bibliophiles who don’t dedicate 18 hours a day to reading (raises hand)? All the other books mocking me.

I see this 200-pager and that 250-pager, each flashing its wiles, each saying, “Hey there, Big Reader. You could be reading me, and you know it. Why don’t you just put down that there little big book and come over to my place?”

Like the Sirens, they are.

My kingdom for two gobs of bee’s wax! Plugs for the ears! Here, here! (vs. Hear, Hear!). Now, now!

But I can’t let myself get distracted. If I do I”ll never make it to the final page (or, as I call it, “Penelope”).

And I admit it. I’ve peeked — Joyce signed off on that page, writing “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921.”

Seven years, he took to write this thing! And probably somewhere in the many inches of pages that remain to be read, I’ll learn that “7” appears 735 times in the Bible, 54 in the Book of Revelation alone (duck!).

I guess this means I soldier on. In honor of Jimmy’s seven years. In honor of God’s seven days. In honor of the seven months it might take out of my reading life!

(As the Jesuits would say: Pray for me.)

When Blog Tanks Near Empty…

poetry

sherpa

If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s being behind the curve.

You have a cellphone and have for years? I still don’t. You been blogging so long that you finally gave it up? I’m still working the mines. You moved on to the next, great thing — podcasting — by launching your dulcet voice over the Internet? I bought a mike last year and it’s still in the box.

Which, when you do the math, leaves me with no cellphone (blessed be!), no podcast (voice still boxed), and a blog becoming root-bound in its pot (it germinated with this inaugural post on April 3, 2016, making it 3 1/2 years old — downright ancient by blogging years).

Why slug on after all this time in a world where blogs have become a tad anachronistic? It’s a question I ask myself often.

The rationale is both sound and suspect. It keeps me writing, and it keeps me reading (so I can write about what I’m reading). All good. But it also detracts from time that might be better spent on “real” writing.

Uh-oh. That old bugaboo. What’s “real” and what’s not when it comes to writing? Some say all writing is real. Others say no — it has to be creativity for the sake of art or, better yet, art you can market.

Not that marketing is the be-all. Royalties are insignificant, especially for poets. But readers? They’re significant, indeed!

That leads to another problem. What if more people are reading your blog (which, to you, is a mere incidental) than your poetry (which you care about because it mixes creativity with craft)?

As a certain Prince of Denmark once said, “That is the question!”

So when I get the occasional compliment about this blog from someone via e-mail or the comments section, saying how much they appreciate the advice or inspiration or sharing of great poetry, I always say the same thing: If you appreciate it and want to show it in real terms (ones that speak to all artists), read my work by clicking the titles of one or both of my poetry books (The Indifferent World and Lost Sherpa of Happiness). They’re in the righthand column under the words “Available on Amazon.” Then follow through: add to cart and Amazon Prime the book’s tank!

Intimidated by price? That’s three ice coffee lattes (or whatever it is people are drinking — being behind the curve, I’m still quaffing HOT coffee… black, yet).

Such actions would make you a truly appreciative reader, both of blog and poetry. And that would be the best gift any behind-the-curve poet slash blogger could ask for.

To Teach Poetry, Get on the Cycle!

poetry teaching poetry

cycle

As a teacher of literature, I was never a big fan of “units.” In teach-speak, a unit is a collection of lessons that feature skills, strategies, and formative assessments leading to a final goal (the summative assessment), which can take many forms (traditionally, however, a paper or a test).

The problem with units is, quite simply, they have a beginning date and an ending date. Or, to be more specific, a hard ending date.

The thunk of hard ending dates is particularly felt when the unit is on topics such as grammar, essays, or poetry. The message to students? We will study grammar, essays, or poetry for these four weeks and then we will move on.

It’s the moving on part that’s a knowledge killer. If a teacher’s focus on something like poetry is compartmentalized by a unit in September, never to be seen again in the course of an academic year, the students will of course commit poetic terms, skills, and practices to short-term memory, spit them out on a summative assessment, and promptly forget everything as they move on to the next “compartment” (the short story unit, say, or the novel unit).

Alas, life doesn’t work that way (though the game of school too often does). In fact, our long-term memory is built on lessons that continually circle back, reminding us of skills and practices we learned in the past. It’s the seemingly inconsequential “Oh, yeah!” a student makes when seeing a poetry term again or experiencing the practice of reading or writing poetry again that makes a difference. Of such small bricks, spread throughout the academic year, are long-term memory walls built!

Bottom line: Thematic units work much better than units by genre. Grammar, vocabulary, poetry, short stories, essays, etc., should never “go away,” disappearing like an obscure Route 66 motel in the rearview mirror. No. Each should continually reappear, the compartmentalized curriculum map be damned.

In a similar vein, the practice of drilling a skill until “mastery” (big time quotation marks!) is achieved is suspect if you never return to that skill again. Students can lose patience if the classroom topic goes on and on like a Charles Dicken paid-by-the-word novel. It’s much better to teach a skill, practice it, move on to another, and keep circling back to it, ensuring that the group of skills you are teaching are related and support each other while at the same time providing some variety.

Such a practice is a microcosm of the thematic over genre unit concept. Big ideas are learned over big stretches of time. This is similar to a carpenter, who employs many resurfacing skills in building a house. Various tools and various strategies are used over and over as challenges and tasks come and go, sometimes in different guises, sometimes requiring a degree of problem-solving.

This interesting and ultimately rewarding practice should be reflected in the learning process as well, as students learn in similar, lifelike, cyclical patterns, bit by bit, hammer to nail, foundation to roof.

Filling Holes in the Reading Résumé

poetry

Filling holes. Classical holes, yet. Not just any “dog-just-dug-it-up-in-showers-of-dirt” holes.

Every year or two I take on a behemoth that I haven’t read but should have read because so many better readers than me have and have been the better for it. Accomplishments on this list include The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), Don Quixote (Cervantes), and Moby-Dick (Melville).

In each case, they’re the type of books that people expect to find on your résumé and are surprised when they don’t. You are, after all, “well-read” (or at least rumor has it).

This year, as of yesterday, the intimidator of the moment is James Joyce’s Ulysses. I am not traveling alone, however. Per advice of better-read friends, I am reading a companion book at the same time: Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book.

The routine is this: Bloomsday Book about chapter you are about to begin, followed by same chapter in Joyce’s book. Kind of like Virgil walking you through Dante’s wine cellars.

Not that I’m any Joyce neophyte. I have read both Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I even see this web site (I would say “blog,” but they are hopelessly out of date) as an ongoing Portrait of the Poet as a Getting-On (I refuse to say “Old”) Man. So there’s that. But neither of those quite measures up to the reindeer games found in Ulysses.

The trouble with reading a “filling-a-hole” book? It pretty much clears the deck on your reading schedule for huge swaths of calendar. That’s because you’re scratching your chin and going, “Hmn” so much. Or rereading a curious paragraph or three. Or making a notation for future reference (that will never be referred to).

But that’s OK. Keep your eyes on the prize, because, when you reach Chapter the Last, it’s always worth it. You feel like you do coming out of church or donating blood. You know: that certain nobility of spirit. As if to say, “Yep. Uh-huh. That was me over there, chatting up Joyce like we were old pals.” (It helped that Jimmy couldn’t see who he was talking to, but….)

So cheer me on, why don’t you. And if you’re not filling any holes in your own reading résumé, ask yourself why not. Then pick a doorstop — any doorstop — and get reading! You don’t need Penelope to tell you that you’ll be the richer for it.

“Fiction Isn’t Machinery, It’s Alchemy.”

poetry writing writing inspiration

Before I say a reluctant goodbye to Peter Orner’s book, Am I Alone Here?, that has been such good company these past three days, I thought I’d share a few final quotes I marked in the book.

Six are from Orner himself, and three are ones he fished from Frank O’Connor’s book, The Lonely Voice (and boy, the writer’s voice is a lonely one, all right — especially if readers won’t buy and read his book).

“For a long time I thought reading would somehow make me a better writer. So I’d read in order to write. I’d justify the hours I spent with my feet up and call reading “my work.” Now I see how ludicrous this is. All the Chekhov in thirteen volumes won’t help me write a sentence that breathes. That comes from somewhere else, somewhere out in the world, where mothers die in car accidents accidents and daughters hide in pain. And yet I have come to the conclusion that reading keeps me alive, period. I wake to read and sleep so I can get up in the morning and read some more.”

“One thing I’m sure of, though, is that I’m drawn to certain stories because of their defiant refusal to do what I just tried to do, that is, explain themselves. Fiction isn’t machinery, it’s alchemy. Anybody who claims to shed complete light on the mechanisms by which fiction operates is peddling snake oil. A piece of fiction can have all the so-called essential elements, setting, character, plot, tension, conflict, and still be dead on the page that no amount of resuscitation would ever do any good.”

“Tolstoy, who (generally) adored Chekhov, once inferred that he might have been an even better writer if he had not been so dedicated a doctor. With all respect, Count, that’s bullshit. Chekhov’s being a doctor may well have been the key to how well he understood the connection between our ailing bodies and our ailing minds. To concern yourself with the hidden lives of others, including the long dead, especially at a time when you are trying to endure your own pain—is there a more generous act in life, in literature?”

“Stories fail if you read them only once. You’ve got to meet a story again and again, in different moods, in different eras of your life.”

“I once read that a reader is a person who lacks a critic’s complacency. I’ve always strived to be an uncomplacent reader, to retain a sense of wonder, even for stories I’ve read a dozen times. Sometimes I read a story and I think about it for hours, days, or, if I’m lucky, years. The thinking is the thing. The most I can give back to any story is a silence born of awe. But there are times, like these, when you want to say something, anything, if only to yourself and the wind in the trees.”

“It gets me every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own, the people who do exist, who do walk the earth.”

And three quotes Peter Orner shares from Frank O’Connor’s book, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story:

“For the short-story writer there is no such thing as essential form. Because his frame of reference can never be the totality of a human life, he must be forever selecting the point at which he can approach it, and each selection he makes contains the possibility of a new form as well as the possibility of a complete fiasco.”

“The saddest thing about the short story is the eagerness with which those who write it best try to escape it.”

“There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness.”

The Humbling Beauty in Reading-About-Reading Books

poetry publishing writing

Every writer is a reader, and every reader indulges himself now and then in a good “reading about reading” book.

This is where I’m at now as I amble through Peter Orner’s Am I Alone Here? (The answer is, Clearly not, P.O.!)

The thing about reading-about-reading books is how expensive they can be. No, I don’t mean the price on the book itself (this one is a $16.95 paperback), I mean the books the author tempts you with.

Think of it this way. You = addict. Author = dealer. Recommended books = the goods.

And so easy, the way this book is set up! Each chapter begins with a picture of the book Orner is lauding at great length. All oxymoronic, considering the long praise is for short story collections, for the most part. Orner, a practitioner himself, frowns on the novel-love of the publishing industry and says, six ways to Sunday night, “What about the short story, that little shining city on a hill?”

Thus he adds to my list such must-see collections as Chekhov’s Selected Stories (but of course, when talking stories, one starts at Mecca), The Stories of Breece DJ Pancake, All Stories Are True (John Edgar Wideman), The Lonely Voice (Frank O’Connor), The Bride of the Innisfallen (Eudora Welty), Selected Stories (Robert Walser), The Burning Plain and Other Stories (Juan Rulfo), All the Days and Nights (William Maxwell), Cheating at Canasta (William Trevor), Collected Stories (Wright Morris), Dusk and Other Stories (James Salter), and Spirits and Others Stories (Richard Bausch).

This is an incomplete list, but if you count the pennies in your cart on Barnes & Noble, you’ll see you’re about 1,267 poem sales away from breaking even.

What’s even more daunting is how well-read authors of reading-about-reading books make you feel as a supposedly seasoned reader. On the list above, for instance, I’ve only read the Chekhov and the Pancake and I’ve never even heard of (until I listened now) Juan Rulfo.

Where have I been, one wonders? What have I been doing with my wastrel reading life, one cries? And how is it that I haven’t fully appreciated these short story masters as much as Orner has?

All good questions, but that’s the point. That’s why you buy a reading-about-reading book in the first place. When you’re done, you select a few of the recommended books that seem most intriguing to you by weighing the excerpts provided by the author and the commentary he adds. Then you buy them to see exactly what’s been going on here, right under your negligent nose all of these years.

And you can’t stop there, either. When writing about Pancake, Orner says, “Stories fail if you read them only once. You’ve got to meet a story again and again, in different moods, in different eras of your life.” Can’t you just feel your reading to-do list growing, like that 10-year-old kid of yours who, just yesterday, was accepted to a college?

Meanwhile, there’s pitiful me, the suddenly chastened “well-read” guy who hasn’t read much anything as described in Am I Alone Here?

Guilty as charged. But even though I haven’t read all of these authors, now I’ve at least read about all of these authors. Doesn’t that count for something? At least until I buy two or three of the collections Orner waxes rhapsodic about?

Yes, it does. And it must in a world where we can’t be too hard on ourselves, even as readers and especially as writers who read and realize that reading more begets writing more and writing better.

Besides, you have to console yourself, has it ever occurred to you that you’ve read a couple hundred books the author of this reading-about-reading book hasn’t?

Ah. Breathe in, breathe out. Reading is not a competition, thank God.