Monthly Archives: March 2020

16 posts

The Anti-Hero’s Journey: Poets Can Play, Too

poetry reading poetry

Many novels follow a circular pattern, much like the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell made famous. But what of the anti-hero’s journey? Or a world with journeys that lack any heroes? Can they start in one place, go out on their fraught arcs, and return, too, changed irrevocably?

The questions come to mind when reading Carolyn Forché’s poem “Selective Service.” It starts with the most innocent of images: the snow angel. It ends with angels, too. But in 26 lines, the definition of angelic bends a bit.

Writing a circular poem like this means that the beginning and end — similar, yet not — are only half the battle. It’s what comes between that matters.

 

Selective Service
Carolyn Forché

We rise from the snow where we’ve
lain on our backs and flown like children,
from the imprint of perfect wings and cold gowns,
and we stagger together wine-breathed into town
where our people are building
their armies again, short years after
body bags, after burnings. There is a man
I’ve come to love after thirty, and we have
our rituals of coffee, of airports, regret.
After love we smoke and sleep
with magazines, two shot glasses
and the black and white collapse of hours.
In what time do we live that it is too late
to have children? In what place
that we consider the various ways to leave?
There is no list long enough
for a selective service card shriveling
under a match, the prison that comes of it,
a flag in the wind eaten from its pole
and boys sent back in trash bags.
We’ll tell you. You were at that time
learning fractions. We’ll tell you
about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet
or lost. Let them speak for themselves.
We lie down in the fields and leave behind
the corpses of angels.

 

And so the traditional, circular arc is as viable an option for poets as it is for novelists. Here Forché shows just how effective it can be.

Have a before and after, happily ever or not? Think about putting it to pen. You might even start in the middle and work your way forward and backward.

The Sweet Seduction of Narrative Poetry

poetry reading poetry

Humans are hardwired for story, all right. Suckers for it. Can’t resist it.

Got a good tale to tell? Ready with just the right amount of detail, cutting all the rest? Then poetry is waiting, open arms, just like any other genre.

Don’t believe me? Check out Walter McDonald’s narrative poem below. You find yourself believing in these two men in a matter of five lines, identifying with what they’re both about and up to, giving yourself up to the inevitable turn at the end because you have to get there to see what happens.

 

What If I Didn’t Die Outside Saigon
Walter McDonald

So what do you want? he growled inside the chopper,
strapping me roughly to the stretcher
as if I were already dead. “Jesus,” I swore,
delirious with pain, touching the hot mush of my legs.
“To see my wife. Go home, play with my kids,

help them grow up. You know.” His camouflaged face
was granite, a colonel or sergeant who’d seen it all.
He wore a parka in the rain, a stubby stale cigar
bit tight between his teeth, a nicked machete
like a scythe strapped to his back. He raised a fist

and held the chopper. He wore a gold wrist watch
with a bold sweep-second hand. The pilot glanced back,
stared, and looked away. Bored, the old man asked,
Then what? his cigar bobbing. I swallowed morphine
and choked, “More time. To think, plant trees,

teach my kids to fish and catch a ball.”
Yeah? he said, sucking the cigar, thinner
than he seemed at first. Through a torrent of rain,
I saw the jungle closing over me like night.
“And travel,” I said, desperate, “to see the world.

That’s it, safe trips with loved ones. Long years
to do whatever. Make something of my life. Make love,
not war.” I couldn’t believe it, wisecracking clichés,
about to die. He didn’t smile, but nodded. So?
What then? “What then? Listen, that’s enough,

isn’t that enough?” His cigar puffed
into flame, he sucked and blew four perfect rings
which floated through the door and suddenly
dissolved. Without a word, he leaned and touched
my bloody stumps, unbuckled the stretcher straps

and tore the Killed-in-Action tag from my chest.
And I sat up today in bed, stiff-legged, out of breath,
an old man with a room of pictures of children
who’ve moved away, and a woman a little like my wife
but twice her age, still sleeping in my bed.

 

The abstract dreams of the injured man and the reality of descriptions and dialogue inside the chopper dance nicely together. And man, that final stanza, that “tore the Killed-in-Action tag from my chest.” Those final four lines of realization contrasting dream life from real life, “what if” life from “actually happened” life.

Makes you glad you’re hardwired for story, doesn’t it? Makes you realize you have stories to share, too, and this isn’t a bad model to emulate.

Not bad at all.

Loss of Libraries: A Hole in Our Social Fabric

blathering comma mine poetry

 

The Year of Living Dangerously, a. k. a. 2020, will be remembered as a year of many losses, greatest of which is human life. There will be many small losses to account for, too, including human interaction, jobs, and in some cases, sanity.

Less noticed on the list of these losses is the shuttering of public libraries. It’s only been a few weeks, but already I begin to notice this hole in the social fabric. Admittedly, some people don’t even use their town libraries or the inter-library loan program. Hell, some people don’t even read. But then there’s the rest of us. The ones who consume two kinds of food—that on our plates and that between covers.

When the libraries shut, we were all frozen in time, left with the books we happened to have checked out when towns and cities called the whole thing off. In my case, it is only four books, now all finished.

If only I had a Nostradamus inkling that this was coming! I would have checked out a couple dozen, as there is no limit. Instead, I have these four with their due dates on perpetual hold. And one inter-library request that still reads “In Transit,” even though it is no more transiting than Plymouth Rock.

If you are a library fan like me, it is probably for the same reasons. Purchasing books to feed your reading habit is a fast lane to the poor farm, and money wasn’t exactly flowing before our time of troubles, never mind during them.

Without the library, then, we are forced to turn to our own bookshelves. Isn’t it odd how they are populated with books we always said we would read but didn’t? In some cases, these are books we purchased, maybe with a birthday or Christmas gift card, thinking we couldn’t wait, and then could.

Scouring my own shelves, I see a few examples. Chief among them is Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. I’ve had it so long, I can’t even tell you why I bought it. Yet there it sits, as apparently the main character likes to do. Perhaps these cabin days are perfect for Oblomov’s temperament. Perhaps it’s time to pick up this still-pristine copy of Goncharov’s classic and dive in.

Then there’s the door-stopping biography Grant by Ron Chernow. I read and enjoyed Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton. I love reading about the Civil War. So I purchased it, sure that I would be getting to it sooner rather than later.

And yet…. And yet…. Once it arrived, I felt little inclination to pick it up, favoring instead shorter books or books of the moment, the kind that constantly catch my fancy.

I have a beautiful clothbound copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, which I actually started to read once upon a year. The bookmark still sits around 1/3rd of the way in. Bookmarks are patient things, ready and willing for readers who are once again ready and willing. Now there’s an option, I’m telling myself. Good old Jean Valjean.

Then there are the collections. At one time, in the early days of its inception, the Library of America started to sell hardcover copies of American classics. I purchased around 30 books by subscription before bailing due to mounting costs. Do you know how many of those books have gone untouched? They’re pretty to look at, with spines colorful as confetti, yet they gather a Library of American Dust.

I have a complete set of Mark Twain books, too, and though I have read many of these (admirably enough), I have not read just as many. Any of those would be ready and willing, should I step up. I need only step up!

Yessiree, Bob. These are the times that try men’s reading souls. These are also the times where readers have to look within, and in this case, “within” means our own bookshelves where all of us keep, free of board, some unread orphans.

How about you? What’s on your unread bookshelf?

 

Whither the Public Park?

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swan

Remember public parks? You entered them with only one thought in mind: enjoying the fresh air, the greenery, the pond, maybe, with some ducks, swans, and geese.

Today, even public parks have become fraught. Some, in the interest of “social distancing,” are being closed like our beaches. Others are still open, but decidedly not with the same vibe.

Yesterday my wife and I visited a park with trails that ran through fields, woods, and salt marshes. One trail led to the sea, where the Atlantic was in high dudgeon, crashing beautifully against the shore.

Coming back on a narrow stretch of trail through the woods, we came across another couple coming the other way. The woman reacted oddly. She stepped off the path into the wood, despite the fact that the grounds were soaked and her sneakers were getting wet. She turned her back to us as we passed around four feet away (we could do no better).

It took all of two seconds to pass, and yet her reaction was almost medieval, as if we were misunderstood lepers or something. Welcome to the new world of coronavirus, where something as ordinary as public parks, like everything else, are suddenly transformed and other-worldly.

And while some might consider it overreaction, her behavior at least deserves respect on multiple fronts: She’s doing the right thing for the community, what she’s been asked to do, what science recommends that we do until we get through this. It’s odd, but it’s where we’re at now.

So let’s get nostalgic, shall we, and look at Wendy Mnookin’s poem, “The Public Garden.” By line 3 in stanza one, you know it is Boston (“swan boats”), a place I’ve been more than once. And yet, reading it deep in March of 2020, it all appears rather strange.

 

The Public Garden
Wendy Mnookin

The sun is shining and I’m content
to be myself, walking across the Common
as families queue up by the Swan Boats,

real swans parting the water
in elegant wakes. This is
la vie en rose—

on a lawn vivid with spring
people walk their dogs, peeling off
in clusters of introduction and gossip;

below a sign that shouts Don’t
Feed the Ducks, families throw
wadded-up bread into the pond;

kids on the carousel want
More! More! Frisbee players,
tourists in Red Sox caps, babies

with their dimpled elbows,
the guy on stilts, the pretzel vendor,
the woman holding out a cup for change

as she recites our forecast,
I’m taking it in, all of it, sun
and melting cones, skinned knees

and soothing words
and single shining tears,
whatever love has rained on us all.

 

Weird how the times can make lines read differently. For instance, “peeling off / in clusters of introduction and gossip;” That’s history.

And the civil disobedience bit rings a bit more true and a bit more foreboding: “below a sign that shouts Don’t / Feed the Ducks, families throw / wadded-up bread into the pond”.

Because the reality is this: For every woman who turns her back to you and huddles hard against a forest to protect herself from possible “community transmission,” there are 50 people who are flouting the rules, who think this is all of a joke, who are—as much as possible—proceeding with life as usual, to the detriment of all. My rights over your rights, in other words. People who are a community of one.

Yep. These are strange times, all right. And, in some cases, it means you read poems through a glass darkly, seeing them in new and unexpected ways. A public garden, for instance, as bit of unanticipated nostalgia.

Context, it’s called. And the inevitable melting cones and skinned knees of history that only was yesterday.

 

Aphorisms to Live By

poetry

glc

Holed up in a cabin that looks suspiciously like your house? Ready to “waste” some time wisely? Consider the sanity we call aphorisms, plenty of which can be found in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books.

The word “waste” comes not from garbage, as you might suspect, but from the business practice of jotting down transactions in real time, only to organize them later in a more formal ledger. Thus, any ideas that came into Lichtenberg’s constantly buzzing head would land in his “waste” book, which is anything but and, in truth, shows some polished, ledger-like thought.

The version I read comes from nyrb’s estimable paperback series (an addiction that could prove costly, so readers beware). Some of my favorite GCL thoughts are as follows:

    • “Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato’s dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.” This resonates with me because I’ve found that, often in life, playing the role of anti-anything amounts to the same hubris as the opposed sentiment to begin with. For instance, to be overly vocal in your disdain for the wealthy and their laughable pride in materialism is, in itself, a sort of “materialism” — the riches of “anti-materialism,” or the pride in ostentatious poverty, if you will. Look at me, at how I wear my pride in despising the laughable pride of others. As Plato might say, it’s all one, and thus do opposites recognize parts of themselves in each other.
    • “Every observer of human nature knows how hard it is to narrate experiences in such a way that no opinion or judgment interferes with the narration.” Is there such a thing as complete objectivity? I think not, and this aphorism speaks to that.
    • “A principal rule for writers, and especially those who want to describe their own sensations, is not to believe that their doing so indicates they possess a special disposition of nature in this respect. Others can perhaps do it just as well as you can. Only they do not make a business of it, because it seems to them silly to publicize such things.” Here we have Lichtenberg anticipating blogs (I write, therefore I am somebody). And yet, Lichtenberg is guilty himself — knowingly so and with a wink. As for my blog, if you read it, please assume the winking behind its “specialness.”
    • “Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.” Mark Twain often sneered at “the damned human race” and held up animals as the superior breed. Maybe it’s that abject “nobility,” a near neighbor of “pride,” that manifests itself in our ideas about our bodies, our modesty, our high sense of decorum — this despite the fact that our bodies are, in one sense, no different than the bodies of animals (who really don’t obsess about the covering of their mortal coils the way we do). That said, I am most grateful that most people do cover their coils. “Mortality” is the least of these coils’ problems.
    • “We are only too inclined to believe that if we possess a little talent work must come easily to us. You must exert yourself, man, if you want to do something great.” We are only too fond of short cuts and of letting ourselves off the hook by way of excuses. One of our favorites: I can’t do that or do that as well because I lack the talent that x has.
    • “You can take the first book you lay your hands on and with your eyes closed point to any line and say: A book could be written about this. When you open your eyes, you will seldom find you are deceived.” Who needs prompts? Just take Lichtenberg’s advice. And yet, despite this, there is nothing new under the sun. The wisdom of Lichtenberg meets the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Amazing.
    • “The individual often praises what is bad, but the whole human race praises only the good.” What I most admire about Lichtenberg is his affinity for irony.
    • “That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.” See what I mean?
    •  “It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written.” This aphorism should be posted above the desk of every poet — and every poetry journal editor.
    • “We have the often thoughtless respect accorded ancient laws, ancient usages and ancient religion to thank for all the evil in the world.” One need only read the front section of the newspaper to reveal the wisdom in this thought.
    • “It is impossible to have bad taste, but many people have none at all. Most people have no ideas, says Dr. Price, they talk about a thing but they don’t think: this is what I have several times called having an opinion.” And this should be posted above the entrance to the U.S. Capitol — a Congress of no ideas, of talking about things without thinking. Or, simply tune to Fox News, a lair of heated and often dangerous to breathe air.
    • “It is very much in the order of nature that toothless animals should have horns: is it any wonder that old men and women should often have them?” File under the category, “Older and bolder.”
    • “From love of fatherland they write stuff that gets our dear fatherland laughed at.” Another thought for our posturing, prattling politicians. Or ugly Americans wherever you may find them.
    • “I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others, too.” Consider him or her you call friend. Reconsider the source of your admiration. Is it a facet of you yourself you’re admiring? And, when your friend disappoints you, is it because you yourself have surfaced in your friend?
    • “Wine is accredited only with the misdeeds it induces: what is forgotten is the hundreds of good deeds of which it is also the cause. Wine excites to action: to good actions in the good, to bad in the bad.” Hmn… I wonder if Lichtenberg was an oenophile? And if he considered himself “good”? A toast to correct answers!
    • “The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.” I am a big (little?) fan of “little things” and believe that they are difference makers in writing, in cooking, in working, in most anything you care to bring up. Together, the little things move valleys.

 

  • “He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.” Cautionary words not only for keepers of waste books, but writers of blogs! Are we that enamored of our own thoughts and words that we think others visit (much less return) to read them? Stats on WordPress are a quick cure for that delusion (and reaffirmation of Lichtenberg’s words).
  • “What am I? What shall I do? What can I believe and hope for? Everything in philosophy can be reduced to this…” It’s hard to get past the first question, much less face dragons #2 and 3! I’m on the stretch drive of life and still haven’t solved for x in the equation x = me.
  • “Writing is an excellent means of awakening in every man the system slumbering within him; and everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.” If Lichtenberg’s words can be used to mock blogging, so can they be used to tout it. Behold! I write, therefore I am!
  • “The Catholics once burned the Jews and failed to reflect that the mother of God was of that nation, and even now do not reflect that they worship a Jewess.” Lichtenberg was fascinated by matters of religion and counted himself an enlightened doubter. Given his druthers between Catholics and Protestants, however, he does his fellow Germans proud. Luther would applaud.
  • “Use, use your powers: what now costs you effort will in the end become mechanical.” If I could teach students of life one aphorism to live by, this would be it. It does get easier! But first, discipline and a work ethic.
  • “To me there is no more odious kind of person than those who on every occasion believe they are obliged to be ex officio witty.” Ah, the office wag… the class clown… the drunk wearing the lampshade. God love ’em (because no one else can).
  • “You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.” People hear what they want to hear, and they seldom want to hear the truth. Speculation and conspiracy theories, on the other hand? There’s no end to the hunger. See: Fox News and The White House.
  • “The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.” Is this another way of saying “talk is cheap”? Or maybe, “action speaks louder than words”? Thus do cliches become novel aphorisms.
  • “He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery…” One admirable trait of Lichtenberg is his ability to criticize even himself. Clearly he has proven his own theory: We are all susceptible to some kinds of flattery, try as we might to remain “pure.”
  • “Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?” At times, irony proves its point more readily than speeches and treatises.

Can “Hygge” Still Work for Us?

humor opinion poetry

hygge

Forget bird. Forget Grease. Hygge is the word. Thing is, can the word survive a pandemic?

For those of you who think Danish is something you wash down with coffee, hygge is pronounced by the consonant-happy Danes like so: “HOO-gah.” In English, it translates to “cozy.”

Right out of the gate, I prefer the sound of hygge over cozy. When I hear “cozy,” I think of overpaid realtors who love the wimpy euphemism to describe a cramped apartment. Hygge, on the other hand, sounds like something privates might bark in reply to a drill sergeant (hoo-gah!). Or something a runner might hawk up and spit out to clear his air passage (hoo-gah!).

I first discovered this word in The New York Times via this feature. What it all boils down to is comfort at home. Nothing’s rotten in Denmark if you’ve got a fire blazing, a few dozen candles flickering, a cup of hot coffee, and, of course, big warm socks to fend the cold from your most distant provinces.

You’ll want some porridge, too (you guessed it—Goldilocks was Danish). Hearty stuff with ingredients like rye, barley, black lentils, and bits of pumpkin and turkey. And if it’s late in the day, you can dispose of the coffee and substitute in. You know. Something appropriately Nordic (read: “alcoholic”) like glogg.

What I liked least in the article was it’s not so subtle advertisements for a couple of books on the topic. And its headline, telling Crazy Marie Kondo, the neatnik apparatchik , to move over and give hygge its 30 seconds of fame.

Blah, blah, blah. If you’re hyggelig (the adjective form, pronounced HOO-gah-lee) and you know it, you don’t need no stinking books. Just sort of take the article’s cue and grab the things that make you feel home for the holidays (“holidays” meaning “any day you’re not at work,” which, in March of 2020, translates to “every day of the week unless you’re a UPS driver”).

This is all guaranteed stuff, this hygge. The Happiness Institute (yes, Virginia, it does exist) has proclaimed the Danes princes of world happiness year in and year out. How do they do it? A whole lot of hygge. That and bacon.

Alas, 2020 has hygge on the run. Can we take pandemic-induced cabin fever and turn it into hygge? Is the happiness of it all that potent?

And while we’re at it, I might as well ask this: If hygge is the word despite everything, will we have enough toilet paper to survive all that fireside eating and quaffing, especially if some of our considerate neighbors have stocked their entire basements and attics with the stuff?

OK, one better and a finishing thought: Do you have the mental discipline to enjoy hygge when it is a government-enforced hygge with nary a Dane in sight (unless you’re reading Hamlet)?

Not easily answered, any of these questions. But still, if you can make a punch bowl of lemonade from an entire crate of lemons, you can find some value in this entire concept.

If home is our lot, let’s love it a whole lot. In kid parlance, let’s play “Pretend” and hygge until the cows come home.

Berryman On the Value of Indifference

poetry writing inspiration

berryman

While spending too much time on the Internet (which is still holding up under a lot of weight), I came across this little quote from the poet John Berryman to wannabe writers everywhere (who, small thanks to the virus, should be doing more writing than usual by not spending too much time on the Internet):

“I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.”

Berryman also advised wall paper consisting of rejection notes from editors, but really, it’s too complicated nowadays, what with the cost of toner or printer ink or whatever you want to call that stuff apparently made of gold and frankincense and sold at Staples for about a quarter of your weekly salary (that is, if you are still employed during these Times of Trouble).

Yeah. That’s it for today. I have to go to that dystopian nightmare formerly known as a “supermarket” right now.

Pray for me. And have a good, anti-socially distant day.

Pandemics Favor Readers & Writers (File Under Small Consolations)

blathering comma mine opinion poetry

 

Although it’s true that pandemics are more democratic than a kids’ pick-up basketball game without refs, they do play favorites in some ways. For infecting people? It is to laugh. I mean to help certain people to help themselves.

Tops among these favorites are the introverts who love to read and write. All our lives we’ve been told that our pastimes are among the loneliest, and it’s true, but consider the adjustments going on in society now that the world at large is under siege.

Hunkering down? Sheltering in place? For most, these words are horrifying. For most, these words bring visions of cabin fever, solitary confinement, boredom run rampant.

Not so for the reader / writer. Bookish introverts have some experience with this. And we have role models, too. People like William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton. Both of these luminaries lived through the Bubonic Plague (though in different years during the 17th century).

In 1606, when his acting troupe, The King’s Men, suspended production due to the ravages of the Black Death, Shakespeare hunkered down and sheltered in place (he just didn’t know it) to write a few trivial plays. Today they are known as King Lear, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra. Not bad for a plague year’s work.

In fact, one wonders—were there no plague—if all three of these would have come to fruition that year. Maybe two would? Or one?

Isaac Newton, too, had to batten the hatches and hide from perfidious disease. It was 60 years later in 1666 (one of the Devil’s favorites), and Newton was forced to cabin in Cambridge. While the Grim Reaper worked tirelessly outside, the wigged wonder harvested wondrous ideas inside. Namely Newtonian physics and some torture now known as “calculus.”

So, friends, the conditions may look bleak for socialites and extroverts who love to party, participate, go clubbing, go out to eat, go out to theaters, go out to ball games, et and cetera, but for you?

For you, there’s now no excuse. This is your hour (week, month, year) to shine! This is your chance to not only read more books than ever before, but to write more than you ever have.

Yes, even if the Internet collapses. Neither reading nor writing is Internet-dependent, after all. Annus mirabilis, then. “Miraculous year” or “amazing year” or “year of wonders,” it means.

2020, in so many numerals.

So consider this your pep talk. Your positive thought for the bleak day. You’re looking at the biggest lemon of your lifetime outside that window (or inside that screen). Take courage and make the biggest pitcher of lemonade you can.

It’s called survival. And opportunity. The strangest bedfellows you’d ever expect to find under sheets.

 

A Sure Sign That Your Poems Might Suck

marketing poetry poetry poetry books poetry journals publishing reading poetry submitting poetry writing poetry

ordgen

Kim Addonizio’s book Ordinary Genius came out 11 years ago, so the statistics I’m about to cite about poetry readership are dated. The greater point remains valid, however. Let’s dive in ipso fasto and meet around the excerpt, shall we?

 

“Books of poetry will teach you more than your mentor or professor or the well-known poet you have traveled to a conference to work with. Reading is like food to a writer; without it, the writer part of you will die—or become spindly and stunted. If you’re afraid that reading will make you less original, don’t be. Falling under the spell of—or reacting against—other writers is part of what will lead you to your own work. Reading in the long tradition of poetry shows you what has lasted, and those poems are there to learn from. Reading your contemporaries shows you what everyone else is up to in your own time, so you can map the different directions of the art. There’s never one route to poetry, one style. Reading widely will help you see this.

“Here is a sobering statistic: Poetry, which has been for many years one of the premier poetry journals in America, has about ten thousand subscribers. Every year, it receives ten times that many submissions from writers hoping to land a poem on its pages.

“That’s a hundred thousand people, writing.

“Are they reading? Possibly. Maybe they’re not subscribing to Poetry because they’re spending their money on books by Neruda and Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser and Derek Walcott. But in fact, a large number of people who want to write poetry don’t seem to like to read it. Many journals have a circulation of a few hundred copies, and poetry books sell dismally compared to fiction or memoir: the first print run is usually one or two thousand copies.

“Maybe you’re one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don’t read, your writing is going to suck.”

 

I love it when people get delicate, don’t you? Kind of like Mom and Dad when you were a kid growing up. Or certainly your siblings. Direct and to the point.

What’s worth gleaning here is this: Although she runs workshops herself, Addonizio is convinced that immersing yourself in the reading of poetry is the best training a wannabe poet can get, period. And yet the statistics seem to show that something else is afoot. Lots of writing, but nowhere near as much reading.

Certainly there’s a marked reluctance to plunking one’s money down for a poetry book or journal. This is surprising, considering the number of poetry practitioners is legion. Why do you think you wait six, nine, twelve months for a response from poetry editors? The transom looks like L.A.’s highway system, that’s why, while the poetry-reading traffic resembles rush hour in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

What’s wrong with this picture? Addonizio would say, “Where to begin….” She finishes her chapter on reading with this flourish:

 

“I can’t stress this point enough: You need to soak up as many books as you can. Even the ones you don’t like can teach you something. If you were a painter, you’d spend time looking at works of art from every period in history. A chef I know, whenever he travels, eats enough for three people—he wants to sample all the dishes. Boxers study the great fights of the past, like the Ali-Forman “Thrilla in Manila.” Marketers look at the successes of past products to try to duplicate those successes. Poetry isn’t a product in that way, but you see what I mean. Read. Imitate shamelessly. Steal when you can get away with it. T. S. Eliot said, ‘Good poets imitate. Great poets steal.’

“So read. Let other writers teach and inspire you.

“Unless you really want your writing to suck.”

 

Time to look in the mirror, poets. What’s your writing / reading ratio? How much time do you spend reading, rereading, copying out, and memorizing poems (all practices Addonizio professes to practice as a successful poet)?

And what about your sense of history? Are you all about contemporary poets only (or even mostly)? Do the words “John Keats” send ripples of fear through your very being?

There’s no time like now to start changing all that. Especially if you’re “hunkering down,” a folksy expression for being cooped up by a pandemic.

One Virus-Related Shortage That Has Been Restocked

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry poetry books poetry in the news satire

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The New York Times reports that, weeks ago, some self-styled American “entrepreneurs,” in a practice called “retail arbitrage,” drove around the country buying up all the hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes they could find because they realized there would soon be high demand for these products due to the impending coronavirus outbreak.

What were these clever dealers planning? Why, to sell these goods on Amazon, Ebay, and other platforms, of course, often at jacked-up prices meant to gouge consumers who were willing to pay the price.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Crazy Claus, and he just came down the chimney. Ask anyone who has been to a grocery store in recent days. You go to buy not only hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes, but toilet paper, water, flour, sugar, vitamins, cold medicine, rubbing alcohol, thermometers, peanut butter, liquor (!), etc., and all you find are shiny shelves.

Was it just last month that we were all joyful and that our lives seemed so normal? Yet here we are—in another place entirely—trying to find our ways again, yearning to summit our challenges, looking high and low for guidance from our lost sherpas of happiness.

Which reminds me. My editor informed me that there has been some “retail arbitrage” going on with poetry books—another high-demand item when people are in their cabins practicing antisocial distancing. “Lots of poetry titles,” she said, “not least of which is your last, Lost Sherpa of Happiness.”

Seems it went out of stock at Amazon when no one was looking. Seems some independent sellers were offering it at marked-up prices (sans Purell).

Scoundrels were barnstorming the brick and mortars, too, raiding Barnes & Nobles and independent bookstores. Savvy sorts realizing in advance that home-bound folks, hiding from the virus, would be seeking its happy succor in nostalgic fits of literary desire.

Well, good news at last. Working in concert with my publisher, we have ordered another printing run and won ironclad assurances from the Amazons-that-be that this collection of poems will not be sold above its retail price, despite the run on supplies, despite any laws of supply and demand, and despite the conspicuous lack of a surprise inside (I may be many things, but Cracker Jack isn’t one of them).

That’s right. No one but no one will be gouged on my watch. And the supply should hold through the rest of March at the very least (he says with fingers crossed).

So, please. If you are still suffering from the sting of other shortages and are feeling a bit blue, know that I have stayed one step ahead of the buyers, gougers, and retail arbitragers for you.

No sell-outs! No virtual shiny shelves! Just poetry books aplenty, free from panic and where you most need them, one click east of cart.

Thank you, and God bless America.

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