Yearly Archives: 2022

30 posts

New Years, Always Bittersweet

humor opinion

A new year. Always a bittersweet thing. Having 2023 on the doorstep, left by someone who wants no part of it, all swaddled and innocent-looking (for now), is a scary thing. Isn’t it every year? Been there, done that, know better. And it all gets you thinking… thinking about stuff you’ve thought a lot about already:

Is it me, or do celebrations seem “forced” on New Year’s Eve? Like St. Patrick’s Day, it has devolved into a drinking holiday more than any other kind of holiday.
The best New Year’s Eve I ever spent? One where I broke a commitment to attend a party and stayed home reading E.B. White’s Collected Essays. I never even noticed as midnight came and went. Now that’s a great way to ring in the new–turning pages!
I noticed the neighbors took down Christmas decorations much sooner than in past years–before New Year’s Eve, even. One reason might be Christmas exhaustion. The material holiday, songs and all, gets foisted on us the day after Halloween nowadays. By December 26th, folks are waving the white flag. Mercy!
Speaking of, is there a cleaner feeling than a house once the tree is pitched and the decorations are boxed and returned to the basement? Yes, we will find a few needles from the tree along about Easter, but still, it’s a sigh of relief to be done with it once it’s done with you.
Before you call me a Christmas Curmudgeon, know this. A lot of my fellow Americans really got into the holiday this year because it was comfort food of a sort. Yes, they overindulged in their family traditions, but given the pall over our heads these days (Covid, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and targeting of civilians, inflation, Agent Orange running for president again, etc.) it made them feel better to go to the birthday party at Farmer Gray’s or to shout “Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!” or to listen to silver bells in the city. Who can blame them for covering themselves in the warm folds of Christmas pasts? They were simply hiding in hopes of making it all go away.
Resolutions? Don’t do it! They don’t work, especially this time of year. Pick another day to resolve. Arbor Day resolutions, maybe, sturdy as an oak. Then make sure said resolution is measurable and concrete–one you can track and WILL track. Otherwise, who wants to hear it?
The average American gains around 2 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, or so I read. Seems low… or so my scale thinks.
Let’s hear it for January, named after the Roman God Janus, a two-faced sort who looked both forward and back, refusing to play favorites between past and oncoming year. Most folks find it bleak, cold, and insufferable, but January’s all right by me, being holiday-free once the first folds.
I’ve been avoiding front pages of newspapers lately, cutting right to the sports and the arts sections. Is this similar to the Christmas-as-comfort-food thing? And who am I kidding? Just because all the bad news goes away for me doesn’t mean it goes away, right?
After enjoying Laura Dassow Walls’ biography of Henry David Thoreau, I might up the ante on my bio-reading for 2023. I already have the door-stopper from Ron Chernow, Grant, and am thinking about a bio of Joyce, too.
Hopefully, Grant does not become a Broadway show. The thought of ole Ulysses S. traipsing across a stage while singing tunes is enough to discourage any man, although (fact!) he once performed in an army play during the Mexican War.
This morning, I caught a falling star as I was out in the climate-warmer than usual air. Must be my lucky day, this last one! Should I buy a lottery ticket, maybe? Nah. One tax I don’t have to pay.
Minor Miracle: How something as small as a chickadee, titmouse, or nuthatch can not only live in winter, warm of frigid, but do it joyfully.
Speaking of taxes and New Year’s, is anyone still watching all of these NCAA bowl games? I didn’t think so. Factoid: Just learned yesterday that the NCAA, one of the biggest money-makers in the nation, is not taxed because of its (ahem) educational mission. The new tax legislation continues this boondoggle. More taxes for you and me, but none for the NCAA sponsored by $$$ Chevrolet $$$ and $$$ Coca-Cola $$$. It’s the American way: we are all equal, except corporations are more equal than the rest of us.
As the famous line goes: “Government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations” is here. Poor Mr. Lincoln must be turning over in his grave.
Also learned yesterday: Many people eat sauerkraut on New Year’s for good luck. Really? My grandmother used to make it in a crock at home. Fermented was big with our grandparents, who knew a thing or two about healthy eating before we had “experts” to tell us a thing or two about healthy eating.
Grandma ate “organic,” too, though the word didn’t even exist because EVERYTHING was organic before the Chemical Age (which came to us along about WWII). So the next time you sniff and dismiss yuppies and foodies who spend more for “organic,” remember that it is normal, healthy food that should NOT be overpriced but is thanks to the giant corporations who prefer the profits in irradiated, herbicide- and pesticide-laden foods (not to mention GMOs)—all stuff Grandma would rightly call “science fiction to be avoided.”
For a guy who avoids front pages, I’m getting awfully political. Good. Get it out of my system. All politics is local, which you might be able to control. Focus your life locally, then, starting with your family.
Happy New Year, readers May your local dreams come true in the fast-approaching year!

How Low Can a Book’s Price Go?

my poems poetry books publishing Reincarnation & Other Stimulants

Editor’s Note: There must be a chimpanzee pushing buttons in the Amazon pricing booth. Two days after this post, in which I marveled that the cost of my book was marked down 48% by Amazon dot glom, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants returned to its full price. Three days after that, it dropped to 24% off. The moral of the story, Tarzan, is to check daily for bargains. When it hits half off again–jump!–because it doesn’t go lower than the mezzanine.

When it comes to Amazon dot com, one is always wondering, “How low can you go?”

No, I’m not speaking of their ethics. I’m speaking of their prices. And their pricing policies, the mechanics of which are unknown. In fact, the variations in some books’ prices track like New England weather—spring today, winter tomorrow, summer next week if you don’t pay attention. If someone understands what’s going on, it’s surely a mystery wrapped inside a bang-the-conundrum slowly.

Exhibit A has been my latest poetry collection, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants. I’ve been watching it roller coaster, and it’s a wilder ride than any Mr. Toad ever took.

Today, though, took all. Its price dropped to 48% off, $9.65. Halved like a grapefruit.

I’d like to say (indignantly) this hurts, but it doesn’t. In fact, though I don’t know why this book has been singled out (and my second from the same publisher, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, still selling for the manufactured retail, has not), I’m OK with it. Sharks need movement to live, poems need eyes. Cue the music.

So, yeah. If it moves a few books into Amazon’s cart. If it stuffs a few stockings. If it warms the hearts of a few poetry fans, all good. Sold books do wonders for the little guy (waves hand from the back row), so I hope the bottom line is that it helps my bottom line and attracts more readers. As for Amazon’s bottom line, nobody’s worried about that. No. Not in the least.

Merry 17 Days Until Christmas!

Knock-Out Poetry

poetry books

When your average reader thinks of the word “poetry,” he doesn’t think of the word “macho” at the same time. And yet, macho poetry exists. That is, if you’re willing to bend “macho” from its negative connotations and tag along instead with Edward Hirsch’s description of Edgar Kunz’s Tap Out – “gutsy, tough-minded, working-class poems of memory and initiation.”

Then there’s Tap Out’s cover. A man’s hands clasped. True, they’re so greasy they look less like a wrestler’s hands than a miner’s or auto mechanic’s, but they certainly convey the idea. What’s most important, though, are the poems in this 2019 outing. Y-chromosome or no, many are damn good.

For instance, Kunz mines the tried and true (for poets) territory of an alcoholic, abusive father to good effect. I was especially taken with “Close,” which originally appeared, appropriately enough, in Narrative magazine.

Close

Off early from B&R Diesel, sharp

with liquor and filtered Kings, he drifts

across the double-yellow, swings

into an iced-over lot. He runs me through

the basics: K-turn, parallel, back-in.

Jerks the Sierra into reverse and eases

the bumper up against the side

of the old bank building. We meet

at the end of the loaded bed, exhaust

and brakelight pooling around our knees.

He balls the front of my coat in his fist,

pulls me close to show the distance

between bumper and brick, pulls hard

until I’m up against the slender arc

of his collarbone, the fine dark stubble

shading his jaw, his hollowed-out cheeks.

He’s still beautiful, my father. Fluid.

Powerful. His bare forearms corded

with muscle, bristling in the cold. Yes,

he’s drunk. Yes, I have already begun the life-

long work of hating him, a job

that will carve me down to almost

nothing. I have already begun to catalog

every way he has failed me. Yes.

And here he is. Home early from a day shift

in Fall River. Teaching me what I need

to know. Pulling me roughly toward him,

the last half-hour of sunlight blazing

in his face, saying This is how close

you can get. Asking if I can see it.

If I know what he means. Saying This. This

close. Like this.

Like many poems in this collection, a narrative poem told with economy. A vivid snapshot in time. “Close” is particularly powerful thanks to the turn that begins with the line “He’s still beautiful, my father” – not words you’d expect from a teen whose father has him by the fist. And that bit about “the life- / long work of hating him, a job / that will carve me down to almost / nothing.” Whew. It’s lines like this that leave me wondering why there are so many readers who do not bother reading poetry, for it is only poetry that can deliver rabbit-punches like this. What these readers are missing!

While still on my heels from reading “Close,” I turned the page and read “After the Attempt,” which appeared originally in Gulf Coast. In this case, it was the closing that wowed me. Kunz nails the landing, as they say. Even the Russian judge is forced to say as much.

After the Attempt

They took your shoelaces,

your carabiner of tooth-

edged keys, but left you

your belt, which you cinched

over your loopless scrubs.

They shaved your scalp

for the stitches but missed

a tuft above your ear

that catches the light

from the hingeless windows.

The receptionist holds up

a small paper bag

stapled shut. Whatever

you had worth saving.

You look, then look away.

Once, hungover

on a gut-and-remodel job

in Grafton, you cracked the root

of your nose with your claw

hammer’s backswing.

You stood very still after,

watching your blood scatter

on the plywood floor, alien

and bright as coins

from a distant country.

I don’t know about you, but I was bought and sold on that blood money at the end. Great image. It didn’t hurt that the familiar worked for it, too. Assuming the setting was Grafton, Massachusetts, this was only a town over from where I lived for twenty years.

In the end, I guess you can say this. There’s not a lot of “macho poetry” out there, and when there is, it’s not always worth reading. In the case of Edgar Kunz’s collection, however, another story. Another story entirely.

Metaphors for Violence

poetry word choice

Why do so many metaphors speak the language of violence?

That question occurred to Ocean Vuong as he was writing his “novel” that walks and talks like a memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Though many examples abound, Vuong chose just a few as shown in this excerpt:

“But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?

“You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience is a target audience. ‘Good for you, man,’ a man once said to me at a party, ‘you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.'”

I have heard of metaphors for violence being essential in the language of sports, but here it creeps into creativity, the arts, everyday language itself. Do we even notice it, though? If not, then metaphor has assumed its place in our language, no longer looking like a comparison in glasses and wig, but acting like a thing unhidden itself.

On Earth We’re Briefly Violent, maybe? Even if it’s not with sticks and stones but with those legendary “words that will never hurt me.”

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong

Ada Limón’s Stretch Drive

Ken Craft poetry poetry books updates on a free-verse life

Newly-anointed Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s book, The Carrying, is divided into three parts, and those who believe you should save the best for last will be pleased to hear that the strongest set of poems hides behind Door #3, the stretch drive.

Thematically, it covers—in its own novel way—such well-trodden territory as love, nature, sickness, sexuality, feminism, horses, and death. I might add “time,” but there’s something in my head saying, “Same as death, brother.”

Oh. OK, then.

The first poem from section 3 I’ll share shows Limón’s talent with description, specifically the way she can weave concrete observations from nature into more abstract ones about life:

Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist, I’ll take it all.

The title poem is in section 3 includes a little projection between woman and horse. This is that rare instance when a poet (not known for Fortune-500 incomes) owns a horse (a small fortune or 500 to own, they say):

Carrying
by Ada Limón

The sky’s white with November’s teeth,
and the air is ash and woodsmoke.
A flush of color from the dying tree,
a cargo train speeding through, and there,
that’s me, standing in the wintering
grass watching the dog suffer the cold
leaves. I’m not large from this distance,
just a fence post, a hedge of holly.
Wider still, beyond the rumble of overpass,
mares look for what’s left of green
in the pasture, a few weanlings kick
out, and theirs is the same sky, white
like a calm flag of surrender pulled taut.
A few farms over, there’s our mare,
her belly barrel-round with foal, or idea
of foal. It’s Kentucky, late fall, and any
mare worth her salt is carrying the next
potential stake’s winner. Ours, her coat
thicker with the season’s muck, leans against
the black fence and this image is heavy
within me. How my own body, empty,
clean of secrets, knows how to carry her,
knows we were all meant for something.

While on the theme of horses, it’s quite an exercise in creativity to compare spontaneous love with the birthing foals: ready to go; microwaved in the momma, practically. I like the leap! Even more fascinating, she gets away with using a “thou-shalt-not” word in poetry, “liminal.” Is she on a roll or what?

What I Didn’t Know Before
by Ada Limón

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

And finally, politically speaking, the following sacred object. As a man, the thought of some asshat verbally assaulting you while you’re gassing your car is, well, as foreign as Mars. Reading this poem gives men a taste of life on Venus, and it’s a bit nauseating.

My mother, who brought up four sons, always said, “Any man who hits a woman is not a man.” I think we can extend her wisdom from physical to verbal applications. Real men treat women with respect. In every way. Period.

Sacred Objects
by Ada Limón

I’m driving down to Tennessee, but before I get there, I stop at the Kentucky state line to fuel up and pee. The dog’s in the car and the weather’s fine. As I pump the gas a man in his black Ford F150 yells out his window about my body. I actually can’t remember what it was. Nice tits. Nice ass. Something I’ve been hearing my whole life. Except sometimes it’s not Nice ass, it’s Big ass or something a bit more cruel. I pretend not to hear him. I pretend my sunglasses hide my whole body. Right then, a man with black hair, who could be an uncle of mine, pulls by in his truck and nods. He’s towing a trailer that’s painted gray with white letters. The letters read: Sacred Objects. I imagine a trailer full of Las Virgens de Guadalupe—concrete, or marble, or wood—all wobbly from their travels. All of these female statues hidden together in this secret shadowed spot on their way to find a place where they’ll be safe, even worshipped, or at the very least allowed to live in the light.

Great stuff. A poem every man should read, especially the wonderful line “I pretend my sunglasses hide my whole body,” which originally included the unnecessary add-on, “and I’m made invisible.” The other minor revision I liked was the alliterative change of “secret shadowed place” to “secret shadowed spot.”

May Ada and all women, too, be allowed to live in the light.

***

If you like posts like this AND reading poetry, consider going to the BOOKS page link above to purchase one of my three poetry collections as a gift for yourself or a friend. Oh. And consider buying (or taking out of the library) an Ada Limón collection, too. Poetry needs the support of readers like you!

Ten Holiday Writing Prompts for Students of Poetry

Ken Craft poetry prompts revising poetry teaching poetry word choice writing writing inspiration

Many English teachers have noticed that students are not wild about poetry, which is passing strange given their childhood love for, say, Dr Seuss and Shel Silverstein. And that’s not even getting into their love for music. Say it loud, say it clear: the lyrics of their beloved songs, found via search engines on-line, are a form of poetry!

All that said, I have found students to be more receptive to reading poetry if they are also allowed to write poetry. You read correctly: “allowed to.” Two of the best ways for doing that are using the strategy of imitation poems (see my imitation poem entries for examples) and using the time-tested concept of fun. In that sense, the December holidays help, too.

The following prompts can be printed separately for random drawing, printed together for student choice, or offered in any way you wish online. In my teaching days, I always picked a prompt and wrote my own “just for fun” first draft. Students love to read their teacher’s early writing. It levels the playing field. It also reinforces the teacher’s assurance that all first drafts need a lot of work and are necessary first steps.

Typically, after they’d had time to write their first drafts, I would put students in small groups to share their work, with a break between each reader for questions and feedback in the form of constructive criticism. Then I had each group choose one from their small circle – either what they consider the best or the most enjoyable – to share with the class at large. The whole class then followed the same model as the small groups: questions for clarification, feedback on what was working and what was not, followed by a chance to go to work on second drafts.

Students like feedback and want to improve their work. Knowing they will meet with a second group comprised of different fellow students for D. 2 readings is usually enough to inspire revision. Having a real audience will do that!

Without further ado, then, here are some fun holiday prompts you can use for poetic inspiration! You can assign as many as you wish (three is a magic number). If your students ask what certain terms in the prompts mean (e.g. “poetic license”), all the better. Learning opportunities work best when it’s the students who are curious. Enjoy!

Fun Holiday Prompt #1:

Pull out a holiday recipe and compose an ode (a poem of high praise) to the item you are baking or cooking. Be sure to include some specific nouns from your ingredients list as well as the smells and tastes (imagery) they offer up as you mix, bake, and ultimately take a bite. If you are baking-challenged or afraid of ovens, you can write after watching another family member or friend do the baking. Read Pablo Neruda. He wrote odes to food (apples, onions, artichokes, etc.) all the time.

Fun Holiday Prompt #2:

Write eight haiku to Santa’s reindeer. Use their specific names and give them distinct personalities and quirks. For the nature requirement, insert climates they visit as Santa makes his rounds.

Do you need the 5-7-5 requirement? Not if you drop it down a chimney in Greenland.

Hint: Their names are Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen. Bonus Deer: Rudolph the Nosy One.

Fun Holiday Prompt #3:

Compose a free verse poem to the holiness of the silent house when you are the first one up and the tree and other holiday decorations are lit. Must still be dark outside. Must be done in your jammies (or whatever you wear) with a coffee or tea or hot cocoa or orange juice, paper and pen or pencil on your lap. Listen to the silence and notice that it’s not all that silent. You may, in fact, notice subtle sounds you never do during the noisy bustle of daylight hours. Create some nice similes/metaphors not just for what you hear but what you see, smell, taste, and touch.

Fun Holiday Prompt #4:

Pick a ghost of Christmas past and write a narrative poem about a memorable Christmas Eve or Christmas Day from your childhood. For inspiration, you could read all or parts of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Then load your poem with hyphenated adjectives, some of those made-up words (the best kind), sensory details, similes/metaphors, and all the other sweet stuff you find in Thomas. Title your work appropriately: “The Christmas the Tree Fell Down,” “The Christmas Dad Burned the Turkey,” “The Christmas Twenty Cousins Came Over,” “The Christmas Our Dog Ate the Stocking Stuffers.” And so forth.

Fun Holiday Prompt #5:

Write a found poem using words from Christmas songs and carols only (lyrics are easily found online). Mix and match your way to originality. Is it OK to embed some of your own words among the famous ones? But of course! What do you think poetic licenses are for? From the familiar you will create something new and interesting!

Fun Holiday Prompt #6:

If you are suffering another global-warming Christmas (green, brown) or live in warmer climes, write a fantasy poem where you open your front door and step into a winter wonderland of your own making. Think Dorothy opening her door to Munchkinland. The terrain you step into should NOT be your front yard, however. This isn’t Kansas anymore, so avoid stereotypical Christmas towns (as seen in movies on that scourge, the Hallmark Channel) and surprise your readers with a Christmas setting they might not expect!

Fun Holiday Prompt #7:

Write a poem about snow that uses all five senses. Never mention the word in poem or title. That’s right, you need to hear snow, too. Readers want specifics on the sounds it makes, as well as its many looks (it’s not always white… have you seen blue snow in a cold crevice yet?), tastes, touch sensations, and smells. This doesn’t have to be long. Just amazing. You do amazing, right? (When it’s done, address it to a loved one and slip in into her / his stocking for a Christmas present.)

Fun Holiday Prompt #8:

There are 8 nights to Hanukkah, each bringing a new gift to be opened. Write an 8-stanza poem showing a child opening each gift as the days progress. Show some variety and surprise in those gifts. Use your own imagination for the perfect countdown to the perfect last day.

Fun Holiday Prompt #9:

You are a homeless person on the main street of your town or a nearby one. From that person’s point of view, describe Christmas Eve at midnight. Include actual structures in the setting, but use your imagination for the character and events that he or she witnesses and thoughts that he or she thinks. The poem might include reminisces from his / her own past, or it might chronicle this person finding joy in an unexpected way (e.g. probably one that does not involve material goods).

Fun Holiday Prompt #10:

Compose a “gift poem” celebrating your relationship and common history with the gift recipient (could be a close friend or relative). Include anecdotes, metaphors, imagery. Revise it to perfection and gift it on the day in a wrapped box. Done right, it will mean more than anything clicked to cart on Amazon dot Behemoth and delivered in two days. Honest!

Fun Holiday Prompt #11:

Create three magi of your own imagination. After looking up names of the original threesome, give them unique names and a destination of your own creativity. Where might three wise men or women venture in the world today? For what reason? Provide them with gifts appropriate to whatever it is they followed and whomever they’ve arrived to see. Use the poem to make a statement about our troubled times or to entertain, showing you can still find joy and goodness in our troubled times. Humor is not required but, like icing on gingerbread houses, is always appreciated.

Fun Holiday Prompt #12:

Write a poem centered on Kwanzaa traditions. Among the gifts opened to celebrate Kwanzaa, children often receive a book on African history. Do a bit of research and then write a poem that would help a young child to understand an important aspect of African culture and heritage.

holiday poetry prompts

Mean Poems

poetry poetry books reading poetry

mean

Poetry, often something we uphold for its beauty and its dalliances with love and nature, sometimes has a reputation to downhold as well. In poetry, Tony Hoagland tells us, meanness can work. That’s right, vinegar instead of honey for your readers. As any misbehaving child will tell you, negative attention can be as good as positive.

Hoagland serves up some examples in the final chapter of his book of essays, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (but not Ken Craft). It shouldn’t surprise us. Have we not learned that the pen is mightier than the sword? Have we not realized the power of words as weapons?

Certainly as kids we quickly learn the lie in the little ditty, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” What bull. Words will always hurt us! If they didn’t, we wouldn’t feel the need to protect ourselves with silly little chants in hopes of magically feeling better.

For starters, Hoagland gives us the plain simple plain of William Carlos Williams–a poem that will red wheelbarrow right over your heart, if you love grandmas.

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed—

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat—
They’re starving me—
I’m all right I won’t go
to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please—

Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher—
Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear—
Oh you think you’re smart
you young people,

she said, but I’ll tell you
you don’t know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.

Ouch. But it hits you in the not-so-sweet spot. Grandparents aren’t always paid to behave like the sweet old grandparents of yore. Sometimes they grow gruffer with time. Sometimes our final memories of them are best overlooked and forgotten. And sometimes that becomes an impossibility. Instead, it becomes a poem.

Or what about Louise Gluck’s “Circe’s Power,” wherein she pulls a Jonathan Swift and looks at the whole damn human race as pig-like. Thus does Circe’s act become more metaphor than magic:

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs.

I’m sick of your world
That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren’t bad men;
Undisciplined life
Did that to them. As pigs,

Under the care of
Me and my ladies, they
Sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness
As well as my power. I saw

We could be happy here,
As men and women are
When their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,
Your men with my help braving
The crying and pounding sea. You think

A few tears upset me? My friend,
Every sorceress is
A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can’t
Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

And one more from Tony H., this one to the tune of “Mommy Dearest.” It’s Stephanie Brown’s poem, “Mommy Is a Scary Narcissist,” which includes the scary word, blepharoplasty (plastic surgery of the eyelids, thank you).

C’mon, I shouldn’t need to mention blepharoplasty.
Her mauled face is a part of the shared horizon.
I don’t need to mention the lift, the tuck, the lipo.
(A Trinity.)

The smile-ever-smiling is a part of the position.
This is Mommy’s supposition:
Sexy. Sexy. Sexy. Everlasting and in high-tonus stance
Decisions
Belong to dads, men, boyfriends, bartenders, chance.

Mommy looks good when she prays in the chapel.
(ferns, lush foliage, candles, rose petals, and flattering paints)
Harder than the other mommies. No one stays.
(She looks into the baptismal font deeply, passionately, and
long.)

Mommy tries to love, Mommy tries to get a job.
Not very hard, the outside world knows that, but Mommy
doesn’t.

Enough already? Ready to cry, “Uncle?” If the world is driving you nuts, you have two creative choices: one, you can write escapist poems for people who want to escape to Pollyanna poesy, or two, you can write with vim and vitriol. Let it all out. Get even. Poetically, of course. Some readers out there just might appreciate it and thank you from the hidden dark and sinister of their hearts.

“I Chose To Stay”

poetry reading poetry

clothesline

Watching televised coverage of Hell on Earth—a.k.a. the Effects of Global Warming as seen in a wildfire, hurricane, or floating ice shelf near you—I am always struck by those who make like Bartleby the Scrivener and “choose not to.” Leave, in this case.

Stubborn? Stupid? Principled? We can agree to disagree, but we can also agree that it makes interesting fodder to chew on.

And what about us? Put in similar straights, watching the majority around us act one way, would we go against the grain or fall in? Somehow, we’re not sure until we get there (and, in many ways, hope we never get there).

The poet Marge Piercy found choosing to stay notable enough to write about. She starts with robins and whales, then moves on to people to show that such behaviors are part of nature and not particular to humans.

Remnants Still Visible
Marge Piercy

Robins migrate, all schoolchildren
learn but here on the Cape, every
winter a flock forms and stays,
long frigid months after their
compatriots have flown south.

They live deep in the woods on
hips and berries wizened by cold.
Sometimes they appear here
among the feeder birds, one
or two almost outcasts.

Off Alaska when humpback whales
leave in fall as the waters freeze
and the world turns white, heading
for mating grounds off Hawaii
and Mexico, certain whales remain.

What makes a creature stay when
almost all of its kind have moved on?
In burned-out areas of Detroit,
you’ll notice one house still wears
curtains, a bike locked to the porch.

Sometimes in the suburbs among
tract houses with carpets of grass
one farmhouse lurks, maybe even
with a barn. I imagine its owner
grey and stubborn, still growing

the best tomatoes for miles, refusing
to plant inedible grass, fighting
neighbors about her chickens,
a rooster who crows at four,
her clothesline a flag of defiance.

Note how stanza four starts with the central question, the catalyst for creativity in the first place: “What makes creatures stay when / almost all of its kind have moved on?”

I remember reading Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust book, Night. His family and fellow Jews had all kinds of warnings about the approach of the Nazis and consequences that might follow when they marched into his hometown, yet his family and the vast majority of the rest chose to stay. It’s hardwired.

As for Piercy, the much simpler example is the farmer who refuses to yield to suburban sprawl and its silly neighborhood covenants (e.g. Thou shalt not have a clothes line where public eyes can see the horror of it all).

In this case, you almost want to cheer for her rooster and that “flag of defiance” known as wind-flapping underwear and brassieres.

Now pass the tomatoes.

"Remnants Still Visible" Marge Piercy

Make It Strange

poetry poetry books reading poetry teaching poetry writing

viktor

In Chapter 4 of his thought-invoking book, Why Poetry, Matthew Zapruder quotes a Russian literary scholar, essayist, novelist, and memoirist no one’s heard of: Viktor Shklovsky. Viktor’s eureka moment? He claimed that the language of artistic texts is no different than the language of texts used to convey information. Asterisk.

Make that BIG asterisk. In artistic texts like poetry, writers do something quite different with this same plain language. They make it strange. The Russian word is “ostraneniye,” which, Zapruder writes, “most often [is] translated as ‘defamiliarization,’ though a more literal translation would be something like ‘strangeifying.'”

In Shklovsky’s view, as we live our lives, the ordinary objects we are surrounded by become “habitual” and “automatic” in our minds until we begin to think of them as abstractions. The Russian writes, “Habitualization devours work clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war… And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”

Let’s pause right there. What a wonderful reminder for every creative writer out there: “make the stone stony” again. Because, you see, we’ve grown so accustomed to stones that they’ve lost their stoniness. There’s no wonder to them. They’ve become, quite frankly, an abstraction, one we simply walk by and pay no mind, one we all think of alike. For the poet, thinking of some ordinary thing “alike,” or like everyone else, is the death knell for his or her creativity.

More Shklovsky: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

The key line? “To make objects unfamiliar.” Make it strange, friends. Make it strange.

Zapruder comments: “Poetry exhibits the purest form of defamiliarization. This is because, in a poem, other tasks, such as telling a story, or fully and exhaustively expressing an idea, never take priority. Therefore, it is in poetry that we see most clearly and powerfully, without any other ultimate distraction, how language can be made deliberately strange, how it becomes especially ‘a difficult, roughened, impeded language,’ in order to jar us awake.”

If this sounds easy–jarring readers awake by hitting them over the head with the ordinary–it isn’t. But it isn’t impossible, either. We’ve all seen it done when we read our favorite poets. In fact, it’s one of the reasons we return to poetry again, one of the reasons prose just isn’t filling enough for our artistic hungers. To see the ordinary used in extraordinary ways is a basic need. To say, “Gee, that was weird–but it’s true, now that I think about it!” is a basic joy.

Poetry. Nothing fancy. Nothing crazy. Just the literal used in strange and wonderful ways.

Dillard and Chee: Writing Teacher and Student

poetry word choice writing writing inspiration

Of great interest to me is the third essay, “The Writing Life,” not because I profess to live one (though I do live a reasonable semblance of one), but because its focuses on Chee’s instructor at Wesleyan (circa 1989), Annie Dillard, an icon of some stature among the writing crowd and, as you might have guessed, me.

Though it cannot possibly be the same, reading the essay gives you a feel for what it would be like to sit in Annie’s class. Chee graciously shares nuggets of wisdom passed along by Dillard to his class. For your viewing pleasure, here are but a few of them:

“Don’t ever use the word ‘soul,’ if possible.”
“Never quote dialogue you can summarize.”
“Avoid describing crowd scenes, especially party scenes.”
“Latinates [are] polysyllabic, and Anglo-Saxon words [are] short, with perhaps two syllables at best. A good writer [makes] use of both to vary sentence rhythms.”
“You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs. The passive voice needs gerunds to make anything happen. But too many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus: running, sitting, speaking, laughing, inginginginging. No. Don’t do it. The verbs tell the reader whether something happened once or continually, what is in motion, what is at rest. Gerunds are lazy, you don’t have to make a decision and soon, everything is happening at the same time, pell-mell, chaos. Don’t do that. Also, bad verb choices mean adverbs. More often that not, you don’t need them. Did he run quickly or did he sprint? Did he walk slowly or did he stroll or saunter?”
“Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer’s experience for the reader.”
“If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.”
“…avoid emotional language. The line goes gray when you do that…. Don’t tell the reader that someone was happy or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn’t angry… She throws his clothes out the window. Be specific.”
“…the first three pages of a draft are usually where you clear your throat…the place your draft begins is around page four. …if the beginning isn’t there, sometimes it’s at the end…you’ve spent the whole time getting to your beginning…if you switch the first and last pages you might have a better result than if you leave them where they were.”
Chee: “After the lecture on verbs, we counted the verbs on the page, circled them, tallied the count for each page to the side, and averaged them. Can you increase the average number of verbs per page? she asked. I got this exercise from Samuel Johnson, she told us, who believed in a lively page and used to count his verbs.”
“You can invent the details that don’t matter…. You cannot invent the details that matter.”
“Talent isn’t enough… Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science; it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me…and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I’m writing.”
“Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go…. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, and then go every time.”
“In the long run, we only ever hit what we aim at.”

Is it any wonder Chee wound up wanting to be Dillard? And now, no doubt, some of his writing students want to be him.

Sic semper, as they say in the not-dead-yet language…