Yearly Archives: 2023

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“I’m Your Humble Scribe”

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It’s always interesting the way Charles Simic makes something of nothing. It’s similar to young writers in school telling their teacher, “I have nothing to write about!” This while the world around them watches in astonishment, then clears its throat.

In “Secret History,” Simic goes old-school, using as his material the nothing which makes something of itself each day. The light in his room. The gloom before dawn. A spider. A lamp. Shoes by his bed.

And the refrain goes, “I’m your humble scribe.”

Dust balls make the poem, as does a lost pearl earring, which makes an appearance despite its disappearance.

The noise of falling snow? It’s here. The vanishing night? Present and unaccounted for. It will be back, after all. As will Simic, who will record it all.

I would say don’t try this at home, but where else would you try it? Many poetry journals out there, circa 2023, would reject such banal subject matter but, stubbornly enough, banalities are eternal, so they forever remain fair game.

Let’s find some of Simic’s secrets in broad daylight, shall we?

 

Secret History
Charles Simic

Of the light in my room:
Its mood swings,
Dark-morning glooms,
Summer ecstasies.

Spider on the wall,
Lamp burning late,
Shoes left by the bed,
I’m your humble scribe.

Dust balls, simple souls
Conferring in the corner.
The pearl earring she lost,
Still to be found.

Silence of falling snow,
Night vanishing without trace,
Only to return.
I’m your humble scribe.

Denis Johnson Incognito

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denis

Death is the ultimate form of going incognito and Denis Johnson, the author of The Incognito Lounge, died and left his legacy in May of 2017.

Johnson was a writer equally at home in poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. A down-and-outer who struggled with alcohol and drug abuse issues in his lifetime, he started with poetry but is probably best known for the short stories collected in Jesus’ Son. Read it and you will quickly see both the poetic lineage in is prose and his debt to Raymond Carver, who he studied under while earning his (what else?) MFA at (where else?) the University of Iowa.

For whatever reason, when a writer of note dies, there’s renewed interest in his or her work. I still have Jesus’ Son on my shelf and reread some of the stories, including the magnificent opener “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” which depicts one of the more surreal car accidents you’ll ever read about, but I also wanted to check out his poetry, remembering how richly rewarded I felt when I read short-story master Raymond Carver’s collection, All of Us.

Here, in honor of his life and his art, are a few of Johnson’s efforts, both from The Incognito Lounge and both included on poet.org’s website:

“Surreptitious Kissing” by Denis Johnson

I want to say that
forgiveness keeps on

dividing, that hope
gives issue to hope,

and more, but of course I
am saying what is

said when in this dark
hallway one encounters

you, and paws and
assaults you—love

affairs, fast lies—and you
say it back and we

blunder deeper, as would
any pair of loosed

marionettes, any couple
of cadavers cut lately

from the scaffold,
in the secluded hallways

of whatever is
holding us up now.

The Incognito Lounge was part of the National Poetry Series edited by Mark Strand. Here is another signature poem that reflects the world Johnson brought art and sympathy to, a poem that includes the memorable “Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,” a Catholic saint of some renown. I hope, after reading it, you check out at least one of Johnson’s works. I will be reading one of his earliest novels, Angels.:

“Heat” by Denis Johnson

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
         you’re just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

“I Do This I Do That” Poems

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For short story writers, they say, it is the cup of hemlock to be influenced by Hemingway. It’s what Muhammad Ali used to refer to as “rope a dope.” Hemingway’s simple style sucks the writer in. The writer thinks he can imitate it truly. The writer writes. Simple garbage, that is.

The poetry equivalent of Hemingway might be Frank O’Hara. If you slowly wend your way through the 600-plus page Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, you may soon feel like a dope enchanted by ropes.

In reading one enchanting poem, “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun),” I came across a line that might explain why. O’Hara makes reference to writing “one of my ‘I do this I do that’ poems in a sketch pad,” and I said to myself, “Eureka! That’s what a lot of these poems are! The quotidian this and that of Frank’s days and nights!”

How simple to imitate, right? We all have “quotidians” hanging around. And we can all write about it in weirdly wonderful ways. Or so we think.

That’s the good and the bad of imitation. The good: It inspires you to write and boy, howdy, do we need a lot of that. The bad: Sometimes imitating is really an attempt to be the second coming of an artist. That’s where the dope comes in.

Anyway, here’s Frank’s poem with the prophetic and helpfully dangerous “I do this I do that” line. If you’re an early riser like me, you’ll find it extra amusing. And if you’re a night owl, you’ll sympathize.

 

Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)
Frank O’Hara

I cough a lot (sinus?) so I
get up and have some tea with cognac
it is dawn
the light flows evenly along the lawn
in chilly Southhampton and I smoke
and hours and hours go by I read
van Vechten’s Spider Boy then a short
story by Patsy Southgate and a poem
by myself it is cold and I shiver a little
in white shorts the day begun
so oddly not tired not nervous I
am for once truly awake letting it all
start slowly as I watch instead of
grabbing on late as usual
where did it go
it’s not really
awake yet
I will wait
and the house wakes up and goes
to get the dog in Sag Harbor I make
myself a bourbon and commence
to write one of my “I do this I do that”
poems in a sketch pad
it is tomorrow
though only six hours have gone by
each day’s light has more significance these days

 

 

The Irony of Pagination in Poetry Books

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Thought for the Day: A novel that is 350 pages is 350 pages; a poetry collection that is 77 pages is not 77 pages.

Why? Because, with the poetry book, when you like a couple of lines, you stop and reread those couple of lines.

Why? Because, with a poetry book, when you like a poem, you stop and reread that poem, sometimes three or four times, to fully savor its secrets.

Why? Because, with a poetry book, when you like the whole shebang, you do not lament coming to the end, you immediately restart to enjoy the book all over again, finding something new in each poem. There is no ending to ruin. There are no spoilers to hamper you.

Thus, when I reread a 77 pager by turning from page 77 back to page 1, it becomes a 154 pager. Add to that the pages I reread the first time (and I’ve lost track) and you see that even the number 154 is wrong.

Conclusion: When it’s good, a poetry collection’s pagination is superfluous. Maybe it will help you find certain poems, if that be your wish. But really, with poetry being as rich and dense as it is, there’s no need for such niceties as page numbers.

Good poetry keeps giving. Like a yeast bread newly covered after kneading, it grows and expands because it is alive. Its brevity, then, is ironic. Deliciously so.

 

 

Bringing Color to Your List Poem

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Although Dorianne Laux’s poem, “Ode to Gray,” is dedicated to Sharon Olds, for poets it stands as a unique type of list poem, a more challenging one. What Laux did was what any of us could do, and though the concept is a simple one, the execution is another matter.

What you do is start with a color, any color, and then write a poem consisting of words or phrases that match the color. Of course, the order is up to your organizing spirit, as are the stanzas.

Here’s what Laux came up with when she launched with the seemingly-drab color, gray.

 

Ode to Gray by Dorianne Laux


Mourning dove. Goose. Catbird. Butcher bird. Heron.
A child’s plush stuffed rabbit. Buckets. Chains.

Silver. Slate. Steel. Thistle. Tin.
Old man. Old woman.
The new screen door.

A squadron of Mirage F-1’s dogfighting
above ground fog. Sprites. Smoke.
“Snapshot gray” circa 1952.

Foxes. Rats. Nails. Wolves. River stones. Whales.
Brains. Newspapers. The backs of dead hands.

The sky over the ocean just before the clouds
let down their rain.

Rain.

The seas just before the clouds
let down their nets of rain.

Angelfish. Hooks. Hummingbird nests.
Teak wood. Seal whiskers. Silos. Railroad ties.

Mushrooms. Dray horses. Sage. Clay. Driftwood.
Crayfish in a stainless steel bowl.

The eyes of a certain girl.

Grain.

 

You might wonder how some of the things in the list are actually gray (foxes? Angelfish? sage?), but I suppose, in certain states or parts, all qualify.

More mind-boggling is how many items Laux came up with and got across with specific nouns. By my count, 47.

And poetic items still play a role. Note examples of alliteration (“Silver. Slate. Steel.”) for instance, and repetition (“Old man. Old woman.”)

Using the world at large, both natural and man-made, you can play this game, too, starting with your color and your list. See if you can reach 30 items, and then push yourself further.

Finally, bring some art to the arrangement, and just like that, you have a Neruda-like ode to the tune of “Color My World” by Chicago.

Good luck. And have fun. That’s what poetry is all about.

If Every Word Is Suspect, Your Writing Will Be Arresting

poetry updates on a free-verse life word choice writing writing inspiration

szymborska

Here’s something I learned from the late Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska: If every word is suspect, your writing will be arresting.

What does this mean? It means writing–especially poetry writing–cannot always be a prisoner of denotation. Of course, specific language serves the creative writer’s purposes for imagery, but there has to be more: not only connotation, but something even more unusual at times.

Sometimes you need to stare at a word for an hour until it begins to change shapes like a Protean gift from the Muse. Sometimes you need to consider angles and caroms that wait like a bounce in inertia’s clothing. Sometimes you need to take chances with words and be willing to write something awful on the faith that every pan of mud might contain a chip of gold.

Consider these three words: future, silence, nothing. Wislawa Szymborska did. And from those rather tired, heard-them-before-and-maybe-even-too-often abstractions, she found gold.

How? By simply handing them to her brain to play with for an hour or so while she made dinner. The result? “The Three Oddest Words.” Enjoy:

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

 

By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

And look what happens to words when they return to their natural habitat in “The Joy of Writing”! We even get a cameo from the word “silence” again–still breaking the rules, still escaping the bullets of denotation, still doing what writers do best when they see not only the world, but words themselves, differently. Enjoy again:

The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence – this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

 

By Wislawa Szymborska
From “No End of Fun”, 1967
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

 

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Hugo’s Rules (of Thumb) for Poetry Writers

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hugo

Rules. More rules. Sometimes rules are good, if they’re “of thumb,” I mean. Unlike compulsory ones, rules of thumb can be treated like Pied Pipers or given the Roman emperor’s thumb.

Richard Hugo’s book, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, features essays both memoir-ish and poetry advice-ish, making it catnip for poets at all levels.

Which brings us to “Hugo’s Rules of Thumb for Poetry Writing” (my term for them). Here are a few selected ones from his book. See what you think:

  • Make your first line interesting and immediate. Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.
  • Sometimes the wrong word isn’t the one you think it is but another close by. If annoyed with something in the poem, look to either side of it and see if that isn’t where the trouble is.
  • Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.
  • Put a typed copy on the wall and read it now and then. Often you know something is wrong but out of fear or laziness you try to ignore it, to delude yourself that the poem is done. If the poem is on the wall where you and possibly others can see it, you may feel pressure to work on it some more.
  • Use “love” only as a transitive verb for at least fifteen years.
  • End more than half your lines and more than two-thirds your sentences on words of one syllable.
  • Don’t use the same subject in two consecutive sentences.
  • Don’t overuse the verb “to be.” (I do this myself.) It may force what would have been the active verb into the participle and weaken it.
  • Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum: one.
  • No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.
  • Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.
  • Beware certain words that seem necessitated by grammar to make things clear but dilute the drama of the statement. These are words of temporality, causality, and opposition, and often indicate a momentary lack of faith in the imagination.
  • Beware using “so” and “such” for emphasis. They’re often phony words, uttered. “He is so handsome.” “That was such a good dinner.” If “so” is used, it is better to have a consequence. 
  • The poem need not end on a dramatic note, but often the dramatic can be at the end with good effect.

Hugo provides examples and elaboration on some of these rules, but I just wanted to give you a flavor. Interesting, no? And in some cases, almost mathematical in their specificity.

Taking these to my poetry manuscript, you might find some good possibilities and some not-so-good ones. Not using the same subject two sentence in a row? What about anaphora? Maximum sentence length, seventeen words? How will you ever channel Allen Ginsberg? And make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it? In the immortal words of four Beatles I once knew, that’s a hard day’s night.

I do like the idea of posting a poem-in-progress where others can read it, though. On the refrigerator at work, for instance. That ought to get a lot of reads, between the “Whose hummus is this? It’s been here for two months!” and the “Who took my Noosa black raspberry yogurt?”

Still, The Triggering Town is an intriguing and at times humorous read. Hugo taught at the University of Montana (of all places!). And, sure as his rules seem to be, he is admirably self-deprecating. In Chapter the First, “Writing off the Subject,” he writes:

I often make these remarks to a beginning poetry-writing class.

You’ll never be a poet until your realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong. It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you. Every moment, I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me. I hope you learn to write like you. In a sense, I hope I don’t teach you how to write but how to teach yourself how to write. At all times keep your crap detector on. If I say something that helps, good. If what I say is of no help, let it go.

Is there a better caveat than that? And so, all thumbs in, one thumb in, or none. As you like it. An advice take-it-or-leave-it guy can do little better than that….

“Apollo and Marsyas” by Zbigniew Herbert

Ken Craft poetry updates on a free-verse life

herbert book

After reading Zbigniew Herbert’s small book Mr. Cogito, I was hungry for more. On the web, I found this disturbingly beautiful (and beautifully disturbing) Herbert poem about a Greek myth and wanted to share it. This translation comes from Alissa Valles in 2007. The good news? It led me to The Collected Poems. Riches lead to riches.

Apollo and Marsyas

The real duel of Apollo
with Marsyas
(absolute ear
versus immense range)
takes place in the evening
when as we already know
the judges
have awarded victory to the god

bound tight to a tree
meticulously stripped of his skin
Marsyas
howls
before the howl reaches his tall ears
he reposes in the shadow of that howl

shaken by a shudder of disgust
Apollo is cleaning his instrument

only seemingly
is the voice of Marsyas
monotonous
and composed of a single vowel
A

in reality
Marsyas relates
the inexhaustible wealth
of his body

bald mountains of liver
white ravines of aliment
rustling forests of lung
sweet hillocks of muscle
joints bile blood and shudders
the wintry wind of bone
over the salt of memory
shaken by a shudder of disgust
Apollo is cleaning his instrument

now to the chorus
is joined the backbone of Marsyas
in principle the same A
only deeper with the addition of rust

this is already beyond the endurance
of the god with nerves of artificial fibre

along a gravel path
hedged with box
the victor departs
wondering
whether out of Marsyas’ howling
there will not some day arise
a new kind
of art—let us say—concrete

suddenly
at his feet
falls a petrified nightingale

he looks back
and sees
that the hair of the tree to which Marsyas was fastened
is white

completely

Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Poetic Device? (Maybe You)

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Handle with care. We’ve all seen the sticker on packages of fragile goods. We should see it on packages of poetic devices, too. Like salt, a little goes a long way.

Thing is, some writers shy away from the simplest of devices completely. Take repetition. I know of one poet who uses Word, highlights her poems, then types in words to make sure she hasn’t inadvertently used any twice—at least in her free verse poems.

But wait. What if you have reason to use a word twice, or thrice, or more? What if it has a role in the poem’s point or mood? Wouldn’t you want it repeated under those circumstances? And isn’t it for you, the poet, to decide?

Well, yes. If handled with care. Let’s look at an example in the form of Hayden Carruth’s poem below. Unfasten your seat belt, though. You’re going to a country road in Vermont late at night and there’s not a lot of traffic.

 

The Cows at Night
Hayden Carruth

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them — forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

 

Without counting, what words seem to come at you the most? And what is their overall effect?

The speaker seems to have a Robert Frost moment here, one where he comes across something that evokes a mood, one he isn’t quite ready to leave (“Whose pasture this is, I think I know,” and all that.) No, not yet.

Carruth even hazards a one-line stanza at the finish. This after eleven tercets. Some poets avoid that like the plague as well. Too gimmicky, they say.

But for me, in this poem, it works. The poem slows down, mellows, invites us in until we’re standing by that fence with the speaker. Heck. We aren’t even tallying why we feel this way, but if we did, we’d be less suspicious of the repetition of certain words. When handled with care, I mean.

For those keeping count, the tally looks like so:

dark = 5 times (includes “darkness”)

sad = 4 times

light = 3 times (includes “flashlight”)

beautiful = 3

innocent = 2 (in consecutive lines, yet)

“As If Death Were Nowhere in the Background”

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Reading a collection of poetry wall to wall brings out certain themes and stylistic quirks. Certainly this is true of Li-Young Lee’s now 36-year old collection, Rose. For one, Lee trades in plain language only. He is rooted in family and the quotidian rhythms of life. His verse is also infused with nature: fruit, vegetables, flowers.

There’s a thread of sadness in many of these poems, too, as if the family and love and desire all go on despite the presence of death. As the last stanza of his poem “From Blossoms” puts it:

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

 

Here is a representative poem by Lee. Note how the first and last stanza form bookends for the poem’s reflections on a mother and a father. It all seems almost too simple for a poem, but simplicity is the stuff of Lee’s work — and he makes it work well.

Early in the Morning
Li-Young Lee

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits on the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.