Journal

712 posts

UPDATES ON A FREE VERSE LIFE

Ideal Conditions for Writing? Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

poetry writing

What are ideal conditions for writing? Far be it for me to offer advice, but since you didn’t ask, I’ll relent.

First of all, it is a myth that poetry, unlike it’s more verbose cousins (novels, short stories, essays) is best written on paper. Sure, many famous poets wax poetic (what else?) about blue ink on long yellow legal pad or in Moleskine notebook, but me, I find the blizzard-like beauty of Word’s lovely docx white just as enticing. Why? To preserve erasers. Nothing gets revised as many ways to Sunday as a poem suffering birthing pains. The confetti of eraser shreddings gets bothersome.

Writing position? As the Poles say, in their poetic way, on your dupa. (If you’re Polish and notice a misspelling, please forgive me.) I love Mark Twain, but never understood his habit of writing in bed. Isn’t there a famous blues song, after all, called “Don’t Write in Bed”? (Ear worm works its way into my cochlea.)

Writing atmosphere? We cannot control the high and low pressure systems the Weather Gods (and their often inept interpreters, meteorologists) send our way, but we can adjust ambience. For me, poetry is best written to classical music. Reason? The aforementioned ear worm. When the music lacks invasive lyrics, it doesn’t turn and do its night crawl through our Muse’s ears.

Music with lyrics is like someone reading over your shoulder. Or worse, someone whispering another man’s poem in your ear while you are trying to compose your own. Have you ever tried to recall a song while another is playing? It puts the caco- in cacophony, let me tell you.

Some of my favorites? I love the Estonian wonder, Arvo Pärt, and his tintinnabulation. Kind of like Poe’s bells, bells, bells, only Pärt does it with more than bells and the quality is much higher than Poe’s. Like Bach, Pärt’s also fond of repetition. Wave upon wave of musical refrain and echo. Are these not musical tools in the poet’s toolbox, too?

When Pärt is not around, I go with Johann Sebastian himself. Or Sibelius, whose music has a nice Finnish to it (and please don’t groan — the Bard is fond of puns, too, and no one groans when he delivers them).

Finally, before I sit down to classical music at the word processor and begin to write, I like to read good poetry for at least a half hour. Wonderful word play by masters sets the tone. Inspires. Fools me into saying, “Shoot. I can do that!” And, make no mistake, this conceit must be present, even if it is a wild conceit.

Results may vary, as they say. As will definitions of “ideal” when talking about conditions. As long as you have some, is all. Conditions that work for you, I mean.

Happy writing.

From Paradox, Poetry

poetry reading poetry

Vignettes. In prose, they are short snapshots of a subject. They lack the plot you’d expect in a short story, but are rich in description and mood and are often strong enough to carry a theme, especially when matched with other vignettes.

The equivalent of a vignette in poetry? Another snapshot, again too passing to be deemed a narrative poem with beginning, middle, and end, but still worthy of comment.

When a reader takes in a short lyric poem about a person, a time, and a place, she is left with the keys to a door she must open herself. “Here is a character,” the poet seems to say. “You fill in the details of his past and the possibilities of his future. See, too, if you recognize yourself or someone like him from your own life.”

An example of this type of poem is Ted Kooser’s below. I’ll meet you ’round the other side of it.

 

“The Student”
Ted Kooser

The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,
and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,

paddling ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,
breaks the surf. He’s got his baseball cap on

backward as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.

 

An image is briefly sketched. We get color (“green shell of his backpack”), and we get physical description (“stiff arms and cupped hands,” “extended his neck,” “chin, hard as a beak,” “baseball cap on / backward”). We even have a location (“the library”).

As this young student is emerging from a hangover, we can even place his age in the college years.

Active verbs help us to envision a bit of action in this nine-lined snapshot, too. He leans into the wind, swings his arms, and extends his neck and chin as he enters the library.

Most important, poetically, is the employment of nouns in metaphorical ways. This kid must not only lean into the wind, he must “lean / into wave after wave of responsibility” and use neck and chin to “break the surf.”

The oceanic image is completed in the final stanza “as up he crawls, out of the froth / of a hangover and onto the sand of the future.” The snapshot is a D-Day in miniature as the young man, who can do it because he is in the prime of life, fights off the vapor of alcohol and establishes a beachhead at the library. Back to business, in other words. There’s a war to fight called education.

And just how heavy is that green-shelled backpack? Heavier than you think. Laden not just with textbooks, it comes “heavy with hope,” as well. As the reader, you can infer what these hopes are, but the simplest is that he can have his keg and get good grades, too, the hope (or delusion, if you prefer) of any partying student.

Worthy of a poem? If the image strikes you as a writer, yes. A mere stroke of the brush, but one that requires just enough paint to say its piece and go home. A vignette with little story except what the reader cares to add. In this case, the student in question is both unique and Everyman (or Everystudent) at once.

Unique universality, I call it. From paradox, poetry.

Word Up!

poetry writing poetry

dictionary

Aspiring poets always think it’s all about the poetry. Read poetry. Write poetry. Study poetry. Buy poetic ability (via those expensive stores, M, F, and A). But, no. There’s more to it than that. There’s the simple stuff, often overlooked. Let’s start with words.

I can hear you now: “Words? What do you mean by words. I use words all the time! What do you think my poems are made of — broccoli stalks?”

Well, first of all, that would be pretty cool. And nutritious. But I mean word choice — or, as the French call it, le mot juste –— and word choice depends upon a solid store of words, one that has a loading dock out back where trucks marked Brains R Us can bring in more supplies each day.

School didn’t end with school, in other words. You need to boost your vocabulary, mostly so you can understand as many words as possible when you read poetry, but also so you can avoid using these words in your own poems.

Ha-ha. A little curveball for you. I say avoid using them because, like thesaurus-itis (that dreaded disease), strutting-your-vocabulary-itis can be life-threatening to poems. Occasionally you will use a new vocabulary word, but mostly you will take a pass on it, especially if it’s a fancy, Latin-based word.

Don’t get me wrong — the dead language will have its place in your poems now and then, but the lion’s share will be Anglo-Saxon based. Plus, you want the nuclear option to use any old (or new) word you know because that’s power, the kind hidden in your pencil or keyboard thanks to the cauliflower pulling the strings (we’re back you your brain via vegetables, you see).

So, how do you do it? One simple way to boost the number of words available to your poems is to look up any word you don’t know. Another is to sign up for Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day. I look forward to my morning word-in-the-inbox. Yes, it’s often familiar, but its roots, related words, and etymology are often not so familiar. What’s more, M-W gives you two examples of the words from the real (vs. the one in Washington D.C. right now) world.

How cool is that? Ask your air conditioner, then word-up

 

 

Joyfully Ambushed

poetry poetry books reading poetry writing poetry

brain

One theme touched on in Matthew Zapruder’s book Why Poetry is “associative movement,” a term he rather dislikes as being too “clinical sounding,” but uses anyway because its meaning is so vast that it’s hard to label and shelf as something else. What can it mean? Lots of things, but for my purposes, I’ll call it the feeling readers of poetry get when they are “joyfully ambushed.”

That term itself is associative. When I preach poetry in the classroom, I praise the value of “unexpected word pairings” — words we seldom (or, better yet, never) see together. Our first reaction, when we read them, is, “Wha–?” And our second reaction is, “But, you know what? I kind of get that, now that I think about it!”

The ambush is part one: the jolt, the surprise, the unexpected idea. The joy is part two: the caboose connection, as if the train of the poet’s thought has latched onto you at the last possible moment, and now you feel the pleasure of being pulled along by this new association.

On a larger scale, Zapruder goes beyond words and discusses how many poems “leap” from one thought to another, similar to the “monkey mind” practitioners of meditation warn us about. In this sense, poets are like hydroelectric plants on a river, harnessing the turbulent white water of their minds to create poetic energy.

A microcosm of the “leap” theory is seen in haiku. Never mind the syllable-counting so beloved by schoolchildren’s fingers, the essence of good haiku is line 3, which takes a tiny leap from lines 1 and 2–different, yet the same. A new trajectory, but in the spirit of the set-up. Zapruder uses a Basho as a for-instance:

 

The cicada.
Nothing in its song reveals
that tomorrow it must die.

 

And then a Sora:

 

The coastal wind
disorders above the sea
the seagulls’ wise drawings

 

Robert Bly even wrote a book called Leaping Poetry. Zapruder shares a quote from that book which discusses leaps from image to image:

In “Nothing but Death,” [Pablo] Neruda leaps from death to the whiteness of flour, then to notary publics, and he continues to make leap after leap. We often feel elation reading Neruda because he follows some arc of association which corresponds to the inner life of the objects; so that anyone sensitive to the inner life of objects can ride with him.

Most people think of daydreaming as the enemy, but in associative parlance it is above all an ally. You need only order these Dionysian delights with a dash of Apollonian “structured mayhem” to find “the inner life of objects,” as Bly puts it.

Metaphor itself provides such associative treats. A is like B? Readers delight in C-ing such novel connections. It’s as if they have been allowed to clamber upon the back of the poet so they can cross a river for the first time and get to the other side–a new place affording a new view and offering a new reckoning on life.

Zapruder’s book is rich with researched gems, quotes that reinforce his lines of thought. I particularly like this one by Roger Shattuck, taken from the introduction to his book The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire:

I spoke at the start of a criterion applicable to all art: that it should present both clarity and mystery. These terms and the evaluations they permit can now be elucidated. The clarity of a literary work of art lies in its reference to experiences already familiar and available to the reader, which allow him to orient himself within this territory called art. The mystery points toward experience not yet known, to an extension of the consciousness.

Ah, yes. The old “extension of the consciousness” bit. It’s not just our bodies that need exercise, it’s our brains, too, and there is no better fitness coach than a talented poet taking us on associative leaps we’ve never experienced before. Aerobic food for thought. Eating and breathing poetry. Me, I’ll walk knowing I might be “joyfully ambushed” by such clear mysteries (or mysterious clarities) any day of the week.

That’s why I read—and write—poetry.

Salad Days for Poetry: They’re Wilting

poetry

As Shakespeare would say (and did in Act I, Scene 5, of his 1606 play, Antony & Cleopatra) alas for the “salad days” of poetry.

No, he didn’t mention the poetry part, just the salad days part, through the mouth of the beautiful Cleopatra reminiscing about her foolish, younger (read: greener) days.

Over time the foolish part has fallen off the salad, leaving the younger part, so the expression “salad days” (the green of youth, which we have a tendency to worship) now indicate only a good thing.

But alas, when it comes to poetry, the salad days are behind us — at least if you use The New York Times Magazine, a Sunday staple for many readers, as an indicator. During Trump’s first administration, poetry enjoyed an explosion of voices, many minority and under-represented ones previously unheard from. Each Sunday you could find a poem in the Times Magazine, too, curated by a rotating editor. The last was Anne Boyer, who resigned in November of 2023 to protest the war in Gaza.

Despite Trump’s second administration and its push against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI) on all fronts, minority voices and identity poetry have remained as strong as ever in Poetry World. Not so in the bigger landscape of journalism. Though the New York Times remains a bastion of truth against Trump & his sycophants’ frequent lies, they decided against continuing the poetry column after Boyer’s political resignation. Thus ended a creative stretch in a highly-visible market, one once edited by the likes of Terrance Hayes, Natasha Tretheway, Matthew Zapruder, and Rita Dove.

It appears that poetry is being pushed back toward the ivory tower of its undoing. No more will you see sweet little poems like this one about a couple in the Puerto Rican countryside, which once appeared in the Magazine‘s Sunday pages. It reads like a side of salad, I think, and was written by the very cooly-named poet Blas Falconer. I leave the dressing to you:

 

“A man and a woman touched”
by Blas Falconer

at night under stairs,
pinball machines ringing, and,
Sundays, he drove her to

the springs of Coamo, the chapel of
San Germán. Had she ever known
happiness? The road
littered with mangos seemed

to go on
forever. She thought,
The people can’t eat

them fast enough,
as if she were not
one of those people.

 

Ah, love and sadness. And sweet mangos. And the salad days of our youth. Foolishly, we thought the good times were here for good. In Poetry World — and in the dark countryside surrounding it, now run by corporations, greed, and corruption — I guess we should have known better.

“The Black Wastes of Moonless Waters”

poetry reading poetry


There’s probably no more welcome expression in the English language than “do-over,” as in, “I’d like a do-over, please.” Not surprising, considering that we get almost nothing right the first time… or the second… or the third. The numbers expand as the task grows more complicated, and what is more complicated than this thing called living a life?

With this question in mind, Philip Levine thought all the big thoughts in his poem, “Let Me Begin Again.” If it appeals to the lost Buddhist in you, no surprise there. I myself am lost more often than not. I keep sensing tiny prayer flags in my soul, flapping their frustration.

 

Let Me Begin Again
Philip Levine

Let me begin again as a speck

of dust caught in the night winds

sweeping out to sea. Let me begin

this time knowing the world is

salt water and dark clouds, the world

is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn

comes slowly and changes nothing. Let

me go back to land after a lifetime

of going nowhere. This time lodged

in the feathers of some scavenging gull

white above the black ship that docks

and broods upon the oily waters of

your harbor. This leaking freighter

has brought a hold full of hayforks

from Spain, great jeroboams of dark

Algerian wine, and quill pens that can’t

write English. The sailors have stumbled

off toward the bars of the bright houses.

The captain closes his log and falls asleep.

1/10 ’28. Tonight I shall enter my life

after being at sea for ages, quietly,

in a hospital named for an automobile.

The one child of millions of children

who has flown alone by the stars

above the black wastes of moonless waters

that stretched forever, who has turned

golden in the full sun of a new day.

A tiny wise child who this time will love

his life because it is like no other.

 

I like how his birthday on January 10th of ’28 brings the comment “Tonight I shall enter my life / after being at sea for ages.” It’s an apt description for the vast oceans of our pre-birth (and perhaps of our post-deaths, too, as only Levine could — or more likely couldn’t — tell us).

The kicker, though, comes at the end: “A tiny wise child who this time will love / his life because it is like no other.”

Food for thought, that. While we’re alive, the “this time” is in our very hands. Too many of us don’t realize that.

With Poetry, Small Observations Bring Big Results

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry poetry prompts reading poetry

Sometimes, as a writer, an idea strikes you so much that you decide to honor it as a personal truism. You hold this truth to be self-evident; the job, then, is explaining how the sun rose on this dawning.

Today’s poem, by the late Jim Harrison, is a great example of one of these abstract truths made concrete. If you can build the idea to the poem’s last line as Harrison does, so much the better. And if the raison d’être is rooted in imagery (here the sounds and sights of trains powered by coal furnaces), better still.

What I like especially is the concept of something appearing to be eternal: the poet ages from boy to man (subject to both change and eventual demise), but the object of his poem seems to be eternal. For me, this idea often springs from animals and nature, but for Harrison, the old train works equally well.  Let’s see how.

All aboard!

 

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found…
Jim Harrison

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found
a large cinder on a long walk along abandoned
country railroad tracks, a remnant of steam
trains, the cinder similar to those our fathers
shoveled from coal furnaces in the early winter mornings
before stoking the fire. In your dark bedroom
you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump
when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.
Now the trains are all diesel and in Livingston at night
I hear them pass, Burlington & Northern, the horn
an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.
Some complain but I love this night music,
imagining that some of the railroad cars are from
my youth when I stood in a pasture and thrilled
to my favorite, “Route of the Phoebe Snow.”
To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.

 

I don’t know about you, but I love “In your dark bedroom / you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump / when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.” Even if you’re too young to have known these sounds, Harrison makes them real through his description. This talent is a must in the poet’s toolbox.

Then, the train’s horn: “an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.” And the lovely flourish at the end: “To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.” That says it all, no? And the readers know it, because each of us could replace “a cinder” with something—seemingly small—that makes us excited about life. Think about it.

Though nowhere near as accomplished, my poem “Here and Gone” was going for the same strategy as Harrison’s: the concept of eternity in the form of something from the past (in this case minnows, dragonflies, and small-mouth bass) looking the same while time works its cruelties on its observer. It’s from my second collection, Lost Sherpa of Happiness:

 

Here and Gone
Ken Craft

excluding a war zone
human death remains
the mad relative
hidden from sight
while nature
files and catalogues
its dead on the public
narrative of roads

why then
looking down on these shallows
at this same school of minnows
hanging in the same green-peg balance
as last month;

looking at
this same dragonfly
stutter-flying the water’s stippled surface
as last summer;

looking at
these small-mouth bass
swimming over the same soul shadows
against gold-gilled sand
as ten years ago;

am I reminded of you

and why would this moment
choose me to endure the eternity
inherent in minnows, dragonflies,
and soul shadows

 

What about you? What sounds, smells, sights, tastes, or touch sensations seem eternal and timeless in your world? What simple thing makes you excited about life?

 

Slaying the “Muse of Sluggishness”

poetry reading poetry writing inspiration writing poetry

The early risers. It’s a club that just as soon not meet, because what’s best about early morning is solitude—a time when a writer can send his convocation to the Muses. While the house still sleeps, I mean. And only the clock’s ticks can be heard. Or the dog’s breathing. Or the heat radiator’s pings (winter) or the air conditioners hum (climate-changed summer).

Fitting music for writing, the early hours. One can’t help but believe that not only the household sleeps, but the world, for part of the magic of writing in the dark before dawn is the deliberate deception that you are the only one in the world awake. A childish delusion, then. Indoor light reflects your face in the dark window pane, and taking the dog outside reveals only a world with birds on the verge, raccoons on the move, and, weather depending, peepers singing (warm world) and owls whooing (cold, mysterious world).

We are the perfect audience, then, for Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s “The Early Hours,” a poem as much about writing as not writing (or, how writing is often hidden in the act of not yet writing). Paradoxical? Here’s the poem:

“The Early Hours”

Adam Zagajewski

The early hours of morning: you still aren’t writing

(rather, you aren’t even trying), you just read lazily.

Everything is idle, quiet, full, as if

it were a gift from the muse of sluggishness,

just as earlier, in childhood, on vacation, when a colored

map was slowly scrutinized before a trip, a map

promising so much, deep ponds in the forest

like glittering butterfly eyes, mountain meadows drowning in

           sharp grass;

or the moment before sleep, when no dreams have appeared,

but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world,

their march, their pilgrimage, their vigil at the sickbed

(grown sick of wakefulness), and the quickening among medieval

         figures

compressed in endless stasis over the cathedral;

the early hours of morning, silence

                                                               —you still aren’t writing,

you still understand so much.

                                                 Joy is close.

 

A muse of sluggishness? I missed him (and am convinced it’s a “him”) in Greek mythology studies but understand his presence, once announced. Then, the two metaphors—one about a love of maps formed in childhood, the other about that odd moment before sleep, the one where “no dreams have appeared,/but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world.”

Perhaps the biggest pay-off to the poem is how it refuses to acknowledge so-called “writer’s block.” Pre-writing, after all, requires NOT writing. Thinking. Dreaming. Creating and recreating the groundwork for poetry. Until, you can’t help but admit, “Joy is close.”

And that, for this poem’s particular trajectory, is the perfect closing.

Pain, Sickness, and the Desire To Be “Adamantly Elsewhere”

poetry reading poetry

saint

It was a great loss for poetry world when Tony Hoagland passed in October of 2018.  More than one of his poems are shared on this website (just search his name), and here’s another, “Arrows,” with its allusion to Saint Sebastian and his arrow-ridden body. The arrows in Tony’s case, of course, would be the cancer that eventually took him. But for others, the arrows could metaphorically equate to many things that torment us, body and soul, causing us, too, to look up, as if nothing on this earth “was ever real”…

 

Arrows
by Tony Hoagland


When a beautiful woman wakes up,
she checks to see if her beauty is still there.
When a sick person wakes up,
he checks to see if he continues to be sick.
He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day,
looks out the window at a sky
where a time-release sun is crawling
through the milky X ray of a cloud.

 

   * * * * *
I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box,
the wires crossed, the panel lit
by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing
out of sequence,
the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls,
and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam,
the message doesn’t reach its destination,
the angel falls down into the body of a dog
and is speechless,
tearing at itself with fast white teeth;
and the consciousness twists evasively,
like a sheet of paper,
       traveled by blue tongues of flame.

 

   * * * * *
In the famous painting, the saint
looks steadfastly heavenward,
             away from the physical indignity below,
the fascinating spectacle
    of his own body
                     bristling with arrows;
he looks up
as if he were already adamantly elsewhere,
    exerting that power of denial
         the soul is famous for,
that ability to say, “None of this is real:
Nothing that happened here on earth
and who I thought I was,
and nothing that I did or that was done to me,
was ever real.”

How Now, Brown Cow?

poetry

Sometimes poetry gets silly. Goofy. Clever for its own good.

Consider Alice N. Persons’ ode to the UPS man. Turns out, it is an ode to the little-appreciated color, brown, as well. “How now, brown cow?” as they say in speech class where rounded vowels are practiced. Let’s take a look at the package wrapped in plain brown fun:

 

Why I Have a Crush on You, UPS Man
Alice N. Persons

you bring me all the things I order
are never in a bad mood
always have a jaunty wave as you drive away
look good in your brown shorts
we have an ideal uncomplicated relationship
you’re like a cute boyfriend with great legs
who always brings the perfect present
(why, it’s just what I’ve always wanted!)
and then is considerate enough to go away
oh, UPS Man, let’s hop in your clean brown truck and elope !
ditch your job, I’ll ditch mine
let’s hit the road for Brownsville
and tempt each other
with all the luscious brown foods —
roast beef, dark chocolate,
brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel, molasses cookies
I’ll make you my mama’s bourbon pecan pie
we’ll give all the packages to kind looking strangers
live in a cozy wood cabin
with a brown dog or two
and a black and brown tabby
I’m serious, UPS Man. Let’s do it.
Where do I sign?

 

Unlike 99.8% of men, the UPS man always brings the right gift because — shazam! — it’s what the lady ordered!

The thought of eloping in a “clean brown truck,” though, is too much. So much, in fact, that the reader is already on board and heading to Brownsville (where else?), where discerning customers and drivers can tempt each other with “luscious brown foods — / roast beef, dark chocolate, / brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel, molasses cookies.”

Before long everyone’s hitting the hard stuff. Sweetly, though, in the form of “mama’s bourbon pecan pie.”

It comes without surprise that the ultimate getaway is a “cozy wood cabin” (brown) with a “brown dog or two / and a black and brown tabby” to boot.

The final flourish? Circling back to the routine of UPS deliveries:

“I’m serious, UPS Man. Let’s do it. / Where do I sign?”

Notice how this mad love is offered to someone who remains distantly-named: “UPS Man.” For the purposes of humor, the UPS man is not so much an individual with distinct looks and personality but a type. Maybe an archetype. You know, like wizards and fairy godmothers who have forsaken pumpkin coaches for an always-turning-right UPS truck.

Signed, sealed, delivered, the poem is yours. Thank you, Alice, for making the simple point: Poets can have fun, too.