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The Sheer Poetry of Dullness

eater

Quotidian. Mundane. For most of us, it’s the relentless repetition and ordinariness of the sun also rising and setting. But make no mistake, it once started in the fertile soil of dreams. And, somehow, a tendril of hope remains in the ground beneath our feet, no matter how scorched it has become by the cycling sun.

I think of this each time I feel empty of ideas and inspiration. I think of it when I hear students say the same upon being assigned memoir writing: “I can’t write because nothing ever happens in my life.”

Dull. Life is dull. The assignment changes on the fly. The assignment, then, is to write about dull. Find beauty in dull. Find heartache in dull. Sniff out hope and acknowledge despair–odd but constant bedfellows–in dull.

I think of this because we all have such ample material when it comes to making music from such ordinary chords. I think of this when I read about Gwendolyn Brooks’ bean eaters in their rented back room full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths and tobacco crumbs and vases and fringes. A polysyndeton of purposefulness, day in and day out, putting on their clothes and putting things away because life demands it of them.

Consider it, next time you’re feeling down. Consider it, too, next time you think you and you alone are denied of ideas–ideas which humbly lie all around you, hidden by a cloak woven of ordinariness.

“The Bean Eaters” by Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, 
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
          is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
          tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Dillard and Chee: Writing Teacher and Student

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In his essay, “The Writing Life,” Alexander Chee shares wisdom that should interest writers of any genre. Certainly it intrigued me — not because I profess to live a writing life (though I do live a reasonable semblance of one), but because the essay 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…

Czeslaw Milosz on the Indifferent World

poetry The Indifferent World

index

Many words–even simple ones–hold multiple meanings. Add connotative undertones to their pedigree and they grow even more fascinating. The word “indifferent” is such a word. Seemingly simple, there’s more to it than meets the eye. That’s one reason why I chose to name my first book The Indifferent World and placed the word itself in many of the collection’s poems.

First, a more conventional look at the word’s meaning, as seen through a beautiful poem written and translated (with the help of Robert Haas) by Czeslaw Milosz. This poem appeared in my copy of All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver. It gains momentum and strength as you read it–a trait I admire in poems.

Return to Kraków in 1880
Czeslaw Milosz

So I returned here from the big capitals,
To a town in a narrow valley under the cathedral hill
With royal tombs. To a square under the tower
And the shrill trumpet sounding noon, breaking
Its note in half because of the Tartar arrow
Has once again struck the trumpeter.
And pigeons. And the garish kerchiefs of women selling flowers.
And groups chattering under the Gothic portico of the church.
My trunk of books arrived, this time for good.
What I know of my laborious life: it was lived.
Faces are paler in memory than on daguerreotypes.
I don’t need to write memos and letters every morning.
Others will take over, always with the same hope,
The one we know is senseless and devote our lives to.
My country will remain what it is, the backyard of empires,
Nursing its humiliation with provincial daydreams.
I leave for a morning walk tapping with my cane:
The places of old people are taken by new old people
And where the girls once strolled in their rustling skirts,
New ones are strolling, proud of their beauty.
And children trundle hoops for more than half a century.
In a basement a cobbler looks up from his bench,
A hunchback passes by with his inner lament,
Then a fashionable lady, a fat image of the deadly sins.
So the Earth endures, in every petty matter
And in the lives of men, irreversible.
And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway.

Last Days of a Scarecrow Summer

poetry

Don’t look now, but we are fast running out of summer dawns. Days when one swaps clothes with a scarecrow. Days when one lie on your back in the grass and talk up the first cloud that passes overhead. I miss such simplicity already.

Still, typing poems you like is good practice for writers. It counts as “close reading” when you type word for word, punctuation for punctuation, and then reread for accuracy. You think things like, “When does this sentence end?” and “Shouldn’t there be a period and not a comma here?” and “Shoot. Wish I’d thought of that!”

Let us hold our collective breath for the last days of summer, then, and turn to Simic, a poet who had a sense for the absurd. A poet from eastern Europe who could appreciate the simple things. A poet who is always worth revisiting.

Summer Dawn
by Charles Simic

Just as the day breaks, it may be time
To slip away on foot
Carrying no belongings,
Leaving even your shoes behind
In some rooming house,
Or wherever you’ve hidden yourself away

To look for another refuge,
Preferring at the moment
The open country, the interstate highway
Empty at this hour,
Or small-town cemeteries, where the birds
In the trees have fallen silent,

The minister has left the church unlocked.
You could enter and rest in its pews,
Or you could wade into a cornfield,
Swap clothes with a scarecrow,
Stretch out on the grass and have a long talk
With the first cloud of the new day.

"Summer Dawn" Charles Simic

Rebecca Solnit on the “Astonishing Wealth” Called “Writing”

poetry voice word choice writing

Montaigne would be proud of Rebecca Solnit’s in her 2013 collection, The Faraway Nearby.

In an essay called “Flight,” she devotes a few paragraphs to the act of writing and, as is only necessary, reading (because what’s one without the other?). I thought it was interesting. Maybe you will, too:

“Writing is saying to no one and everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure, that I ordinarily can’t imagine saying them to the people to whom I’m closest. Every once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers. Said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading. Is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two? Is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?

“I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away—first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one, and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk.

“Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to become a writer was told by a gypsy, ‘You will be loved by people you’ve never met.’ This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing. You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand. Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way. It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor.”

You see the words “faraway” and “nearby” popping up here, how perfect they are for the lonely sharing that is writing and reading, yet the source of the title is alluded to in another essay called “Wound.” Georgia O’Keefe, the great artist who once lived in New York City, moved to the desert boonies (read: Taos, New Mexico), and when she did, she signed letters to friends with the closing “From the faraway nearby.”

Thank you, Georgia, for a theme! One which Solnit stitches like a thread through the collection is this wide-ranging book. Thank you, too, for a metaphor. One elastic enough to cover writing and reading and many other paradoxes afforded by daily life.

As for her pearls of wisdom re: writing, you can see Solnit’s point all too well if you write. As I am the nearest writer at the moment, let’s use me as an example.

Why am I writing this? I could just sip this wonderful first black coffee and passively read emails (easy) and news of the world (not-so-easy). Instead, I’m milling away at this keyboard, watching letters do the ant-crawl thing across this screen.

I’m not writing strictly for myself (though I gain from it, surely). I’m doing it for intrinsic reasons, because I’m compelled to as part of a “odd compact,” as Solnit puts it, an assumption that people I will never know are out there (in the “faraway nearby”) reading words I only recently strung together, enjoying them, relating to them.

Scary, I know. But think of it: Some may start this piece and not finish it. Some may dig all the way to the other side (the end, or what Solnit might call “China”). Some may even return to this webpage regularly to see what I write again.

Almost mystical, isn’t it? But without each other (writers, readers), the magic would be gone. The faraway wouldn’t be nearby at all.

Tony Hoagland’s America: Look Familiar?

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If you’re tired of empty phrases like “Build a Wall” and “Make America Great Again,” you might consider Tony Hoagland’s America for respite. At least you’d be a realist, and at most a decent judge of political poetry.

Tony Hoagland’s view of America is subtle, though. No in-your-face pronouncements. Just creative and philosophical riffs that seem to be written in the key of how-did-we-get-here?

Here are two examples, starting with the more famous older one:

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

I like the idea of America’s walls consisting of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings and MTV episodes. And of fathers being stabbed and bleeding Benjamins instead of blood. A Goldman Sachs America, then. “My plutocracy, t’is of thee/Sweet Land of Money Trees,/of Thee I write,” and all that.

Note, too, the all-important “your own hand” in the penultimate line. Americans as accessories to the crime. Yes, even protesting Americans, ones who miss the inherent hypocrisies of commercialism and comfort.

And now, a more small-town America look:

Summer in a Small Town

Yes, the young mothers are beautiful,

with all the self-acceptance of exhaustion,

still dazed from their great outpouring,

pushing their strollers along the public river walk.

And the day is also beautiful—the replica 19th-century paddle-wheeler

perpetually moored at the city wharf

with its glassed-in bar and grill

for the lunch-and-cocktail-seekers

who come for the Mark Twain Happy Hour

which lasts as long as the Mississippi.

This is the kind of town where the rush hour traffic halts

to let three wild turkeys cross the road,

and when the high school music teacher retires

after thirty years

the movie marquee says, “Thanks Mr. Biddleman!”

and the whole town comes to hear

the tuba solos of old students.

Summer, when the living is easy

and we store up pleasure in our bodies

like fat, like Eskimos,

for the coming season of privation.

All August the Ferris wheel will turn

in the little amusement park,

and screaming teenage girls will jump into the river

with their clothes on,

right next to the No Swimming sign.

Trying to cool the heat inside the small towns

of their bodies,

for which they have no words;

obedient to the voice inside which tells them,

“Now. Steal Pleasure.”

For me, the price of admission is paid in two spots: “Summer, when the living is easy/and we store up pleasure in our bodies/like fat, like Eskimos,/for the coming season privation.” And “Trying to cool the heat inside the small towns/of their bodies,/for which they have no words:”

Even Hoagland seems to know he’s struck gold, featuring his brilliant turns in short lines as he does. Big picture, small picture. It’s all in your perspective, America. Just don’t let the forest blind your from the trees.

“Don’t Forget That When You Get Older.”

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Quaint. That’s the word that comes to mind when reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “Manners,” a poem dedicated to some “child” 106 years ago.

It is especially quaint (and I daresay nostalgic in the most human of ways) to see it through the clouded lens of 2024. A poem about manners? In the Age of Trump and its trickle-down rudeness, selfishness, greed, and narcissism?

The speaker’s grandfather, perhaps laughable to more cynical readers, might come across as almost holy to others. Grandpa as prophet, then, and where did we get lost along the way?

See where you fall as a reader. Is it a hopelessly-dated chuckle or a prophetic reminder that there’s still time, and always will be, to go back to being human beings who are part of a shared community—that is, humans who are actually kind and considerate of each other no matter where they fall on the political spectrum?

I hope that question is not rhetorical. And that horses enjoy the poem as much as humans…

Manners
Elizabeth Bishop

For a child of 1918

My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
“Be sure to remember to always
speak, to everyone you meet.”

We met a stranger on foot.
My grandfather’s whip tapped his hat.
“Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day.”
And I said it and bowed where I sat.

Then we overtook a boy we knew
with his big pet crow on his shoulder.
“Always offer everyone a ride;
don’t forget that when you get older,”

my grandfather said. So Willy
climbed up with us, but the crow
gave a “Caw!” and flew off. I was worried.
How would he know where to go?

But he flew a little way at a time
from fence post to fence post, ahead;
and when Willy whistled he answered.
“A fine bird,” my grandfather said,

“and he’s well brought up. See, he answers
nicely when he’s spoken to.
Man or beast, that’s good manners.
Be sure that you both always do.”

When automobiles went by,
the dust hid the people’s faces,
but we shouted ”Good day! Good day!
Fine day!” at the top of our voices.

When we came to Hustler Hill,
he said that the mare was tired,
so we all got down and walked,
as our good manners required.

A Father Confesses Confusion

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Playing father to a teenager is work—unpaid work that deserves holiday overtime. Yes, fathers vaguely recall being teenagers themselves, but their own sons are cryptic echoes at best, ciphers not easily solved, and memory is of little use because each child is so different from that little guy called “me” from our own distant memory.

In his conversational confession poem, “Last Night I Drove My Son Home,” Jim Daniels provides insight into the rigors of bonding with 15-year-old sons who have changed mightily since their grade-school days.

Let’s make like Father Sullivan and listen in:

“Last Night I Drove My Son Home”
by Jim Daniels

from his friend’s house, where they were filming
a movie starring my son in a love triangle.
My son, fifteen, has never been in a love right angle,
or even a love straight line, as far as I know.
He stopped talking two years ago—
to me, I mean. I got this secondhand from a street informant
I’ll refer to here by her code name, Little Sister.

A warm night, windows rolled down—my cheap car
requires physical cranking. (Not even a CD player!)
Purchased in 2003 when he was ten and still kissed me goodnight
and may even have held my hand while we watched
old movies. (No cable TV either!) Yesterday
he made me kill a giant bug, and I briefly saw
that ten-year-old again.

Full moon—I could see him looking up at it,
following it as I turned and we lost it to the trees.
September, but moist like August. I ached
for a few soft words between us in that silence.

On a sidewalk near the park a young man sat,
face in hands, a friend standing helpless above him.
I slowed down. What’s that guy doing? I said aloud.
Is he Okay?

I see him too, my son said.
As the friend helped the man
to his feet, I sped on.

My son hummed an old song about the moon
that I didn’t know he knew. My son, the star
of a movie I’ll never see. I just get
these vague coming attractions.
I caught him in a lie or two this week.
Every exchange a house of cards—all it takes
is a deep sigh, and they come tumbling down.

I’d have hummed along with him,
but I didn’t want him to stop.

The poem purposely jumps from the good (snippets of conversation and the humming of a song the son might have sung when young) to the bad (silence, lies, and the constant specter of a sigh razing any exchange to the ground).

The snapshot, a mix of dialogue and first-person point-of-father, tries to capture the essence of a stage in life—a stage parents want to solve and rescue, on the one hand, and to see pass quickly and mercifully, on the other.

When it comes to family mythology, time is life’s trickster. Some parents have it easy with their kids, and others are put through the wringer. It’s random, so any poem about it can be random, too, in a calculated kind of way, of course.

Do you have a family confession to make? It can be from the past or the present, but the ordeal, if spoken as truth, will meet sympathetic ears from the Father Confessors known as your readers.

You know, like that guy from any Catholic childhood’s past, nodding his head behind a dimly-lit screen.

Un-Haiku-ish

my poems poetry The Indifferent World

rooster

Last night, once again, long bouts of insomnia. One of those nights where you’re awake so much, you cannot recall sleep time from awake time. The shortest poem in my first book (The Indifferent World), a mere three lines, hits on this experience.

Three lines, you say? Is it haiku? Maybe. It certainly is not the 5-7-5 syllabic formula favored in schools, but these days anything three lines can be called “haiku-ish,” just as anything 14 lines gets labeled “sonnet-ish.”

Being more of a purist, I prefer calling the poem “un-haiku-ish.” Still, it catches the flavor of sleeplessness all right, and serves as a salve this morning as I prepare to begin another “day in the life,” as the Beatles called their tribute to the quotidian first written and sung in 1967.

Here you go:

3:30
by Ken Craft

In the dark,
from over the water, a rooster
celebrates my insomnia.

By which I mean, 3:30 is something that should be slept through, not experienced. It is, in short, best left to roosters like Chanticleer (who brings no cheer).

Bottom line? Thank God for afternoon naps.

Planes, Trains, and Poems

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vietnam

Sometimes poems do the jobs of planes, trains, and automobiles by taking us places we’ve never been, then giving us a taste (a sight, a smell, a sound, a touch) of what that location is like.

This is what happened for me in one of the poems included in Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows. It’s called “Facing It,” a poem where Yusef Kanunyakaa has me standing in front of a memorial I’ve never seen: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Notice the images, how some the figurative language mirrors what many of these names went through in that faraway land, that faraway folly instigated by old men back home. This is but one thing that poetry does–and does well.

Facing It by Yusef Kanunyakaa

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.