Journal

712 posts

UPDATES ON A FREE VERSE LIFE

Nature, the Present Moment, and Other Gifts to Poets

poetry reading poetry

marsh marigold

We’ve been told more than once that we’re dying. Living, the learn’d astronomer tells us, is nothing but a long and inevitable walk toward our deaths, after all.

Bummer. And do you mind stepping aside, Sir Astronomer, so I can enjoy that starlight, maybe?

Sometimes a poem is a capital-R Romantic chance to strike back at logic and the gloom that leavens it, compliments of the capital-R Realists who take their jobs too seriously. The poet David Budbill took such an opportunity in the following poem.

 

The First Green of Spring
David Budbill

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

 

I’ve always enjoyed Budbill’s poetry, chiefly because he is so attuned to nature. The tide has turned against nature poetry (as my rejection inbox attests), but I still think celebrations of simplicity (or should I say, of complex simplicities) are a key reason for poetry.

In the words of the Buddha, focus on today and the world around you. Tomorrow and the much-ado’s about human interactions will take care of themselves.

If you are interested in reading more about David Budbill’s (1940-2016) work, you can leap down this rabbit hole.

Extended Metaphors? Wash and Fold ‘Em.

poetry reading poetry

laundry

Extended metaphors can be like a marathon, positively breathless to maintain in equal measure, but it’s worth it when you cross the finish line. And really, if your poem isn’t terribly long then your metaphor isn’t terribly extended, so why shy away from them?

For an example of a good “starter” extended metaphor, what about the natural parallels between love and laundry? But of course! We often think of the pair as similar. Or not.

But you will after you read a poet do it. You’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I see the connection. Why didn’t I think of that?” The short answer: Because you’re thinking of your own extended metaphor once you’re done reading this post.

 

Static
Barton Sutter

Well, Old Flame, the fire’s out.
I miss you most at the laundromat.
Folding sheets is awkward work
Without your help. My nip and tuck
Can’t quite replace your hands,
And I miss that odd square dance
We did. Still, I’m glad to do without
Those gaudy arguments that wore us out.
I’ve gone over them often
They’ve turned grey. You fade and soften
Like the hackles of my favorite winter shirt.
You’ve been a hard habit to break, Old Heart.
When I feel for you beside me in the dark,
The blankets crackle with bright blue sparks.

 

In this case, the “extended” in Sutter’s metaphor is a sonnet’s length, is all. You can do it, too, in 14 lines or less. Rub your muse against a balloon or something, then touch it with your writing finger and see if there isn’t some static. Creative static extended till the end.

The Tyranny in Novelty

poetry revising poetry submitting poetry writing

As a writer, it can be liberating to no longer feel the pressure to create something new. You know the voice: “Hey, you. Mr. Writer. It’s been a few days (weeks, months) since you wrote anything new. What kind of writer do you call yourself, anyway?”

A smart one, if you plow more writing time into revision. Writing is revision, they say, yet, too often, we heed the siren call of creating the new instead. It’s flashy and cool like a red sports car. It’s what makes us “writers,” a name easier to assume than live up to.

Compared to the red sports car, constantly revising the old looks like Dad’s Buick. You’re tired of that poem, story, essay, or chapter. You’d prefer not working on it anymore. You crave the sound of screeching wheels and the smell of burning rubber as the new little sports car fishtails once and jumps forward — forward into the future!

Here’s a hint about revision: the need is heralded by any given work’s rejections in the market place. Once it comes home to Daddy five or more times, it becomes a symptom instead of a piece of writing. An object of need.

Think of the market as a physician trying to tell you something: Stop creating new when you’re not quite done with old. Open your myopic eyes. Seek the imperfections that others are clearly seeing.

Revision can be leavened with “new,” too. Try novel ingredients by adding. Note a new look by deleting. Move words and sentences around. Make a sports car of yesterday’s wheels through the gentle art of reconsidering.

Liberate yourself from the tyranny of constant novelty. Think of revision as the color red, then, and — who knows? — maybe it will be read, then accepted by the notoriously negative marketplace.

Vroom-vroom.

 

 

 

The Power of Lists

poetry reading poetry

crow

The humble list poem. It is not to be underestimated. As your cue, writer, consider Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s memorable words, “Let me count the ways.”

That was love, but love isn’t the only thing worth counting. Everything that resonates is fair game. As an example, we have the late Tony Hoagland’s “Example”:

 

Examples
Tony Hoagland

Aspirin,
crack cocaine,
the poetry of Keats,
Kathleen’s big beautiful face,
and The Communist Manifesto
— these are all pain relievers.

Death from cancer of the mouth
of the tyrant Joseph McCarthy;
the blue crow sliding over the arroyo, cawing;
the baby taking the lima bean from his mouth
and pushing it between the lips of his mother
— these are examples of justice.

The moment when you step away from the party;
the sound of the eighty-foot spruce tree, creaking;
the hour in the waning afternoon
when the attorney stands beside her car,
removes her sunglasses, and looks up at the sky
— these are examples of remembering.

The metaphor that makes you laugh out loud.
The warm breast of the dental hygienist
pressed against your ear
as she leans to get access to your plaque.

The dream in which you find yourself at sea,
at night, with water under you so deep
you weep with fear. And yet the darkness
does not take you into it
— these are examples of fortune.

 

Let us count the counted: pain relievers, justice, remembering, and fortune. But you can create any category you wish. The key is to list concretes which illustrate your abstractions.

For example, in S1 here, pain relievers become aspirin, crack cocaine, the poetry of Keats, Kathleen’s beautiful face, and The Communist Manifesto. If your list creates odd bedfellows, all the better. Your reader will stop and wonder why or how, and we all know that wondering and readers make for a heady match.

Note, too, how the crow in S2 is blue. A black crow will not do. It is expected, and writers should always respect such inferences on the part of the reader. Press adjectives into duty only when they fly against expectations. Thus, the beauty in “a blue crow sliding over the arroyo, cawing.”

Note, too, imagery, such as “the sound of eighty-foot spruce tree, creaking.”

Note, too, the specificity we can relate to, even if we haven’t personally seen it: “the baby taking the lima bean from his mouth / and pushing it between the lips of his mother.”

And finally, the last item on your list, which assumes a position of power, much like the first Canada goose in a V flying south:

The dream in which you find yourself at sea,
at night, with water under you so deep
you weep with fear. And yet the darkness
does not take you into it

These are examples of your good fortune in reading a list poem that works. Now you write, too.

“The Body Is Nothing but a Map of the Heart”

poetry reading poetry

You need only read the first two lines of the late Len Roberts’ poem “Acupuncture and Cleansing at Forty-Eight” to realize it was 21 years ahead of its time. Forgoing meat and dairy? Forswearing sugar? All that’s missing is the banishment of gluten.

Still, there’s more than a little acupuncture going on in this poem. There’s a life being revealed, many pains being traced, and Dr. Ming working hard, against all odds. If you’ve never tried acupuncture, here’s your chance—a poem that makes its vicarious points, one by one:

 

Acupuncture and Cleansing at Forty-Eight
Len Roberts

No longer eating meat or dairy products or refined sugar,
I lie on the acupuncturist’s mat stuck with twenty
needles and know a little how
Saint Sebastian felt with those arrows
piercing him all over, his poster
tacked to the wall before my fourth-grade desk
as I bent over the addition and loss,
tried to find and name the five oceans, seven continents,
drops of blood with small windows of light strung
from each of his wounds, blood like
the blood on my mother’s pad the day she hung
it before my face and said I was making her bleed to death,
blood like my brother’s that day
he hung from the spiked barb
at the top of the fence,
a railroad track of stitches gleaming
for years on the soft inside of his arm,
blood like today when Dr. Ming extracts a needle and dabs
a speck of red away, one from my eyelid, one from my cheek,
the needles trying to open my channels of chi,
so I can sleep at night without choking,
so I don’t have to fear waking my wife hawking the hardened mucus out,
so I don’t have to lie there thinking
of those I hate, of those who have died, the needles
tapped into the kidney point, where memories reside,
tapped into the liver point, where poisons collect,
into the feet and hands, the three chakras of the chest
that split the body in half, my right healthy, my left in pain,
my old friend’s betrayal lumped in my neck,
my old love walking away thirty years ago
stuck in my lower back, father’s death, mother’s
lovelessness lodged in so many parts
it may take years, Dr. Ming whispers, to wash them out,
telling me to breathe deep, to breathe hard,
the body is nothing but a map of the heart.

 

Waves of anaphora and repetition of all sorts. And why not? Pain repeats and, through repetition, builds. Writing about it is akin to Dr. Ming. It gets the chi flowing!

Some Poetic Wisdom from Kahlil Gibran

poetry

In between books, I happened to pick up a copy of Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran, a man who had his day in the 60s and 70s and, I’m sure, is still read by many. I noticed, as I read through his aphorisms, that some had to do with poetry, art, history, philosophy—all of those abstract distractions that have fascinated me over the roiling years. Here I share a few:

  • The poet is he who makes you feel, after reading his poem, that his best verses have not yet been composed.
  • Poetry is the secret of the soul; why babble it away in words?
  • Poetry is the understanding of the whole. How can you communicate it to him who understands but the part?
  • Poetry is a flame in the heart, but rhetoric is flakes of snow. How can flame and snow be joined together?
  • Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.
  • History does not repeat itself except in the minds of those who do not know history.
  • Sayings remain meaningless until they are embodied in habits.
  • Poetry is a flash of lightning; it becomes mere composition when it is an arrangement of words.
  • Art began when man glorified the sun with a hymn of gratitude.
  • Philosophy began when man ate the produce of the earth and suffered indigestion.
  • To be closer to God, be closer to people.

Although you might lament the fact that inspiration is like lightning while words are mere composition, you can at least take hope in the first saying. No matter what you write, the best is yet to come!

A great thought to start any Monday, I think.

“Silence Is the Weapon”

poetry

Silence. It’s said to be golden, but it’s more than that. It’s a writer’s tool. It’s a speaker’s tool. For how writers use it in interviewing, let’s listen to biographer Robert A. Caro in his paragraph-sized essay, “Tricks of the Trade” from the book Working:

“Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carrés George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for myself, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write ‘SU’ (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of ‘SUs’ there.”

So simple, yet so difficult to do: keep quiet. Let silence do its work. And you don’t have to be an interviewer. You can be anyone trying to get anything out of anybody.

As for speakers, I give you the pause. The pregnant pause—so pregnant it’s in the third trimester. At poetry readings, a slight pause at a strategic point in a poem often does wonders for a work read aloud.

And we all know silence’s value in joke-telling. Some people are good at telling jokes, and those people all share one thing in common—a sense of timing.

They know when to wait. Pause. Shut up. Then they reap the benefits.

“The Nothing That Is…”

poetry

I write a lot of nothing here, but let’s put it more kindly: I often write how the poet’s job is to find something in nothing. As poster boy, Will Shakespeare will do. He wrote a lot of nothing, too, one pie-sized portion of it called Much Ado About Nothing.

When you think about it, every successful poem is much ado about nothing. The reason the reader relates is simple: He or she says, “Hey! I know that nothing, too!”

Man, I hate to give credit to existential viewpoints, but there’s always the sneaking suspicion that the universe is nothing but chaos, that there are no reasons to this madness, that mankind is left with the thankless job of cobbling his own useless order and code of conduct out of life, despite the mess. OK, maybe because of the mess.

No one knew better than good old Wallace Stevens. His life was a perfect example. Each day, the click-click-click of those black wingtips as he walked down the hard, shining floors of his Hartford, Connecticut, insurance company, sat behind his large polished desk, and performed his orderly job by mapping out mankind’s measurable follies for profit.

And each night when he stepped back into the windy world outside our windows? Like the Yellow Brick Road, people. Somewhere between Munchkin Land and Oz. Anything goes, from talking scarecrows to flying monkeys, because life isn’t Kansas anymore—in fact, never was.

Instead, Stevens saw a big, sprawling, populated nothing that no amount of insurance could protect us from, and if you like scary oxymorons, you might just win yourself a brief little broom of happiness and call it “a poem.”

One of my favorite examples of “nothing” as poem disguised in the charcoal eyes and carrot nose of everyday life? Wallace Stevens “The Snowman,” a perfect frozen dinner good any time of the year, warm or cold:

 

“The Snow Man”
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

 

Rereading it, you find a lot of nothings and nots, bare places and beholds. Harsh? Maybe. But, being ever the contrarian, I can rephrase it this way: What good is life if we don’t behold the stark truths around us? Between stone teeth and corncob pipe, the snowman would tell us: “Not much.”

So behold the nothingness today and make something of it. It’s all you’ve got to work with, and the sooner you accept that and put a smile on it, the sooner you’ll make sense of your world.

Weird Works

poetry writing inspiration

Sometimes, to find success in writing, an angle is in order. Sometimes that angle comes from your own unusual background. And sometimes, if your background is not terribly unusual, it comes from letting yourself go and writing the weirdly fascinating.

Weirdly fascinating can be fact or fiction. By now everyone knows how one can be as crazy as the other, so whether you are the reporter relaying truth (gussied up, as this is poetry we’re talking) or the artist amusing some Muse with your imagination, it matters not.

Weird works.

This alliterative fact of life came to mind while I was reading my June issue of The Sun. It includes a poem by Ellen Bass, a poet I’ve written about before.  Ellen’s title, “Kiss,” leads one to the usual assumptions: namely, humans kissing (something they do quite well). Like Cracker Jacks, however, this poem is hiding a surprise inside. Take a look and see what I mean:

 

Kiss
Ellen Bass

When Lynne saw the lizard floating
in her mother-in-law’s swimming pool,
she jumped in. And when it wasn’t
breathing, its body limp as a baby
drunk on milk, she laid it on her palm
and pressed one fingertip to its silky breast
with just about the force you need
to test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,
a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.
Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martens
and camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,
and bent her face to the lizard’s face,
her big plush lips to the small stiff jaw
that she’d pried apart with her opposable thumb,
and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard’s lungs.
The sun glared against the turquoise water.
What did it matter if she saved one lizard?
One lizard more or less in the world?
But she bestowed the kiss of life,
again and again, until
the lizard’s wrinkled lids peeled back,
its muscles roused its own first breath
and she set it on the hot cement,
where it rested a moment
before darting off.

 

Oh, man. I’m not sure I want to picture that, but it’s hard not to when the poet wields such a fine paintbrush. Kissing lizards? Well, why not, after some thought. This weirdly wonderful piece is infinitely more interesting than kissing humans, after all. If you want to be bored by that, just turn on your TV.

A Sense of Place

poetry writing writing poetry

In reading essays in Robert A. Caro’s Working, I was struck by the unanticipated similarities between fiction, nonfiction, and yes, even poetry writing. Apparently Caro was, too, else why would he write this:

“The importance of a sense of place is commonly accepted in the world of fiction; I wish that were also true about biography and history, about nonfiction in general, in fact. The overall quality, the overall level, of writing is, I believe, just as important in the one as in the other.

“By ‘a sense of place,’ I mean helping the reader to visualize the physical setting in which a book’s action is occurring; to see it clearly enough, in sufficient detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action is occurring. The action thereby becomes more vivid, more real, to him, and the point the author is trying to make about the action, the significance he wants the reader to grasp, is therefore deepened as well. Because biography should not be just a collection of facts. Its base, the base of all history, of course is the facts, it’s always the facts, and you have to do your best to get them, and get them right. But once you have gotten as many of them as possible, it’s also of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book’s facts are located. If a reader can visualize them for himself, then he may be able to understand things without the writer having to explain them; seeing something for yourself always makes you understand it better.

“Another point. Since places evoke emotions in people, places inevitably evoked emotions in the biographer’s subject, his protagonist. Therefore, if a biographer describes accurately enough the setting in which an action took place, and if he has accurately enough presented the protagonist’s character, the reader will be helped to understand the emotions that the setting evoked in the protagonist, and will better understand the significance that the action held for him. If the place is important enough in the subject’s life—if he was raised in it, for example, or presided over it, or maneuvered within it—if the place played a significant role in shaping his feelings, drives and motivations, his self-confidence and his insecurities, then, by making the place real to the reader, the author will have deepened the reader’s understanding of the subject, will have made the reader not just understand but empathize with him, feel with him.”

To fully appreciate the importance of bringing place to life, you need only think of your favorite subject, your particular area of expertise: yourself. What places have mattered most to you? What do they say about you? How do they reflect your concerns, interests, and fears?

One such place, surely, is your childhood stomping grounds. They reappear with regularity in your dreams, sometimes even populated with people from present circumstances.

Or your place of employment. Work long enough at a place and it begins to attach itself to you. How do you function within it? How do you make it work for you?

Not to mention (but I’m about to) your home, its surrounding grounds, its inner rooms. Walk in anyone’s house and you’ll begin to divine his or her interests. Books on the shelves. Pictures on the walls. Furniture style, cleanliness or lack thereof, colors, items on shelves and countertops, music playing, food cooking or baking in the oven, etc. Together, they fashion a composite of you.

The genre of writing matters not. Character and place are intertwined echoes of each other. For writing purposes, that means lighting, temperature, objects in place, colors, actions occurring (or not). Place can be brought to life with tricks in the writer’s toolbox shared by all genre specialists: figurative language, rhetorical devices, action verbs, specific nouns, imagery, and so on.

Try it. Write about a place only, but with a character in mind. See how much you can flesh out the man or woman just by a setting important to him/her. You’ll see that Robert Caro, biographer, was on to something. More than he knew….