Big Bang Poetry

On we go through Elisa New’s questions about poetry from the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is, in full: “Is the making of a poem, that essential creative act, different from making a painting?” She goes on to wonder, “Is it different from playing an instrument? Does one, while making a poem, hold a little linguistic instrument while one makes a painting hold a little brush? Does one hold that brush in mental fingers? Ply language on some sort of cerebral tongue?”

This is a much more specific question than how poetry is similar and different to all the other arts. But as I said in the last Elisa New post, there seems to be more of a brain-to-body coordination necessary in fine arts like painting and sculpting or than in playing a musical instrument. Those all take physical and mental practice. Children learn to write pretty fast and it doesn’t take much time to learn to type on a keyboard.

Impulsively, conceptually, though, there may be similarities.

So da Vinci had opinions (as seen in the image above). Frank O’Hara also thought about this quite a bit, about the intersection of painting and poetry. Probably as part of his job description. He worked himself up through the ranks to curator at MOMA in New York City and was friends of many of New York’s abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s. Two of his painterly poems are “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “The Michael Goldberg Variations.” Funny I came across this later poem today because yesterday I finished The Loser, a novel by Thomas Bernhard which  features the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and his performances of “The Goldberg Variations.”

I also wrote a poem about the conversation between painting and poetry while I was a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College (so this would be the mid-1990s at the house at the top of Brandt Terrace in Yonkers, New York), a poem that ended up in my first book of poems about space exploration to Mars, Why Photographers Commit Suicide (2012). I remember sitting on the floor writing this. The movie title, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, was on my mind and Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” was on the radio, which is where the bristle bone line appears. In fact, I think a workshop edit suggestion at the time was to change the verb unbreak to healing in order to further distance the poem from the song, which was getting a lot of radio play at the time.

On a Clear Day You Can See Jupiter

Mary McCray

Some nights when the universe dips in and out of my street
like a dancer, I can see Jupiter through my window.
And I wonder where you are and how things are for you,
like performing resuscitations on a dream.

And although we are together—fundamentally here
on the same hemisphere, you don’t have to answer me.
You don’t have to reply to this untethered planet heart.
It’s too late for us and I surrender to the war
of my fates—where poems burn into pieces of litter.

Take your watercolors and color my window with Jupiter.
Crack open the glass with your knives and turpentine.
Paint these words of mine, life-full of hue and value
and watch my heart healing like a bone
inside the tornado of a thousand bristles.

You don’t have to answer me. You just need to know—
on a clear day you can see Jupiter—in my eyes
and on your fingertips, where the universe
dips in and out of your street like a dancer,
in my words and through this window where I’m on the horizon.

I would probably change the bristles from a thousand to a hundred. That’s a bit much. As was the melodrama of too lateness already in my mid-20s. Wow. What did I know?

More conversation between O’Hara and his painters:

• Frank O’Hara: In Poem, in Paint
• Frank O’Hara and Jackson Pollock
• Collaborations between poet Frank O’Hara and painter Norman Bluhm

Art, Artifice and Ancestry

“They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.
We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.”

This is from John Ashbery’s greatest hit, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a great contemplation of art for any self-portraiture artist.

I guess you know when any blog post begins with an Ashbery quote, this is going to take a minute.

After a bit of a break we are moving on ahead with Elisa New’s questions about poetry from the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is about how poetry is like or different from the other arts. I started with this post last week and stalled after the brief categorical musings below.

I started  by listing out all the arts I could think of: the so-called plastic arts (3D things like sculpture), drawing and painting, photography, the fabric arts, music, film and animation, theater and dance and the writing arts. There’s also decorative arts (furniture and home goods), experiential art (like happenings), digital art (including game design) and fashion design. Some would include architecture. There are probably more I’m missing.

I guess the answer to a question like this is sort of hierarchical, (and I’m going to come back to this later), because on some level the impulses to make art are all the same. And there are mashups happening between all these art forms. So in that way, it’s very fluid.

You could argue that writing is very verbal and verbal arts would include poetry, prose, theater scripts, screenplays and the lyric part of songwriting.

Some physical artists use word play as well, either as abstract material or as literal content to add another layer of meaning to physical objects. Likewise, some writers work with spatial ideas on paper.

I’ve always thought writing entailed the least amount of physical skill. Many of the arts demand a good deal of hand-eye coordination. Magic fingers. The physical arts are very tactile obviously. Writing happens mostly up in your head.

Of all the arts, music seems the most abstract and nonverbal (apart from lyric writing). But many of the other arts can be plenty abstract, as can writing itself if words are separated from the things they attempt to signify.

And here is where I hit a wall last week. What else is there to say about this? I am always trying to figure out the buckets and usually find out buckets themselves are problematic. If you ever have to make an arbitrary bucket choice in your categorization scheme, something is wrong with your buckets.

Over the last few weeks, my friend Jen has been conversing with me over email about the 2024 Joni Mitchell book Traveling (Ann Powers) and about jazz fusion and purism. For example, in the book we learn that many jazz purists insist that what Joni Mitchell was doing was not jazz but jazz fusion. I was telling Jen today that I never really understood what the word fusion meant, (just one of those obscure jazz words, you know) before we started talking about it. And I went down a rabbit hole last week wondering about the other music genres. Did they all have a sort of renegade fusion gang pulling at their neatly sewn seams?

Like is there blues fusion? I often research Cher’s 1970s torch catalog for my other blog and many of those songs are defined as blues songs, but they seem more like pop/blues. Would torch songs be considered a kind of fusion?  Is there a rap fusion, a classical fusion (would Liberace sit here?). Does fusion just mean a mashup?

I was telling Jen today that I think my whole problem is that I can’t see the boundaries of anything. I really struggle with this. Music genres, movie genres, writing genres. Where are the boundaries of the western or  horror genres? How is a prose poem different from flash fiction?  What the hell is fictional memoir?

The Exorcist  is a prime example for me. It’s mostly a mid-1970s auteurist drama IMHO. I just Googled that term to see if it was a thing. Not only is it decidedly not a thing, but the first movie that came up for it was Al Pacino’s comedy Author! Author! which I love for predictable reasons: it’s got a dramatic actor in a comedy pretending to be a wacky family drama but is ultimately about a completely failed family system. What’s not to love about that??

But back to The Exorcist, which is a slow burning candle depicting mainly the breakdown of single, working mother with a few scary scenes thrown in that tap into the horror genre and were so remarkable that they captured our idea of what genre that movie was.

It’s very fuzzy for me, as you can see. And so when anyone exploits the complexity of the buckets we’ve culturally created, (with a comedy horror or a western horror movie, for example), I’m delighted. I’m in my space.

And I think my problem with buckets is not just because I overthink my buckets (which I do), but because of the way my brain works to categorize anything. Should we categorize the Lucky Charms marshmallows by color or shape?

But also I struggle for a plethora of other reasons, like living through postmodernism, being part of the Gen X group, influences I have encountered starting with my father, who himself organically resists buckets and loves both Lucinda Williams and ABBA songs.

As I was thinking about all these issues: fusion and types of art, I was also working to understand my poetic ancestry. Poets like Joy Harjo have been calling for poets to create a written genealogical chart of our writing influences. And I’ve been having trouble with this, too, because I’ve been mistakenly focusing on my teachers and mentors, who did influence me but not really my taste (or lack thereof). I kept trying to draw up from Howard Schwartz to his teacher and then up to that man’s teacher, all the way back to Theodore Roethke. But that never feels right. I don’t think my experiments are really related to those people at all. They were just guides and mentors, (versus textual influencers), trying to help me do my own thing not something like their thing. My poetry is really nothing like Howard Schwartz’s or Theodore Roethke’s poetry.

When I’ve talked about my interest in Queer Culture, (most recently in my Cher blog), this has probably been my greatest influence. Even if you’re not LGBTQ+, you can have a queer sensibility, (see the book Camp Grounds, David Bergman). And I think this has to do with the gay male culture I’ve been exposed to as a Cher fan and my sympathy not only with those artists politically, but very importantly aesthetically. And the aesthetics very broadly include camp, drag, the celebration of guilty pleasures but also the idea of textural resilience and bullying, and as a woman who was pressured in many ways to be a “sweet Mary,” the tools of subversion.

So this morning I was reading an essay on the New York Poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler), and I realized I was unavoidably influenced by these poets (and a plethora of ancestors between them and me) and their ideas of genre fusion, their slippages in tone. Were they being serious or funny in their poems? Were they making fun of pop culture or revering it? I feel I can fundamentally understand that they were doing both at all time. Because I too, cannot fairly see the boundary between comedy and drama or pop culture and anything else. And it’s not surprising that the two pillars of this school (Ashbery and O’Hara) were gay men.

The New York School poets targeted the boundaries between high and lowbrow art, including poems that reference movies, symphonies, French fiction, pornography, epics, cartoons (this is Brian M. Reed’s list from this morning’s essay in The Cambridge History of American Poetry)…and most famously abstract expressionists paintings.

Reed goes on to say these writers adopted “the same impassioned tone toward both elite and popular culture which can leave a writers taste level in doubt, as well as lead to a reservation considering his or her fundamental aesthetic values.”

Or I would argue a reservation considering the idea of fundamental aesthetic value itself.

Or the fact that some of us can only see one bucket.

Later Reed says, “the poets permit themselves to scramble, invert, reinvent, and otherwise tinker with every available discourse without respecting any of them as sacred or outside the limits…[and they] exalt in this freedom by making artifice and artificiality a central theme in their work.”

Later Reed says the New York School poets would also “draw attention to the problem of artifice, probing its zero degree, the boundary between art and nonart.”

So this problem is hierarchical, we can see again. Where is the boundary between say rap and pop or comedy and drama? Then where is it between movies and photographs? Between poems and song lyrics? Between high and lowbrow? Between art and nonart?  The good and the bad?  A yen and a taste? The opinions of ourselves and the opinions of others we love and admire? The border between the self and others period?

It all feels irrelevant then when you can’t find the edges.

The sculpture at the top is “Rethink Plastic” is by the artist Javier Jaén.

We’re working through Elisa New’s very interesting questions about poetry from the Emily Dickinson Harvard MOOC. The next question is a big boy: “Is poetry a deliberate craft controlled by a maker?”

And here I think Elisa New is asking about how much control we have over our creations, how much of the poem comes from inside us versus how much comes from something outside of us. And this is really a spiritual (and biological) question about where our consciousness begins and ends.

You might believe you are a singular entity, biologically and mentally speaking, or you might believe you are part of a larger system of energy or thought.

I personally am agnostic in pretty much every spiritual sense: not ruling anything out but not fully accepting of any belief system. I’m spirit-curious, as it were. Non-committal. I have commitment issues, religiously speaking. I was raised by one stalwart atheist and one reluctant atheist.

I believe it was the writer Will Storr who said it takes just as much faith to believe in ghosts as it does to not believe in them. And you could pretty much take that perspective to any kind of spiritual dilema.

Anyway, as it pertains to writing and creative thinking, I have had three kinds of experiences around this.

1) Writing with the conscious mind: this includes a conscious effort to brainstorm, organize, draft and edit work.

2) Subconscious accidents and architectures: these are unplanned things that happen but that are traceable back to training, experience, expertise and other subconscious activities happening in your own brain. Sometimes natural, serendipitous connections and subconscious decisions are made with details and architectures.

3) Outside contributions: here is where it gets a bit spiritual. Some writers believe in a real external muse, a mystery or a loved one or maybe input from God or ghost writing. Poet James Merrill believed his content was being provided by a Ouija board in his book The Changing Light at Sandover and poet Jack Spicer was another major poet who believed language was “dictated” to him and he was not “an agent of self-expression.”

This question has prompted me to go back through my own experiences in writing poems (from high school to now) and make a survey of my various “phases.”

High School Phase in St. Louis: this was my first, exploratory, practice of poetry (reams of it!) handwritten in notebooks, a lot of high-school love stuff and play with free association. It’s marked by a lack of training and very little reading of other poetry. And not a lot of thinking about how creativity works.

Undergraduate College Phase in St. Louis: these were my first advanced classes in the explication of literature, my first poetry-writing workshops, the happy discovery of writing mentors/teachers (the first encouragements I received to continue on). I started to meet other poets (amateur and professional), started to read poems (contemporary and the canon). This period was marked by my revolt against the idea of a poems written in a series (no idea why; it seemed pretentious) and embracing metaphorical writing, especially the extended metaphor poem. My word choices became more conscious as I had discovered the magical uses of a thesaurus. All this was firming the muscle of my conscious writing skills.

Graduate School in Yonkers: I was getting continued encouragement and realizing I was wrong about the series-based poem thing. I actually loved doing series work and would continue to do basically that going forward. I was also learning to write narrative poems (the Mars poems) and telling small stories. I was doing more conscious-writing skill-budling.

Post-Grad School in Los Angeles: here I started a deep dive into Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and was developing an interest in telling my family history on my father’s side, having an epiphany of confluence for those two interests while reading Zen and the Art of Falling in Love by Brenda Shoshanna, which eventually resulted in the cowboy book. The family history got dropped and I was practicing more long-form narrative poetry instead. This to me was some unconscious work starting to happen, some happy accidents, integrations and conflux of various separate interests and ideas.

Writing in New Mexico: this period is marked by starting on the NaPoWriMo challenges while I was temping at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. These were yearly explorations in form prompts and series poems on speed. After moving to Albuquerque, I started to take MOOC surveys on the history of American poetry, the final phase being “Electronic Poetry” or digital poetry after which I began exploring browser-based poems.

Now, from the beginning to this point I had never experienced anything like writer’s block on any writing projects except maybe day-job assignments in marketing (which were miserable experiences). For good or bad, I’ve always had plenty to say, a lot of obnoxious opinions. Maybe once in a while I’ve had a problem with a plot point or a spot of rhythm or word choice, usually needing help ordering a series or a book. For spelling and punctuation, I will always need another set of eyes (if I can find them).

But here is where it starts to get weird. For all the NaPoWriMo projects from 2013-2021 and including 2024, the writing was mostly directed  by me. I had complete authority over those poems (in my mind at least). There were some subconscious happy accidents, some parallelism I didn’t consciously intend or a clever plot point that designed itself.

In 2021 I started what turned out to be a two-year project of dictionary poems. This was a project inspired by Lohren Green’s Poetical Dictionary (2003) and I had assumed I’d have complete authority over not only the the containing poems but the words themselves.

I soon found out that I was unable to insist upon any of my own words. If I picked out a word I wanted to use, I would always get writer’s block. This was the first time in my life experiencing a block over anything. What the hell! I could pick as many words as I wanted but poems went nowhere over and over again. There was no rational argument I could make to the mysterious muse.

And it’s not like words just came to me from the outside. That didn’t happen either. I would come up with a few words every few days and a voice (that didn’t seem to be me) would almost nudge me with an encouraging voice telling me that “maybe you should explore that word.” And I would have to wait for that nudge or I couldn’t proceed. So f**king weird. And I had no control over how often words would be sort of “approved” by this voice. How frequently they would come or not come.

At the same time I was working on another series, NaPoWriMo 2022. I was pretty busy doing that and hoping to put the dictionary poems on hiatus. But that month a large bunch of dictionary words came in a fury and I found myself often posting two poems a day, one NaPoWriMo poem and one (or more) dictionary poem. It was crazy-going until I finally appealed to the voice (or whatever it was) to stop sending me dictionary words.

Almost in a huff, the words stopped and they stopped for what seemed like months. Was this myself in a huff with myself?

I can’t characterize much about the voice but it almost seemed to have a gender and an age. But hey, let’s not go there.

For that NaPoWriMo year in 2022, I had a similar but not identical experience with “the voice.” These poems were based on pop and rock songs and I did determine (for the most part) which songs I was going to write about. I also felt I had authority over the hook for each poem and their narrative direction.

The voice (and it did seem like the same voice) appeared only to help me with particular problems. For example, I had a big problem with the poem for the song “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” That poem was a hot mess involving literally a shipwreck. Figuratively, the poem was a wreck itself. I opened up my mind to suggestions from outside of myself and I received back the idea to use Theodor W. Adorno’s famous quote about “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” as a alternative guiding principle for the poem. Big help. Thank you very much.

Similarly, I became stuck with the poem for the song “Could It Be Magic.” I couldn’t get a direction or any traction with it. All I knew was that the poem was half-written and I got very angry every time I worked on it. Why was I getting so angry? Then one day while I was in Cleveland, Ohio, visiting my parents an answer popped into my head like a gift.

It was the song making me feel angry. Incredibly, the response I needed was not only the answer to my question, but it was the answer to the poem and the whole set of poems. It was amazing!

In another section of the set, the muse was completely unhelpful. I had a placeholder song for a poem (and a placeholder story to go with it) that I did not want to use. I wanted to use another song by that artist but I couldn’t yet find it. Also, the story was too enigmatic. It didn’t fit with the other more direct poems in the set. I was blocked again.

I opened up again for help. The voice returned but this time with an adamant no in response. The voice said unequivocally, “this is the song and this is the story you get.”

Well, I couldn’t believe this was true. Surely, open-mindedness would prevail and another song by that artist would come with and new idea, just like it did for those other problematic poems. This artist had many songs, after all, and I had months to prepare. As the day of publication kept getting closer, I felt nervous but never resigned. I kept checking in; the voice kept saying no. This is the song; this is the story. So aggravating! Up until the day of publication, I kept hoping for a new idea and that voice never waivered. To this day, I see that poem like the flaw in the Navajo blanket, the open door that defines the whole set.

I have not experienced either of these experiences since those projects of 2021 to 2023.

And I can’t honestly tell you I even believe in this voice or the idea of an external muse. It’s not very rational and human perspective is so limiting and easily misled. Maybe I just have a very active imagination. Maybe I have a deep, subconscious creativity.

Maybe the longer you practice writing, the more deeply you go into your thinking mechanisms and the weirder that might seem. On the other hand, maybe the longer you practice writing the more you are able to tap into intelligences beyond yourself.

So in answer to this question of whether poetry is a deliberate craft controlled by its maker, I really couldn’t say.

We’re working through Elisa New’s very interesting questions about poetry from the Emily Dickinson Harvard MOOC. The second question is really two of her questions: “Is poetry native language at all? Is poetry a kind of music?”

We’ve argued about this previously, most notably when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Price in Literature in 2017. Well, I guess it was just me arguing with the points made by New York Times poetry critic David Orr. I can’t paraphrase it all here. Suffice it to say I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks poetry is not music and language both.

The use of “Native” is interesting in the first question. Does this mean pre-language versus learned language, like toddler-speak? Or does it mean pre-history language like petroglyphs? Or some kind of under-language that is always with us, some emotional language?

Poetry for me has a pretty big umbrella and it involves an implication of permanence. I mean every writer intends a kind of permanence for their work, (a possible stay against death), but poetry tends to have a greater shot at a longer shelf life. Poetry is not inherently disposable like, say, political opinion or podcast reviews. The topics are more universal, the tone meant to strike more deeply into the psyche.

I am always considering the place of petroglyphs as poetry, too, and our hesitancy to label American Indian verbal rituals as poetry. Unlike verbal ceremonials, someone took the time to write out concepts in petroglyphs. I have some petroglyphs on the hill behind my cul de sac. And as far as “native” language goes, (in all senses described above), they “feel” like poetry to me. They explore something intellectually serious and they strive to be permanent.

Often they intend to commemorate a special occasion or idea.  As does music.

Poetry has always challenged the boundaries even poets have tried to attach to “poetry.” Poetry should this and poetry should that. Always they are trying to contain the idea of poetry around themselves, their work or their taste. Musicians do this, too. Maybe so did the petroglyph writers. Humans love to tell each other what to do.

Is poetry simplified language? Except that it can be delightfully complex and convoluted. Is it a simplifying of our experiences? Except that it can illustrate the complexity of our experiences. Is it elevated language? Except that it can be coarsened language. Is it a narrative? Except that it can be non-narrative. Is it form? Except that it can challenge the idea of form.

It uses words. Except sometimes it tries to loosen words from their moorings. And it can be gibberish. It can be written in any language system (petroglyphs). It can be pictorial sometimes or can employ the same intention with symbols (petroglyphs).

It is not music. Except that it often is imbued with music. It’s almost impossible to separate poetry from any trace of music, any occurrence of rhythm and rhyme.

It may even be a third thing, a hybrid teetering in-between and pulling from native pre-language, sophisticated layers of modern languages and also ice-skating with tropes of music. If not an in-between thing, it is maybe an ever-morphing thing that grabs from all of its neighboring communication systems. It is possibly undefinable.

We could let it go, this attempt to nail it down. But tell me what’s the fun in that?

(Atom sculpture)

Years ago I took some Harvard MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) with Elisa New. And during the class on Emily Dickinson she went through a list of very interesting questions about poetry.

She noted that certain Dickinson poems theorize about “what poetry is, what poetry is made of.” And then New goes on to ask multiple questions around the substance and boundaries of what poems are, what poetry is.

I’ve collected these questions and we’ll be exploring them for the rest of the year, starting with the opening inquiry: what is poetry made of…

….which you can’t very well answer, by the way,  without speaking figuratively.

I would answer this by saying poems are made of heart and brain matter, the substance of yearning, suffering and joy, the desire to nail down the salty, sugary in-betweens-ness of our lives.

It is made of nothing from the periodic table of elements, not even the breath or paper it finds itself delivered upon. It is both a voice and not a voice in every sense of the word. It has no DNA or nucleus.

It has a big charge without any atoms.

It has no matter and yet it does.

Poetry is one of the only human things on Earth not made of carbon.

And this reminds me of a love poem from my first book, Why Photographers Commit Suicide, “Monogamous Carbon: A Classified Ad” written back in the early 1990s when I lived in Yonkers, NY, and was writing science poems for my MFA at Sarah Lawrence.