Month: July 2022

The Essay Project: Different Takes on the Prose Poem

July 21, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So there was this kind of event that happened at Sarah Lawrence when I was there where fellow poetry students would put out flyers for little gatherings outside of classes and workshops, like impromptu discussions. I went to two of them, (that I remember anyway). One was on making a living as a technical or business writer organized by the poet Ann Cefola. I never did persue a professional writing career, (as soon as I discovered I had quite limited amounts of creative energy reserves), but Ann I became friends at that event and have remained supportive colleagues ever since that day. The other gathering was organized by a poet named Karl. I still have his flyer: "The Common Table: The Prose Poem." A bit pretentious sounding but I was always curious about prose poems and how they diverged from fiction shorts or shock fiction. At this event we were to determine the borderlines were actually very fuzzy.

The flyer quotes Charles Baudelaire, (considered the first prose poet and the one who coined the term), and his preface from Petites Poemes en Prose about the "miracle of a poetic prose…supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses."

Oh la la. The flyer then goes on to talk about this "confounding form" that is not an "unstructured monster" but "subtle" and how "you know a prose poem when you find one."

Or write one. I have written many pieces over the years I consider somewhere inbetween prose poems or fiction shorts. I've also been known to perform prose-poem opportunism, like for this poem "Orgasmic Orange" which is truly a three stanza lyric poem but here is masquarading as a prose poem.

And then I have many, many poems that intially came out as prose but they don't seem rightly prose and so were changed into verses (sometimes going back and forth a few times to figure out what they really were). "Fortune" is a recent example of a poem that initially came out like a longish prose poem and then was shaped back into tighter verses. And I think "tight" or "loose" here are my personal keywords when determining which direction to go in.

But nobody seems to agree on what the rules or the tools are or how to define the prose poem.

There's an excerpt in this packet from Introduction to the Prose Poem: An International Anthology edited by Michael Benedikt who agrees we are "in the midst of" an exploration on what prose poetry is," a genre "self-consciously written in prose" and forgoing the device of the line break. He says a key word for him is "intense," and says the form has a structure with its "own independent internal logic…metaphor and analogy" using "a music more internal" and "subtle" where the "line is not present to underline musical effects."

He notes that some of "the major poets in verse" worked with prose poems toward the end of their careers "when their command of poetry and their sense of its possibilities were presumably at their most practiced and acute:" Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme and Valery.

The packet then includes a deep dive into Michael Benedikt's poem "The Meat Epitaph" and how he drafted versions. He was very organized and kept each draft coded in file folders! My notes on this section quote Princeton Encyclopedia's definition of the prose poem as a form of contractions that undermine the action, how over time, poetic devices have become less effective and what does a line by itself mean; often it contradicts the sentence it is in ," [which is what I've always liked about it].

Anyway, Benedikt talks about the contradiction he was working with in his poem: how an "impious human" can write "morally concerned…poetry without betraying either the impiousness of the Self or the seriousness of the subject."

Benedikt talks about aspects of his process and whether prose poetry is "freely associative" and how structure finds its way into free verse and what poetic divices are still in play in the prose poem but that prose poems often read with a kind of "flat" style and borrow qualities from the surrealists.

My marginalia from the conversation has extra definitions:

Self-consciously a poem in prose using poetic devices: sound, meter, repetition" [but short fiction can also do this]
"5 elements: (1) logic of the unconscious; (2) every day speech; (3) relativity, the idea that reality is questionable [more an idea of modernism really]; (4) wit and humor, black humor; (5) politically and socially skeptical, questioning of fixed ideas [again, modernism really]

We also talked about how pieces like "A Potato" by Robert Bly have a kind of fable-like quality, that these pieces are not always linear, not always "about something" or to "further some idea."

One question remains for me based on one note toward the end of the conversation: "form of prose poem is rectangle (box); pack only essentials."

Is this true? Or is there room for more superfluous storytelling in prose pieces than verse? Because usually when I convert something back into verse, a lot has to go and I shave out quite a bit. So are prose poems more economical than verse poems? In some ways they might need fewer words than a long-form poem but have more breathing room than a short lyric poem has or a haiku obviously.

Packet poems:

"Bloating and Its Remedies" by Jim Heynen
"Cows in Trouble" by Steve Martin (one of my favorite shorts/prose poems)
"The Meat Epitaph" by Michael Benedikt
"The Five Fingers of the Hand" by Aloysius Bertrand
"The Old Woman's Despair" by Charles Baudelaire
"The Sirens" by Franz Kafka
"The Victory Burlesk" by Margaret Atwood
"A Potato" by Robert Bly (another one of my favorites that I typed out here)
"The Wheelbarrow" by Russell Edison
"The Broken" by W. S. Merwin
"Vespers" by W. H. Auden
"Clocks" by Julio Cortazar
"Pretty" by Jayne Anne Phillips
"Laura's by Gunter Eich

At the meeting, Karl also provided a bulleted list of poets who have tried the form, a list which is too long to recreate here but here are some highlights not already mentioned above:

Charles Mallarme
Arthur Rimbaud
Juan Ramon Jimenez
William Carlos Williams
Jorge Luis Borges
Tomas Transtromer
Charles Simic
Pablo Neruda

I would add to this list:

Gertrude Stein (why does she always get left out of these things?)

The Essay Project: Childhood Trauma in Art

July 12, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The next essay is a bit of a departure from the other SLC class essays, It’s the preface and two chapters from The Untouched Key, Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness by Alice Miller (translated from German).

In the book, psychologist Miller explores the way childhood events affect paitners and writers and how she can see childhood influence in pieces of art. She considers these clues to works “lost keys.”

The first chapter is on Pablo Picasso, particularly his “late works in Basel” painted when “he was 90 years old.”

She talks about how he “disregarded all convention as well as his own technical ability and attained what he had wished or all his life: the spontaneity and freedom of a child, which his perfectionism robbed him of in childhood…I seemed to be sensing a man’s last strenuous efforts to express the most hidden secrets of his life with every means at his disposal before it’s too late, before death takes the brush from his hand.”

Miller says, “a great deal has been written about the sexual themes…attributed to his declining libido” but she feels the sorrow exhibited in his late work reaches back to childhood trauma and not “an aging man’s regrets at his waning sexual vitality.”

She sensed this, she says, from “the themes," “the force of the brush movements,” “the vehement way he sometimes applied the color and conjured up new feelings that had to be given form,” his “haste to produce the unsayable, to say it with colors.”

But then again, these things could indicate almost anything.

But Miller continues, “since the efficiency of defense mechanisms decreases in old age, since repression works with less ingenuity, it was possible, I thought, that traces of childhood trauma not evident before might become visible in his late works.”

And the trauma Miller explores was based on his intense “reluctance to go to school” which was presumed to have been caused by a 1884 earthquake in Málaga when he was three years old. His parents had to flee with the family and the stress of the escape possibly caused his mother to go into premature labor days later before the family could safely return home. She sees implicit support in a poem Picasso wrote in 1936 about a cacophony of screaming (children, women, birds, flowers, beams and stones, bricks, chairs, curtains…paper, etc.) Miller sees a visual depiction of the earthquake (as seen by a child) in Guernica (1937) with its “horror, terror, and helplessness…total destruction…he even painted himself over to the right as the bewildered child in the cellar.”

Miller says Picasso “always abandoned a style once he had developed it…but the theme of the distorted human body haunted him all his life.” She says “little children often express their traumas in a painting….it took forty years before he was able to paint like a child, that is, to let his unconscious speak.”

She admits most biographers gloss over Picasso’s childhood in total, and this earthquake’s significance in particular.

I’ve been exploring childhood myself (in some subconscious ways, too) so this was an interesting topic for me. But like all things, I half believe it and half don’t. She’s probably right in general but she simply doesn’t have enough evidence in Picasso’s case to make a definitive, convincing case; so she just rehashes the same arguments multiple times and across many pages as if rewording the few pieces of evidence will prove a theory to be true.

Very sketchy biographical information does not equate to threads drawn out from years of therapy. As a psychologist and psychoanalyst, Miller would know this.

In the other chapter included in the set, Miller talks about an exhibit of Chaïm Soutine. She draws parallels between the childhood's of Soutine and Hitler and how one man became an artist and the other a despot.

She talks about Soutine’s paintings filled with “strange, twisted, tormented figures…houses, streets, and squares…that looked as though they might start to quiver at any moment…I asked myself whether the extremely threatening situation of the Nazi Holocaust had motivated, or even compelled, Soutine to paint the work as shaking and falling apart.”

She talks about how Soutine and Hitler were both punished severely with “brute force” for wanting to become artists, Soutine because his family were Orthodox Jews and Hitler because his family was totalitarian. In Soutine’s case, he had an advocate in his mother which helped “him develop a sense of justice.” Hitler had no advocates.

Miller then goes on to talk about the childhood of Paul Celan and “the witnesses who rescued him” from his yard-locked life where “the world lies on the other side of the chestnut trees” and Dostoyevsky whose father “treated his serfs with such cruelty that in 1839 they murdered him” and Stalin and his childhood of extreme poverty not dissimilar to Charlie Chaplin's but whose “experience of being loved can be sensed in all the Chaplin films. In spite of hunger, misery, and calamity, there is always room for feelings, for tears, for tenderness, for life.”

Miller says, “the truth won’t allow itself to be silenced completely, even with the help of poetry, philosophy, or mystical experiences. It insists on being heard, like every child whose voice has not been completely destroyed.”

It’s possible these conclusions are too simple in the face of an annoyingly tangled and complex lives. But that doesn’t mean her ideas might not be on to some clues regarding these artworks or that we can’t use this to explore our own ideas and executions, to explore our own childhoods.

Over a year ago, my mother sent me a box of things she had collected from my childhood. Confronting that box was a bit shocking and eye-opening for me. It opened a door to my childhood that is still bearing fruit. And it also has me thinking about the ways in which childhood and young adult events are still shaping my behavior and reflections today.

The Essay Project: Three Haiku Masters

July 7, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The last time we discussed haiku we were working through 52 weeks of haiku meditations (and that seems like a lifetime ago!).

I have no idea where this little packet came from, I'm guessing not from the Sarah Lawrence essay class, if only because it's not an essay, but the introductory chapters of The Essential Haiku, Versions of Bashō, Buson and Issa by Robert Hass. It could have been distributed at a poetry conference workshop from somewhere or even from another class somewhere. Not sure. But it's in the essay stack now so…here we go.

Robert Hass did a lot of work to reinterpret the haiku tradition and this book has been a popular place to dig into haiku traditions.

The packet includes the full Introduction chapter and then the separate biographical pages introducing each poet, along with some curated poems from whomever put the little packet together. I’ve culled a smaller set in each section below.

All of these poets spent "years in travel, sleeping at monasteries and inns…[as] poet-wanderers…for whom travel and its difficulties were a form of freedom and a way of disciplining the mind…All three became teachers of poetry."

Hass explores three core Buddhist metaphysical ideas about nature:

Natural things are transient
They are full of dependencies
They suffer

Many of the season references reflected "a Japanese way of thinking about time and change." For example, snow itself had many associative meanings particular to Japanese culture having to do with exposure and bareness. Spiders were a "traditional mid-summer theme." Seasons gave "a powerful sense of a human place in the ritual and cyclical movement of the world. If the first level of a haiku is its location in nature, its second is almost always some implicit Buddhist reflection on nature. One of the striking differences between Christian and Buddhist thought is that in the Christian sense of things, nature is fallen, and in the Buddhist sense it isn't."

Hass explores three core Buddhist metaphysical ideas:

Natural things are transient
They are full of dependencies
They suffer

What appeals to us, Hass says, is the "quality of actuality, of the moment seized on and rendered purely, and because of this they seem to elude being either traditional images of nature or ideas about it….this mysteriousness…they don't generalize their images…mysteriousness of the images themselves." Hass quotes Roland Barthes in noting the poems' "breach of meaning" as post-modern objects, as "deconstructions and subverters of cultural certainties" and the "silence of haiku, its wordlessness."

Hass then talks about how in particular Zen Buddhism "provided [these poets] training in how to stand aside and leave the meaning-making activity of the ego to its own devices. Not resisting it, but seeing it as another phenomenal thing, like bush warblers and snow fall."

Individually, the poets break down like this:

Matsuo Bashō
(1644-1694)

Bashō was the calm ascetic and seeker who wrote what was then called hokku. Many of his poems dealt with "the transience of things" and "spiritual loneliness…profound loneliness and sense of suffering." His poetry centered on "a sense of sabi…loneliness, or aloneness, or the solitariness akin to no-mind, which gives intense concentration, and curious lightness, and a tragic sense to the work"

Bashō "insisted on poetry as a serious calling…that it amounted to years of immensely subtle thinking about how to give resonance and depth to the image"

He was credited with reinventing the form and studied Chines poetry, Taoism and Zen. One of his students brought him a gift of a banana tree (bashō) from which he took his name. In a big city fire in Endo, his house burned down.

"He thought about giving up poetry, but confessed that he couldn't do it."

Deep autumn–
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?

An autumn night–
don't think your life
didn't matter.

Even in Kyoto–
hearing the cuckoo's cry–
I long for Kyoto.

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.

First snow
falling
on the half-finished bridge.

Yosa Buson
(1716-1783)

Bunson was an artist of painterly precision who loved the of materials of art and color and the shape of things, according to Hass. He was a distinguished and successful painter and his poems Hass describes as painterly, "visually intense" with a "aesthetic detachment…in love with color. There is a sense in them also of the world endlessly coming into being."

Hass says Bunson’s haiku are like early poems of Wallace Stevens ("The Snowman" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.") Buson was critical of contemporary haiku masters and said:

"These days, those who dominate the kaikai world peddle their different styles, ridicule and slander everyone else, and puff themselves up with the title of master. They flaunt their wealth, parade their ignorance, and promote themselves by arranging their students' innumerable wretches verses in anthologies. Those who know better cover their eyes in embarrassment and are ashamed of such behavior."

So not much has changed.

Hass says scholars like to compare the objective Buson and the subjective Bashō.

Tethered horse;
snow
in both stirrups.

Coolness–
the sound of the bell
as it leaves the bell.

His Holiness the Abbot
is shitting
in the withered fields.

The mad girl
in the boat at midday;
spring currents.

Green plum–
it draws her eyebrows
together.

A gust of wind
whitens
the water birds.

The owner of the field
goes to see how his scarecrow is
and comes back.

Morning breeze
riffling
the caterpillar's hair.

Old well,
a fish leaps–
dark sound.

Escaped the nets,
escaped the ropes–
moon on the water.

The old man
cutting barley–
bent like a sickle.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky–
the moon steals it.

Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.

Kobayashi Issa
(1763-1827)

Issa was the humanist of pathos and humor and anger.

Issa means "a cup of tea" or "a single bubble in steeping tea." He has been described as "Whitman or Neruda in miniature" and has also been compared to Robert Burns and Charles Dickens with his "humor and pathos, the sense of a childhood wound, the willingness to be silly and downright funny, and the fierceness about injustice." He could also be "didactic and sentimental" but in his best work he was "quite unlike anyone else, the laughter cosmic, the sense of pain intense…with no defenses against the suffering in the world."

Like Buson, he was a Pure Land Buddhist and he could be "inclined to moralize" but that there is an "edge of rage in his poems, something very near cynicism." He often wrote about "the smallest creatures….flies, fleas, bedbugs, lice" and his work has been described as "countrified haikas" with "vernacular language" and "local slang."

As it happened his house also burned down.

Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

(For many years I had a NYC Metro placard with that poem on it, which I picked up one night from a stack of donated Metro posters at a poetry event in NYC.)

New Year's Day–
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
but slowly, slowly.

Under my house
an inchworm
measuring the joists.

I'm going out,
flies, so relax,
make love.

Even with insects–
some can sing,
some can't.

Don't know about the people,
but all the scarecrows
are crooked.

Blossoms at night,
and the faces of people
moved by music.

The gorgeous kite
rising
from the beggar's shack.

Cricket
chirping
in a scarecrow's belly.

Autumn evening–
it's no light thing
being born a man.

The holes in the wall
play the flute
this autumn evening.

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

Last time, I think,
I'll brush the flies
from my father's face.

Autumn moon–
a small boat
drifting down the tide.

Here,
I'm here–
the snow falling.

Insects on a bough
floating down river,
still singing.

Outtakes From NaPoWriMo 2022

July 1, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

There were two poems that got booted from NaPoWriMo 2022 because of new poems that asserted themselves into the set at the last minute. Below is one of the two.

These two deleted poems were vulnerable for replacement for various reasons, maybe I didn't feel they were finished or they were missing some element or I wasn't really that attached to the song itself (although a feeling of incompleteness surely applies to many of the existing poems too, just not as strongly, including one of the replacement poems that I never was happy with; but that particular song asserted itself somewhat strenuously).

In any case, I was reminded of one of the poems this morning because another song by the artist came up on my android shuffle while I was on the treadmill and I was reminded how much I do like Dana Glover. In this case it was the definitely the poem, not any blasé feeling about the song.

My friend Christopher used to spend hours perusing CD stores in LA to cull out all the cut-outs, discounts and failed attempts. He probably had thousands of them at one point and he gave them (and still gives them) out at Christmas and birthdays with detailed post-it note descriptions of why it was a crime the artist never made it big. I've saved all the post-its completely disassociated from their CDs and they're still pleasant to read like random enthusiasms.

Anyway, Christopher gave me this album (I'm assuming quite inadvertently) right before my wedding, which was not lost on me at the time. We both loved this song and talked about Glover's talents and assets quite a lot back then. My first draft of the poem, due to its theme of being unable to think clearly in the middle of an emotion, is probably what made it difficult for me to critically solve the poem's problems, which today looked like the first two stanzas.

I reworked it this morning. It was in the April 19 slot before getting shown the door by REO Speedwagon.

So Many Thoughts
from “Thinking Over,” Dana Glover

Glover’s inquiring notes climb up my tributaries
like feels. And when I’m feeling, I stall;
I can’t think. The muscle halts.
The machine jams.

And I forget how pretty she is
when her long wail sweeps me up
to its crest. This beautiful girl
who is thinking everything so
dramatically, thoroughly through.

What a lucky turn for her,
this ability to reason through swales
and careening buckles,
ripping out a seasick howl
in the middle of a capsize.

She's like a mermaid
whose heart and mind and soul
are all the same thing.

Month: July 2022

The Essay Project: Different Takes on the Prose Poem

The Essay Project: Childhood Trauma in Art

The Essay Project: Three Haiku Masters

Outtakes From NaPoWriMo 2022

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