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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.

The Essay Project: Creative Writing MFAs

June 29, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

It’s possible I sorted these essays together one day when putting them away or they’ve surreptitiously found each other in the stack like long-lost frenemies: “The Limited Value of Master’s Programs in Creative Writing” by Jay Parini from The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 1994) and “In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes” from the book The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. In any case, they were not submitted by the same students. I only know this because “Robert/Ray” is handwritten on the Hugo essay and not on the Parini essay. So this must have been an essay argument occuring within the essay class while we were all working our ways through the $$$ Sarah Lawrence MFAs in Creative Writing. It doesn’t surprise me that the “Robert/Ray” packet was in support of MFAs as the Robert refers to Robert Fanning, the poet who would go on to become a creative-writing professor.

Both make their case. Let’s start with Parini:

“How does one learn to become a writer? The answer now put forward by many universities—and one that that I must question—is: Enroll in a masters-of-fine-arts program in creative writing. The old answer, of course, was that you learned the writing trade in the marketplace, under conditions that forced a certain economy of style and fostered self-discipline.”

Parini mentions journalists like Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Updike. He also lists poets who had what we would think of as ordinary jobs: T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frost, and poets who found “shelter in universities and colleges” — Nabokov, Roethke, Saul Bellow, Malamud, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell. (Every respectable literature department needed to boast a famous writer after all.)

He says there's “nothing intrinsically wrong” with the “tour d’ivoire.” He quotes Saul Bellow in saying defensively, “the university is no more an ivory tower than Time magazine, with its strangely artificial approach to the world.”

Parini talks about the incompatibility between literature departments and creative writing programs that live within them, “hermetically sealed” where students “sign up in droves.” They do.

Parini asks an important question, “Is what students demand actually being supplied? If not, should universities be held responsible for failing to practice truth in advertising? Given the extra time and expense of master’s programs, I doubt the M.F.A. degrees in creative writing are generally worth the investment.”

Now Hugo will go on to argue that students don’t get what they demand, but they do get something valuable. Like Tom Lux on our first day at Sarah Lawrence when he told us quite brutally that the best we could hope to get out of the program would be a circle of friends who would be our lifelong readers.

Parini argues for writing classes at the undergraduate level instead (as where he teaches). He says in undergraduate writing classes are like piano lessons are to music appreciation. “There is something about actually trying one’s hand at a sonnet, for instance, that makes one appreciate exactly why Shakespeare’s are great.”

Great!

Parini says,

“Let us assume (generously) that a hundred people in any generation become poets whom someone might want to read a hundred years from now. That leaves a lot of others writing poetry for their own ‘self-development,’ as we say…[however] few students enter such programs for spiritual nourishment. They hope to improve as writers, to be sure, but they also want to get a leg up in a the world of publishing and…acquire a credential that will be of some use when they apply for a job as a teacher of creative writing.”

“An M.F.A may help someone find a good job once in a blue moon, but I would never send one of my undergraduates on for the degree…so that he/she might wind up employed as a teacher of creative writing. Such advise would be tantamount to malpractice, since the chances of [them] finding employment in this field are minimal.”

And do the programs even produce good work? No, Parini says, they produce

“perfectly competent but essentially uninspired poems, stories and novels…often between hard covers…selected by prize committees established by the M.F.A. programs themselves, so that their graduates can have an outlet for their work…It may well be that graduate study in creative writing actually damages potentially good writers, making them too aware of what is fashionable and too fearful of developing in the idiosyncratic ways that make for genuine originality, if not greatness, in a writer.”

Learning to write, Parini says, “takes a lifetime, as it is always difficult, and the rewards are ultimately personal. All that matters in the end is that you find a language adequate to experience, and that is terribly hard to do.”

Next we move on to Richard Hugo’s chapter of defense in The Triggering Town. I think it’s mildly interesting that Richard and Ray thought to put their names on the essay but not Hugo’s. If you have The Triggering Town (which lots of poets do), I guess it’s considered self-explanatory.

Hugo says Ezra Pound successfully taught Eliot, Williams, Hemingway and Yeats and says it’s just a fact of life, “as long as people writer, there will be creative-writing teachers. It’s nice to be on the payroll again after a century or more of going unemployed.”

And like Parini, Hugo draws some stark differences between literature/English departments (which are so critical and expository) and creative writing classes. He says lit departments take good writing for granted and often produce theoretical papers with very poor writing (if you’re a nerdy member of JSTOR you know this for sure). “I’ve seen sentences that defy comprehension written by people with doctorates in English from our best universities.”

Good reading and good writing can be related, Hugo says, but are not always related. Creative writing “feeds off its own impulse….sometimes I talk about a triggering subject…the impulse to the poem” but there's also “a genuine impulse to write…so deep and volatile it needs no triggering device” (no reading to inspire its creativity), nothing but an “urge to search [that comes] from need, and that remains mysterious…”

Hugo sees actual “contempt for good writing among some scholars…common to hear a published scholar who wrote clearly referred to as a popularizer.” Writing, Hugo says, is not a “natural reward of study.” It takes work and practice.

“We creative writers are privileged because we can write declarative sentences and we can write declarative sentences because we are less interested inbeing irrefutably right than we are in the dignity of language itself…to use language well requires self-sacrifice, even giving up pet ideas.” We are “cavalier intellectuals” and “scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.”

In direct contradiction of Parini, Hugo says he has about 40 ex-students “now publishing” and that many teachers can list more than that.

Hugo is a bit worried though: “I’m not sure the sudden popularity of creative-writing courses is a privilege. It may be our ruination. It is becoming a sore point in English departments. The enrollment in creative writing increases and the enrollment in literature courses is going down. I‘m not sure why and I’m not sure the trend is healthy.”

He says many theorize this is due to “the narcissism of students, the egocentric disregard of knowledge, the laziness, the easy good grades to be had in the writing courses.”

“If I had to limit myself to one criticism of academics it would be this: they distrust their responses. They feel that if a response can’t be defended intellectually, it lacks validity. One literature professor I know was asked as he left a movie theater if he had liked the movie, and he replied, ‘I’m going to have to go home and think about it.’ What he was going to think about is not whether he liked the movie, but whether he could defend his response to it. If he decided he couldn’t, presumably he’d hide his feelings or lie about them. Academics like these, and fortunately they are far from all the academics, give students the impression that there’s nothing in literature that could be of meaningful personal interest….

I still consider academic professors indispensable to an English department. Whatever the curses of creative writing, it is still a luxury. If there’s a choice between dropping Shakespeare studies or advanced poetry writing, I would not defend retention of the writing course.”

He then lists problems of graduate writing programs, including how to judge students for acceptance, “I think Yeats was right when he observed that what comes easy for the bad poet comes with great difficulty for the good” and that “a piece of writing is a hard thing to judge” and “most writers haven’t learned to submit to their obsessions” at that level.

And here is the meat of his argument where he explains what programs can do: “A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time. Writing is tough, and many wrong paths can be taken…we teach writers to teach themselves how to write.”

One of my favorite paragraphs was this:

“It is a small thing, but it is also small and wrong to forget or ignore lives that can use a single microscopic moment of personal triumph. Just once the kid with the bad eyes hit a home run in an obscure sandlot game. You may ridicule the affectionate way he takes that day through a life drab enough to need it, but please stay the hell away from me.”

He then makes a good case for narcissism (at least against a dehumanizing system):

“You are someone and you have a right to your life. Too simple? Already covered by the Constitution? Try to find someone who teaches it. Try to find a student who knows it so well he or she doesn’t need it confirmed.”

“In the thirty-eight years…I’ve seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and bad politics and odd court decisions that our lives don’t matter [This was published in 1979]…modern life says that with so many of us we can best survive by ignoring identity and acting as if individual differences do not exsit. Maybe the narcissism academics condemn in creative writers is but a last reaching for a kind of personal survival. Anyway, as a sound psychoanalyst once remarked to me dryly, narcissism is difficult to avoid. When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do. A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. Your life matters, all right. It is all you’ve got for sure, and without it you are dead…Oblivion needs no help from us.”

I will pay off my 30k Sarah Lawrence creative writing MFA shortly. But then I chose Sarah Lawrence for its proximity to New York City. Was it worth it? Possibly. It did change my life in ways that are still unfolding. Do I wish it had been cheaper? Definitely but then I haven’t exactly had to starve myself paying it off. Are my parents disappointed in my creative writing MFA (that I paid for) and the much cheaper English BA (they paid for). They unfortunately are.

But here is where I would quote Philip Levine (who I’m in the middle of a long journey through) from his essay “Class With No Class.” He talks about not following the family business like his twin brother did and his mother’s joking admonitions that his life has proven the case for social mobility (in a downward sense). I agree with Levine whole-heartedly, especially where he talks about ‘blessed time.’

“I am pleased I did not fulfill the expectations of my class…my years in the working class were merely a means of supporting my own. My life in the working class was intolerable only when I considered the future and what would become of me if nothing were to come of my writing. In once sense I was never working-class, for I owned the means of production, since what I hoped to produce were poems and fictions. In spite of my finances I believe I was then freer than anyone else in this chronicle.

In order to marry and plunder a beautiful and wealthy woman I did not have to deny I was a Jew; for the sake of my self-esteem I did not have to reign like a chancellor over my family and my servants; in order to maintain my empire I did not have to fuel it with years of stifling work; in order to insure my legacy I did not have to drive my sons into the hopelessness of imitating my life.

Of course it meant years of living badly, without security or certainty, what I have called elsewhere ‘living in the wind,’ but it also meant I could take my time, I could take what Sterling Brown called my ‘blessed time,’ because after all, along with myself, it was the only thing I had.”

Creative writing programs are, in no small sense, buying time. And I’m often saying I value this blessed writing time above money, so much so that it’s the only thing I’ve ever stolen.

The Essay Project: Art Has Taken a Life

June 20, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This is an interesting little essay that kind of messed with my head yesterday. It looks like it was an essay from a long-time writing group I’ve been in from college and not the essay class of Suzanne Gardinier. I can only tell from the marginalia notes. One member has noted that this is Chapter Eleven from Muriel Rukeyser's book The Life of Poetry. Another person has noted the essay is dense and annoying, from a fascinating book but not warm and inspiring. At the end another member of the group said they had to work too hard to get there.

Even I joined in saying Rukeyser sounded "so full of herself" and "what does it all 'mean?" I've added a new note on re-reading this essay 25 years later: "so was I apparently." [What a shit!]

The interesting thing about this group is how stranded I feel from the other members. In a recent experience, we were reading a Haruki Murakami book that just blew me away and moved me a great deal and before the group met to discuss the book, I discussed it with my old boss and friend Kalisha (who has worked with me on some recent poetry projects and who picked the book as one of her favorites books last year). I told her I anticipated, with some heartache, that my group would not like this book. We had come to appreciate books very differently and I wondered if this was because my life experiences had been different than theirs or if, like for this particular book, maybe you had to live through something similarly difficult and painful (something hard to write about). Could someone appreciate his nuanced take on tangled love relationships without having felt them? Which is not to say members of the group haven’t felt love pain in relationships, but maybe just not Murakami’s particular type of relationships or maybe not a pain of just loving, but a pain of loving and being loved. I'm not sure where the disconnect is, but it's somewhere in there.

And just what I expected happened. The members were unenthused about the book. One of the them called the book flat linguistically and emotionally. Which is the opposite of what I experienced. I then went back to Kalisha to report that I felt maybe some human subtlety had been missed because I found it all very moving and piercing. Kalisha said, "Yeah, I found the muted, emotionally detached aspects of the characters touching and often devastating. He does that so well."

And now I can’t help continuing to feel a bit like an outcast in the group since I agreed with them 25 years ago when I read this essay here for the first time and today it seems painfully clear to me.

The essay is about the exchange of energy between people who write and read poetry.

"Exchange is creation. In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions…the gift that is offered and received…"

I'm sure 25 years ago I was like WTF does that even mean? Today I'm somewhat awestruck by the idea.

"…the symbols themselves are in motion…we have the charge, flaming along the path from its reservoir to the receptive target. Even that is not enough to describe the movement of reaching a work of art."

Rukeyser talks about how how poetry (and all arts) have become compartmentalized and intellectualized:

"We have used the term 'mind' and allowed ourselves to be trapped into believing there was such a thing, such a place, such a locus of forces. We have used the word 'poem' and now the people who live by division quarrel about 'the poem as object.' They pull it away from their own lives, from the life of the poet, and they attempt to pull it away from its meaning, from itself…prepared to believe there was such a thing as Still Life. For all things change in time; some are made of change itself, and the poem is one of these. It is not an object; the poem is a process."

She quotes Charles Peirce in saying, "All dynamical action [dynamical?], or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects…or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs."

Rukeyser corrects this to say a poem is a "triadic relation. It can never be reduced to a pair…[but is instead] the poet, the poem and the audience."

And then she goes on to define what she thinks of as 'audience' as 'reader' or 'listener' or better yet 'witness' with its

"overtone of responsibility in this word…not present in the others; and the tension of the law makes a climate here which is that climate of excitement and revelation giving air to the work of art, announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done of the self. These three terms of relationship–poet, poem and witness–are none of them static. The relationships are the meanings, and we have very few of the words for them."

She's trying to locate where poetry is here, where it is located, not in the words but in the relationships between readers and writers.

She talks about the oddness of personality tests, Rorschach tests (which since this essay have been fully discredited). She says that instead we need a test where "we could begin to see how changing beings react to changing signs–how the witness receives the poem."

It's like stepping outside a very limiting matrix. She says we are like a "juvenile learner at the piano, just relating one note to that which immediately precedes or follows. To an extent this may be very well when one is dealing with very simple and primitive compositions; but it will not do for an interpretation of a Bach fugue."

She talks about how the witness of a poem is "the entire past of the individual" and how the reader experiences a poem with their entire past.

She talks about running a workshop with a group of students where they try to locate where a poem exists. She has them start with a blank piece of paper "with its properties and possibilities." She talks about the "process of reaching a conclusion." She asks a volunteer poet to create a poem "on the spot" in their head, to remember it and recite it to the group. Then the poet leaves the room to write the poem down on paper in the hallway. So the group has heard an early, unwritten version of the poem. She then asks the class whether a poem has occurred and where the poem exists? What is the poem made of, what material?

The student poet returns and reads the poem as composed on the paper. It was remarkably similar, Rukeyser says, maybe one word was different. Then she asks the poet to tear up their poem into small bits. "Now where is the poem?" she asks.

The group thinks the poem lives in the imagination of the poem and the group. Rukeyser asks if the poet had died in the hallway, would there have been a poem?

"We have all gone through an experience," Rukeyser says. "We have seen something comes into existence."

So it was here that I stopped reading for a while. Rarely do I finish an essay in one or two sittings or days. But after putting this essay down, my mind was hot with an idea that I didn't know where to place. So I wrote this:

This is going to make me sound crazy but I feel I am in the middle of something bigger than I can fully comprehend yet, something powered by art and words and music and feelings and technology. It’s come to feel like a whirling cyclone of all those things; and one of its most amazing features is that it's unfolding right out in the open and nobody knows it's happening.

Rukeyser is saying that art is life and that possibly a life of the mind is not a full life, one that is missing the electricity of feeling and, most essentially, its feedback [feedback is actually a word Rukeyser will use later in the essay].

Most creative people I know (including once myself) tend to compartmentalize life and art and relationships, as if art is a reflection of this or that, a commentary to the side, appreciated as distinct experiences with distinct goals and motives. But when you see them all binding up together in your own life, it's shocking and you are no longer able to discern the borderlines.

Life and art are directing each other and technologies are getting tangled up in there.

This definitely refers back to my struggles with the writing group and not all of us being able to see similar things happening in the same piece of writing. Not everyone can see it. Which is, on one level, very crazy-making. But on another level its what Rukeyser is talking about, something that is happening not on paper or in a text, something not in any one thing but in a realtionship between certain writers and witnesses.

And you have to get to the other side of the phenomenon to understand it.

Yeah, so those were my notes to myself halfway through re-reading this yesterday. Now we continue with Rukeyser:

"The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form…the process has very much unconscious work in it." [I feel like a lot of my work of late has had plenty of unconscious aid as well.]

She talks about various 'surfacings': (1) the initial idea "which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off…meaning;” (2) another deep dive, stillness; (3) making notes of images, a first line, final self-work; (4) the actual writing; and then you change to a witness to do the (5) rounds of editing.

"We know that the poetic strategy, if one may call it that, consists in leading the memory of an unknown witness, by means of rhythm and meaning and image and coursing sound and always-unfinished symbol, until in a blaze of discovery and love, the poem is taken. This is the music of the images of relationship, its memory and its information."

That is…like crazy.

She then quotes Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics [whom we've just been talking about discussing digital poetry!] who talks about "problems of entropy and equilibrium…and she talks about some stuff about particles and containers that is above my head, but she brings it back to poetry:

"Now a poem, like anything separable and existing in time, may be considered a system, and the changes taking place in the system may be investigated. The notion of feedback, as it is used in calculating machines and such linked structures as the locks of the Panama Canal, is set forth. The relations of information and feedback in computing systems and the nervous system, as stated here, raise other problems. What are imaginative information and imaginative feedback in poetry? How far do these truths of control and communication apply to art? The questions are raised…like Proust's madeleine, still setting challenges to the sciences."

I can't fully get my head around all of that, but I can see clearly that technology and feedback are a big part of it. And human technology.

"The only danger is in not going far enough," Rukeyser says. "The usable truth here deals with changes. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility."

I mean.

"If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion and several kinds of death. All we can be sure of is that our art has life in time, it serves human meaning, it blazes on the night of the spirit; all we can be sure of is that at our most subjective we are universal; all we can be sure of is the profound flow of our living tides of meaning, the river meeting the sea in eternal relationship, in a dance of power, in a dance of love. For this is the world of light and change: the real world; and the reality of the artist is the reality of the witness."

Oy vey. And I didn't realize this yesterday when I read the essay but last week I wrote a poem after a visit to Chama, New Mexico, for a future print book. It's a poem about "living tides of meaning, the river meeting the sea" (!) another magical spark of serendipity that has occured in this essay that is a bit astonishing. I'll preview it here:

If You Want To Know

If you want to know where I’m going,
I’m going with the river.

I will not be pulling out water with a bucket.
I will not be swimming upstream like a salmon.

If you want to know,
I’m going with the river.

I won’t be standing on the bank like a bystander,
(Well, I mean maybe literally but not figuratively).

If you want to know, I’m going with the river
and at the end we will come to the ocean

and the ocean will push us back, push us back,
push us back until we are ready,

until the ocean is ready
and then we will be gone.

It's getting very hard to distinguish between art and life (and essays about life and art) right now.

The Essay Project: How Modernism Has Given Us Who We Are

June 16, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Incredibly this is our 54th essay!

I haven't done an essay in a few weeks because this particular essay took forever to read. Partially this was because I had company coming and I only clean the house before company comes so it took a while to get the house up to my mother's standards even though she's not the company coming.

Then there was the dry, academic essay itself. Then there was the fact that the Sarah Lawrence student who photocopied it from a book back in the early 1990s didn't notice there were unreadable words at the bottom of every page due to their bad copying job. (It was also maddingly stapled so that you have no idea which direction you should be going turning pages). This didn't stop me from reading it, however. It just made me stop after every three pages and take a brain rest.

The essay is an introduction called "The Idea of the Modern" by Irving Howe, most likely from his book The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts (1968). And it is good summary of what modernism is. But the essay was very interesting to me for another reason.

First I want to say there's always been something that has bothered me about modernism and I've never been able to put my finger on it (its un-scalability??) Although I did (as I was taught to) love many of its practitioners. I've felt this way for as long as I've known what modernism is/was (I think like we're still obsessed with it), going back to college or back to when we read "Prufrock" in high school.

I absolutely cannot read this essay and not think about the vitriol of politics today and how what was once a modernist fringe point of view has become a mainstream way of thinking. So the challenge for today's essay is to read it on two levels: (1) historical modernism and (2) listening for things you've heard people say on Twitter, Facebook or protest rally signs or the crazy Uncle or Aunt narc-splaining at holiday dinners or wherever you hear these basically nihilistic spews.

This is en example of how dry the thing is:"…historical categories are helplessly imprecise and that the unified style or sensibility to which they presumably refer are shot through with contradictions."

Any sentence with contains the phrase "to which they presumably refer" is a little soul crushing. But we slog on! Because we're literary warriors!

Another one, "Historical complexity and confusions are seldom to be overcome by linguistic policing." Who could argue with that? Except the linguistic police. "…the important thing is not to be 'definitive' which by the very nature of things is unlikely, but to keep ideas in motion, the subject alive."

I actually agree with the sentence but I've spent no small time wondering about how 'the nature of things' works.

The whole essay is about the "sensibility" and signs of modernity, which "seems willfully inaccessible" with its "unfamiliar forms" and "subjects that disturb the audience" and "threaten its most cherished statements."

This is what we like about it, it's revolution and irreverence. From 2022, however, we have what I would call 'mercenary modernists.' They don't care about the struggle. They're professional disturbers and threateners. In some cases they've picked a side to work for and they don't even know what the issues of the struggle are. Or in some cases, they're just trying to draw focus back to themselves for purely narcissistic reasons.

This is why we can't have nice, revolutionary things right now. Think about the caricature of the angry white male (or female) in America as you read the rest of this.

"The prevalent style of perception and feeling….is a revolt against the prevalent style, an unyielding rage against the official order."

"A modernist culture soon learns to respect, even to cherish, sigs of its division. It sees doubt as a form of health."

"It cultivates, in Thomas Mann's phrase, 'a sympathy for the abyss.' It strips man of his systems of belief and his ideal claims, and then proposes the one uniquely modern style of salvation: a salvation by, of, and for the self."

Wow.

"Subjectivity becomes the typical condition of the modernist outlook. In it's early stages, when it does not trouble to disguise its filial dependence on the romantic poets, modernism declares itself an inflation of the self, a transcendental and orgiastic aggrandizement of matter and event in behalf of personal vitality…freedom, compulsion, caprice."

"Modernism thereby keeps approaching–sometimes even penetrating–the limits of solipsism."

There you go. He just said it. And then goes on to quote a prediction from Herman Hesse:

"a whole generation caught…between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence." And Howe emphasizes, "Above all, no simple acquiescence." Howe says this "posits a blockage, if not an end, to history."

"The consequences are extreme: a break-up of the traditional untiy and continuity of Western culture, so that the decorum of its past no longer count for very much in determining its present, and a loosening of those ties that, in one or another way, had bound it to the institutions of society over the centuries."

That doesn't seem all bad though, right? Some of that traditional unity was kind of sexist and racist. But there's that scary law of unintended consequences…

"Culture now goes to war against itself, partly in order to salvage its purpose and the result is that it can no longer present itself with Goethian serenity and wholeness. At one extreme, there is a violent disparagement of culture (the late Rimbaud), and at the other, a quasi-religion of culture (the late Joyce). In much modernist literature, one finds a bitter impatience with the whole apparatus of cognition and limiting assumption of rationality. The mind comes to be seen as the enemy of vital human powers. Culture becomes disenchanted with itself, sick over its endless refinements. There is a hunger to break past the bourgeois proprieties and self-containment of culture, toward a form of absolute personal speech, a literature deprived of ceremony and stripped to revelation. In the work of Thomas Mann, both what is rejected and what is desired are put forward with a high, ironic consciousness: the abandoned ceremony and the corrosive revelation."

I'm getting exhausted reading this.

"But if a major impulse of in modernist literature is a choking nausea before the idea of culture, there is another in which the writer takes upon himself the enormous ambition not to remake the world (by now seen as hopelessly recalcitrant and alien) but to reinvent the terms of reality."

Here we go. We are there. Politicians are doing this as we speak.

"…the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs has charged, "modernism despairs of human history, abandons the idea of a linear historical development, falls back upon notions of a universal condition humane or a rhythm of eternal recurrence, yet within its own realm is committed to ceaseless change, turmoil and recreation."

Ceaseless change, turmoil and recreation. In business-speak this is called 'disruption." It makes me so tired I need to go lay down for 30 minutes.

Ok I'm back. Howe says, "…always the hope for still another breakthrough, always the necessary and prepared for dialectical leap into still another innovation." The "predictable summit…violates the modernist faith in surprise" so "culture must all the more serve as the agent of a life-enhancing turmoil."

And then we have our modernist ideas of the artist, the Genius,

"…declares Hegel in a sentence which thousands of critics, writers and publicists will echo through the years, 'it must be the public that is to blame…the only obligation the artist can have is to follow truth and his genius."

Stick a fork in it.

Modernism, Howe says, is devoted to raising questions, not answers. "We represent ourselves, we establish our authenticity, by the questions we allow to torment us." We embrace uncertainty, "the makeshifts of relativism" because "men should live in discomfort." He quotes Eugene Zamyatin: "Revolution is everywhere and in all things; it is infinite, there is no final revolution, no end to the sequence of integers."

He then lists some basic attributes of modernism:

Rise of the avant-garde as a special caste
"an avant-garde marked by aggressive defensiveness, stigmata of alienation….Bohemia both as enclave of protection within a hostile society and as a place from which to launce guerrilla raids upon the bourgeois establishment, frequently upsetting but never quite threatening its security…the avant-garde scorns notions of 'responsibility' toward the audience; it raises the question of whether the audience exists, of whether it should exist."

It's a ready made pose for any artist seeking their artist otufit. So convenient and attractive. Just speaking for myself. But here's the thing, the bourgeois have adopted it and contorted it and now here we are.

Howe goes on to say as much, "the avant-garde writer or artist must confront the one challenge for which he has not been prepared: the challenge of success. Contemporary society is endlessly assimilative, even if it tames and vulgarizes what it has learned, sometimes foolishly…the avant-garde is thereby no longer allowed the integrity of opposition or the coziness of sectarianism; it must either watch helplessly its gradual absorption into the surrounding culture or try to preserve its distinctiveness by continually raising the ante of sensation and shock."
The problem of belief
"Weariness sets in, and not merely with this or that other belief, but with the whole idea of belief. Through the brilliance of its straining, the modern begins to exhaust itself."
Self-sufficiency of the work
a move "toward an art severed from common life an experience…The Symbolists, as Marcel Raymond remarks, share with the Romantics a reliance upon the epiphany….For the Symbolist poet…illumination occurs only through the action of the poem…And thereby the Symbolist poet tends to become a magus, calling his own reality into existence and making poetry into what Baudelaire called 'suggestive magic.'"
The idea of esthetic order is abandoned
"it downgrades the value of esthetic unity in behalf of even a jagged and fragmented expressiveness" because "formal unity implies an intellectual and emotional, indeed a philosophic composure; it assumes that the artist stands above his material, controlling it…After Kafka it becomes hard to believe not only in answers but in endings."

Or feelings.
Nature ceases to be a central subject
Nature becomes an idea, a "token of deprivation," a "sign of nostalgia."
Perversity–which is to say surprise, excitement, shock, terror, affront–becomes a dominant motif.
"The modernist writer strives for sensations…he has little use for wisdom."
Primitivism
"Sophistication narrowing into decadence–this means primitivism will soon follow. The search for meaning through extreme states of being reveals a yearning for the primal….the turning upon one's primary characteristics, the hatred of one's gifts, the contempt for intelligence, which cuts through the work of men so different as Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, and Hart Crane….is always haunted by the problem of succession: what, after such turnings and distinctions of sensibility, can come next?"
A new sense of character
"Character for modernists like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, is regarded not as a coherent, definable, and well-structured entity, but as a psychic battlefield, or an insoluble puzzle, or the occasion for a flow of perceptions and sensations…into a stream of atomized experiences, a kind of novelistic pointillism."

The hero's struggle is a lack of belief in anything. "In Hemmingway's novels, the price of honor is often a refusal of the world. In Malfaux's novels, the necessity for action is crossed by a conviction of its absurdity."

Is this why we see such a lack of the heroic in our current culture? Our movies are filled with superheroes that don't seem to translate into heroic actions in real life. Maybe this because we have a subterranean disbelief in heroism and "the meaninglessness of the human scheme" and "the joke of progress."

And in the end, ourselves.

Howe quotes D.H. Lawrence, "I am weary even of my individuality, and simply nauseated by other people's."
Nihilism, boredom
"Dostoevsky tries to frighten…by saying that once God denied, everything terrible has become possible. Nietzsche give the opposite answer, declaring that from the moment man believes neither in God nor immortality, 'He becomes responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life."

I'm with that last guy.

"Nihilism lies at the center of all that we mean by modernist literature, bothe as subject and symptom."

Ok, so that's all very heavy and depressing. But Howe predicts a kind of vague end to all of it. "How do great cultural movements reach their end? It is a problem our literary historians have not sufficiently examined, perhaps because beginnings are more glamourous."

What will end modernism, Howe says in his closing sentence, is "the kind of savage parody which may indeed be the only fate worse than death."

Fingers crossed. Taking another nap now.

Ellipsis, Joan Didion and Me

June 13, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This recent Atlantic article by Caitlin Flanagan, originally entitled "Chasing Joan Didion," was interesting to me in that it was both a fan account as Flanagan visited the places Didion had once lived and, in moments, an illuminating description of what Didion does best.

Like this, for example:

“This is Joan Didion’s magic trick: She gets us on the side of ‘the past’ and then reveals that she’s fully a creature of the present. The Reagans’ trash compactor is unspeakable, but Jerry Brown’s mattress is irresistible.”

And this,

“People from the East often say that Joan Didion explained California to them. Essays have described her as the state’s prophet, its bard, its chronicler. But Didion was a chronicler of white California. Her essays are preoccupied with the social distinctions among three waves of white immigration: the pioneers who arrived in the second half of the 19th century; the Okies, who came in the 1930s; and the engineers and businessmen of the postwar aerospace years, who blighted the state with their fast food and their tract housing and their cultural blank slate.”

Since I am very different from Joan Didion, I often wonder what appeals to me about her. Flanagan is seeking a similar objective in this essay. For me I think one thing is Didion’s hardline, constant re-evaluating of her family history (especially its myths and legends) which, like mine, seems inseparable from her family state’s very history:

“In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, there’s an essay called “Notes From a Native Daughter”—which is how Joan Didion saw herself. It’s generally assumed that she began to grapple with her simplistic view of California history only much later in life, in Where I Was From. But in this first collection, she’s beginning to wonder how much of her sense of California is shaped by history or legend—by stories, not necessarily accurate, that are passed down through the generations.”

And a certain aura around her in the idea of writing being a performance:

“Heading to the seminar that most freighted and engaged her: the writing class of the great Mark Schorer, whom I knew very well when I was growing up. He was a very kind person and also a peerless literary critic, and he found in Didion’s early work evidence not just of a great writer. 'One thinks of the great performers—in ballet, opera, circuses,' he said. 'Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything'…

Her grand achievements:

For years it was known as the greatest leaving–New York essay of all time. It’s about the revolving door, the way you can arrive there young, innocent, and new, but the very process of adapting to the city will coarsen and age you.”

And in this famous first line,

“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

As Flanagan says, “Everyone who loves Joan Didion remembers that sentence—the shock of it, the need to race back up to the top of the essay to see if you’d missed something. ‘I had better tell you where I am, and why,’…When I fell in love with Joan Didion, it was just the two of us and all of those electric sentences, and that was enough.”

Flanagan also talks about how this aspect of performance felt empowering for women:

“She was in Berkeley as a Regents’ Lecturer, and because my father was then the chair of the English department, he was sort of serving as her host. She came to our house for dinner, and she hardly said a word. But a week or so later, when my father said, 'There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,' that got my attention. Apparently, her office hours—usually the most monastic of an academic’s life—were being mobbed. Not just by students; by women from the Bay Area who had heard she was there and just wanted to see her. All of these women felt that Slouching Towards Bethlehem had changed them.

It wasn’t a book that was supposed to change anyone. Not only because that was by no means Joan Didion’s intent, but also because—look at the subjects. How can an essay about Alcatraz (as an attractive, mostly deserted place, not as a statement on either incarceration or the land theft perpetrated against California’s Indian tribes); an essay about a baby’s first birthday party; a forensic investigation of the marital tensions that led Lucille Miller to kill her husband—how can all of those add up to something life-changing?

Because in 1968, here was a book that said that even a troubled woman, or a heartbroken woman, or a frightened woman could be a very powerful person. In “Why I Write”—which was, in fact, the Regents’ Lecture—she famously described writing as an act of aggression, in which a writer takes control of a reader and imposes her own opinions, beliefs, and attitudes on that reader. A woman could be a hostage-taker, and what she held you hostage to were both shocking public events and some of the most interior and delicate thoughts a woman can have. This woman with the vanda orchid in her hair and her frequent states of incapacitation could put almost anyone under her power.”

Flanagan relates this back to her own childhood:

“I had no power growing up, but I did have books and ideas, and I could be funny. I know I could have ended up being a magazine writer without ever having that chance experience. But what Joan Didion taught me was that it didn’t matter that I had such a messy, unenviable life—I could sit down, all alone, and write enough drafts to figure out what I thought about something and then punch it out into the culture.”

Although I'm sure the idea of power through writing would have sounded appealing, there were instead for me very specific rhetorical devices of Didion's style that just seeped into my writing almost unawares, such as her use of ellipses, not just those little three dots at the end of a thought but, as Oxford dictionary defines it, "the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues."

Or as others call it, Didion's

ellipses and evasions
ellipsis charged with irony
a certain calculated ellipsis
“Her art has always been," says Joyce Carol Oates, "one of understatement and indirection, of emotion withheld."

In Joan Didion, Sentence and Style, Kathleen M. Vandenberg goes into some detail about the ellipsis thing:

“Writing, Didion notes, is ‘an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding, rather than stating.”

In 2005, Didion described her process as “discovering what’s on my mind and then hiding it.”

Why would she do that? There’s a whole chapter on women doing this kind of subterfuge in Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia Ostriker, a chapter which is all about male/female power dynamics and I’m assuming Didion was caught up in this very thing from her own mythologizing of male power, trying to write around it, and her ideas about her own ‘fragility.’

Vandenberg says as she wrote about politics, “she focused on the use of language as ‘an obscuring device’” and her writing is often about the “rhetoric of gaps” which occurs as a “deliberate withholding of interpretation and commentary at the level of the sentence.” Vanderberg shows examples of connected sentences without and transitional words or phrases in between. And she explains how Didion's various grammatical tricks gives us the impression that Didion’s voice is “both forceful and understated.”

It’s hard to know where our influences come from. As Charles de Gaulle once said, "Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life." All I know is I enjoyed reading Didion’s reserve and evasion just as much as I enjoy my own.

So it would seem to follow…

But late in her life Didion herself felt it was her writerly evasion that possibly wrote her self. And she tells us this with predictable understatement that is not quite a warning but a matter of fact:

“I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or who I have become.”

In any case, I don’t believe writing is all that powerful in that it can forcibly change another's mind like a hostage. Although I do think there is a level of intimacy in making the attempt to change a mind.

Rather, for me, Vanderberg gets to the crux of the truth right here:

“What is withheld, what is omitted, is in many ways more powerful than what is present…her reflections on pivotal moments are inevitably pared down, set in sentences deceptively short and simple given the complexity and weight they are meant to convey”

The unsaid develops a certain power like a vaccuum of air.

Toward the end of the book, Vanderberg quotes the end of Didion's book Blue Nights which deals with the death of her only daughter, a poem-like string of sentences that are full of many typical Didion rhetorical strategies, including ellipsis:

“Go back into the blue.
I myself placed her ashes in the wall.
I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.
I know what it is I am now experiencing.
I know what the frailty is. I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
You may see nothing still to be lost.
Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”

Poems About Music

June 2, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Since I spent the early part of the year writing poems from songs (and really enjoying it) I was interested in what other poets had done with their inspirations and found a few anthologies with music poems in them.

Unlike poems about movies (a relatively new technology), poems about music go way back into the centuries all the way to Homer. Like they did for movies, Everyman’s Library has published Music’s Spell, poems about music and musicians. If you’re looking for more contemporary poems, this might not be the book because it's heavily weighted toward historical poems mixed with some contemporary ones.

Some other highlights:

"Juke Box Love Song" by Langston Hughes
"First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels" by Allen Ginsberg
"Painkillers" by Thom Gunn
"Waiting on Elvis, 1956" by Joyce Carol Oates (a poem found in multiple anthologies)
"The Composer" by W.H. Auden
"For Poulenc" by Frank O’Hara
"Lines: To a Movement in Mozart’s E-Flat Symphony" by Thomas Hardy
"When the Violin" by Hafiz
"The Guitar" by Federico Garcia Lorca
From "Jubilate Agno" by Christopher Smart
"Piano Lessons" by Billy Collins
"In a Museum" by Thomas Hardy

"Music" by Anna Akhmatova whose Lyn Coffin translation ends with:

“And she sang like the first storm heaven gave,
Or as if flowers were having their say.”

"The Flute" by Andre Chenier about a music teacher and the Lloyd Alexander translation ends with:

“With my young fingers in his knowing hands, again
And yet again he guided them until they could,
Of their own will, draw music from a tube of wood.”

"From Fruit-Gathering" by Rabindranath Tagore which ends:

“The flute steals his smile from my friend’s lips
and spreads it over my life.”

"The Tongues of Violins" by Walt Whitman:

The tongues of violins!
(I think O tongues, ye tell this heart, that cannot tell itself;
This brooding, yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.)

From "Gerog Trakl’s Trumpets:"

“Dancers rise from a black wall–
Scarlet flags, laughter, madness, trumpets.”

From Hamlet by William Shakespeare which ends:

“Call me what instrument you will,
though you can fret me,
yet you cannot play upon me.”

From Walt Whitman's "Proud Music of the Storm" which ends:

Give me to hold all sounds, (I, madly struggling, cry,)
Fill me with all the voices of the universe,
Endow me with their throbbings—Nature's also,
The tempests, waters, winds—operas and chants—marches and dances,
Utter—pour in—for I would take them all.

"The Solitary Reaper" by William Wordsworth that ends:

“The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.”

From "Don Juan" by Lord Byron:

“The devil hath not, in all his quiver’s choice,
An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice.”

And “The Singing Lesson” by David Wagoner which ends:

“If you have learned, with labor and luck, the measures
You were meant to complete,
You may find yourself before an audience
Singing into the light,
Transforming the air you breathe—that malleable wreckage,
That graveyard of shouts,
That inexhaustible pool of chatter and whimpers—
Into deathless music.”

I actually got the idea to look for music poems from another anthology, Seriously Funny, Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else edited by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby, which Billy Collins recommended in his Masterclass. There was a definite style of poem in this anthology, long-lined narratives at the expense of short, funny pieces. And I'm sure reading a book full of long-lined poems crammed with odd details influenced a recent Rockford Files poem I finished last week. But strangely there were more unfunny poems in the anthology than funny ones, although there were some interesting music poems sprinkled in:

"Country-Western Singer" by Alan Shapiro
"I’d Rather Look for My Keys" Freeman Rogers
"Understanding Al Green" by Adrian Matejka
"Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (after Ezra Pound)" by Josh Bell
“Don’t Know What Love Is” by Honoree Jeffrey (a great poem about sneaking out to a Dinah Washington show)
and “Elvis, Be My Psychopomp” by David Kirby

Then there's Mystery Train by David Wojahn with its famous sequence of rock poems. My well-read friend Sherry, seeing I was writing pop-culture poems in graduate school, recommended the book to me when we were both at Sarah Lawrence in the mid-1990s.

The middle sequence contains 35 poems on various rock history milestones: James Brown at the Apollo and on tour, a poem about the car Hank Williams died in, Jerry Lee Lewis’ scandalous marriage to Myra Gale Brown ( I was surprised to relearn her name today since she’s always credited as “underage cousin” even on Jerry Lee Lewis' Wikipedia page and even in this poem she gets no name), Ritchie Valens before his plane crash, the Beatles in Hamburg in 1961, a poem about the song “Surfin’ Bird,” Janis Joplin leaving Port Arthur in 1964, Dick Clark hiding his real age, Elvis shooting the TV while watching Robert Goulet, the last days of Brian Jones by his swimming pool, Altamont, listening to The Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival in Vietnam (and The Doors during the making of Apocalypse Now), John Berryman listening to Robert Johnson, the “Exile on Main Street” Rolling Stones tour, Nixon naming Elvis an Honorary Federal Narcotics Agent, Malcolm McLaren signing the Sex Pistols, Elvis in Las Vegas, drunken bar parodies of Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley's tour, Brian Wilson’s sandbox, Lisa Marie Presley, Bo Diddley, Roy Orbison’s comeback tour, and TNT Colorizing the movie A Hard Day’s Night.

The problem with re-reading all these poems these days is that the subjects seem too obvious now and over-visited. And the poems all sound the same for the most part. There's not much variation in the form, tone or point-of-view. Some exceptions are:

"Buddy Holly Watching Rebel Without a Cause, Lubbock, Texas, 1956" (a poem which was also in our movie anthology)
"W.C.W. Watching Presley’s Second Appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”: Mercy Hospital, Newark, 1956"
"Woody Guthrie Visited by Bob Dylan: Brooklyn State Hospital, New York, 1961"
"Delmore Schwartz at the First Performance of the Velvet Underground, New York, 1966" and another poem directly following about Lou Reed at Delmore Schwartz’s wake.
"History Being Made: Melcher Production Studios, Los Angeles, 1968" about Charles Manson
The Assassination of John Lennon As Depicted by the Madame Tussaud Was Museum, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1987"

And then lastly, the anthology Sweet Nothings, An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry edited by Jim Elledge which like the unfunny-funny poetry anthology above it has a lot of poems only tangentially referencing rock songs (and some not even). But there were still some good exceptions:

David Trinidad's "Meet the Supremes" (a list of an ode to all girl groups)
Kay Murphy's "Eighties Meditation"
Jim Elledge's "Strangers: An Essay" (about Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise)
Dorothy Barresi's "The Back-Up Singer" and "Nine of Clubs, Cleveland, Ohio"
Christopher Gilbert's "Time with Stevie Wonder in It"
Sydney Lea's "The One White Face in the Place"
Michael Waters' "Christ at the Apollo, 1962"
Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" (probably the most famous poem about popular music)
Mark Defoe's "Dream Lover"
William Matthew's prose poem "The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives"
Ronald Wallace's "Sound Systems"
Lisel Mueller's "The Deaf Dancing to Rock"
Thom Gunn's "The Victim" (about the death of Nancy Spungen)
Joseph Hutchinson's "Joni Mitchell"
Katharyn Howd Machan's "In 1969"
Robert Long's "What's So Funny 'bout Peace, Love and Understanding"
Dana Gioia's "Cruising with the Beach Boys"
Gary Soto's "Heaven"
Albert Goldbarth's "People Are Dropping Out of Our Lives"
David Bottoms' "Homage to Lester Flatt"
David Wojahn's "Buddy Holly" (much better than the Mystery Train poems, IMHO)
Van K. Brock's "Sphynx"
Richard Speakes' "Patsy Cline"
Richard Blessing's "Elegy for Elvis"

Larry Levis' "Decrescendo" with the line:

"The man on sax & the other on piano never had to argue
Their point, for their point was time itself"

James Seay's "Johnny B. Goode" with the lines:

"though I could probably write one of those pop-culture essays
on its All-American iconography,
the railroad running through the promise-land"

Michael Loden's "Tumbling Dice" with the line:

"is 'Ooo Baby Baby'
still the melting point of ice?"

And I must mention to end, surprisingly none of these anthologies included my favorite music poem, "Serenade" by Billy Collins.

Conspicuous Poetry Consumption: Poetry Scrolls

June 1, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We have a few locations here in Albuquerque and Santa Fe (Range Cafe, The Standard Diner, Meow Wolf) that have Art-O-Mat machines, converted cigarette dispensers made into cigarette-pack-sized art dispensers.

For $5 you can buy art objects and I have an office shelf half full of them because I can't pass them up. In fact, I will panhandle five bucks if I find myself near one of these machines without cash.

About six months ago at the Range Cafe near the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center I came across a poet in the Art-o-Mat selling poetry scrolls in his cigarette box.

This poet calls himself Reverend Stray Toast (a.k.a. Max Toast) and his creative packaging includes nutritional information (Total Fascism 0%) and the warning that "poetry has been scientifically proven to have the ability to, under certain circumstances, Change Your Life."

The box contained three scrolls.

"Show Love" (click to enlarge) is about getting back what you put out with lines like "I will stay until I become the depiction of I love I miss in the world" and "being alive is harder than being intelligent."

This is mostly a poem of fragments and ramblings about abandonment, competition, self-hate and inauthenticity.

He stays in the realm of abstractions a bit too much but he's putting it out there on little scrolls…so enjoy it I say.

"Sequentialism" is a complete free association poem where one word in one line rolls into the next: "history story teller/teller at the bank/Banksy at Gaza/gauzed wrapped strip nude" and some lines even repeat a word like "miss your face face your fears/fears of commitment meant it/the other way."

The final scroll contains three poems: "Class," "Resonate" and "Go Figure" which tells us to "Figure something out/with your hands./Now fix it."

Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 3 of 64)

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The Essay Project: Three Haiku Masters

Outtakes From NaPoWriMo 2022

The Essay Project: Creative Writing MFAs

The Essay Project: Art Has Taken a Life

If You Want To Know

The Essay Project: How Modernism Has Given Us Who We Are

Ellipsis, Joan Didion and Me

Poems About Music

Conspicuous Poetry Consumption: Poetry Scrolls

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