Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World
Sometimes I think the only thing the self-help industry has done has been to make us self-centered, self-satisfied and full of certitudes.
This article talks about how most scientific and creative inspiration comes from the not-knowing and the desire to know.
Wislawa Szymborska on How Our Certitudes Keep Us Small and the Generative Power of Not-Knowing
As the 52 Haiku project was ending, I started cleaning out my garage and found a box of poetry essays from college. I had been hanging on to them in case I became a teacher (I didn’t). I thought it would be a good weekly project to review them here as I decide to find electronic copies or trash them. I’m sure they won’t all be available online but I’ll try to find a book or some way to track them down if you want to read them for yourself.
I picked this first essay because it was short. And carries a big stick.
“On the Function of the Line" by Denise Levertov (1979). You can find a copy from Yale.
This is a very famous and influential essay often used in defense of free verse. It’s short but is full of great quotable things.
Levertov famously positions the line break as a tool in a poet's toolbox (as opposed to a style). My only complaint with the essay is that Levertov doesn’t really go into all that much detail about the line break. When she does she talk about its "fractional pauses," she mentions rhythmical, pitch and melodic score of a poem, noting it’s rhythm and hesitations (or pauses). Indentation she mentions as another similar method of scoring.
She talks about how these pauses work most naturally before nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, words that don’t require punctuation near them to denote slight pausings. She also finds examples to show why the same pauses are ineffective around articles and blames a line break found around those words as a misunderstanding of the idea of enjambment. She says, “enjambment is useful in preventing the monotony of too many end-stopped lines in a metrical poem, but the desired variety can be attained by various other means in contemporary open forms.”
How can you tell if your particular score works? Levertov suggests you play around with line break variations and then have someone else read to you the variations. If they don’t “read the poem right," then you haven’t positioned your line breaks correctly.
Levertov doesn’t deny that formal verse can use line break pauses effectively as well and she uses Gerald Manley Hopkins as an example; but his example also shows how this goes against the natural grain of the formal ethos, to be “forcing an intractable medium into inappropriate use.” In other words, closed forms are great because they’re, well, closed forms. Why rob them of that when you can just default to open forms?
A discussion of line breaks inevitably brings up the issue of the prose poem, that poem without a single line break of which Levertov says, “some of our best and most influential poets have increasingly turned to the prose paragraph for what I feel are the wrong reasons – less from a sense of the peculiar virtues of the prose poem [I wish she had elaborated there!] than from a despair of making sense of the line.”
I have to admit many of my prose poems came to exist after I couldn’t make sense of their line breaks.
Levertov digresses in a few places. (What essay doesn’t?) She talks about open versus closed (metrical, rhyming) forms. She says, “open forms do not necessarily terminate inconclusively, but their degree of conclusion is – structurally, and thereby expressively – less pronounced, and partakes of the open quality of the whole.” Closed forms lack the sound of “dogmatic certitude.” There’s something about end-stopped lines that smells of certainty in an uncertain world. She calls open forms more “exploratory” revealing the the process of a writer's thinking. You can see this in some poems, how they seem to be written as if the poet is thinking while writing it. Closed forms often seem more results-and-conclusions oriented. She also mentions that open forms “build unique contexts" that “can’t be judged by preconceived method[s] of scansion” and that have a “grace or strength implicit in a system peculiar to that poem” and a “fidelity to experience.” All true but terribly, terribly vague.
Ultimately, there is no clear and precise depiction of what different open-form line breaks do other than provide a vague score of how to read the poem. Considering the well of documented tricks and tips for formal poems, you’d like the same kind of organized catalog of uses. This essay was just like an open form poem, exploratory and in no way conclusive or certain. But then this was the 1970s, a decade of scoping out territory more than big displays of poetical science.
Levertov also digresses for quite a while to discuss deleting private moments from an open form [but wouldn't you do this for a closed form, as well?] and then further digresses on the difference between the private and the personal in a poem, which is extremely useful for new poets but really off the point of this short essay. But it’s very helpful nonetheless so I'll quote her:
Levertov gets cryptic toward the end. She talks about “Olson’s ‘breath’ theory” and newbs will be left to wonder what the heck this is without googling it, a verb that didn’t even exist when this essay came out. She's actually referring to another famous essay, "Projective Verse by Charles Olson." Here's a long essay explaining the other essay.
But finally, she has a lovely definition of poetry in this essay: “the voice of each one’s solitude made audible and singing to the multitude of other solitudes.” Quite lovely.
All this lead me to wonder about the success of the open form and how it still both appeals to mass audiences and writers and has simultaneously driven away many readers at the edges of its experimentations. The more generous and accessibly of poets have done well: Stephen Dobyns, Billy Collins (storytelling still goes over), Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver. And if that’s all too easy for some, there’s always Albert Goldbarth and Anne Carson. Open forms still serve. Line breaks do real work in open forms when used properly. This essay can help you practice on that a bit.
I've been doing some revisionist thinking about self help.
Many things have contributed to this: a 10-day webinar about narcissism and two books I recently finished.
The 2010 book Living Oprah (given to me as a gift) is about what happens to your self-esteem if you followed every piece of advice from the old Oprah Winfrey Show for a full year. Oprah Winfrey-fan Robyn Okrant does this as an experiment and hilarity ensues. But along the way she starts to question the value of most self-help agendas and time-sucks and wild-goose chases. I too like Oprah but am realizing self-nurturing does not provide for yourself or others the way we've believed it should.
It's amazing how positive Okrant managed to stay about Oprah and the Oprah-industrial-complex. This book was in no way anti-Oprah as much it was questioning our obsession with self-help.
So this parlayed nicely with another book I was reading at the same time, Selfie by Will Storr (also a gift book). This was an amazing book about the unhappy intersection between pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps American Individualism (and an Ayn Rand kind of conservatism) with the self esteem movement (EST and other Californian self-help initiatives, a largely post-hippie liberalism). Both have merged to produce this 2020 world citizen.
I’m someone who has always been attracted to self-help prescriptions because I believe I’m in dire need of it and I have the willpower and stamina to actually do the things. Am I self-improved? Has it all been a waste of time and a tragic loss of engagement with possible communities and outward serving life models?
I bring this up in Big Bang Poetry because I know there are a large group of poets who find poetry writing helpful toward self-exploration and self-healing (self-help in a nutshell), or as part of the meditative process. While that has never been my main goal in writing myself, I do see the value in it, which is why I’ve been working on 52 Haiku.
These are both good books if you are interested in refocusing your aims and where you choose to place your time. It might also affect what subjects you choose to write about.
Modern angst, right? Recently I fell for an email scam by NordicTrack for a tune up on my treadmill. They surprisingly and immediately outsourced the project to a treadmill parts company who themselves then outsourced me to a repair company out of Arizona(!) because, they said, there were no mechanics smart enough or patient enough to learn how to service NordicTracks in the whole state of New Mexico.
It was, predictably, a shit show. It took the Arizona company weeks to schedule visits to New Mexico and they kept trying to schedule visits on weekends two days before that weekend. I wasn’t allowed to schedule anything ahead. So if say I was on vacation Memorial Day weekend, they’d fully expect me to cancel that the Thursday prior. If you were out of town, too bad for you. You had to wait another two weeks or a month later for another late-minute, surprise schedule request. Great customer service, right?
I ordered the tune up in April and it wasn’t completed until July! They could have avoided all this by saying the NordicTrack tuneup service wasn't available in New Mexico but….they didn't offer that information…or a refund. Sucker!
And not only did I pay $200 for the tune-up, but I paid to fix all the broken items separately. The $200 was just a courtesy charge for the initial visit. At one point I was arguing with the middle company about getting a free visit for a mistake the repairman made on the previous visit that needed to be fixed before the tune-up could be completed. I did get the free visit.
No one understood the system, least of all me. And it was a horrible, time consuming experience being passed around on the phone for 30 minutes a transfer. Ultimately it was a complete rip-off at the end of which I was supposed to receive a one-year warranty. Guess what? It never came.
I had no one to complain to in the tangle of outsourcings. The service was all spread out so thin no one would take responsibility for any mistake in the chain. Lots of finger pointing happened. And even the employees involved seemed confused and frustrated.
Great job, NordicTrac!
But this is all to describe a quote I read from the New York Times Magazine in an article entitled “Panic Attack,” a piece about modernity and why it’s making us so angry and full of anxiety:
“…our world [is full of] strange and byzantine distances between individuals and the grand global forces affecting us. This feels as obviously true today as it might have to a midcentury reader of Kafka. You can argue with a store owner; you can’t argue with the call-center representative of the company contracted to maintain the point-of-sale machine owned by another company contracted by the multinational conglomerate that owns the store….In the 1991 novel “Generation X” one of Douglas Coupland’s character ventures that “the world has gotten too big—way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers.” A pressing national worry, right now, is that our dueling bumper-sticker snippets have nothing productive to say to one another."
So think about that as you prepare and devise your stories and poems. What productive thing do you have to say that goes beyond a bumper-sticker snippet?
Visiting Chicago last month, Monsieur Big Bang and I came upon this museum, noticing it because of a Bob Dylan exhibit advertisement in the window of the building.
The small museum packs a big punch. The Bob Dylan Electric museum was one small hallway but filled with memorabilia, the end of which focused heavily on his Nobel Prize winning. The museum obviously considers him an American Writer, which I was happy to see, because it confirmed my existing, documented bias on the issue.
Newspapers weighing in / Bob Dylan's influences / The Nobel Prize Reception Invite
Related, I really appreciated one massive wall of writers and their genre, to show how inclusive they were in considering the idea of the American writer (from songwriters to book authors to poets to playwrights and speech writers).
The permanent exhibit is a massive display of American writers through history, giving you a really good sweep of American ideology in major periods, from Colonial to present day, each exemplar including a photo or artistic rendering, a sample of their major works, a statement of their importance and maybe a big of trivia, all this supplied on swinging interactive triangular blocks.
There were quite a few poets I didn’t know and I made a list of writers I wanted to check out.
De Vaca was the first writer listed (a memorialist) followed by John Smith (autobiography), William Bradford (historian) and Anne Bradstreet (poet). That’s right, America’s first poet was a lady-poet! The display had America broken into categories of colonial, revolution, new nation, and literary independence.
There was also an electronic display on American themes across time. And one entire small sub-exhibit devoted just to the inventions of Edgar Allan Poe.
There was also an amazing electronic board of writing excerpts. The museum called it a Word Waterfall reading “what does it mean to be American?
They had a display on magazines and visitor’s favorite books, a Frederick Douglass exhibit, and two last exhibits where I wasn’t sure when one ended and the other began: The Mind of a Writer and Tools of the Trade (from Typewriters to Touchscreens). I love how contemporary they are!
Exhibits included a table of typewriters you could interact with, a display of first lines, an electronic touchscreen version of Jack Kerouac’s scroll manuscript for On the Road.
There was also an exhibit of writerly habits, writer fuel, and advise on how to organize your thinking. 
There were also poetry computer games! One where you would try to figure out missing words from a poem and a word magnet game.
What a fun, interactive museum! My only complaint was the lack of erasers for sale in the gift shop. What writer doesn’t need erasers?
Visit their website for upcoming events: Americanwritersmuseum.org.
This is a major book review catch-up. As I've been switching work situations, I kept on reading but couldn't keep up with blogging. So here we go…
The World Broke In Two, Bill Goldstein
The book cover looks very retro but this book actually came out in 2017 and it's about the year 1922, right after Proust had been translated into English and James Joyce has published Ulysses. Many established writers were disrupted (as we would say today) and Goldstein covers the comings and goings of four of those writers: Virginia Woolf (working on her Mrs. Dalloway novel), T.S. Eliot (writing his epic poem "The Waste Land"), E.M. Forster (working on A Passage to India) and D. H. Lawrence (roaming the earth, particularly his visits to Italy, Australia and Taos, New Mexico).
Although I loved getting context on D.H. Lawrence's inability to like anything, (he's the favorite writer-visitor of the state of New Mexico and I'm always trying to figure out why), I don't really see how his chapters fit in with the others. He wasn't influenced by one of the two landmark books as the others were, the other's had of a circle of friendships (which he was not a part of), and nothing of a modernist masterpiece came out of his work during that time. So why was he included?
But anyway, the biographer does penetrate the time very well, including all the letters going back and forth, discussions about writing and figuring out how to be modern.
New Directions in Digital Poetry, C.T. Funkhouser
This is one of those books I've been trying to find for a while. Copies are usually too expensive, which happens with certain books that are used as textbooks. For some reason the world thinks it's okay to extort shameful fees from poor students.
Anyway, this 2012 book is pure textbook stuff. Not for the disinterested. Most of the online pieces I tried to look up were already unavailable, with screenshots at best (example, Angela Ferraiolos pieces and works by Mary-Anne Breeze). So the book is basically descriptions of cool digital pieces (mostly in Flash) that you have to imagine in your head.
I was able to access the digital poem "Vniverse" by Stephanie Strickland (now an app form) and that was enjoyable. Jim Andrews has a piece dbCinema that is still online.
If you have Flash enabled, you could view interesting things by Deena Larsen, Serge Bouchardon and Jason Nelson.
I love the possibilities for digital poems, but it still seems that many talented writers are fiercely disinterested in exploring digital media. And likewise, the writers who do explore these terrains are often programmers first. As Funkhouser admits,
"…many digital poets do not aspire to reify lofty historical norms. Instead they employ different sorts of patterns, wherein programmatic randomness and machine cognition combine to synthesize network/media resources into a digital event almost guaranteed to contain turbulence. Readers may intuitively acclimatize to fragmentation and the absence of conventional syntax, traits not foreign to modernist and experimental poetry in the last century."
I have plenty of thoughts about this and the values experimental programmers bring to poems versus the value that writers would pursue. More on that later. But for now, it's just interesting to note that poets are willing to do experiments on paper that they're shy of doing in other media for some probably techno-phobic reason. And although I sympathize with that (as a lover of books and the machine of books), it's shortsighted and willfully missing out on understanding the possibilities of different platforms and media. And it misses, by a mile, the issues of our times, particularly similar interests in the realms of abstraction and the role of authorship in web reading and how "the signal to noise ration…is often fraught with diversion and dead ends." Better writers could explore digital opportunities, "orchestrating a textual experience that undermines its facade."
Most digital poets and experimental traditional poets have the same end goal: they want their pieces to "cause thinking" or "incite thought." And digital lit isn't always a criticism of traditional modes, although sometimes it is.
New & Selected Essays, Howard Nemerov
I really enjoyed one of Howard Nemerov's essays in the compilation Poetics, Essays on the Art of Poetry and so I bought his collected essays from 1985. Nemerov is the sister of famous photographer Diane Arbus (who claimed they had a sexual relationship as teens), and was a distinguished professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis from 1969 to 1991. This book would have come out when I was 15. The likelihood of my attending Wash U was slim. It was St. Louis' ivy league. But to think I could have studied with him if I had been more aware of my surroundings…
Anyway, this book is dated in many ways (one essay is on the horrors of in-vitro) and there is an extremely unilluminating love-fest of essays between Nemerov and poet Kenneth Burke. But there are some great things in here:
– A great fictional conversation between an advertising copywriter and a poet.
– Good comments throughout (and one full essay) on Wallace Stevens.
– Big topic areas like middle-aged poets used to write about in the 80s: the arts vs. religion and another essay on how poems operate like jokes (you know I love that stuff!).
– A comparison between human imagination in Blake and Wordsworth.
– He also tackles essays on metaphor, figures of thought and making meaning.
– There are also essays on newsworthy topics of the day, speeches, commentary on fiction, meter in poetry, and essays on Dante, Rilke and Randall Jarrell.
Some good quotes:
"The great babble of the world goes incessantly on as people translate, encipher, decipher, as one set of words is transformed more or less systematically into another set of words–where upon someone says, 'O, now I understand….'"
"To view the poet as a magician is fair, if we remember that magicians do not really solve the hero's problems, but only help him to confront these…"
"A joke expresses tension, which it releases in laughter; it is a sort of permissible rebellion against things as they are–permissible, perhaps, because this rebellion is at the same time stoically resigned, it acknowledges that things are as they are, and that they will, after the moment of laughter, continue to be that way. That is why jokes concentrate on the most sensitive areas of human concern: sex, death, religion, and the most powerful institutions of society; and poems do the same.
"…as Mr. [William] Empson said (in a poem), 'The safety valve alone knows the worst truth about the engine.'" [There's a whole magazine predicated on this very quote!]
"…In general, to succeed at joking or at poetry, you have to be serious; the least hint that you think you are being funny will cancel the effect, and there is probably no lower human enterprise than 'humorous writing.'" [Thank you.]
And in reference to the book above, this quote seems apropos here:
"A.M. Turing [the godfather of digital lit, by the way] once said that the question 'Can machines think?' was too meaningless to deserve discussion, and suggested that the proper short answer was 'Can people?'"
"…the posture of the literary mind seems these days to be dry, angry, smart, jeering, cynical; as though once people had discovered the sneaky joys of irreverence they were quite unable to stop" and he warns that "the intelligent and crafty young at last, as Ulysses says, eat up themselves."
Two novels about people writing: The Anthologist/Traveling Sprinkler (Nicholson Baker, 2009) and The End of the Story (Lydia Davis, 1995)
These books are so similar in a way I feel I need to compare them. In the Baker story, the main character is a man, a poet and musician going through a breakup and unable to finish the introduction to an anthology of metered poetry. In fact, the whole piece is pretty much about his avoidance of writing or his struggling to learn a new instrument. He's not very likeable and he thinks a lot about poetry and music (there's some great meditations on the history of poetry here converging back to music) and discussion on the history and meaning of many poets and poems. And although the character is a bit of a mansplainer, that annoyingness is part of the point. He knows so much he can't move. He can only ruminate. It's enjoyable but I had to take it in little bursts because he does drone on and the novel melds into a kind of free-form essay on poetry and music. Luckily the chapters are short. The book resolves but somewhat unsatisfactorily. It just kind of runs out of steam. And although the novel is a nice enough way to spend some time, I haven't recommended it to anybody. But I'm keeping it, so that says something.
The main character in Davis' book is an academic woman, a translator of French, and a novelist who is struggling to write the very novel you have in your hands. Although you never fully believe the story is a fiction and she ruminates herself about the borders between the forms. Like the character above, this story involves a very painful breakup told in excruciatingly but amazingly exacting psychological detail. Think Proust in "Swann's Way." Davis is interesting in that she's a Proust scholar (she's re-translated his first book, to date) but she writes with a very limited vocabulary. Not quite like Hemingway but closer to that than to Proust. Her topics get a lot of coverage but not in a vocabulary-rich, long-sentence way. Which is perfectly fine. That entirely serves the character, who is even less likable than Baker's main guy. Our character here has hit rock bottom in the relationship arena and so there's no 'splaining at all, just wading through the all-too familiar confusion of a sudden collapse of a love affair. There are no chapters here…it's just one long mess with section breaks; but thankfully it's a short book. There are great passages about novel writing and character construction and although the story doesn't resolve, the end seems pretty perfect. It was heartbreaking and I've been recommending it to everyone I talk to.
Plainwater (Anne Carson, 1995)
Carson's covers are so demure. I'm including this because there's not an Anne Carson book I've read that doesn't inspire me to try one of the same epic forms she invents from piece to piece. I can't not think about writing when I read her books. They never disappoint even though often they're often above my head.
This books seems like her most personal. She calls the pieces essays and poetry but it's hard to tell what's what. The cornerstone piece, "The Anthropology of Water" is about modern pilgrimages and amazingly threaded together with great commentary on love and traveling. The love poem, "Canicula di Anna" is also another good piece of brain food I'm still deciphering.
Her books have real re-readability for me because even the fragments I can manage to understand are plenty thought-provoking.
I also just finished her chapbook, The Albertine Workout, which considers Prout's character Albertine from many angles.
Even though my life was out of control last year, I did manage to keep reading…to keep sane! These books below were worth talking about.
Who Reads Poetry, 50 Views from Poetry Magazine
This slim book is an anthology of essays from Poetry magazine, non-poets who read poetry and what they get out of it, from scientists to doctors to war correspondents. It was a bit dry but interesting to me. I like that Poetry magazine is searching for relevance outside of poetry writers. I'm not sure what was missing for me, but something was. I'll keep thinking about it. The essays are filled with great thoughts though, lots of quotable material. A few examples:
American Philosopher Richard Rorty talks about poetry as friendship, “I now wish I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose…rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts–just as I would have if I had made more close friends.”
Tex expert Xeni Jardin talks about poetry like a machine, “Poetry is, you might say, the command-line prompt of the human operating system, a stream of characters that calls forth action, that elicits response.”
PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown quotes Haitian poet Frankétienne with a very pragmatic view, “Words cannot save the world” and Brown continues, “Look around you, see the destruction, the stupidity, the despair, and you have to believe he’s right. And yet an account must be given.”
Residuum by Martin Rock was finally a poetry experiment worth reading. These are cross out experiments that read like real time edits. Poems go in multiple directions at once. Some edits are around truth or specificity or political correctness or just the political. My first fear was this is gonna suck. It did not suck. The branches were illuminating. There are not so many poems in the book that it feels overwhelming. Also, each poem is framed by a black and white photo of a machine circuit and a body circuit which plays on the idea of circuits in thinking and the writing process.
There are probably many strategies for reading these, but I approached it by reading the crossed out words first and then backing up and reading the rewrite. It can be read like conscious corrections of the unconscious. They’re impossible to quote, but here are some examples (click to enlarge):
Twin Cities by Carol Muske-Dukes
Taking about Residuum to a friend, we also discussed how tired we were of reading generic confessionals from the 80s, the cryptic one and a half pagers we all used to write (and I still do!). The form is dead and old, we decided. We were hungry for experiments done well.
When I picked up this book I thought it would be more of that. And there are poems like that, Muske-Dukes process the death of her husband and a childhood in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. But there were some great things in here too, like “Condolence Note: Los Angeles” about sending condolences in the modern era, “River Road,” a compact thing of grief, “Heroine” a poem essay about Jane Eyre and Rochester and the problems of this couple:
"Except for the matter of the thread, the breath-colored
Filament linking two hearts with pretty much nothing
In common. The thread pulses like a Bronte umbilical,
Which it is.."
There’s also a great poem about hate mail, called…"Hate Mail.” And the best poem was almost a kind of response about the limits of confessional poems, a poem called “Parrot” which ends:
I think I know, the Parrot protests. I honestly think
I know, but I am so tired of squawking the same
Profound shimmering insights–& nobody listening!
So the old style does not lose value with the new.
Early last year while visiting Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, for a hot springs soak at Fire Water Lodge (they accept pets), I found this used book, Poetics, Essays on the Art of Poetry, edited by paul Mariani and George Murphy. It’s filled with the essays of poets extolled in my undergrad and graduate classes and is filled with the au courant thinking about poetry circa the late 70s and early 80s.
Jonathan Holden talks about “where we are now” with modernism and postmodernism: “…the revolution has left the poet in America a bureaucratic specialist isolated in a university as in a laboratory, conducting endless experiments with poetic form, and in an adversary relation to general culture.”
Paul Breslin talks about how to read a contemporary poem: “It has a stock rhetoric of portentousness, and all too often its mysteries are only the trivial mystification of cant and code.”
Charles Simic talks about negative culpability, uncertainties and the positions you take as a poet: “One can say with some confidence that the poet writing today can no longer be bound to any one standpoint, that he no longer has the option of being a surrealist or an imagist fifty years after and to the exclusion of everything else that has been understood since.”
Brendan Galvin writes about compassion and writing “close to the bone” that becomes self indulgence: “…real frisson doesn’t come from hyperbole, but from understatement.”
Galway Kinnell writes about self absorption and the school of self dissection: “The poetry of this century is marked by extreme self-absorption. So we have been a “school” of self-dissection, the so-called confessional poets, who sometimes strike me as being interested in their own experience to the exclusion of everyone else’s.”
Tess Gallagher writes about poetry as a reservoir for grief and the communication of poems to their audiences: “Poems, through ambiguity and the enrichments of images and metaphor, invite our returns.”
Sandra Gilbert talks about the poems of self-definition and modern views about female confession and the madwoman trope: “Men tell her that she is a muse. Yet she knows that she is not a muse…men tell her she is the angel in the house, yet she doesn’t feel angelic, and wonders, therefore, if she is a devil, a witch….Men tell her that she is Molly Bloom, Mother Earth, Istar, a fertility goddess…They tell her….that she should not mean but be.”
Alicia Ostriker talks about the female divided self and covers poets from Anne Bradstreet to Lucille Clifton in four categories: authenticity, anatomy, sexual politics, and love poetry: “Raised up to be narcissists, which is a game every woman ultimately loses, we must laugh that we many not weep.”
Howard Nemerov talks about image and metaphor (loved this so much I bought his book of essays): “I will add that one can love a poet without being either cajoled or bulldozed into believing his theories.“
Robert Hass talks about rhythm and prosody: “Free-verse poems do not commit themselves so soon to a particular order, but they are poems so they commit themselves to the idea of its possibility, and, as soon as recurrences begin to develop, an order begins to emerge.” and “Two is an exchange, three is a circle of energy, Lewis Hyde has said, talking about economics.”
Stanley Plumly talks about silences: “That remarkable tension between how and why, the lyric and the dramatic, between lingering and needing to go on, between the horizontal rhythm of the line and the vertical rhythm of the story, with the balance always favoring the movement down, is what gives free verse its authority."
Stephen Dobyns talks about metaphor and memory: “…it is the ability of metaphor to elicit large non-verbal perceptions that is one of the great strengths of poetry and what can make a poem immediately convincing.”
William Matthews writes about poetry as knowledge: “A writer who speaks of having something to say is almost always doomed by that obligation to bad writing, unless he or she is willing to append: ‘but I don’t yet know what it is.’”
William Stafford writes about diction: “Where words come into consciousness, baffles me.”
Michael Ryan talks about primordial images: “I think if there is anything in us that is purely preliterate and unconscious, it is rhythm. We are subject to its influences incessantly, and our lives depend on it”
Lisel Muller talks about germanic and romance words (my copy is missing the final pages of this essay but I really enjoyed it): “The tradition of French poetry, Bonnefoy says, is abstract; it deals with essences. French poets want generic words, unlike English ones, who want the specific.”
Robert Pack talks about silences, Caesuras, and ellipses.
Denise Levertov writes about the function of the line: “The fact is, they are confused about what the line is at all, and consequently some of our best and most influential poets have increasingly turned to the prose paragraph for what I feel are the wrong reasons–less from a sense of the peculiar virtues of the prose poem than from a despair of making sense of the line.”
Marvin Bell writes about re-reading and learning about rhetoric: “…the great achievements of American poetry have been essentially rhetorical, those of rhetoric rather than of image and metaphor, or of imagination, structure and vision” and “…the poem is primarily a set of rhetorical maneuvers.”
I haven’t been blogging but I have been reading. Here's a roll-up of some of the books of poetry I've read this year.
Looking Back to Place
This is a very small run of an anthology of New Mexico poets, published by the Harwood Arts Center in Albuquerque. I couldn't even find a photo of the book jacket online. Lame. The back cover talks about people’s relationship to place and how place is sacred, etc. But it wasn’t a very satisfying look at the place that is New Mexico. There were few good NM poems but the scope was not limited to this state. Jill Battson had two good poems: “Lightning” and “As Seen from New Mexico” and Maresa Irene Thompson’s “What Water Means to Desert People” was great. I probably has higher expectations since the project was such a locally produced one.
High Plains Poems
I found the complete opposite result with Inez Hunt’s High Country Poems. Obviously self-published but I managed to find that cover online! This is a book I found in Las Vegas, New Mexico, at the very fine local bookstore there, Tome on the Range. Yes, the book looks awfully self-published and by that I mean bad graphics, bad layout, bad titles and really distracting backgrounds. The book practically reeks of bad design ideas. Did I mention the complete font overdo on every poem? But guess what? Looks are deceiving. Yes, the poems are classic, stereotypical western poems. But the writing was so much better than your average cowboy poet. I now wildly speculate that Inez Hunt was simply out of print and some friend or family member put together this anthology of her best poems out of kindness and respect. I’m not 100% on this theory but she apparently did leave poems to her daughter and now here we are with this great thing.
Excerpts from "Ghost Town House"
…storms strike hard
To shake the chinking loose
And cold settles in a down-draft
Through a sodden flue.
Glass shatters or is stolen,
Leaving hungry holes.
The floors break through
Where memory grows too heavy for the joist.
The rats gnaw tediously along with Time
In little bites.
With the River on Our Faces
On a recent trip to Arizona, I picked up With the River on Our Faces by Emmy Perez at the University bookstore in Tuscon. Perez’s poems of place depict Southern Texas and El Paso. Perez also writes Rio Grande poems and poems about border politics. “The History of Silence” was the best poem inside and I wished I could find the long poem transcribed online so I could include it in my Poems for Dictators list. Her poems are meandering like rivers and occasionally remote. Some of her gaps are too mystifying and obscure, but there’s a 2016 poem that mentions Trump’s wall.
Aqua Santa, Holy Water
Pat Mora books always feels like a good poetry deal to me. This book covers all forms of water topics: the sea, rivers, rain, birth and general wetness. It’s about women and water, about danger, slyness, erotica, Frida Kahlo. The poems have some great titles, like “Coatlicue’s Rules: Advice from an Aztec Goddess” and “Malinche’s Tips.” This poem invokes the landscape of the southwest that I feel and smell everyday. Mora also gets political about borders in poems like “La Migra” ("Let’s play La Migra /I’ll be the Boarder Patrol.”)
The amazing poem “Let Us Hold Hands” is often posted online as a healing or political poem performed in a convocation.
Buzzing Hemispheres
I also picked up the book Buzzing Hemisphere by Urayoan Noel in Tuscon under the faculty authors section. This is an amazingly experimental book about translation. Poems are in Spanish and English but never strictly translated. Noel takes liberties with his own poems! The book is also about borders between hemispheres, politically speaking, and the hemispheres of the brain. Noel uses language experiments with word play, spacing, bolding, layout, numerics, letter casing, and experiments in word choice for his translations. For instance, in English the word might be “musicians” but in Spanish the word is “mercenario.” So translations become inter-textural! And some of these experiments are no small feat (pun intended). There’s a form he calls a Sunnet in there, a syllabic staircase sonnet that manages a mono-rhyme poem with the correct syllabics in both Spanish and English. There are also poems that use Google Translate, anagrams created with anagram apps (one called United States shaped into a concrete poem), poems translated from spoken word. English and Spanish are shuffled around.
For anyone interested in the art of translation, this is a great book for you.
This year I also read Mary Oliver’s primer on formal poems, Rules for the Dance. This is a good textbook for writing in meter and forms with plenty of sample poems at the end.
Recently, my parents moved from Lancaster County in Pennsylvania (where they retired) to Cleveland, Ohio, where my brother lives. I spent two weeks in late 2016 helping them comb through 30 years of stuff and stage it for removal to local charities or trash. My mom and I have never particularly shared the same interests in books. She likes historical fiction and I like experimental fiction (as a kid I liked scary fiction!). But anyway, in her stack of books to give away she had a book called Poe & Fanny, a novel by John May, an historical novel about a literary figure, Edgar Allan Poe, about a particular time in his life. So as historical fiction, the story is highly speculative but it portrays a very historically detailed account of Edgar Allan Poe’s time in New York City.
It takes place right at the time his most famous poem, “The Raven,” had been published. Poe was living with his wife and mother-in-law (who were also his cousin and Aunt) and explores an affair he was having with one of his admirers, up-and-coming poet Fanny Osgood. The novel doesn’t really prove an affair happened but offers an interesting possibility.
Chapters switch points of view between Poe, Fanny, his mother in law and his editor friend Willis.
The books reads like a historical fiction but there are interesting parts of academic considerations, like on page 25 where you learn in detail about the feud between Poe and Longfellow, which apparently was more of a paid editorial intended to drum up subscriptions for the offending paper. Author John May considers what Poe might have really thought of Longfellow as a writer, his meter, awkwardness and poetic ambition.
Pages 39 and 52 talk about “The Raven” specifically, it’s reception and explication. Fanny meditates on the poem’s sorrow, finds it emotionally compelling, and appreciates its vitality and gravitational pull. She insists the meter is a reflection of the heartbeat. Poe’s friend Willis later considers the poem's use of the name Lenore as a rhymed code word for Poe’s wife Sissy. Willis explores connotations and word derivations in the poem and about Poe’s wife’s impending death of tuberculosis.
Page 64 depicts Poe’s famous recitations of the poem and his affinity with women.
The end of the book includes real poems from Poe and Fanny both referenced in the novel and poems that might reveal evidence of an affair.
The violence and violent rhetoric in America has been very depressing this year. So it was comforting to read the book Revolutionary Memory, Recovering the Poetry of the American Left by Cary Nelson. I learned about this book from a MOOC I took last year on Modernism from the University of Illinois. Nelson hasn’t published an anthology of labor poems yet (and most of these poets are out of print) but this book serves as a veritable introduction to leftist poetry and how it was suppressed out of public consciousness in the 1950s.
Many of the new MOOCs on Modernism are starting to explore more marginalized poets as a refreshing alternative from the academic canon. This includes poets of color writing at the time, not just the Harlem Renaissance but writers who are Asian and American Indian. Nelson also explores the political writers who were all persecuted during the McCarthy Red Scare era which hit hard both Hollywood and academia. Turns out, McCarthyism is still hitting academia hard because these poets are never taught as part of the Modernist era, although they were published in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Langston Hughes is the exception that proves the rule. He is taught widely as part of the Modern Harlem Renaissance but his most most political poems are always excluded.
Nelson reintroduces many poems written about and during the early 20th century labor movement, poems about the Spanish Civil War, and poems about political speech, all which have been essentially erased from our social memory but also from the history of American poetry.
This is a fascinating look at a whole lost genre of poetry, which oddly wasn’t even recovered and repurposed during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
Remember I was going to do a haiku challenge this year starting in June? WTF, 2018! Things just didn’t turn out as expected this year. But I’ve stayed on track with haiku meditations.
Wes Anderson released his beautiful Isle of Dogs this year. Fabulous animated version of a Wes Anderson movie (in look, humor and tone). I own the DVD. I have the giant poster. I wear the t-shirt.
But there were two satirical haikus to open and close the movie.
I turn my back
On human kind
Frost on window pane
And then at the end:
Whatever happened
To man’s best friend
Falling spring blossom.
I loved it. I also tracked down Issue 47 of Rattle Magazine for its catalog of Japanese forms. In the back, there's an excellent dialogue on haiku between Timothy Green and Richard Gilbert. They specifically discuss Allen Ginsberg’s famous translation of the Basho frog in a pond poem, explicating its last line, “Kerplunk!” Gilbert says, “the wetlands of Connecticut have bullfrogs and they do kerplunk! And Allen’s from New Jersey and they kerplunk there, but in Japan they don’t kerplunk.” And he goes on to discuss why this translation, however charming, accidentally and significantly changes the meaning of the original poem by altering the size and sound the frog makes when diving into the pond.
And I finally finished a book about translations of a Chinese poem by Weng Wei, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, How a Chinese Poem is Translated by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz. This overpriced, 50-page book had been on my wish list for a while. And it was an interesting dissection of translation problems with examples of 19 attempts to translate a 1200-year-old 4-line poem that was part of a landscape scroll. The authors provide notes on the Chinese language and how word choice and meter may affect reading. They start with Ezra Pound’s contributions, explain transliteration (word for word or character by character) and then dive into translations chronologically by W.J.B. Fletcher (1919), Witter Byner and Kiang Kang-hu (1929), Soame Jenyns (1944), G. Margoulies (1948) which was French so even the translation needed a translation, Chang Yin-nan and Lewis C. Walmsley (1958), C.J. Chen and Michelle Bullock (1960), James J.Y. Liu (1962), Kenneth Rexroth (1970), Burton Watson (1971), Wai-Jim Yip (1972), G. W. Robinson (1973), Octavio Paz (1974), William McNaughton (1974), Francois Cheng (again French, 1977), H.C. Chang (1977), and Gary Snyder (1978).
Here is a succinct quote about the situation:
“…translations are relatives, not clones, of the original. The relationship between original and translation is parent-child. And there are, inescapably, some translations that are overly attached to their originals, and others that are constantly rebelling.”
But Weinberger and Paz were way too dismissive about the translations they don’t like and too laudatory over translations they themselves contributed. Their was a glaring unfairness built into the project: all the other translators didn’t nearly the same amount of space to describe their choices as the authors provided themselves. And then they used highly subjective judgement words like “dull.” They made inexplicable leaps, attributing to a translator “unspoken contempt for the foreign poet” if the translation stayed too far from the original. Weinberger and Paz called for the “dissolution of the translator’s ego” (as if such a thing were possible) all while ignoring the fact that their own statements were rife with ego. Later in the book they insist of Kenneth Rexroth that he “ignores what he presumably dislikes.” There's a shitload of presuming is my point.
I appreciate the detail and close readings this book provided but some comments were willfully enigmatic like this one
“…taken from a three-volume set, all by the same translator, and published, oddly, by Columbia University Press…”
The fact may indeed be odd but you’d have to be an insider to understand why.
But there was a wonderful keeper quote from poet Gary Snyer:
“The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a re-imagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. And no individual remains the same, each reading becomes a different—not merely another—reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.”
You can't dip your foot in the same river twice. The same poem cannot be read twice. Wow. Given that sentiment you’d think the authors would have been more open to the personalities of these translations that were different than their own.
I hope to get "52 Haiku" back on track next year.
….so then we found out we had to move. On top of everything else. Criminy! The fact that this book is coming out this year is a miracle. It's been rough. The last few months have been packing and planning a move. Not what I had in mind for this year at all.
But we've had a lot of help from friends and family and I'm grateful for that because it's kept things with this book on track, but barely.
But I would not advise putting out a book of any sort in the same year you have to move. It's financially and physically not a good idea. Had I known.
Anyway, I also want to point out how many edit drafts this process went through. If you don't love editing, don't self-publish. End of story.
This manuscript was originally written in 2014 and went through two (2) drafts of editing by myself and Monsieur Big Bang way back then.
This year the manuscript was professionally edited (probably the most expensive part of the venture apart from cover design). That was edit number three (3). Then I edited the manuscript one final time as I was laying it out for proofs. That was the fourth (4) edit.
You can see from the post-it notes above, proofs needed many edits too. As of today there have been six (6) rounds of proof editing.
We're at a total of twelve (12) rounds of edits. In the very last versions, you're often only editing one or two things, but it's time consuming. And you have to enjoy making small changes over and over again. Which I actually do. I really enjoy editing. I find it relaxing and productive. You wouldn't know if from all the typos in this blog but if I had the time I would take every post through 4-5 rounds of editing. But it's a free blog, so you get what you pay for.
This book isn't free and it needs to be error-free.
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