Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World
I just created a reading group guide for my new book, "Why Photographers Commit Suicide."
Each question has two parts:
1. Questions about what can be found in the book and how the poems work
2. Questions about how the reader might feel about the topics covered in the book.
Thinking outside the box just might keep you alive!
Because my latest collection is full of poems based on science, specifically astronaut Michael Collins' 1990 book Mission to Mars and various Discover Magazine articles, I think it would be a good time to start discussing writing about science.
We are seeing massive changes in our lifetime in the areas of science and technology. Understandably, this freaks us out; but as poets (and human-nature processors or a sort) we hesitate to work through this in verse.
The poems in Why Photographers Commit Suicide are about evolution, astronomy, the space program, physics, biology and psychology as they relate to the space program. And many other poets have been writing about science for quite a while. To start meeting them, I'll start by posting a New York Times article from 2009 by David Corcoran, "The Poetry of Science," about poet Kimiko Hahn who was inspired by clippings from Science Times.
Most importantly, Hahn writes about science without a scientific background. Of course she can do this because anyone can relate to living in our scientific world and there are natural metaphors we can mine from science.
Ms. Hahn, 54, says she has no science background. She fell into writing about botany and entomology and astronomy “because I find them fascinating — in the way someone might think Japan is an exotic place, for me science is an exotic place.”
The samples of her poems in the article are very humorous and whimsical. Which is another fertile aspect of writing about science, it can be naturally funny:
“The humor comes through with your science writers,” she said. “That’s part of the attraction. For me, the language and substance of the articles is so exciting that part of my challenge is to live up to the wonderful writing — how can I borrow it, how can I steal it. It’s a kind of game.”
The connection between writing about your personal experiences and writing about technology and science is effortless once you get going.
These are forms I'm oft working with, by the way. We're locked in a love-late relationship.
1. Pantoum
Four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.
Expertly rendered, the result is always an obsessive compulsive poem with turrets.
2. Epistle
Poems that read as letters.
Is this an angry letter to my mother, my ex-lover or the most eloquently peeved letter city parking enforcement has ever received?
3. Triolet
The first line is repeated in the fourth and seventh lines; the second line is repeated in the final line; and only the first two end-words are used to complete the tight rhyme scheme.
It’s pretty for a dirge. But that’s like some jerk in LA calling you New York pretty
4. Sestina
The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi.
Is this a poetic form or some Byzantine bureaucracy of a rhyme scheme? It is a scheme indeed. A scheme to make me lose my mind.
5. Haiku
A three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count.
Either I’m a simpleton, a guru or a comedian.
6. Renga
Poets work in pairs or small groups, taking turns composing the alternating three-line (haiku) and two-line stanzas. Linked together, renga were often hundreds of lines long.
Group poems ruin friendships. A brilliant narrative will always be unthreaded by your former bff who punctures your ingenious plot twist with the words “Betsy awakens./Like the dawn, all before this/was just a fool’s dream.”(see #5)
7. Prose
The prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry.
Some say this is fiction-short’s wannabie. I say I worked and reworked my line breaks until line breaks became meaningless.
8. Epic
A long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey.
Does the modern reader really have the attention span for this? Not unless I can figure out a way to turn two seasons of the TV show Wilson Phillips: Still Holding On into epic verse.
9. Free verse
Formalists keep calling your poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Va-jaja” derivative, lazy and self-absorbed.
10. Sonnet
Sometimes there’s so much traffic in this poem, it’s hard to make the turn.
So who hasn't had this book recommended to them about fifty times in their poetry studentship? Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke must be the most-recommended book for young poets…heck, the title implicitly begs to be read by novice bards.
I pulled off my copy (that I bought in Westchester, NY, back in the mid-1990s) from the bookshelf and opened a page randomly for some craft advise for today.
Bingo! That's how easy this is!
"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
What a good focus goal: to write about one of your questions, letting go of all possible answers.
At poetry writing conventions and conferences, you can easily call out the poetry snobs right away because they will consistently provide disparaging comments about either Stephen King or Billy Collins if one of their names is somehow brokered into the conversation.
They are discerning after all. They would never read Stephen King.
But I am a fan of pop culture (as well as a student and a victim of it) and I prefer the company of other pop culture gutter rats.
Although I wouldn't say I'm a fan of Stephen King. I have grown tired of movies based on his books, his style as a columnist can be off-putting in a Dave Barry kind of way (and yes I saw their band once, The Rock Bottom Remainders, at the Los Angeles Book Festival) and I once had the misfortune of reading the first pages of his wife's somewhat awful novel galleys when I was an intern at Penguin in New York City.
That said, I have read three or four King novels and have appreciated them (Skeleton Crew, The Stand, Pet Cemetery, Carrie and, best of them all, The Shining) and after seeing King read in St. Louis on his Insomnia tour I found myself with a signed copy of his book that I carried around for ten years before selling it for $130 a few months ago on eBay.
King has written two books on his craft (On Writing and Dance Macabre) and I've read and learned things from them both. And I loved The Shining. I loved how he weaved elements from one chapter into major events of the next. I felt that book had real craft about it.
As I feel the presentation of horror has ultimate craft about it: the chilling level of aggression, writing that sinks into your bone marrow, the genre itself a representation of poetic form. The same demands are made: how will the artist break out from this form's structure? What thrilling things can you find in the text and subtext? In your own scary unconscious imagination?
It takes balls to write scary. And sometimes I wonder if poets are ultimately intimidated by it.
From Dance Macabre:
"One of the things that makes art a force to be reckoned with even by those who don't care for it is the regularity with which myth swallows truth…and without so much as a burp of indigestion."
Isn't this the eternal dilemma of Truth or Beauty? Which is again why I love a good ghost story. If it's true, far out. But if it's a lie, well then I love how a well-placed lie can contain the truth. And a truth not usually found from the text, but in the vulnerable mind of the reader.
Reviewing my scribbles in Dance Macabre, I found where King quotes the poet Kenneth Patchen:
Come now,
my child,
if we were planning
to harm you, do you think
we'd be lurking here
beside the path
in the very dark-
ness part of
the forest?
Okay, I'm not so sure about those line breaks but I'm intrigued by the short scare, enough that I just ordered Patchen's Collected Poems. Reading his bio on Amazon…
Kenneth Patchen, 1911-1972, was born in Ohio, fought in WWII, and spent the rest of his life invalided by spinal disease. His was a powerful, angry voice that could sing some of the most beautiful love poems of the past century. He moved easily among the San Francisco poets, a contemporary of Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the famed City Lights Book Store.
…highlights how exciting it is when anger and pain really go for the jugular. It's scary to read. I admit that it's not always peaceful and illuminating. But when you experience it, you feel like you're living in a more present way. You're breathing in a more active way, the way that allows you to notice your own living and breathing.
Sort of like shock-Zen.
I dissed King's wife Tabitha earlier but she's a crucial figure in the world of horror fiction. In On Writing, King writes:
Someone once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of the story, the writer is thinking, "I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part. For me that reader is my wife, Tabitha.
So without Tabitha we probably would not have gone through the thrilling horror of The Shining and we know for sure we wouldn't have read Carrie because Tabitha dug it out of their trash can. Can you imagine a world without these popular melodramas of high school, marriage, neighborhood communities and all their entourage of fears?
Imaging all the crazy inane things that scare Americans? Without Stephen King would we have ever seen the likes of the brilliant F/X show American Horror Story? Don't get me started on those Jessica Lange performances.
For my dollar, I like poetry that shoves me back into the corner of my couch with an afghan pulled over my head.
But maybe that's just me.
In his 1997 book, Best Words, Best Order, Stephen Dobyns begins with a chapter called Deception where he states:
"the writer must give up all theories and be a complete pragmatist. He or she must ask constantly: What am I trying to do? He or she must measure the words against intention and demand how each word, sentence or image contributes to the whole."
However, self-deception is the most powerful and insidious kind and many writers don't have the psychological strength to meet their own deceptions head on. In fact, for many writers, their writing is just another self-deceptive coping mechanism. Why would they want to change that?
Writer/psychotherapist Charles Harper Webb talks about psychological blocks in the October/November 2011 issue of The Writer's Chronicle that I picked up in a waiting room where I'm working at IAIA.
Webb says to succeed a writer must "approve of expressing personal power and powerful emotions…must lower his psychological defenses…cast off modesty and deference….[and] be willing to be harshly criticized." He says this is the "price of power." I think he means poetic power.
He also lists possible "power sources" of a healthy poem:
I'm sure many experimental poets would take issue with many of these (including #13 but possibly #10 too).
What power sources are crucial for you? What self-deceptions hold you back?
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My father tells this joke often: there are two types of people–the type of people who put everyone else into types of people and the type of people who don't.
Reading Real Sofistikashun by Tony Hoagland, I'm often hitting the question of what type of writer I might be. These questions are good to think about.
I see it this way: there are two types of poets–the type who feels well served by their language and the limits of words and the type who feels the language fails them profoundly. Do you write about how words fail you or do you write about how they succeed to describe your living experience?
Some writers aim to share and connect through their poems. Others are dealing with disconnection and alienation.
How accessible should you choose to be might be related to your relationship with language itself and your feelings about your abstract reader.
There's no right answer. It's a temperament, your unique temperament.
And further, are you trying to express your one essential self or do you want to explore your many selves. Hoagland talks about the differences. He quotes Cszelaw Milosz from "Ars Poetica?"
The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.
Later he considers Guillaume Apollinaire and says,
"The purpose of poetry," Apollinaire might have said, in response to Milosz, "is to remind us how unnecessary it is to remain just one person."
Which one of these statements do you feel more confortable with?
I just began to read Real Sofistikashun by Tony Hoagland, his book of essays on craft. Right away he begins with an exercise which he uses to begin workshops with his students:
"Describe your work in terms of its most characteristic emotion, or "humour"– whether you write from a taproot of rage, pity, love or grief. It seems as important to know this about yourself as to know your country of origin.
I'm struggling to define my voice today. I think facing your "taproot emotion" is challenging because it may show you an emotion you're not comfortable with. For example, I'm a bit concerned that my predominant emotion is derision with a slight contempt. I can be sarcastic.
The last chapter in the Hoagland book is called "Negative Capability, How to Talk Mean and Influence People." The back cover elaborates on this idea: "Meanness, the very thing that is unforgivable in human social life, in poetry is thrilling and valuable. Why? Because the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless observer in all of us, the spiteful perceptive angel who sees and tells, unimpeded by nicety or second thoughts. There is truth-telling in meanness."
Instinctually I agree with this because I've always had a queer sensibility. As a catty Cher fan, I've often joked that I'm a gay man in a woman's body. But the truth is, I sympathize with the most bitchy, irreverent, flaming martyr in the room…because this is fundamentally part of my personality, but one that only finds life in my writing and with my husband (poor feller).
On the one hand, the "sweet Mary" side of me is not happy about this manifestation of myself as a writer, the emotional tone I gravitate toward, the one with the meaner edge, disdainful and cutting. My inner Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain.
If only I could write aphorisms as well.
"When an honest writer discovers an imposition, it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence."
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880
"I shall not write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers."
Mark Twain as editor of the Buffalo Express in 1869
"Even prophets correct their proofs."
"There are two ways of disliking poetry, one was is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope."
"Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honor."
Oscar Wilde
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