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Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Craft (Page 17 of 18)

The Benefits of Poetry Classes

June 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

ClassIn one marketing manual I read last year, the author stated the key to success was to always be learning. I agree with this and so I plan to always be a student.

With the rising costs of college, not everyone can  afford to continue with the big degree programs. But community college classes are a great alternative.

This spring I took a poetry workshop class with Barbara Rockman at the Santa Fe Community College. I took this popular class last year also and in each class I met others who had taken the class more than once. I was so excited to be back in touch with other poets that last year I got a little teary-eyed. I loved picking up copies of everyone else's new poems at the start of each class. All those new poems–I got a kind of a shopper's high.

What I've learned in Barbara's classes:

  1. Discovered new directions for your writing from directed assignments (odes, sonnets, themes)
  2. Got reminders on tips, tricks and mechanics
  3. Learned new ways of being as a writer, explore the spirit of writing (thinking about the more meditative aspects of what you do)
  4. Got good suggestions for further readings on craft
  5. Listened to other students talk about movies that have inspired them creatively
  6. Learned the names of new poets to explore
  7. Enjoyed a connection: conversations, social moments before and after class
  8. Found out where local poetry events take place
  9. Learned about poetry mailing lists
  10. Received good feedback on my own new poems

This spring I also took a class on Nobel Prize Winning Poets taught by David Markwardt. We studied the first half of all the Literature category winners who were poets. Most of them I had never read.

  1. I loved Rabindranath Tagore and was fascinated by his one-sentence, one-line writing style. So logical!
  2. William Butler Yeats has never been one of my favorite poets but I make some headway with him during this class and did enjoy all the comments from our group.
  3. The big shock for me was how much I liked T.S. Eliot this time around. I've always had issues with Eliot, ever since I had to read "Prufrock" at my high school in St. Louis. Because Eliot is from St. Louis (he's right there in the University City walk of fame), the town has had a love-hate relationship with him. He's an expat after all. Midwesterners don't cotton much to that sort of thing. Also, he always seemed such a snob, a Negative Ned. At Sarah Lawrence when we read "The Wasteland" in a craft class, I went so far as to declare (somewhat snobbishly in my own way) that "any poem whose footnotes were longer than the actual piece had big issues with flow." That entertained the teacher but truthfully I wasn't giving the man a chance. In David's class we stuck to the more manageable poems and I was surprised at how dark and creepy they were…right up my alley! His depictions of horror would inspire anyone who loves ghost stories (guilty as charged!). Eliot can also be silly and irreverent which I didn't expect. 
  4. I didn't connect much with Juan Ramón Jiménez
  5. or Gabriela Mistral. Don't know if this is an issue of the poems or the translations (or me).
  6. And although I was really looking forward to the Neruda class. Monsieur Big Band and I had a Neruda poem read in Spanish at our 2009 wedding. My husband picked it out because he wants to do to me what the spring does to the cherry tree. ;-)   Unfortunately, I had to miss that class.

Because three of our six writers were Spanish-speakers, we talked a lot about the art of translation, including discussions on:

  • word choice
  • tone,
  • musicality
  • figurative vs. literal language
  • the ego of the translator

I really enjoyed these classes and was sorry to see them come to an end. Whenever I take a class in ceramics I find some new inspiration or new way of looking at things from each new teacher. Different teachers see things differently. One might show you how to work the wheel with their technical advice, but another one might have some spiritual advice that gives you just that little extra push towards understanding. Honor every teacher's point of view and this will broaden your own knowledge of any craft.

 

5 Books About Writing in Forms

April 29, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Although my journey in forms is far from complete, so far I have made it through five books on the subject. If you are new to this sort of thing, I find it helps to take these books in small chunks, go away for a while and come back later rather than be overwhelmed by this brave old nerdy world.

HandbookWhen I was an undergraduate at The University of Missouri-St. Louis, The Poet's Handbook by Judson Jerome (of Poet's Market) was our assigned reading for one of my workshops. We never got around to it and for years I let it linger on my bookshelf intimidated by its very cover. Years later, I gathered some stones and read the book. Was I wrong! This book was a gentle soul, easing me into the study of forms, starting from a look at free verses and the importance of the line.

Myself, I have never been able to keep the terms of scansion memorized, no matter how many of these books I read. Although I do feel I have the musical concepts solidly internalized from years of reading, writing and listening to music closely. But like any good mechanic, you only become more engaged with the tinkering you do when you learn how the car works.

That said, it is comforting when Jerome says, "It compounds frustration, if not confusion, to realize that neither Chaucer nor most of the poets who followed him up to modern times ever actually analyzed verse this way. They just wrote it with rather amazing metrical consistency, and these complicated adaptations of Classical metrical [scansion] terms have been introduced by prosadist to explain the phenomena of the poet's practice."

That's right! Poets didn't bother with bracketing out their lines with marks and numbers. And  scansion and metrics are not scientific laws. The whole "science" is rather inexact but better than nothing when it comes to studying a poem's engine. In fact, depending upon how you read a poem, there can be open controversy over whether a certain phrase is make up to be one antipast or an iamb next to a trochee. No one needs to get that crazy or snobbish about i.

The Poet's Handbook is an accessible textbook that covers most everything metrical including a healthy section on rhyme. However, there's not much on the popular forms like sonnets and sestinas.

RussellYears later I picked up this book at a library sale, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form by Paul Fussell. Both Jerome and Fussell make valiant cases for the use of forms, although Fussell is more dense and stuffy in his defense of why we need to care about music:

"…that regardless of the amount and quality of intellectual and emotional analysis that precedes poetic composition, in the moment of composition itself the poet is most conspicuously performing as a metrist."

Composition! Dear me. He can be a bit heavy handed as in, "Civilization is an impulse toward order."

Maybe true, Jack, but thousands of years of civilization hasn't made us all that civilized. But here is where my politics creep in. Unfortunately, a discussion on form invariably leads toward politics. Hippie liberals are free verse fanatics and conservatives are nostalgic for an era of Andy Griffith order that never was. Forms and free verse are like kids in a custody battle in the middle of it all.

I think young writers today are happily living with writing in a melding of both free verse and forms as they like, which is as it should be. Older folk still seem to have their axe to grind, (like the kind of "classical" poetry The New Criterion has been consistently whining for over the last decades). The establishment complains there is no variety or passion, specifically anger, in modern poetry, all while refusing to  acknowledge the very passionate and angry poets already out there. Is it a coincidence this poetry is being written by minorities and young women? When you dig beyond the common complaints and ailments, the bedrock is always political when it comes to free verse versus form.

Anyway, if you'd like something more advanced, this book is interesting for that and Russell focuses his study on metrical variation (how to set up an expectation in meter and then thwart it for effect) and like Jerome's book, there is a section on free verse and how it fits in. He makes an excellent point with:

"a free verse poem without dynamics…perceptible interesting movement from one given to another or without significant variations from some norm established by the texture of the poem… will risk the same sort of dullness as the metered poem which never varies from regularity…The principle is that every technical gesture in a poem must justify itself in meaning."

Russell also covers the sonnet extensively but not much on other popular forms like sestinas and pantoums.

This is surely your stuffy, highbrow choice.

ReasonI don't know where I picked up Rhyme's Reason by John Hollander but its best attribute is that it's skinny and concise, less than 100 pages. But the book covers verse systems, meters, free verse, "aberrant forms," and various popular forms such as odes, sestina, villanelles, etc. I like that it also covers rhetorical schemes such as the epic simile. It also has the best section on rhyme of the books here.

This is good for a fast breeze through all the basic concepts. Not much evangelizing which is always appreciated.

 

NewbookLewis Turco's The New Book of Forms was the popular must-have book on forms when I was at Sarah Lawrence College in the mid-1990s. Turco's divides his study on metrics into sections: the typographical, the sonic, the sensory and the ideational level. I found this organization to be elusive and confusing and I had more question marks by his text than in any other book. However, the real meat of this book is the last 175 pages which include an index of every form imaginable with examples.

I've used this book entirely as an invaluable encyclopedia of forms. But it's very lacking on the background behind those forms so it wont do on its own.

OdeThis is the book I just finished over the weekend, actor Stephen Fry's The  Ode Less Traveled, a book that was given to me by a friend. This one is an oddball in the set. Fry is both accessible and off-putting. He's upper crust British, a Shakespearean actor (which gives some perspective on blank verse), and he goes blue inexplicably in parts beyond the naughty limericks (which are great, btw). He's also a (very knowledgeable) layman attempting to teach to newbies. Experienced poets may have no patience for this. Because I like to re-visit subjects as a newbie occasionally (as Zen Buddhists instruct me to do), I found this refreshing. His book even includes lessons and tables. He's also good at bringing in pop culture examples (a gesure too lowbrow for the other books). I also appreciated he definition of what poets do, that we are concerned with precision, "exactly about the exact, fundamentally found in the fundamental, concretely concrete, radically rooted in the thisness and whatness of everything." Later he says, "Much of poetry is about consonance in the sense of correspondence: the likeness or congruity of one apparently disparate thng to another. Poetry is concerned with the connections between things."

But his attempts at humor often fell flat with me.Very flat. And of course he falls into the political pit, calling most contemporary poetry, "feeble-minded political correctness…it is if we have been encouraged to believe that form is a kind of fascism." WTF? He defines "free-form meanderings" as "prose therapy" and navel gazing. Hey, a form doesn't prevent one from navel gazing.  Then he goes on to say he is "far from contemptuous of Modernism and free verse" and he worries you'll think he's an "old dinosaur." Which I do BUT as my grandfather always said, you can learn something from anybody and I did enjoy this book overall. 

A good light choice for newbies and the eternal newbie.

 

Saturday’s Moment of Craft: Fictionalizing

March 16, 2013 / / 0 Comments

EmbellishToday I took a book off my shelf, Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, and randomly opened it to a page with this quote:

"The poet might have expanded the possibilities, even if he had to fictionalize the situation to do it." –– Richard Hugo

I know there are some poets who feel committed to their role as a poet who is a witness to the truth. And I honor and respect that path (although it is not the one I've chosen).

However, I submit to everyone that the imagination may know how to tell truth better than the facts. Or to put this in terms anyone who watches The First 48 on A&E can understand (I've been
48addicted to that show for years and years now), you come to realize facts are often as nebulous as our memories or our imaginations.

Fact itself is a fictitious word. This is why the United States now is in fisticuffs  over politics and bi-partisanship. One man's facts are another man's spin.

But this is no reason to give up all hope and start writing language poems (although I honor and respect that path, it is not the path I've chosen). The ultimate truth is out there. But maybe you just shouldn't rely on facts to take you where you need to go.

By the way, that First 48 cast up there is my favorite team, the Memphis homicide detectives: Tony Mullins, Lieutenant Toney Armstrong, mystery 3rd guy, Mitch Oliver and Caroline Mason (she's an investigative inspiration and a prototype of a character I'm working on for a novel…I love her!) I'm going to log off right now and watch another episode.

 

Moment of Craft Fridays: Writing About Science

November 2, 2012 / / 0 Comments

MicroscopeBecause 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.

Top 10 Poetry Forms So Oft Annoying

October 24, 2012 / / 0 Comments

ShakesThese 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.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Acclimate to the Question

October 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

LettersSo 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.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Poetry & Horror

September 16, 2012 / / 0 Comments

KingAt 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.

250px-AHS_season_2So 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.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Avoid Self-Deceptions

September 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Dec

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:

  1. Effective technique
  2. Authenticity
  3. Religious/spiritual overtones
  4. Seriousness (with room for humor)
  5. Good stories dramatically told
  6. Cinematic action-writing
  7. Willingness to tackle big themes
  8. Explosive metaphors and imagery
  9. Truth-telling/insight
  10. Compassion
  11. Vulnerability
  12. Healthy sexuality
  13. Accessibility

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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