Category: Craft (Page 17 of 18)

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.

Theodore thinking about his worrisome rhythms

One thing I've learned from many poetry workshops is that the sections of my poems that really hit it off with readers are those lines or phases which dramatically break a previously set rhythmical pattern. Like an orchestral piece of music, you take comfort in the ever-predictable musical phrases. However, it's the line that varies from that predictability that stops the show and turns out to be a crowdpleaser.

I figure it works like the architecture of a good joke.  Subverting expectations creates a laugh, creates a little heart squeeze.

In the book, On Poetry & Craft, the compilation of Theodore Roethke's essays and random thoughts, in the essay called "Some Remarks on Rhythm," Roethke explores the ways rhythms work to serve our poems:

While our genius in the language may be essentially iambic, partially in the formal lyric, much of memorable or passionate speech is strongly stressed, irregular, even 'sprung.'

What about the rhythm and the motion of the poem as a whole? Are there ways of sustaining it, you may ask? We must keep in mind that rhythm is the entire movement, the flow, the recurrence of stress and unstress that is related to the rhythms of the blood, the rhythms of nature. It involves certainly stress, time, pitch, the texture of the words, the total meaning of the poem. We've been told that a rhythm is invariably produced by playing against an established pattern….It's what Blake called "the bounding line," the nervousness, the tension, the energy of the whole poem. And that is a clue to everything. Rhythm gives us the very psychic energy of the speaker…

It's nonsense, of course, to think that memorableness in poetry comes solely from rhetorical devices, or the following of certain sound patterns, or contrapuntal rhythmical effects. We all know that poetry is shot throughout with appeals to the unconsciousness, to the fears and desires that go far back into childhood…"