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Category: Craft (Page 18 of 18)
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
So we've been talking about how working on thinking skills can help your poetry. I know there is some resistance to this idea, as if the creation of poetry is only natural thinking, without effort. I agree that some degree of organic inspiration is involved, however thinking about thinking is still a crucial component of both gaining wisdom and communicating your wisdoms. Consider the competitive runner. Although "getting into the zone" is important, so is practice and the harder she pushes herself (within safe limits), the more races she will run.
Which brings me to the next point: reading essays and books about theory and thinking can be dry and difficult. "It's too hard! It feels like college!" my fellow writers whine. Don't fret over the stuff that's too dense to penetrate right away. Read through it and glean what you can. As long as you're always learning, as long as your mind is always working and thinking and making some connections–you don't have to understand all of it. The next babble of theory will get easier.
I hit the same wall when I started reading pop-culture theory this year (I am also, after all, Cher Scholar). Pop culture books can be even more esoteric. But if you keep coming at concepts and ideas from different angles, the better you'll run.
Thinking in Writing by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan is, as I've mentioned before, a good overview on ways we organize our thoughts.
For years I've had Literary Theory, A Very Brief Introduction by Jonathan Culler on my bookshelf. Last week I started reading it and although it was a hard slag at first, it should be required reading for all writers, especially poets.
To understand how the car runs, it's always good to know how the parts all work together. How do poems create meaning?
"…theory involves a questioning of the most basic premises or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted: What is meaning? What is an author? What is it to read?"
Although you may not think these big ideas matter to your little poems, thinking about these things can take you down some new and amazing intellectual paths. And it's helpful to know how the critics and theorists qualify various rhetorical tropes.
Many lament the fact that college curriculums (not to mention bookstores and large book-fest events) focus almost entirely on fiction, while poetry (once the definition of literature) gets the short shrift. Culler elaborates on why this is:
"This is not just a result of the preferences of a mass readership, who happily pick up stories but seldom read poems. Literary and cultural theory have increasingly claimed cultural centrality for narrative. Stories, the argument goes, are the main way we make sense of things."
So you see, this is what we are up against as poets, this is what our own intellectual peers have surmised about the value of poetry versus fiction. Ignoring the reality won't help poetry as a art form and it probably won't serve your individual poems much either.
Sitting on my desk at IAIA, stuffed behind one of those ancient phone-message books (the ones with carbon copies no less), I found a little blue mini-book called The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking, Concepts and Tools. What a find! I haven't cracked it yet but I did skim through the graphics, great overviews of thought like this one (so sorry my scanner sucks!):
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…"
Well, turns out the book from 1937, Hart Crane, The Life of an American Poet by Philip Horton, was a regular page-turner. I read it in four days and loved how Horton gave Crane's life-events an evenly-spread psychological context, something I'm missing from the more recent poet biographies (Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford, for example). Which reminds me, Edna was only given a throw-off mention in Crane's biography (on one page as "that girl poet") when in fact she was in her prime contemporaneous with Crane in New York City, although she swam in different circles.
Otherwise the biography was pretty open about Crane's life, including his sexuality (although the author treated it, albeit sympathetically, as a mental disorder). Much theory was made over Crane's dramatic childhood and his relationship to his work. Horton provided a very strong defense of the more difficult aspects of Crane's poetry, aligning him more with T. S. Eliot in spirit and technique, as opposed to the other famous writers of the Lost Generation, his contributions including:
- his revival of Elizabethan blank verse
- his use of unusual words
- his incorporation of complex machinery and mechanical activities of his time, the industrial age, (the spiritual values of airplanes, subways and skyscrapers), and understanding these developments as both oppressive and corrupting versus freeing and enlightening.
Interestingly, Hart Crane wrote a poem to Emily Dickinson and among his more popular poems were excerpts from his opus "The Bridge" (compared by Horton to T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" as a great epic about America) and his Voyages poems. In Hart Crane's life, he only published two books White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930) before he committed suicide in 1932 by jumping off a steamship sailing from Mexico to New York. His body was never found.
Craft talk in the book
Quote from his letters:
"I can say that the problem of form becomes harder and harder for me every day. I am not at all satisfied with anything I have thus far done, mere shadowings, and too slight to satisfy me. I have never, so far, been able to present a vital, living, tangible–a positive emotion to my satisfaction. For as soon as I attempt such an act I either grow obvious or ordinary, and abandon the thing at the second line. Oh! it is hard. One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment."
"Let us invent an idiom for the proper transportation of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!"
"One works and works over it to finish and organize it perfectly–but fundamentally that doesn't affect one's way of saying it."
Horton discussing the poem "Faustus and Helen:"
"Technically, it showed important extensions of craftsmanship: the long rhythmical lines approximating the pentameter without, however, committing themselves to any distinct pattern; the enrichment of language and music fused by syntax and assonance into an idiom unmistakably his own–these things brought him a sense of power and confidence….a milestone for him, making the step from minor to major intention. It's subject matter indicated an expansion of consciousness, a shift of interest from the particular to the universal. He had achieved at least a partial realization of his long-standing desire to write of the 'eternal verities'…to ally his work firmly with tradition and still to express fully the spirit of his own times."
Horton talking about Crane's circle of literary friends:
"For almost a year the four met [Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank] frequently, tacitly recognizing a kind of spiritual brotherhood that bound them together in a unit distinct from other factions of the artistic world. Their catch words were 'the new slope of consciousness,' the superior logic of metaphor,' 'noumenal knowledge,' the interior rapports' of unanimisme, the doctrine of Jules Romains."
Horton talking about Crane's use of words:
"His attitude towards language was much like that of a painter to his pigments. He gloried in words aside from their meaning as things in themselves, prizing their weight, density, color, and sound; and gloated over the subtle multiplicity of their associations."
"Crane appears to have built up his poems in blocks of language which were cemented into coherent aesthetic form by the ductile stuff of complex associations, metaphors, sound, color, and so forth. This would account for the juggling about of lines from one context to another with what seems to have been a kind of creative opportunism. Actually he was doing no more than the painter or sculptor who strives for what has been called 'significant form.' His enthusiastic study of modern painting was having its own influence…he considered [his poems] not as vehicles of thought so much as bodies of the impalpable substance of language to be molded into aesthetically self-sufficient and complete units….Crane intended these poems not as descriptions of experience that could be read about, but as immediate experiences that the reader could have…The reader was not necessarily expected to derive any more rational meaning from these poems that from those state of consciousness, experienced by everyone at the same time, which forever elude the conclusive grasp of reasonable understanding and expression."
For Horton, this is why Crane can be classified as a mystical poet, for his search of the elusive consciousness.
Speaking of mystic poets and that which "forever elude the conclusive grasp of reasonable understanding and expression," I went to my local Santa Fe performance space last night to see the documentary Rumi, Returning. It was an awful mess. A room full of baby boomers grunting over Rumi poetry, so many of them the theater ran out of chairs and one elderly lady tried to sit on my lap (not kidding). The film was convoluted, pompous and looked like something shot in the 1980s, complete with bad sound, camera jumps and travel footage of Turkey overused in all the wrong places.
I just finished reading The Editing of Emily Dickinson, A Reconsideration by R. W. Franklin and Emily Dickinson, The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi. Franklin's book turned out to be interesting in detailing the problems in publishing a complete edition of Emily Dickinson poems: she created so many different variations of many of her poems, scraps left unfinished and alternate word choices expressed on many of her original papers. Defining a final "author's intent" proved impossible.
Gelpi's book attempted to place Dickinson's mindset and evolving philosophies in the context of her struggles with Puritanism and the major thought-leaders of the day, New England's writers Emerson and Thoreau. But Gelpi also had interesting things to say about how a poet-creator self-defines and he included a laundry list of craft-techniques he felt made Dickinson unique.
Gelpi believed a poet could identify as one of three kinds of a creator:
- a passive see-er
- an assertive genius
- a skilled craftsman
Gelpi's list of Dickinsonian craft, I feel, is useful to any poet who reads Dickinson or wants to add a flair of Emily to their work:
- Use unique, fresh language
- Use New England colloquialisms (or your local alternative)
- Drop the S from the third-person singular of the present tense
- Emphasize nouns by striking the articles
- Use singular nouns where plurals are expected
- Make parts of speech perform unorthodox functions
- Coin words
- Write in hymn stanzas (quatrains of short lines with 3-4 beats)
- Use dots and dashes as breathing points
- Use slant rhymes
- Use mostly monosyllable words
Gelphi also surmised that Dickinson liked to exist in a constantly yearning state, never to have her desires fulfilled because, as Gelphi said, "Fulfillment is static; desire is a process."
Interesting food for thought.
The Poetry Checklist
This week I found a few interesting checklists online for writing poems. Now I don't know any poets who actually use checklists to write or read poems, but I took a look anyway (maybe they'd be good for a friend or relative struggling through a literature class).
This first one is a checklist primarily for explication of poems: http://www.longwoodshakespeare.org/handouts/explication.pdf
However, it's so temping to want to read this list as a poet and feel you need to keep all these balls in the air when writing each poem. Which is crippling.
Better to focus on one or two skills at a time and let those seep under your skin and then move on, skill by skill. Then, one fine day, all skills will pull together for a masterpiece. It's inevitable, right?
Next, the Practical Poet has posted a checklist for Haiku: https://sites.google.com/site/graceguts/essays/practical-poet-creating-a-haiku-checklist
And here is yet another list formatted in an unattractive table:
http://www.huntel.net/rsweetland/literature/genre/poetry/checklistEvaluate.html
In some kind of freudian slip, I saved the checklist graphic for this post as "hecklist." But I don't want to heckle these checklists. I'm an obsessive list-maker myself. There are good things to draw from such orderliness and making your own lists here and there will be useful in organizing our thoughts. And a good thought is the gold at the top of anybody's checklist. Writing is only as good as your thinking. We always forget that. You can't string together a well-crafted poem without well-crafted thinking.
So if list-making scratches that hamster-on-the-wheel-in-your-head, it's a good thing.
Does your poem have utility?
In fact, I found the last item on all these lists to be the most worthy of consideration and reconsideration. Nobody talks about it much but it really is the most crucial force in determining a poem that succeeds with readers and a poem that doesn't:
Does it have ideas people can use?
Be honest. Does you poem have ideas people can use?
