Category: Craft (Page 7 of 18)

The Essay Project: George Oppen and David Rivard’s Tips of Techniques

August 2, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Catching up on our essay class essays, the next essay in the Suzanne Gardiner class with "George and Mary Oppen: Poetry and Friendship" by Sharon Olds which can be found in the book The Oppens Remembered: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (can read on Google books).

This essay is mostly about Oppen as a person and what Sharon Olds likes about his poetry: its cleanness, its ferocious and tenderly agile grammar, its passion for language and the human…its deep genuineness…air of inevitability…for all their wroughtness [the poems] had the authority of natural things….When I read Oppen, I could feel parts of my brain being used that had never been used before….his morality, his politics….a clear-eyed witness…his objectivity and his calmness…his persistent, tireless defining.”

It's sounds so vague but that's how poets talked about poems in the 1990s.

She also liked his “combination of modesty and certainty. It gave him a strong air of moral authority, authority without arrogance. And there was in his work such a sense of male sweetness, the strength that lets a man sow his vulnerability.”

Interesting, the opposite of toxic masculinity.

Olds talks about how sometimes she would “believe it and not understand it…the cogs locked—everything stopped.”

She liked how he was “alternatively elevated and concrete” and how he wrestled with “the problems of privilege, injustice, isolation, identity and poverty.” And how poems could “float in several meanings…rather than trying to find a single path through the poem and stick to it grimly” and how he had “the sound of a prophet….a religious sense.”

She recommended Mary Oppen’s memoir Meaning of Life and talked about visiting the couple in San Francisco and staying at their house and the conversations she had with them.

After the essay, there were attached to the stapled packed a few photocopied pages of 'George Oppen’s Notes' from his letters to Rachel Blaus, 1965 in Selected Letters of George Oppen.

I talk about the following note in my own little essay on digital literature: “the poem is NOT built out of words, one cannot make a poem by sticking words into it, it is the poem which makes the words and contains their meaning. One cannot reach out for roses and elephants and essences and put them in the poem.”

But a lot of these notes I either disagreed with or didn’t quite understand:

“We think the world because we have experienced it.” (You could argue the opposite.)
“The true question of philosophy lies not in what he says, but why he says it.” (There’s marginalia on the essay, not mine, which says “psychology” which is exactly what I was thinking, not poetry.)
“Intelligence is the ability to experience value.” (???)
“No one knows enough to make a book before he writes the book. The writing is a test and a discovery: test and discovery word by word as you go…” (probably true)

I wholeheartedly disagree with this next bit of self-servingness of WANT:

“Poetry speaks of the Will. It seeks to find what we truly WANT Poetry tends therefore to come into conflict everywhere with an established morality. For a morality must be based on the will, on what we WANT. We Even a revealed morality must speak, I think, of a conversation on the will. Of a redemption of the will. But a morality cannot be based on an end which we do not WANT”

(Covid19-2020 anyone?)

But these are interesting:

“POETRY: Openness:: it opens”
“…the serious artists are enemies of art
Always”
“Poetry is a non-tactical art. The poem works out the statement; it is not involved in the tactics of communication. Or of dramatization. This is the fault in Frost; he is too often being tactical.”

Speaking of Robert Frost, the next essay in the David Rivard class packet was Rivard’s own draft essay on Robert Frost and other poets, "Sentences and Syntax: The Voice Making Itself."

I don’t see this title anywhere online so it’s possible the essay was never published or published under another title.

He starts by describing an early-in-the-film one-shot scene from Goodfellas where Kenry and Karen enter The Copa and how this shot is is part of Martin Scorcese’s “cinematic syntax, how the camera becomes “a mediating character, an intelligence” and can be seen in other Scorcese movies like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

He says Robert Frost has a similar stamp of identity and Rivard uses "The Woodpile" to illustrate how the poem builds “an air of vague psychological menace.” The poem uses a particular arrangement of words to build this effect, Rivard says, “the scrambling of referents….expanding sentence lengths,” lots of conjunctions that build the scene and other words of “propulsiveness.”

Rivard then reviews Frost’s ideas about “sound of sense” (how the rhythm and intonations of the sentence have its own sense disconnected from the meaning of the words and Rivard uses Alice in Wonderland as an example of the sound of sense).

Rivard then uses the poem “Provide, Provide” as an example of the spoken voice which he differentiates from the “plain voice” of 1960s poets like M.S. Merwin, James Wright, Louis Simpson and Robert Bly…with their “straight-forward and uncomplicated syntax.” Rivard says that “as a style it is one of the dominant modes of magazine verse. The poem tends not to change pitch from sentence to sentence, never mind the line, and a kind of stasis sets in.”

Which is pretty amazing thing for me to read right now because Rivard recommended I read some Merwin when I took this class and Merwin's plainness drove me batty at that time and I remember writing up a paper for Rivard complaining profusely about it and feeling like Rivard was a bit offended by my complete distaste for Merwin at the time. I’ve since revised my opinion as people do when they grow up.

Anyway, then talks about Arthur Smith’s poem "Nap" and how everything in the poem is pointed at and that there’s “a lack of moment in the syntax.”

Then Rivard talks about Frost’s “sound of sense” theory possibilities in free verse where “the shapes and movements…are controlled largely by the sentence, not the line,” how greater variation and control can be used for pitch and postures."

This is a good point about free verse. He talks about how Louise Glück and William Carlos Williams do that. “Line breaks, phrasal units, clauses within sentences—all act as counterpoints to the sentence as it unwinds down the page.”

Rivard says, “the argument made by the sentence is the argument with the self.” This almost sounds like a George Oppen note.

Next Rivard talks about Philip Larkin’s poem "Reference Back" and Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 71" where Rivard talks about the poem's working out of thought and how inverted syntax and the left-out “connective tissue” can “produce torque” and tension in the lines. “The language has plasticity and mass as well as motion and exactness.”

Then he talks about Rilke’s "Spanish Dancer" which he compares to the Cezanne’s paintings and their use of color to create sense. Likewise, Rilke uses tension with music and meaning.

Then he discusses Denis Johnson’s "In a Light of Other Lives" and how speed is caused by “some unnatural line breaks” and some parings of plain and “extravagant” adjectives that “creates a charge.”

The final poem discussed is Frank Bidart’s "To the Dead" and how Bidart uses doubled punctuation, line breaks, stanza breaks, capital letters, dependent clauses, interjections, unfinished phrases…and constant hesitation or extension.

There's a lot going on in this essay. The next essay in Rivard packet is Adrienne Rich’s "The Hermit’s Scream," which we already covered in the Gardinier class so I’ll be skipping over that. This is the only overlapping essay so far so it must have been a popular one for poetry workshop teachers back then.

More Explorations in Digital Media Poetry

August 2, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Just finished Media Poetry edited by Eduardo Kac and although it's a bit old (2007), it really got my ideas flowing for some new pieces and solidified my thinking around what I want to do.

I created a few new things:

– my own essay on directions for digital poetry
– a digital literature primer (linked from the essay)
– I've also been exploring more digital lit pieces and updating my favorites list

The Essay Project: The Process of Making a Poem, Memorizing Poems

June 28, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In Suzanne Gardiner's Sarah Lawrence poetry essay class sometimes people like me (but this time it wasn’t me) would turn in newspaper clippings and articles about poetry instead of essays. I did it because I couldn’t navigate a book of essays for the life of me. Others did it for whatever reason and I’m thankful in hindsight because it gives us a break from academic blather. And I like that too, but sometimes you need a refreshing contrast.

This article was in a 1995 issue of The Washington Post Magazine, “A Narrow World Made Wide” by Walt Harrington. It’s a profile of then-U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove.

Harrington follows Dove around for a few days while they talk poetry and she rewrites a poem then-called “Sweet Dreams” that eventually becomes “Sic Itur Ad Astra.”

They start by discussing her bewitching hour for writing which is midnight to 5 am, but she admits she can’t do this any longer with kids and a day job. This reminded me of writing in High Schoo and at UMSL in my St. Louis bedroom and at Sarah Lawrence in my Yonkers basement apartment. My sweet spot was 10 pm to 4 am. And I had particular parts of my room or apartment that were most conducive to creativity, somewhat like a vortex although I have never felt a real vortex so that’s just conjecture.

Harrington and Dove explore her new one-room writing cabin behind her house. She has a small stereo there where she plays records while she writes. This made me think of the one-room she-shed behind my house that a former owner blew glass in and then another made local, award-winning beer in. I’ve turned it into a Cher She-shed. Maybe it should have been made into a writing cabin. Messed-up priorities, huh?

The poem Dove is rewriting originated from a line in a notebook dating back to 1980. “For 15 years, she had looked at those lines every couple of months and thought, ‘No, I can’t do it yet.’ She wrote 300 other poems instead. But just seven weeks from today, [she] will consider [the poem] done—with a new title, new lines, new images and a new meaning the poet herself will not recognize until the poem is nearly finished.”

“It will be a curious, enlightening journey: one poem, one act of creation, evoked from a thousand private choices, embedded in breath and heartbeat, music, meter and rhyme, in the logic of thought and the intuition of emotion, in the confluence of the two, in the mystery of art and the labor of craft, which will transform random journal notations, bodiless images, unanchored thoughts, orphan lines of poetry and meticulously kept records of times and dates into something more. Words with dictionary meanings will become words that mean only what the experiences of others will make of them, words no longer spoken in Rita's voice but in whispering voices heard only inside the heads of those who pause to read her poem.”

The author traces her inspiration back to a line in the German book Das Bett and Dove’s love of the sound of German words and “the cadence of thought.” She says, “the sentence said something beautiful and it sounded beautiful: ‘And that is the essence of poetry.”

They start with her first draft that had a line I loved but which was lost to the next rewrite immediately: “we’ll throw away/the books and play/sky-diver in the sheets—” Dove decides she doesn't want the poem to be a “joyful, childlike poem.” The poem would transform itself to be about her ideas on fame instead, her “yearning to travel to the stars and her irritation with daily life.”

They talk about Dove’s unique filing system where she files poems “by the way they feel to her,” like if they contain violence or are introspective or are about her daughter.

She continues to edit the poem: “Rita now enters a strange and magical place in the creation of her poetry, as she begins to carry on a kind of conversation with her poem, as she tries to actually listen to what the poem she has written is trying to tell her, the poet. And the poem begins to create itself.”

What I like about journalistic pieces about poets in contrast to academic essays is the power of the journalist's observation brought to bear on the subject. Non-academic writers seem to be able to step outside of their own heads and look at things objectively, especially when they’re writing about the thought process itself.

“Some people's minds run from point A to point B with the linear determination of an express bus roaring from stop to distant stop. Theirs are minds trained to avoid detours, to cut a path past the alleys and side streets of distraction. Rita's mind is more like the water of a stream swirling randomly, chaotically and unpredictably over the stones below as it still flows resolutely downstream: "It's hard to describe your own mind, but I am really interested in the process of thought. Sometimes I catch myself observing my own thoughts and think, Boy, that's kinda strange how that works.' " Rita is not like those who see tangential thoughts as distracting digressions: "I'm interested in the sidetracking."

Again, this reminded me of my inability to tell a story straight through and avoid tangentials (especially verbal yarns) without going off into sub-stories and eventually losing track of the main point. Losing the thread. And how getting lost is remarkably fun.

“When I write, I feel like I am learning something new every second. But I'm also feeling something more deeply. You don't know where you've been. That's the mystery of it. And then to be able to put it down so that someone else can feel it! I feel incredibly alive."

She makes a million judgements as the poem progresses from draft to draft. She wants the poem to be a collage of fleeting images like a dream. She likes a line but takes it out to use someday maybe in another poem. Invoking food seems too earthy, corporeal. Another part is too surreal. Another part is “not believable.” Another word is too narrow. Some words are just “place holders for the poem’s cadence. New words will come.” Another word is “’too thick,’ not simple enough.” She plays with enjambment “looking for meanings that she didn’t see at first.” She wants more “intriguing, surprising metaphors” and to “imitate the clarity of children’s literature.” Does a line add anything? Does it add nothing?

When she gets stuck, she turns to work on another poem and that cracks the code of the poem she has put aside. “Distractions cleared a path.”

This is a great blow-by-blow feature on the writing process, the end of which discusses a poem's physicality, “…it must also look clean and pure on the page. The idea is to reach people not only through words, ideas, images, sounds, rhythms and rhymes, but also through the pattern of ink their eyes see on the page.” Finally, she gives a nod to Paul Valery’s infamous line when she says, “A poem is never done. You just let it go.”

Somewhat serendipitously, the essay we are up to in the David Rivard class packet is also a journalistic piece, although one written by Robert Pinksy himself from The New York Times in 1994 with the somewhat laborious title, “A Man Goes Into a Bar, See, And Recites: The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained.” This is a good piece about the technology of poetry as it relates to memory.

“POETRY is, among other things, a technology for remembering. Like the written alphabet and the printing press and the digital computer, it is an invention to help and extend memory. The most obvious examples are mnemonic verses ("Thirty days hath September. . . .")… Poetry, a form of language far older than prose, is under our skins.”

Pinsky lists all sorts of masterful forms and rhymers, from nursery rhymes to 'naughty limericks' to Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan (Nobel prize winner!), David Byrne (not a Nobel Prize winner), Salt-n-Pepa (it was the 1990s), Johnny Mercer and Mitchell Parish, hymns “some of which are excellent poems.”

Then he talks about the benefits of asking students to memorize poems and how when people do recite poems, we hear a “quality of attention” or a “peculiar quiet” from the listeners.

He talks about how many people know lines from T.S. Eliots “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and how “getting something by heart in an intuitive, bodily event” that fills “some peculiar human appetite.”

Unfortunately, I am terrible at memorizing things. In high school theater I had no stage freight but complete line blackouts that other actors had to rescue me from. It also explains why I was so lousy at learning French. Although later when I tried to learn Spanish, the French popped out unceremoniously to the chagrin of my Spanish teacher, which indicates a retrieval malfunction instead of a storage one. Probably the only thing I was ever able to memorize is Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard” and once at Sarah Lawrence Jean Valentine made us memorize a poem for her workshop class. I memorized Charles Baudelaire’s “Spleen.” I read it again recently and it’s like I’ve never read the poem before. It must be completely archived in some sub-basement of my brain's catacombs.

But while I was searching for the poem online last week I found this wonderful page of "Spleen" translations by different translators (https://fleursdumal.org/poem/161) with links to various editions of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. I tried to read these line by line so I could understand each translator's unique word choices and I kept getting lost. So today, I created this mashup of each writer's line in a stanza, side by side, one at a time. Of course, reading it this way you lose each writer's momentum, particular atmosphere and rhyme scheme. But you can always go back to the fleursdumal.org site to read them separately again.

Actually, the translation I memorized for Jean Valentine, the Penguin edition translation by Joanna Richardson, is nowhere to be found online. I still think its the best translation but that's a discussion for another day.

When, like a lid, the low and heavy sky
Weights on the spirit burdened with long care,
And when, as far as mortal eye can see,
It sheds a darkness sadder than nights are;

When earth is changed into a prison cell,
Where, in the damp and dark, with timid wing
Hope, like a bat, goes beating at the wall,
Striking its head on ceilings mouldering;

When rain spreads out its never-ending trails
And imitates the bars of prisons vast,
And spiders, silent and detestable,
Crowd in, our minds with webs to overcast,

Some bells burst out in fury, suddenly,
And hurl a roar most terrible to heaven,
Like spirits lost for all eternity
Who start, most obstinately, to complain.

And, without drums or music, funerals
File past, in slow procession, in my soul;
Hope weeps, defeated; Pain, tyrannical,
Atrocious, plants its black flag on my skull.

Pinsky claims “The pleasures of having a poem by heart, if not necessarily always greater than those of analysis, are more fundamental.” It does feel like an accomplishment if you can get one completely into your head.

While I was working on last week’s Adrienne Rich essays, I found more Rich essays and letters. I wasn’t going to blog about them but there were some eerie and important critiques around narcissism worth revisiting.

The New Yorker had a great piece recently on the wellness industry, the quicksand of which I am not extricated personally but when I read Rich's comments about female self-actualization from March 2001 it resonated. She talks about early 1970s feminism and personal self expression.

"Personal narrative was becoming valued as the true coin of feminist expression. At the same time, in every zone of public life, personal and private solutions were being marketed by a profit-driven corporate system, while collective action and even collective realities were mocked at best at at worst rendered historically sterile” …in “mainstream public discourse, personal anecdote was replacing critical argument, true confessions were foregrounding the discussion of ideas. A feminism that sought to engage race and colonialism, the global monoculture of United States corporate and military interests, the specific locations and agencies of women within all this was being countered by the marketing of a United States model of female, or feminine, self-involvement and self-improvement, devoid of political context or content."

That's exactly why beauty products have co-opted political messages.

In August 1997, Rich wrote this:

Like so many others, I've watched the dismantling of our public education, the steep rise in our incarceration rates, the demonization of our young black men, the accusations against our teenage mothers, the selling of health care–public and private–to the highest bidders, the export of subsistence-level jobs in the United States to even lower-wage countries, the use of below-minimum-wage prison labor to break strikes and raise profits, the scapegoating of immigrants, the denial of dignity and minimal security to our working and poor people. At the same time, we've witnessed the acquisition of publishing houses, once risk-taking conduits of creativity, by conglomerates driven single-mindedly to fast profits, the acquisition of major communications and media by those same interests, the sacrifice of the arts and public libraries in stripped-down school and civic budgets and, most recently, the evisceration of the National Endowment for the Arts. Piece by piece the democratic process has been losing ground to the accumulation of private wealth.

1997 she wrote that! Pretty amazing. She goes on to say:

And what about art? Mistrusted, adored, pietized, condemned, dismissed as entertainment, auctioned at Sotheby's, purchased by investment-seeking celebrities, it dies into the "art object" of a thousand museum basements. It's also reborn hourly in prisons, women's shelters, small-town garages, community college workshops, halfway houses–wherever someone picks up a pencil, a wood-burning tool, a copy of "The Tempest," a tag-sale camera, a whittling knife, a stick of charcoal, a pawnshop horn, a video of "Citizen Kane," whatever lets you know again that this deeply instinctual yet self-conscious expressive language, this regenerative process, could help you save your life. "If there were no poetry on any day in the world," the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, "poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger." In an essay on the Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire, Clayton Eshleman names this hunger as "the desire, the need, for a more profound and ensouled world." There is a continuing dynamic between art repressed and art reborn, between the relentless marketing of the superficial and the "spectral and vivid reality that employs all means" (Rukeyser again) to reach through armoring, resistances, resignation, to recall us to desire. Art is both tough and fragile. It speaks of what we long to hear and what we dread to find."

In October of 1996 she wrote that we "go on searching for poetic means that may help us meet the present crisis of evacuation of meaning."

"In the America where I'm writing now, suffering is diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe familial, and at most to be "shared" with a group specific to the suffering, in the hope of "recovery." We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as communal and public, or as deriving from "skewed social relations" (Charles Bernstein). Intimate revelations may be a kind of literary credit card today, but they don't help us out of emotional overdraft; they mostly recycle the same emotions over and over."

Adrienne Rich signed a book for me once at the Dodge Poetry Festival around this time. She gave me a withering stare when I handed her my copy of her book An Atlas of the Difficult World as if to say, "you haven't read any of my books yet, have you." Like a statement, not a question. And I hadn't. But I didn't take it personally. I had my whole life ahead of me. But that state was more intense than the Cher stare!

But now I've come to really appreciate her comments and it grieves me somewhat that so few of us were listening to and registering her warnings. That deserves a Cher stare if anything does.

The Essay Project: Physically Pleasurable Poems

June 17, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re back to the essay bundle from David Rivard’s Sarah Lawrence Class. And I'm to the Robert Pinsky essay, “Poetry and Pleasure” which was from the book Poetry and the World (1992). You can also catch the essay online.

So Robert Pinksy: very respected as a critic of poetry, even among those who dislike poetry criticism. A few times I’ve tried to enjoy his essays (particularly in The Situation of Poetry) but I have always failed pretty hard. He’s so dry and stuffy, I always thought.

He begins this essay talking about a poem he loved as a child and its essential physicality, “what I could feel the consonants and vowels doing inside my mouth and in my ears.”

He talks about Yeats and “the idea of pleasing…[the] sense in which a work of art is a gift, a gift of pleasure which some of us aspire to give.”

He then talks about magazine and workshop poems and even “one’s own poems” that fail, “they are not interesting enough to impart conviction. Most of them fail to be surprising or musical or revealing enough to arouse much interest.”

Then he goes on to say the most interesting poems for him have the same quality as songs, jokes and personal letters “which embody for me the qualities of physical grace, lively social texture and inward revelation.”

You could easily say this about many other cultural artifacts so his short list is a little curious, but I like these things too so why quibble.

By physical grace he says he means “the counterpoint of their music and their sentences…..something that approaches actual song." He says, "Here is Ben Jonson singing” as he introduces the Jonson poem “His Excuse for Loving.”

Jonson “defeats the predictable” Pinksy says and “the elements that delight us appear to grow out of the swelling sense that he will sing, even though expectation and age threaten to hold him back.” It is an achievement of “personal expressive rhythm” Pinksy says.

“As to jokes” he continues, it is their structure. And here I have to say this really warms me to Pinsky, his explications of comedy is this serious way.

“I think that the idea of ‘good jokes’ and ‘bad’ ones reflects a misconception; the timing and social placement of the joke, and the textural pleasures of its telling, matter far more than the mechanical burning of a narrative fuse toward the little explosion of a punch line.”

Yes.

“The joke about the one-armed piccolo player might be right for a certain moment after a picnic, but not for the car ride home. …People naïve about jokes fail to see this enormously social, contextual limitation to the form, and are bewildered when the Jewish parrot joke that caused tears in one setting invokes only polite smiles in a slight different one; moreover, such a teller exaggerates the importance of ‘how’ it was told, while underestimating the original teller’s sense of precisely when to time the joke.”

Doesn’t this explain where we are today? The tragic internet-is-everywhere drifting of jokes into social areas where they were never meant to drift and causing high offence?

He goes on to talk about a joke’s “charm of texture," touches of joke-telling that “establish context and conviction, make up the living body of a tiny work of art, for which the punch lines is merely the graceful closure.” What we call "‘taste’ or ‘timing’ or ‘tact’ or ‘wit.’"

A problem poets and comics have in common, he says, is “how to arrange and dispose a feeling—how to put something first, something else second, and so forth. The silliest joke, too, must solve this problem…The skill…of presenting the joke is in presenting the dance or tension of the two elements, ordinary and bizarre.”

Pinsky finishes by talking about “music’s grace” being “the most basic aspect of a poem’s appeal” but that the social contextual sense is the next “profound pleasure….by revealing to us the inward motion of another mind and soul.”

He explains his love of letter -writing in this regard because he can go “a little further into myself than I might in conversation; the element of planning or composition seems to strip away barriers, props, and disguises, rather than to create them.”

Did I even realize this before he said it? What is a blog if not a long letter into the self?

He illustrates this idea of self with Walt Whitman’s poem “Spontaneous Me” where Whitman does a quick inventory of his momentary self and ends cavalierly with

“And this bunch pluck’d at random from myself,
It has done its work—I tossed it carelessly to fall where it may.”

Pinsky concludes:

“Such movement cannot be affected or faked. It comes from conviction: confidence in the power of rhythm; trust in the social generosity between artist and audience; belief in the movement of one’s own thoughts and feelings. Convincing movement is what commands interest. (Boredom appears to be a response to tunelessness, timidity, or weak faith in the work of art, a sense that the soul is standing still.)"

He ends with Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Incantation”

“Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

…

And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction."

Pinsky says, “It is good to read a poem that suggests that poems are supremely important…[that] promises vital, unsuppressible knowledge…[with] the most pleasurable ways of knowing.”

Great essay. Maybe it was me who was dry and stuffy.

The Essay Project: Writing As If Our Lives Depend Upon It

June 8, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So we're back to the handouts from Suzanne Gardiner’s Sarah Lawrence class on reading poetry essays. There were four essays stapled together in this weeks packet.

The first two are Adrienne Rich's short five-paragraph essay "As If Your Life Depended On It" and "The Hermit’s Scream," both found in her book What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Poetics. You can also find the book here: http://docshare04.docshare.tips/files/26340/263406179.pdf

The first essay is important because this was a big manifesto when I was at Sarah Lawrence: “You must write, and read, as if your life depended upon it.”

I was always hard-pressed to figure out how to make this edict feel right for me, a spoiled suburban kid. What profession would I have to have to make reading something a matter of life or death? That's kind of why I became an English major. Would it be researching my political speech before a firing squad? A doctor on a desert island with an antiquated Physician’s Reference Guide? See? This is how spoiled middle-class kids think.

It reminds me of how I once approached Algebra II in high school by pretending ,y assignments were decoding military messages like I was in some kind of Pat Benetar “Shadows of the Night” video or something. That trick worked, btw. I got an A in that class. Unfortunately I was taking the class pass/fail. Sigh.

But anyway, that’s not even what Adrienne Rich meant. She goes on to say that it means letting your reading penetrate your beliefs, “the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your…carnal life,” for your reading to “pierce the routines…”

She talks about how hard this is to do, socially speaking. And how scary this idea is…

“To read as if your life depended on it — but what writing can be believed? isn’t all language just manipulation? Maybe the poet has a hidden program — to recruit you to a cause, send you into the streets, to destabilize, through the sensual powers of language, your tested and tried priorities? Rather than succumb, you can learn to inspect the poem at arm’s length, through a long and protective viewing tube, as an interesting object, an example of this style or that period. You can take refuge in the idea of “irony”. Or you can demand that artists demonstrate loyalty to that or this moral or political or religious or sexual norm, on pain of having books burned, banned, on pain of censorship or prison, on pain of lost public funding.”

“Or, you can say: ‘I don’t understand poetry.’”

Good swipe there at ironic distance and academic politics.

The next essay in the set is “The Hermit’s Scream” which starts by describing how Rich was haunted by an Elizabeth Bishop poem, it’s observation and description, “Chemin de Fer” and how subtle is the call to action in the poem: “What teaches us to convert lethal anger into steady, serious attention to our own lives and those of others.”

Then Rich goes on to question what political activism is and how it might be related to making poetry:

“There is still no general, collective understanding from which to move. Each takes her or his risks in isolation. We may think of ourselves as individual rebels, and individual rebels can easily be shot down…”

“Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.”

She then talks about types of anger, non-violent, direct action, what faith means for an activist and how one must fight against unquestioning belief:

“An activist’s faith can never be unquestioning, can never stop responding to ‘new passions and new forces,’ can never oversimplify, as believers and activists are often tempted or pressured to do.”

Was she clairvoyant or what? She even points to the “ominous cult of violence in contemporary cities” [and rural places I would now argue] and the “role of mass media in promoting violence” and “patterns of brutality.”

“’Nonviolence,’ ‘antiviolence.’ The feebleness of the language, however passionate the determination, tells us something. Violence is what looks out at us from those phrases: its expressionless or grinning face is what we see, not what it displaces. War goes on demanding its ‘fatal unity.’ What face has ‘visible and responsive peace’? What does it mean, to put love into action? Why do I go on as if poetry has any answers to that question.”

The essay then goes on to discuss Suzanne Gardiner’s poem “To Peace.” Is this some student kissing up to our teacher?? WTH. But in hindsight I’m glad they did because it’s great revisiting this amazing Gardiner poem, is a conversation between herself and the enemy peace. Some excerpts:

“Peace I have feared you hated you scuffed dirt
on what little of you I could bear near me

….

Coward I have watched you buckle under
nightsticks and fire hoses…

…

Where are the stone
lists of those who have died in your name

…

…How
will I teach my children whom to respect
how to find themselves on a map of the world
when I have seldom seen your face
Tell me Bloodless Outlaw Phantom what is
the work of the belligerent in
your anarchic kiddom Where is my place

Rich says, “There is not a real poet alive today, or for some time past, who would do what Homer did or even if he/she could, or Virgil….the glorification of war an conquest.”

But it’s not that black and white, is it, Rich reminds us because there are “those who have grown up knowing that violent resistance is the only way to stay alive. The questions of the poem need concern all those who condemn violence" "…theatrics can distract us from…the knowledge that at the end of the twentieth century there is no demilitarized zone, no line diving war from peace, that the ghettos and barrios of peacetime live under paramilitary occupation, that prisoners are being taken and incarcerated at an accelerating rate, that the purchase of guns has become an overwhelming civilian response to the perceived fractures in the social compact.”

Wow.

She then explores the June Jordan poem “For Michael Angelo Thompson,” a chilling poem from an event in 1973 when Thompson was hit by a Brooklyn city bus and was turned away at the hospital and later dies. Rich talks about how her first reading of the poem as a white person was that it was “elegiac, not furious” but this was a misinterpretation of the refrain “Please.” The poem is a requiem she comes to understand.

Rich goes on to quote Audre Lorde’s “Power” which starts “The difference between poetry and rhetoric/is being/ready to kill/yourself/instead of your children" and ends the story of a man pushed to violence and then called a beast.

Rich ends the essay by quoting Lorde in saying that writing “at the edge, out of urgency” opens you up “to a constant onslaught…of possibilities…like meteor shows all the time….constant connections.”

The third essay in the set is only the partial excerpts from An American Primer with no author attribution. Turns out this is Walt Whitman (thank you, google). The book seems out of copyright now so can find some reprint versions around.

This section is about the power of place names: “All lies are folded in names” and we are immediately reminded of the current controversy over using American Indian identifiers for sports team names.

“Names are the turning point of who shall be master. There is so much virtue in names that a nation which produces its own names, haughtily adheres to them, and subordinates others to them, leads all the rest of the nations of the earth. I also promulge that a nation which has not its own names, but begs them of other nations, has no identity, marches not in front, but behind.”

The essay ends with:

“Californian, Texan, New Mexican, and Arizonian names have the sense of the ecstatic monk, the cloister, the idea of miracles, and of devotees canonized after death. They are the results of the early missionaries and the element of piety, in the old Spanish character. They have, in the same connection, a tinge of melancholy and of a curious freedom from roughness and money-making. Such names stand strangely in California. What do such names know of democracy, — of the hunt for the gold leads and the nugget, or of the religion that is scorn and negation?“

“American writers are to show far more freedom in the use of words. Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are to-day already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect, — words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood, — words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature.”

The final essay in the set is Audrey Lorde’s famous 1977 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury.”

Lorde’s essay is aimed at women and talks a lot about ancient and hidden possibilities in our non-European, native-mythizing consciousness and it reads a bit vague and dated late-70s feminism.

“I speak her of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”

Very strongly worded. But it exposes succinctly the divide between activist poets and academic poets engaging in language play. She goes on to say,

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”

I have to admit, a lot of Lorde’s essay is over my head, especially sentences like this:

“We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialize to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safely.”

I get the point now finally typing it out, but I did get lost in “resistance to the deaths we are expected to live.” Live through? In any case, it speaks to a harrowing existence. I get that.

What I like about Audrey Lorde's essay is the vulnerability she mixes in with her headiness. This is something Adreinne Rich lacks. And Lorde's transitions are natural and fluid, unlike the second Rich essay which jumps from one short section to another with little connective tissue.

The Essay Project: Stripping Down

March 19, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Louise Glück, the recent, much deserved recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of the next essay in the David Rivard class packet. It's her “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence” essay and it’s very interesting that Rivard placed this essay after Tony Hoagland’s “Disproportion” essay because it takes an opposing stance (just like our previous essay did).

This isn’t one of my favorite Gluck essays. I loved both of her essay books American Originality and Proofs & Theories. But even back when was a young, egomaniacal little poet I wrote at the end of this essay TERRIBLE ESSAY (in all caps like that even).

Hubris, meet me.

Anyway, I can’t say I had a complete turnaround with this essay but it’s a good argument for inconclusion and brevity, stripping it back down, the opposite of all that extra bling and filler Hoagland (and vicariously I) were enjoying in his essay.

Glück is deprecating at first, admitting she has a “tendency to reject all ideas I didn’t think of first…[which] creates an obligation to articulate an argument.” Hey, it's almost as if she was arguing with Hoagland directly.

“I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence….to the power of ruins….wholeness is implied.”

She talks about Holbein’s drawings exhibited in an unfinished state and how they show the “power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial…”

She rejects the “cult of exhaustive detail” and finally declares she prefers “the suggested over the amplified.” This is a preference against flamboyance for subtlety. But unlike the previous essay we discussed, she doesn’t bank in terms like truth or authenticity. She doesn't make a character judgement in other words. This is a choice of craft, she says.

To show examples, she covers Rilke’s poem about the torso of Apollo and how Rilke is the “master of not saying.” She then covers Berryman’s Dream Songs,” the drama of which she says is “the absence of a firm self.” Then she moves to George Oppen and says she tries to read Berryman and Open side by side (interesting project idea).

“Oppen’s clean, austere, dynamic poetry has very few active verbs. No one uses the verb of being better.” And she talks about his silences and pauses. “..very little of the language is vivid….ideas are held in suspension….austerity and a distaste for blather.”

[mmmm….bather….sounds like buttah.]

Glück admits she has a “suspicion of closure” that is common for many post-modernists, who have the luxury of being suspicious of it, I might add. Certain experimental ideas in post-modernism have been labeled privileged and I think for good reason (although I do also like all those experiments). War-torn poets may yearn for closure in a way that middle- and upper-class poets can’t quite imagine. But this is a solid stance of poets of Glück's age and I don’t want to be dismissive of it either….it’s an offshoot of the challenge poet-modernism made to classic Academia and at that time it was very useful.

Glück talks about “the time it takes for information to be absorbed” as we read through a poem. I love this about Gluck, that she thinks this mental process through.

She talks about Oppen’s “characteristic move” of “the idea implied in being dismissed,” how he “defines things by saying what they are not….creation through eradication is, for me, congenial.”

For sure there is something frustratingly heartfelt in the unsaid-but-indicated thing, but I don’t know as I would go as far as to call it ‘congenial.’

“When poems are difficult, it is often because their silences are complicated, hard to follow. For me, the answer to such moments is not more language.”

This is an interesting position for a poet to take, for someone who's currency is language, but not very unlike her own poems. I just would insist again here that neither way is right or wrong, just strategies one prefers.

She calls the “dream of abundance” “all detail and no shape…’gratuitous.’”

She admits “withholding is currently suspect. It is associated with rigidity, miserliness, insufficiencies; with faculties either atrophied or checked. It is a habit not admired in personal interaction, in which realm it is associated with ideas of manipulation, slyness, coldness; it is considered uniformly dangerous in governments, and so on.”

It's hard to argue with any of that, even in our favorite poets. These attributes are human ones, of personal choice. Some miserly, atrophied, manipulative, cold poets are quite good (as the reading goes).

But none of this proves being flamboyant, effusive, forthright, loose and over-explain-y is wrong in any way.

Glück believes the tension “promotes depth” as it is “distilled.”

Now for me, the bang for the buck in this essay comes in her explication of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which is really brilliant. She says,

[The poem] “is a poem of pathological delay. The action of the poem is inaction. “Let us go, then, you and I…” But Prufrock puts off starting….nothing in fact, occurs; nothing is ever begun.”

Finally, I get this poem. Thank you Louise Glück.

“The future is impossible, the past lost. And the present a vacuum: non-action….The poem is all wringing of hands…the masterpiece of avoidance. At the poem’s center is the unsaid…”

Since I searched Google a few days ago for Glück, my news page has been posting links to recent articles about her, including these interesting things:

The Soul-Excavating Work of Louise Glück on Lit Hub

and Mourning, Reimagined: The Misunderstood Poetics of Louise Glück on The Harvard Crimson

Creepy Google. But thanks.

The Essay Project: Truth and Character

March 15, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Back to the essays from Suzanne Gardiner’s Sarah Lawrence class.

This new essay from my stack is a good example of how non-literary essays can be particularly good essays for poets. In our Essay class, a student pulled this essay "For the Artist Everything in Nature is Beautiful" from “Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell” by Auguste Rodin Originally published 1984.

Art essays are always great poetry essays. I have stacks of art books that have taught me invaluable lessons about creativity and how other artists think, the similar struggles they've gone through, how they solve problems with their projects. So don’t pass up those thrift art books that look interesting to you.

And this is a pretty important essay as they go, so timely as it follows Tony Hoagland’s "Disproportion" (which I ravenously agreed with two week ago). This essay is the other argument, the argument we’ve been hearing for the last 4 decades (or maybe longer, since the Romantic poets).

This particular conversation compares a Rodin sculpture to a a François Villon poem that inspired it, both depictions of the ravages of age.

[By the way, while I was in Cleveland a few months ago my parents had me watch the first two seasons of The Kominsky Method, also a depiction of the ravages of age].

The Villon poem talks about shrunken breasts and sausage-speckled skin and the “dream and desire” for “eternal beauty” and finding beauty in unlikely places. Gsell maintains the Rodin’s sculpture is possibly superior, more fearful of a depiction (being so visual).

“What one calls ‘ugly’ in Nature can become great beauty in art…When a great artist, or a great writer gets hold of one of these types of ‘ugliness,’ he instantly transfigures it. With a wave of his magic wand, he transforms it into beauty; this is alchemy, this is like a fairy tale.”

This is actually an idea going back to the Romantic poets elevating so-called common topics, an idea rising to a groundswell in the artist archetype we live by today. And it's a swell idea. It’s a good thing. It can be like a fairy tale.

The problem is this idea has become a cynical pose devoid of the authenticity it claims to represent. And here is where the whole idea of authenticity, truth and character starts to falter.

“The reason is that in Art, beauty exists only in that which has ‘character.’ ‘Character’ is the intense truth of any natural spectacle, beautiful or ugly. …the soul, the feeling…The ugly in Art is that which is false, that which is artificial, that which seeks to be pretty or beautiful, instead of being expressive; that which is affected and precious; that which smiles without motive; that which is pretentious without reason; the person who throws out his chest and swaggers without cause; all that is without soul and truth; all that is only a parade of beauty and grace; all that lies.”

There are many ways to be in this world, so many ways to express one's 'soul' and every communication (be it a painting, sculpture, poem, short story whatever) requires both its lies and its truths and these words 'character' words have become vague and insincere at best and stale, ugly lies at worst. These words have become establishment code for who's included or excluded as a 'serious' artist. It's fundamentally untrue.

Plus those words just can’t break through the wall of post-modernism with its deftness and exposing fake truths. If truths have turned fake then what can we say about the truths found in artifice?

I explain it like this: there’s a very good reason why a gay man (for example, or member of any other disenfranchised group) might be attracted to artifice and 'over-the-top' kitsch and big display. Why would that be? What do these ideas offer for longtime disenfranchised, excluded artist?

What does the idea of authenticity have for someone living a life that demands they hid their true selves? Not much. If you can't be your authentic self for one reason or another, if society's definition of authenticity itself excludes you, why cater to its limitations?

This essay has had its day.

The next essay will be another argument against the flair proposed by Tony Hoagland's essay on "Disproportion," this time by Louise Glück and it's an essay I find to be a much better (modern) argument against the frills of bling.

The Essay Project: Sparkle and Excess

March 5, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I didn't recognize this essay at first. It's another one from David Rivard's class set called “On Disproportion” by Tony Hoagland. I’m predispositioned to like Hoagland. He’s very funny. And this essay is from one of my favorite books, his Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft.

He divides the world of poems into “two large camps”

(1) “the conservative, well-wrought, shapely poem” and

(2) “the deformed, admirably lopsided, zany, and subversive one.”

“Any good poem," he says, "tames the savage or savages the tame to some degree.” Balance. I like it. He talks about how good poems should hold “certain opposing energies” and defines “disproportion” as a “conscious indulgence in stylistic effects…indulgences of the unconscious impulses…..even when such indulgences distort the ‘packaging’ of the poem.”

[Because I’m also Cher Scholar I might call this the Cherness in a poem.]

Hoagland first looks at the straight-laced poems of Horace who “harmonizes and subordinates parts to a whole” and who believes “the middle way is best.” Another example he uses is William Carlos Williams’ poem “Pastoral,” a poem which he says has an “appealing plainness….directness that seems open and American.” Horace poems, he says, are “didactic in…intention and argumentative in its structure…architectural and conservative…symmetrical and lucid.”

Hoagland uses Oscar Wilde as a comparison, a poet who contends “what art really reveals to us in nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition….If nature had been comfortable, man never would have invented architecture…” He's so funny.

Hoagland contends that Wilde was more “frank than most artists about the ego drive that lurks beneath making, and the need to make the ego feel safe. The goal, as he presents it, is a sense of mastery.” Hoagland points out our internalized “biases when we say a poem should be ‘economical’ and ‘efficient'…"applying commercial terminology to art.”

I would also ague that we misread "authenticity" as this same kind of economy. “Control exacts a cost too: It is often achieved at the expense of discovery and spontaneity,” Hoagland says.

He then covers a few poems of Wallace Stevens, “the first poet in whose work [Hoagland] recognized elements of style as deliberately excessive….[with elements of] playfulness rather than loftiness.”

Hoagland appreciates the way these poems are “elastic in form instead of architectural, more like a Sinkly than a Grecian urn with” their “willingness to gallop off…allowing language to balloon into clause upon clause….experience…not really interested in organizing…excess instead of wisdom….opulence instead of utility…sometimes far-reaching heartiness….the human value of flamboyance.”

As a Cher fan, of course I’m inclined to agree with all of this.

It's not “mere style,” Hoagland says. But then he wonders if style can even compete with “autobiography crowd[ing] the pages of literary magazines, proclaiming the virtue of the raw, the mimetic, and the experiential.” Alas, this is a Rolling Stone music critic too!

Hoagland admits this thing “uneconomical—the marriage of a lot of fancy words to a little bit of situation…linguistic vaudeville…” combined with sobriety can create “a boozy eloquence and then into a serious invocation.” He maintains “our ability to change direction in an artwork is greater than we commonly suppose….comedy and pathos coexist.”

He quotes the Denis Johson poem “It’s Thursday: Your Exam Was Tuesday” to say “The most literal-minded of readers might charge that the poet wastes twelve lines to say nothing more than that ‘the moon came up.’”

The ultimate disproportion poem cited is “Cities” by Susan Mitchell and Hoagland refers, as I have above, to rock music’s terms: “feedback occurs when a guitarist moves his instrument too close to its amplifier—an ugly screeching burning sound is the result…often produced deliberately” and this equates with Mitchell’s “pure voluptuousness of sound."

Hoagland says we seek control “economy and proportion. We discard such insubordinate language because it doesn’t match the rest of the furniture in the house, because we aren’t supposed to allow an elephant in the living room: It makes ownership unclear.”

He then covers Tess Gallagher poems, “disorder maps". This poet, he says, is "seized by the muse (the medieval called it the furor poetica) and carried away.” He says we should see this as “not only an ecstatic ‘giving in’….but as a rebellion against the predictable development of more generic poems….Excesses, this essay argues, are good. In capable hands, they demonstrate freedom, give pleasure, celebrate artifice, react against convention, and illustrate the healthy, complex earthiness of the maker.”

The Essay Project: Dull Subjects

February 25, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Since I was in Cleveland for a spell, instead of lugging there all my remaining essays from the Suzanne Gardiner Sarah Lawrence Essay class, I packed instead a bound book of essays from David Rivard’s class. Rivard was a visiting teacher while I was there and his poetry workshop included lots of rigor and readings (which is why that class was my favorite workshop at SLC). Anyway, since I was a young shit back then (grown-up from being a little shit), I didn’t find much to agree with in Rivard’s essays at the time. But looking back I like these essays much more than the ones from the students in the essay class. Oh, the happy surprises of maturity.

Anyway, this bound book of photocopies is a marvel in and of itself, back when the days teachers could make them, before copyright nailed their beleaguered asses to the overpriced textbook wall. I’ll be keeping this Rivard volume long after I throw all the other essays away. It has bootleg cred now.

The first essay in the collection is “Dull Subjects” by William Mathews. You can find a copy on JSTOR if you have a subscription or are a student: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40375714?seq=1

The jist of the essay is about how dull subjects can be transformed into amazing poems when handled with craft. He starts with a quote by Robert Creeley after someone once asked him after a poetry reading, “Are those real poems or did you make them up yourself?”

Oy. Mathews talks about the process of writing and how it helps us discover and transform ostensibly dull subjects. The essays starts ethereally by mentions of “ex-pressing” and making matter malleable and what the raw material "is" but then a “subject matter is chosen” and how pointless the subject matter really is. Consider, he says, trying to use an Index by Subject to find a poem.

(I actually find those moderately useful sometimes…”what was that poem about eggs that mystery guy once wrote?”).

Anyway, Mathews claims there are only four kinds of poems and maybe he’s right about that:

“I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
We’re not getting any younger.
It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (2) with you, honey.
Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and visa versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spend and on we know not what.”

That’s probably all you need to say in a poetry essay right there. But Matthews goes on to talk about the “ur-plot” for poems, kind of like an elevator pitch for movies and then he says even grammar has a plot: sentences open and they close, one line precedes another with “considerations of time and rhythm, which is to say narrative and suspense.”

Brilliant.

He then talks about “how provisional ostensible subject matter is” with examples from Wallace Stevens. He talks about the poem “Harmonium” and the mathematical nature of the first few lines. “Subject matter," he says, "…is often in poetry a place to begin.” He then talks about William Carlos Williams’ poem “Spring and All.” Poems about perception.

“It’s not only that dull or modest, or unassuming subjects provide a useful place to being, or that they can be in themselves a constraint against melodrama and easy grandeur….but may well…incite a poet’s suspicion of the perfected certainties or art in the face of a life—not the poet’s, necessarily, but anyone’s—that is unruly, unfinished, and unstoppable.”

He then talks about Howard Moss’s poem “The Summer Thunder” which seemed so apropos after January 6, 2021. I couldn't find it online, so I transcribed it at the time:

“The Summer Thunder” by Howard Moss

Now the equivocal lightning flashes
Come to close for comfort and the thunder
Sends the trembling dog under the table,
I long for the voice that is never shaken.

Above the sideboard, representation
Takes its last stand: a small rectangle
Of oak trees dripping with painted greenness,
And in the foreground, a girl asleep

In a field who speaks for a different summer
From the one the thunder is mulling over—
How calm the sensuous is! How saintly!
Undersea light from the lit-up glen

Lends a perspective to an arranged enchantment,
As peaceful as a Renaissance courtyard
Opened for tourists centuries after
Knights have bloodied themselves with doctrine.

Matthews says “syntactical discontent” causes “shifting barometric pressure.” He ends the essay with this:

“It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn’t dull, but the quality of attention we do or do not pay to it….Dull subjects are those we have failed.”

Amen.

The Essay Project: Writing Mysticism

January 8, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Happy New Year all. I’ve lost some time here since mid November. First the election drama in the U.S. which is ongoing, with the Confederate party having decided to abandon democracy and the union. On top of that, both of my 84-year old parents caught covid-19 in Ohio the week after the election. We came screechingly close to losing them both. It was a horrifying experience including my mother’s dystopian descriptions of the covid ward at the normally excellent Cleveland hospital. This after a year of hearing members of my extended family rail against any kind of covid restrictions so they could be free. I’m a different person on this side of things. The ramifications of this are still to be seen.

Anyway, back to work, including this project.

"Toward an Open Universe" by Robert Duncan (1982) (Find the book)

I started reading this essay before all the shit started. Much of it was incomprehensible to me on the first read, punctuated with Duncan’s own poems as examples. (How generous of him.)

It's an essay about rhythm, the “tide-flow under the sun and moon of the sea, systole and diastole of the heart, these rhythms lie deep in our experience” and the breaking rhyme, “swell and ebb/rise and fall” of lines of poetry. Okay, I’m with you so far. But then we get into “personal and cosmic identity” and Schrödinger and Oedipus and “psychic life.” “Each poet seeks to commune with creation, with the divine world.” “We work toward the Truth of things.”

Nice ideas, but I’m skeptical.

He even admits: “this is a heroic and dramatic gesture and may obscure what I would get at.” Yes. Yes it is.

His poetry snippet to match (spaces intentional):

( obscurity. Flaring into a surf

upon an answering obscurity. )

That kind of gauzy vagueness was fun for a few decades but now it’s not wordplay anymore, it’s politics. And if you indulge in it it, you sound like a self-involved narcissist. And also probably a privileged jackoff with too much time on your hands. (And I say that from a place of privilege with enough time on my hands to write this blog post).

“It is not that poetry imitates but that poetry enacts in its order the order of first things, as just here in this consciousness, they may exist, and the poet desires to penetrate the seeming of style and subject matter to the most real where there is no form that is not content, no content that is not form.”

Sigh. My head hurts. I do understand a statement like this: “dance and poetry emerge as ways of knowing.” They are ways of knowing. It’s the "emergence" I’m hung up on. And the capitalized generic nouns.

“To answer that call, to become the poet, means to be aware of creation, creature, and creator coinherit in the one event. There is not only the immanence of God, His indwelling, but there is also the imminence of God, His impending occurrence. In the expectancy of the poem, grief and fear seem necessary to the revelation of Beauty…

To be alive itself is a form involving organization in time and space, continuity and body, that exceeds clearly our conscious design. ‘It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of “equilibrium” that an organism appears so enigmatic,” Schrödinger writes…

“Becoming conscious, becoming aware of the order of what is happing is the full responsibility of the poet.”

These absolutes about what poetry is and what a poet should be are always so narrow.

“All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song;”

“Poetry, therefore, we will call musical thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.”

This reminds me of a poet named Greta at Sarah Lawrence whose poems Jean Valentine coarsely said were completely without music. I don’t for a minute think this is because Greta failed to think deeply.

But Duncan finds me again when he says “This music of men’s speech…is clearly related to that beauty of mathematics….

He talks about more about Schrödinger and disequilibrium and how decay is part of moving to a state of equilibrium, that life is an evasion of equilibrium.

“Our engagement with knowing…our demand for truth is not to reach a conclusion but to keep our exposure to what we do not know.” This is good. This is important.

It’s about how striving is more important than arriving. He then quotes Charles Olson’s breath and line ideas.

This essay packed came from my Sarah Lawrence essay class and it also contained another essay, “The Experience of Poetry in the Scientific Age” (1966) by May Swenson.

Similar to the Duncan, Swenson’s piece is semi-metaphysical if that's even the right word. And this is okay. You just have to be in the mood for it. I'm not always in the mood for it. The Duncan essay really annoyed me the first read. The second read it was much more palatable.

“What is the experience of poetry?" Swenson asks, "…a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming”

She quotes W.B. Yeats as saying poetry is “the thinking of the body.”

Well, I guess it is and it isn’t. I don’t feel T.S. Eliot did much thinking particularly outside of his head.

“The poetic experience…is one of constant curiosity, skepticism, and testing—astonishment, disillusionment, renewed discovery, re-illumination. It amounts to a virtual compulsion to probe with the senses into the complex actuality of all things, outside and inside the self, and to determine relationships between them.”

She compares and contrasts the impulses of the scientist and the poet and thinking into possibility, the poetic method and the scientific method. This essay is way before the 1969 moon landing so it references the possibility of that as if it were in the future.

She, too, uses her own poems as examples. She says, “Science and poetry are alike, or allied, it seems to me, in their largest and main target—to investigate any and all phenomena of existence beyond the flat surface of appearances.”

The she asks, “How is it that with our own minds we can explore our own minds.” She actually has an interesting poem about that she shows called “The Universe.”

But prescriptive “should” paragraphs like this wear on my soul:

“The poet’s universe had better be centered within the present: it had better not install itself (and stall itself) in anachronisms either conceptual or expressionistic. Because the poet, I believe, should be in the vanguard of his time. He can, in his unique way, be a synthesizer and synchronizer of the many components and elements of a great new pattern emergent in the investigations of biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, astronomers, physicists, et al."

By the way, when should a writer give up on a list and finish with an et al?

She finishes with “Poetry can help man stay human.”

Other than metaphorically, scientifically speaking…what other choice do we have?