Category: Craft (Page 9 of 18)

The Essay Project: The Modernism of Stein, Moore and H.D.

June 12, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I've been posting blog reviews of essays I was given in a poetry essay class at Sarah Lawrence College in the 1990s. Here's another one. Sometimes essays were simply chapters in a book, like this: “Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism” from the 1993 book The Columbia History of American Poetry (Parini & Miller).

Although this is a great-looking tome of comprehensive American poetry history (the kind I’ve been looking for actually), the fact that a student brought this particular chapter to discuss is very telling. Modernism when I was at Sarah Lawrence was about 80 years old. It’s now over 100 years old. And the fact that it takes up so much of our intellectual energy is crazy-making to me. I’ve taken three Modernism MOOCs: the University of Pennsylvania’s ModPo (which made connections between Modernist and contemporary language poetries), Harvard (connecting Modernism in Chicago, New York City and London) and the University of Illinois (exploring poets the Modernists rejected; this class was my favorite because it showed the flip-side of history). I just finished reading B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and in his biography by Jonathan Coe we see even Johnson was criticized back in the 1960s for thinking James Joyce was something new. That was 30 years before my Sarah Lawrence class. Will we ever move on?

Anyway, this is an article about the forgotten women of Modernism, the “largely neglected figures” of Gertrude Stein, H.D. and Marianne Moore. This is all in the context of the 1990s when this book came out. All my MOOCs covered Stein, H.D. and Moore and I studied Stein in undergraduate school, so I feel this error of omission has been partially rectified. I say partially because the Big Brains of Modernism are still considered to be Eliot/Pound/Williams/Stevens and that quadrant of maleness has been way over studied.

This chapter reviews what made Stein/H.D./Moore unique in their processes and content and what made them vanguards in their own right and not just adjuncts to the guys.

“These women shared this antipathy to sentimentality but did not often share the positions of their male contemporaries, whose experimental forms masked conservative—even reactionary—attitudes toward women, society and politics and whose interests in myth and history excluded women.”

That’s exactly what the University of Illinois class on Modernism was talking about!

It's also noted in this chapter, however, that Alfred Stieglitz was one of Gertrude Stein’s first champions (as well as Georgia O’Keeffe’s) and Stein's first published poems appeared in issues of Stieglitz's Camera Work in 1912.

“Stein was the most modern of the Modernists.”

In college when we were studying Gertrude Stein (who I was just hearing about), my classmate Diane Harvestmoon said, “Listening to Gertrude Stein is like listening to rain.” I always remember that brilliant thought. Don’t try to figure rain out, right?

“Until recently, she remained a writer’s writer.”

I think she’s still a writer’s writer and that’s okay. She’s compared to Hart Crane here in their shared sense of “surface pleasure of the text.”

The essay also drops the bombshell that “H.D. had already perfected the [Imagist] style that Pound claims to have discovered.”

I also love the Marianne Moore’s quote of George Grosz, that art is “endless curiosity, observation, research, and a great amount of joy in the thing.”

The essay claims these writers were “working from a wholly different and more revolutionary attitude toward poetic authority than the High Modernists.”

The Essay Project: Prose Poems

June 3, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I have never read an essay to satisfactorily describe how a prose poem works, especially in comparison to typical poems or short prose. And I like prose poems and “sudden” fiction pieces. I’ve just never read anything that really seems to be able to explicate what they’re doing and why they should be prose poems and not line-break poems or shock fictions. This essay from my essay stack is no exception.

It's a mystery piece in my pile called “The Prose Poem: The Example of A Potato” by Karl Johnson. I can’t find any information on this essay or this writer online. There’s a former New York Daily News editor online with that name, but I can’t verify a match. I’m wondering if this might have been a student at either University of Missouri-St. Louis or Sarah Lawrence College and the essay found it's way into my essay class stash. I’m really not sure.

The essay begins by accepting that the words prose and poem contradict each other. And the writer acknowledges the fun of line breaks: why give them up? Seeking for benefits of the prose poem over line breaks, he comes up with “subtlety" as line breaks are so prominent and work so well to illuminate their beginnings and endings. They can be heavy handed, possibly melodramatic, not subtle enough in the middles. I can buy that.

He shows as a delicious example, “A Potato” by Robert Bly.

A Potato

The potato reminds one of an alert desert stone. And it belongs to a race that writes novels of inspired defeat. The potato does not move on its own, and yet there is some motion in its shape, as if a whirlwind paused, then turned into potato flesh when a ghost spit at it. The skin mottles in spots; potato cities are scattered here and there over the planet. In some places papery flakes lift off, light as fog that lifts from early-morning lakes.

Despite all the eyes, little light gets through. Whoever goes inside will find a weighty, meaty thing, damp and cheerful at the same time, obsessive as a bear that keeps crossing the same river. When the jaw bites into the raw flesh, both tongue and teeth pause astonished, as a bicyclist leans forward when the wind falls. The teeth say, “I never could have imagined it.” The tongue says: “I thought from the cover that there would be a lot of plot….”

Johnson is right to say this prose piece is not a short of fiction. But I disagree about why. I would say the piece lacks a narrative, scene or dialogue that brings fiction to life. Johnson lists poetic elements like metaphors, similes, rhyme, assonance, consonance, metrics of iambs, and a feeling of pattern. But fiction can use these tricks-of-trade as well. So this doesn’t really separate the prose poem from the short fiction unless we can all agree on a threshold of figurative language that makes one thing a poet and another thing fiction. But that seems arbitrary and a waste of effort; because as poets experiment toward narrative, fictioneers are pushing experiments back with copious figurative devices.

Is the linebreak missed, Johnson asks? This is often a question I ask myself too. I do eventually make a decision but I’m never at all certain why. Johnson is on target to say, “Sometimes the meaning of a line out of context even contradicts the meaning of the sentence as a whole” but actually this is why poetry with line breaks can be so exciting. Why give up that double meaning that line breaks provide?

Finally, Johnson discusses the poems “broken expectations, taking a literal subject with a reader’s preconceived notions and subverting those “in the last sentence.” Which is a very cool thing, but not something the form of fiction or poems with line breaks cannot do.

But at the end, the essay really starts cooking, illustrating how old the form of prose poem might be. He traces them back to William Carlos Williams in 1918 and back to Baudelaire in 1855, both writers producing books of only prose poems. But he goes further than that to Chinese Writers using the Fu form of rhyming prose and then suggests even the Old Testament qualifies with its patterns and repetitions.

Productivity and Devotedness

June 3, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I read a really sexist essay last week by Robert Duncan so I looked him up on Wikipedia to see if he was part of that sexist clique of Modernists. Wikipedia describes him as “a devotee of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle” and that got me wondering if I was going to be a “devotee” of some poet, who would it be? I mean someone who could I be a completest for (buying up every volume and critique)? Who could I haunt the alleys over in search of they key to what makes them magical beings? I was stumped by this question. I mean it didn’t take me long to narrow down a few suspects. I have never NOT enjoyed an Albert Goldbarth or Anne Carson book. I could see becoming a devotee of someone who I could imagine enjoying 100% of their output and consuming their biographies with relish.

But….Anne Carson is ruled out because her stuff is all, in actuality, over my head and I’m completely unwilling to learn Classic Lit to any degree, let alone what I would need to do to fully comprehend Anne Carson books. So…I'm crying uncle on that one. Albert Goldbarth on the other hand, yeah I guess I could become a devotee of his but the one time I saw him at the Los Angeles book festival, he was a bit crusty. So I don’t know if I could show up to all of his shows, if you know what I mean. Which you'd have to keep up with as a devotee.

Here’s the other issue, I'm already pretty busy being a devotee in the pop culture sphere. And honestly, that's too much fun to give up. I mean, until there are 33-lps, 45s, 8-tracks, dvds, blu-rays, Vogue magazines, tv show episodes, posters, perfumes, skin care products, goth furniture to track down, I might get bored with just collecting….books. I mean I just bought a Cher puzzle today. And I'm eagerly anticipating it's arrival. Can you picture an Anne Carson or Albert Goldbarth doll, complete with an array of Bob Mackie outfits? No. Maybe we should have that. But we don't. So, I'm out of luck to become a poet's scholar. I'll have to make do with my literary finger puppets, which do come with awesomely detailed outfits.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting article on how our writing rituals may help us think: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-psychology-of-writing-and-the-cognitive-science-of-the-perfect-daily-routine. It includes a chart of famous writers and their waking-up habits vs. productivity levels. Here's a shortcut to the chart: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/12/16/writers-wakeup-times-literary-productivity-visualization/. The chart is hard to summarize but the author with most books and genres combined with the most awards is Ray Bradbury, who woke up at 9 am everyday.

The article references a book called The Psychology or Writing by Ronald T. Kellogg but the only affordable version is on Kindle or from your local library. While looking for that book I also came across this interesting workbook called The Psychology Workbook for Writers by Darian Smith, which steps you through how to create well-rounded fiction characters.

Finally, while I was visiting the brainpickings.org site today, a pop-up window came up saying, "Hey, I thought you could use a poem today." And boy, I sure could. What a nice websity thing to do!

It's like a free gift at checkout!

The Essay Project: Who Owns Art

May 21, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Some days in our Essay class, we'd get two essays in one packet. These two essays by Chinua Achebe come from his book Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. Both essays cover Western ideas about individuality, which track nicely to our current conversations and struggles in the Age of Narcissism.

Essay one: “The Writer and His Community”

Achebe says, “One of the most critical consequences of the transition from oral traditions to written forms of literature is the emergence of individual authorship.” He talks about the physical transformation as well: “…a story that is told has no physical form or solidity, a book has: it is a commodity and can be handled and moved about.”

Igbo artists “are always careful to disclaim all credit for making.” Achebe quotes Herbert Cole as saying, “A former onyemgbe fears that he might slip up and say, ‘Look, I did this figure.” If he [says] that, he has killed himself. The god that owns that work will kill him.”

John Plamenatz is quoted as saying, “The artist ploughs his own furrow, the scholar, even in the privacy of his study, cultivates a common filed.’" Achebe continues, "It has been said that the American Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first to use the word ‘individualism’ in the English language, rather approvingly, as a definition for the way of life which upholds the primacy of the individual.”

“Western man [has] made the foundation of his philosophical edifice, including the existence of God, contingent on his own first person singular!…Perhaps it is the triumphant, breathtaking egocentrism of that declaration that occasionally troubles the non-Western mind.”

The west “prompted the view the view of society and of culture as a prisonhouse from which the individual must escape in order to find space and fulfillment….when people speak glibly of fulfillment they often mean self-gratification, which is easy, short-livid and self-centered. Like drugs, it has to be experienced frequently, preferably in increasing doses.”

“Fulfillment is other-centered, a giving or subduing of the self, perhaps to somebody, perhaps to a cause; in any event to something external to it. Those who have experienced fulfillment all attest to the reality of this otherness.”

It’s interesting to contemplate what this means for our philosophy of living, but this essay is actually asking us to consider our ideas of the self when we write or create art pieces.

“…resulting art is important because it is at the centre of the life of the people and so can fulfill some of that need that first led man to make art: the need to afford himself through his imagination an alternative handle on reality.”

It's true, however, that the Igbo community supports its artists. They won't starve by creating art for the community for free. But I think Achebe is not necessarily talking about support as much as he is referencing the credit we seek or demand, the ego that wants to place yourself into the creation story.

Read the online version here.

Essay two: “The Igbo World and Its Art”
Igbo African art is “never tranquil, but mobile and active, even aggressive.” Apparently there are no private art collections among Igbo people. Art is always spiritual and public.

The Essay Project: Why Am I A Poet?

May 12, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This week's essay is "The Politics of Narrative—Why I Am a Poet" by Lynn Emmanuel.

My big stack of essays came from a class I took once at Sarah Lawrence College back in the 1990s, a class on reading and writing poetry essays and we also did a Wen Fu project, which is basically a set of ars poetica poems or poems about writing poems, essentially a poetry essay in poetry form. Suzanne Gardiner taught the class and I loved it. But not all the essays where technically academic essays. Some were news articles and book chapters.

Here is an example of one of the pieces that defies categorization, a more creative pieces about the creative process, almost a memoir about process. It’s short and I probably find it more interesting now than I did back then when I first read it in my 20s. What an unusual way to explain poetry, of being “tired of beauty” and then falling for it anyway or like a rezzcipe…and how its all delivered almost like from a barfly bending your ear over a night of regrets and hard booze. The best part:

“I’m kind of a conceptual storyteller. In fact, I’m kind of a conceptual liver. I prefer the cookbook to thee actual meal. Feeling bores me. That’s why I write poetry. In poetry you just give the instructions to the reader and say, “Reader, you go on from here.” And what I like about poetry is its readers, because those are giving people. I mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done. They pull their own weight. If I had to have someone at my back in a dark alley, I’d want it to be a poetry reader.”

Amen.

A very funny and illuminating little piece.

Essay Project: Writing Workshops

May 1, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This week's essay is more of an online article on Literary Hub but it's really good: "Unsilencing the Writing Workshop" by Beth Nguyen.

I was resistant to these ideas about restructuring the writing workshop at first. After decades as a student, I had grown accustomed to the imperfect edict of staying silent while other writers critiqued my work. Always, some responses were completely self-centered (“I’m just not into this genre you’re doing…I would switch to this genre that I like") and comments were often conflicting. But on the other hand, poets talking about their own work in a workshop can get unproductive and highly defensive themselves. Some poets tend to do more talking than listening. They enroll in the workshop seeking praise and glory and, if it's not forthcoming, try to talk everyone into giving it.

But Nguyen makes a very good point about the need to eliminate conversations that plummet down rabbit holes, confusions that can be easily fixed if writers could chime in even briefly. Much time is wasted “talking about a plot point or logistical matter that could easily be cleared up by simply asking the writer what was intended.” And eliminating these pointless distractions would leave more time for substantial structural conversations.

There’s a fine line between a writer mistakenly forgetting crucial information in a piece and a reader who wants to be coddled and not have research any detail. It's true, as Beth Nguyen says, no one can agree on what constitutes basic knowledge. In her example, the idea of dim sum took a workshop discussion down an irrelevant path because some readers didn't know what this dim sum was. She illustrates how basic knowledge falls along cultural groups.

From Nguyen's comments, it occurred to me that the current workshop process (with its silent authors) follows the New Criticism's austere paradigm. And it is a political, biased and very outdated paradigm. As Nguyen insists, “a text doesn’t exist without its author or without the time, place and circumstances—political, cultural, and more—in which it needed to be created.”

This is my problem with New Criticism in a nutshell. In this blog, I've compared it to Hercule Poirot refusing to see any other evidence but what is found at the scene of a crime. Who would do that?

“Workshops are always personal,” says Nguyen. Sad but true. Readers can’t check their biases outside of premiseses of a workshop. They just can't seem to do it.

Nguyen says opening workshops to comments from the authors created an uplifted mood in the classes. Authors were able to discuss their intentions and help the group refocus. That led to less off-base prescribing and more open-ended questioning in the class.

The Essay Project: Metaphors

April 24, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This week's essay is Stephen Dobyns’ “Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory” which can be found in his book, Best Words, Best Order.

This is a great essay if you’re into metaphorical writing. If you’re more of a language poet, not-so-much. Dobyns refers to symbolist poets who feel a poet is a “bright light” but disagrees with them and believes a poem should communicate something to readers.

If you’ve read Dobyns, he’s not an experimental, language poet. He seeks communication and for him the metaphor is a big part of that explosion of understanding between two people.

The essay is full of declarations about what poetry is:

“..if the poem is incapable of establishing an intimate relationship with is audience, then it simply isn’t a poem.”

He does invoke Gertrude Stein and her theories about cliched metaphors. He attributes this to sophistication in readers. For example, readers today are too smart for old metaphors that connect the loneliness to the moon. I see the issue as more that metaphors have overstayed their welcome and become a tiresome guest, or maybe have been so fully swallowed up into our subconscious metaphorical thinking they're not surprising anymore. In a sense, these dead metaphors have just sublimated themselves into everyday language.

Later Dobyns says, “A poem should obey the rules of simple discourse: information must be exchanged and understood.”

This sounds like a challenge that language poets would be happy to take up. Poetry is impressively evasive of “shoulds.” On the other hand, poems about the gaps in communication are getting pretty long in the tooth themselves in these days of propaganda and misinformation. It feels like we’ve willfully weakened a collective communication muscle.

This is going to sound strange, but I kind of feel a mental-orgasmic pleasure at conceptualizing metaphors and don't quite understand people who have a distaste for them. Sometimes I wonder if those people might have fewer metaphorical taste buds or sensations, or are just no good at metaphorical mapping…or maybe they have too many taste buds and are overwhelmed by the concepts. Nothing wrong with that. If you don’t enjoy logical, analytical thinking, you won’t enjoy metaphors.

But this essay is about metaphors and poems seeking participation from their readers and how the connection can be aided with metaphorical language, including simile, allegory, analogy, to use Dobyns’ examples.

Dobyns says, “…the actual subject of any poem is the reader. The poem should be where the reader sees himself afresh, momentarily freed from the trappings of the world. But for this to occur, the reader must be able to find his way into the poem as a participant.”

He names types of recognition which he says should be balanced in a poem: intellectual, physical and emotional.

He likes open-ended, somewhat mysterious metaphors and he gives a treasure trove of great examples, which would be useful for classroom instruction I would bet, my favorite being, “A liar is like an egg in mid air.” He also uses many full poems as examples, including Tomas Transtromer’s “Face to Face,” M.W. Merwin’s “When You Go Away,” Jean Follain’s “Signs,” Michael Ryan’s “Consider a Move,” the old poem “Western Wind,” Stanley Kunitz “My Sisters,” James Wright’s “Outside Fargo, North Dakota,” and Wallace Stevens’ “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm.”

He defines mystery vs. vagueness which only ever leads to dead ends and he puts early Imagist poets in the vague cateogry in a convincing argument. There needs to be sufficient information for possible comparison and he says, “Imagist attempted to erase the comparative role of the image.” Which, yeah…they kinda did. But they wanted you to supply the second half. In a way, that can be seen as more participatory. Although he’s right, it limits communication between poet and reader regarding the exact same idea. In the case of these Imagist poems, they’re like exercises in a workbook; what the reader comes up with the poet will never know.

The essay also talks about the metaphorical plane of reference and the plane of feeling. There’s a great section about how our mind might understand metaphors subconsciously before we assemble them consciously.

The Essay Project: Crafting Last Lines

April 16, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

During our first week of essays we talked about the line and the breath and I linked to a Charles Olson essay by Brendan C. Gillott (he's from Cambridge in the UK) which was mostly too much academic circling but had this interesting quote:

"…Stephen Fredman, who's study The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition has as its premise that US-American poetry characteristically has no ‘ground,’ no inherited tradition, and that much in modern American poetry can resultantly be understood as a search for some form of legitimating history. In Fredman’s account, Olson found his ground in Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, often considered (with some justice) to be the United States’ answer to the European Romantics.”

Crafting Last Lines

This is our last look at Elton Glaser's “Entrances and Exits: Three Key Positions in the Poem” which you can’t find online or in a published book.

Glaser quotes some good people here, including this summary of the important position of an ending line by Tess Gallagher who says, “the way in which you finish a poem is the most important place in the poem, the place where you’re going to satisfy or disappoint the urges that got you to write the poem in the first place.”

Oy. No pressure.

Stanley Kunitz also has a good quote. He doesn’t want “neat little resolutions” but likes an ending that is “both a door and a window,” a jumping-off point, not a stopping but a place where perceptions are expanding out.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith talks about a poem's “special terminal features,” its “self-evident truth,” that “confirms our experience.” Commonly, readers look for “authority and resonance.”

This reminded me of some Russel Banks short stories I just finished. None of them had resolute endings. But that still felt somewhat interesting.

Many writers and readers want something this essay describes as talismanic, something with the force of a proverb, gravitas, metaphoric, orgasmic, “the anchor or prophecy, prayer, or shadow of the apocalypse” (Maxine Kumin) or simply, a sense of closure.”

The problem is, truth and rightness are very relative. Think of two poems written in 2020 by a liberal versus a conservative poet. Both would be charged with alleged truths, gravitas and "rightness" in their own minds.

But James Merrill insists, “you don’t end pieces with dissonance.” There's some kind of musical closure these poets are describing. Tess Gallagher wants the “peak of emotion that contemporary writers think unfashionable, as if we haven't a right to our own passions and should taper off and be noncommittal in order to sneak up on the truth.”

And although I'm suspicious of poetic truths, I agree with Gallagher, too. We have a right to our feelings. And David Foster Wallace would warn us against abandoning them for fear of sentimentality. But it's not enough just to lay them out there. Everyone has feelings and passions. Do they rise to the level of poem's end?

Anne Sexton clarifies that “we don’t like poems that trail off” and Maxine Kumin continues the thought “so that the reader, poor fish, doesn’t actually know the poem has ended.” Kumin admits “it is possible for a poet to come down on an understatement that jars us to some apprehension of the truth.” She references the poems of Wallace Stevens and Charles Wright. Kumin likes the art of “shifting the focus or tone or intent at the poem with a socket wrench just at the end.”

Herrnstein Smith talks about “closural allusions,” words of finality like sleep, death, dusk, night, autumn and winter.

The essay also asks you to beware of the forced ending with too much rhetoric. This is described as unearned, ornamental, too precious, fancy writing, that shows strain and hints at pomposity.

The essay lists helpful craft features for good endings, like imagism, repetition, sound and rhythm, puns, parallelism, antithesis, unusual syntax, unorthodox word order and asks us to look at the haiku's impact of great beginnings and endings in three lines!

Glaser himself seeks “carbon concentrated language,” pressure put to words and stopping when there's "nothing left to be said."

Howard Nemerov had my favorite comment in the piece, “Endings are somehow contained in their beginnings.”

Lots of good stuff here! Good luck with crafting your exits.

Best closing lines from novels

Other blog posts for this essay:
Crafting Titles
Crafting First Lines

The Essay Project: Crafting First Lines

April 7, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This is the second essay overview of three from Elton Glaser's “Entrances and Exits: Three Key Positions in the Poem” which you can’t find online or in a published book.

Glaser quotes Robert Penn Warren who said, “the great battle of the poem is won or lost in the first line, or in the first five lines anyway.” This doesn't seem absolute to me. Some poems with weak first lines do recover. It all depends upon the reader. But the opening scene of any kind of discourse is a heavily loaded position. Structure matters. First lines are like foundations. Without strong first lines a poem could collapse.

But maybe you're going for that.

Glaser summarizes how first lines help a reader understand where they stand. First lines pull them in through the keyhole (to borrow from John Ashbery's quote from the first section of the essay). He also quotes William Stafford who uses the metaphor of the fishing line tugging on a fish. You're luring readers in.

Glaser offers some questions to consider:

1. Whose story is this poem?
2. Whose voice is speaking?
3. What promises does the first line make (in story or form)? Are conventions and patterns rewarded or thwarted?
4. Does the poem lure the reader in with suspense, a puzzle, a surprising or shocking image?
5. Does the story start too far back? Does the story start in the middle of things?

Glaser quotes Nancy Willard who says a first line lets you into the house of the poem like a homeowner or a thief. I love that idea. As a writer, are you the owner or the thief?

Glaser himself talks about a poem relaxing into itself, that it must unlimber before the reader loses interest. This is an interesting idea. How stiff is the poem?

Most of the poets quoted in the essay seem to feel the first lines must command attention and offer authority, “the unadorned but resolute voice…who knows what he or she is talking about.” Language poems have called some of this into question. Questioning, lack of authority, lack of command can work sometimes, too. Feel free to experiment. Not everything will work.

Glaser introduces Howard Moss' idea of setting the initial music of the poem to “intrigue the ear and the mind.” Your first line not only influences the reader but manipulates the writer, setting off down a certain musical path or another. It's often hard to break free of this initial musical impulse.

My rubric for myself has always been 'try not to be boring.' This goes for subject matter, story and the language. Glaser talks about the first line being "implicitly dramatic" and the drama of syntax (sentence structure) or delayed verb.

In any case, the first line of the poem is an exciting place to be for both the writer and the reader. Enjoy your first lines!

Suggested readings:
Glaser recommends Howard Moss essay "The First Line" from his book of essays, Whatever is Moving

Writer's Digest lists their favorite first lines of poems.

Other blog posts for this essay:
Crafting Titles
Crafting Last Lines

The Essay Project: Crafting Titles

April 2, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Elton Glaser came to visit Sarah Lawrence one day in the mid-1990s and read from Color Photographs of the Ruins, a book which I have not been able to find on Amazon strangely (even used) and only this one, very grainy photo. Although I do have a signed copy at home. I haven't read it yet.

Glaser also came with this essay in tow, “Entrances and Exits: Three Key Positions in the Poem” which you can’t find online or in a published book either.

I like a lot of this essay but not so much Glaser’s reason for writing it or for letting us in on why we should write good beginnings and endings: so overloaded readers of poetry can skim them to find promising prospects.

However dire the situation is for the gatekeepers of poetry journals and contests, I wouldn’t recommend that kind of reading practice Glaser calls “winnowing the worthwhile poems.” I’ve been pleasantly surprised too many times to depend on a poem's first or last line. Plus it’s very a ungenerous way to read strangers. Sure there’s an avalanche of poetry out there to read. For a professional reader, fine, use your silly tricks but that will just give you a lot of poems with soft middles.

For the rest of us, just read less poems and read them with your full attention. Live with the fact that you won’t be reading them all.

So you see, if I would have judged this essay but the same rubric Glaser recommends judging poems, I would have stopped reading it after page one, which is a shame because it has some great stuff in it. See?

Truth is there’s an art to getting in and out of a poem. And where there’s an art, there are rules and experimentation will always challenge those rules. Changes in cultural norms will result from those challenges. For example, jokes that sounded good in 1968 don’t work as well in 2020. We grow. But to break the rules, you should learn a few. And this essay is full of good rules.

Weak first and last lines can ruin the whole show. And a good title is like a marketing sign.

This week, we'll just focus on good titles.

Glaser starts by listing some of the poets who have eschewed titles: Emily Dickinson, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Creeley. But at the end of the day, Glaser points out, all title-less poems get titles slapped on them anyhow, [unless no one cares] so you may as well put your vote in?

What Glaser says a good title does:

1. A good tile will add another dimension to the poem (sometimes drastically) or lead you to approach a poem “at on oblique angle” and you can look back at the title with “unforeseen connections” to the poem. There’s pleasure in tracking the distance traveled between the “initial premise and the unpredictable resolution.” He gives a great example of this with the poem “Eating Tomatoes” by Janet Beeler Shaw. He shows how the title defies expectations and morphs from mock-serious to sensual to solemn. At the end of the day, the matrix broadens with a good title.

2. A good title can make an obtuse poem accessible.

3. Glaser quotes Charles Wright in describing the “particular pleasure in thinking up titles.” This is true. Why give that up?

4. Titles can be “miniature poems in themselves."

5. The title can act as a preview on a theme or scene, highlight a crucial clue, trigger a poem’s tone.

6. A poem can also shake up the premise about a form or style with a misleading title. Like for instance using Ode or Sonnet and then subverting expectations.

Glaser reminds us that John Ashbery called titles a keyhole into the poem. And that sneak peak is often delicious and voyeuristic. So often good titles have a magical quality or the echo of a ringmaster calling you into the tent.

Other blog posts for this essay:
Crafting First Lines
Crafting Last Lines