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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.

A Book About the Spanish Flu

March 5, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I was talking to my book club peeps about Covid and the 1918 Spanish Flu (err…Kansas Flu) and how undocumented that bit of history was in terms of monuments. We were talking specifically about the World War I parade in Philadelphia that killed so many people. My friend Sherry mentioned the book Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt (1996) as a good book (if not monument) of poems about the Spanish Flu.

While I was in the thick of my own Covid-related family event I was unable to read them. But in January I picked the book back up and finished it. It’s a “must read” for pandemic poetry, depicting the wartime and rural devastations to small American towns.

A beautiful prologue follows the march of time with weeds and bushes and trees overtaking a place where people once lived:

“And who can tell us where there was an orchard,
where a swing, where the smokehouse stood?”

These are some heart wrenching poems about family members burying loved ones literally hours before succumbing themselves. There's one really pertinent one about a teacher dealing with sick, coughing children and how she couldn’t touch them when they cried. There’s another metaphorical one about how the flu spread all over the world,

“the sickness was more like brushfire in a clearing,
everyone beating the brush with coats and hands,
meanwhile the forest around us up in flames.
What was it like? I was small, I was sick,
I can’t remember much—go study the graves.”

There’s also a good one about a man who planned his own services as he waited to die, another about pure senselessness of the disease:

“The family next door was never struck
But we lost three—was that God’s will? And which
Were chosen for its purpose, us or them?

The Gospel says there is no us and them.
Science says there is no moral lesson.
The photo album says, who are these people?

After the paw withdraws, the world
hums again, making its golden honey.”

Another follows a soldier in the war who returns home:

“Say he lived through one war but not the other.”

And a view from the undertaker,

“Have you ever heard a dead man sigh?
A privilege, that conversation.”

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.”

Letters to Big Bang Poetry

February 26, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

From mid-2019 to fall of 2020 I received a slew of letters to Big Bang Poetry. But I'm terrible at responding in a timely manner. So don't come here looking for help on a class assignment that's due tomorrow morning is all I'm saying. But I love getting letters and I'll try to respond here eventually.

(1) In August 2019 a name named Pieter from the Netherlands wrote this:

“For one of our clients I am currently working on a magazine which will be distributed in an amount of 1000 copies among their business relations. I would like to publish your poem ‘Writing Poems 9 to 5’ as part of a spread with a background image of Windows 10. I like your poem as being kind of a meta description of poetry and it fits good with the image thanks to your reference to Microsoft: “Microsoft changed everything with their windows.”

This was the poem from NaPoWriMo 2019:

Writing Poems 9 to 5

My first job was data entry, with all those awful numbers.
The next ones were flush with time and words were incalculable,
floating out of copiers and stenographers. I hand-wrote them then

in-between walking memos to real, plastic inboxes.
Microsoft changed everything with their windows
in which I could type out my poems. After all,
writing poems looks awfully similar to working.
And instead of office supplies, I began to steal time.

I snuck words in through open windows,
met them in small storage rooms, had conferences
with them at lunch. I sat in ergonomic chairs
while they reclined on the yellow, lined paper.

Sometimes I had to cajole them.
Sometimes they were team players.
Sometimes they were only wanting to gossip.
Sometimes they came out of the mouths of people
standing unawares in front of my desk. Sometimes
they didn’t show up to work, but I couldn’t fire them.

They liked to be fussed over, rearranged.
They wanted to be knit and spaced.
All they wanted was my attention.
And they must have known I would never give them up
for all the money. Because at the end of the day,
when they took their leave, it always sounded good.

We came to a nominal monetary agreement but then I never heard back so I'm guessing the client didn’t like the poem as much as Pieter did. Wah wah.

(2) In August 2020 a woman named Angelica wrote:

“Hello, I’m doing a research project for school on the influence of cognitive biases on business decision making and one of the sources I need is a poem. I read your poem Irrational escalation and I feel it incorporates my topic. I understood the first stanza; however, I wasn’t too clear about how to interpret the rest. I was wondering if you have the time to explain it to me. Thank you! From a highschool student in need to pass her AP Seminar class.”

This was the poem from NaPoWriMo 2015:

30 Poems About Suffering: Irrational Escalation

The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.

The Donner Party refusing to stay put,
Mark Twain’s four million dollar investment
in the Paige Compositor, an early automatic
typesetting machine, Paige taking Twain’s money
for 14 years while other machines prevailed.

A project of biases like this.

It is the broken heart bias, the grit bias.
Tenacity like a tin ear. The fellow who completes
what he has, dammit, set out for.

Does it take decades anymore? Months across
the mountain pass? A lie you tell yourself
as fast as a tweet?

In times like these a robot could grab it—
your timely mistake and capitalize
your catastrophes . No leak. No hack.
No time to adjust to fortune’s funny ironies.

What happens too fast, what happens slow and long—
there’s always a spot of space to stop for,
time to consider time itself in your hand
with its diamond faces. What are you doing
and should you not pivot slightly to the side?

I love the idea that a business class might be requiring poetry research. My response: "I'll try to explain it with some questions…

The first stanza is just examples of historical people who have refused to give up no matter how dire the situation.

Stanza 2. "A project of biases like this." — like this project of me writing these 30 poems. 🙂

3. Why might you might not want to give up, what motivates you to not give up despite all the evidence?

4. How long would it take to abandon your bad idea? The poem was inspired by a tweet so does Twitter help us or not help us to realize when we're wrong?

5. Is it because we're human and not machines?

6. Would it help if we slowed down our thinking process?

(3) In October 2020 Robert wrote:

“I found your short poem The Bosque online and really connected with it. I’m making a short film about the Bosque for my capstone documentary class at Santa Fe Community College and was wondering if I could use your poem in the film. I think it will be a really good fit for what I’m trying to capture. Of course I would credit you.”

Here's the poem from NaPoWriMo 2014:

30 Poems About Language : The Bosque

Not the fog of memory,
the fog of a fugitive concentration.
Letting go of the handrail
and wandering in the bosque.
There is no memory there.

How exciting! I said okay and asked to see the film when it was done. He showed me an early cut and my parents and I were able to watch it together in Cleveland. If the film ever becomes public, I'll post the link here. The photo above is from the National Geographic article on the Rio Grande Bosque.

( 4) In October 2020 someone named Lacey wrote:

"I’m reading Paul Celan. I came across this poem and I need an expert’s take on what it could possibly mean. I have my own…impression but I want to flesh it out. The poem is:

'Each arrow you loose is accompanied by the sent-along target into the unerringly-secret tumult.'”

This was a fascinating question and typical enigmatic poem for Celan, made even more fascinating by the fact that I found multiple alternate translations online. This question even inspired me to read one of the collected translations.

To me the particular translation above seems to be about how the object of your desire(s) can get tangled up into the chaos of your affections.

But some versions didn’t seem as negative in connotation. So I tracked down the original German poem and found a native German speaker to provide a literal translation. My friend Julie hooked me up with her friend Heike's husband Joe who said,

"I went a bit more literally:

'Every arrow that you send its way accompanies the shooting target into the undeviating, secret scrimmage.'

To me that describes a situation, like in ancient times, where archers sent the arrows in the air targeting someone, but it could hit anything in a certain unknown range where the arrow went."

Totally different than my interpretation. Interestingly Paul Celan was the subject of a recent New Yorker article in November 2020, “How Paul Celan Reconceived Language for the Post-Holocaust World.” Turns out this is the 50-year anniversary of his death.

In the article they quote Celan talking about the “thousand darknesses of murderous speech” (which is timely since which we are living through murderous speech again from neo-fascists and QAnon. Examples include the rally cry “death to democrats” and the threats of beheadings against public servants who disagree with their dear leader.

Both of Celan's parents were murdered during the Holocaust and Celan spent his career dealing with the atrocities committed by the Nazis in a language “sullied by Nazi propaganda, hate speech and euphemism.” Sound familiar?

Hans Egon Hothusen, a former S. S. officer who became a critic for a German literary magazine, called Celan's famous poem "[Deathfugue]" "a Surrealist fantasia” which was both a denial of Celan's own experience and humanity, spoken by a residual Nazi attempting to control the narrative. Even after the war ended, Celan was still trolled by anti-semites.

(5) In November of 2020 Alex wrote:

"I was very drawn to one of the poems I read on your website because it seems eerily similar to how I view American leadership the last 4 years. It begins with “you mistake me.” The poem doesn’t seem to have an author, title or date. Is this something you wrote? Can you provide any info at all?

In this case, Alex found the poem on my Poems About Dictators page.

My response: That verse you indicated is part of a long poem called "Listen to the People" by Stephen Vincent Benet (from 1941). He's a great lost poet from the 1930s and 40s. The poem was so long I couldn't quote all of it so the ellipses (…) between the verses indicates there is text in-between which was not quoted. Here is a link to the full piece: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/listen-people

Here's are some more interesting links about the poet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Vincent_Ben%C3%A9t

(turns out he coined the phrase 'Bury my heart at wounded knee.')

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephen-vincent-benet

https://poets.org/poet/stephen-vincent-benet

I discovered this poet in the book "Revolutionary Memory" by Cary Nelson about labor poets who were lost or suppressed during the red scare. Vincent Benet also wrote the famous long poem "John Brown's Body" for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Like a lot of other labor/leftist poets of the 1930s-40s, he's now out of print; but you can find used copies of his work around online.

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?

The Poem That Came to Me After January 6, 2021

January 7, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I read this poem in an old essay I dug out this morning. It felt so timely delivered after yesterday's grim sedition on a symbolic place.

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.

The Essay Project: Reading Poems

November 10, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This week's essay is Marvin Bell’s “The ‘Technique’ of Re-Reading.” You can find an edited version here: https://poets.org/text/technique-rereading

This is an essay about reading poems to get you better at writing poems.

Speaking for myself, I did okay without reading poems at first, but when I started reading poems I started having transformations and epiphanies. So there you go.

And much of the time in the beginning I had to let go of understanding everything I read (in poems and essays). In fact there are still poems and essays (including parts of this one) where I have trouble understanding everything.

Here Bell starts by talking about the superstitious tricks of writing (like having a favorite pen). He then goes into re-reading as a way to learn the tricks of language. A first reading generally tells you what it says. A re-reading tells you how it says it. This is a way, Bell says, to educate yourself in the absence of teachers.

He then talks about his experience re-reading Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer” with its extended metaphor and similes.

Bells hints at but talks too briefly about American poetry and rhetoric vs. image, metaphor, tone, voice, imagination, structure and vision. I didn’t come away with much I could hold on to there. But I did understand this…

“It is harder, much much harder, to learn from poems which skip that rhetorical level, and which present themselves as associational texts in which the reasoning is in between the lines, while the lines themselves present only the emblems of experience and, sometimes, of epiphany.”

He then talks about James Wright’s “To the Saguaro Cactus Tree in the Desert Rain” as an example of a poem listening to itself. Not completely sure what that means.

He then goes into the history of James Wright’s writing choices from formalism to prose poetry and his particular poetic structure.

He talks about translations that take liberties with literal accuracy and “exaggerate the spirit of the poem” and brings up Robert Bly’s translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s “After a Death” about the death of John F. Kennedy, although the poem never specifically states that fact.

Bell compares American verse with international poetry in an interesting way:

“Perhaps we favor particulars in part because our choice has long seemed to lie exclusively between specifics and explanation. For important reasons, we favor the concrete over the abstract, the particular over the general, presentation over explanation, showing over telling. Yet so much poetry from other cultures exhibits both the tensile strength of the particular and the active force of the general.”

He talks about the fear of the sentimental.

“The beginning of the final stanza of this poem reminds me of the distance between our poets and many of our critics. Few of our critics would care for a line like, "It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat." Half of our poets and most of our critics write as if they believe that, since life ends in death, we are essentially dead. Hence, they believe, sometimes without knowing it, that any uncomplicated emotion about life is excessive: therefore, sentimental. But poetry, because it is written by the living to be read by the living, is a way of life. It is always about living, even in the shadow of death…I find this quality in poetry from other countries more often than in American poems: the quality, that is, of releasing from objects the emotional force they hold in quiet.”

He ends by dissecting his own poem, “To an Adolescent Weeping Willow.” We used to hear this a lot in writing workshops:

“…poems are not about what one already knows so much as they are about what one didn’t know one knew.”

Glück, DiPrima, Heine and Vincent Price

November 10, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Louise Glück has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is great news. Diane DiPrima has died, which is bad news.

Tribute article for Diane Di Prima:
NPR

Read more about Louise Glück:
New York Times
The Guardian

I had a whole set of posts about Halloween ready this year but then I got sick the week of Halloween and then the U.S. election happened last week and since we're on the brink of Civil War here, I'm not that enthused about revisiting fictional horrors. But I have been interested lately in Vincent Price movies. This is another week of Cher/Poetry blog cross-writing about him.

But anyway, this week I watched his movie Diary of a Madman and there was a poem in it by Heinrich Heine:

A Woman

Sie hatten sich beide so herzlich lieb (They both loved each other so dearly)

They loved each other beyond belief —
She was a strumpet, he was a thief;
Whenever she thought of his tricks, thereafter
She'd throw herself on the bed with laughter.

The day was spent with a reckless zest;
At night she lay upon his breast.
So when they took him, a moment after,
She watched at the window — with laughter.

He sent word pleading, " Oh come to me,
I need you, need you bitterly,
Yes, here and in the hereafter. "
Her little head shook with laughter.

At six in the morning they swung him high;
At seven the turf on his grave was dry;
At eight, however, she quaffed her
Red wine and sang with laughter!

Vincent’s character explains how each stanza ends with the same words but a different tone.

Finally, around Halloween I heard about two new books of early short stories by women, two books which claim to prove women were some of the earliest adopters of surreal and scary stories.

Women’s Weird, Strange Stories by Women (1890-1940),
edited by Melissa Edmundson (2019)
There’s a Women’s Weird II coming out soon.

Weird Women, Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers: 1852-1923, edited by Morton and Klinger (2020)

The Essay Project: Subject Matter and Intellectualist Poetry

October 23, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This week's essays are by Mark Van Doren. My stapled packet contains two essays with the handwritten date of 1942. They're collected in a book called The Private Reader: Selected Articles & Reviews (1968).

"Poetry and Subject Matter" is an argument against pure experimental abstraction in Modernism.

"Save for the esoteric and the insane, no one who is recent years has defended modern art by insisting that all art be free from subject matter has ever been quite comfortable with doing so. For art needs subject matter as much as it needs form, and only a madman will continue to deny this. Indeed it cannot have form without subject matter; thought it can have technique, a smaller thing that survives catastrophes easily, a kit of tools that turns up, rusty but still recognizable, under the ruins of any civilization. It is the tools of poetry rather than its shape and meaning with which criticism has largely been concerned since poetry in its modern phase began to need defending: since, that it to say, it began to lose its audience.”

If we sends ourselves back to 1942 we can understand why conversations about subject matter might be fresh. MVD might have been dismayed to see how far those impulses went headlong into the 21st century.

“There is something beyond the parts, a formed life which in poetry at any rate is never born without benefit of subject matter. The difficulty of modern poetry is to be explained not by the presence in it of techniques which further study will make us love by by the absence in it of subject matter.”

This was a lost cause in 1942. I think we can see how it makes more sense in 2020. Forsaking subject turned even more narcissistic than confessionalism somehow. Eradicating even the self.

MVD admits that Wordsworth (“still the classic of modernity”) struggled to find a subject for "The Prelude" after many years of waiting for one. But Wordsworth's successors “have been forced back upon themselves in search for something to say"…and "even the subject of self” is something one “bravely exploits” but in it we only hear a “tone of complaint….of irony.”

MVD suggests that “poetry has become impossible because the world no longer supplies [the poet] with things to love.” He invokes “The Waste Land” … part of contemporary poetry with nothing to say. Writers lack a “faith in theme” like war, love, justice, God.

“The subject has been tarnished beyond any tolerable point: and once more it has ceased to reveal its variety….uniformly disillusioned and abstract.”

Disillusionment and abstraction…that was pretty much what modernism was about. To complain about this was to miss the point. Or state the obvious. But he understands our pain: “the industrial revolution, machinery, the middle class, too much sanitation, too little leisure, the credit system, standardization, total wars, frontier psychologies,…the hideousness about him.”

Imagine complaining about middle class leisure today, machinery, washing machines. We’re all leisure and embrace of technology today. He's be horrified. We’ve sold out our middle class in a race to the Walmart price and a house full of machinery crap.

He asks, “Was the world ever beautiful…is any actual world the prime material of poetry?” Perfection “was never here, and it will never be here, and the poet should know this better than anybody. But the typical modern poet, having sold himself to the world, knows only that he has been deceived.”

These messages must have been harshly unsuited to the poets of his time. Or the poets of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

As we're dissembling into chaos and social media, our complaints about the foibles of language seem trite and privileged. MVD is absolutely right when he said,

“The world is all that it is, and there is an infinite number of things to say about it.”

The second essay is called "Achievements of intellectualist poetry" and here he takes on modernist's "difficult poems."

“I shall maintain that Intellectualist poetry has forced us to think exhaustively about the art which it serves—about the elements of this art, I mean, and about its history—and that as a result we have become an audience which for better or worse is committed to the complex poem”

He describes these complex poems as: “skeletons rather than as figures in the flesh," "diagrams of the nervous system, hideous with a tracery of vermilion and purple lines," and "Studies in anatomy, confusing in the way that diagrams are confusing…too many joints exposed."

There are many problems, he says. One, our age is eclectic, we read and know too much, “every style is available to us.”

Second: “we believe in too many things, not that we believe in nothing”…“we are meaninglessly free to choose. Neither orthodoxy nor heresy is possible in a situation which bestows upon all truths an equal and therefore minimum value. So the poet must make what stir he cam among the small, dry bones of thought, rattling them fantastically or arranging them in patterns which at best can only startle us by the oddness with which familiar notions have been juxtaposed.”

Sound familiar?

Third, society is to blame, poverty, war, spirits strangled in an evil and ugly world. [Man] has “a fierce desire to escape the very data of existence. Objects, customs, things: he distrusts them all."