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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."

Sound familiar?

Anne Sexton & Maxine Kumin

October 23, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Poets Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton are one of the interesting famous poet friendships. While working on the Essay Project I came across Kumin's book To Make a Prairie, Essays on Poets, Poetry and Country Living and reading that led me to read Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems. My friend Ann sent me a copy of her collected poems and it’s been sitting on my shelf next to a Sylvia Plath’s collection for over 10 years.

The Kumin book begins with a section of interviews. She talks about meeting Sexton in a poetry workshop and becoming long-time writing friends. Only two of the interviews resonated with me, one where she quotes John Ciardi as defining a poem as “a way of meaning more than one thing at a time” and the Karla Hammond interview which talks about poems with too much “furniture” and Kumin’s typical level of specificity, as well as message poetry, psychic distance in a poem, metaphors as “tricks” and other craft “tricks” she learned around form and meter that help her write poems.

Section two is full of essays on poetics. The first is a short piece on the creative process (digressions, improvisations), her memorial comments for Anne Sexton, another short piece on Sexton’s book, The Awful Rowing Toward God, and a longer essay on their friendship. ("The clear thread that runs through all the books of poems is how tenuous that life was. She was on loan to poetry, as it were. We always knew it would end. We just didn’t know when or exactly how.”) The other pieces in the section are about Kumin's own writing process: she calls alliteration “pyrotechnics” and she has this to say about metaphor: “is not smaller than life. It mediates between awesome truths. It leaps up from instinctual feeling bearing forth the workable image. Thus in a sense the metaphor is truer than the actual fact.” Huh.

Section three contains three lectures on poetry. Besides the Sexton pieces, these are worth the purchase of the book. There’s an excellent essay on different ways to close a poem called “Closing the Door.” The next essay, “Coming Across” is about about the intent of the poem. The last essay, "Four Kinds of I," is about the point of view in lyric, persona, ideational and autobiographical poems.

The last section contains four essays about life on her country farm.

Now on to Sexton’s collected poems. I was intrigued by Kumin's comments. I didn't really like Sexton's poetry in college and I've been tired-out with confessional poetry for many years, so much of what we still read today is either the self-involvement of language experiments or confessional pieces. I tried to read Transformations in graduate school at Sarah Lawrence and although I liked it better than reading Cinderella years before, I still didn't love it.

But, as I say again and again, you have to be ready to read any book you pick up. It's as much about you as it is about the book. Some years you’re just not ready for it. I tried to pick up about 10 other poetry books and was unable to finish anything before I started reading Sexton. I was restless and didn’t know what kind of poem would break me out of it.

This book was interesting for another reason, like other books you read it defined the principle of sunk costs. Reading the first book in the collection was a real struggle but I kept going.

A few weeks ago I finished a MOOC called Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age (University of Michigan) and we were learning the concept of Sunk Costs, which is like saying 'don’t throw good money after bad.' Bail out if you’re not enjoying something. I’ve always found this concept to be faulty in the case of reading, at least reading some things. For novels or short stories these days I’m very willing to bail out early. Life is short and getting shorter. But I usually hang in there with books of poetry, especially collected or selected works where certain phases might not be your cup of tea but soon you may very well come upon something transformative (to use a Sextonism).

As I said, I didn’t respond much to the first book (To Bedlam and Part Way Back) partly I think because I was expecting it to be more “bedlamy” from all the mythologies about her and critiques of her work. Maybe at the time it seemed more shocking. By the time I got to “The Operation” in the book All My Pretty Ones, I was getting hooked and appreciating her stoic and well-spoken candor about womanhood, like her famous "In Celebration of my Uterus." Many essays over the last decades have bemoaned her kind of shock confessionalism and I think this deterred me from reading her to be frank, especially since I’ve read a trillion confessional books. But I wasn’t turned off by Sexton. She was a far superior writer to many later-day confessionalists, rarely was she boring in this middle period. I found much to love in Live or Die and Love Poems as well. Details in these poems are also interesting snapshots of the late 1960s and early 1970s and it's interesting to read her thoughts after Sylvia Plath's suicide in "Sylvia's Death" ("O tiny mother,/you too!/O funny duchess!/O blonde thing!") Like Plath, Sexton references Nazis and the holocaust a lot and it doesn't really age all that well.

From "For Eleanor Boylan Talking With God"

Though no one can ever know,
I don't think he has a face.
He had a face when I was six and a half.
Now he is large, covering up the sky
like a great resting jellyfish.

From "The Black Art"

A writer is essentially a spy…A writer is essentially a crook…

Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hats,
we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
But when we marry,
the children leave in disgust.
There is too much food and no one left over
to eat up all the weird abundance.

Much of her life, Sexton struggled with ideas about God and religion. From "Protestant Easter"

And about Jesus,
they couldn't be sure of it,
not so sure of it anyhow,
so they decided to become Protestants.
Those are the people that sing
when they aren't quite
sure.

From "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife"

She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

It's in the book of fairy tales retold, Transformations, where Sexton is on fire. Re-reading both of my copies, (the collected set next to my original copy with the drawings and Kurt Vonnegut introduction where he first proposes his Cinderella story structure) was a revelation. This time I took the trouble of looking up any Grimm fairy tales I didn’t already know. Her tone is cavalier and very funny. Her similes are whimsical and very 1970s ("The queen chewed it up like a cube steak" and "She was as full of life as a soda pop" and "as ugly as an artichoke"). The tales are twerked in darkness and cynicism and at times awfully sobering, like the final Sleeping Beauty poem alluding to sexual abuse by her father ("It's not the prince at all/but my father/drunkenly bent over my bed.")

The Book of Folly was back to strictly confessional poems to some extent and trying out other group sets, like “The Jesus Papers” and the Fury and psalm poems in “The Death Notebooks,” all about her explorations with religion. I almost enjoyed these more than her final non-posthumous book, The Awful Rowing Toward God where I felt some of the deft skill devolving again all throughout the end period, as if the control slipped and poems became more diary entries, unfinished, even in the horoscope set. But throughout all of it there is the march toward the end, her self-loathing, more and more of an inability to see herself as anything but foul and often literally evil.

When the cow gives blood
and the Christ is born
we must all eat sacrifices.
We must all eat beautiful women.

There's an intro essay by Maxine Kumin (her own book's version, but expanded).

The Essay Project: War Writing (It’s Closer to Home Than You Think)

October 14, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The essay I dug up for this week is definitely from the Sarah Lawrence essay class because Lamont and Annie actually put their names on the first page, which is nice, because then I can remember them. They found a Jan/Feb 1996 article in The American Poetry Review by Christopher Merrill about poets and the war in Sarajevo, “Everybody Was Innocent: On Writing and War.”

Aside from this essay, we can all sense we’re living through unprecedented times right now, relatives against relatives, old friends against old friends, teams against teams. I watched The Social Dilemma last weekend on Netflix and fears are mounting regarding civil wars in most established democracies around the world right now. This is no longer a far-fetched idea. And it seems social media has done a lot of the work to create a monstrous dystopian reality for all of us.

As writers we all may soon be called upon to become war writers right inside of our own poems about place. This will become the same project.

When I read news reports of Sarajevo back in the 1990s, I remember feeling very moved and very removed. So reading this essay again gave me both a flashback on that feeling and an entirely new perspective.

In this article, Christopher Merrill visits Sarajevo and interviews an ‘embedded’ poet there. Which reminded me, I subscribed to APR for a few years and never read a single article like this in the journal, only academic reviews and landscapes. I wish APR had been as hard-hitting when I subscribed.

The article talks about the special issues around writing about war, such as:

“I want to explore some of the ways in which writers can approach a subject extensively covered by the media: when television cameras shape our perception of a tragedy like Bosnia, how can writers respond to it without, as Sarajevans say of some visitors to their city, ‘going on safari’ – shopping for material, that is, like tourists?”

We can easily replace the idea of television with cable news and social media.

1996 was a year of commemorations, Merrill stated: the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, V-J Day, the shootings at Kent State, the fall of Saigon…

"it is important to remember that more than fifty wars are now taking place around the world. The Cold War is over, and we are deep into the Cold Peace.”

Merrill talks about how in Sarajevo the war script was flipped, how in typical wars, the majority of the casualties were soldiers. But in Bosnia, the majority of deaths were civilian. He talks about the “sense of ambiguity integral to the talks of writing about war. Nothing is as it seems…despite what pundits and politicians would have us believe.”

He quotes Vietnam writer Tim O’Brien:

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of the truth itself, and therefor it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is every absolutely true.”

He talks about the “enormous power of television” and how “CNN has the power to shape events” and again for us it's the cripplingly awesome power of social media and the Internet.

The article quotes Greek poet, Odysseas Elytis, translated by Olga Broumas and T. Begley, who says that during World War II,

“An entire contemporary literature made the mistake of competing with events and succumbing to horror instead of balancing it, as it should have done”

in contrast with the example of Henri Matisse who:

'‘in the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz…painted the juiciest, rawist, most enchanting flowers and fruits every made, as if the miracle of life itself discovered it could compress itself inside them forever.”

This reminded me of the immense and moving humanity to be found in Georges Perec’s novel Life A Users Manual. Merrill says,

“This is, of course, no small task—even in peacetime. And those who rise to the occasion in war are truly heroes of the literary imagination.”

He considers Bosnian poet Goran Simic one such hero, “discovering meaning in this tragedy.” He also quotes Ferida Durakovic,

“Before the war I didn’t really like Goran’s poetry. It was too hermetic to me. But now it’s so clear and direct. Now he only writes about what’s important.”

Merrill says what interests him is how Simic “looks at the crevice between what the media finds and reality itself.” Merrill talks about Sarajevan humor “at its most biting with a profound moral vision….” and this most haunting warning by journalist Dizdarvic,

‘the victory of evil continues on unabated—the powerlessness of good, the triumph of chaos over order, the verification of defeat in the match between humanity and the bestial goes on…that Sarajevo’s story is not unique—many other towns like it lie along the road of the madmen who have ruined it. As a Sarajevan who has seen and lived through these events, I am compelled to broadcast a warning: there are sick people in the world who now understand that they are dealing with a public that, when it comes to international politics, is egotistical, incompetent, and unrealistic. We are witnessing a renascence of Nazism and Fascism, and now one is willing to call it to a halt. We are witnessing the abolition of all recognized human values.”

That was 1996.

“This insight,” Merrill says, “is one reason why the War Congress closed its session with Ferida Durakovic reading a declaration asserting that ‘the writer exists to face evil.’” Merrill says, “Televised images of war are revolting, but we grow used to them. The writer’s task is to change that.”

Merrill talks about Tobias Wolff’s memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War,

”Wolff went to see at eighteen dreaming of Melville, and it may be said that he went to war to act out something from Hemingway. A writer’s education depends upon the stripping away of illusions about the world—and the self. There is no better place to do that than in a war, where you quickly come up against your own cowardice.”

Merrill ends with a comparison of the witnesses versus the watchers:

“The difference between witnessing and watching is a function of the imagination. Witnessing comes from the Old English for to know; watching is related to waking as from sleep. First we watch and then, if our imaginations are sufficiently engaged, we witness. What I wish for is to make witnesses of us, not just watchers, because in the Age of Television [the Internet] no one is innocent.”

We are at the precipice, if not in the midst, of a civil war, a global civil war and also a very local civil war. It is here. How will we write about it?

The Essay Project: The Music of the Poem

September 22, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Not all the essays in my stack are from my essay class. This one was given to me by a classmate named Teresa and her note says “Mary: Essay on Music from Teresa.” This essay, "What Do I Like?" by Theodore Roethke is from Conversation on the Craft of Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (1961).

Teresa had been talking to me about the rhythm in my free verse poems and this is an essay all about rhythm and music in lines, the power of meter even in free verse, which Roethke calls “a denial in terms…the ghost of some other form, often blank verse.”

Roethke takes apart his favorite stanzas by these poets (some listed only by last name, others by full names): Auden, Samuel Johnson, himself, George Peck, Elinor Wylie, (Louise) Bogan, Charlotte Mew, Donne, W.H. Davies, Blake, Janet Lewis, Robert Frost, Stevens, Ransom, Whitman, Lawrence, Christopher Smart, and Robert Lowell.

Roethke talks about iambs, sprung lines, base line, alliteration, logic, feminine endings and velocity, spondees, propulsion, repetition, psychological pacing, tone, stress, the “bounding line” or the nervousness in a line, the tension, the energy, the psychic energy, rhetorical devices, enumeration, successive shortening of line length, line length variation, modulation, the natural pause, and the breath unit.

Here are some of the most interesting quotes:

“To question and to affirm, I suppose are among the supreme duties of a poet.”

“We must keep in mind that rhythm is the entire movement, the flow, the recurrence of stress and unstress that is related to the rhythms of the blood, the rhythms of nature. It involves certainly stress, time, pitch, the texture of the words, the total meaning of the poem.”

“We all know that poetry is shot through with appeals to the unconscious, to the fears and desires that go far back into our childhood, into the imagination of the race… [which is why] "some words….are drenched with human association…”

“We must realize, I think, that the writer in freer forms must have an even greater fidelity to his subject matter than the poet who has the support of form. He must keep his eye on the object, and his rhythm must move as a mind moves, must be imaginatively right, or he is lost.”

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