Poetry

I had the poignant duty of sending out the email newsletter announcement last night that the 2009 Ojai Poetry Festival has been cancelled. The current financial situation has affected our founders, our prospective donors, and our hopes for ticket sales considerably. So, the committee is conserving its resources in hopes of reviving the festival in 2011. Having already sent hundreds of emails and made numerous updates to the website in anticipation of such a great lineup, I am, needless to say, disappointed.

And yet, I am heartened by the absolute flurry of poetry events passing through in recent weeks. A small but formidable group of women poets are hosting a reading in a beautiful backyard just around the corner from me. The names of two fellow students from long ago found their way to me in announcements of their separate readings. Others seem to be driving up and down the California coast reading poems associated with their recent prize, or book, or just because there seems to be a hungry market for poetry right now.

In some cases, the marketplace of poetry does intersect with the financial marketplace. Those poets who have managed to in some way cobble together a lifestyle of writing and teaching poetry are likely influenced by the recent economic downturn. Yet there exists a separate marketplace for poetry wherein supply can be measured in willing voices, and demand in eager ears. This marketplace seems to work almost inversely to the financial marketplace, in that difficult times bring us back to the necessity of art.

Writing poems is, in many senses of the word, “free.” And during times when it can be difficult to be generous materially, opportunities to be generous with one’s time and creativity seem to represent an outlet for hope. Attending readings, buying and borrowing books of poems, is generally inexpensive. Yet the payoff is significant. From a small investment of time, an enrichment of perception. Therefore, as the stock markets, and other markets, continue to rattle and roll, I say let us all invest our human currency—in reading, writing, and listening to great poems.

Today I received contributors’ copies of Rattle #30, due out in December. The poem they published was selected as an honorable mention in The Rattle Poetry Prize. Congratulations to Joseph Fasano, whose first-place poem is wonderful, to the other honorable-mention poets, and to all those poets whose poems were selected for this special issue focusing on cowboy poetry.

I look forward to reading and re-reading it!

I got final approval on my MFA thesis from my faculty advisor this morning. In celebration, here is one of my favorite clips on the perils of being a closet academic. (Note: this video contains strong language and adult themes—that is, if you can understand what is being said!)

In her debut full-length collection, Good Friday Kiss, Michelle Bitting delivers a ferocious and nuanced experience of womanhood. These are poems of the sister reflecting on her brother’s suicide, of the mother squirting meds into her autistic son’s cran-apple juice and nursing her daughter in a vampiric pre-dawn delirium, the uniformed schoolgirl in a tryst with her married teacher, the wife offering her body like bread to her husband before his long journey, the middle-aged left-coast mom facing cancer, plastic surgery, and taking up the guitar again.

The collection builds upon the success of her chapbook, Blue Laws, offering deeper reflection, sharper perception, and an expanded range of poems. Bittings work is not so much confessional as it is unflinching in its observation, including in its self-reflective moments. In the poem “Strange Flesh,” she thanks a nameless donor for, “inking the little O / on your DMV form, / for prettying up my smile.”

Keenly attuned to both biting irony and expansive tenderness, this collection addresses the question all poetry addresses—“what does it feel like to be human?”—and addresses it head-on.

In “The Annals of Suicide,” the speaker turns from momentary thoughts of self-harm to a noisy bird on the patio:

His crimson chest and pate teased up,
he reminded me of a clown
on a circus night gone south—rain
and the generator blows,
lights fritzing, the tent half-caved.
Still, under a spot’s drained glow
with one perfect trick
he murders the crowd,
the masses staggering to their feet,
in fits of senseless laughter
as his painted lips unhinge
and he gulps the flaming sword—
swallows it down without burning.

Though Bitting’s impulse is narrative, she resists easy moves and shock value, probing the seemingly mundane, not so much for big answers, as worthy questions. In the end, through moments of bold perception and astonishing honesty, we share with Bitting in the bittersweet “education in love / we didn’t know we needed / and never asked for.”

I actually received word from a fellow student (thanks, Ron) that Oregon Literary Review published this poem on their website. Beyond the main subject of the poem, which is the loss of our infant son, the poem has a lot of creative history for me, some of which I plan to discuss during my graduate reading at the upcoming MFA residency.

I wrote and re-wrote this poem through half a dozen forms (and non-forms), finally arriving at terza rima as the medium for sustaining and combining so many different thoughts, experiences, and feelings. First drafts began when I was in London, visiting the house of John Keats in hopes of absorbing greater negative capability, and reading a lot of Robert Hass to keep out of the rain. I wanted to encompass so many thoughts and feelings all at once, as Hass often does in his gentle way, but had not yet found the means to do so.

It was David St. John’s magnificent sequence “To Pasolini” (from Study for the World’s Body), however, that renewed my belief in the terza rima form, and then a succession of old favorites, from Seamus Heaney to Dante himself, whose work further encouraged me to explore what freedoms I might find within the form’s constraints. In the end, it is a poem about many things, grief being, hopefully, an aperture in this poem, even as it has become one in my life.

As my wife points out, artistry is a balancing act. I have been working on the manuscript portion of the creative thesis for my MFA—essentially, a book-length collection, composed of poems I wrote during my study in the program. Having scrutinized, selected, and arranged this body of work, I now find that the highly critical part of my character has become over-activated. Setting down to write new poems, a thought goes off in the back of my mind: will this poem be good enough to include in the manuscript? It is an absolute creativity killer.

And so, the dance between precision and wild abandon continues, albeit on a new dance floor. I can only assume poets working on their ninth and tenth books have somehow figured out how to resist this urge—to scrutinize when one needs to be devil-may-care free. This, more than any single element of craft, must be what breeds longevity in the arts—some ability to operate within the almost schizophrenic nature of artistry. Now that my manuscript is more-or-less assembled, and in celebration of my conscious rebellion against taking myself, and my body of work, too seriously, I am off to attempt to write a deliberately “bad” poem. The worse, the better. Such challenges goad the duende.

In case, like me, you may have been taking yourself a bit too seriously lately, please enjoy what may be one of the strangest Monty Python sketches in history, featuring three of the big six of Romantic poetry, ants, the queen, and lots of sherry—all conveniently subtitled in Spanish:

I recently got the good news that one of my poems received an honorable mention in the Rattle Poetry Prize. According to the editor, the poem was selected from over 4,000 poems entered this year. It is particularly encouraging that they chose a poem that represents one of my recent attempts at breaking the “page barrier”—that is, writing a poem longer than one page. I look forward to reading the nine other honorable mention poems and, of course, the first-place-winner’s poem, when they are published in December. The $100 prize I plan to put toward—you guessed it—more poetry books.

This semester, like last semester, I am writing brief annotations on the books I read. As I mentioned earlier, I am focusing on late modernist poets. Here are a few notes on some iconic books that have had a great impact on my relationship to poetry:

Jarrell, Randall. The Lost World: New Poems. New York: Collier Books, 1966.

This collection of poems is strikingly different from Jarrell’s body of work about wartime aviation. These are mostly dream-like meditations on childhood, told from the perspective of a child, and sometimes as persona poems in the voice of a woman. They employ deliberately prosaic language and a stocky, often single-stanza form.

Merwin, W.S. The Lice. New York: Antheneum, 1967.

A forceful, strong-voiced body of poems. Possibly a predecessor of Glück’s ventriloquistic style? Also somehow reminiscent of Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. Haunting, powerful, and impossible to summarize.

Merwin, W.S. The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1979.

The soldered-together sentence fragments, lack of punctuation, and disruptive repetition of certain phrases in this collection of poems is highly reminiscent of Paul Celan. This collection seems clearly more influenced by French than The Lice, which, by compare, moved into a more distinctly American voice, while retaining the high-voltage associations and also adding metaphoric elements reminiscent of Pablo Neruda. Merwin was striking out in new directions in The Moving Target, no doubt heavily influenced by his translation work.

Moore, Marianne. Selections from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962.

Poems of observation, many of which follow a pattern of syllabic counts from stanza to stanza. Many of these poems employ a wit akin to that of the Algonquin Round Table (Dorothy Parker et al.), and certainly possess a kind of period charm. But beyond this, the work is interesting for its celeritous musicality, and in particular the ways that Moore works with enjambment and slant internal rhymes to create pleasurable disorientation.

Silkin, Jon. Poems New And Selected. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1966

These are compelling meditations on life and death, at once seemingly plainspoken and yet intellectually intricate and refined. His poems about the death of his son, as well as similarly resonant poems about the death of animals, betray a deep sensitivity and a beautiful use of forms that invent themselves as they go along.

Snodgrass, W[illiam] D[eWitt]. Heart’s Needle. New York: Knopf, 1959.

This is a collection of meditations upon failure, written in a variety of somewhat formal structures. The title sequence focuses on failures in parenthood. This collection does not strike me as “confessional” in the sense we have adopted since the 1980s of direct revelation and admission of shortcomings, as much as it attempts to find language suitable to relate a sense of futility in the speaker’s voice, and the speaker’s relationship to the world.

Stevens, Wallace. “Ideas of Order.” and “The Man With the Blue Guitar.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977. 117-188.

A collection of musically-driven poems, which seem to find their way by musicality into strange ideas and sensibilities. “The Man With the Blue Guitar” is an ars poetica composed in couplets, simultaneously explaining and demonstrating Stevens’ poetics through the metaphor of the blue guitar.

Williams, William Carlos. “Spring And All” Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970. 88-151.

An experimental work interspersing poems with fragmentary prose commentary on the importance of imagination in art and life. An incredible sense of freedom is achieved by the deliberate meanderings, starts, stops, and intentionally mis-headed sections. The poems, set apart from the surrounding experimental-style commentary, demonstrate Williams’ characteristic style.

There is a Zen story about working very hard wherein a young student (in some versions, an American,) approaches the master and asks how long it will take him to become a master himself. The master replies, “ten years.” The student emphatically explains that he will work twice as hard as any of the other students, pushing himself to the limit to master his teachings more quickly. “In that case,” replies the master, “twenty years.”

For me, poetry is like this. Usually, when I find myself wanting to work very hard, it is because I have not been writing consistently. You see, I have waned in my discipline of getting up early before work to write. And, as a result, I notice myself daydreaming about dramatic change, such as a fellowship with a great expanse of uninterrupted writing time stretched out before me. Yet, invariably, I find that when I start writing consistently again, I become more satisfied and accepting of my present situation. My careerist thoughts subside. I enter back in to the vocation of poetry, the lifelong pursuit.

The art of not pushing, but rather focusing on consistency, is alien to our fast-food culture. And yet, writing something daily is actually a form of instant gratification as well—a true and lasting gratification of actually having written, good or bad. It is also, ironically, good for one’s career. That is because publication and awards are a numbers game. And writing consistently produces a greater volume of higher quality work than an approach of fits and starts. At least, that has been my experience so far.

So, it’s off to bed for me, and up early to bang something out—good or bad—for sake of staying in the flow.