at the other side...

bad, bad, bad... part 2 (7/1)

Answering question 2: What is the poetry I gravitate toward?

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#2 – The poetry I gravitate toward is of no set school, tradition, or lack of tradition, no set form or content, no set language or culture. I gravitate toward poems that make me pause, make we read them again – poems that make me move mentally, emotionally, spiritually… whatever… into a larger place. As to form or style, I’m eclectic in my reading, or tend to be.

Here’s a poem - certainly for changing eye and hand - by Ted Kooser that is as close to perfection as I can imagine. The poem takes me in, and there’s no way to return. I can never get to the end of this piece, and that's wonderful. That’s what I want from poetry.

After Years


Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer’s retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

             - from Delights & Shadows


I’m drawn to the metaphysical, certainly, to lines that ache with image and music, that tend to move away from causes, from the political - mainly because the cause poem is, by and large, a poem of the moment and not of the universal. Often, the poetics of the moment is too controlled by the cause or event. Too restrained by the cause. There are exceptions, of course. I have to note that Lorca, who is listed below, is a political poet. But I think his politics are internalized. Snyder, another example, is a writer who combines environment and politics to such an extent that it's impossible to separate the two. That is a great quality in his work.

In the truest - or maybe deepest is the best term - sense, every poet is political... if the voice is honest, is true. I’m thinking know of Adrienne Rich who stated that if the poet doesn’t come to terms with her or his deepest self, the poetry may be good, may possess a form that is pleasing, even be popular, but the poetry will be superficial. “Diving into the Wreck” – a poem about the creative experience, about the nature of life – is most certainly one of the three or four most important poems in my life. But, I should add that The Dream of a Common Language is my choice as her finest collection. I think that work is the closest the reader gets to Adrienne, the person. I do consider Rich to be a political poet.

William Stafford is a poet – wielding major influence on my own poetic self – whose poetry is absolutely political, yet the political view is subtext, is the necessary blood of his writing. Every Stafford poem is fused with the force of his stand against war. That is vital to understanding the world of his poetry, as well as the nature of his craft.

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A small list of poets – and in no particular order – from a glance at the poetry books on one shelf beside my computer: Jorge Luis Borges, Wislawa Szymborska, Eileen Myles, José Garcia Villa, Paul Celan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mary Ruefle, Jelaluddin Rumi, Denise Duhamel, Tory Dent, Bob Hicok, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Joy Harjo, Rusty Morrison, Carl Phillips, Ryōkan, Arthur Rimbaud, Anne Carson, Robert Herrick, Lucille Clifton, Frank Stanford, H.D., and Czeslaw Milosz.

bad, bad, bad...

I’m fascinated by the recent discussion at Barbara Jane Reyes’ blog on Billy Collins’ comments on bad poetry in The Norman Transcript.

Here’s part of the article:

“One of the reasons people don't read as much poetry anymore is the fault of the poets,” he said. “It’s not the public’s fault. There’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t worth reading.”

It’s the other 13 percent, Collins said, that he lives for. “Poetry should be transparent. Transparent poems tend to teach themselves.”

Collins edited the 2006 edition of The Best American Poetry, and noted a similar point in his introduction.

How many poems see the light of print in America each year? To find the answer simply multiply the number of literary magazines in the United States by the average number of poems per issue times the number of issues each year. That’s right: too many. It’s enough to make you wish the NEA would award grants to poets for not writing, like the ones farmers get for not growing crops. And partially because of this glut of publications, there is also a quality problem to be faced. A friend of mine announced one night over dinner that 83 percent of contemporary poetry is not worth reading. Somehow, that number, pulled out of the air, continues to be deadly accurate. I should add quickly that I count myself among those whose lives would be sorely impoverished without the dependable availability of the remaining 17 percent.

I find it interesting that in neither the Norman Transcript article nor his introduction to BAP 2006 does Collins state who might fit into the worthy of reading group or the this is trash - avoid it. Why not state your favorites? Why not state the bad? I don’t understand his reluctance. Would that somehow lessen Collins’ universal appeal? Would that be bad poetic politics?

Collins almost always plays it safe, plays the crowd. And he is great at that. Make no mistake. I wish though that he would commit to something beyond the humor of the moment. But I also have to realize that that is who he is. I somehow keep wanting to remake Collins into my vision of Billy Collins - which is, of course, one my own flaws.

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Several questions do come to mind:

        Why do I read poetry?

        What is the poetry I gravitate toward?

        What is the poetry I don’t like?

        What makes a poem a poem?

        What are my favorite poems?


So- let me try to answer the first question … and I’ll hold my comments on the other four for another time.

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Here’s this morning’s visit to Verse Daily, a poem by Teresa Pfeifer … and it helps me answer, hopefully, question #1:

Matryoshka

No house of self, my little Matryona
No more whispers of the war you can hear in there,

No wallpaper with open-winged eagles,
Their beaks repeating themselves.

No empty corners for a comma dalliance,
Umpah, umpah, er ah, twiddler of thumbs.

Neither are there curtains with toy drums
To draft a feeling for the time of day.

Would be relief. Would be sweet.
Open you and there you are,

By diminishing returns.
No in-a-gadda-da-vida, honey.

No sting of cerebellum inside its case.
Rattle you and every door unhinges,

Pop and the cat is purring,
The top whirring and that bird is out.

You never rust from springs.
Countless Springs.

And the voices you hear,
No longer come from things.

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I like the piece. I like the shift voice from the deliberate and even spiritual resonance of the language in the opening lines to the more direct, hard-edged “No in a-gadda-da-vida, honey” of the poem’s second half.

I do think the Pfeifer’s poem is certainly connected to our poetic tradition. Stanza seven with its “No sting of cerebellum inside its case. / Rattle you and every door unhinges.” – places the writing squarely on the shoulders of Dickinson and Whitman. Whether or not the references are intentional are, for me, unimportant. I make the leap. I do that. It doesn’t matter if Pfeifer intended the connections. I find the connection. And I find it because of what I bring to this poem. It’s the weight of my life that brings itself into the poem.

I read Pfeirer’s poem. I thought about it; I thought about other things relative to it. I went back, and read it again. Thought more. Searched my head – meanwhile that intrusive and iconic song about who-knows-what from an earlier time kept voicing itself. Even that was good. I don’t like the song, but I like this moment. This is a poem I would like to come back to. Find another angle, and enter again. That’s what I look for when I read. And for me, that’s enough to tell me this is a good poem.

I read fiction and non-fiction to go somewehre ... in my head. But I read poetry to find myself, to make me look out a window, to make me pick up a pen.

waiting...

The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different—not merely another—reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.

                              – Eliot Weinberger, from 19 Ways of Looking
                                       at Wang Wei (Asphodel, 1987)
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This little book, with commentary by Weingberger and Octavio Paz, focuses on various translations of one four-line poem by Wang Wei. But – this is not merely a book of translations or about the translating process. Its true force is about reading, about our approach to language. The different versions of the poem illustrate just how cluttered our reading lives are. We don’t read as much as we scan. And as for writing, most never move past the surface of what is there – waiting.

If you want to be a better writer – or reader, for that matter – spend time with this book.

no reason not to be careful...

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A story with its own take on silence, with its own code of faith – and loss. Given the balancing of grand scale and intricate motion, of twisting light and shadow, No Country for Old Men makes me a believer. I know the story, love this story. The closing pages of the novel make me ache ... this is what my life will come to. And it’s all about the path, the road, the smallness of chance that takes us in the end. A cup of coffee. Dust that settles on our clothes. Voices that never quite know when to stop.

The novel (and the film, for that matter, in its own way) focuses on the American archetypal confrontation ... the good, the bad, the ugly. The lost connections – or missed connections – that make the reader/viewer question both purpose and chance. Each version captures the massive expanse of the story’s play – with its many layers of the physical and the spiritual – against a powerful wasteland.

Knowing when to let go, when to change. I’m of this mind: human nature refuses to adapt – instead, we demand change. This is what we want – therefore, the world must change – then I can have what I want. These are my needs. I will live here, I will say this, I will do – no matter what follows – I just will do. McCarthy’s book, with its marvelous lines that almost intersect, and the Coen’s filmic interpretation, its power centered on a restless, disturbed, and absolute real Ed Tom, capture the tone, the textures in character, the landscape of the story that rests in my head. A story that has been waiting in me – all my life.

No Country for Old Men, novel by Carmac McCarthy (Knopf, 2005) & film by Joel and Ethan Coen (Miramax, 2007)

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    If I don’t come back tell Mother I love her.

        Your mother’s dead Llewelyn.

    Well I’ll tell her myself then.

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Your’e asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do.

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    People think they know what they want but they generally dont.

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Here’s a soundtrack for the book ...



Texas Flood

Stevie Ray Vaughan

... music to live by ...

this one looked at the window...

Last night, in a parked car, waiting, I’m reading Donald Justice, Collected Poems – I have a little light – and conclude that what I want, what I both need and demand from poetry – is not to be taken outside myself. I don’t read to be entertained, don’t read to be enlightened or to learn. My reading – no matter the genre – always focuses on a connection with words or image. I want to move deeper inside myself. That’s why I read … play guitar … watch films … listen to the wind, to rivers, to voices.

I’m always searching for words that make me tilt my head, left – my eyes move away from the page. Somewhere inside, I say yes, yes. And I’m a happy man.

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– from Counting the Mad

This one thought himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man,
An ordinary man.
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.

round and still...

William Stafford

Emily’s House in Amherst


Her voice for awhile held itself afloat
in this room. Curtains in her presence
represented all that could posses riches
and live so fully that there was no need to move.

Here by the window her eyes received
the world, round and still, round and still
all day till the slow surprise of the moon
topped the outer forest that fringed the horizon.

We have you, voice, in here. The world
it carries has no horizon. Curtains
descend when shadows and evening come
or when any word comes near your name.

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Stafford – no matter the theme, topic, or image in his works – has a way with his pen of flattening the lines and the language. Flattening the language … in the sense of not drawing attention to itself. Excess is never present in his works. His writing, by design, is never loud. The languages flows evenly, quiet, deep, effective. Readers are encouraged or even forced – such an odd word to associate with Stafford, but true nonetheless – forced to participate. The words – while appearing tame – are camouflaged against the fierce backdrop of the self as universe. With most any Stafford poem, the reader must turn inward, and will always – always – arrive at some sort of truth or revelation … without having any idea of how the moment happened. His works are natural, impacting, mantra-like – though never simple.