only in a variation...

Life is not a work of art – the moment cannot last.

                  –A River Runs Through It, the film

Here’s what I’m thinking…

Things don’t just happen. We do encounter them. Also, they don’t actually pass from us when we think they end. I’m not certain they can leave us. We must surely retain some shred of whatever it is. Some sort of bridge or connection must exist between me and this other.

In other words, these “things” – and you define them however you want – have always been and always will be. I can plan an F note on the guitar or sing the F note only because the F note already exists. I’m writing these words – just now – because the words already exist in me, already exist in the universe. I’m not creating. I’m rearranging whatever is already there into a variation.

In this moment, nothing exists in a complete form. Only in a variation of that form.

If I were to accept the premise that “life is not a work of art,” everything I’ve ever believed about myself would suddenly and finally end. I do accept the thought that life is not a finished work of art. The work has no end, and since it has no end, it could not have a beginning. The work, as it has always been doing, continues. I don’t do the work. I am what is being worked.

at the other side...

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

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

*

#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.

*

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.

*

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.

~

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.

*

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.

suddenly, in every tree...

By way of example…

much & nothing, part 3

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Tess Gallagher

Choices


I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
should be.

*

As I read this piece by Tess Gallagher, collected in a marvelous anthology, The Poets Guide to the Birds (Anhinga Press, 2009), edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, I find it supporting my premise of the writing process – allowing the poem to find us. The grand awakening that is embodied in the line “Suddenly, in every tree” is the turning point – in my reading of the poem – for the poet to find his or her voice, and for the poem to settle into that voice. The poem’s final line posits that this is the way it should be.

This is a remarkable poem that carries inside it the Buddhist principle of no nature, of being one with and not separate. In our creative selves, we may want to force – say – the poem, but that is not the truth, nor is it the way. The strongest reality is the unseen presence, the shadow figure, the vision. That part or place which is often ignored in the mad dash to find the great truth. If the unseen nest is not realized, all that remains is contrivance. It may be well-structured and well-accepted, but it’s not the real piece of writing it could have been.

I am certain that Gallagher would not want the reading of her poem to be limited to a focus on the creative process. The fact that it also speaks volumes – from such a few lines – about daily living, about relationships, about our connection with the natural world, about the self, is the underpinning of the poem’s strength.

Note how the nest, though hidden, unnoticed, is already well-established and thriving when the poem’s speaker, searching for what she believes is a greater find – vast drifts of snow over mountains – finds, as if by accident, the nest, the home. This realization shows that the speaker’s life will never be the same, and that is one of the true marks of greatness.

much & nothing, part 2...

Explaining Much, Explaining Nothing, Part 2


I do write about the self – whatever that is, and I’m not certain at all … even to the point of questioning its existence – but that writing, for me, by and large, is placed elsewhere as well. It may very well be that I can only approach myself in relation to otherness. A force, as Newton posited, will push against something, and meet with an equal force.

Let me offer this poem as a representative of that layer of my own writing. The genesis was my reflection on a then recent surgery on my wrist. The surgery was relatively minor, but when the blade enters the body, and one must be put under, minor no longer applies. An accounting will take place. There’s a dream, a winter, and the music of the great Charles Mingus – parallel lines (or worlds) that meet on the page.


Storm

               “Cumbia and Jazz Fusion,” Charles Mingus,
               Recording, NYC, 10 March 1977


Birds throat the jungle to life—
squawking green to percussion
to oboe, bassoon.
That’s how the song begins—
but what I can’t see when I listen
is Mingus’ shoulders, wood curving
from his belly, both hands
on the upright’s long neck—
and no way to know
that in his hands, in the music,
in darkness between recording

and this room, years away,
where I sit listening,
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
an impatient ghost,
is beginning its own
flexed pleasure paradigm
in the pulled bars of the bass clef
at song’s end— in the fade.

I lift my own right hand—
so recently under the surgeon’s knife,
the wrist letting go its lump
—and trill my fingers, for circulation,
in counter to the coup d’état
of trumpet and sax whose blare
is a red sun bearing down
on the warm sea— a last border
where colors blend
to deep and perfect silence.

And then I sleep— my head filling
with thick, wet trees
and river gods and boats run aground.

In the morning— you, dearest reader,
remove the bandage, kiss my opened palm,
dress the wound

while January, fresh-pillared
in wood smoke, gives up
its first snow to our roof.

                     —originally published in Writer’s Quill

explaining much, explaining nothing...

If I were to attempt a description of my own writing – I would have to use the word landscape. There are birds, rivers, mountains, the sea... But I must add that it’s a landscape that’s not limited to nature. The landscape is often contrived or already existent. The setting is usually one that is viewed rather than one that is traversed. And it’s usually empty. What that says about me as a writer, I’m sure, must explain much – though not to me. I don’t try to get at that. If you move too close to something, the perspective disappears. Maybe it’s too fragile.

One of my earliest and most vivid memories – I must have been three, maybe four – is my looking through, carrying around, or always having close by… my father’s college text Art History of the Western World when he was a student at Florida Southern. I became lost in those paintings, the photographs, the sculptures. What was most fascinating was not that the pieces of art put me in another place – it was that places inside me opened. And that was phenomenal for me at that time in my life.

Way leads on to way, as Frost writes, and I found myself approaching film, for example, in the same way. I wouldn’t really – and still don’t – watch a film. I study a film. I’ve never been able to approach any of the arts from the point of entertainment. I don’t write to entertain; I don’t read to be entertained. I don’t want a good read. I don’t want just to listen to good music. I do want the world(s) of music all around me. If I’m in the right place, something gets at me, and that makes me who I am.

It makes since, then, that my own work unfolds in a few phases or gatherings: film, art, music, literature. That may be a weakness – I can’t say – but I can’t seem to break free of that, and I’m not certain that I want to. My world – maybe even my life – is a reaction to, an understanding of, a going into the arts. Always has been. Instead of creating a new world for a protagonist, I place characters inside an already created world. A view from inside a film. A piece of music. Reaction to painting. And so on. Many of the people in my works are dead. But, reality is such a difficult notion to approach. The reality in my head may be the blues singer’s death in 1938. Or at least my take on that death.

I do remember that Stanley Kunitz said that poets don’t really (or shouldn’t would be more clear) choose the subjects of their poems. The poem chooses the pen, chooses the writer. I rest in that. Call it surrender, call it giving in, call it going into. So be it. Here I go.

that may have lives of their own...

What makes a poem a poem?

A reasonable beginning?

Start with a personal definition:

poem (pō ׳ əm): 1a. words; words in the mind; words in a dream or an idea b. words spoken or not spoken, with or without voice; words in a grouping that represent, that state, that imply, that sound; words on the tongue, emphasized or not 2a. words intrinsic to the universe, to living things, to dead things b. words that may or may not reveal themselves; words that may have lives of their own, independent of any expected or implied existences or creations c. words that need no host in order to be 3. words placed on the page or spoken in such a manner as to provoke a response in or from the speaker, reader, or listener 4. something stolen outright or by accident from existent or nonexistent sources 5a. words that may or may not carry their own music, rhythms, and tone b. should carry a sense of place, time, or space 6. words are miracles (e.g., an invitation, according to William Stafford, to happen 7. in some instances: numbers, drawings, physical or natural objects, found objects, certain foods or plants, or musical or artistic pieces of various devisings

*

In the cauldron:

lyrical or narrative arc
special conveyance for language
conduit for thought or reflection
a created or inherent mood or tone
dwells wholly or in part in the real,
driven by image, theme, story, music, or language
given over to any one or more of possible forms
       and their variations
known by its look or feeling or sound
must surely have its own motive
must have an audience to be completed
must exist in some variation(s) of the real, the natural,
       the figurative, the imaginative, or the universal

striving for perfection...

Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky, Dir. / 1975

I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.

*

… [Robert] Bresson is perhaps the only man in the cinema to have achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand. I know of no other artist as consistent as he is in this respect. His guiding principle was the elimination of what is known as ‘expressiveness’, in the sense that he wanted to do away with the frontier between the image and actual life; that is, to render life itself graphic and expressive. No special feeding in of material, nothing laboured, nothing that smacks of deliberate generalisation. Paul Valéry could have been thinking of Bresson when he wrote: ‘Perfection is achieved only by avoiding everything that might make for conscious exaggeration.’

                                               Diary of a Country Priest
                                               Bresson, Dir. / 1951

*

The artist cannot make a specific aim of being understandable— it would be quite as absurd as its opposite: trying to be incomprehensible.

*

When I say I cannot influence an audience’s attitude to myself, I’m attempting to formulate my own professional task. It’s clearly very simple: to do what one has to, giving of one’s utmost, and judging oneself by the most rigorous standards. How can there then be any question of thinking about ‘pleasing the audience’, or worry about ‘giving the public an example to emulate’? What audience? The anonymous masses? Robots?

*

In a word, the image [in film] is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as in a drop of water.

*

The function of the image, as [Nikolai] Gogol said, is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life. It does not signify life or symbolise it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.

*

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

*

Through a Glass Dakrly
Bergman, Dir. / 1961






I have a horror of tags and labels. I don’t understand, for instance, how people can talk about [Ingmar] Bergman’s ‘symbolism’. Far from being symbolic, he seems to me, through an almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.

*

All creative work strives for simplicity, for perfectly simple expression; and this means reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life. But that is the most painful part of creative work; finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. The struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped.

                     – from Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky
                           (Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair)




Solaris
Tarkovsky, Dir. / 1972

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)
*

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...

At the risk of repeating myself...

Poetry is not a school, nor is it a movement. It’s not really communal. Not in its truest and most perfect presence. It needs liberation. Poetry is solitary, non-conformist – that is, not compelled to its own likeness in the world – and is deeply personal.

Most of the poets I know ... most of the readers I know ... are much too conservative for my taste. They’re out of balance – too tilted toward their own comfort zones, toward the familiar, toward the yes in their lives.

Sometimes we need the no – because without it, we shrivel away.

…

Will it seek others – not unlike itself – to share, to devour, to enlarge? I would say yes. Does it need others? Yes. A voice, to be a voice, must have an ear.

But, in the words of Ry Cooder … and all the shadows before him – “the very thing that gives you life kills you in the end”.

I am what I am...

I can’t speak for the rest of the world - won’t try - only my world.

The 2008 winner of the Sow’s Ear Chapbook contest is Maureen Seaton. I’m proud to be the one who selected her work – to be published in 2009. It’s an amazing collection by an amazing poet. The prize includes publication, author’s copies, and $1,000.

There’s a fee for the contest. Yes. But, I receive no money, nor do the other editors with SE. Every poet who submits a ms. to the contest, receives a year’s subscription to the magazine from the press and a copy of the winning chapbook.

Was there a high level of competition this year? Most certainly. Should some of the poets not have entered? That’s possibly true. But, I will tell you this, every writer who entered this year's contest will receive for the money they spent ... poetry: three issues of the magazine, Sow's Ear Poetry Review - a quarterly that for the last 20 years has published many, many poets ... the famous and the not so famous … and the winning chapbook. The contest helps provide stability and existence to a magazine that continues to be a strong venue for writers.

There are many book and chapbook presses that are independent, passionate, and fair - presses that offer similar services and opportunities without taking advantage of writers. I also realize that there are presses, editors, and writers who will and do take advantage... I can only tell you that I’m not one of them - nor is Sow’s Ear Press.

I realize that mine is not the majority view here, but I needed to say it.

I also edit Blue Fifth Review - no fees, no contests.

if the shoe fits I should wear it...

So, what I’m lacking with my own poetry is concentration. The world, the voices, the noise – are too distracting. Makes the work superficial, uneventful, too pointed in a direction.

Silence is so important for the mind, for the being, for art.

I have to move in a different direction from the voices, from today. I don’t want to write something for today. That’s too limiting and limited.

Relevance, identification, importance, even readers … are all yokes. If those are the reasons I write – if that’s what moves me – nothing I say or write will have any real truth, and won’t be the poem that should be. It will be art – oh yes … weak, watered down, superficial – but it will only be an imitation of something that could have been, should have been real, vital, certain.

For the most part – though certainly there are exceptions – the poetry I read in magazines and collections are imitations of the poem … lines impersonating a work – some, in quite gifted fashion – but, nonetheless, imitations. Not the real thing. Maybe that’s the comfort – I’m not alone in this. But I feel alone in the poetry… therefore I am.

Maybe I write too much. I know I think too much … It gets in the way too.

What if I only wrote, in my lifetime, one good and solid poem – What then? That would be something. Then I would be a poet. But, I haven’t. Still waiting.

into a state of change...

I’m thinking about the effects of poetry and prose.

For me, prose – in terms of fiction or even non-fiction, for that matter – is about words connecting moments to moments in creating a sense of story. The happenings of the story, if the writing is effective, are detailed and real. When I’m reading a work of fiction, for example, I become a spirit-character in the setting. I move in the landscape, but I’m separate from it – another plane, another dimension. I see, hear, feel. The setting may be in my head, but it’s not in me. When I read drama – no matter the form, type, or style – I view the landscape and the events, but I’m not in them. The characters in a dramatic work, no doubt because of voice and speech – both on the stage and page – are close at hand, but I’m outside looking in. The pleasure is there, all the same.

On the other hand, poetry – in any of its many incarnations – is more about moving me into the moments of the words or, more probably, moving the moments into me. I’m not separate. I’m inside the words / the words are inside me. Poetry forces me into some mode of action, and that action may translate itself into thought, motion, dream, music, writing, speech, faith… That’s not to say – since I’m no fool – that prose would not or could not move another person to action.

One can talk about an idea or even write about the idea. And, if the telling or the writing is strong, I can be moved. But show me that idea in a poem, and I go beyond being moved – into a state of change.

Certainly, poems may possess prose-like characteristics. “A Story about the Body” by Robert Hass and “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché are both prose poems and do exhibit a narrative in story-like detail, but these works are overwhelmingly poetic, based on the writers’ use of imagery, language, literary devices – just to name three. Many prose passages or entire novels may display a strong poetic atmosphere, yet maintain their fictional structure. Works such as Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson and “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver come to mind.

It appears to me that a difference is that with prose, I penetrate the words … with poetry, the words penetrate me. What I’m not certain of is … Does that have more to do with me than with poetry or prose? I’m of the mind that many – probably most … if units sold mean anything – feel or experience quite the opposite.

someone to read it...

Mary Ruefle

A Certain Swirl


          The classroom was dark, all the desks were empty,
and the sentence on the board was frightened to
find itself alone. The sentence wanted someone to
read it, the sentence thought it was a fine sentence, a
noble, thorough sentence, perhaps a sentence of
some importance, made of chalk dust, yes, but a sen-
tence that contained within itself a certain swirl not
unlike the nebulous heart of the unknown universe,
but if no one read it, how could it be sure? Perhaps it
was a dull sentence and that was why everyone had
left the room and turned out the lights. Night came,
and the moon with it. The sentence sat on the board
and shone. It was beautiful to look at, but no one
read it.

         - from Verse Daily

*

A poem about desire. Again, if Nietzsche is correct, the wanting is much more powerful than the receiving. But ... the desire is nonetheless present, active, irrefutable.

We write ... to say something? Surely. We write ... to be heard? – I’m not so convinced of that reasoning as ideal. We do write for understanding – even it purely for the self.

The closing to Ruefle’s poem connects with me. What is written on the board is not important. The fact that the room is empty, the moon is shining, yet the sentence remains, solitary and unread, is everything.

whoever reaches the ideal...

– from “Epigrams and Interludes,” Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

65
      The attraction of knowledge would be small if one did not have to overcome so much shame on the way.

69
      One has watched life badly if one has not also seen the hand that considerately— kills.

92
      Who has not, for the sake of his good reputation—sacrificed himself once?—

99
      The voice of disappointment: ‘I listened for an echo and heard nothing but praise—’

106
      In music the passions enjoy themselves.

132
      One is best punished for one’s virtues.

146
      Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

161
      Poets treat their experiences shamelessly: they exploit them.

175
      In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.

                  (Trans. Walter Kaufmann)

dust and ashes...

I woke up this morning – after a really bad dream about poets, of all things – and had these three questions zipping through my head:

Do poets publish too often?

Why do poets publish?

Why do poets write?


… Then, after one cup, I went to Jilly Dybka’s Poetry Hut Blog and read this marvelous article:

It doesn’t matter what you think about your work. This is one of the weirdest lessons a writer has to learn, that the emotions that push you to write better, with greater accuracy, truth, verve, wit; the despair that makes you cast your eyes to the ceiling and then plunge back to the keyboard; the running pleasure of one good word being followed by a better; the glee as you set a time bomb ticking in the text; the glorious megalomania with which you set out to describe and yes! conquer! the! world! ... are all completely redundant once the piece is finished.
. . . .

          – Anne Enright, from “Final Thougths,” The Guardian,
         5 July 2008

This is the moment when lines that span the universe cross each other. All things connecting. All things making perfect sense.

It is, of course, important to note that every stage of a writer’s life is layered with certain emotional colors. That is such a wonderful thought.

In my 20’s, my colors were metallic reds and blues with splats of yellow all throughout. But, they weren’t my reds and blues (maybe the yellows were mine – I can’t be certain)… They were someone else’s. I only thought they were mine.

These days, years later, it’s burgundy … deep & rich & satin. It’s not perfect – not even close – but it’s mine.

not getting in the way...

I have thoughts that tell me what a poem should be, how it should look on the page, how the words should sound, that tell me there’s an audience (that’s the big myth, the dangerous myth) – but that’s probably when I’m thinking too much of myself, giving myself more credit than I should. That’s me getting in the way.

When I have no thought about the poem, no idea, no plan – then I’m surprised by the words and form that . And then I think yes – that’s the way it should be.

I get in the way too much. I want this. It should be this way. I know what I’m doing. The good poet doesn’t write. The good poet listens. Here, I make no personal claim of success or consistency. Most of the time I fail miserably. Or at least compared to what’s in my head.

What about all this writing in journals or notebooks? Do I give that up? Of course not. What I write there – and it should be a great deal – are the ingredients … dicing the tomatoes … turning on the oven … finding my baking pan … roasting the garlic and green onion … recognizing all the smells of the kitchen. They come.

in the nothing...

My own poetry is dead – or at least is dying a slow, meandering death. There are flashes of something I once thought I might try to say, or believe I could say, but the ink never quite finds the page the way I think it should. So, the rest is silence.

And what I cannot say, I say very well – in leaving it alone. In forgetting to remember. In the nothing that will have its way.

Gregory Orr says it as it was always meant to be said.

*

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Gregory Orr

Two Poems About Nothing

          “I’ll write a song about nothing at all . . .”
               —Guillaume IX of Aquataine (1071–1127)


When I was young
I fell in love
with nothing.
Nothing had
my heart.
I was a moody
unpleasant youth;
even my mother
disliked me.
What are you
brooding about?
she’d ask.

                    Nothing
I’d answer.
For once, she
approved.
You’re good
for nothing,
she said, and
nothing is good
enough for you.

*

When I was a child
nothing was everywhere.
It lay thick on leaves
and gathered in pools
under cedar trees.
Nothing filled
our barns
and grazed our pastures.
Nothing was so abundant
we never thought
to praise or prize it.
Those days are gone
forever. Now nothing
is scarce
and we lack for nothing.

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.

*

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.

finding your own wilderness...

The only real language is one that is stripped of agenda. To write a truth – in poetry, for example – a poet must give up any sense of audience. The poem will find its own audience – no mistake about that. Poetry is its own purpose, and shouldn’t be forced into this or that track. That would limit or maybe even destroy whatever force was present at the first moment. It makes its own path.