Monthly Archives: February 2017

8 posts

Stupid Questions

poetry

mic

In the education world, the saying goes, there are no stupid questions. But in the big-boy world, the expression has deep roots. One place where it is most prevalent is sports, where breathless victors, still caught up in the power and the glory of their heart-stopping wins, often find a mic thrust into their faces with the question (from a supposedly college-educated sports journalist), “How do you feel right now?”

Stupid question. And I long to hear the athlete who replies, “Horrible. This is the worst feeling I’ve ever endured. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to the locker room for a good cry.”

But no.

In the writing world we have stupid questions, too. How often are established writers drilled with stock questions begging stock answers? Too often. Here are a few of them, along with answers we might appreciate, if only the interviewed grew weary enough to wax playful:

Q: Where do your ideas come from?

A: Aisle 7, bottom shelf, Wal-Mart automotive department. They’re made in China, my ideas.

Q: What inspires you?

A: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream as hors d’oeuvres, salad, main course, and, if need be dessert. On a Friday night when all weekend’s breaking loose.

Q: Where do you write?

A: Where I’m sitting at any given moment. Often a chair. Cliché, I realize. Do you need the brand and model, in case you want to add inspiration to cart?

Q: Who do you read?

A: Poets. To steal ideas.

Q: But who are the great poets?

A: Your list is as good as mine. Pay no attention to those poets behind the curtain. Words to live by.

Q: What do you recommend to someone just getting into the poetry-writing business?

A: Turn back, oh man. No. Really. I recommend that you do not read any poets, classical or contemporary, and, whatever you do, don’t write every day. Or what you know. Or to show vs. tell. Poison to writers, all of it.

Q: Do you make a living as a published poet?

A: My God. Like Scott and Zelda before the crash. Have you never seen drunk poets dancing in public fountains? They’re in damn near every city in Europe. Also Des Moines.

Q: Do you believe in MFAs?

A: Would they disappear if I didn’t? Me, I am letterless, as was the case in high school, where the quarterback got all the girls.

Q: Is poetry dead?

A: Why do you think zombies are so popular now? Read Poetry and Rattle, why don’t you.

Q: If I had to subscribe to one poetry magazine, which one would it be?

A: The American Conservative. For erasure poetry.

Q: Is there any question I didn’t ask that I should have?

A: Don’t mock me. And thank you.

Brian Doyle: Pro at Prose Poetry

poetry

mink-river

Note: It is with sadness that I report that a few short months after I wrote this post, Brian Doyle passed away from a brain tumor. To lose a writer of his talent is a loss for all of us.

I first discovered Brian Doyle when I read his imaginative novel of the sea, The Plover, a few years back. The good ship Plover makes a cameo in Doyle’s earlier book, Mink River, which I just finished reading yesterday,

Doyle is a prose writer with poetic blood coursing through his veins. You need only look at his inspirations to learn why. In the back of Mink River, Doyle includes among his “lodestars, compass points, emotional touchstones” while writing the book these stalwarts: The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake and The King James Bible. He also tips his hat to that poetic essayist Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being.

Blake and the KJV especially are quoted early and often in this book. The crow is partial to the Psalms. The doctor likes Ecclesiastes. And Blake words just jump willy-nilly, followed by the one-word nod, “Blake.”

Among the poet’s bag of tricks, anaphora and polysyndeton and alliteration are three favorites. Doyle’s disciplined rambling brings a small Oregon town to life slowly but surely. In episodic chunks, we meet a cast of characters, Winesburg, Ohio-like, including a speaking (and thinking) crow named Moses. The book walks the line between real and surreal at times, but a gentle approach to surrealism always seems to carry it across the suspension bridge of disbelief. And before you know it, gentle reader, you have favorite quirky characters. Or quixotic ones, maybe. All cued up.

So what does this poetic prose look like? Let me copy a bit from the text as an example of Doyle’s delights. If you like it, perhaps a whitewater raft trip down the Mink is in your future. Or a trip at sea on the Plover, if you prefer.

And even if not, it’s fun to watch a writer having fun, luxuriating in words, turning in them and breathing them like oxygen for the creative lungs. Here, then, is a dash of Doyle:

“New trout, having never seen rain on the river, rise eagerly to ripples on the Mink. Some windows close against the moist and some open for the music. Rain slips and slides along hawsers and chains and ropes and cables and gladdens the cells of mosses and weighs down the wings of moths. It maketh the willow shiver its fingers and thrums on doors of dens in the fens. It falls on hats and cats and trucks and ducks and cars and bars and clover and plover. It grayeth the sand on the beach and fills thousands of flowers to the brim. It thrills worms and depresses damselflies. Slides down every window rilling and murmuring. Wakes the ancient mud and mutter of the swamp, which has been cracked and hard for months. Falls gently on leeks and creeks and bills and rills and the last shriveled blackberries like tiny dried purple brains on the bristles of bushes. On the young bear trundling through a copse of oaks in the woods snorffling up acorns. On ferns and fawns, cubs and kits, sheds and redds. On salmon as long as your arm thrashing and roiling in the river. On roof and hoof, doe and hoe, fox and fence, duck and muck. On a slight man in a yellow slicker crouched by the river with his recording equipment all covered against the rain with plastic wrap from the grocery store and after he figures out how to get the plastic from making crinkling sounds when he turns the machine on he settles himself in a little bed of ferns and says to the crow huddled patiently in rain, okay, now, here we go, Oral History Project, what the rain says to the river as the wet season opens, project number …something or other … where’s the fecking start button? …I can’t see anything … can you see a green light? yes? is it on? damn my eyes … okay! there it is! it’s working! rain and the river! here we go!”

I’ll miss the book and the next one will suffer a bit by comparison. Is there any higher compliment you can pay an author?

Ten Honest Rejections

poetry writing

reject

Your poem has been rejected. Again. But don’t you wish the rejections were a bit more truthful? After all, we live in an age where “truth” is under siege. It needs all the help it can get. And boiler-plate rejections are just so impersonally vanilla. Let’s try a little chocolate pizzazz, shall we, because if we’re going to get rejected, we might as well enjoy it a little, no?

Dear Writer: Thank you for your recent (as of 14 months ago) submission. We really didn’t read it because, well, we’re pretty elite as poetry journals go (and they go), and we receive upwards to 500 submissions a day, most of them as awful as yours. Thanks for the $5 reading fee, though! Yours, Kevin Ka-Ching, Editor-in-Chief.
Dear Writer: Thank you for your most recent query about the considered-long-lost submission that must have fallen behind our inbox 18 months ago. We have found it and brushed off any e-dust bunnies as a gesture of respect. Please accept our sincere apologies for the length of response time for this rejection. We trust, being a poet, that you understand.
Dear Writer: We started reading the first of five poems you submitted and, eight words in, knew you didn’t know the first of five things about writing poetry. We’re good, no? (Your eight words, on the other hand, aren’t.)
Dear Writer: Do you really count yourself a poet? Does your house really lack a mirror? Perhaps it’s time you looked honesty in the face. Or at the very least, started bothering the short story market’s editors. End of story.
Dear Writer: Thanks for the laugh. Really.
Dear Writer: Thank you for your Poety Zine submission but, to be honest, these are not Poetry Zine kind of poems. We like politically-slanted work, especially ones that rail against the New Fascism taking over the world like unfree verse. In a similar vein, we like pop culture poetry–works that mention things readers care about like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, selfies, texting, and uploaded photographs of food. Your poem about snow and birches and crows (of all things!) was lost on us.
Dear Writer: We opened your submission only to find that you are not a known writer whose name would lend credence and panache to our journal’s cover. How disappointing. Try us again. When (and if) you have a name, we mean.
Dear Writer: Your first poem contained the words darkness, lovely, very, cerulean, shards, and dog. News flash: No, no, no, no, no, and no poem can succeed once it’s swallowed these words.
Dear Writer: Do you know the first thing (or, should I say, the last thing) about line breaks? What are you, winging it here? Is not poetry a science? An art? Are you willing to put in the time before you waste ours? We are all volunteers here, short on time and money and, like most poetry ventures, about to disappear into Internet vapor at any moment. Be kind and do your homework. Please.
<a moment of silence / OK, more than a moment / utter darkness / very lovely darkness / cerulean-shards-inside-a dog-darkness>

The “Sullen Art” of Writing Poetry

poetry writing writing inspiration

dwarfs

Sure, some writers love to spout off about inspiration, about their passion for writing, about the way their precious ideas bloop out as finished products, ninth month in the first week and Hail Caesarean!

Then you have the honest writers. The ones who write quality poems, but acknowledge it as work that seems to take this side of forever. Writer as the eighth dwarf, call it, whistling as he heads off to the mines for another day’s work. Poem as dirt and sweat, then. As collar so stained you can no longer see the blue.

One poet who described writing this way was that brief star from Wales, Dylan Thomas. I say brief because his life was cut short by the black hole called alcohol (also known as “America’s drug of choice”).

In the end, Thomas writes, his work is for the lovers “Who pay no praise or wages / Nor heed my craft or art.” Now those are words a writer can identify with, as writing, even when published, seems the province of a vacuum, of a god named Hoover or Dirt Devil.

Here is Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art.” Does it look, like so many good poems do, spontaneous and born of sea or briny foam (or, God save us, of Adam’s rib)–miraculously? Or can you picture the messy process, the ink stains and half-past-midnight oil, start to finish?

I know a poet who claims he sends no poem to markets until he’s revised it for at least a year. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But if it’s true, it’s wise. Wiser than any golden potato chip.

“In My Craft or Sullen Art” by Dylan Thomas

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

revision process

Sure Things: Food and Loneliness

poetry writing writing inspiration

rice

What to write about?

Seems like an easy enough question. Some say your topics should be determined solely by the dictator that is you. Others say have mercy on your readers’ souls. Consider them. Others still–the agnostic wafflers of the bunch–say, “Why not both?”

I’ll be political and not take a stand because who really cares what I think? I do know this: You’re in trouble if you think you can write about something you know nothing about or don’t care about.

Which brings us to two sure things: food and loneliness. Like air and water, they will keep you grounded.

How do we know food resonates? Easy. People eat it up. And people with cellphones (there are a few, apparently) actually photograph and upload the stuff before eating it. Curious case closed!

And loneliness? True, most confuse loneliness with being alone, two different animals. Unlike many in this world, I cherish alone time. It sustains me. And my writing. But I know the world also harbors manic social sorts. They get frenzied by lack of sound, technological input, people. They believe they are unpopular, neglected, or sad if not buoyed by activity and input. (How sad!) Can you go wrong, then, when writing about the poignancy and beauty of alone-ness? Rhetorical, I assure you.

My thoughts turned to these two staples of writing after I read Li-Young Lee’s poem “Eating Alone,” which nicely breathes and drinks the two poem-sustaining wonders in one fell swoop. And check out the last line! It speaks to the ages (if you’ll pardon the pun). See if you agree:

“Eating Alone” by Li-Young Lee

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can’t recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.

— from Rose by Li-Young Lee, BOA Editions

My Book Finds Precious Real Estate

poetry The Indifferent World

So your book is listed on amazon. Ho-hum. The same is true for 4,609,398,623,211 other books. Where the rubber really hits the road is when your book sits on a bookstore shelf. We’re talking prime real estate, many dots beyond com, between Barnes and his distinguished brother, Noble, say, or between some Mom and some Pop in an independent bookstore, maybe.

Such was my treat Wednesday night when I ran into the University of Connecticut’s Barnes & Noble bookstore before taking in the basketball game at Gampel Pavilion. There it was, into the blue and on the poetry section shelves, standing between Billy Collins (nice to meet you, William) and Rita Dove (peace out, sister)–The Indifferent World, looking anything but indifferent with its gaudy red “Local Author” sticker.

I had one-quarter a mind to autograph it on the spot, but no. Probably out of line without management’s blessing. So I just said hello, because you know what? This particular copy of the now-familiar book looked different. A prince among the paupers waiting to be adopted at amazon. An august leader among the plebes sitting in my to-be-signed-at-readings bag at home.

Despite the watery cover, it had definite airs. And why not? I say. Seize the moment, kid. Carpe your diem while the sun shines, because the sun also sets, as Hemingway almost told us.

In parting, I whispered these words to it: “I hope you find a good home–but maybe not just yet. Maybe after a few weeks, enjoying the view.”

When Poems Drink Too Much Language

poetry

too much

Dial 911. I think my poem’s on something.

I thought the house smelled a little odd this morning. A bit more organic than usual. My first thought was the dog, who always looks guilty, but no.

Turns out, it’s that poem I wrote yesterday.

My fault, in a roundabout way. I left some “language” poetry lying around the house. Ron Silliman, Gertrude Stein. Rae Armantrout (oh, forgive me… rae armantrout). Typically it’s under lock and key.

What was I thinking, you ask? I wasn’t. I was just writing, having a little fun. And my poem, it started watching The Young and the Reckless on TV. Like any adolescent, its brain hasn’t fully developed. Ask and it will have no raison, no d’être.

Last night, on the counter, I’d also left open an old New Yorker to a Dan Chiasson review of Mai Der Vang’s debut poetry collection, Afterland. Dan quotes a Mai poem (“Mother of People Without Script”) with impunity, with little regard for rhyme, reason, or innocent bystanders (read: impressionable poems-in-progress):

Paj is not pam is not pan.
Blossom is not blanket is not help.

Ntug is not ntuj is not ntub.
Edge is not sky is not wet.

On sheet of bamboo
with indigo branch.

To txiav is not the txias.
To scissor is not the cold.

To scissor is not the cold? What could it mean? To scissor is the hot, maybe? My poem didn’t care. It clearly swooned at the whole idea of inhaling language like this.

As is typical of the young, my first draft rationalized: “What does it matter if my words carry no meaning and every meaning at the same time? That’s for the reader to climb through. The reader comes, interacts, and makes meaning from words, beautiful words. I just provide, in my lettered bounty.”

I even found a few glossy M.F.A. brochures lying around. Lord.

Once I challenged it, my poem started getting uppity. It grew loud with its opinions, heady with its possibilities. “You only need imagination,” it said in its post-, post-, post-modern voice. “Mine is to stir the embers of your imagination. From there, the fire is yours.”

Then it passed out.

Eventually, I had to ask myself: Did I really write this? Can wordplay be taken this seriously? Are there still “language editors” out there, even “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” ones, ready to click ACCEPT so many years after the heyday of avants being off their gardes?

And why me, anyway? Rehab is expensive stuff, and detoxing poems is neither easy nor cheap. You know and I know that health care is fraught these days. Kind of like poetry sales. And poetry marketing. And yes, the raising and writing of poetry into good, rule-abiding citizens.

Pray for me, friends, and do not judge me. Better yet, pray for my poem, and do not judge it, either. It’s on an IV now, getting 50 cc’s of meaning per hour.

You’ll see. A little revision. A few dactyls here, a few trochees there. It will be on its metrical feet in no time.

Meanwhile, I thank all of you for your expressions of sympathy. See you in the hospital gift shop…

Excuses in the Winter of Our Discontent

poetry

richard-iii

Not writing? Heck. Not marketing writing, either.

What is it about this winter of our discontent? And how did Steinbeck (via Shakespeare’s play, Richard III) know that it’s tough to write when you’re constantly sick, both physically and mentally?

If you work in a Petri dish or go to grocery stores where people cough all over apples, pears, and kiwi, you know something about winter and coughs and sneezes and sinus congestion and stomach bugs and strep viruses and bronchitis and locusts. Biblical in scale, all these bacterial and viral agents! And creativity doesn’t flourish in the same rotten conditions as such germs.

Then there’s the sickness from day-to-day news. All new authoritarian-style leaders popping up around the world, each using methods (chiefly the Internet) their 1930s forefathers had never heard of. The slow death of ideals of the Enlightenment–the very ideals that gave birth to The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution–buffets the soul and, with it, 8 of the 9 muses at least.

But is it any excuse? Is it any reason to say, “I just don’t have it in me to write. I can’t think of anything under these conditions. I don’t even feel like submitting work, much less writing it”?

Of course not. These lame dodges are found at an Excuses R Us near you.

Yes, you could write about the sickness itself, physical or moral, but I find that makes me sicker still. The proper tack then, is to take a page (say, 241) from escapist fiction’s book. Many people read just to get away from it all. Perhaps it’s time to write for that reason as well.

I know, I know. Our compatriots at the ramparts will accuse us of indifference, the very thing authoritarians depend upon. Well, Jekyll your Hyde, then. One by day, the other by night.

“Multi-tasking” hasn’t become a buzzword for nothing.