Monthly Archives: April 2017

10 posts

Fake Muses: Drugs, Alcohol, & Insomnia

poetry writing

hungover

I can’t tell you how many people associate artistic genius with substance abuse. History, they say, proves their point. Romantic poets (e.g. Coleridge) on opium. Not-so-romantic poets (e.g. Bukowski) on booze. And writers of all stripes (e.g. Poe) on most everything, some of which land you in a Baltimore gutter for good (“Nevermore…”.)

For some reason, when it comes to writing, insomnia gets the same benefit of the doubt as heavy drinking and other alternate states (e.g. New Jersey). Surely the insomniacs who can’t sleep must be writing a lot. Good writing, too. Ethereal writing, On-fumes writing. Almost-out-of-gas writing.

Yes and no. Being up in the thin hours of the night may open up a whole new savannah of time for writing, but under what conditions? Each night I fall asleep with ease. My insomnia profile is of the mid-night wake-up variety. Thus, after, say, four or five hours of sleep, I wake up and my body thinks it’s refreshed and ready to go. Lying in bed to beg more hours of shut-eye does no good. Counting sheep does no good. Even counting iambic beats to Shakespearean sonnets does no good.

So I get up, often writing to pass the hours. It may increase production, but the quality is suspect. Around two hours after fleeing the bed, my energy begins to sap like maple syrup in March. Drip, drip… drip. Suddenly I crave sleep again. Trouble is, it’s time to go to work. And that can make for a long day.

Drinkers (of which I am not one) know that alcohol giveth and alcohol taketh away. You get your buzz and own the world (well, rent it for an hour, maybe), and then it comes back to collect. Too much alcohol messes up sleep, makes a Benedict Arnold of your stomach, fords a D-Day in your head. Have fun writing under those conditions.

So don’t romanticize or misrepresent the role of substance or sleep abuse in the name of creativity. Like the Wizard of Oz, it’s more smoke and mirrors than reality. Paying attention to that man behind the curtain, you realize that the best writing occurs when you treat your body like a temple. A well-rested temple.

My Book Cover, My Self

poetry

cormac

Book covers should be the most enjoyable part of the process for an author whose manuscript is on its way to publication. Should be. I say this because most of us don’t have access to Chip Kidd., designer of Cormac McCarthy book covers among hundreds of others.

“Chip!” I want to say. “Over here! Chip in, why don’t you? My book-soon-to-be needs a cool cover, and while I have a million equally cool ideas, I don’t have the know-how. The resources. The cachet and style. That’s where you come in, Chip. Chip? Chip? Are you there…?”

A few years ago, in an effort to improve my classroom library’s nonfiction shelf (anemic at the time), I bought Kidd’s YA book, Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design. It’s a neat trick, actually, learning something that should be simple, but isn’t, by purchasing a young adult primer on the matter. Chip spells it out, and I nod my head.

Thus it is that I picked up ideas on form, typography, content, and concept. I learned that I prefer horizontal tricks to vertical, dark covers to light, image cropping to repetition and patterns, simplicity to complexity, and cool colors to warm.

Does that say as much about me as Myers and Briggs? My Book Cover, My Self. Sounds like a sound personality test, in its way.

It’s true, after all, that we are suckers for beautiful covers–books we like to be seen carrying around. It’s also true that we are loath to carry around an ugly book. So much for “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” We can and we will and we do. It’s a free country, after all, so there.

Bottom line: As the due date for final decisions approaches, we want our book covers to be cool more than anything in the world. A cover people will be proud to tote about, even if they don’t read it (this is poetry, after all, and only fellow poets read poetry, and not many of them can afford poetry books).

Lucky for me, I have time yet. A few months to play with the possibilities. For now, all I can tell you is that it will be a dark horizontal simply cropped cover in cool colors.

What could be YA-simpler?

Poetry in an Age of Anxiety

poetry

nuke

Yesterday, while reading the Sunday New York Times, I came across this article called “America’s New ‘Anxiety’ Disorder”, which alluded to the title of W.H. Auden’s poem, “The Age of Anxiety,” in its first paragraph. Terrorism, the threat of nuclear war, the rise of authoritarian governments and nationalism–these do, indeed, make for a potent brew of angst in today’s world.

It reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s poem, “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers,” wherein she implies that reading and knowledge alone are enough to make one complicit. It goes like so:

It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers – Margaret Atwood

While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpsesand as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

Maybe there’s a bit of “it’s always me” to that poem, our inbred inclination to take on guilt. Or maybe it’s just the frustration that freezes us–the way our helplessness against the world’s ongoing narrative turns us into acquiescent bystanders who rationalize our inability to be agencies of change.

In times like this, you turn to Charles Simic, a man who knows something about war-torn states and growing up in an age of anxiety. In his childhood, anxiety meant bombs raining down on his hometown of Belgrade. It meant flight, chance, the sheer luck of survival. Because of that upbringing during WWII, the darker side of mankind would become an undertone in many of his works.

In the poem “Those Who Clean After,” for instance, one wonders if reading a poem can be as unsettling as reading any newspaper, which brings to the fore the question of whether “dangerous” is good for us or not. See what I mean here:

Those Who Clean After (for Robert Bly)-Charles Simic

Evil things are being done in our name.

Someone scrubs the blood,

As we look away,

Getting the cell ready for another day.

I can’t make out their faces,

Only bucket and mops

Being carried down stone steps

Into the dark basement.

How quietly they hose the floor,

Unfurl the musty old rags

To wipe the hooks on the ceiling.

I hear only the sounds of summer night,

The leaves worried as always

By that nameless something

Which may be lurking out there

Where we used to keep the chickens.

My Rejection Note, Their Marketing Tool

poetry

Writers attract rejection via the inbox like electricity draws dust via static cling. It’s just part of the game. Sometimes, though, Emperor Nero publications add thumbs-down insult to injury, salt to wound, in- to dignity, when they use rejections as marketing opportunities. You know. Something like this:

Dear Writer:

Thanks for submitting your work to Poems R Us, where the acceptance rate is 1.487 %. After careful (of a sort..) consideration, we have decided that your poems are not the right fit for us — a size 13 extra-wide trying to wedge into a size 8 narrow, to be exact — but wish you the best of luck in finding this a home elsewhere (read: a publication nowhere near as prestigious and cutting-edge as ours).

If you haven’t already, you might consider giving Poems R Us‘s current issue a look HERE. Our archives of great poetry written by great poets can be found HERE. Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter HERE and HERE. Share the link to our website with your friends, virtual, real, and make-believe. Remember, we are home to the very best poetry appearing both in print and on the Internet.

Best,

Peter L’Editor
Poems R Us (But Not U)

Later, you begin to receive e-mails at the rate of two a week from this same periodical trumpeting this issue, that contest, these “insider” writers. Eventually, due to excessive swelling of the inbox, you’re forced to click UNSUBSCRIBE and wonder if invitations to submit are more likely invitations to add to mailing lists, to reading-fee coffers, and to overall data fodder.

That said, you must remain an optimist of the first order. Looking at the bright side — it’s nice to feel wanted, even if it’s you and not your work. And it kind of makes you feel like part of the greater poetry community, no? Kind of.

Ah, well. In the words of the prophet: Keep believing, keep writing, and keep trusting that more doors will open if you do.

Joe Queenan Loves Books. Poets? Not So Much.

poetry

joe queenan

I just finished a round-trip to South Carolina, traveling my favorite way–on a train where I can read to the rumble of tracks in that glorious Amtrak invention known as the quiet car (all *$%& cellphones SILENCED, thank you). After wrapping up the complete Jack Gilbert poetry collection, I turned to a light read in the form of Joe Queenan’s One for the Books, wherein Joe throws elbows and opinions on all things bookish.

This book has more italics than Maine has mosquitoes. That’s because Queenan cites so many book titles, all italicized. And although it is a book lover’s bonanza, there are, alas, few if any poetry books mentioned. Like many bibliophiles, Queenan is happily addicted to reading and books. Just not reading poetry and poetry books. Quelle surprise!

In one amusing section, Queenan is grousing about speakers at libraries. Listen in:

“Library events scare me, as they provide refuge for local historians, fabulists, tellers of tall tales, historical reenactors, and even dream weavers. Not to mention the single most feared creature on the planet: the self-published poet.”

Sorry, team. I laughed. I’m sure traditionally-published poets like me aren’t many levels above the woeful self-published ones in JQ’s eyes, but ha-ha and que sera, sera! If you can’t laugh at yourself, you can’t laugh, non?

Queenan loathes book clubs, too. When friends asked him to join one, JQ writes, “I left town for about six weeks, disconnected my phone, stopped answering e-mails, and told people that I had a weird retinal pigmentation disease that made it impossible for me to read books. Especially books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”

From there, Queenan goes on to belittle those ubiquitous “Questions for Discussion” found at the end of many books these days. It is the editors’ and publishers’ hope that you, gentle readers, will select their book as the next “book club selection of the month” so that everyone will buy a copy. These questions just make life that much easier for you.

With one book out and one on the way (if December can be considered “on the way”), I wondered why I didn’t think of this ruse before. So easy! Perhaps the second edition of my debut effort can include an amendment for Book Clubs in the back? It might look something like so:

The Indifferent World

In the poem, “Barnstorming the Universe,” Craft discusses a space-traveling barn that crashes in the middle of a Maine field, mid-July. Do you believe barn landings should have a central location like Cape Canaveral, or is the meteor-like randomness of their crashes half the fun? Discuss.
“Astapova Station” describes Leo Tolstoy’s final flight from death, which ended at a train station with wife Sofya (and a “Honey, do” list) hot in pursuit. How important is Czarist Russia’s lousy train service to this poem’s denouement? Who do you sympathize with more–Team Leo or Team Sofya?
This book includes two poems about a large-animal veterinarian in Vermont treating a horse in “Tonsillectomy” and a cow in “Young Brain in the Dairy Barn.” Are bloody operations in a barn appropriate material for poetry? Would Li-Po approve? What about the Lake Poets?

Yes. Discussion Questions for Poetry-Reading Book Clubs. The sort of thing that might move poetry book sales from double digits to, say, a mighty three. (Not many books of poetry challenge the mighty comma, which is only forced into action once your sales cross No Poet’s Land, a. k. a. terrain over 1,000).

In any event, I am an omnivorous reader (maybe more so than Joe), so despite the dearth of poetry collection titles, many fiction and non-fiction recommendations were garnered while reading this book. Also many rereads (Queenan calls Dubliners the single best collection of short stories ever, for instance, so I said to myself on the train, “Hmn. Long time no Dubliners. Time to move it up on the the list. Done!”)

Overall, a few laughs and a lot of book titles added to the borrow-or-buy list. Not bad, eh? Now I just need to find a paperback called One for the Poetry Books. One that sniffs its nose at fiction and talks all poetry all the time.

Fox & Hedgehog Poets vs. Krebs & Snopes Ones

poetry

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” or so Archilochos told us when we were young in the 7th century. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out whether I’m a fox poet or a hedgehog poet.

Renaissance men, they were a foxy lot, knowing many things from many different disciplines. It was their point of pride, to the point of competition even. The poster boy? Leonardo da Vinci, of course. Foxier than Reynard the Fox. Or Foxy Loxy. Or any other foxes traipsing around Aesop’s fables instead of being productive.

Me, I lean hedgehog, though I can’t for the life of me identify the “one big thing” I know. Isn’t that what life is all about? Trying to figure out the one big thing? And isn’t that the itch that causes us to scratch out so many poems? Searching for the big thing, in that respect, becomes the Muse’s key of Middle C.

In his book, The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo dispenses with foxes and hedgehogs and buys stock in another split: fictional characters. He distinguishes between Ernest Hemingway’s protagonist Krebs from the story “Soldier’s Home” and William Faulkner’s young protagonist Snopes from the story “Barn Burning.” According to Hugo, we are either Krebs poets or Snopes poets.

Hugo describes Krebs as a man who is, “by birth and circumstance” an insider. His experience in the war and his sensitivity cause him to feel “alienated and outside.” Little Snopes, on the other hand is “by birth and circumstance… an outsider who wants desperately to be in. He wants to be a part of what, from his disadvantageous position, seems a desirable life.”

Taking his metaphor on the road and applying it to American poets, Hugo writes: “Not from birth and circumstance, but by virtue of how they feel about themselves and their relation with the world, as revealed in their poems, many American poets see themselves as (or really are) Krebs or Snopes.”

Hugo’s scorecard looks like so: The Krebs poets are William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Richard Wilbur, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, and Allen Ginsberg. The Snopes poets are T. S. Eliot, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, William Stafford, Louise Bogan, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and A. R. Ammons.

“For a Krebs poet success means accepting values he knows are phony. For a Snopes poet, success could mean he has cast aside all people (including himself) he believes are doomed to failure and whom he continues to love. In both cases the result could be self-hatred and creative impotency.”

Hugo himself seems drawn to the Snopes crowd. I’ve no idea if the Snopes poets traffic in foxes or hedgehogs, and I’m not even sure I fully grasp what he’s after here, but it seems sure that the two characters arrive at the creative springs via different paths.

And what would the modern equivalent be? The MFA insider crowd, laureled by academia (scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) vs. the feral poets, reading and writing each day without so much as a sideways glance at universities, residencies, seminars, and workshops? Would the former be the fox/Krebs tribe while the latter is the hedgehog/Snopes one? And where would you fit in, if the poetry world were split in such easy dichotomies?

A head scratcher, I admit. Especially if you feel so mixed up as to identify as a hedgehog/Krebs or a fox/Snopes. Then what?

Write, I guess. When you’re confused by anything, the answer is always “just write.”

A Leading Poem, Adrienne Rich in Irony

poetry poetry books

adrienne rich

I read somewhere that Adrienne Rich’s 1978 book, The Dream of a Common Language, has come to be considered a classic of poetry. This despite the rule (arbitrary, like all rules) that “classics” must steep for at least 50 years before anyone dare designate them canonical.

Curious, I took Rich’s book out of the library yesterday. It’s cloth binding and strong stitching speak to its age. This is not the type of book that falls apart like its modern-day brethren, where pages often leave the nest early, floating to the foreign ground and leaving behind non-sensical jumps in a soiled nest.

In the Billy Collins interview I posted comments about Saturday, Sir Collins stated that poetry books should always start with their strongest poems first, and if you don’t know which of your poems are strong, perhaps you shouldn’t be attempting publication.

Here, then, as a test of the best-foot-forward rule, is Rich’s lead-off batter. It is a poem called “Power” in an eponymous section, the first of three in the book.

Power

Living in the earth-depositis of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

Compact and powerful, no doubt. Distinctive, too, is Rich’s neglect (spare one colon) of punctuation and her use of spacing. At first I was confused about the spacing’s purpose. Was it to signify a pause, to emphasize, to replace punctuation gone on holiday (I picture commas and periods holding hands, sipping from drinks with tiny paper umbrellas coming out of them), all of the above?

As is true with Zbigniew Herbert, the missing punctuation certainly helps to slow readers down, a function often served by longer lines and sometimes achieved by a dearth of stanzas. And though this opener isn’t as personal as many of the poems that follow (I am still mid-read), it does set the stage for a theme important to Rich, a feminist.

“Power” also shows no small sense of irony–like radiation, an element of modern-day life to be reckoned with due to its undeniable power.

If Music Be the Food of Poetry, Play On!

poetry writing

arvo part

Rumor has it that Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is an acquired taste, like salmon, Brussels sprouts, and all those other things you steer clear of as a kid. Repetition. Tintinnabulation. Waves of mesmerizing music (much of it religious in nature) washing over you.

I love writing poetry to classical music, but none more than Pärt’s. Whether his minimalist style shows up in my writing, I don’t know. In some cases, a definitive maybe. Can music genes long-jump to writing ones? And what is the sound of one note writing, anyway?

Koan-like questions, but some say ours is not to ask why, it’s to accept when inspiration strikes (with help or without), which is why I steal a page from the Bard and say, If music be the food of poetry, play on. (Yes, I snuck “poetry” in for “love,” but, in the final analysis and after checking the nutritional facts, what’s the difference?) The preceding link is to all instrumental pieces by Pärt, but you can find plenty of choral works, too, such as this meditative collection or this old favorite.

If your Muse is not inspired, it may sneak away for an Estonian nap. And yes, dozing mid-poem can be refreshing, too. To coin the well-minted Shakespeare once more: “to sleep, perchance to dream the next line.”

For an example of a minimalist poem from The Indifferent World written under the influence of Pärt, here’s a poem that’s so simple and so given over to mood that it may seem like empty calories to some, but it’s all a matter of taste, of course. Strawberry shortcakes and hot fudge sundaes with whipped cream are empty calories, too. It doesn’t mean you always scowl and put your nose up when they’re offered.

“Sitting in the Dark” by Ken Craft

In the dark
before dawn,

in the kitchen
before the lake,

when the windows
are rain-runneled

and the room
is still shadow,

I like to sit
and stare at black

glass glaring back,
beady with reflection,

runny with rumination
and the slip of sadness.

Though I don’t think ole Arvo has read any of my poems, I think he would approve of that little guy. Nothing fancy. Simple words. And not the best poem I ever wrote, but it does mirror a contemplative mood–one created while writing to Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, as I recall.

How about you? Do you write to music? And does it sometimes infuse the blood of your poems-in-progress?

Poetry That Fits the (Bud)Bill

poetry

I posted this book review for my (five) readers at Goodreads and thought I’d share it with my (four) readers at the University of WordPress.

T’was only a week ago I read David Budbill’s Moment to Moment. I didn’t want the moment to end, so I inter-library loaned a few more, reading While We’ve Still Got Feet in two days.

It’s very similar to the first. Short poems. Simple style. Constant allusions to ancient Chinese (Han Shan, especially) and Japanese (Ryōkan, especially) poets. Bud almost acts like he’s a reincarnation of these guys, due to his heading out for the mountains (in this case, Judevine Mt. in Vermont’s Green Mtn. chain) for a life of seclusion. Um, with his wife. And plenty of visitors. With the occasional visit to New York City.

OK, so there’s a touch of Thoreau’s Walden to it in that respect. Ole Henry David’s shack on the pond was only a mile or so from home, and he could visit Mums and Dad any day of the week. But I digress. Back to the reincarnation thing. Here’s a poem that visits the theme:

Different Names, the Same Person

More than a thousand years ago when I lived in China,
my name was Han Shan. And there were more of me
before that.

And plenty after also. Two hundred years ago,
in Japan, I called myself Ryōkan.
All of us:

independent, hating literary artifice and arrogance,
yet neither misanthropic nor taciturn,
friendly and talkative rather, but

preferring to live alone, in solitude, removed
and in the wilderness, keeping to that kind
of emptiness.

We’ve always been around, in lots of different places,
in every age. It’s just, only some of us
get known.

There’s one of us, I’m sure,
in your neighborhood
right now.

For a touch of his naturalistic bent, there’s this:

Winter: Tonight: Sunset

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.

Very nice. As Mark Twain said of classics: “My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.” I feel this away about Budbill’s poetry. They hydrate the body poetic. No nonsense. And his poignant flair for lamenting old age and impending death hits a sweet spot, too. Who wants to give it up?

Finally, to hammer home the Chinese connection, Budbill writes poems where he references the “Emperor,” just as Han Shan and friends did so many years ago. Only in Bud’s case, the “Emperor” is the President (of the Disunited States of America), and the bad reputations of both are not far apart:

What We Need

The Emperor,
his bullies
and henchmen
terrorize the world
every day,

which is why
every day

we need

a little poem
of kindness,

a small song
of peace

a brief moment
of joy.

Hear, hear! I say. Time for more moments and more Budbill….

The Good (Poetry), the Bad (Poetry), and the Ugly (Poetry)

poetry writing

good bad ugly

What is “good” poetry? What is “bad” poetry? Will you always know it when you see it? Or are the answers to such questions automatically suspect due to the “you” in the latter question?

It’s a conundrum even Socrates would have trouble beating–we know good poetry when we see it, supposedly, but what happens to the ticker tape parade when Person B comes along and proclaims your “we hold this goodness to be self-evident” to be so much wishful thinking or, worse, garbage?

From the opposite tack, we often feel sure when we come across “bad” poetry. We scrunch our noses, shake our heads, perhaps abandon it halfway as if it were Joyce’s Ulysses. But what if this obviously bad poem appears on the lofty pages of Poetry magazine, say, or the loftier still pages of The New Yorker? Is it time to look in the mirror and start wondering about ourselves as judges?

I was left to contemplate such philosophical mysteries yesterday when I experienced a first. A poetry journal accepted one of my poems and, when I consulted my manuscript slated for publication around the new year to ensure it hadn’t undergone a title change (I hadn’t seen that title for awhile), I noticed the poem was no longer in the manuscript.

Data malfunction, you ask? Accidental deletion, maybe? Not quite. As I’ve been combing over the manuscript, tightening poems and, in a few cases, replacing “weaker” ones with new blood of a stronger strain, I’ve placed the cut poems if a file called “Pulled from Ms.”

It so happens that the accepted poem–one that I obviously decided was “bad” because multiple editors had given it the form e-mail boot, in so many words telling me it was bad–was lurking in this “out bin” with some other sheepish poems. Only now it looked less sheepish and more indignant.

“See?” it said. “You doubted me. You doubted yourself and decided I was bad. Ugly, even. Now what?”

I’ll tell you now what. I moved it back into the manuscript. Lines between the good, the bad, and the ugly had blurred dramatically. And all in the electronic flash of an acceptance.

What abstract point does this concrete experience make? Is it the old saw which states that we are the worst judges of our own works? And if so, how does that explain our negative reactions to other writers’ poems that find their ways into the most highfalutin’ of poetry journals and magazine glossies?

We’re told to judge not, but we can’t help but judge. We’re only human (which is, ironically, equal parts good, bad, and ugly at times).

My theory, subject to ridicule by Socrates and heirs to his cause, is that the great middle ground is impossible to pin down with such adjectives. There are extremes at either end–unquestionably good because they’ve stood the test of time and still thrill new generations of poetry readers, and undoubtedly bad because, well, the poet in question assaults the senses and a few other innocent bystanders, when his poetry is inflicted on them.

Still, taking out, say, 20% of poems on either end of the spectrum, we’re left with that huge DMZ: 60% of what we read or maybe even write ourselves. Is it good? Bad? Ugly like a duckling with ambitions?

Good luck deciding. Yesterday’s e-mail has me reaching for a poetic white flag.