Monthly Archives: July 2018

6 posts

Donald Hall on Poetry: Revising, Sharing, & Critiquing

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Hall Book

While reading The Selected Poems of Donald Hall, I jumped to the “Postscriptum,” where Hall offers up some thoughts on poetry writing — and especially on poetry sharing with someone who could give competent feedback. In Hall’s lucky case, he was married to that person, fellow poet Jane Kenyon, until she died of leukemia at the ridiculously young age of 47. What follows are selected bits from Hall’s P.S.:

“Reading my things aloud a thousand times, I have become aware of language that works and language that has dead spots.”
“Most of my life, I have worked on poems each morning, fiddling with everything. I have crossed out a word and substituted another; the next day I have often returned to the first word, or found yet another. Or I have broken a line at a new place. Always when I finished a poem, I showed it to friends who told me if it was terrible, or at least suggested improvements. I did the same for them.”
After we married, Jane [Kenyon] and I worked together over each other’s poems. We did not look at early drafts — it’s a bad habit; wait until the poem solidifies — but when the poems felt done, each of us used the other as first reader. One day I would say, ‘I left some stuff on your footstool,’ or Jane would tell me, ‘Perkins, there are some things on your desk.’ (‘Perkins’ was me.) If I repeated a word — a twist acquired from Yeats — Jane crossed it out. Whenever she used verbal auxiliaries I removed them, and ‘it was raining’ became ‘it rained.’ Jane kept her lines clear of dead metaphor, knowing my crankiness on the subject. She exulted when she found one in my drafts. ‘Perkins! Here’s a dead metaphor!’
“Neither of us did everything the other said. We helped each other vastly. She save me from a thousand gaffes, cut my wordiness and straightened out my syntax. She seldom told me anything was good. Sometimes she’d say, ‘This is almost done,’ or ‘You’ve brought this a long way, Perkins.’ I asked, ‘But is it any good?’ I pined for her praise. It was essential that we never go easy on each other.
“People have long assumed that poets flourish when they are young, but for most poets their best work comes in middle life. Wallace Stevens said, ‘Some of one’s early things give one the creeps.’ A friend insists that no one should publish a poem written after eighty. I hope I wrote good things, young and old, but my best work came in my early sixties.”

Mercenary Poets Take Note!

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Art for art’s sake? What about money, for god’s sakes? If you have some semblance of poetic talent or are adept at fooling some of the people some of the time (in politics, it’s “some of the people all of the time”), you might try these three strategies:

Be an INSTAGRAM POET. I have never been on Instagram and wouldn’t know how to navigate it if landed there after a 3-hour tour (terribly dated Gilligan’s Island reference). That said, I do know of some poets who have raked in fans like autumn leaves by breaking the rules (The Third Commandment: Though shalt not ruin your poems for submissions by offering them for public viewing). It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that Rupi Kaur is the best example of this. And you can laugh or sneer all you want at her “poetry.” She’s laughing or sneering all the way to the bank. Score: Rupi 1, Purists 0.
Be a WEDDING POET. If you write poetry, you know that 99.47% of the reading public (which is 23.85% of the public) do not read poetry or, worse still, listen to it… unless they’re at a wedding. Ask any bride-to-be. On the extensive checklist for becoming a bride (beyond spending the equivalent of Costa Rica’s GNP) is finding so-called love poetry–something modern to go along with anything read from the Bible. As for the Bible, it is somewhat ironic that you seldom hear anything read from that hot-and-heavy entry from the Old Testament, The Song of Solomon. In parts, it’s too racy for even a wedding! My recommendation is that grooms read it on their honeymoon, maybe. Their brides will be suitably impressed!
Be a FUNERAL POET. Right behind weddings is funerals. Like fertilizer for poetry, they are. And we all know that funerals, like weddings, eliminate any need for family reunions. This is the Ben Franklin approach to writing poetry, and it sells. Yes, your poem could go VIRAL (killer stuff!) if it’s perfect for sending off the dead. Think of that song, “Wind Beneath My Wings” (Bette Midler, poet) or “In the Arms of an Angel” (Sarah McLaughlin, poet). Oh, man. If I hear them one more time…. But, people love ’em! And groove to them. And especially love to cry to them. Poetry not as neglected sideliner, but as Roman conqueror.

Veni, vidi, vici, people! Get writing. About love! About death! Preferably on Instagram!

Wanna Buy an Overpriced Book?

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry poetry books publishing

Book prices are a funny thing, except to your wallet. Alcoholics may suffer from cirrhosis of the liver; bibliophiles’ wallets and pocketbooks may suffer from cirrhosis of book purchases.

Where do pricing decisions come from? My first book, 98 pages of poetry, goes for $15.95 retail, which is publish-speak for $16, thank you (consider gas prices at $181.9 cents a gallon… where does the 9/10ths of a penny come from?). And my second book, 105 pages of poetry, logs in at a straight-up $17.

High? Probably. But anyone who’s browsed the poetry section in a bookstore (two shelves, hidden in a corner near the water cooler and the rest rooms) knows that poetry books run high. Why that is, I cannot say. Don’t poetry sales have enough going against them? (Rhetorical question)

But I come not to wonder about retail prices on books that earn royalties (a petty day’s pay for authors), I come to wonder about scurrilous pricing by third parties bent on cashing in—not only on book buyers, but on authors, too.

As Exhibit A, I give you this website offering my book, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, for a mere $119.86.

That’s right. You can buy a new book from Amazon for $17, but this site provides a better deal—a mark-up of some $103. Who would spend such a sum? God knows, but it apparently happens, else this practice would not be so widespread. Right?

The psychology could be that some people, without looking, think a book is rare or out-of-print. Or maybe they think it’s a special copy. Or maybe they buy from the first website they find in a Duck-Duck-Go (who uses Google anymore?) search. Or maybe they are confused. Rich and confused, a combination beloved by swindlers.

Whatever the reason, if anyone buys my book at that price, I will get a royalty payment of nothing, nada, zilch, while the mysterious seller will take home over $100 for my work (and yes, writing is work).

Is this stealing? In my dictionary it is. But others might use the euphemisms “capitalism” or the “free (haha) market,” maybe, or the “American way,” perhaps.

This practice is most visible on Amazon itself, where every book is available both new and used from “other sellers,” who tack on $3.99 (translation: $4) shipping. If you scroll down Amazon’s listings here you will see that my book, for example, runs as high as $49.06 (bargain hunters take note!).

Heck, my wares can even be had at Everyman’s favorite store, Walmart! At a $1.80 mark-up, yet. And hurry! As Wally (Mart) kindly warns you on the site, there are “ONLY 5 LEFT!” (Not to worry, I have more than 5 available, not only at a better price but signed.)

Explorations on the web will even turn up sellers both exotic (South Africa!) and far-flung (Europa!). Yep. This book is, as they say, IN DEMAND. In some cases, I may see a pittance royalty (more aptly called “pauperty”), and in other cases, I will see nothing but the back of the Artful Dodger making off with both the cost of the book and the mark-up.

But such are the prices of authorship and fame. It’s the law of supply and demand, I tell you. The fewer copies of a poetry book there are and the higher the demand, the more the price will go up. And up. And up.

And if you think no fool will purchase a book at that price and at that cost to the author, think again. Donald Trump is the President* of the United States. Think of purchases as votes. Think of asterisks as saying it all.

See what I mean?

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident…Once You Read Them

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One of the most famous lines in Thomas Jefferson’s start-the-presses Declaration of Independence is “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

OK, let’s not get political and note any ironies about what follows (“…that all men are created equal”) because you know and I know that inequality is as big in the Age of Trump as it was in the Age of TJ (a slaveowner himself).

Instead, let’s consider the role of truth in poetry. Truths are as important to good poets as they are to enlightened philosophers. If a reader reads your poem and has an aha moment that goes something like this: “Yes! I recognize that truth, and I loved the new way you uncovered it!” then you are onto something. Something we call the essence of good poetry (like gold cobbled from mongrel minerals, a rarity that will delight more than alchemists).

I just finished reading Ellen Bass’s collection, Like a Beggar. It includes a batch of Pablo Neruda-like odes, which are a lot more fun that Ancient Greek-like odes. Here’s an example of a “little truth” that Bass uncovers in her own creative way.

It’s called “Ode to Invisibility,” and it touches on the way older people become more and more “invisible” in a youth-worshiping world because… because what do they matter, anyhow?

If you’re older, you can read it and say, “Aha, I recognize this feeling!” and if you’re younger, you can read it and say, “Oh, yeah. Old people? I think I’ve noticed a few in the past two years….”

Ode to Invisibility
by Ellen Bass

O loveliness. O lucky beauty.
I wanted it and I couldn’t bear it.
When I was a girl, before self-serve gas,
as the attendant leaned over my windshield,
I didn’t know where to look.
I could feel his damp rag rubbing the glass
between us. Or walking from the subway,
even in my work boots and woolen babushka,
all those slouched men plastered to the brick walls
around the South End of Boston—
I could feel them quicken, their mouths
opening like baby birds. I was too beautiful.
and never beautiful enough.
Ironing my frizzy hair on the kitchen table.
All the dark and bright creams to sculpt my cheekbones,
musk dotted on my hot pulses,
and that pink angora bikini that itched like desire
as I laid myself down under the gold of a key we didn’t yet fear.
Hello, my pretty. Your ankles were elegant,
your breasts such splendor
men were blinded by their solar flare.
These days, I’m more like my dog,
who doesn’t peruse himself in the mirror,
doesn’t notice the gray at his temples, though I think
it makes him look a little like Cary Grant in Charade.
I can trot along the shallow surf of Delray Beach
in my mother-in-law’s oversize swimsuit,
metallic bronze and stretched-out so it bulges like ginger root.
On one side, that raucous ocean surging and plunging,
on the other, the bathers gleaming with lotions and oils.
I can be a friend to them all, even the magnificent young,
their bodies fluid as the curl of a wave.
I can wander up to any gilded boy, touch
his gaudy biceps, lean in confidentially. I’m invisible
as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand.
It’s a grand time of life: not so close to the end
that I can’t walk for miles along the pulpy shore,
and not so far away that I can’t bear
the splendid ugliness of this disguise.

The poem turns nicely on the line “These days, I’m more like my dog” and really gets down to the self-evident (but hard to express) truth with the line “I’m invisible / as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand.”

The good news? For women who once had to endure wolf whistles from men on city streets, invisibility is a blessing. But also a harbinger.

Just thank god that you can still walk miles along the pulpy shore, Ellen tells us. It’s a consolation, and consolation, they say, was the penultimate thing out of Pandora’s box.

Random Thoughts: July Edition

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Summer vacation giveth and summer vacation taketh away. Yes, there is more time for reading, which is why you carried that extra piece of luggage to paradise, but there are also more family and friends buzzing about, sometimes visitors for a day (or two) and sometimes visitors for a week (or two).
Company and reading are like oil and water, taxes and savings, Trump and intelligence. Mismatches all around.
I am presently reading a book called Advice for Future Corpses by Sallie Tisdale. I get comments from people who see me reading it or see it lying around. “Light reading, I see,” they say sarcastically. Or, “Great beach read you have there!”
I guess I’m a future corpse and they’re not. Which is the book’s point entirely. Or one of them.
I’ve been looking at markets for poetry and reacquainting myself with the forgotten fact that many poetry markets are centered at colleges and universities. In other words, the reading periods there are closed until (surprise!) September.
And really, do we have to say “September” at a time like this (read: July)?
The Fourth of July is behind us and, as is the new trend, private fireworks (now legal in this state, for instance) continued all the way till midnight or thereabouts. I wrote a prose poem about this last year. It’s a bit sarcastic. Tongue in cheek, maybe.
But I love my country as much as the next guy! Especially when it’s quiet.
(Both the country and the next guy, I mean.)
Because I often get new ideas for new poems and especially specific lines for new poems, I’m trying to carry a little notebook about (and if you’re thinking “Use your cellphone, fool,” recall that I don’t own one). Trouble is, the notebook in my pocket seems to work like kryptonite against new ideas. Remember the notebook, and my mind goes blankety-blank. Forget it, and the Muses begin warming up in the orchestra pit (with smirks on their nine faces).
It’s 63 degrees Fahrenheit this morning with a forecast for the high 70s today. No need for air conditioning. This is why Maine was invented, thank Odin. It is the antidote to air conditioning.
As my poetry book (to go with my prose book), I’m reading Like a Beggar by Ellen Bass. I like her stuff. A lot. And the great thing about the poetry world is how huge it is, and how often you can discover a “new-to-you” poet who you like. A lot.
Thank you, Ellen.
Usually I pick out one classic I’ve never read to tackle over the summer. This year, though, I’m going biography (also tome-like in size). I have one on Grant (U.S.) and one on Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da). How’s that for variety? But I can only pick one. We’ll see if I’m in an American or Florentine mood come August.
PBS is having a nationwide reading group and now asking everyone to vote from a list of 100 books. It’s a hilarious mix of genres and styles, from 100-page YA books to Moby-Dick and Don Quixote (two books, it so happens, that I have read on past “must-read-a-classic” summers). To what purpose, this vote? To show how inclusive PBS is?
Everyone has classics they have never read and insist they must before they become a future corpse. For me, the biggest “must finish” is James Joyce’s Ulysses. If Hemingway can do it, so can I. (So there, Ernie.)
And then there are classics we just don’t give a damn about reading. Ever. No matter how much other readers crow about them. For me this includes anything by Virginia Wolff, Henry James, William Faulkner, and many, many Victorian novelists (whose books, in fairness, I will consider as doorstops on windy days).
Oh, if only readers (and non-) would purchase my books as doorstops! (Um, screen doors only, please. Or maybe mouse-hole doors, considering how light they are — the mouse doors, not my books.)
Meaning: the subject matter of my poems is not “light” like this blog entry. Oh, no. Some poems even muse about death. Which implies future corpses. Again.
What was it Ben Franklin once said? Ah, yes. “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except future corpses and taxes.”
Other sure things in life (missed by Ben)? People willing to take your picture if you ask them to while out and about in public. In my case, it’s my wife’s phone. Because my wife cares about pictures (it’s in the job description under “wife,” I think). And everyone, it seems, loves to play Good Samaritan with a camera So quick. So easy. So kind.
Ask any writer who submits regularly. Checking Submittable for updates is like watching grass grow.
I wish it were like watching weeds grow. Results would come much faster.
Keep summer reading, friends! And summer writing! And staying un-corpselike!

A Word or Two From the Dept. of Speculation

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Defined as a novel, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation proves just how protean and flexible that word can be. It includes a story of sorts, but it is told not in paragraphs so much as unindented blurbs.

The author, a college writing teacher, shares a few quotes related to writing and life (but I repeat myself). I copied a few here just to have. And share, if you like. They mean different things to different people, which is the strength of a good quote, I guess.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Once the phial was full—here is the bottle it came in. Hold on, there’s a drop left there…No, it was just the way the light fell.”

(Oh so bittersweet, that. And oh so F. Scott.)

Simone Weil: “Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.”

(And attention with object equals a chance to make something of yourself. It won’t happen by rote, apparently.)

Arabic Proverb: “One insect is enough to fell a country.”

(Makes me think of locusts. In what was the land of milk and honey. But you don’t need to go back to Biblical ties for one insect to wreak havoc. Or, more likely, one chemical company. Like Monsanto. Which I think was swallowed by Bayer. Which means you best buy aspirin to swallow elsewhere.)

Stefan Zweig: “It was quite difficult to reach Rilke. He had no house, no address where one could find him, no steady lodging or office. He was always on his way through the world and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction it would take.”

(Reminds me of North American Indians, who had no concept of property. Earth was everyone’s property. Maybe Rilke was channeling his inner Indian.)

John Berryman: “Let all flowers wither like a party.”

(Similes can remain pretty, even after the flowers die.)

Rainer Maria Rilke: “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”

(But how do you know if they know a secret thing? It is a secret, after all. Explains why Rilke and I so value being alone.)

Rainer Maria Rilke: “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.”

(Dear Writers Writing Every Day: Please don’t forget to leave your desks and live. This message from your Muse, who lives much like a North America Indian did.)

Franz Kafka: “I write to close my eyes.”

(I read for that same purpose. Many present-day writers put me there, and a few yesterday writers, too.)

John Keats: “No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.”

(It only seems easy, the world. The difficulty will come in saving your soul on the other side. By then it may be reaped and sold.)

Thank you, Jenny! And thank you, quotes! I wish any Americanos reading this a Happy Fourth. My Fourth-of-July wish is the the Electoral College President will put down his binkie (tweeting device) and read Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence instead. Then the Constitution. Both short. Both more substantive than Fox & Friends, too.