Yearly Archives: 2018

132 posts

“The Admonitions of Beauty”

poetry

A few days ago I talked about moments, how unnoticeable and neglected they can be. They’re like fireflies glowing in a jar. The poet’s job is to capture them, describe their essence to a point (leaving real estate beyond that point for the reader), then release them to the skies they belong in.

In that same vein, we have Baron Wormser’s poem “Opinion,” which is about a drive to work. We don’t know if the speaker is commuting in a car or a subway, a bus or a train, but we can all relate to another person (“Merriman” in this poem) talking our ears off with his endless opinions.

In this age and day, opinions are the scourge of the land and the foundational cracks enemies of democracy like to encourage any way they can. Unlike the bad old days, opinions don’t even have to be based on facts anymore because enemies of democracy (both outside and within) are working hard to render that word useless.

But that’s another raft trip, Huckleberry. Baron Wormser brings us back to the theme I’ve been featuring this week: moments, and the lost art of opening ourselves up to such moments.

The enemy, in this case, is not democracies’ many foes but our fellow human beings who are obsessed not with moments in the natural world but with trivia from distractions humans create and specialize in. Read: soy products, diesel cars, and, of course, the New York Mets’ starting pitching:

 

“Opinion”
by Baron Wormser

 

Halfway to work and Merriman already has told me
What he thinks about the balanced budget, the Mets’
Lack of starting pitching, the dangers of displaced
Soviet nuclear engineers, soy products, and diesel cars.

I look out the window and hope I’ll see a swan.
I hear they’re bad-tempered but I love their necks
And how they glide along so sovereignly.
I never take the time to drive to a pond

And spend an hour watching swans. What
Would happen if I heeded the admonitions of beauty?
When I look over at Merriman, he’s telling Driscoll
That the President doesn’t know what he’s doing
With China. “China,” I say out loud but softly.
I go back to the window. It’s started snowing.

 

I should note, in light of that final stanza, that Wormser wrote the poem in 2004 under the G. W. Bush Administration. Still works, though, doesn’t it? The Presidents never know what they’re doing with China.

(You can repeat that precept softly. Then go back to your window. Let me know what you see….)

An Abundance of Moments, an Embarrassment of Neglect

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Pinch yourself. You’re alive. But how do you know, and what is it you’re hardly noticing as days roll in and out with numbing regularity?

Answer: a lot. Reason: the five senses. Even more so the four neglected senses. You know how partial we are to our eyes. To sight. The favored child among our brood.

But what if the idea is to conjure a moment — pick a moment, any moment — using the senses, not just sight but touch, smell, sound, and taste? Imagery, we call it, is an essential poet’s tool. One willing to share the poetic limelight with figurative language.

Given the heady mix of imagery, figurative language, and the moment, you’d see a direct link between Buddhism and poetry. What’s present around us at any given moment, with focus, with meditation, can become something more than it seems. The insignificance of a world that can become mundane lies in our own prejudices. Moments are always there but, through bad habit, we are usually not.

Sure, picking a small moment and magnifying it sounds simple, but simplicity is a lovely sound, as proven here by Kenneth Rexroth, who leads us to enlightenment at the end of his humble paean to life as simple moment:

 

Confusion of the Senses
by Kenneth Rexroth

Moonlight fills the laurels
Like music. The moonlit
Air does not move. Your white
Face moves towards my face.
Voluptuous sorrow
Holds us like a cobweb
Like a song, a perfume, the moonlight.
Your hair falls and holds our faces.
Your lips curl into mine.
Your tongue enters my mouth.
A bat flies through the moonlight.
The moonlight fills your eyes
They have neither iris nor pupil
They are only globes of cold fire
Like the deer’s eyes that go by us
Through the empty forest.
Your slender body quivers
And smells of seaweed.
We lie together listening
To each other breathing in the moonlight.
Do you hear? We are breathing. We are alive.

 

For your own “We are alive” or “I am alive” moment, you can slow down and invite one into your own life. Then honor it by writing a poem rich in the senses leavened with the meaning you give it (or, better yet, it gives you).

It’s how we experience the world, after all — if only we would more often!

Memory: The Muse’s Accomplice

poetry

Speak, Memory. It’s a Nabokov title, sure, but it’s also a command many a poet has issued to himself. Or, if he believes in such things, his Muse.

Why? Because memory is about as fertile a field as you’ll find, especially if it lies fallow for a few years. This phenomenon is known as déjà vu, which is French for “What the hell just happened here?”

Give it some thought. You saw or heard or smelled or touched or tasted something that sent you back, H.G. Wells-like, in a time machine. Once, after tasting peanut butter, which I had not purchased for years, I was transported to my childhood where I ate the stuff almost every day, slathered with Welch’s grape jelly between two pieces of Wonder (Why  I’m Eating This Crap) bread.

Sheer poetry.

To show you what I mean about Memory and its best bud the Muse, notice how the poet Jeffrey Harrison sees something, has a startling flashback, and then tries to make sense of it through poetry.

It’s a simple, everyday act, which is good, but there’s something left unsaid, too, which is better. He’s sees his 19-year-old son drinking water directly from the tap, and it reminds him of his older brother — now dead — who used to do the same thing, decades before anything went wrong.

That’s it. Enough said. Sometimes a poem’s success lies as much in the unspoken as the spoken. Sometimes the mystery makes the reader “get it” more than any revelation would.

Give a listen and see what I mean:

“A Drink of Water”
by Jeffrey Harrison

When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;

and when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,

because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,

which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, and across time …
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.

© 2014 by Jeffrey Harrison, from Into Daylight, Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA.

Selling the World to Children: Not for the Faint of Heart

poetry

The poem “Good Bones” was included in the “Best of 2017” series last year, but author Maggie Smith had the foresight to make it ring true no matter what the year.

Therefore, as we approach the blessed end to 2018, we can count it a “best” again if we wish. After all, the word “best” is up for grabs, yours to throw around with no regard for lamps and other fragile items in the room as much as mine. The poem originally appeared in Waxwing:

 

“Good Bones”
by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

I love the ending. That false note of hope sung loud and proud in a key of despair. So true. So ring out the old and ring in the new.

For more of the same….

Sometimes Simple Works

poetry

Norman MacCaig was an institution of sorts in Scotland. As a poet, he was prodigious in output. Known for the simplicity of his lyrics, he wrote quickly, and anyone diving into a collected works will quickly see that sometimes it shows and, amazingly, sometimes it doesn’t.

Here’s a simple poem by MacCaig called “Small Boy.” Given that we are in the materialist season (called “Christmas time” in many parts of the world), the plain message resonates in its odd way:

 

“Small Boy”
by Norman MacCaig

He picked up a pebble
and threw it into the sea.

And another, and another.
He couldn’t stop.

He wasn’t trying to fill the sea.
He wasn’t trying to empty the beach.

He was just throwing away,
nothing else but.

Like a kitten playing
he was practising for the future

when there’ll be so many things
he’ll want to throw away

if only his fingers will unclench
and let them go.

 

Looks like it was written in minutes, yes? And yet the final stanza contains a pebble with a little more heft. As kids, we let go because we are like kittens playing and haven’t a care in the world. Part of that is because nothing that we own owns us. Yet.

But soon, MacCaig points out, little fingers will grow to larger ones. They will hold tighter to possessions, to money, to status. Quite simply, they will lose the habit of letting go.

The small boy, in that case, is more enlightened than the man he will become. He will both grow and devolve as human being. Surely he would never even consider, at age 45, going to the beach and chucking pebble after pebble into the sea for no reason.

Everything needs a reason, after all. And reason keeps its roots in desire.

The Mysterious Equations of Narrative Poetry, Where “Less Is More”

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Story. Cavemen loved them, apparently, as do the so-called civilized types we call ourselves today. Tell me a good story, and I’m your captive till the happily ever after. Words to live by. Especially if your name is Sheherazade and your pretty life depends on it.

The last entry from my reading of Gregory Orr’s Poetry as Survival has to do with story. He quotes Aristotle, who famously said, “Men reveal themselves in deeds and acts.” (I love it when Ari gives lessons on show vs. tell.)

And if you sample poems in the various journals you submit poetry to, you will find that certain editors lean heavily toward narrative poetry. Narrative threads weave their way through lyric poetry, too. They are not mutually exclusive. I’ll yield the floor to Orr:

“Story is not simply a narrative of chronological events. Story selects and arranges (or rearranges) details and events and gestures for their symbolic significance. In prose narrative, ‘more is more’ because the goal is often to establish the complex richness and variety of the world of experience. In lyric story, ‘less is more.’ Everything that does not add to the intended dramatization is stripped away, and meaning is compressed into action and detail that reveal significance. Only that part of the world that heightens the dramatic focus is kept. Thus Aristotle in his Poetics says that if some part of a poem is removed and someone reading the poem doesn’t notice a gap or absence, then that part was never a genuine part of the poem after all.”

I love that last bit about a reader not noticing missing lines in a poem. Trouble is, the reader has to be someone other than yourself. As the poet, you often cannot see the extraneous from the essential. Every word is your baby, after all. Your mother hen instincts secretly kick in.

Aristotle’s observation also reveals the irony in assuming the job of the novelist is more arduous than the job of the poet. Yes, the novelist has his English Channel of words to swim across, but the currents and the vastness of the body itself allow for error, for digression, for the ego to occasionally break loose and pontificate. The poet, on the other hand, must work from the recent storm’s puddle on the sidewalk. That’s it. Check out the reflection while it’s there, then make do and make it work.

So I ask you, which is more difficult: “more is more” or “less is more”? If you chose the former, you’re likely the person who would select the biggest wrapped box in a line-up of various-sized gifts, too, thinking surely that size is everything. In America, we would say, “How American.” I’m not sure what they would say in other countries, but they’d say something (while shaking their cosmopolitan heads).

Back to Orr:

“Aristotle also locates the heart of story in conflict. In lyric poetry, such conflict needn’t be anything melodramatic. Merely introducing two pronouns into the opening line of a poem creates tension essential to story: ‘I saw you in the diner…’ There is a subtle, unresolved tension between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ that seeks to be developed and resolved. You can see how subtle but real that tension is if you substitute a unitary pronoun: ‘We went to the diner.’ The reader may still be curious about what will happen next, may even curious about who the ‘we’ is, but the story tension created by the I/you has disappeared. It is this tension or conflict that is at the heart of a story, providing story with dramatic focus.

“Unlike narrative, which can have numerous characters, story in the personal lyric will have only two or three characters in order to establish and maintain dramatic focus and thereby communicate the story of the self. Here’s a personal lyric by Theodore Roethke that structures itself around story:

 

My Papa’s Waltz
by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

 

Interesting, isn’t it, how a poem like Roethke’s — one that we’ve read a million times — can be used as an example of narrative poetry. It’s so short, I never thought of it that way.

But the truth is, narrative poetry can out-flash the flashiest of fiction. And if it looks easy, look again. Then get to work, as that’s the only way your story will reach the Promised Land (which looks a lot like the word “published” to me).

 

“Thou Shalt Not Write About Pet Death” (and Other Commandments Moses Never Brought Down)

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old cat

As a high school English teacher, I can remember teaching a unit on admissions essays. We had many resources, of course, and almost all of them warned of clichés and clichéd topics. One of these verboten topics? You guessed it: pet death.

Pet death is an entry drug to bad writing, the experts warned. Admissions officers who read such essays complained of the treacly sentimentality, the sugar-coated hyperbole, and yes, clichés like blackflies in a Maine forest. Some said they even gave up reading the minute they realized they were reading “The Death of Fluffy.”

If you’ve read this blog any (and I know a few of you exist), you know I bridle at the whole idea of “Thou shalt not’s….” It bothers me when so-called experts say, “You can’t write about that topic. It’s tired.” It bothers me when the nabobs of knowledge say, “No to that word. And that one. Oh. And, of course, that one!” It bothers me even when a respected saint of the canon like St. Billy of Collins writes, apparently seriously, that he stops reading any poem the minute he comes across the word “cicada.”

But still. If you’re going to write about your pets death, proceeding with caution is advisable. Once your pet death poem is done, you and your critique pals can debate its success, given the degree of difficulty. Going where angels fear to tread takes some angelic spine, after all, and I like that in a poet.

As Exhibit A on the topic of “pet death” (insert sound of cliché alarms blaring here), I give you Robin Chapman’s “Enough,” about the death of her cat (which, by the way, opens up a whole new can of worms in the form of cat pictures on the Internet, but I’m not going there, thank you). See what you think:

“Enough”
by Robin Chapman

There is always enough.

My old cat of long years, who

stayed all the months of his dying,

though, made sick by food,

he refused to eat, till, long-stroked,

he turned again to accept

another piece of dry catfood

or spoonful of meat, a little water,

another day through which

he purred, small engine

losing heat—I made him nests

of pillow and blanket, a curve of body

where he curled against my legs,

and when the time came, he slipped out

a loose door into the cold world

whose abundance included

the death of his choosing.

 

It’s Giving Tuesday. You Know What THAT Means!

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

giving tuesday

Yes, it means you are supposed to be giving, and that explains why you are getting all of these e-mails from journals and magazines that once (or three times) rejected your poetry but now promise NOT to reject your money.

I could get jaded and do a narrative eye roll here, but I fully understand these magazines’ plights. I have signed on to two new poetry journal subscriptions in the past month. Truth be told, I didn’t know “Giving Tuesday” existed, so I jumped the gun. But no one seems put out, so it’s all good.

But really, if we’re going to talk giving, we have no choice but to talk books, because everybody (and his sister) knows that the best gifts are books. Sure, it’s more fun to receive books, but this is Giving Tuesday, not Receiving Tuesday, so let’s get over that technicality ipso fasto, ‘K?

If you give a new (to you) poet some support by buying his book, that is a major give on an otherwise ordinary-looking November Tuesday. That can be done by taking your giving mood over to Amazon’s “Lost & Found” Department, where you’ll find a shiny new copy of Lost Sherpa of Happiness. Check out these “giving” reviews:

The New York Times: “A dark horse!”

TIME Magazine: “Below the radar no more!”

The Washington Post:” I know this guy!”

Best of all? Your gift of poetry is matched. That’s right. It counts for the person you give it to (even if it’s yourself, in which case your secret’s safe with us), and it counts for the starving artist and his small, independent publisher (in this case, Kelsay Books in full Dickensian mode).

Sound tempting? God, I hope so. Waxing poetic for no reason at all would be such a drag!

The Dangerous But Necessary Art of Compression

poetry

I still have my George Bilgere book out from yesterday, so why not share another poem? Although wistful, like sentimentality, is quicksand-dangerous for a poet, Bilgere seems to walk the edges with aplomb. What is creativity without risk? Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but we’re not in this to play safe.

This poem, in three swift stanzas, tries to negotiate the mysteries of innocence and aging. The question it poses: Is youth as good as it gets? If you’re an adult, you certainly hope not. You say, “It’s not quite as simple as all that.” And yet… and yet.

Let’s dip our toe in the pool and get wet, shall we?

 

“The Wading Pool”
by George Bilgere

The toddlers in their tadpole bodies,
with their squirt guns and snorkels,
their beautiful mommies and inflatable whales,
are still too young to understand
that this is as good as it gets.

Soon they must leave the wading pool
and stand all day at the concession stand
with their hormones and snow cones,
their soul patches and tribal tattoos,
pretending not to notice how beautiful they are,

until they simply can’t stand it
and before you know it
they’re lined up on lawn chairs,
dozing in the noonday sun
with their stretch marks and beer bellies,
their Wall Street Journals and SPF 50.

 

Parallel structure is used throughout, as Bilgere uses concrete “stand-ins” to represent toddlerhood, teen and twenty-something-dom, and, finally, the maturity of our discontent.

The question in poems like this is simple: Is there enough runway for a poem to lift-off and make profounds statements (in this case about conformity and mortality)? It is, after all, the duty of poetry to compress, not just words but ideas. The duty and the challenge, I should say (and there’s the rub).

Which reminds me, I need to rub the bird with a salt and brown sugar brine so it can brood in the fridge for a day. Happy Thanksgiving to all (4.5) of my readers. Wade in bravely!

How Abstract “Sets” into Concrete

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shoals

Abstractions are hard—to write about successfully. Especially when concretes have to do all the talking for them.

As Exhibit A, I give you the concept of “silence.” It’s basically a nothing that is something. But how do you describe it?

If you look at a long list of abstract nouns and pick one to write about, you’ll see what I mean. It’s a workout, one your doctor will approve of due to the cardiovascular benefits. You know, where you have trouble carrying on conversation with a work-out partner because you’re too busy breathing.

For inspiration, let’s look at the concrete images the late Tomas Tranströmer came up with for the word “silence.”

You might wonder, straight off, what the antecedent is for the pronoun “they” which appears in Stanza 1 and is repeated in Stanza 4. As for me, I will luxuriate in the final stanza and its image of silver shoals—no, table silver—just kidding, silver shoals, swimming the depths of the black Atlantic’s “silence.”

If it leaves you thinking about the different types of silences, all the better. That’s the thing with abstract words. They are protean in nature. Expansive. Malleable. Perfect, turns out, for a series of concrete images created by you and your rogue accomplice, the imagination.

 

“Silence”
by Tomas Tranströmer

Walk past, they are buried…
A cloud glides over the sun’s disk.

Starvation is a tall building
that moves about by night—

in the bedroom an elevator shaft opens,
a dark rod pointing toward the interior.

Flowers in the ditch. Fanfare and silence.
Walk past, they are buried…

The table silver survives in giant shoals
down deep where the Atlantic is black.