Monthly Archives: July 2019

6 posts

In Our Time: The Poetry of Resistance

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the tradition

In the past week, I’ve been reading a telling triptych of materials. As readers of this page know, I have Terrance Hayes’ book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. But I’m also slowly wending my way through Jericho Brown’s The Tradition.

To complete the trio, there’s the bad habit I have of reading front page news, where (alas!) the newspapers are addicted to tweets from He Who Must Not Be Named For Fear of Getting Cheetos Dust on the Furniture.

What a combo. And Hayes’ and Browns’ poems are better understood in this light. Or lack of light.

Consider it a variation of “through a glass darkly.” The days of being inspired to write a poem by trees or the moon are finished. For writers of color, at least, the drumbeat of degrading tweets and rally rants before ravenous crowds is enough. It’s like rich manure yielding bumper crops of literature.

I’m not sure I can call this situation a silver lining, but it makes for poetry that’s worth rereading, both for the empathy and for the talent. And I’m sure the Regrettable Muse doesn’t call only to people of color. The Accent-on-White House is inspiring a lot of political (and humanitarian and satirical and outraged) response from all quarters.

Hemingway’s first short story collection was called In Our Time, and some of the material (e.g. “Big Two-Hearted River”) was the result of his time — one of world wars created, as all wars are, by old politicians (presidents, premiers, dictators, fascists, Communists, and other stripes) for young men to die in.

As I read these poems, I can’t help but reflect on how much “our time” feeds our poetry and literature as well. Where there’s blood, there are roots that feed on it. And where there’s racism, there is soil that soaks it up and bears bitter fruit.

And so it goes, both sadly and beautifully, in our own time. One that we must not only own, but respond to and resist as writers always have—with the pen.

The Ever-Evolving Sonnet

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Sonnets. You remember them from school, right? In this corner we have the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, and in that corner we have the Shakespearean (or English) sonnet. Sonnets loved rules: Fourteen lines. Ten beats per line. A rhyme scheme.

But that was your great-great-etc. grandfather’s sonnet. The new sonnet has only one rule (and even that one is suspect), namely the 14 lines. Some say the lines should be about the same length to form a box-like construction, but some say pay no attention to that martinet behind the curtain.

As proof on how far the sonnet has come, I give you Terrance Hayes, who recently wrote a book of them called American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Catchy title, that. But not a book for rules. Instead, all 14-liners that care way more about voice than rules.

All are title-less, unless you count the first line as a title. Here is the lead-off batter of the entire collection:

The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little
Writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not
Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,
And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent
His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG? Dream on, Mr. Bard. You need not worry about rhyming. As you read the book, you’ll find that lovely Rita, Meter Maid, need not don her uniform, either.

What’s interesting is how the modern sonnet has made nice with free verse. Old school poets would have called them diametrical opposites, but old school poets have given up the tower and fled, porridge still steaming.

To see how close this sonnet comes to prose, you need only read it AS prose, then reconstruct it so Mr. Hayes doesn’t suspect Goldilocks at play. Here’s how it will look:

The black poet would love to say his century began with Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually it began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors, poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned, and skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary. What do you call a visionary who does not recognize her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing. His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent his beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it. He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

Prose and free verse are a bit like Romulus and Remus. Very good friends weaned off the wolf of rules.

Overall, good news for poets allergic to form poems. You, too, can write the new sonnet! Take 14 lines, drink plenty of liquids, and see me in the morning! Meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying the rest of Hayes’s book.

“The Charm of Voice Is More Important Than Economy.”

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In his new, posthumous book, The Art of Voice, the gist of Tony Hoagland’s message can be found at the opening of Chapter 3, “The Sound of Intimacy: The Poem’s Connection with Its Audience.”

If you’ve been browbeaten by writing teachers and mentors who insist on economy at all costs, you might by surprised by his words:

“A successful poem is voiced into a living and compelling presence. The convincing representation of a speaker may be created by force, or intellectual subtlety, or companionability, or even by eccentricity, but it must initiate a bond of trust that incites further listening. That presence in voice is not always ‘intimate’ in a warm, ‘best friend’ kind of way, but the reader must be impressed that the speaker is a complex, interesting individual who is intriguingly committed to what she is saying, and how she is saying it.”

So far, so good. And it holds true for all writing, I think. Even blog posts. Do I have a voice here? With words as your only camera, can you “see” me by dint of diction alone? Hoagland continues:

“Such presence is only sometimes created by brevity. Many gurus on the craft of writing declare that a writer should ‘make every word count.’ Yet in poetry, often the charm of voice is more important than economy. After all, most of our daily interchanges don’t convey information in an economical manner. When we say ‘What’s up?’ or ‘Looks like rain,’ our speech isn’t really about conveying information, but about signaling to the listener that someone is present and accessible—open to conversation. They are gestures of presence. How about them Seahawks?”

I love that embedded little quote in this paragraph: “Often the charm of voice is more important than economy.” You can hear more than one poet craning her chin to the sky to shout, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last!”

“All day, every day, those ‘uhs’ and ‘ers’ and ‘likes’ pepper and salt our spoken interchanges. These ‘inefficiencies’ of speech serve a purpose in building tone and voice; they ‘warm’ and humanize poetic speech; and they have their own prosodic contribution to make to poems. These interruptives, asides, idioms, rhetorical questions, declaratives, etc., float through our sentences like packing material, which in a sense they are—they pack and cushion and modulate the so-called ‘contents’ of our communications. And this technically ‘inessential language’ creates an atmosphere of connectedness, of relationality.”

From there, Hoagland goes on to provide examples in poetry via poems that live and breath voice. Without the “inessential” verbiage, they’d sink. Start weeding out “unnecessary language” in these works (á la writing workshop feedback from the learn’d astronomers) and you’d have a poem that fails.

Fancy that. The unfanciness of it all, I mean.

But, as I said in part one (yesterday’s post on Hoagland’s book), this is not license to be sloppy and wordy in your writing. It is permission to consider the word “essential” hiding in “inessential,” especially if voice is the craft that you are working on as a writer.

Not working on that craft? Maybe you should be. And maybe Hoagland’s parting-this-world words will help you in that cause.

Tony Hoagland Gives His Blessing

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art of voice

Yesterday I picked up Tony Hoagland’s posthumous book and, I assume, the last, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice. The purpose of this 168-pager is to promote ways writers can add “voice” to their poetry, and it doesn’t hurt that the essays enclosed have plenty of voice themselves.

“Voice” is one of those literary terms that everyone knows but no one wants to define. Hoagland is happy to oblige. He calls it “the distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual speaker.”

In his opening paragraph, he goes on: “In many poems voice is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it memorable, that holds it together and aloft like the womb around an embryo. Voice can be more primary than any story or idea the poem contains, and voice carries the cargo forward to delivery. When we hear a distinctive voice in a poem, our full attention is aroused and engaged, because we suspect that here, now, at last, we may learn how someone else does it—that is, how they live, breathe, think, feel, and talk.”

Sound pretty awesome. Sounds pretty “I’ll have some of what he’s having.” And as Hoagland further proves, voice forges a relationship between writers and readers. Voice eliminates the very idea that a reader might discontinue reading your poem after line three or thirteen. At the mercy of voice, a reader can’t help herself. She’s yours. She. Must. Read. On.

“A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tone, and temperature, by turns intimate, confiding, vulgar, distant, or cunning—but, above all, alive. In its vital connectivity, it is capable of including both the manifold world and the rich slipperiness of human nature,” Hoagland adds. Clearly, then, it is a topic worth 168 pages.

For me, in the early going of this book (which I’m still reading and, no doubt, will write plenty more about here), it is a blessing. The late Hoagland’s blessing to me personally. Which just goes to prove his point—the fact that I would take the early messages in this book personally, I mean. It is all a product of voice.

In Chapters 2 (“Showing the Mind in Motion”) and 3 (“The Sound of Intimacy”), Hoagland says it’s OK to ignore the common poetry-writing rule of cutting to the bone (details in future posts). Why? Because, too often, all that economy kills voice.

Hoagland even goes to bat for colloquialisms like “Here’s the thing,” “Hang on a sec,” “Laugh if you like,” “Know what I mean?” and “Well, you see….” Use words like that in a poetry writing class and the instructor will have the scissors out in the first minute. Or imagine a workshop approach where you read a poem with any of those expressions. Your workshop classmates (competitive lovelies that they are) will have the polite daggers before you get to the last line.

“Writing like this is superfluous,” they would say. “Wordy!” they would succinctly (by way of example) shout. “Prolix” the show-offs would smirk.

But what if it is all in the service of voice? Sure, it has to be done right, but many beginning poets feel as if it outright cannot be done. Poetry must be concise at all costs. Adjectives and adverbs are guilty until proven innocent.

And all of that is true. Until it’s not.

For that thought, I thank Hoagland and will continue to thank him as I read (and then reread) this little book. He has given me his blessing to be wordy if it serves a purpose and if it bonds the reader to my work.

If all this sounds like a tightrope walk, welcome to the business. Still, it’s good to learn once again that there are no easy answers or recipes to success when it comes to poetry. Answers are merely opinions, and that’s what makes for horse races (and books about writing poetry).

Reading the New York Times’ “By the Book” Feature

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One Sunday ritual I enjoy is reading The Book Review in the New York Times, where I can reliably find a feature called “By the Book.” In this column, famous people (mostly authors, but sometimes actors, singers, artists, etc.) answer pre-submitted questions about their reading habits, prejudices, and insights.

For me, “By the Book” is a great resource for books I want to explore and possibly read myself. Granted, some columns are richer than others, depending on the person interviewed. But I’ve also learned, over the weeks, that some of the Times‘ stock questions are better than others, too. Let’s take a look at some of them.

What Books Are on Your Nightstand? Always the opening volley, this question brings answers that are sometimes valuable, sometimes not. I often pick up ideas for books to read here, true, but many searches show the books to still be in the “advanced reader copy” phase. I also find that interviewed subjects use this question to promote books by friends, relatives, and people they owe favors to. When this occurs, it’s fairly easy to connect the dots with a little research.
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most? Here, subjects most typically offer established contemporary authors along with their reasoning. That said, some will use it as an opportunity to promote a black sheep, dark horse, or unjustifiably unknown author worth checking out. The Times’ sometimes adds to this question by focusing on the specialty of the subject. For example, an artist might be asked to pick authors who write about art.
What’s your favorite thing to read? And what do you avoid reading? Here subjects often delve into genre or take pride in NOT delving into genre. Some admit to prejudices agains certain genres while other profess an open mind. As for the “avoid reading” question, at times “By the Book” will be more particular and ask about authors the subject avoids or dislikes, making it politically dangerous to specify a living author. Most subjects duck this question or choose a disliked writer who is conveniently dead.
What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing? This question goes to writers only. I read every word because, as a writer myself, I find it interesting the way various authors separate (or don’t) “church and state.” Meaning: Some, if writing historical fiction, as an example, will refuse to read another writer’s historical fiction. Instead they’ll read a completely different genre, one lonely out in left field like poetry. Their reasoning is often fascinating and insightful. You can (and should) learn from all kinds of writing, so any writer who avoids a genre does so at his/her own risk.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? Another favorite, this question often begs trivia gleaned from nonfiction books. Often I say, “Huh,” and move on, sure to forget the interesting nugget I just temporarily learned. Ah, well. At least I had fun temporarily learning it!
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of? Another chance for the subject to demonstrate his or her breadth as a reader. Another chance for me to follow up by researching the little-known title. Sometimes I even buy it.
What moves you most in a work of literature? A great question because there is such a wide variety in replies. Also, it’s a thoughtful question. Ask it of yourself. It’s not easy to pin down, especially if you go beyond stock answers like “plot” and “character.”
How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night? I often skip this because I often don’t care. Do you scratch your chin with your right hand or your left? Do you stand in the shower facing the spray of water or facing away? Ho-hum.
How do you organize your books? Another section I skip. This might interest detail-oriented or obsessed sorts, but spatial guys like me don’t care about Dewey or his bloody Decimals, much less the alphabet, colors, or sizes of book spines someone uses to pretty-up their bookshelf. As the prophet Charlie Brown once professed: “Good grief!”
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? I’m back in for this question, although the irony in the answer is usually lost on me because I don’t know the subject enough to fully appreciate the surprise. Instead, it becomes another oddball author or oddly random book title for the pondering.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift? Here’s a chance to name drop. The subject will often choose a book, of course, but also offer the name of the gift-giver and the reason the book was so special. Interesting. And difficult to answer. Think how YOU would answer it, especially if you have been gifted so many books over the years.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? I read this answer to see if it jibes with any of my favorites: Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, Levin (or whatever his full name is, in Anna Karenina), and Jake Barnes. As for villains, I don’t have any favorites, but relish the chance to read about some that I might read up on.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? These two questions are separated. You could argue that answers are of interest only if you care about the subject being interviewed. It provides history to the development of that subject, after all. and thus would prove meaningful to you. But often it’s predictable fare that I skim over or skip entirely.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? Good God. A fruitless question, given the current presence in the White House. Many subjects use it as a predictable chance to say, “Why bother? The president can’t read.” Others will gamely offer a book and a reason, usually with political knives sharpened. In case you haven’t noticed, most writers are a liberal lot.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? I call this the “Barbara Walters” question, kind of like “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” Too cute for its own good, in other words. I’ve yet to read an answer that’s particularly compelling. Like uploaded internet photographs of cats or food people are about to eat, it falls under the category of hashtag who cares (#whocares?).

It’s the Fifth of July

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fireworks

… and I’m posting my poem “It’s the Fourth of July,” which originally appeared in Unbroken Journal, a poetry journal dedicated to prose poems.

And hey, the Fifth makes a cameo at the end of the poem, so who’s to fault me for being untimely?

It’s the Fourth of July
Ken Craft

and he’s listening to Oh Say Can You See in a sea of runners and an awakening 8 a.m. heat. The blue smell of Ben-Gay on the mentholated old guys & Axe on the sun-venerating young guys & armpit on the just-rolled-out-of-bed lazy guys & no one’s run a New Balance step yet. The ellipsis after the song’s last line is always a chant of USA! USA! USA! from the fun-run campers who must not read (at least footnotes) because they never feel the wet hand of irony in that disunited “U” running down their body-painted backs.

Jesus, but he bolts when the pistol goes, heat or no. On the course, though, he is passed by sausage-heavy middle-aged men & oxy-huffing retired men & stick-legged kids & women of all stars & stripes. Begrudge not, says the Bible, so he celebrates their speed or their youth, their fat or their fair sex—whatever hare-bodied thing there is to celebrate.

That night, after the picnic-table splinters & charred cheeseburgers, after the fries & bottles of we’re-out-of-ketchup, the fireworks mushroom into night clouds & umbrellas rain down hiss & heat sparkle, made-in-China reds, whites & blues. He cranes his neck, the skies soured with smoke & sulfur, holding tight the hand of his sweetheart.

Then it’s blessed be bed, after the grande finds its finale, only he is wakened by more (USA!) fireworks up the street (USA!) at 11:30 p.m. Still the holiday, after all, ignited by the undoubtedly drunk, after all, because booze is God-Bless-America’s drug of choice, after all. The outdoors explodes until midnight & he’s had about all he can stand lying down & cursed be Thomas Jefferson anyway, with his noble agrarian society & its whiskey rebellions & its pursuits of happiness & its God-given rights & its who-the-hell-are-you-to-tell-me, question comma rhetorical.

You know how this ends: It’s insomnia again. In the shallow, post-patriotic hours of the Fifth of July. Come cock-crow morning, on his walk, Fido sniffs the empty nips & plastic fifths along the sandy shoulder of sleepy roads. There’s even a patriotic Bud box, hollowed-be-its-name, white stars emblazoned on the blue of its crumpled carcass.

God bless America, he tells it.