Monthly Archives: November 2019

13 posts

Stream-of-Thanksgivingness Reprise

blathering comma mine humor Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry poetry books publishing random thoughts The Indifferent World

Here’s a reprise of the oft-mentioned and frequently reread 2017 Thanksgiving column with a few additions and minor changes to suit the dying days of 2019. What’s amazing is how many changes were NOT needed. That is, it’s reassuring to know how strong our thankfulness remains in these consistently challenging times.

Some random thoughts, then, before people to my west wake up in their houses to the smell of bread and onions and butter and slowly roasting turkey. Let the madness of Thanksgiving begin anew!

First of all, I’m thankful for YOU, the reader. Blogs are like mosquitoes in the Maine woods, so for readers and especially regular readers, I am most thankful.
Second of all, I won’t bore you with the usual thankfulness faves. You know, for family and friends and health and roofs over one’s head.
Whoops.
Has anyone else in Norman Rockwell’s America noticed the rise in Comfort Food Consumption (CFC) since the electoral college’s election of Trump?
Of course I’m listening to George Winston’s piano music. Autumn, specifically, on this rainy, 38-degree (Fahrenheit, for those keeping score) Thanksgiving morning. (Note: In the northern hemisphere, it remains autumn until Dec. 21st when a certain solstice elbows in.)
Free verse. Whoever set it free it in the first place? And how did its rescue become such a cause célèbre?
Sunrises. Always be grateful for sunrises. By comparison, sunsets are rather commonplace. Why? Because more people witness them.
Poetic touchstones: Frost, Yeats, Kooser, Wright, Gilbert, Dickinson, Szymborska, Kenyon, Roethke, WCW, Stevens, the Chinese and the Japanese of old.
Can we give thanks for the resurgence of print books? As was true with Mark Twain, news of its death was greatly exaggerated. For those who love a book’s heft and smell — its essence, if you will — this is wondrously good news.
And what about local bookstores run by mom and pop? If they’re close enough, talk to your economist again and forego that Evil Empire Amazon discount. Less to a conglomerate capitalist behemoth and more to writers. As a reader and patron of the arts, isn’t that what you’re about? Put your money where your principles and precepts are and quit stuffing the turkeys!
Has anyone else noticed the rise in people watching Comfort Movies on Hallmark (CMOH) since the electoral college’s election of Trump? (Note: I think the Hallmark movie formula can be written out like a not-so-scientific equation.)
Shakespeare. Always give thanks for Shakespeare. And reread two plays (minimum) a year, one comedy, one tragedy–each metaphors for your life.
Speaking of classics, have you ever noticed how many poets read the King James Version of the Bible, especially its most poetic books (e.g. the Psalms) for inspiration and rhythmic tutelage? Amen to that!
Personally, I take comfort in Ecclesiastes, easily my favorite Old Testament book.
If any of your grandparents are still alive, give thanks. If one or both of your parents are still alive, give thanks. And overlook their shortcomings by reminding yourself of your own.
I am thankful for people who are kind on-line, a place where trolls in basements virtually proliferate and pillage virtual villages of good will. It’s easy to be an anonymous bad-ass, but to be an anonymous decent person? Less so.
I’m thankful for the first ritual of the day, my daily coffee (bread was otherwise occupied).
Let’s hear it for poetry markets, for poetry editors and readers who take huge swaths of their time to read would-be, wanna-be, and is-be poets’ best efforts!
Has anyone else noticed the rise in People Drinking Alcoholic Beverages (PDAB) since the electoral college’s election of Trump?
Which reminds me, we give thanks for newspapers, journalism, objectivity, facts, and truth… the victims of demagoguery the world over.
Speaking of, give thanks for every country in the world where peace rules the land and where good people may sit down to break bread with their families without worrying about bombs and guns and war. May we do our best to spread it to countries where that is not the case.
For ars poetica and ars blogica.
I’m grateful for two books under the belt, with #3 now finished in manuscript form and dressing itself up for publisher courting.
I’m grateful for readers who support new poets whose books are unavailable at local libraries (to the tune of ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me”).
And economists who speak up when thrifty sorts balk at the price of poetry books: “That’s only 30 cents a poem! And besides, why aren’t you so thrifty when it comes to your daily ice coffee (size: Honkin’), your monthly phone plan (size: Macy’s Parade balloon), your cable bill (size: outrageous), and your cases of bottled water (size: totally unnecessary)?” (Let’s give thanks for good questions!)
I’m grateful for perspective.
For any reader who made it this far. Thank you! May you stay cool, calm, collected and well-read as we enter the holiday season!

“The Mechanics of Mystery”

poetry reading poetry

dara

I’ve read Dara Wier’s sonnet “Scorch Marks” many times, and my favorite line is its description of my favorite birds (and frequenters of many of my own poems), crows. Wier writes, “The crows look at us in their crooked / Ways. They converse and inverse and walk like the mechanics / Of mystery they are.”

And, happily enough, the crows are not the only mechanics of mystery in this poem. But they are one of many references to the color black, starting with the title, followed by a black swan and then the pupils of eyes and then that universal symbol of crushing depression, the black dog.

As is often the case, the secret lies in the pronouns. The narrator uses the first-person plural “we” and is addressing a second-person singular “you.” Only who is this “you” and where might that “you” be now?

As for the last line, it’s a wonderful finish for any work of literature that might use an unreliable narrator: “Who are we to believe what we say?” Many readers are convinced that any first-person point of view, be it the singular “I” or the plural “we,” is as suspect as John Wilkes Booth. We all, in other words, view the world through our own glasses darkly, and no two glasses are alike.

Don yours, why don’t you? See what you make of the poem. It’s a great example of the reader-writer compact. The writer leaves enough ambiguity for the reader to bring in all her baggage and get comfortable for a few days’ visit.

“What’s that I smell cooking?” the reader asks.

“You tell me,” the writer answers.

Scorch Marks
Dara Wier

Whenever we find wide black swaths burned across our paths
We think of you. Our friend the black swan turns to look
At us frequently when we pass by its pond. We see your back
Far away deep inside the pupils of those we love. We stare
And we stare where we are. That is what we do. It make us
Look as if we’ve misplaced our minds or perhaps replaced
Ideas of mind with some new stronger fog. I feel you
Fading and find you falling for that feeling, you staring farther
Into one of the farthest vanishing points in the universe.
We find this alarming. We are losing track of something.
Our friend the black dog watches us carefully as we walk by
The door she guards. The crows look at us in their crooked
Ways. They converse and inverse and walk like the mechanics
Of mystery they are. Who are we to believe what we say?

“How We Entertain the Angels”

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It’s always risky business writing about love. The masters seem to get away with it more than contemporaries. Think Robert Burns: “O my Luve is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June,” and all that lovely stuff.

Still, I admire modern poets who try their hand at such heady topics. I admire them even more when they allow themselves an “Oh!” or an abbreviated “O!” just to put on a Burns-like show. Nicole Sealey shows us how it is done in the poem below. Raw and honest, I’d say, and the ending says as much about human nature as it does about love, only adding to its appeal.

Object Permanence
[For John]
Nicole Sealey

We wake as if surprised the other is still there,
each petting the sheet to be sure.

How we have managed our way
to this bed—beholden to heat like dawn

indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-
important as to think everything

has led to this, everything has led to this.
There’s a name for the animal

love makes of us—named, I think,
like rain, for the sound it makes.

You are the animal after whom other animals
are named. Until there’s none left to laugh,

days will start with the same startle
and end with caterpillars gored on milkweed.

O, how we entertain the angels
with our brief animation. O,

how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.

Like love itself, a little beautiful and a little sad. Who wants to give it up? Who wants to see the beauty of the rose meet its withering end? Not Robert Burns. And apparently not Nicole Sealey, either.

Never Explain

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Novelist and short story writer Tim O’Brien’s Dad’s Maybe Book, is an advice manual of sorts addressed to his two sons, Timmy and Tad. In it, he offers advice to the boys about life. Luckily for writers, he also offers the boys advice on writing. You never know, I figure he’s thinking, if genes will carry.

Below is an O’Brien riff on the writer’s trap known as explaining too much. And though O’Brien uses the words “fiction” and “stories,” you can bet the advice works as well for poetry, drama, and nonfiction. Here’s O’Brien:

“The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable—who we are, why we are—and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

“In a story, explanation is like joining a magician backstage. The mysterious becomes mechanical. The miracle becomes banal. Delight vanishes. Wonder vanishes. What was once surprising, even beautiful, devolves into tired causality. One might as well be washing dishes.

“Imagine, for instance, that Flannery O’Connor had devoted a few pages to explaining how the Misfit became the Misfit, how evil became evil: the Misfit was dyslexic as a boy; this led to that—bad grades in school, chips on his shoulder. Pile on the psychology. Even as explanation, and because it is explanation, there would be, for me, something both fishy and aesthetically ugly about this sort of thing, the stink of determinism, the stink of false certainty, the stink of a half- or a quarter-truth, the stink of hypocrisy, the stink of flimflam, the stink of pretending to have sorted out the secrets of the human heart. Moreover, Timmy and Tad, I want you to bear in mind that explanation doesn’t always explain. Few dyslexics end up butchering old ladies. Evil is. In the here-and-now presence of evil, evil always purely is, no matter how we might explain it. Ask the dead at My Lai. Ask the Misfit. ‘Nome,’ he says. ‘I ain’t a good man.’ In the pages of ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find,’ Flannery O’Connor goes out of her way to satirize and even to ridicule such explanation. And for Hemingway, too, explanation is submerged below the waterline of his famous iceberg. In great stories, as in life, we are confronted with raw presence. Events don’t annotate themselves. Nightmares don’t diagnose themselves. With the first whiff of Zyklon B, with the first syllables of a Dear John letter, with the first ting-a-ling of a dreaded phone call, with the first glimpse of your own nervous oncologist, there is what purely is.”

Father / Son Poetry

poetry reading poetry

carpenter

There’s an old expression: “Keep it in the family.” The problem for writers? Family is one of the wellsprings of emotion, and from emotion comes words, sentences, paragraphs or stanzas.

We could clarify and say, “Keep the bad stuff in the family,” maybe. At least then you get half the territory to play in. The good stuff. Father / son poetry, for instance. The inspiration that brought Michael Milburn to write his poem “To My Son’s Girlfriend.”

Good poetry often answers a question. The more unusual the question, the better. For the speaker in this poem, the father of a teenage son who now has a girlfriend, that question might be “Why am I a little jealous? It doesn’t make sense.”

Or does it?

Read along and see if you feel some empathy for the speaker:

To My Son’s Girlfriend
Michael Milburn

I’m tempted to ask
what you see in him.
Although you probably
see the good that I see
I wonder if you realize
how much he is my handiwork,
or which of the qualities
you daydream about in class
are the ones that I take pride in,
his cordiality, for example,
or love of silliness.

It’s uncomfortable for me
to think of anyone else
loving him the way I do,
possessing him in a way
that only his mother and I
have ever possessed him,
and I can’t deny being jealous,
not so much reluctant
to share or relinquish him
as resolved to remind you
that he’s been around
longer than your love,
under construction if you will,
and that each cute trait
or whatever occurs to you
when you hear his name
I feel proprietary about,
like a woodworker
who makes a table
intending to sell it
but prays that no buyer
will recognize its worth.

In this case, writing about family seems safe enough. If you were the son in question reading the finished poem, would you object? Probably not. Probably you’d chuckle. Feel a little pride. Feel an extra burst of love for the “carpenter voice” of your dad stepping back and admiring his writing.

For this is more than the stated “jealousy” we see in the poem. This is also the passage of time, a milestone seldom noted along the way like, say, graduation or marriage or retirement.

This is about a son transitioning from boy to man. This is about a father suddenly reluctant to give up his handiwork when it is too late to grasp and hold on to the status quo.

The buyer already has cash on the table. On life goes on….

Redefine, Sense, Identify, Write

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silence

As a teacher, I often made use of the brief riches to be found in two sources: poems and short documentary films. Preview, prepare writing or discussion (or both) prompts, show, and turn it over to students.

For me, The New York Times’ “Film Club” series was an indispensable source of watch-and-write material. Most often the “write” was a Film Club Journal entry, but other times it was the gateway for an essay or poem or opinion piece.

As an example, consider the possibilities in the 7-minute documentary film called “Sanctuaries of Silence.” It tells the story of Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist (of all things) who goes out with sensitive listening devices and records the sounds of silence.

But hold on there. Let’s redefine first, an always fruitful assignment for students. Don’t let them assume or forever fall back on denotations. For creative purposes, pick an intriguing word and have them redefine.

Hempton redefines silence as the absence of human-made sounds. For him, sounds of the natural world alone don’t count as “noise.” No, noise pollution—that is, the product of the human race—rates as true “noise,” and it’s harder and harder to escape from it (think of planes passing overhead, even in the most remote of locations).

For student writers, going outside and putting their senses on high alert is good practice, whether it is a man-made setting or a natural one. In this case, it is sounds they would focus on and record in notebooks, but certainly it could be sights, smells, tastes, and sensations of touch as well.

Identify? What’s making that sound? If you think the exact source and its name is easy, just try identifying it. Hunting down the source of a noise is not always easy. Even crickets can grow shy when you get close enough, and does your average writer know the difference between a cicada and a katydid, a wood thrush and a yellow warbler? How about an urban setting? Manmade objects have specific names, too.

There’s an exact word for everything, all right, and specific nouns, along with active verbs, are the muscle and bone of good writing, no matter what the genre.

Starting with film or poem or both always makes for excellent writing kindling. Students love them, too, and they don’t eat up a lot of class time, so there’s a lot of educational bang for your instructional buck.

Not a teacher? Be an autodidact. Put that notebook to good use. Redefine, sense, identify, and write!

10 Good Writing Habits from Lydia Davis

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Lydia Davis has a new book out called Essays One, and in those pages is an essay called “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits.” I don’t have the book yet, but I do have the wisdom to keep Literary Hub on my Bookmarks list.

There you will find a lengthy excerpt from the book that covers only TEN of Davis’s recommendations. The thing is, she provides examples for most of the ten, so a serious writer might do well to wade through them.

Me? I especially like #3 quoted below. Why? Because I’m already doing it, meaning I can chalk one up without the least bit of effort. (Don’t you just love it when you “fall in” like that?) Here it is in Lydia Davis’s own words:

“#3: Be mostly self-taught.

There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures: I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.”

Of interest to poets especially will be #6. And before we part, I might suggest you find a physical notebook (if you don’t have one already) to carry about for notes because you’ll be hard pressed to adopt much of her advice without one. It comes as no surprise that most all serious writers have one and use it religiously.

Plus, the idea of shopping for the right notebook and the right pen or pencil parallel parks itself right next to a curb called nirvana. What is it about “writerly objects” that so mesmerizes writers? Ours is not to ask so much as to buy and use.

You heard me: to use. Buying and shelving or otherwise neglecting is akin to one of those non-writers who goes to all the hip writer hangouts and talks a good game while writing a sum total of nothing.

Cue “The Pretender.”

Poetry for the Little Guy

poetry reading poetry

Two cheers for the little guy!

No one can relate to him like a poet. We are naturally inclined toward the second best, the also-rans, the almost-but-not-quites.

We’re little guys, too. We launch poems into some deep space called Submittable, then look through the telescope for months sandwiched on months, catching only empty blackness and distant stars (apparently known as “editors” who are rumored to exist).

Not much happens when you’re a little guy. Day in, day out. Same old, same old. Only when you least expect it do you get a meteor flaming out in your Inbox. Usually it’s a form letter saying, “Thanks but no thanks.” Never is it a form letter saying, “Do you realize how many thousands of poems we have to wade through? These never even got past the first readers, who are overworked, by the way, and often distracted. You’d be, too, if you were given the minimum minimum wage (read: nothing per hour) to read this stuff.”

That’s why I like best the first-time published poets when I see them designated as such in poetry journals. Heroes. New poets who ran the gauntlet and actually came out the other side, bloody but still on two feet. Anything-but-safe-poets. Anything-but-well-known-poets-who-take-up-bandwidth.

The poet Ron Koertge gets it. In the poem below, he sings the praises of sidekicks, those little guys forced to stand in the shadow of heroes, the heroes viewers demand, the stuff of our little-guys-yearning-to-be-heroes dreams. I think you’ll identify. Give it a go:

Sidekicks
Ron Koertge

They were never handsome and often came
with a hormone imbalance manifested by corpulence,
a yodel of a voice or ears big as kidneys.

But each was brave. More than once a sidekick
has thrown himself in front of our hero in order
to receive the bullet or blow meant for that
perfect face and body.

Thankfully, heroes never die in movies and leave
the sidekick alone. He would not stand for it.
Gabby or Pat, Pancho or Andy remind us of a part
of ourselves,

the dependent part that can never grow up,
the part that is painfully eager to please,
always wants a hug and never gets enough.

Who could sit in a darkened theatre, listen
to the organ music and watch the best
of ourselves lowered into the ground while
the rest stood up there, tears pouring off
that enormous nose.

"Sidekicks" Ron Koertge

Going Off Track

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Narrative poetry is more often anecdotal poetry than not. When a poet gets caught up in a sweeping or, God forbid, generational story, she may never see the end of it. But anecdotal? And, say, one featuring the generational attitudes? Much more manageable.

Here Lawrence Raab starts with words he surely heard one day: “Your train departed ahead of schedule.” From there, he lays out a brief story featuring unexpected reactions in his family, chiefly from his son, who apparently has a bit of the Tom Sawyer in him—enough to defuse any angst or anger, enough to turn a smile.

It’s Not Just Trains
Lawrence Raab

The ticket office was closing
when we arrived and were informed
our train had departed ahead of schedule.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Trains
leave on time, or late, but never early.”
“Such things happen,” the agent replied,

“more often than you would think.”
“Look around,” he added,
“and pay attention. It’s not just trains.”

When I told my family of this unexpected
predicament, I was taken aback
by their lack of surprise. “Let’s wander

a while through this pretty little town,”
my wife proposed, “and see what happens.”
“Or else,” said my son, “let’s head off

into that dark woods beyond the tracks,
each alone and without our baggage,
and try to find our way out

before nightfall.” He smiled, I thought,
at me in particular, as if he’d known
all along that would be the plan.

Not much in the way of poetic tricks and flowery language here. Just the facts, Jack. An anecdote straight up.

Sometimes story alone can carry the day. Even in poetry.

For Teachers of Poetry, a Cautionary Tale

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Yesterday I provided an excerpt from Rattle editor Tim Green’s interview of the poet Kwame Dawes. Today, a final excerpt, this time touching on the damage “education” can inflict on poetry.

“Part of the problem is that we teach poetry with a manual that is used for an exam. Just think about when people encounter poetry. As children you learn nursery rhymes, but slowly that narrows down, and you stop hearing poetry except in school and in a context that demands the dreaded ‘analysis.’ You don’t have the advantage of a poem being made into a Lifetime movie, which you have for fiction and plays. For poetry it starts to be all school. And in school the teacher stops one day and says, ‘What does it mean?’ But the teacher doesn’t say, ‘You’re going to spend the next 40 years of your life trying to understand what it means.’ ‘Next week there will be an exam!’ is what the teacher says. ‘So you’d better know what this means now.’ Poetry is not like that, but we learn poetry that way.

“Consequently, people come to a poetry reading to apprehend in the moment, because if they don’t, they remember their childhood experience when they felt like idiots for not understanding. If someone comes up to me after a reading and says a poem is deep, what they often mean is, ‘I didn’t understand a word of it, but I can’t admit it, so I’ll say you’re really deep.’ That’s the anxiety. That’s what we need to break. Here’s the thing: we do not put that pressure on music. I admit there’s some music that’s poppy, but look at how many songs are hugely difficult, and people will stay with them and will come back 30 years later and say, ‘You know, I’ve been singing this song for 30 years, and I never realized what was going on.’ … It’s because there’s no exam!

“Listen, I don’t want to stereotype cultures, but in Ireland poetry is read at bars and so on, and people don’t know what they’re hearing while it’s being read, but as they grow older they begin to contemplate it. They know it by heart, and eventually they begin to understand things that are quite complex, but at the time they had something to hold on to, and it was enough—they had the cadence, they had the prose, but they also had stretches that they understood, and they were allowed to have time, because that is not a school room. This also happens in griot cultures in North and West Africa where the griot carries the histories of the community. In cultures in which proverbs are cherished and valued, this also happens. We have come to ritualize this process of learning over time in American rural and urban cultures where ‘folk’ sayings and proverbs are granted the chance to be mysterious for a time. No exam next week. Heck, it happens in churches the world over. We accept mystery and the slow process of understanding.

“The problem with poetry today, even here in America, is what happens in the class room. That’s the problem with apprehending poetry, because we feel like we have to understand it right now—all of it, right now. And the only thing you can understand right now is the Hallmark greeting card—which, by the way, are very smartly written. [both laugh]

“Hallmark cards aren’t easy to write, if you think about what they achieve. My wife gives me a card, and it’s lovely, it tells me a lot. A guy in South Carolina gets the same card and thinks, ‘Wow, you found my soul.’ Same poem—wow, that’s pretty impressive, right? [laughs] So I do think that is the dilemma. That’s the heart of the dilemma: giving people permission to return, to learn and read and apprehend poetry over time. And I think, as we ease the pressure for immediate comprehension, we allow for the possibility of complexity. Because the technology of writing allows us to return and return and return. When there was no writing, we either memorized or we apprehended in the moment, and then the rest was the dew. But the technology of writing, we can read to the bottom and go right back to the top. If we didn’t have an exam next week, we could keep doing that. If there’s any gift that our poetry community can try to inculcate in the culture, it’s that poetry is a life and life lived. I am not suggesting that we toss out the exam, but I am suggesting that we parallel that kind of learning with more open-ended approaches to encountering poetry. Because we do it with so much else. People go back to museums and do pilgrimages back to the same pieces of art once a month, and they come up with complex feelings and ideas about it. No one says they need a degree in art appreciation… But we rarely give poetry that space. I think that’s something that’s desperately needed.”

Nota bene: The entire interview can be found in the Fall 2019 issue of Rattle.