Yearly Archives: 2019

114 posts

The Writing Equivalent of Frankenstein’s Monster

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As writers, we are the sum of our reading parts. Or so the thinking goes. Like Frankenstein’s monster, we are pieced together by the books we read and all those styles, old and fresh, become parts of our body politic.

But it doesn’t always work that way. For instance, I have been reading more of Charles Simic’s poetry than anyone else’s of late. You know the feeling. You get in a groove for awhile, so you ride the wave and hang ten until you’re ready for some beach and a little rest under some other writer’s sun.

Simic is the epitome of simplicity. That’s a simplistic characterization, of course, but I mean his diction. His poems are mostly short, as are his lines. He favors end stops and many sentences travel no further than one or two lines, five max. It’s a style that invites imitation, like Hemingway’s in the prose world.

As a for instance, here’s a Simic poem I read just last night:

 

Nearest Nameless
by Charles Simic

So damn familiar
Most of the time,
I don’t even know you are here.
My life,
My portion of eternity,

A little shiver,
As if the chill of the grave
Is already
Catching up with me–
No matter.

Descartes smelled
Witches burning
While he sat thinking
Of a truth so obvious
We keep failing to see it.

I never knew it either
Till today.
When I heard a bird shriek:
The cat is coming,
And I felt myself tremble.

 

Gee, I wonder who Mr. Nearest Nameless is? Our old familiar friend, that’s what. The one carrying sharp objects (he has no respect for safety rules) while wearing a hood so he is as faceless as he is nameless.

The thing is, I also wrote a poem yesterday, to a friend who had lost a friend to the Nameless one. Was it the epitome of simplicity? Did it resound of Simic as you would expect?

Not quite. It was a single stanza poem, ten lines strong and all one sentence (commas working time and a half).

The moral of this story? It’s too easy to say that monkeys seeing will always become monkeys doing. Sometimes influences will push you in different directions. Sometimes, as a writer, you become the antithesis of the models you’ve been reading. It’s a bit like love, famous for bringing opposites together, where harmony can be found as each part finds a soothing escape from itself.

So much for “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Yes, your writing may come under the spell of both classical masters and well-received contemporaries. But it may also make like the Sons of Liberty, tossing a little tea in the harbor in the name of artistic rebellion.

Whatever happens, accept it, because, whether you write with the tide or against it, you’re responding to it, and that’s what’s known in the writing world as inspiration.

So my thanks and appreciation go out to you, Charles. In short sentences or long, leggy poems or clipped. At least you have me writing!

Spring Is Icumen In–Sing Cuccu

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Yesterday we sang a joyful ditty to spring (prematurely) . Today we double down, figuring singing generates heat, so what the heck.

Yes, there’s the famous olde English round, “Sumer Is Icumen In–Cuccu!” but really, emotions run much higher when we sing invitations to spring. Summer? It can wait. Once we get there, we’ll do nothing but gripe about the heat and humidity anyway.

But spring? It’s less than two weeks away. Don’t believe me? I yield the floor to an expert. An expert grouch, that is. Even he looks happy (for him) in this paean to spring:

 

Coming
by Philip Larkin

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

 

Instead of “Cuccu!” this thrush sings “It will be spring soon, / It will be spring soon.” I like that in a thrush. Repetitive to the point of inexplicable giddiness, to the point where Larkin, whose childhood was boring like yours and mine, “can understand nothing / But the unusual laughter, / And starts to be happy.”

Take that thought (Larkin smiling) and sound (thrush singing) to work with you today. The “fresh-peeled voice” that astonishes brickwork will lift you like nothing else. Then you can laugh at winter’s remnants.

It will feel good, I promise. Even if it’s in public. Even if you look downright cuccu.

Spring-Inspired Poems

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As has been the habit these past few years, winter has saved itself for March. Until Sunday night’s snowstorm (over a foot of snow, scorning the 4-8 inch predictions of our so-called “weathermen”), the winter was laughable, snow-wise. Cold? Yeah. But snow? Hardly enough to roll Frosty, taking him for all he’s worth.

March isn’t the most popular of months. Supposedly coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, it is the advent of mud season (bad), red-winged blackbirds (good), and St. Patrick’s Day (if you like beer, very good).

It also heralds the coming of spring (March 20th) in the northern hemisphere, giving poet Jim Harrison the right idea. He knew a sense of humor about March was essential to the season. As evidence, watch what he does at the end of this little poem:

 

Winter, Spring
by Jim Harrison

Winter is black and beige down here
from drought. Suddenly in March
there’s a good rain and in a couple
of weeks we are enveloped in green.
Green everywhere in the mesquites, oaks,
cottonwoods, the bowers of thick
willow bushes the warblers love
for reasons of food or the branches,
the tiny aphids they eat with relish.

Each year it is a surprise
that the world can turn green again.
It is the grandest surprise in life,
the birds coming back from the south to my open
arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.

 

Clearly Jim wrote this about parts south of here. Note the specific nouns that matter most to a poem, in this case “mesquites,” “oaks,” “cottonwoods,” and the alliterative “willow bushes” and “warblers.” And like any hot dog, the aphids are eaten “with relish” (sorry, bad joke there).

Harrison uses a new stanza for a shift. The poem’s view pans back to a more philosophical scope. It goes from a particular March to “Each year it is a surprise…,” heaping praise on the earth’s regenerative powers, despite everything man does to it, despite the cynic’s sneaking suspicion that the cold may never let go.

Note how “the grandest surprise in life” is a phrase whose antecedent should be the world turning green but (curveball) turns out to be “the birds coming back from the south to my open / arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.”

Oh, those selfish little birds. Guilty of gluttony, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. But anyone who has fed birds can appreciate the gentle joke here. The cliché, “she eats like a bird” to denote she hardly eats anything is laughably inappropriate. Birds eat many times their weight every day, and I’ve yet to see a chapter of Weight Watchers for Warblers open in any neighborhood near or far.

No, sir. Birds are ripped, as they say. Like charter members of Cross Fit. In great shape, as is Harrison’s sense of humor—a good thing to hold onto in such gloomy months as March.

Selling Poetry Books: What Works

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Selling poetry books, they say, is like selling space heaters in Hell. Or ice cream cones in Antarctica. Or the truth at the Orange House.

Honestly, as the reports stream in from fellow published poets, I begin to wonder. That may be because I am not on email terms (alas!) with any heavy-hitter poets. I email St. Billy of Collins and hear the lovely sound device of crickets (an alliterative insect). I drop a line to the admirable Marie Howe, and she doesn’t stoop to pick it up. I send a quick “Hey, there!” to Tracy K. Smith and her secretary returns a boilerplate rejection slip (poor Tracy is so busy being Ambassador to Poetry that she has eliminated emails from her reading regimen).

But where was I? Oh. Selling poetry books. What works, poets wonder? Here’s a list of trial balloons my fellow published poets have cross-examined:

  • Poet A: “Whenever I get a request for money from a charity or a telemarketer on the phone (and cursed be the names of Alexander, Graham, and Bell), I tell them yes on one condition: They go on amazon.com and buy my book first. Once that sale is confirmed, I write the check, but only for amounts less than that of the book. A girl’s got to turn a profit. Especially a poet girl!”
  • Poet B: “After a year on the market, standing against the wall like the nerd with zits at a middle school dance, my poetry book needs some help. I contact my editor and tell her to slash the price of my book in half on amazon. I tell her most people find the hardcover price for soft-cover poetry books too much. She laughs and say, ‘Whatever.’ Whatever that means….”
  • Poet C: “You’ve got to unplug that ‘Look Inside!’ feature on amazon, man. It’s not a peek, it’s a downright dressing down! Over half the book can be read for free! How you gonna sell books that way, huh? Huh?”
  • Poet D: “Marketing savvy, dearie. I created a special Facebook account for my book and, after two years of marketing savvy, sold two books there. And the Twitter book. At least one sale in two years right there. As they say in Boston: How do you like them apples?”
  • Poet E: “I send my manuscripts-to-be to all the Saints: St. Billy of Collins, St. Marie of Howe, St. Tracy of Smith, etc., and ask for a blurb. You get that heavyweight blurb on the back and see if that doesn’t make a difference. You might have to buy a few relics first. You know, pieces of wood that W. B. Yeats or Wallace Stevens supposedly touched, but it’s worth it.”
  • Poet F: “Poetry readings. Lots of poetry readings. To hear my voice. While everyone else in the audience — chiefly other poets, who are tighter than two coats of paint — sit there and don’t hear my voice because they’re too busy preparing for their own voice at the mic. Yep. An open mic reading is good for one sale almost every time. Almost.”
  • Poet G: “I mail my books to newspaper poetry editors (or book editors, if the newspaper is too tiny to staff a poetry editor) and ask them for a read and a review. Sure, it’s expensive, all those books and all that charity to the United States Postal Service, but every once in a while, you hit pay dirt. Usually it’s a small weekly in Nebraska, but Oh, Pioneers, does it feel good!”
  • Poet H: “Keep a poetry blog and become a personality. This country runs on the cult of personality. This country is addicted to cults and all about the Kool-Aid. Why, this blog alone, the one I’ve nurtured like a broken-winged baby bird for six years, has sold two books. I know because 8,850 readers have clicked ‘TO READ’ on Goodreads dot com, and the working ratio on ‘TO READ’ to ‘SOLD’ is 3,000 to 1. It’s coming soon, I tell you! 9,000 ‘To-Reads-Means-One-Book.’ The Promised Land!”
  • Poet I-Yi-Yi: “I do Goodreads dot com Giveaways. It works like this: I ‘give away’ hundreds of dollars to put a book up for free, then the anything-for-free groupies all sign on for it by the thousands. Finally, I mail my book into the void for free, never to be heard from again. Oh, wait. Do you mean ‘What sells poetry book?’ or ‘What sells Goodreads’ Giveaways’?”
  • Poet JK: “Selling Poetry Books: What Works? Nothing. You write poetry for yourself. You do it for ego. You do it for art’s sake. But you don’t do it for sales. It’s a buyers’ market, and everyone’s sitting on their prose-grimy hands, waiting it out, waiting for a price they like: Free. And even then, many will take a pass. Sestina that, why don’t you?”

 

Oh, those bitter poets. They’re a laugh riot in their alphabetical way, aren’t they?

Maybe I should have titled this “Selling Poetry Books: What Doesn’t Work.” But who would read that, I ask you? The post would become the equivalent of a poetry book, languishing on the charts like Prometheus on his rock.

Damn those eagles of reality, anyway.

When Bitter Meets Sweet

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bittersweet

In poetry writing we see many dancing pairs. Sometimes they are pulled tight into a slow dance, and other times one spins off from the other for a bit of solo work before magnetically returning home to her partner.

This came to mind as I read Stephen Dunn’s poem “Sweetness.” It starts with generalities and philosophical abstractions about life, then settles in to some specifics by finding its way to a concrete example. The camera slowly pans across life, then zooms in on a specific life.

In this case, the poem is tracing life’s bittersweet roots. How can something so bad be so beautiful? Watch for the poem’s “turn” in the sixth tercet:

 

Sweetness
by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

 

Most interesting here is how sweetness arrives, staying “just long enough / to make sense of what it means to be alive, / then returns to its dark / source.” It seems passing strange to see sweetness described this way, but that is one of the functions of poetry, to explain the passing strange, or at least to make it a possibility for startled readers.

When sweetness travels a “bitter road,” Dunn seems to imply, it is most like life. It has come far for this epiphany, this understanding that blending and contrasts most often bring out the true nature of life.

Dance on, paradox.

Hot Cha!

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When you think William Carlos Williams, you think memorable name. You think Paterson, New Jersey. You think poetry slash doctor who wrote the compelling short story, “The Use of Force.”

And assuredly you think of the little-poem-that-could, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” where white chickens are forever pecking around a red wheelbarrow glinting with rain. Or maybe the sweetness of the simple but satisfying “This Is Just to Say,” where plums remain “so sweet / and so cold” in the timeless ice box of memory.

But such notoriety is no reason to skip reading deeper into a famous poet’s work. There are surprises. There are lesser-known and lesser-regarded works that may resonate with you, a poetry reader with your own discerning tastes.

“No ideas but in things,” WCW famously reminded us when he was in teacher mode. If you keep it simple and if you keep a sharp focus on “things” that have names, you can imply ideas that hide behind them.

By way of example, “Late for Summer Weather” is a thing de force (French for “great example”) with its objects (mostly clothes) and its colors (but no wheelbarrows in the rain).

It also features a most unusual, for the often dour-looking Williams, ending line. Shall we, then?

 

Late for Summer Weather
by William Carlos Williams

He has on
an old light grey Fedora
She a black beret

He a dirty sweater
She an old blue coat
that fits her tight

Grey flapping pants
Red skirt and
broken down black pumps

Fat Lost Ambling
nowhere through
the upper town they kick

their way through
heaps of
fallen maple leaves

still green-and
crisp as dollar bills
Nothing to do. Hot cha!

 

Ah. The beauty of working hard at doing nothing! The beauty of a straight neck looking around at nature as opposed to down at a cellphone like some bent Neanderthal training for a future Humpback Olympics. And mostly the beauty of a town called Fat Lost Ambling, New Jersey (Exit 157 on the Jersey Turnpike).

Hot cha!

Painting Your Own Private Malibu

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malibu

In my last post, I talked about the magic of trains, how they can serve as metaphors for not only romance and adventure, but escape and renewal. In this post, I give you the poor man’s train: his brain.

Who needs an engine when the tireless brain can get you there? It has a habit, doesn’t it, of imagining a place called “Better” and sometimes the town one over, “Better Yet.”

As individuals, we all know places that are more than happy to play the role of Paradise on Earth. Sometimes it is a place we have actually visited. Other times it is a place we’ve read about or seen on television. Does the brain care? It is to laugh! Daydreaming brains specialize in not caring.

Here’s a concrete example. For the poet Mary K. Stillwell, the answer to her troubles is found on the California coast. It is a town called Malibu, one we’ve all heard of and one that seems particularly well-suited to serve as an engine of desire. Exempli gratia:

 

Moving to Malibu
by Mary K. Stillwell

Some nights I think of it,
moving to Malibu, just as I stretch,
like a cat stretches, to my full length,
as though I am easing into cool waters.
I imagine the blue of the sea;
the bright green leaves of the geranium
on the patio, the bright pink blooms,
the yellow sun and white sand,
in the distance, white triangles,
from the deck, wind chimes.
I will be as content and as happy
as Balboa. I will have breakfast
at my wicker table and in my wicker chair,
with the cats watching. I will taste
salt on my lips after coffee.
My door will be open. When you come,
you will carry a loaf of bread,
a bunch of flowers. The sunset
is brilliant; we might as well be anywhere.

 

If you’re going to write about a dream destination that will change your life to storybook, bring your palette of colors (notice here the “blue of the sea,” the “bright green leaves of the geranium / on the patio, the bright pink blooms, the yellow sun and white sand” and, “in the distance, white triangles.”

Sensory details, too, please (“from the deck, wind chimes”). A simile never hurts, and here Stillwell is “as happy / as Balboa,” the guy who trekked across Panama, climbed a tree, and cried, “Ocean, ho!” (Pacific, that is. Supposedly calmer than its wicked sister of the east, the Atlantic.)

Reveries are personal, as you can see. Here the speaker’s is populated with wicker and cats, two things I’d give a wide berth to while negotiating a dream existence. But she does not fail to remember the other. The welcome visitor. The love interest. The one how will “carry a loaf of bread, / a bunch of flowers” to enhance the happiness by sharing it.

Once you pencil in “the one” (whether you already have one or not—this is your poem, after all), the picture is complete, for we are nothing if not social animals, and no paradise is worth its chlorophyll in fig leafs if you do not have a lover to walk it with.

Just ask Adam and Eve. They might have taken a wrecking ball to their Garden of Malibu, but at least they had each other.

And one last sunset, too. I hear it was brilliant.

When Primitive Means Enduring

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robin

In some ways we are as advanced and as sophisticated as we think we are, but in many ways we remain, as Jane Kenyon puts it, “primitives.” That is, we are as the human race always has been and always will be.

In literature, the definition of “classic” is debatable, but one point seems to meet with agreement: time is not of the essence. Because, if a written work is a classic, it will read as new 500 years from now as it does today.

Shakespeare may not have been aware of this, but readers since his death are. His work traded in basic human emotions, and with that “primitive” stroke, gave many of his plays the gift of immortality.

In her poem “The Blue Bowl,” Jane Kenyon keeps it simple. She buries her cat the old-fashioned way—no coffin, no insurance policy, no service with words of any sort. Just sand and gravel. And a blue bowl, like a sword or talisman buried beside a Viking warrior.

The Blue Bowl
by Jane Kenyon

Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
          They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

The death of a pet will not haunt you like the death of a family member or spouse, no. But it will stay with you for a few days, making that final simile spot-on.

But robins are brown-vested Buddhists living in the present, not sentimentalists paying homage. Not to cats and blue bowls.

The poem is written. Life goes on.

Defining Poetry? Good Luck.

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In his essay, “Notes on Poetry and Philosophy,” Charles Simic takes a shot at defining poetry. It is a moving target, to say the least. One that zig-zags. But that hasn’t stopped the poets and the philosophers from trying. Let’s listen in on an excerpt from Simic’s essay:

“Poetry is not just ‘a verbal universe that looks inwardly on itself,’ as someone said. Neither is poetry merely a recreation of experience. ‘It was and it was not,’ is how the old storytellers used to begin their tales. It lies to tell the truth.

“Mallarmé thought there were two kinds of language: parole brute, which names things, and parole essentielle, which distances us from things. One serves representation and the other the allusive, fictive world of poetry. He’s wrong. It’s not that clear-cut. If anything, it’s both. Poetry is impure. I don’t think Heidegger understands this either.

“The poem is an attempt at self-recovery, self-recognition, self-remembering, the marvel of being again. That this happens at times, happens in poems in many different and contradictory ways, is as great a mystery as the mystery of being itself and cause for serious thought.”

So, there. Some homework for you. Define poetry by giving it some serious thought. And good luck to you, because you’re going to need it.

As the prophet Peggy Lee once put it: Ain’t we got fun?

General Stores, Specific Poems

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store

In this Big Brother day of hidden cameras and mics, social networks designed to data-mine and influence, and cautionary tales in a Key of Orwell, it seems quaint to talk about voices around us. You know, the type you hear with with your own ears. When in close proximity. The old-fashioned way.

Those voices are often a song, a precept those who listen more than they talk have appreciated since time immemorial. Sometimes you hear them in a small diner. Sometimes at the movies while waiting for coming attractions to attract. And sometimes at the general store, an institution still found in small New England towns.

If voices be songs then poetry is not far behind. In that sense, the quiet poet, going about his or her business by placing a bunch of bananas and a head of broccoli in a basket, serves as conductor who must later pull these musical strands together. Here’s how Jane Kenyon did it up in New Hampshire:

 

At the Store
by Jane Kenyon

Clumps of daffodils along the storefront
bend low this morning, late snow
pushing their bright heads down.
The flag snaps and tugs at the pole
beside the door.

The old freezer, full of Maine blueberries
and breaded scallops, mumbles along.
A box of fresh bananas on the floor,
luminous and exotic…
I take what I need from the narrow aisles.

Cousins arrive like themes and variations.
Ansel leans on the counter,
remembering other late spring snows,
the blue snow of ‘32:
Yes, it was, it was blue.
Forrest comes and goes quickly
with a length of stovepipe, telling
about the neighbors’ chimney fire.

The store is a bandstand. All our voices
sound from it, making the same motley
American music Ives heard;
this piece starting quietly,
with the repeated clink of a flagpole
pulley in the doorway of a country store.

 

Depending on the listener, this poem may sound antiquated or passing familiar. What’s sure is this: It in no way resembles pushing a cart through Target or, God save us, any big-box store with piped-in music (especially cloying in the Christmas season, which starts the day after Halloween).

No, you need the same type “bandstand” as could have been gathered round a generation or three ago. Small-town America. Mom & Pop stores. Small and independent businesses where the mega-stores won’t bother because, the zip-code Gods say, the money isn’t there.

So, if you’re collecting voices and cobbling together poetry, let that be a start. Go where the money isn’t and where the people are. Then listen. And write.