Yearly Archives: 2019

127 posts

Clive James’ Recommended Poems

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Last week we lost Clive James, writer and critic from Australia, which naturally led to sales of his books that will do him no good. I picked up his Poetry Notebook and, in the early pages, came across a blog-friendly list. You know blogs and lists. A marriage made in Purgatory.

Still, James was of the opinion that good poetry is best put to memory. Some educational methods never go out of style — or shouldn’t.

Here’s a Clive James Starter List for Memorization of Very, Very Good Poetry:

Sonnet 129 (Shakespeare)
“The Definition of Love” (Marvell)
“Ode on Melancholy” (Keats)
“Vitae Summa Brevis” (Dowson)
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (Yeats)
“you should above all things be glad and young” (Cummings)
“The Emperor of Ice Cream” (Stevens)
“The Sunlight on the Garden” (MacNeice)
“Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love” (Auden)

Granted, old school. And very DWM (Dead + White + Male). His list called Five Favourite (sic) Poetry Books has the same slant:

The Tower (W. B. Yeats)
Collected Poems (Robert Frost)
Look, Stranger! (W. H. Auden)
Poems 1943-1956 (Richard Wilbur)
The Whitsun Weddings (Philip Larkin)

Not exactly a wild and crazy list, right? In his defense, James quotes Wilbur who, in his critical book on poetry, Responses, says there might be an occasional revolution in poetry, but it will always be a palace revolution. (Oh those poets and their ivory towers. They love to circle the ivory wagons and get all insular and interbred, don’t they?)

Writes James: “The mission of the poet is to enrich literary history, not to change it. When the academic study of a poet begins to concentrate on his supposedly game-changing impact on the history of literature, it’s time to watch out. All too often it will be a case of the publicity outstripping the event.”

There you have it, poets. Leave revolutions to the firebrands. Make like Rockefeller and enrich!

Why Is the Past So Small? (And Other Memory Tricks)

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Margaret Atwood is better known as a novelist (chiefly for The Handmaid’s Tale) but she’s no slouch when it comes to poetry.

In the poem, “The Small Cabin,” she does one of those “Speak, Memory” poems, and the word “small” is oh, so important when it comes to memory. Anyone who has returned to their childhood house, neighborhood, or school knows that. What loomed large in childhood is now laughably small (if you dare revisit the place, that is).

Watch how Atwood expertly takes this memory trick and parlays it into something larger at the end. Have I mentioned before how important “turns” and “endings” are in poetry? Oh, yeah. A few times, maybe.

Important. And devilish to pull off with aplomb. So when we see it, we admire it. And try to emulate it.

The Small Cabin
Margaret Atwood

The house we built gradually
from the ground up when we were young
(three rooms, the walls
raw trees) burned down
last year they said

I didn’t see it, and so
the house is still there in me

among branches as always I stand
inside it looking out
at the rain moving across the lake

but when I go back
to the empty place in the forest
the house will blaze and crumple
suddenly in my mind

collapsing like a cardboard carton
thrown on a bonfire, summers
crackling, my earlier
selves outlined in flame.

Left in my head will be
the blackened earth: the truth.

Where did the house go?

Where do the words go
when we have said them?

Self-Analysis as Creative Source

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The best cure for writer’s block is the writer herself. Consider, writer, your field of expertise. Within the goal lines you will surely find these players: self, ego, and consciousness. Now jump in the stream and, as the psychologists say, let yourself go.

If you do, and you start with the prompt “I always have to be…,” you might come up with a poem like Ron Padgett’s “Think and Do” below. It looks easy, reading it, and nothing inspires an idea-hungry writer like the sensation of looking easy.

From a few things that define you as a person, you just relax on your back and let the stream of consciousness carry you down river. Enjoy the muffled sounds of forest and rushing river (your ears are underwater) and especially the moving sky and clouds above you, framed like art by treetops.

Before you know it, your sense of humor will kick in (it always does once you’re relaxed). And before you know it, you’ve gone from stuff you’re good at to non sequiturs. You know, like Rodin’s The Thinker, a big lug of a statue that holds within its muscular body all manner of contradiction.

By spicing your self-analysis with specificity and thought processes that your friends, upon reading them, would say, “Yeah, that’s just like him,” you’ll have a lively poem to work on in no time.

Looks easy, right? (Cardinal rule for writer’s block: Bring a sense of humor.)

Think and Do
Ron Padgett

I always have to be doing something, accomplishing some-
thing, fixing something, going somewhere, feeling purposeful,
useful, competent—even coughing, as I just did, gives me the
satisfaction of having “just cleared something up.” The phone
bill arrives and minutes later I’ve written the check. The world
starts to go to war and I shout, “Hey, wait a second, let’s think
about this!” and they lay down their arms and ruminate. Now
they are frozen in postures of thought, like Rodin’s statue, the
one outside Philosophy Hall at Columbia. His accomplish-
ments are muscular. How could a guy with such big muscles be
thinking so much? It gives you the idea that he’s worked all his
life to get those muscles, and now he has no use for them. It
makes him pensive, sober, even depressed sometimes, and
because his range of motion is nil, he cannot leap down from
the pedestal and attend classes in Philosophy Hall. I am so
lucky to be elastic! I am so happy to be able to think of the
word elastic, and have it snap me back to underwear, which
reminds me: I have to do the laundry soon.

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”

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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

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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.”