Yearly Archives: 2019

127 posts

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

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.

How Goodreads Uses Its Readers As Ad Tools

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tool

Some of the “Good” has been lost from Goodreads since the Amazon takeover, as you might have guessed given the nature of the Bezos Beast. For one, advertising on the web pages is more prominent and persistent. And for two, you, the user, are being used more and more as an advertising tool without your permission.

Well, I should rephrase that. Anytime you use a website, you are subject to its conditions, which are usually spelled out in a long document of legalese that no one can be bothered to read. Thus, if you are used, it is with your “permission” with a heavy accent on the air quotes.

The biggest change of late has been in the feed. It used to be that you read updates strictly made by your Goodreads friends and people you are following (if any). Chances are pretty good that you would miss most of these updates because there are so many that they quickly become buried under the moving thread on the screen.

No more. Advertisers now pay Goodreads/Amazon to highlight users’ actions so that they are mentioned multiple times. The two chief actions that make you a marketer’s tool appear to be the “Wants To Read” button and the “Like” button.

Now, second in every feed line-up and then even more periodically throughout, you’ll see a “Sponsored” post. Usually it takes a book one of your friends “Wants To Read” or “Likes” and heralds it as such. Thus, others may see more and more of you because a book’s publisher is using you, free of charge, to promote their book, even if you only made a random click and have little intention of really reading the book.

One way around this new advertising device is to ditch the “Wants To Read” button. Goodreads has hardwired it in, so you can’t actually take it out, but you can neglect it, leaving it at a perpetual zero and making yourself worthless to GR/Amazon’s advertising game plan.

I created a shelf called “Ordered,” and if I like a book enough to either get it from the library or buy it, I place it there. Because the shelf has a unique name, however, it avoids the advertising puppet strings.

For me, there’s double pleasure in this small protest. The “Wants To Read” button is pretty much a joke, anyway. As an author, you learn this quickly. Hundreds upon hundreds of readers are happy to “want to read” your book, but very few of them actually will. It’s as empty as gesture as “Have a nice day” from the bored cashier at the supermarket check-out.

Imagine if that button were taken to mean what it really means! Imagine if “Wants To Read” actually placed a book in cart at a bookstore website and then purchased it for mailing purposes to the user. Now we’re walking the walk and not just talking the talk!

But I digress. And it may be that you use GR and are bothered not a wit by the increased presence of ads and your pawn-like place on the behemoth company’s chessboard. But if you do care and still want to use the website, you can make a few simple moves to reduce your helpless role in the increased advertising gambit.

Empty your “Want To Read” shelf. Create and label a new one unique to you. Only place books that you will actually will read into it. It’s a small protest, yes, but everyone loves the big boys’ tea when it’s floating in Boston Harbor.

Nature, the Present Moment, and Other Gifts to Poets

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marsh marigold

We’ve been told more than once that we’re dying. Living, the learn’d astronomer tells us, is nothing but a long and inevitable walk toward our deaths, after all.

Bummer. And do you mind stepping aside, Sir Astronomer, so I can enjoy that starlight, maybe?

Sometimes a poem is a capital-R Romantic chance to strike back at logic and the gloom that leavens it, compliments of the capital-R Realists who take their jobs too seriously. The poet David Budbill took such an opportunity in the following poem.

The First Green of Spring
David Budbill

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

I’ve always enjoyed Budbill’s poetry, chiefly because he is so attuned to nature. The tide has turned against nature poetry (as my rejection inbox attests), but I still think celebrations of simplicity (or should I say, of complex simplicities) are a key reason for poetry.

In the words of the Buddha, focus on today and the world around you. Tomorrow and the much-ado’s about human interactions will take care of themselves.

If you are interested in reading more about David Budbill’s (1940-2016) work, you can leap down this rabbit hole.

Extended Metaphors? Wash and Fold ‘Em.

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laundry

Extended metaphors can be like a marathon, positively breathless to maintain in equal measure, but it’s worth it when you cross the finish line. And really, if your poem isn’t terribly long then your metaphor isn’t terribly extended, so why shy away from them?

For an example of a good “starter” extended metaphor, what about the natural parallels between love and laundry? But of course! We often think of the pair as similar. Or not.

But you will after you read a poet do it. You’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I see the connection. Why didn’t I think of that?” The short answer: Because you’re thinking of your own extended metaphor once you’re done reading this post.

Static
Barton Sutter

Well, Old Flame, the fire’s out.
I miss you most at the laundromat.
Folding sheets is awkward work
Without your help. My nip and tuck
Can’t quite replace your hands,
And I miss that odd square dance
We did. Still, I’m glad to do without
Those gaudy arguments that wore us out.
I’ve gone over them often
They’ve turned grey. You fade and soften
Like the hackles of my favorite winter shirt.
You’ve been a hard habit to break, Old Heart.
When I feel for you beside me in the dark,
The blankets crackle with bright blue sparks.

In this case, the “extended” in Sutter’s metaphor is a sonnet’s length, is all. You can do it, too, in 14 lines or less. Rub your muse against a balloon or something, then touch it with your writing finger and see if there isn’t some static. Creative static extended till the end.

The Tyranny in Novelty

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ferrari

As a writer, it can be liberating to no longer feel the pressure to create something new. You know the voice: “Hey, you. Mr. Writer. It’s been a few days (weeks, months) since you wrote anything new. What kind of writer do you call yourself, anyway?”

A smart one, if you plow more writing time into revision. Writing is revision, they say, yet, too often, we heed the siren call of creating the new instead. It’s flashy and cool like a red sports car. It’s what makes us “writers,” a name easier to assume than live up to.

Compared to the red sports car, constantly revising the old looks like Dad’s Buick. You’re tired of that poem, story, essay, or chapter. You’d prefer not working on it anymore. You crave the sound of screeching wheels and the smell of burning rubber as the new little sports car fishtails once and jumps forward — forward into the future!

Here’s a hint about revision: the need is heralded by any given work’s rejections in the market place. Once it comes home to Daddy five or more times, it becomes a symptom instead of a piece of writing. An object of need.

Think of the market as a physician trying to tell you something: Stop creating new when you’re not quite done with old. Open your myopic eyes. Seek the imperfections that others are clearly seeing.

Revision can be leavened with “new,” too. Try novel ingredients by adding. Note a new look by deleting. Move words and sentences around. Make a sports car of yesterday’s wheels through the gentle art of reconsidering.

Liberate yourself from the tyranny of constant novelty. Think of revision as the color red, then, and — who knows? — maybe it will be read, then accepted by the notoriously negative marketplace.

Vroom-vroom.

Vuong Song

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This week I picked up Ocean Vuong’s new book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s listed as “a novel” on the cover, but you know how genre goes these days. I can say with some confidence that it is not straight-up poetry like Night Sky with Exit Wounds, but I’d peg it more memoir than novel. Call me traditional.

The conceit is a series of letters from a young Vietnamese man to his mother, who cannot read. Proceeding chronologically, it starts when the letter-writer is a young boy in the familiar (to me) city of Hartford. (And how neat to see Franklin Avenue appear on its pages!)

Novel, memoir, hybrid, there’s no denying this is prose. But it is poetic prose, so if you’re hankering for a book of poetry, you should have no problem diving into an ocean of this kind.

For example, here is a paragraph taken from p. 12 in the text:

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the firs snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

If you’re thinking these lovely lines of prose could easily be rearranged into a short stanza of poetry, you’re thinking like me. Whoever thinks of an eye as something god cares about, much less as his “loneliest creation,” is thinking in a novel way. No, wait. A poetic way.

And it’s almost aphoristic when Vuong writes “the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing.” Antithetical wisdom, that.

Then the bit about the other eye, unaware of the first, “just as hungry, as empty.” Nice. And finally, in a concrete example of all this poetic abstraction, his mother opens the door to the first snowfall so his young and hungry eyes can fill their emptiness with wonder.

Two pages later, the end of this chapter features a one-line, one-word paragraph—the word “Look.”

We may be briefly gorgeous here on Earth, but our prose can be gorgeous much, much longer. But don’t take my word for it. Read for yourself.

The Power of Lists

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crow

The humble list poem. It is not to be underestimated. As your cue, writer, consider Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s memorable words, “Let me count the ways.”

That was love, but love isn’t the only thing worth counting. Everything that resonates is fair game. As an example, we have the late Tony Hoagland’s “Example”:

Examples
Tony Hoagland

Aspirin,
crack cocaine,
the poetry of Keats,
Kathleen’s big beautiful face,
and The Communist Manifesto
— these are all pain relievers.

Death from cancer of the mouth
of the tyrant Joseph McCarthy;
the blue crow sliding over the arroyo, cawing;
the baby taking the lima bean from his mouth
and pushing it between the lips of his mother
— these are examples of justice.

The moment when you step away from the party;
the sound of the eighty-foot spruce tree, creaking;
the hour in the waning afternoon
when the attorney stands beside her car,
removes her sunglasses, and looks up at the sky
— these are examples of remembering.

The metaphor that makes you laugh out loud.
The warm breast of the dental hygienist
pressed against your ear
as she leans to get access to your plaque.

The dream in which you find yourself at sea,
at night, with water under you so deep
you weep with fear. And yet the darkness
does not take you into it
— these are examples of fortune.

Let us count the counted: pain relievers, justice, remembering, and fortune. But you can create any category you wish. The key is to list concretes which illustrate your abstractions.

For example, in S1 here, pain relievers become aspirin, crack cocaine, the poetry of Keats, Kathleen’s beautiful face, and The Communist Manifesto. If your list creates odd bedfellows, all the better. Your reader will stop and wonder why or how, and we all know that wondering and readers make for a heady match.

Note, too, how the crow in S2 is blue. A black crow will not do. It is expected, and writers should always respect such inferences on the part of the reader. Press adjectives into duty only when they fly against expectations. Thus, the beauty in “a blue crow sliding over the arroyo, cawing.”

Note, too, imagery, such as “the sound of eighty-foot spruce tree, creaking.”

Note, too, the specificity we can relate to, even if we haven’t personally seen it: “the baby taking the lima bean from his mouth / and pushing it between the lips of his mother.”

And finally, the last item on your list, which assumes a position of power, much like the first Canada goose in a V flying south:

The dream in which you find yourself at sea,
at night, with water under you so deep
you weep with fear. And yet the darkness
does not take you into it

These are examples of your good fortune in reading a list poem that works. Now you write, too.