Ken Craft

718 posts

The Young Woman Inside Her, Dying to Live

essays on poetry poetry

Mary Ruefle is a poet, but like many poets who have reached the Promised Land (a.k.a. “Publication Upon Submission”), she also butters her bread with essays. Her collection called My Private Property is mostly mini-essays. Flash essays? I’m not sure if they have a name yet. I do know this, the lines are double spaced, the font is large, and the page total is 103. (The cost is $25 for the hardcover, or about 25 cents a page.)

Of course, poetic essays are to varying degrees more poetic or more prosaic. With few exceptions, these are short. Here’s an example:

 

PERSONALIA

When I was young, a fortune teller told me that an old woman who wanted to die had accidentally become lodged in my body. Slowly, over time, and taking great care in following esoteric instructions, including lavender baths and the ritual burial of keys in the backyard, I rid myself of her presence. Now I am an old woman who wants to die and lodge inside me is a young woman dying to live; I work on her.

 

Pithy, no? And rewarding in its way, at least to elderly sorts, who can identify with young women and men lodged inside themselves, dying to live. “I work on her” (or “him”) seems to be Solomon-like, too. There’s no choice but to get to work on them, after all.

Also included are a series of untitled shorts on the colors of sadness. I give you the first and most obvious color in the series: Blue.

 

Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips with scissors and then into little pieces by a knife, it is the sadness of reverie and nostalgia: it may be, for example, the memory of a happiness that is now only a memory, it has receded into a niche that cannot be dusted for it is beyond your reach; distinct and dusty, blue sadness lies in your inability to dust it, it is as unreachable as the sky, it is a fact reflecting the sadness of all facts. Blue sadness is that which you wish to forget, but cannot, as when on a bus one suddenly pictures with absolute clarity a ball of dust in a closet, such an odd, unsharable thought that one blushes, a deep rose spreading over the blue fact of sadness, creating a situation that can only be compared to a temple, which exists, but to visit it one would have to travel two thousand miles on snowshoes and by dogsled, five hundred by horseback and another five hundred by boat, with a thousand by rail.

 

Almost a stream of consciousness, these, but they don’t work as well as the titled shorties surrounding them. Still, an exercise in imagining concrete items that “are” metaphoric examples of colors can’t hurt, gray matter-wise. (And yes, gray is included in the series.)

Did I like it as well as her the other essay collection of hers read earlier this year, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures? I did not. But that’s beside the point. When you bother with a book start to finish, the point is to find something you DO like, such as that young man I forgot about — the one lodged inside me, dying to live forever.

 

Making Synecdoche Work For You

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We’ve been looking at a lot of poems that use personification of late. Here’s one that employs the rhetorical device known as synecdoche.

As defined by Mental Floss, a website that cleans the brain, “A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part or component of something is used to represent that whole—like calling a car your ‘wheels,’ the staff of a company the ‘hands,’ or the film industry as a whole ‘Hollywood.’”

In other words, synecdoche is something we use every day. We just don’t know it because we didn’t know the name.

Name? Funny I should say that. Your name is a part of you that becomes you. Think reputation. But the poet Danusha Laméris went one step further. She thought mortality. Names die, after all, as they rise and ultimately fall in popularity. True, some pull the Lazarus act and make comebacks, but when’s the last time you saw a baby named Lazarus? (Another rhetorical device, called “the rhetorical question”).

Let’s see synecdoche at work:

 

Names
Danusha Laméris

What happens to the ones that fall out of favor:
the Dorises and Archibalds,
the Theodores and Eunices?
They all had their day,
once roamed the earth in multitudes
alongside Gerties and Wyatts—
at least one in every classroom.
Names written in neat block print,
scratched into tree bark,
engraved on heart-shaped lockets,
filling the morning paper
with weddings and engagements.
How could they have known
that one-by-one the Constances
and Clydes would disappear,
replaced by Jennifers, Jacobs,
Ashleys and Aidens.
That few would ever dance again,
corsages pinned to their breasts
or hear their names on the radio
whispered in dedication,
or uttered in darkness
by a breathless voice,
or even shouted out in anger—
Seymour!”—
as they grabbed the keys and stormed out the door.
Each name fading quietly from daily life
as though it had never existed,
except for the letters etched into stone,
warmed by the sun
and at night, lit by a crescent moon.

 

Interesting, the way our names “live” beside us only to lie down above us. It’s not the way we think of them, typically. It’s the way a poet thinks of them. It’s why we read poetry.

 

“I Am Naked as a Table Cloth”

poetry poetry books

One of the great things about being a feral poet—one that wouldn’t know M, F, or A if he fell over them—is discovering poets that everyone else in the poetry world (hint: it’s precious small) has known forever. That’s what happened the day I met Frank O’Hara for the first time via his seminal work, Lunch Poems.

When I reviewed the book, I said I read the poems through the hair of my eyebrows. By that I meant I was frowning, not so much in disapproval as in wonder, at what I was reading. This guy was joyfully off the New York wall. Other people told me, with a bit of ennui built over time, “Oh, yes. He’s of the wonderful New York School.” Me, I missed the boat (not to mention the school), growing up a few precincts over in Connecticut.

Anyway, here’s the first poem that hit me that week—the first poem in O’Hara’s collection of Manhattan lunches, written in 1953 before I was me (and I’ve been “me” for a long, long time):

 

“Music” by Frank O’Hara

If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35c, it’s so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
I must tighten my belt.
It’s like a locomotive on the march, the season
of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they’re putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
But no more fountains and no more rain,
and the stores stay open terribly late.

 

Doing a bit of research on O’Hara that day, I saw he died a bizarre death but a few years after the publication of Lunch Poems, getting hit by a beach taxi (whatever that is) on Fire Island and dying at the tender age of 40. Granted, not as bad as Keats dying at 25, but still a loss, considering  what fun might have remained in the non sequiturs-to-be that comprised his poetry.

Since that initial encounter, I’ve employed the time-honored method of choosing poems via a random flipping of pages in the book. Rereading. Un-frowning. Refusing to judge. When it comes to poetry, there’s nothing quite like a “What the–?” rereading to smooth the brow.

The Long and Short of Big and Small Poems

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Unless you are talking haiku or senryū, short poems are scary. When you write them, you reread your work and feel a bit like an Italian grandmother looking at her skinny grandson, all skin and bones. Naturally, you want to put some meat on this weak thing. Feed it pasta and bread. Give it the nourishment of more words.

But sometimes, short poems are just fine, thanks. You just have to trust them. I often arrive at my shortest poems by finally throwing out whole swaths of the larger poem it once was. Lines, stanzas, all deleted in the name of brevity because, paradoxically, what’s left does as much or more.

Brevity, when it works, is a powerful little shot. When it works. Sure, there’s always the danger of readers wanting more. These readers are not content when Hemingway’s iceberg theory is applied to poetry (only show a little, let the reader infer the rest). But you are the ultimate arbiter. This is your skinny grandson, no?

Of course, long poems can be scary, too. “Howl” and “Leaves of Grass” notwithstanding, some readers wade in and start to drown in words. Is all of this necessary, they ask? Does the poet lack discipline?

Some beginning poets shy away from both the long and the short of it. They seek safety in the middle way, and their shortest efforts often begin on a well-trod poetic path — the 14-line realm of the sonnet.

Why, though? Short poems can be fun, and some topics thrive with a brief snapshot of verse. And, for a stream-of-consciousness type work, what better than a long, meandering poem with voice?

As an example of a short poem that gets over the hill on its own, check out the following from Aracelis Girmay. It is called “Ars Poetica,” a popular title meaning “The Art of Poetry” which, thank the Muses, you are as free to define as the next poet.

 

Ars Poetica
Aracelis Girmay

May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.

Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record

of the foot’s silver prayer.
                    I lived once.
                     Thank you.
                    It was here.

The Education of a Poet

poetry poetry books reading poetry writing poetry

I read, and I learn. I may not always like or even USE what I learn, but learning is learning.

For Exhibit A, I give you the rather wonderful book Plainwater by Anne Carson. A mix of poetry and essays, it offers up an incisive creativity that looks at the world in new ways (the job description for every writer, I’d venture).

The 1995 book is divided into five sections (this from the inner flap): “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings, a present-day dialogue with a poet of the seventh century BC; Short Talks, one-minute lectures on topics as diverse as trout and Parmenides; Canicula di Anna, a chronicle of a phenomenology conference conducted in Perugia, Italy; The Life of Towns, verbal photographs that capture the essence of the nearly extinct ‘town’; and The Anthropology of Water, a travelogue of three moments in the journey of a woman’s life.”

While I reveled in each section of the book, it was the poetry of The Life of Towns that taught me something. Something I may never use, yes, but something.

Carson introduces this section with the words, “Towns are the illusion that things hang together somehow, my pear, your winter.”

Well, shoot. You could probably substitute most any word for “Towns” in that sentence and get somewhere, but the pear/winter dichotomy gives you an indication of where Carson’s mind wanders.

What she does in the town poems is capitalize the first word of each line and then end each line with a period. Even if it’s not the end of a sentence. And it usually isn’t. This technique gives the poems a remarkable effect. Let me share a few by way of example:

 

Town of Spring Once Again

“Spring is always like what it used to be.”
Said an old Chinese man.
Rain hissed down the windows.
Longings from a great distance.
Reached us.

 

September Town

One fear is that.
The sound of the cicadas.
Out in the blackness zone is going to crush my head.
Flat as a piece of paper some night then.
I’ll be expected.
To go ahead with normal tasks.
Mending the screen.
Door hiding my.
Brother from the police.

 

Luck Town

Digging a hole.
To bury his child alive.
So that he could buy food for his aged mother.
One day.
A man struck gold.

 

Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

 

Town of the Death of Sin

What is sin?
You asked.
The moon stung past us.
All at once I saw you.
Just drop sin and go.
Black as a wind over the forests.

 

At first, of course, this capital-period, capital period tick-tock annoyed me. Why couldn’t Carson just write it correctly, I wondered? If I wanted to fully appreciate her poems, I had to work for it. But I didn’t want to work. I was the reader, after all. It was the writer’s job to do the heavy lifting, and mine to sit back and enjoy.

But then, not wanting to miss the show, I rolled up my sleeves and set to work. And I do mean work. I slowed down. I back tracked. I lingered word by word. It became a game–one I could win if I gave it the effort.

In short, whether it was her intention or not, Carson had me reading and rereading with care, puzzling her words and sentences together until we came to mutual agreement on each poem’s meaning and worth.

Could there be more to it than that? Perhaps. But I know this: a poet has at his or her disposal more simple tools than we expect to slow spoiled and entitled readers like me down.

And if you don’t.
Believe this.
It’s perfectly.
Fine by.
Me.

Through a Difficult Year Darkly

poetry reading poetry

Gary Snyder. Beatster. Hiker. Buddy to Lowell, Massachusett’s wunderkind, Jack Kerouac. It’s Hump Day, a hopeful day, if any among these election year days with wars going on can be called hopeful anymore, so I figured I’d simply share two of his “seems so simple” poems.

Thing is, a lot of poems—even simple ones—read differently over time. It’s like we’re reading them through a difficult year darkly, to twist the Biblical phrase. Simplicity isn’t so simple. Innocence looks like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Little Red Riding Reader says, “Is there a catch here?”

The first poem is directed at an audience of children. When Snyder wrote it, I mean. Given the circumstances, the poem’s flowery flourish might as well apply to adults nowadays. But that’s if you think lines have been blurred between the ages and a lot of other things. You be the judge.

 

For the Children
Gary Snyder

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

 

And here’s a bonus Snyder. Outdoorsy like many of us these days. I should know. I’ve been outside every day, walking miles, mapping my sanity.

I’ve seen a lot of others out there hoofing it, too. Walking roads and trails. Walking beaches. And walking dogs. I haven’t seen this many dogs on leashes since the last Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

Who says the dog days are only in August? Like everything else, the dark news of too much computer or television time has redrawn the maps. And calendars. And history books.

 

Map
Gary Snyder

A hill, a farm,
A forest, and a valley.
Half a hill plowed, half woods.
A forest valley and a valley field.

Sun passes over;
Two solstices a year
Cow in the pasture
Sometimes deer

A farmhouse built of wood.
A forest built on bones.
The high field, hawks
The low field, crows

Wren in the brambles
Frogs in the creek
Hot in summer
Cold in snow

The woods fade and pass.
The farm goes on.
The farm quits and fails
The woods creep down

Stocks fall you can’t sell corn
Big frost and tree-mice starve
Who wins who cares?
The woods have time.
The farmer has heirs.

 

OK that’s it for today. I’m going out to check the corn. And avoid the news.

The Poetry of Escape

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lawrence

What is it about travel? The urge to move, to discover, to see, is a poem unto itself. A rich vein worth mining.

Often travel is rooted in the psyche. Moving one’s home, restlessly, is a form of travel–only what are we fleeing? What are we seeking? Do we think we will be a new person if we find ourselves among strangers in a strange land? If we do, we forget (or deny) the “setting within.” You can escape place, yes, but you can never escape the topography of self.

All of these questions came to mind in Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage. Though it is ostensibly a book about D.H. Lawrence, it is about most anything but D.H. Lawrence, too. Still, Lawrence shadows the author (who shadows him) throughout and, at the end in Taos, New Mexico, Dyer wonders about Lawrence’s wandering soul:

“At various times Lawrence wondered why he had drifted so far from his inclination to sit tight: ‘What is it, makes one want to go away?’ ‘Why can’t one sit still?’ ‘Why does one create such discomfort for oneself!'”

In search of answers himself, Dyer purchases a discounted copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry at a nearby bookstore and pauses over her poem “Questions of Travel.” It is a moment all readers know well. A moment of synchronicity where we feel we were fated to open a book and read words which transect present preoccupations.

As summer grinds on with all its travel plans, I see new wisdom in Bishop’s poem myself. Dyer’s synchronicity becomes mine, yet another variation of the reader-writer transaction that ripples out to the forever-shores of reading. I especially love Bishop’s comparison of strange lands to a stage (“Is it right to be watching strangers in a play /in this strangest of theaters?”), as if the “real” of distant places is actually the “make-believe” to our foreign eyes–if only because our eyes cannot otherwise make sense of them and feel a need to write our own narratives.

Or maybe we don’t want to make sense of them at all. Maybe travel becomes the essence of escape that way. Thus, the strangers we see in a distant land become storybook cutouts from the distant land of our nostalgic pasts–ones that never really existed and still don’t, only we will them into existence as a panacea for all that hectors us in the hellbent humdrum of our daily lives.

As you read (or reread) Bishop, consider your own restless roots. See if you can find the “why” in yourself, photograph it, maybe, and look at it later, marveling at how different it looks from the perspective of time and experience.

 

“Questions of Travel” by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
–For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
— Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
— A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.

— Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages
— Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.
— And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians’ speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?’

“No Poem Is Ever Ended…”

essays on poetry poetry

I am perversely attracted to philosophy books, but the rewards are few. As a rule, they speak their own language, which runs circles around mine. Straight talkers like Marcus Aurelius are one thing; trying to divine Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger another.

Barring philosophers, a good substitute for musing on the meaning of life has been reading collections of essays by poets. Give me a poet who is equally adept at prose and I am a happy man. Certainly this was true of a slew of Tony Hoagland books. Ditto Jane Hirshfield. And now I can add Mary Ruefle to the list.

Though I don’t know how she pronounces her name (is it “rueful” like a pot of rue?), Mary Ruefle’s poetic collection of speeches slash essays, Madness, Rack, and Honey, is a relaxing and thoughtful exercise in reading, especially if you enjoy embedded quotes.

The drill, then, goes like this: Mary adds quote to essay, Ken highlights and annotates said quote. What more could any writer (her) and reader (me) ask? Here are a few I have noted:

 

“Paul Valéry, the French poet and thinker, once said that no poem is ever ended, that every poem is merely abandoned.”

Comment: Any poet who has read his published poem realizes the truth in this. The itch to improve through revision cannot be satisfied.

 

“Paul Valéry also described his perception of first lines so vividly, and to my mind so accurately, that I have never forgotten it: the opening line of a poem, he said, is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet’s task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall.”

Comment: There you have it. If you have tried but failed to write decent poetry, perhaps you should make like Johnny Appleseed and stop barking up the wrong tree.

 

The least used punctuation in all of poetry, Ruefle asserts, is the semicolon. Some poets think they should be all-out banned from poetry.

Comment: As noted by my faithful readers of these pages before, I oppose any banning of anything: dog poems, poems that use overused words like “dark” and “darkness,” even poems about cicadas (sorry, Sir Billy of Collins, but that rule is fit for fools).

 

Among the last words Emily Dickinson wrote (in a letter): “But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.”

Comment: Those last four words are awesome. I loved them so much, I used them in the final poem (“Coda: Miss Emily Speaks”) of my third poetry collection, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants. BTW, I wonder if Emily D ever considered poetry?

 

Charles Simic once said, “The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.”

Comment: Strange for a man who made his living with words.

 

“Keats said only one thing was necessary to write good poetry: a feeling for light and shade.”

Comment: I like words like these because they are so cryptic. I can fashion one meaning from them, you another. It’s like getting a pencil to trace the exact spot where light ends and shade begins, then returning to find it the next day.

 

“Pablo Neruda warns us: ‘We must not overlook melancholy, the sentimentalism of another age, the perfect impure fruit whose marvels have been cast aside by the mania for pedantry: moonlight, the swan at dusk, ‘my beloved,’ are, beyond question, the elemental and essential matter of poetry. He who would flee from bad taste is riding for a fall.'”

Comment: Neruda creates a rule against rules (good), but isn’t this itself a rule (bad)? I leave you with that conundrum because, if you’re going to bang a drum, you can’t do better than a conundrum, thoughtful and chewy.

Quick Wrights (in the Key of James)

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Sometimes James Wright in Eastern mode is all you need by way of meditative start to your day. Like “Trying to Pray”:

 

Trying to Pray
by James Wright

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women’s hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes, and think of water.

 

Restorative, no? Thinking of good things in the world (which we sometimes forget, especially if we read front pages of newspapers). Thinking of “good” darkness (which we often assume as inherently “bad”). But mostly thinking of women’s hands touching loaves. Simple. Nice. With the powder of flour tracing the wrinkles.

Here’s another quick Wright:

 

In the Cold House
by James Wright

I slept a few minutes ago,
Even though the stove has been out for hours.
I am growing old.
A bird cries in bare elder trees.

 

Very Li Po, that. The nature image at the end, reflecting back on his personal situation as a sleepy man in a cold house. Wonderful metaphor for old age, I think. And somehow, in both cases, good warm-up poems to read before you write your own.

…which I think I’ll do now.

 

 

 

Rogue Poems on the Lam

humor poetry reading poetry

Charles Simic is of the camp that says poems, like characters in a novelist’s work, take on a life of their own minutes after written, quickly declaring independence from the poet-god that breathed life into their lungs.

It’s an expansive, capital-R Romantic notion, the type Dr. Frankenstein could relate to (if you forget, for a minute, that Dr. F’s “poem” was a monster hit with other lessons to teach).

Whether you believe your poems are independent states or not, it’s pretty to think so, and rather amusing, too. As evidence, you need only read Ellie Schoenfeld’s ode to other poets who, thanks to her imagination, take on lives of their own, too (“It’s…a-livvvvve!”).

Originally written in 2009 as part of her collection The Dark Honey: New and Used Poems, Schoenfeld’s poem, an ode to personification if ever there was one, was shared on yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac.

Let’s listen in here and see what poems (and rival poets) do when left to their own devices:

 

The Other Poet
by Ellie Schoenfeld

The poet explains exactly
what her poems are doing on a variety of levels.
I am jealously impressed.
My poems go places
but send no postcards––I have no idea
what they are doing. They do
whatever they want to.
I give them curfews
but they wake me in the middle
of the night, they interrupt meetings
and other situations where I have no time
for them. They hang on me
when I am on the phone.
They do not keep my secrets
and sometimes they lie.
They can be sullen and withdrawn
or explosively obscene.
I think my poems have problems with authority,
conduct disorders, attention deficit.
The other poet is like the parent
with the bumper sticker about their honor student
while I am speeding along
to get to the correctional facility
before visiting hours are over.
I try to give my poems direction.
They tell me they have cleaned their rooms
but we both know it’s not true.
After all these years of therapy
we still don’t understand each other.
I write a poem and think
“What the hell is that?!”

 

Humor is healthy, but humor popping the vitamins of truth can run circles around us. Rhomboids, too.

Still, if you cannot laugh at yourself, at your own obstinate writings, or at the whole danged microcosm called Poetry World (it runs by its own rules of physics, like your rogue poems), what business do you have filling white screens with briefly free verse?

I thought so.