Revision and Reading

I've been working on revisions in earnest today. I am in the midst of drafting a ten-part poem, in conjunction with a ten-week workshop I signed on to participate in this spring. So it's helpful to counterbalance the new with the familiar.

Also, trying to read even more . . . lately I've been drawn to Charles Harper Webb (someone I don't know) and back to Reginald Shepherd (someone I have read over the years). There are so many poets whose work I only glancingly know.

Jason Shinder's Pending Posthumous Collection

On his blog, Mark Doty offered up a poem from Shinder's last collection.

I am particularly partial to another of Shinder's late poems, which I feel is filled the power and energy that we spend a lifetime tamping down. We all would do well to let it rip, while we are able. 

On Poetic Greatness - D. Orr in NY Times

Want to start a row amongst a bunch of word nerds? This piece by David Orr in the NY Times could be your catalyst.

That the parameters for greatness in poetry are more subjective than in many other endeavors is (perhaps) the one thing we can all agree on.

Orr contrasts Robert Lowell, who he cites as a less-talented but more ambitious poet, with Elizabeth Bishop, who wrote relatively few poems but labored over each meticulously.  And he declares that Bishop is now considered closer to greatness. 

Let Round One begin.

I like Orr's jab at the tendency to swoon over the amazingness of poets from beyond the U.S.A.'s borders. I can think of one young female poet who seems a current manifestation.

Ultimately, what any poet or artist can do is to write, to paint, to compose, to sing, etc. What's great about anything that results from these efforts will sort itself out (and probably change with time and new generations). 

Challenging ourselves as poets to write well . . . to not fall into repetitiveness or tediousness . . . is the crucial element for creating a body of work that might seem great to someone someday.

 

On the Posting of Revisions

My brother, Walt, suggested it might be interesting to use the blog as a tool for posting revisions to initial drafts I've composed on the blog. I am still experimenting with the use of the blog as a catalyst for creating drafts. Over the past month I've tended not to use it for creating initial drafts (back to using pen, paper, and/or computer files) . . . with the exception of my thoughts on the inauguration . . . captured in the form of a short poem.  

This afternoon I pulled up a copy of an initial draft I composed on the blog on Christmas Day. I find that I can look at new efforts for the first time after about a month. I still haven't got enough distance to revise them objectively (and harshly) enough, but I can start at that process. 

For whatever unclear reason, I've decided to put this initial revision on the blog. 

Messiah Matters

Rooms along the street 
filled with evergreen fragrance
temporary as youth. Promise
day: promised hope 
to celebrate, 
appreciate. The day marks 
another rung to hold the foot on 
before waking 
to a new neighborhood 
of descent. We carve away
the pink flesh from a pig's bone, 
while the more au courant 
bless tofurkey 
to evolution's halting struggle. 

Over prayers, it's strange
to recall that the Argentine air force
would fly drugged innocents 
over the Atlantic, strip them
to skin and toss
them into the blue.
Words welded into weapons,
the military turned every nuance
black and claimed it beauty.
Such a litany, a liturgy
for the redemptive urge
of paranoia. Junior officers
pardoned years later, to walk
the streets with mothers searching
shop windows for children's reflections.
Wouldn't we be shocked 

to find a trench coat and unmarked
van outside the front door?
The whirlwind hovers
in history's porous murk, ready
to snuff civility's lantern.
In the minds of disgruntled cousins,
a mantra regains voice . . . break
the necks necessary
to restore the balance that others
hoard in their vaults
and mansions. Here comes
a new year. Maybe harmony
will bubble forth, all judgments
postponed, salvation's broken tire
patched, and the journey turned
into just the adventure 
each child senses 
living might become. 

Neil Young: Advice to Artists

In this interview, Neil Young is asked if he's interested in reaching out to new fans, and his answer seems to me to be the essential advice that every artist should bear in mind: "I'm always interested in reaching out to anyone who wants to listen, but really I'm doing it for myself."

"So it's really been coincidence. I'd have a big hit record and then I'd have what some people would say 'it flopped, miserable, terrible record' . . . and I'm going what a great record that was. I really liked it because it's going against the grain, it's got an individual thing, and it's not trying to be anything other than what it's doing."

I'm always intrigued by poets who say they write for an audience. I know we all do. Though for most of us the primary (and often only) audience we have is ourselves. 

Write things you enjoy, make them as well-crafted as possible, and have fun revising and revisiting your poems . . . in the process someone else may stumble upon and enjoy them, too. 

Let's see if I can heed my own advice.

On a Wonderful Remembrance of Jason Shinder

I just received the NY Times alert on Poetry, via email, and among the articles and reviews is a beautiful remembrance of Jason Shinder by Melanie Thernstrom.

While I didn't know Jason, a good friend of mine did. 

My friend and I were both taken aback by the power, by the intensity and integrity of the emotions evident in Jason's published poems after he became terminally ill. 

I don't know that Jason found his subject to be death per se . . . so much as his recognition of death coming gave him the power to cut the chains that bound his artistic spirit. 

The poems shared to date have the same intensity as Plath's last works . . . a bare knuckled brawl with the demons and issues that most matter.

I look forward to the final collection that Jason's friends (Sophie Cabot Black, Marie Howe, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Tony Hoagland) are editing. On the one hand, I am sure it will make us wish he'd lived longer, to give us more of these highly charged poems . . . on the other hand, it will be a wonderful testament to a poet who let his gifts soar through the final days he was allowed to experience.

Robert Wrigley . . . Talking Sense (To Me)

I remember the first time I read a Robert Wrigley poem. I was amazed to find a poet working with narrative. In almost all of Wrigley's poems something happens. A story's revealed in the context of a poem. 

Not a lot of poets are interested in narrative, it seems to me. The lyric remains predominant. I'm not necessarily bemoaning this, but it's what makes someone capable as Wrigley is with narrative poems that much more intriguing. 

In an interview that Poetry Daily has from Sou'wester on its site, Wrigley also makes a case for the role of the line in poetry. The line often gets ignored. I've heard a number of wise practitioners argue that lines are to be read through, that they are in essence unimportant to the poem.

Wrigley's emphatic: "Either the lines matter or the poem doesn't. More specifically, I can say this: The line must have integrity. It must have a life of its own. The line must say something within and beyond the sentence of which it is or may be a part. The line must be integral, not just another course of bricks, another piece of lapped siding."

I concur. I'm not sure that I practice this very effectively, but I do think that lines are critical elements to a poem's success. 

And from what do effective lines arise? Wrigley offers the following, "First comes music. The sound of things. One word, one sound may bring on another word, and thus a concept, a direction, entirely unforeseen by the poet, who trusts that the ear never lies, that hearing is believing."

I've been considering the idea of the imaginative, the poetic ear that each poet spends such effort to coax and nurture. From this place comes what makes effective poems possibly transcendent: passion. Wrigley speaks to the passion he finds in Plath, which transmutes to energy for the reader . . . which perhaps allows the poem to translate something essential and universal that's buried within each of us.

A Bit of Wisdom from Our Poet Laureate

My brother, Walter, sent me a link to an article on Kay Ryan, from the Christian Science Monitor in 2004. There's much to glean from this brief piece, but the best bit in my opinion is at the end.

Ms. Ryan offers a bit of advice, a bit of perspective, a bit of inspiration, when she observes, "If there is a [literary] game of sorts, you can win by staying home and doing the writing. Good work can make its way in this culture."

Advice I intend to heed on this snowy Sunday.

The World Has Gone White Tonight

Snow

The world in this place has gone 

white tonight. The waves 

on the Atlantic have given

themselves to the Arctic pulse 

that's infused our section of coast. 

Crystalline confection, lifted 

on the currents that sort themselves

around the city's towers. Finding

a brick surface, the reticent grass . . .

the frozen breath expanding 

across the lagoon's shallows.    

Even the sky has lost 

its ambition. Let the city sleep

in heaven's pale mystery, quiet 

beneath the gown, until morning.

  

Pre-Dawn Analysis and Rambling

Awake at 4 AM. Is this an odd luxury as a result of a 4 day weekend? Certainly. 

I hope that the guards at the gates to my rational self doze off before I do. It feels like there is potential circling around and even through me. Will it manifest in keystrokes? 

Perhaps. 

I've spent a lot of time with my poems so far this weekend, and the general sense that I get is that I need some breakthrough. Perhaps exhaustion can be the catalyst.

I think it's evident (even to me) that I am not blessed with innate genius. The poems I've written seem to have no merit by any objective standards (e.g., editors or readers who find them worth reading). Over all the years, I've grown to accept this verdict with varying degrees of aplomb.  

Still, I wish to write poems that are good poems. 

I have some that I personally like. And that seems worth something. 

It seems likely that I will continue to be my only audience . . . and I seem lately to be a more discriminating and cantankerous audience, which is hard on the poet (me). 

It appears fatigue has got me chasing my tail now . . . when my artistic show appears destined to feature me as writer, reader, and critic, it's time to draw the curtain. 

I'll be back at it again, after some sleep. That's the one certainty when it comes to my poetry. 

Boom-Boom-Boom

Outside my building there's a Godzilla-size jackhammer demolishing one of the entrances to the Copley T station. The city's amenable hum typically is disturbed by drunken youth at this hour of the night . . . wandering the alley below my window, pissing on the trash dumpsters, dropping bottles, proclaiming their alpha-maleness. They and other random noises generated in the melee that's a 21st century urban center can annoy, but nothing akin to what this 20 beats per minute pulverizing has achieved this evening. 

Fortunately there must be a rule requiring the work to knock off at 11 PM. The top of the hour's passed and now I just have the radiator hissing and some voices in the distance to distract me. With some luck, Chloe (the small white ruffian who lives next door) will not decide to fill the void of relative quiet with barking. I've got poems to revise before bed. Now that the metronome beating concrete has subsided, we'll see if I can avoid any other self-imposed distractions. 

Rejection Rant (On Advice to Pare Back Rhythm)

Okay, I will admit that I am possibly a couple thousand hours of practice short of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hour Plane of Artistic Achievement goal. On the other hand, since I haven't been keeping track, I may be well beyond the magic mark. Wherever I may be on this continuum, I am still mired in the great dark sea of rejection that most writers swim in like some kind of artistic purgatory . . . only occasionally spotting a light on the horizon that could be a ship steaming toward the promised land of Publication Acceptance.

That light usually turns out to be a note of encouragement scrawled on a form rejection slip. But, hey, it's a light . . . and I am usually thrilled to get a glimpse.

Not today, so much, however.

I've submitted work to a certain journal off and on over the last half-dozen years. I received a nice note once and a standard form rejection another time (apparently someone forgot to turn the light on!). Today, after four months waiting, I received my latest submission back in the mail . . . the prodigal offspring of my imagination returned for recycling.

I bear no ill-feelings over the editors' decision. I understand how many of us are swimming around and hurling submissions (which must at times seem like endless crates of stinking fish) at overwhelmed editors. And I truly appreciate the time and interest an editor takes to jot any personal words on the literally countless rejection slips sent out each year. It means a lot.

So I was flattered and humbled that one of the editors jotted that  they're " . . . honored you keep giving us a chance." What a wonderful thing to say to a half-drowned poet. 

The note went on to proclaim my poems "well crafted, but need more edge . . ." Okay, that's helpful criticism. I can target this journal with some of my edgier efforts next time. 

But, it was the closing comment that put me in mind to raise the window and step out into the freezing cold on my fire escape and yell into the night, What the f*** are you talking about?

" . . . some said, less insistent rhythm?"  Wow! 

Seriously? Poetry should be less rhythmic? That the particular editor who penned the note ended this comment with a question mark gives me hope that he or she also didn't quite know what to make of this advice. I simply could not disagree with such advice more. 

It troubles me that this fine journal has editorial staff that may think unrhythmical poetry is better poetry. I've worked too many years to develop my ear to ever go back to my early days, when the music was off-key or missing in many of my poems. 

 I don't think I can send more work to this journal. For I don't think I can strip out what rhythm I've managed to coax from the language in my poetry.  I'm disheartened that an editor is out there who thinks doing so would make my efforts more worthy of sharing with readers. 

Dilbert's Creator Miraculously Healed By Poetry

Poetry is good for what ails us

Saving Private Ryan vs. Blade Runner

With Veteran's Day (and Memorial Day) comes the Battle of the War Movies, fought on the ever-expanding battlefield of cable and satellite TV. I'm not complaining. As a child growing up in the Cold War era, I was fascinated by everything to do with the hot war that was WWII. There was a time when I knew every episode of the series "Combat." I remember "Von Ryan's Express" at the drive-in; the bug-smeared windshield fading away before harrowing train chases. "The Longest Day" and "Patton," both seen with my grandfather at the decrepit Edison Theater in Ft. Myers. When Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks revived the epic war movie with "Saving Private Ryan," I was in the line to be among the first to see it, and I continue to subscribe to HBO in tribute and gratitude for "Band Of Brothers" (and a different type of war series, "The Wire").

Thus, when a friend of mine who had never seen "Saving Private Ryan" happened to be sitting beside me on Monday evening when the channel-surfing lottery wheel stopped on TNT and found Capt. Miller (Tom Hanks) and his squad coming upon a German artillery outpost, I was unrestrained in my enthusiastic endorsement: "You have got to watch this!"

Of course, the problem with commercial television is that they show commercials. Inevitably, one eventually arrived, and we were off surfing again for something to entertain us during that 240 or so seconds of advertising. We found another film in mid-stream that my friend had never seen all the way through, "Blade Runner: The Final Cut."

Now we had a dilemma. How to choose which war to follow? Ultimately we melded the two into one odd viewing experience, and my friend has still not seen either film in its entirety. But that's probably okay . . . it's a little like dipping into a book of poems where you find a number of pieces that you enjoy, but you don't ever get around to reading through the collection front to back in its entirety.

Beyond the example we represented of the modern television viewer's incessant impatience, watching pieces of these two movies made me wonder at my fascination with cinematic representations of war. It may be a gender bias . . . something primal to do with testosterone and territoriality. In fact, that seems most likely. I can see myself much more as the terrified interpreter, Upham, in "Saving Private Ryan" than any of the Mamet-type manly warriors who fought brutally and bravely against their German counterparts.

Though it occurs to me that humans of both genders (and our animal colleagues) have this fighting instinct deeply wired into our essential selves. Darwin defined the game's setup. Each generation that comes along simply takes up its position somewhere on the game board, and then fights like hell to defend it. We want to win. Why?

The answer to that has to be a subject for another entry (or two). But it's a really interesting question, and its answer depends a lot on how one defines winning. What's it mean to win, when we all eventually die . . . both winners and losers? Winning may be mostly about postponing dying, and ensuring that extra time is spent with greater allocations of pleasurable experiences than the losers get. Or maybe the game is being fought in shadow lands (to borrow from C. S. Lewis) or in shadows against a cave wall (thanks Plato). No matter, we sure seem to be fascinated by playing, and watching . . . especially when we can step back and watch great actors and cinematographers show us replays!

Commuting Poets

Are poets lonely creatures, or are they gregarious extroverts? Is a performance poet more the latter than the poet who writes to publish? I traveled on a train today, across the aisle from another Boston poet, who might've been a carnival organizer or a nightclub hostess in a prior incarnation. He's published work, but he seems to be stimulated most by performing . . . particularly in his role as emcee of a local reading series

I see this fellow occasionally on this particular train, and, while I know who he is, he hasn't any idea that I am a fellow poet. Awhile back I even wrote "Poet's Commute," about our coincidental journeys. He always talks to the person who plops into the seat beside him. And, so, this morning I made certain to sit across the aisle in a seat beside the far window. As there was no one else nearby (I suppose), my fellow poet attempted to engage me in conversation. He asked if I knew whether or not the Pats had won yesterday, which I confirmed they had. He wondered who they had beaten. I wasn't sure, but then recalled that it was the Bills from Buffalo. He moved on to the Celtics next, and, yes, I knew they'd won yesterday as well . . . against the Pistons. 

Now, if I were not of the lonely poet tribe, I might have introduced myself. I'm certain we'd have had a fine conversation on things to do with poetry. And I could benefit by networking with other poets. Instead, I cut the budding conversation off like a gardener who doesn't really trust flowers. I tugged my headphones on, got the music going, and opened my journal to see if I'd gained any new ideas overnight on how to bring the draft of a poem to a reasonable conclusion.  

And, throughout our ride, I felt a slight gnaw of regret that I am unwilling to be more sociable. Poetry writing is a self-reflective pursuit. It might be pleasant to know another poet, who happens to commute on the same line as I do. We could be like the bankers from State Street who I also see sometimes . . . discussing LIBOR and financial options . . . the way we might discuss enjambment and metrical strategies, or even whether Doc Rivers should work Gabe Pruitt into the rotation in more games.

Dickinson vs. Graffiti

To make a prairie                                 

it takes a clover                                        

and one bee,  

One clover,                          

and a bee,

And revery, 

The revery alone

will do,

If bees are few.

The juxtaposition of Emily's poem with the modern shout-out art below might seem too contrived if created in a piece of prose . . . but in Amsterdam so many things that seem fantastic to the imagination can be found incarnate.