A fear of boredom (what’s the medical term for that?) compels me to try something different every day here: lists; imaginary poems, novels, and essays; little book reviews. We’ll see. I’m currently teaching a poetry seminar in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and maybe that alone will be enough to blog about. For example, I gave a lecture on the tension between voice and craft a day ago. (Let me know if this bores you.) (I love parentheses.) Ever since an epic discussion-disguised-as-debate I had with my friend Renegade, I’ve been thinking about it. He believes there are specific principles to what constitutes a great poem (or work of art). I disagree. “There are many forms of great, many ways to be great,” I told him. “Claiming there’s a set of predetermined principles—that’s too conservative for my tastes,” I said. (Note: you should never call someone named Renegade “conservative.” Nor should you imply another poet is not thinking like an artist. He’s kind of stopped speaking to me because of it.) Yesterday I was listening to a podcast (like blogs they are a form of tedium, that can occasionally be enriching) on Science and the City where V.S. Ramachandran gave a lecture on “Synesthesia and the Universal Principles of Art.” He claimed in the more speculative part of his talk that principles like: peakshifting, grouping and isolation determine how we judge and respond to art. (You’ll have to check it out to get the details: http://www.nyas.org/snc/podcasts.asp.) All very compelling, but for me Renegade and this dude are talking about art from the outside; from the perspective of the gazer/audience; not the artist. Even if it’s misguided the artist needs a healthy sense of individuality to sustain his or her imagination. The “principles of art” might help guide the imagination, but they should not determine it. Shouldn’t we say as much about Craft, the most used word (other than the word “poem”) in poetry workshops everywhere? Craft is a guide not a formula. The elements of craft are how we know we’re reading a poem and not a short story or newspaper piece. Even in prose poems examining the elements of craft (tone especially, but also imagery, metaphor, structure if not form) tell us whether we’re looking at a poem or a prose paragraph. Discussing Craft allows us to break poems into parts: the frequencies of diction and meter, the concrete blocks of imagery, the equations of metaphor. Craft gets at the science and engineering of poetry. It makes poems machines. And though I’m about to tell you poems are not mere machines, I fully acknowledge the value of talking about them this way. Craft gives us a common language, common tools. It also gives the teacher a way to measure and evaluate poems. Evaluation is easier when one sees poems as machines. But if a poem is a machine, it’s an animal too. Depending on your stance: an animal with a machine skeleton (say like Steve Austin, the bionic man) or a machine shell with an animal heart (say like Robocop). I’ll say here, that I think the poem is mostly an animal. We work to tame it, to train it, but ultimately it has a mind of its own. It’s a child we’re raising, a child we birthed and are responsible for, but a child we do not “own.” And if it’s alive (language is alive, right?), we can’t just saw off a leg without ramifications. In fact, if it’s an animal, we accept it even if one leg is shorter than the other. (One of Jesse Owens’ legs was shorter than the other, and look how far and fast it got him.) If the poem is an animal, we are not after perfection (the thing we are after if we view it as a machine), we are after what a parent is after. We are helping the poem discover its dream. Every poem has a dream. Hell, every word has a dream that, as far as I can tell, might best be described as a wish to be useful, indispensable, maybe unique. Renegade wasn’t hearing this. Once he and I argued late into the night (argued until I lost my voice) about whether or not Billie Holiday was a great singer. He said in what I remember now as the voice of Mr. Spock that she might have been a great stylist, but that her singing was never technically correct. Her poor technique had, in fact, ruined her voice, he said. I don’t think Billie Holiday was after “craft” or technique. Maybe this is too romantic, but I think she was after something beyond “craft.” And I’m suggesting that there is something beyond Craft where poetry is concerned too. Has to be. Otherwise a mastery of craft would mean a mastery of the poem. We’d expect a mature poet with control over “the principles of craft” to never write poorly. With the exception of Stanley Kunitz, most poets seem to get worse as they “mature,” not better . . . In the lecture I brought in poems by poets who demonstrated a “mastery” of craft in their first books, but inevitably moved beyond craft to something else. Amiri Baraka is an easy example. The poems in 1961’s Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note show that he obviously knows (or knew) “the rules.” The first five lines of the title poem: Poems are bullshit unless they are Which is better depends on your tastes, I suppose. I tried to tell Renegade I was less interested in good/great vs. bad than in the relationship between craft and voice; tangible and intangible. One of the reasons we don’t talk much about voice is its slippery, atmospheric quality. It’s a close cousin to Tone, which is maybe the most difficult of the craft elements to teach. Tone and Voice are matters of sensibility. You can’t teach sensibility can you? Maybe sensibility can only be shaped/filtered through craft: sometimes enlarged by it, sometimes obscured. (I love the word “maybe” only slightly more than I love the word “perhaps.”) Tell me how you’d define Voice in poetry? Tell me in a way that would make it useful to students. Tell me in a way that would convince Renegade. Maybe we don’t even have a good definition of craft yet. I’d vote for adding “culture” as an element, for example. Where would you discuss the influences of race, class and gender on theme and language if not in a discussion of craft? Including culture as an element helps me argue for the poems Baraka has been writing since Black Art as poems, not polemics with line breaks. His infamous poem “Somebody Blew Up America” makes use of all kinds of figures of speech—especially irony (“Who the richest / Who say you ugly and they the good lookingest.”) even if ultimately those elements are funneled toward a particular (polemical) intention. Intention is, perhaps closer to function than craft because it involves a poem’s purpose; it involves how the writer intends the poem to “function” for readers. (Perhaps craft should/does help one discover function and intention.) “Somebody Blew Up America” is a bad poem, for me because it lacks consistency of craft/design, not because it lacks craft. It possesses a clear Voice (Baraka Persona), but the articulation (construction) of Voice is not necessarily independent of craft. It’s a matter of which comes first, maybe. At what point does craft (the principles of poetry) give way to voice (the sensibilities of imagination)? And visa versa: when does/should the imagination (Voice) give way to the principles (craft) that guide a reader through the poem? (Say, maybe its called “craft” because it’s what transport the language . . .) I’m thinking of folk like Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, and Lucille Clifton. Aren’t their best poems the ones that “match the rhythms of their strides”—to adapt a Wally Stevens line? Shouldn’t we be wary of any “principles” that flatten or normalize those rhythms? Shrug. I could go on, but what would I have to talk about tomorrow. I’m gonna call Renegade soon. Sooner or later . . .
First off, sorry about that long ass blog yesterday. Performance Anxiety. I plan to write less and less each day. Maybe just my name by the end of the week. I jerked upright in bed somewhere around 6 a.m. today and blurted: “Chuck Norris!” to an empty room in an empty house. Maybe I thought someone was lurking about. All day I’ve been troubling myself with why it was Chuck Norris (and not Bruce Lee or Jim Kelly). He's a Republican, I think. And with each year more and more strange looking. An image of Chuck Norris decapitating (dechoppitating?) a bad guy’s head is among my earliest memories of drive-in movie nights with my parents. I assume my parents took me with them to see such things because they thought I’d forget them. They were partly right. I only remembered enough to constitute occasional nightmares; enough to constitute a world- view that is mostly dream. Do you too believe surrealism is often more real than realism? What was Plato thinking to distrust “reality” in the hands of artists? I ask because I bought Anne Carson's Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan (Princeton University Press, 1999) along with me to Lewisburg. It's a terrific book. A mix of classics, history lesson, and philosophy, which I realize describes lots of her work. She shows us how poems are the most polymorphous/polytypic of literary forms: they can be or blend the techniques of journalism, fiction, theatre, cinema, manuals, on and on. (Where are the science fiction poems: Automatons, cone-shaped rockets, women with three eyes and men with none?). In a section called APATE (the art of deception) she says Plato “deplored poetry all the way back to Homer, [because] it cut words free from any obligation to reality." This may be a simplified translation of Plato (simplified by my hands not Caron’s, no doubt), but I’m drawn to questions of reality versus deception in art. Elsewhere in the chapter she says Gorgias, the sophist, believed the word that tricks you is more just than the word that does not. “Teachers like Gorgias and Protagoras alleged that the proper activity of words is not to describe but to deceive.” I said as an aside yesterday that there is a relationship between craft and function. A few questions: Does the political poet place function beside craft, if not before it? Is poetry directly engaged in political discourse deceptive? Are poems about personal subjects (family, gardens, sunsets) “benevolent” deceptions? Baldwin said something like art is that which reveals the questions hidden by the answers, so I figured I’d just ask, not attempt to answer. (Can a question deceive?) I want to believe it’s only “deception” when the artist lacks morality. Is all true/great/enduring art moral art? You ask “What do I mean by morality?” and I ask “What does Plato mean by “Reality?” Is Reality (which is not the same thing as Science) more subjective than Morality (which is not the same thing as Religion)? These are questions worth wrestling with—maybe just outside the door of poetry. Really, reading Anne Carson (and this writer Rebecca Solnit. Check out Wanderlust and A Field Guide to Getting Lost), I am overcome with the wish to weave such questions into the fabric of a poem. Poems can hold anything. I also want to poke Plato in the eye and cut the imagination free of any obligations to reality. Hell, reality makes me want to do it! And yet, I know catchphrases like “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” “War on Terror,” “Commander and Chief,” “Home of the Free” magnify the problems with “cutting words free.” Are politicians the poets Plato was thinking of? The word that tricks you is not always just, Gorgias. Language is deceptive, yes. It is only occasionally a Deception. Here’s Stephen Colbert twisting the twisted in on itself at a Knox College commencement address. A deceptive deception: And when you enter the workforce, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-porous borders. Now I know you're all going to say, “Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America.” Yes, but here's the thing—it's built now. I think it was finished in the mid-‘70s sometime. At this point it's a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spanish, the next thing you know, they'll be translating the Bible. God wrote it in English for a reason! So it could be taught in our public schools. I’m out like Chuck Norris.
What does the Internet and its boundless resources mean to the poet compelled to turn information into imagery and ideas? Maybe this could describe all poets. Surely someone somewhere has discussed this question once or twice. Last fall when my poet-wife entered a Library Science masters program (in part to get away from the goo attached to living as a poet and teacher of poetry), one of our first discussions/debates concerned what the Internet meant for the library. I argued that the library was on its way to becoming a kind of museum; that its role as a locus for information was being replaced by the Internet. She disagreed, not only because of the class presumptions I was making (not everyone can afford computers and Internet), but because I had no idea what was going on in today’s libraries. I was/am mostly at the keyboard. True, true, but I’m on a tangent here. (Plus I lost the debate.) I find the kinds of information online both overwhelming and endlessly interesting. Today when a student read a poem framed by a fairly obscure religious reference, another student admitted to using Wikipedia to learn about it. I and half the class chimed “Ahh, Wikipedia,” while the other half stared blankly. [Commercial break: Students invariably ask how important it is to know all of a poem’s references and allusions. My response: one can admire/appreciate a portrait (for its brushstroke, composition, color, etc) without knowing who the subject of the painting is. If the painting is no good, knowing who the subject is doesn’t make it better; if it is good, knowing the subject enriches the experience.] Maybe the ease of research in the age of Google means everyone should be informed. Everyone should know everything. This reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s 1978 essay: “The Little Man in Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience,” which says the nature of America is such that there will always be someone in the room who knows more about your subject than you. Remember the bar scene in Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon’s character (janitor, genius incognito) corrects and thoroughly embarrasses some smug Harvard PhD student about an obscure theory of economics? Well, all through that movie, Damon is playing the little man (albeit a romanticized version of the little man, because I can’t believe a “genius” who looked like Matt Damon would ever be a janitor). Knowing Mr. Joel Dias-Porter (aka DJ Renegade) I have no trouble believing the idea of the little man. Ellison says the little man is an inescapable figure because he (or she) is a product of “America’s social mobility, its universal education, and its relative freedom of cultural information.” Though I can’t get with the holey optimism of “social mobility” and “universal education” (Ellison must have had his eyes closed when he said it), it’s not hard to believe “cultural information” is freer than ever. (I can hear my wife saying my eyes are closed too.) Will the Internet proliferate little men and women, America becoming one big Chehaw Station? I hope so. A student trying to get on my good side today suggested I was some sort of intellectual. I’m no intellectual. Just a nosey bean with a mild obsessive-compulsive disorder and access to the Internet. How to be as smart if not smarter than Terrance in eight easy steps*: 1. Wikipedia: a cooperative free-content encyclopedia at http://www.wikipedia.org/. 1,176,523 articles and counting. 2. Science and the City (http://www.nyas.org/snc/podcasts.asp.), where you’ll find podcasts featuring interviews, conversations, and lectures by noted scientists and authors. 3. David Byrne (http://journal.davidbyrne.com/). Visiting this site will also make you as smart or smarter than David Byrne. 4. http://phrontistery.info/index.html. From the site: “If you're looking for an online dictionary, a word list on a given topic, or the definitions to rare and unusual words, the Phrontistery is for you.” There is a 15,500-word dictionary of obscure and rare words. 5. Ron Silliman’s blog at http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/ It exceeded 750,000 visitors this week and is as compelling for Silliman’s ideas as it is for the poets, wannabe poets, sycophants, and weirdoes who respond to his posts. Plus you will be a hit at the next Language Poets Party or Charles Olson Fan club meeting. 6. http://www.slate.com/: today’s papers: A daily summary of what’s in major US newspapers. The contrasts in headlines covering the same information is often unsettling. Example: the New York Times says: "BUSH TAKES STEPS TO EASE INCREASE IN ENERGY PRICES" where the USA Today says: "EFFECT OF GAS PLAN MAY BE LIMITED" and the LA Times says: "BUSH'S PROPOSALS VIEWED AS DROP IN THE OIL BUCKET." 7. Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net/). Simply described as “a directory of wonderful things.” From today’s page: “How to turn a $60 Linksys router into a $600 super-router”; a video of a shredding machine violently “deconstructing” a BMW; a World Cup played by ants; everything you ever wanted to know about Victorian London. 8. Step 8 will remain undisclosed, Sucka. * Results may vary.
“You may not like my stuff, I’m kind of a nature poet,” a student said at the beginning of our conference today. I instantly wondered which of my anti-nature poems she’d been reading. “A good poem is a good poem,” I said even as I wondered who decides the “kind” of poet we are to be? The poet Bob Wrigley lives in rural Idaho (all of Idaho is rural) and often writes about animals. His book titles, for example, include: Lives of the Animals and Reign of Snakes. And the big clue: in his author photos he’s often outside!! Still, I knew I’d made a mistake calling him “a nature poet” to his face once. I backtracked: “Oh yes, there’s a lot of other stuff in your poems, my bad.” Fitting Wrigley on the Nature shelf is as problematic as fitting me on the—actually I don’t know the name of my shelf . . . Can the poet claim a style and still claim to resist categorization? Should a poet bother claiming a style? (No.) If categories are unavoidable, does it make more sense to categorize the style of the poem and not the style of poet? Writing nature poems does not make one a nature poet, just as a poet who experiments is not necessarily experimental. It makes sense that a poet would resist these labels, if only because they imply one’s approach to poetry is fixed. The wish to categorize may be an inherent part of reading and comprehension. Maybe it’s bound to a wish for clarity—a clear sense of order (organization/direction). More often than not categories lead to presumptions. The easiest example would be the problems in reading a lyric poem as if it were a narrative poem. Since a poem rarely announces itself as narrative or lyric, a reader can be forgiven for making certain assumptions before entering a poem. But to exit a poem with the same assumptions, is obviously a fairly limited engagement. What seems to be an effort to comprehend is often an effort to impose a narrow meaning or to strip meaning away. I’m thinking about the dynamics of the typical workshop of course, but I’m also thinking about the broader implications of a fixed “standard of excellence” in art. Such an illusion of good and bad allows a reader to insist the problems are always with the poem and not, at least to some degree, with how the reader has read the poem. It is like listening to Bach and saying it’s bad because it has no rap or guitars. Obviously as a different style of music, it requires a different set of criteria. The way we judge a “nature poem” should not be the way we judge what I’ve heard called an “urban poem.” (Did you know “urban” replaced “inner city” which replaced “ghetto” which replaced “black”?) I’d argue that even the criteria specific to a “performance poem” differ from the criteria specific to a “spoken word” poem. Of course such an array of styles means a reader is expected to constantly shift and mix perspectives. Not just from style to style, but poem to poem. That’s a good thing. Jay-z has been mixed with the Beatles; Biggie Smalls has been mixed with Frank Sinatra—it is possible to value two very different things at once. No reader should want a poet to be one thing. No poet should want to be one thing; to have one style. This is why we’re looking for the “urban nature poem” (I think Major Jackson’s Urban Renewal poems come closest to such a thing). And we’re looking for the child of Gertrude Stein and Billy Collins; the child of Lucille Clifton and Wallace Stevens. Imagine those children. Imagine their poems.
Sometimes just after two writers meet and sometimes just before they separate the question, “What are you reading?” enters the conversation. In my imaginary city all people greet and depart in this way. Trying to make you fall in love in 5-6 lines . . . * Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? You best know this one, but if you’re just learning to read: Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” * I love this body, this solo & ragtime jubilee behind the left nipple, because I know I was born to wear out at least one hundred angels. From Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Anodyne.” Let it burn a trail across your scalp. * Love is a word, another kind of open— As the diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth's inside now take my word for jewel in the open light. From Audre Lorde’s “Coal.” Four lines, but what more do you need? * Sometimes I like to think about the people I hate. I take my room at the Hate Hotel, and I sit and flip through the heavy pages of the photographs, the rogue's gallery of the faces I loathe. My lamp of resentment sputters twice, then comes on strong, From Tony Hoagland’s “Hate Hotel.” Had there been time we might have talk about Hoagland’s PERSONA poem “The Change.” * From “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. Everything begins with a Yes, said Clarice Lispector. * |
|
||||||
|
POETRY TOOL Search for poems by poet, title, theme, and occasion. Also, articles, audio, and works for children. 
|
|
E-MAIL SIGN-UP News, updates, events, and media releases by e-mail.
|