Dear Poetry: Advice on Inhuman Mechanicity and Writing with Emotions

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i find emotions a huge problem, and the idea of writing poems because they give me pleasure at odds with wanting to develop as a person-writer through poetry – should i be developing better pragmatism towards writing and if so how would i do that? do poets ever talk about their inability to write a poem?

Feeling pleasure is a legitimate way of developing as a person-writer! Unless your pleasure is somehow at the expense of others, or of art, or if you feel displeasure in the poems themselves.

I think “writing poems because they give me pleasure” is relatively pragmatic. I’ve heard many poets envy others who seem to take more pleasure in the process of writing itself; it lets them (in the fantasies of the poets who express this envy, at least) defer the anxiety to a later stage of the writing process.

Be pragmatic; I think it will reassure you to be so. If pleasure helps you write, make use of it, but just as a tool for the production of drafts; ignore that pleasure once you have something to work with. After that, you need a reader: someone who will give you specific, non-stressful reactions (someone who writes “this part gave me all the feel” or “this line is great! write more like it!” not someone who writes “the universality of the elmwood's beauty is rendered too banal by its proximity to reflections on your father”).

This is my most generic poetry advice: let yourself write, and find someone to share the work with as you write it. Your last question, I mean, implies that you don't have many poets to talk to, since as far as I can tell, poets talk constantly about “inability to write.”

Anne Boyer’s “Not Writing” is one great poem about writing / not writing:

I am not writing "Leaving the Atocha Station" by Anne Boyer and certainly not writing  "Nadja" by Anne Boyer though would like to write "Debt" by  Anne Boyer  though  am  not  writing also "The  German Ideology" by Anne  Boyer and not writing a screenplay called "Sparticists."

I’m still worried that you might believe emotions should be left out of poetry, though.

In an interview last year, Morgan Parker talked how her desire not “to leave any emotional stone unturned,” as something “exhausting and exhaustive,” and as necessary, especially “to tell [her] own story in [her] own language.” “As a black American woman,” she writes, “I know that that if I don’t, someone else will tell it for me and probably leave out the best parts.”

I don’t think you want to be told to turn over your emotional stones, but I think Parker’s interview clarifies how “wanting to develop as a person-writer through poetry” can’t be opposed to emotions.

Parker also has an advice poem about the need to put some “emotions” at bay. In “If You Are Over Staying Woke,” the speaker offers a list of instructions for what to do when you can’t read any more news of racist violence. That “you” is not white people, who the poem suggests don’t need advice to learn to “Keep an/empty mind” to avoid the news:

Water
the plants. Drink
plenty of water.
Don’t hear
the news. Get
bored. Complain
about the weather.
Keep a corkscrew
in your purse.
Swipe right
sometimes.
Don’t smile
unless you want
to. Sleep in.
Don’t see the news.
Remember what
the world is like
for white people.

By listing strategies for avoidance, the poem winds up closer to the feelings its title claims it’s putting off; as it keeps going, the instructions change. No longer looking away, now: “Write the news/Turn/into water.” Instead of watering the hydrangeas (instead of hyacinths), the addressee is told to “White” them. By the end, the news is here—

funeral
funeral

—whether it’s read or written. The funeral comes, twice, despite the weather, the water, the hangover, the sleeping in.

You might try writing instructions for how to “be pragmatic,” how to avoid the emotions that seem like a problem to you; perhaps, in that way, you’ll get to the emotions themselves. But if you don’t want to write right now—if you’d prefer to eschew the pleasure of writing altogether—that’s always a good opportunity to read instead. Read Parker’s Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night.

In Robert Duncan’s “The Homosexual in Society,” he writes, “in the face of the ‘crime’ of my own feelings, in the past I publicized those feelings as private and made no stand for their recognition but tried to sell them disguised, for instance, as conflicts arising from mysterious sources” (361). In The Poetry of Jack Spicer, Daniel Katz compares Duncan’s “ambivalence” here to Lorca’s in Spicer’s translation of “Ode for Walt Whitman,” where “No one wanted to be cloud.”

Read things that help you want to be cloud, like My Vocabulary Did This to Me. And if you start writing feelings, remember that “Any fool can get into an ocean/But it takes a Goddess/To get out of one.”

Yours,
Diana

***

Hello Diana, 

I usually write dense blocks of pseudo-allegorical, faux-technical-writing, inhuman & mechanical, science fiction-esque poetry. But, lately, I am trying to write a long poem that is about human observation, individual perception, intimacy, fantasy, memory, and eroticism in horror and adult films. I'm finding the conversion to be difficult. (However, Devo was very successful in combining erotic fantasy with mechanization.) Do you have any advice for poets who might be trying to momentarily exist un-machine-like? 

Robotic in the tropics, 
Ed Steck

Dear Ed,

Do you think your usual writing is strictly inhuman/mechanical, and that you’re struggling to convert this mode into something more human?

Or do you think that mechanicity and technicality of your previous writing already explored observation, individual perception, intimacy, etc.?

The Devo makes me think it’s the second, which suggests you’re asking a different question: how do I change my writing, when the change in what I’m writing “about” doesn’t necessarily require the change in style I want?

For example, in The Garden, you wrote:

The system’s exploration into its internal structure is both alarming and interesting. Self-awareness is a speculative succession from stagnant sponsorship. It is questionable whether the self-awareness is inherent in the program itself, or if the program’s code accumulatively generated original algorithms, or if the program was covertly coded to be self aware originally.”

I’m not saying you were, like the program, covertly coded to be self aware that this question, with regards to your new work, was a question also asked by your earlier work. I’m saying that the mechanical/human divide between your two “contents,” so to speak, isn’t the problem; I think you’re looking for a new relationship between “form” and “content;” i.e., a new poem.

My first advice, then, is to read/reread Samuel Delany’s “About 5,750 Words,” an essay on the importance of literary “style” in science fiction:

Every generation some critic states the frighteningly obvious in the style/content conflict. Most readers are bewildered by it. Most commercial writers (not to say, editors) first become uncomfortable, then blustery; finally, they put the whole business out of their heads and go back to what they were doing all along. And it remains for someone in another generation to repeat:

Put in opposition to “style,” there is no such thing as “content.”

Delany is arguing against the sense that, in “commercial writing” like SF, there’s a proper “content” that guarantees genre. To counter this, he gives a sentence one word at a time over the course of many pages—“The red sun is high, the blue low.”—to dramatize the way reading each word in order affects the reader.

This doesn’t get so close to what you’re asking, but I wanted to wave away the words I used that reaffirmed this lie about form/content as separable.

In your description of what you want to write, “observation/individual perception” seem most likely to affect syntax, tense, line breaks, clarity, etc.—and I wonder if those are your descriptions of how you want to “convert,” rather than things you’re writing about. Create or draw on some characters in horror and adult films, give them emotions and fantasies and intimate relationships, and then try writing what they perceive/observe from their perspective. (Technical writing represses the role of the observer—constructions like “It is questionable” are designed to hide who does the questioning. If you write from the perspective of someone with their own question, you’ll start converting a bit). Then, try writing what each imagines the others perceives/observes. Do this in dense prose, and then do this in three words lines, get angry about both forms, and come up with another. Is there a form you’re super comfortable writing in that isn’t at all like the way you’ve written before? If you’re used to writing love letters, for example, you could write a love letter from the perspective of a character in one of the films that details what they observe, and you could do something with that once you get out of old habits.

This all seems very serious, I know. I think you’re just saying you want to make more room for feelings. Feelings are expansive, though; they need lots of room; we can make room for them with form (sometimes they need the space of line breaks, or the accumulation of semicolons), with wine, with bodies. I often believe that, as I get fatter, for example, I might be making more room for my feelings, or at least, I know my love for my cat, Monster, grows alongside his belly.

Beautiful cats will help you! There’s no room for the mammal in your first sense of the “inhuman/mechanical;” put some cats in the sex-room, and whatever mechanicity will rub up against their scent glands.

Yours,
Diana

***

Dear Poetry,

I need a lot of advice.
Thanks in advance.

-Real Deal Dallas

Dear Real Deal Dallas,

Here are some poems with solid advice:

Read Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, where he considers his Cat Jeoffry, and imitate as many of Jeoffry’s actions as you can get away with:

For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws
       extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be
       interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his
       neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it
       a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more
       properly begins.

Read Rin(don) Johnson’s new Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People, which Inpatient Press classifies under both “Poetry” and “Self-help.” Telling you to read this book is good advice enough, but if you’d like more specific advice, it could help you decide whether to have children. Johnson’s “A Confession: I Am Scared to Have Kids”:

I am scared to have kids because what if I really
love them and want to be around them all the
time and they hate me and they don’t ever
want me around and they tell me that they
can never be their true selves around me and I
know this is true because I can hear them sigh [. . .]

Read Trisha Lows’s The Compleat Purge for help writing your will.

Best,
Poetry