XLVIII.
Unto my books so good to turn
Far ends of tired days;
It half endears the abstinence,
And pain is missed in praise.As flavors cheer retarded guests
With banquetings to be,
So spices stimulate the time
Till my small library.It may be wilderness without,
Far feet of failing men,
But holiday excludes the night,
And it is bells within.I thank these kinsmen of the shelf;
Their countenances bland
Enamour in prospective,
And satisfy, obtained.Emily Dickinson
Month: November 2008
Cures for Poetry Burnout?
Wow, it’s been a while. My Internet was down for a while there, but I’m back now.
And I have a problem.
Since finishing my MFA, I’ve been suffering from poetry burnout. I don’t want to write it, and I don’t want to read it. I’m not so worried about the writing end of things, since inspiration comes and goes and all, and I’m puttering away on revisions and submissions and non-fiction in the meantime, but the lack of urge to read is getting to me. I’m eating up novels and non-fiction, but poetry, not so much.
Has this ever happened to anyone else? Anyone have any great suggestions of poets or books to jump-start my stalled brain?
sonnets!
I am greatly amused by the “What the hell, man?” page of the Riverdale Sonnets site … and impressed by the actual sonnets. Especially the one that begins “Were space but all we needed, I would tear / it from the stars. …”
And, from the same author (lunarhalo): .-/.-./- = art. *glee*
“It is important to forget about what you are doing – then a work of art may happen.” – Andrew Wyeth
- Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott. And unsurprisingly, the Senator reads Walcott.
- What is Art For?: For the founders, intellectual property was a great privilege; copyrights and patents were primarily meant to serve, in Madison’s words, as “encouragements to literary works and ingen ious discoveries.” By extending copyright retroactively, Hyde told me, the C.T.E.A. negated the logic of incentive: Mickey Mouse can’t be invented twice.
- Filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad talks about honesty in art: Follow your inner instincts. Because, as Mr.Wyeth himself once said, “If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.”
- Don’t Mind Your Language…: A post in defense of a living, evolving language by the inimitable Stephen Fry.
Weddings
I am working on a response to Jeannine’s comments about being able to hear a poem but my shock and sadness about California’s vote on Proposition 8 keeps getting in the way. I give you Alice Oswald‘s poem “The Wedding” which cares not at all what the biology of your lover may be.
Wedding
From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions…
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins it’s like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.
Stateliness has its day.
What’s left to say after this seemingly endless campaign? (John Ashbery, August Kleinzahler, Joshua Mehigan, Mary Jo Bang and J. D. McClatchy answer, in poetry, in The New York Times.)
not rhyming but reading…
Mary’s cri du coeur prompted some scattershreds of thoughts I might expand on later, but for now, here’s the raw gleaning:
How do you classify a platypus? or Hybrid Forms
Mary brought up an interesting point a couple of posts ago, about how to know a poem is a poem. In these days of prose-poems and flash-fiction, microfictions, visual poetry, and flarf (poems generated by Google searches,) how indeed do we define a poem?
It made me think of my training for my first degree, in biology, which is really a science of classification. How do you classify an animal that lays eggs but feeds its young with milk? That has webbed feet and a beak but is clearly no bird?
In my classes, it is sometimes difficult to explain to students, some of whom remain stubbornly attached to the kind of poetry they were exposed to as youngsters: typical 17th century, rhyme and meter, regular stanzas, etc. They just refuse to believe free verse is poetry, or they get frustrated when I show them a poem by a conversational poet, like Frank O’Hara, or, say, a prose poem from Matthea Harvey, or an almost broken-prose piece like Louise Gluck’s “Telemachus’ Detachment:”
“When I was a child, looking
at my parents’ lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.”
A genius of tone and unexpected line break, Gluck uses this character’s utterance to show how simple a poem can be.
I use the analogy of a poetry toolbox. There are tools that poets use, that Mary mentioned: rhyme, meter, rhythm, metaphor, imagery, alliteration, line breaks, onomatopaiea…perhaps there are others – jumps in narrative, dream-like tone. But how do you know a poem is a poem? It usually declares itself when you read it out loud.
I was introduced to prose poetry in my very first poetry book, which was my mother’s textbook for her first Freshman English class in college – Introduction to Poetry, by X.J. Kennedy. In the 1969 version, he includes a poem by Karl Shapiro called “The Dirty Word.” Later, in grad school, one of my teachers taught Baudelaire’s prose poetry. How did I know these were poems? Instinctually, I think, the way we learn everything. When I teach prose poetry to my students, I often use examples of haibun by Basho. His haibun combine prose and haiku in an elegant, sometimes disjunctive way. What makes these poems? Well, do they use tools from the poetry toolbox? Do they look like prose, but act/sound/read like poems? Does it lay eggs like a duck or alligator, but is warm-blooded and milk-giving, like a mammal? What are the defining characteristics of “poetry?” What is the poem’s DNA?
Animated poetry
In a conversation on the Poets & Writers Speakeasy forum, poet Wendy Babiak mentioned videos of poetry animations and short films, citing as a favourite “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins (animation by Julian Grey of Head Gear).
That’s one of eleven animations of his poetry commissioned by the Sundance Channel’s Action Poetry Series, which includes: “The Best Cigarette” (David Vaio/Will Hyde/FAD); “Budapest” (Julian Grey/Head Gear); “The Country” (Brady Baltezor/Radium); “The Dead” (Juan Delcan/Spontaneous); “Hunger” (Samuel Christopher/FAD); “No Time” (Jeff Scher); “Now and Then” (Eun-Ha Paek/Milky Elephant); “Some Days” (Julian Grey/Head Gear); and “Today” (Little Fluffy Clouds/Curious), which is my favourite animation, although I think “Walking Across the Atlantic” (Mike Stolz/Manic) is my favourite of these poems.
SamuelChristopher also animated “Angel,” which is from Hashisheen by Bill Laswell and read by Nicole Blackman, who I recognize from The Golden Palominos’ album Dead Inside.
Here’s are some other animations and short films based on poems:
- British Council/Bloodaxe Books has a series of animated poems; my favourite is Selma Hill’s “My Sister’s Poodle is Accused of Eating the Housekeeping Money.”
- “Flash Cards” by Rita Dove (animation by Arthur Greenwald Productions) – the simplicity of the drawing reminds me of the old school Sesame Street a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.
- “Lullaby” by Anne Sexton (short film by Jeff Doud/RIOT).
- “Monologue At 3 AM” by Sylvia Plath (animation by Catherine Davenport)
- “Once Upon a Time” by Vishwajyoti Ghosh (animation by Nilratan Mazumdar)
- Somebody has done a series of videos with a hand puppet reading Charles Bukowski (it’s actually the author’s voice): “Grammar of Life,” “The Light of Jesus” and “Photo.” I can’t decide if these are dumb or funny.
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” animation by Edward Picot, from the poem by Wallace Stevens. If you only look at one of his visualizations, go for either #1 (Among twenty snowy mountains) or #12 (The river is moving).
Finally, the Poetry Foundation, in association with docUWM at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has a Poetry Everywhere series, which includes: “I started early…” by Emily Dickinson (Maria Vasilkovsky); “The Language” by Robert Creeley (Chad Edwards); “Mulberry Fields” by Lucille Clifton (Jason Walczyk); “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” by John Ashbery (Kate Raney); “Snowmen” by Agha Shahid Ali (Kyle Jenkins); “Some Words Inside of Words” by Richard Wilbur (Anna Wilson); “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden (Allison Alexander Westbrook IV); and “Tornado Child” by Kwame Dawes (Nicole Garrison).
Refrain
How do you know it’s a poem?
Joanne saved me by pointing to Reginald Shepherd’s discussion of difficulty in poetry. I’m relieved to know I’m one of a crowd that asks “Why is this a poem?” I have the modal problem.
I’ve spent a lot of energy reading poems and berating myself for disliking them when instead (I think) I was simply frustrated by being told it was a poem although it exhibits no traits I would considered poetic.
(I’ve even done this on the IntarWebs and disconcerted and hurt people who write things I don’t consider poems because I could not articulate my own difficulty. I’m a little ashamed.)
How do you know it’s a poem?
They do exhibit at least one trait: these things which may or may not be poems are usually lineated. (I am leaving out prose poems here because I do not know what to do with them. Correction: I know what to do with them: I call them “vignettes” and consider them prose. This does not make them less powerful or moving.)
But how much poetic device does a lineated group of words require before it becomes a poem? If we throw in metaphor and simile and call ourselves done we have cheated the prose fiction writers, and the prose non-fiction writers, who use both of those to tell us stories made up and of ourselves.
Do we require rhyme or onomatopoeia?
How do you know it’s a poem?
The Portuguese and Spanish had monorhyming stanzas. That made it pretty obvious when someone was speaking a poem.
How do you know it’s a poem?
In English I am at a loss to know, if I’m not looking at it, unless the poem is end-rhymed. There’s nothing else for my ear. No measure, no indication. Meter will out, yes, but it doesn’t give you the anticipation or the closure.
Actually, it isn’t the rhyme per se, it’s the repetition of sound. Because a ghazal would sound like a poem in English, with that repeated word/phrase ending the second line in each couplet. It would probably sound like one long line to the ear. (Plus there would be the excitement of when you could chime in and chant along.)
How do you know it’s a poem?
Sometimes, when I have worked to set aside my definition of “poem” I have been able to enjoy a piece for what it is, rather than what I am hoping for.
And yet I sit down to read poems for a reason, with a visceral need to feel the way a poem makes me feel, with anticipation, with yearning. At that feverous pitch, it is difficult to respond well to pieces that don’t sing.
How do I know it’s a poem?
I know it by its repetition, be that assonance, alliteration, consonance, meter, refrain. By something unnamed that surprises me with its music.
I have so much difficulty finding poems like this. Sing me names, please? And tell me, because I genuinely want to know:
how do you know it’s a poem?