anapoetics

"It's a good poem if ..."

"... I'm a different person when I'm finished reading it."

"the haunted lyric"

From an essay in Blackbird by Anna Journey:

As I read Dexter Booth’s Scratching the Ghost (selected by Major Jackson for the Cave Canem Prize), Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam (chosen by Chad Davidson as winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s First Book Award), and Emilia Phillips’s Signaletics (the Editor’s Choice for the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize), I’m struck by their poems’ lyric beauty and the subversions which complicate it: through the gothic or grotesque, the braiding of historical and personal narrative threads, and the construction of lyric speakers haunted by the past or by aspects of themselves. And though Booth is the only one of the three authors originally from Richmond (Faizullah hails from Texas, while Phillips is from Tennessee), all of them spent several years studying poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I can’t help but notice the poets’ pronounced interests in the macabre, in ghostly figures, and in a particular mode of narrative braiding used to structure time in the contemporary lyric poem. Put simply: these authors write the haunted lyric. It’s a mode of layering fragments of narrative akin to those mottled cobblestones in Poe’s old city, the one that, set fire by retreating Confederate soldiers, slowly rose, transformed from the ashes. It’s a mode that perhaps first rooted itself in Richmond with the work of Larry Levis, who taught at VCU from 1992 until his death in 1996, and currently continues in what Linda Gregerson terms the “history-haunted cosmos”—that apparitional and eclectic juxtapositional mojo—of the poetry of David Wojahn, as well as in the work of other poets currently living in the city, such as Kathleen Graber and Joshua Poteat. The haunted lyric (one in which the author braids haunting personal details with historical, often ghostly, figures), while certainly not exclusive to the locale, may indeed be Richmond’s reigning poetic subgenre.

frost dickinson

Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
(Frost)

And He – He followed – close behind –

I felt His Silver Heel

Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes

(Dickinson)

"in the gut, rapid fire"

Louise Mathias is a favorite poet of mine.  This is from an interview with her.

This is your second book. Can you talk about how putting together this book was different than the experience for your first book?

It was definitely easier. You learn to trust your gut. I also think the poems I wrote during this 9- or 10-year span were more unified in voice and obsession than those in my first book. With Lark Apprentice, I had this idea drilled into my head that you had to create a narrative arc -- maybe I read it in some awful article about how to navigate the contest system, who knows? With The Traps it was more about pacing -- I mostly wanted to keep punching the reader in the gut, rapid-fire style, with a few key spaces to breathe.

rilke neruda dickinson

in a silver heaven between dream and day
(Rilke)

in secret, between the shadow and the soul
(Neruda)

Between the light -- and me --
(Dickinson)

larson plath

....  Each day the eyes
of my cat assemble a more precocious gold.  

We press our blackened flesh against a sky so bright. I hold
her in my arms at the fading windows.
(Larson)

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
your handful of notes;
(Plath)

neruda hughes

I love you like this because I know no other way
but this way, where there is no I, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that my sleep shuts your eyes.
(Neruda)

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face
(Hughes)

"practical, circumspect, and discreet"

Well, ok.  Even though Mansfield Park is my most favorite Austen novel.

Take the Jane Austen Character Quiz here!

"the poet's fever dream"

Two new Plath biographies recently came out.

[via]

"simplify complexity"

There had to be a reason.

... the intense empathy developed by so many poets is a skill essential to those who occupy executive suites and regularly need to understand the feelings and motivations of board members, colleagues, customers, suppliers, community members, and employees.

... poetry readers further developed greater "self-monitoring" strategies that enhanced the efficacy of their thinking processes. These creative capabilities can help executives keep their organizations entrepreneurial, draw imaginative solutions, and navigate disruptive environments where data alone are insufficient to make progress.

[via]

"ambition involves a type of achievement"

"Don't just try writing a song, try and write a hit song." -- Prince (advice to Gwen Stefani)

"What poets should be trying to do [is] to be as good as Dante.  The only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best." -- Donald Hall (quoted in Beautiful & Pointless by David Orr)

"white on white"

From Poetry Daily, the smooth rhythm of this excerpt, and its subject matter, reminds me of Frost:

where it can lose itself, disappear.
Those stunning ermine that snowless year

were neon on the gold leaves' makeshift carpets,
thrilling to witness, but ideal targets

for even the most dull-eyed predator.
Better to secure a sound white square

however unremarkable, unsubtle.
A person has to settle for what's possible.

                                                                                -- Jacqueline Osherow

"love is hard to stop"

White
Godiva, I unpeel --
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
(Plath)

His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
(Hughes)

gerber daisies

And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were

(Thomas Hardy)

"reality withdrew"

Andre Durain, "Bridge Over the Riou" (1906) (detail)

"[A]s Michael Fried put it many years ago, sometime after the turn of the 20th century 'reality withdrew from the power of painting to represent it.'" (Kenneth Baker)

And bowing – with a Mighty look –

At me – The Sea withdrew –

(Emily Dickinson)

emergency brushstrokes

I went to Ottawa last week to see the Van Gogh: Up Close exhibition. This painting was included.

 

Vincent van Gogh, Iris (1889)
(National Gallery of Canada)

It was remarkable in real life, as is all of Van Gogh's work that I've seen so far. The unbloomed stems were much less blue than in this image.  They were almost absent, ghost-like, as if they would someday emerge from the air rather than grow. 

"something that can go on being made"

James Wright on what he learned from Roethke:

He taught mainly the craft, and he, like Berryman and like Lowell, was an entirely conscious craftsman. He understood that the relation between the craft and the mysterious imagination is not what we conventionally think it to be. There are some people who think that a very careful, conscious craftsmanship will repress your feelings. And Roethke understood that it is careful, conscious craft which liberates your feelings and liberates your imagination.

"unorthodox beauties"

The New Yorker blog "Page-Turner" has a very interesting two-part post by Michael Cunningham on his work on the Pulitzer fiction jury this year, when no Pulitzer for fiction was awarded.  The whole story is quite interesting, but for present purposes, these are the tidbits:

Fiction involves trace elements of magic; it works for reasons we can explain and also for reasons we can’t. .... A great work of fiction involves a certain frisson that occurs when its various components cohere and then ignite. The cause of the fire should, to some extent, elude the experts sent to investigate.

....

We loved each of the authors for their triumphs over the forces of banality, contrivance, predictability, thinness, falseness, randomness, tidiness, and all the other forces that defeat almost everyone reckless enough to write fiction at all.

Once again, for "fiction," say "poetry."

"invent and abide by a system"

This stood out from a recent, short interview with Yusef Komunyakaa:

I believe meaning is primary and not a tangled connundrum. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be on the surface of the poem.  One has to invent and abide by a system of asthetics.

This reminded me of the thesis of an essay from the The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman (1970).  In her essay "The World as Icon: On Sylvia Plath's Themes," Annette Lavers writes that Plath's poems

derive their meaning, both profound and sometimes literal, from an underlying code, in which objects and their qualities are endowed with stable significations, and hierarchized.  It is indeed only because such a pre-ordained scheme (probably unconscious to a great extent) existed that such a large output, of such quality, was made possible.  ....

Recognition of this fact ... sheds light on what Sylvia Plath was trying to do with her poetry.  She was not trying to render each experience by means uniquely suited to it, but rather to dominate such experiences by making them fit (sometimes with difficulty) within a previously adopted framework, which automatically results in their being integrated in a scale of values. 

Conscious (or unconscious) adoption by a poet of an invented system, code or framework, then, coheres a body of work.

"speak to my ingenuity"

This poem by Laura Cronk was on Poetry Daily recently.  It's a love story, modern and ancient.