anapoetics

"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.

"go a little bit luminescent"

A friend sent this poetry prompt from "The Time is Now" series of prompts by Poets & Writers: 

In a 2008 Paris Review interview with Kay Ryan, she explains her neologism "recombinant rhyme"--a craft technique of stashing "rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middle." According to Ryan, "snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem" allows her to "get the poem to go a little bit luminescent." Take a poem of yours that could use more musicality, and revise it to include recombinant rhyme.

You can sign up to receive a writing prompt (poetry, fiction, essay) by email each week.

"an invaluable cache of sensory detail"

Sandra Beasley is putting together her third book of poetry:

I'm at that painful stage of knocking down a manuscript so I can build it up again. This mirrors a stage of my poem process: I take a reasonably polished draft and remove all the line breaks so it becomes a prose paragraph. Next I edit it in that form for syntax and flow, which ensures I don't have excess language in there simply for visual rhythm (e.g., writing toward a median line length). Only then do a I re-break the poem again, rethinking all line and stanza options. If it ends up as before, lovely. But often it does not. And sometimes I have to come to terms with what's missing, and dive back in to revise on a content level.

"like a sort of soul-compass"

The book I just bought last Saturday at a used bookstore (The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman (1970)) includes reproductions of several drawings by Plath (as well as a selection of her poetry, most of which was uncollected at the time).  And then today, across my feed reader comes a link to a slideshow of Plath drawings being shown at a gallery in London. 

This one's cute:

Looking at some of the drawings suggests that the process of re-creating objects on paper can help a poet "see" them in a way that's different from the sensory, and therefore (ideally) interesting but not wholly foreign.  In other words, the process of drawing can inform the process of writing and constitute study for both.  (Not that many of us have time for that.)

Here's one from my book:

Rock Harbour, Cape Cod (detail)    

I don't have sufficiently comprehensive knowledge of Plath's body of work to connect this drawing to any particular poem (nor does my book attempt to do so).  Some of the other drawings in the slideshow are quite thought-provoking if you stop to study them.

[via]

"controlled uncontrolledness"

From the essay "Warnings from the Grave" by Stephen Spender in The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman (1970):

The landscape is an entirely interior, mental one in which external objects have become converted into symbols of hysterical vision:

This is my property,
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron

And the wall of old corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it--

My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick grey death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.

'Letter in November'

We can enjoy the 'description' in this, the autumn-golden apples in the grey-soup mist.  All the same, this nature is not the great furniture of the continuity of the seasonal earth, on which the distraught mind can rest.  Or if there are some externals in these poems ... they in an atmosphere in which the external is in immediate process of becoming the internal, opposites identical with one another.

This reminds me of Van Gogh's landscapes, which express not so much what the artist saw as existing in nature, but more what existed in himself, projected onto it. A few weeks ago a Logan essay prompted the question how could nature ever appear in poetry in a way that could be new?  Of course what Plath was doing 50 years ago now can't exactly be characterized that way. 

From the introductory essay by Newman:

[In an early essay from the juvenilia s]he endows the sea with the characteristics of her own mind.  .... It is not surprising then, to find in the last poems, that Nature herself is equated with, and even regulated by, the mind.  .... [This] requires that imagination become equal to experience.  ....  There is no division between the world and her wilful representation of it.

The exertion of that will on the reality we commonly inhabit results in an art in which reality is not completely distorted, either beyond the reader's recognition or to the point of absurdity, but altered just enough to be interesting and new, but still feel true and plausibly real.  The insight of this art feels somehow more true than everyday sensory perception, and far more true than narrative. 

I'm constantly looking for poets who do this but the truth is I can't seem to find very many.  Dickinson and Keats, Louise Mathias and Tomas Transtromer (translations of whose work I've just started reading) come to mind.  One essay calls Transtromer's poetry "ensorcelated," or more precisely, says that it takes place in "ensorcelated places."  The Spender essay calls Plath's work "emotional-mystical." 

More from Spender:

Considered simply as art, these poems have line to line power and rhythm which, though repetitive, is too dynamic to be monotonous.  Beyond this, they don't have 'form'. From poem to poem, they have little principle of beginning or ending, but seem fragments ....  [T]he length of the poem is decided by the duration of the poet's vision, which is far more serious to the poet than formal considerations.

"she tried deliberately to locate just what it was that hurt"

From an essay called "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems" by Ted Hughes, in The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman (1970).  I picked up this book at a used bookstore today.

Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them.

--

[S]he never saved lines or phrases. ....  If she didn't like a poem, she scrapped it entire.  She rescued nothing of it.  Every poem grew complete from its own root ....

--

Her reactions to hurts in other people and animals, and even tiny descrations of plant-life were extremely violent.

--

It's my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us.  It seems to me that this is poetry's only real distinction from the literary forms that we call 'not poetry'.

--

Surveyed as a whole, with attention to the order of composition, I think the unity of her opus is clear.  Once the unity shows itself, the logic and inevitability of the language, which controls and contains such conflagrations and collisions within itself, becomes more obviously what it is -- direct, and even plain, speech.

"transcending the dailiness"

The Chronicle's Books section on Sunday had a review of four new poetry collections.

"a tiny handful of her closest friends"

Portrait of a closeted writer:

The cost of caring about something you know you will most likely fail at is that you will look a little ridiculous in the eyes of the people you love. So you dissemble.  You tell people at a dinner party that you’re a teacher, a lawyer ....

"duende! terrible angels!"

"What kind of poetry do you write?"

Some poets take the question seriously:

Poems that make me uneasy. If a poem doesn’t make me increasingly uneasy as I work on it, I toss it, as the absence of unease and conflicted feelings usually means there is too little at stake in the poem.  (Idra Novey)

Some less so:

I sometimes ask if the question might be rephrased as one with multiple-choice answers. What are the possibilities? (Bob Wrigley)

"we bear our own distresses more passionately"

Via Ron Silliman, Auden on Rilke:

One of the constant problems of the poet is how to express abstract ideas in concrete terms.  ....  Rilke is almost the first poet since the seventeenth century to find a fresh solution.

Auden goes on to portend confessionalism in this 1939 review.