anapoetics

"forms for our inner life"

Tishani Doshi:

The late Adam Zagajewski ... believed there were two aims of lyric poetry. The first is the need to provide forms for our inner life; the second is to be on watch for history ....

(Once, while browsing the table in the poetry room at City Lights, I found Everything Begins Elsewhere by Tishani Doshi and it has become one of my favorites.)

"snip off a length"

John Ashbery:

In a 1976 interview ..., Ashbery describes his creative process: “I have a feeling that in my mind is an underground stream, if you will, that I can have access to when I want it. I want the poetry to come out as freshly and unplanned as possible.” In another interview from 1984, he directly addresses the issue of resolution: “I don’t look on poems as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head, and I occasionally snip off a length.”

"attentive connections"

From an interview with Maureen Thorsen (also a lawyer-poet):

[Poems] do start with little notes. I keep cheapie notebooks on me at all times, and will sometimes just stop in the middle of walking somewhere to get a thought down. (I find if I don’t write it down as soon as I think it, it just disappears). I don’t ever really sit down and write a whole poem. I sort of build them up over time, riffing on something I’ve jotted down, and coming back to it over and over and adding pieces or taking them out or rewording them. 

....  It’s about all I can do to keep up with my day job and still write poetry. I mostly write by making use of “interstitial” time—my commute, for example. .... The writing process I’ve developed—that of collaging and remixing notes—has been shaped by time pressure. I don’t really have the luxury of sitting down and thinking about a poem for several hours at a go.

The bold part is so true. I've lost a lot of thoughts by thinking I'll remember them later.  What's worse is when I remember that something slipped away, but I don't know what.

"a new poem is not cold at all"

From an interview with Lucie Brock-Broido:

You admit a series of initiating realities, truths—but not yet told slant. After a long period of incubation, you muster the courage to become hard on yourself, on the poem itself. You keep it on a tight leash as you edit the thing. You yank the choke-chain harder. The final soliloquy, many, many drafts later, is the poem after it’s been raked and scarified and held tight. Then, finally, you let yourself Have Your Way with the poem.

"into saying something else"

"Poetry is … a desire to feel everywhere estranged, in touch with or at least reaching for the other, out of house & home. ….  The basic desire of poetry is therefore nomadic."

                                                       -- Pierre Joris, quoted by Ryan Clark

"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.

"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.

"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

"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.

"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.

"not all honesties are equal"

William Logan writes thought-provoking reviews for The New Criterion:

The image of the apron seems merely decorative, until you realize it’s there to introduce the butchery.

Takeaway:  each image should serve a purpose.

The poems witness a degrading world where manners and the grace of language have been eroded by technology.

Takeaway: what does your poem witness?

and too many poems that end on a little pneumatic—or perhaps Plathetic—urgency

Takeaway: "Plathetic."  Like "Shakesperian" or "Homeric," right?  I get it.

There are many poets writing now in what might be called the New Breathlessness.

Takeaway: how hard it is to avoid accusations of pretension.

on the secret life of mirrors

Takeaway:  OK, that could lead to an actual poem.  But would you have to give credit?

These fragments of rural life are like outtakes from Frost, but without the Yankee cunning that made American pastoral so unpredictable.

Takeaway:  what could possibly be said about nature that would be new?  There must be something.

"to hold together contradictions"

In a review of three recent poetry collections (posted yesterday at the Los Angeles Review of Books), Peter Campion discusses the ending of the poem "Torn" by C. Dale Young:

This is a stunning ending. But why? I wondered when I first read the poem. Aside from the dramatic situation itself, which is certainly powerful, what makes this so affecting? I think the answer has to do with a series of savvy formal maneuvers, which nuance and strengthen the personal testimony. .... Young knows that drama often works by taking one more additional turn, after the central realization, ....  [This] complicates the poem and makes it more powerful. 

"a deep, early love of poetry"

The Los Angeles Times books blog has lessons on writing from novelist Ann Patchett.  Many of them apply equally to poetry, including this one:

Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them our of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the fresh water underneath.

Substitute "poems" for "stories."

"the presence of the total self"

An interviewer asked poet Philip Levine "whether, while writing, he had ever entered flow, a state of mind in which time seems to stop."  His response:

I don't care for your phrase "the flow" because of certain implications that aren't true for me. I use the term "fire," as horse racing maniacs use it (I was once one): a horse is said to fire when suddenly it finds all the speed it's capable of.  ....  I don't remember ever "entering the flow"; I remember "firing."

....

When I'm getting nothing I accept getting nothing because I know that getting nothing is what you do when you're not getting something; it is an essential part of the process. Or so I believe.

I believe the state which we call inspiration does not depend on any outside force, the muse, etc. We may feel the power of another force, but I believe the power we're feeling is the power of the presence of the total self. We feel like someone else because we are so rarely totally ourselves.

Levine was just named U.S. poet laureate, replacing W.S. Merwin.

"to see clearly is poetry"

This quotation is attributed to Ruskin:

The greatest thing a human being ever does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what he saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands of people can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion -- all in one.

I found it here.

"a lick of German"

The June 2011 Poetry is the yearly "translation issue,"  in which a "translator's note" follows each poem.  I always thought that to translate you had to speak both languages fluently.  But in this issue, Lucia Perillo translates a Rilke poem while freely admitting she doesn't speak "a lick of German."  

Another translator's note says the translator relied in part on a "literal rendering" by a fluent speaker.  This presented some entirely new ideas about what translation means. 

A couple of years ago I spent some time coming up with my own version of "Love Sonnet XVII" by Pablo Neruda.  I was aided by two years of high school Spanish, two other English versions (by Stephen Tapscott and Mark Eisner) and Google translate.  Now I feel I have full license from Poetry to present it as a translation.  So here it is: 

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, topaz,
or the arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries the light of hidden flowers inside;
thanks to your love, darkly in my body
the binding scent of earth has arisen and lives.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you candidly, without pretense or pride:
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. 

"digging in the loose soil of a new story"

This week's New Yorker has an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri: "Trading Stories: Notes from a Literary Apprenticeship."

"a form of magic designed to mediate between 'this hostile world and us'"

From an article in the Chronicle about the upcoming Picasso exhibit at the de Young:

The influence of African sculpture, which Picasso said made him realize that art was a form of magic designed to mediate between "this hostile world and us," can also be seen here in the proto-Cubist studies for the epochal "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

As a verbal art form, poetry is even closer to magic than painting or sculpture.  The Poetic Pattern (1956) by Robin Skelton has a whole chapter on poetry's origins in magic:

[T]here is a magical aspect present in all poetry, for poetry, by its very nature, seeks to recreate the complete pattern of a certain aspect of life in order to reveal that completeness to the hearer.  Thus, the perfect lyric, though it may have no 'marginal' difficulty, excites us purely because of its pattern, purely because it magically portrays the perfection which we all desire, and imposes the illusion of complete harmony upon the reality of our chaos.

"tend to the small stuff"

From an interview with Eamon Grennan:

For Grennan ... , the life of a poet is that of an observer. “As a poet, you listen and you look,” he says. “You are being spoken to, rather than speaking at. And you try to register the thing that is being said to you. Sometimes you try to get yourself out of the way, but you can never get quite out of the way. You’re the lens through which you look.”

I have a stack of Grennan poems torn out of old New Yorkers before throwing them away. 

"the poem makes up the poet to write it"

I try to pay attention to as many things as I can simultaneously and grab onto whatever wire seems most glowing–sometimes it is the imperatives of poetic concerns, other times imagination.

I know the poem's finished when it feels like it’s got somewhere and those last lines have a kind of lyrical power. My process is to begin messily and proceed through drafts by hand and typewriter to some sort of what feels to me coherent charged system.

Glowing wires in a charged system from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Dean Young (May 3, 2011).