The Practice of Poetry

Hello, If you are interested in this blog, it has been reinvented on Blogger. You can find my new poetry contemplations here:
Practice & Craft at http://practiceandcraft.blogspot.com/

Thanks for reading,
H.K.H

Recently, my partner read a poem I have coming out in the new issue of Aquila Review titled, “After Losing My Eyeglasses.” It happened that he hadn’t read this poem before. He read it while I made dinner, and as we sat down to eat, he said, “I wish I could have dinner with the person who wrote this poem.” Ah, there’s the rub. For better or worse, I am a poet and a workhorse. When responsibilities build, I get lost behind the obstructions; bills, chores, meetings and deadlines muddle my senses and make me forget everything else. The absence of poetry can be deadening. It’s tax season. Does anyone dream up poems in the middle of tax season?

I’ve grown accustomed to periods of quietness from my own poetic voice. I’m avoiding the cliché of calling this phenomenon “writer’s block.” The term entails too many caricatures of writers to use it seriously. This isn’t about staring at a wall and chain-smoking all day only to write a sentence and then delete it. This isn’t about doing battle with the Void. This is about knowing how to dowse for water with a tree branch. It is about walking slowly and patiently through a field until you feel the sure tug as the switch dips between your hands.

In the essay, “Education of the Poet” Louise Gluck claims, “When the aim of the work is spiritual insight, it seems absurd to expect fluency. A metaphor for such a work is the oracle, which needed to be fed questions. In practical terms, this means that the writer who means to outlive the useful rages and despairs of youth must somehow learn to endure the desert” (15-16). So how does one go about overcoming those dry territories? Gluck implies that it is different for each person: we must have our own techniques.

This week, Gary Snyder read at the Lunch Poems series on the UC Berkeley campus. One of the audience members asked, “Do you have any advice for new poets?” Snyder advised the young woman to read all the poems in the English language. Then learn other languages. It is good, basic advice: read. If one is reading Jane Austen or Toni Morrison, or anyone else in the literary canon, one is unequivocally engaged. At the point of engagement, it might not matter if you are creating your own poems—because the synapses are firing in the old gray matter, and the poems you want to write will (eventually) come.

Other than reading, the frustrated writer in me likes to edit. When a friend sends me a piece they have been writing and asks for comments, I’m always glad to respond. It is neighborly work, even if we don’t have addresses on the same block. We are sharing our common work in exchange for a little conversation and perhaps a small gift of something homemade. Jars of jam, loaves of home-baked bread, and poems are all the modest tradable stuff of life. It also happens that when I see my friends’ writing and witness their work in the act of creation, it often reminds me of where I left off with my own work.

I don’t believe that writer’s block, or bouts of poetic absence, is a bad thing. The silence is an opportunity to pay attention to what is going on unnoticed beneath the clamor of the daily grind. And if you aren’t talking about your poems at the dinner table, well, why not?

Sometimes it seems like you know a poet after reading only one of their poems. Voice and sensibility can reveal itself quickly with utter disclosure. Hayden Carruth’s poetry feels like this. I came upon his collection Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey a couple years ago in the Seattle university district. It was an odd, dark day; the newspapers headlined Saddam Hussein’s hanging, and I sat at a bar sipping an Irish coffee and avoiding the news programs by disappearing into Carruth’s work. He felt immediately real & close. In the poem “California” he laments:

No longer do we
need an insane president to end us
by pushing a button. People
need only go on living as they are, without change,
the complacent and hard-eyed
everywhere.

Carruth’s voice speaks with a quality of humbleness and truthfulness which draws in the reader. This small snip from “Franconia” is exemplary:

Sparrows chirped in the rafters, moths
wandered in and out among shafts of moonlight.
Home is wherever these odd moments

snag our raft on the slow river of exile.

By the time we get to the “snag [of] our raft” we’ve been drawn in enough to feel the tug as a visceral sensation. This inward-pulling intimacy makes Hayden Carruth’s work easy to enter. It is also one of the reasons why even those of us who were distant strangers will miss him now that he has passed away. Sometimes, we are dear friends with strangers.

Today Ilya Kaminsky read at UC Berkeley for the Lunchtime Poetry series. Kaminsky is a poet whose first book, Dancing in Odessa, won the 2005 Addison M. Metcalf award, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year, and the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Although his style is very different from Carruth, his poetry also succeeds at coaxingly and immediately drawing the reader in. After reading a few pages, you feel like you could recognize his work anywhere– you know it as you know an old, familiar neighborhood. Consider these lines from his poem, “In Praise of Laughter”:

…my grandfather composed lectures on the supply

and demand of clouds in our country:
the State declared him an enemy of the people.
He ran after a train with tomatoes in his coat

and danced naked on the table in front of our house–

Yet almost as soon as Kaminsky begins reading, all pretense of knowing disappears; where one would assume calmly whispered lines, he shouts or cries or releases with exultant exclamations. The rhythm of his reading voice is punctuated with lifts and plummets. His reading voice moves much like the display of the hummingbird I watched this weekend: climbing high, hovering far above the coyote brush, and then dropping like a runaway elevator. The poems whirl in a voice that reminds me of Yeats.

The movement between these layers of knowing and unknowing makes poems changeable and often, somehow, new experiences each time we read or hear them. Our experience of a poem changes depending on the ways we are experiencing the historical moment, the weather, or our own mood. If we are solitary and reading at a bar with a whiskey and coffee, or if we are surrounded by a crowd and watching the poet lean into the podium and fill the room with striking, passionate clamor we will experience the poem in a new and different way. Such understanding is the intimacy of things that grow and live and thrive.

Consider the following observation about persuasive writing by Don Rothman, an English professor at University of California Santa Cruz:

“My students, for the most part, think of persuasion as coercion and, therefore, are reluctant to embrace the challenge to write persuasively. Like the rest of us, they have been bombarded by advertising and many do not want to intrude on others’ spaces in an effort to change their minds or urge them to act in certain ways. It’s as though persuasion is an ugly word that reveals a desire to abuse others rather than an act of social responsibility that can be performed with respect, even love. I try to direct students’ attention to the humane aspects of persuasion” (43).

Rothman nicely re-orients the intention of persuasive rhetoric. Language that is imbued with intelligence, respect, and benevolence should indeed be powerful and wise. In an ideal world, it would be more common than the free-for-all tactics of, say–ruthless, dollar-focused salesman. We hear evasive, tricky, story-telling often, don’t we? Respectful, socially responsible rhetoric should be the language of our democratic dialogues. But, how often do we hear it? How can we encourage it in our students’ writing, and our own?

“The Writing Classroom as a Laboratory for Democracy,” is a compelling interview in which Rothman addresses his philosophy behind the approach he uses to teach persuasive writing. Even if we aren’t teachers, there is something to think about here. For instance, he explains one of his motivations as “I want to persuade them to notice the pleasure in moving between the poles of personal experience and public discourse; the pleasure that comes from thinking with other people whose ideas fill your brain like dreams. I’ve come to assume that my students need new ways of thinking about themselves as learners in order to become more fully, thoughtful makers of the world” (44). He discusses the importance of teaching students to wear another writer’s shoes and feel what it feels like to believe what they believe. Good poets are deft with this imaginative leap into the other.

Most poetry aims to transform the internal experience into a shared experience, but I wonder if we emphasize enough to young poets that poetry can be a powerful leveraging tool for social justice, for mindful persuasion? This may be where our current, common tendency towards confessional poetry has a serious limitation: we don’t always move the poetry beyond self-revelation–new poets often stop before the final step into other, into the universal experience.

“Unfortunately, writing is rarely taught in schools as a tool for nonviolent persuasion or as a multifaceted activity whose effectiveness often requires us to enhance our empathy. It is rarely taught as a tool for exploring ways to live together” (48). This seems particularly apropos in the face of such blatant lying, deception, and inauthentic language in the election chatter.

How can poetry be one of the tools for “explor[ing] ways to live together?” Poet Pattiann Rogers’ collection, Firekeeper, explores includes a poem titled, “The Laying on of Hands” which addresses this issue superbly. Beat poet Anne Waldman performs poetry that shakes, sweats and hollers in the face of deception, violence, and power. Many teachers offer such templates and tools for developing young poets everyday. However, composition theory and creative writing theory are often such separate realms that sometimes it is helpful to read what the others are doing and reflect on our how it squares with own practices.

If you want to read the full interview with Rothman, you can find it at: http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2474

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I have always been cautious of the tourist’s gaze; writing about new, exotic, foreign things is a dangerous endeavor. The tourist’s gaze is the gaze of the outsider. Yet sometimes, the outsider’s gaze is exactly what is needed.

It seems like a very basic concept that we need new perspectives to keep our ideas flowing. The average sandwich is re-invented fairly regularly: the classic grilled cheese sandwich morphed into a “panini” and recently, it was reintroduced as a “flat-iron sandwich.” Papayas strike my fancy because I don’t eat them as often as bananas. So, slight variations can shift the angle just enough to give us a new perspective, or a new appetite.

Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil for years, yet much of her work still focused on the sturdy, northern landscape of her childhood. She had a pet toucan, but I can’t remember any poems of hers that include toucans. She thrived in the tropics, but she didn’t overuse it in her writing. I often wonder if this was an intentional avoidance on her part–a shtick she didn’t want to take up.

Must we avoid the tourist poems altogether for fear of a naive poem? Or alternatively, how do we switch to the outsider perspective in our own cities, communities, or homes so that we can find inspiration in the common day? Traveling to Greece to eke out a new piece of writing is cost-prohibitive, especially with the oil crisis.

If we can hold both the outsider and insider perspective simultaneously we have a much broader and deeper perception. It is a balancing act, a teeter-totter between being fully intimate with a subject and knowing it from the inside, and being separated enough to see with unblurred scrutiny.

Carolyn Kizer’s book of essays, Proses: On Poems & Poets is thoughtful, witty and easy to read. The essays are often brief, a page or two in length, and easy to dip into for a few stolen moments of literary grist and gossip. I mean gossip in the best possible sense: we get glimpses of her sitting at a table with Gary Snyder, John Hollander, and Stanley Kunitz. We watch along with her and Kunitz as the other two carry on a passionate discussion of word origins like “a particularly inspired badminton match between two champions” (135).

But there is deeply probing discussion in this collection too. For instance, her essay, “Western Space,” is one of my favorite in the collection. Here’s a tidbit:

“Solitude. In big cities one is lonely. In the desert, the woods, in the small American town, the poet is solitary–and most of the time glad of it. Enormous spaces separate one poet from another. We write letters, mail poems; we befriend one another as best we can. Eastern visitors remark about our loyalties to one another, the pleasure we take in one another’s success, the way we share unfinished work and ask for advice. ‘It isn’t like that in New York!’ they say. And the introspection encouraged by solitude is often more lyrical than sour, more sturdy than self-pitying” (97).

This comment reminds me of how I recently visited my old stomping grounds in the Spokane, Washington area. I could still connect to the pockets of quiet on the Little Spokane river; I could still feel the luxurious space and solitude with a poignant longing. Many of us, I think, would (and do) trade the dynamicism of culture and community for solitude and space. In such a place, poets find their community despite the impediment of distance.

Her essay attempts to describe the pervasive feeling of environmental destruction we as a culture must contend with. “We all live with the vision of an Eden despoiled. In a very literal sense we live with images of rack and ruin” (100). Such an observation sums up a lot about what I see at the heart of the nature writing of the West coast. Undeniably, we must contend with loss, destruction, and havoc, in which we all play some part. These feelings of sadness, mourning and guilt are part of the water table that soaks through our collective awareness.

She finishes the essay with an evocation of Hamlet: “In the midst of mourning, we still have lots of space in which to move around, alone in the field, with our ghosts” (100). In Western space, we are still able to feel the echoes of our ancestor’s sense of expansiveness; but, the land is populated with traffic and congestion, and also with noisesome haunts. I’ve grown up with these ghosts; they’ve followed me from town to town, meadow to mountain peak. They make my heart ache, but like a clairvoyant who sees ghosts and feels compelled to voice their messages, I too feel compelled to tell the stories that have been neglected or submerged. And I appreciate reading Kizer’s interpretation of this impulse.

I’m happy to sit down with Kizer’s essays, and dip into the thoughts of one of our nation’s best literary thinkers and provocateurs today.

Proses: On Poems & Poets by Carolyn Kizer. Published by Copper Canyon Press, 1993.

Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami talks about the last twenty-plus years as a writer and marathoner in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. His memoir discusses his parallel efforts with writing and long distance training, and how they affect one another. The book touches on an interesting question: what life-long habits can help a writer stay balanced, focused and ultimately, prepared for the hard work of writing?

Murkami discusses how writing is difficult mentally and physically (for instance the long periods of being sedantary) and claims that running has helped him train and be an endurance athlete as well as an endurance writer. As interesting as the idea is–the book is a bit boring.

At first, this frustrated me: I was looking for grand insights, or more dramatic examples of how such rigorous physical output increased his creativity in unexpected ways. I was looking for the brainstorms that he had while on mile eighteen. But this didn’t happen. In fact, he admits he doesn’t think about much at all when he runs. He mentions that he runs to counterbalance his love of Dunkin Donuts and his tendancy to gain weight. Ultimately, that is the kernal of wisdom buried in the book: those habits we practice every day–whether it is running like Murakami, or taking daily walks like Mary Oliver, or eating kale and brown rice so we don’t become overwhelmed with physical ailments, those habits are essential, so essential they are often too idosyncratic to be generally applicable to others. I could describe the importance of my daily cup of coffee and bowl of bran twigs to my general digestion, which keeps me focused on the poem on my desk and not on my finicky, sluggish stomach, but, you’d probably tune out pretty quick. In fact, I think you already did.

Murakami’s memoir is fun if you are a marathoner. I enjoyed hearing that in Japan, they give the runners pickled plums instead of GU. I wished for more descriptive moments like this. He is most vivid when he describes the number of roadkill he tallied while he ran through Greece. But, the most helpful thing for the writer-audience is to hear his implicit argument: we have to think carefully about what components keep our brain clear and our body relaxed enough to keep the creative reserves replenished and deep.

For the last week and a half, I’ve been wandering around with Frida Kahlo’s work in mind. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is currently exhibiting her collection, along with a significant collection of photographs and documents about her life. Kahlo’s paintings are intriguing when viewed individually; when viewed en masse however, her work is as unsettling as an avalanche.

I’m curious about the impact of confinement on Kahlo’s work. She was frequently bedridden as a result of an accident and several follow-up back surgeries. In my mind, Kahlo’s confinement (and extreme concentrations of undiluted emotion in her work) is similar to the storm cloud energy of Emily Dickinson’s self-imposed confinement and work.

Alfred Habegger’s Dickinson biography, “My Wars are Laid Away in Books” cites a letter regarding one of Dickinson’s visitors who gives a raw response to Emily’s presence. Higginson reports after the visit, “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.” Habegger quotes Higginson further, when “Decades later, in a final attempt to sum up his impression, he availed himself of a newer psychological vocabulary: ‘The impression undoubtedly made on me was that on an excess of tension, and of something abnormal’” (524). Neither Habegger or Higginson acknowledge that part of her tension could have been a result of a mix-up over what day Higginson was to visit; Dickinson had prepared herself to host his visit, but he showed up a day later than expected. In one who accepted guests so rarely–and only under controlled conditions–this social call mix-up could have thrown Emily enough to create an “excess of tension.” But that is tangential; this excess of tension, which Higginson recalls vividly enough that decades later he is still trying to articulate it, is like the palpable, zinging energy one feels standing in a room with Khalo’s paintings. For that matter, it is the electric fence energy that hums underneath all of Plath’s Ariel–again, a woman who distilled the poems into a collection in one brief, intense period when she was living alone with her children in England. We could blame it on something else of course–attribute it to instability or insanity–however, it could be that these women happened to channel creative lightning, and used their confinement to allow it out, unmediated and unapologetically.

Habegger inserts a fairly muscular critique at the end of this Higginson account, and suggests that we should feel (sorry) for Sue (Emily’s beloved sister-in-law) for living next door to Emily’s energy for so many years. Yet, that seems like misplaced sympathy; her creative power wasn’t a nuclear power plant. A river, dammed, may look placid but the salmon can’t run. A river, undammed, is a rough artisan that sculpts with the precision of a scythe. Kahlo, Dickinson and Plath were not, perhaps, the most light-hearted nymphs in all social situations, but social success is often a matter of masking, tricks, evasion and untruths. It is a generalization to group such different women together; however, the ways they harnessed the contained energy of their restrictions–isolation, confinement, physical limitations–is stunning but more importantly perhaps, it speaks to the ways one can gather and direct artistic energy.

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Most writing advice can be condensed down to three points:
1. There is a powerfully important difference between a quail egg and an egg.
2. Things ask to be poems if you listen carefully.
3. Measures of confidence, stubbornness, doubtfulness and playfulness are essential through out the writing process.

There are yellow snapdragons growing in front of the car in my driveway, and the car has been unused long enough that the blossoms are taller than the bumper. The elements of our day are poems with or without our attention–we just have to notice, and write them down.

Natalie Goldberg has a new handbook on memoir writing called “Old Friend from Far Away.” If you need encouragement or direction, it might work for you. The activities are brief directives to prod writers into exploring. For instance, she says, “Tell me what you thought was ugly. Be detailed. Go. Ten minutes” (23). She has the clipped and energetic feel of a coach hollering at you from the edge of the track.

Some people write better with structure or constraint. Others just need space to breathe and watch.

Just tell me one thing: what kind of egg is in your hand? And where else have I seen that particular shade of quail egg blue?

And then sometimes, a book changes your relationship to paper. Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is one such book. It is a post-9/11 novel that grapples with the aftermath from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy. The narrative is keen and true, but I am most interested in what Foer chooses to do with the page to tell his story. The book is interspersed with photographs, graphics, handwriting, and white space. The illustrations and images depict what the characters in the book look at, photgraph, or imagine. Some of the pages echo pages from the character’s own journals; the affect is a deeper intimacy with the characters: we see what they see, much as if the novel has loose snapshots or postcards tucked in-between the pages.

This is not a wholly new approach of course–writers often play with white space, or use graphics to enhance the story-telling. But ultimately, Foer makes the reader comfortable with the multidimensional feel of the story-photograph medium by consistent use of images of believable, everyday things–doorknobs, cats, Stephen Hawking–that makes the ending significantly more impactful. I won’t write a spoiler; you’ll have to find out for yourself if you haven’t already read it.

Foer re-shaped the novel to fit a topic that refused traditional models. The result is stellar. I find the techniques employed in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” inspiring for not only the way novels can be reconsidered as form/text relationships but also the way poems can be reconsidered. Poetic form is an endless frontier. But, many of us are stuck in the suburbs, re-creating track-home poems.