The Practice of Poetry

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Generally, poetry books and daily newspapers are relegated to completely separate realms. Of course, there are places like the New Yorker, where the two converge in the same medium. Some newspapers syndicate a column by the current poet laureate. But in such cases, the poetry is the leavening agent, the entertainment. We turn to newspapers and television news programs to stay informed on the immediate happenings of the world.

The nature of poetry is slower, more contemplative, more reflective than newsprint. The newspaper and the poem serve separate functions. However, both reporters and poets often observe and report on the same historical events. The poem can offer a distilled and clarified vision of an event that helps us understand it on levels other than the literal. Take Stephen Dunn’s poem, “From Underneath” for example. The poem begins with an excerpt from the Syracuse Post-Standard, about a 52-year-old woman who falls off a cruise ship and is rescued by a giant sea turtle. Here is just a portion of the poem:

She swooned into sleep.
When she woke in the morning,
the sea calm, her strange raft
still moving. She noticed the elaborate
pattern of its shell, map-like,
the leathery neck and head
as if she’d come up behind
an old longshoreman
in a hard-backed chair.
She wanted and was afraid to touch
the head–one finger
just above the eyes–
the way she would touch her cat
and make it hers.
The more it swam a steady course
the more she spoke to it
the jibberish of the lost.

Dunn’s language is straight-forward and simple: it maintains the feel of the original newspaper report in tone. However, Dunn is able to probe the frantic state of the woman’s emergency-stressed mind. He makes comparisons to everyday things and draws on our intimate understanding of housecats and wooden chairs.

When stuff from the daily news is transformed into poetry, we learn about the event, but we process the information on a deeper level of thinking, one that can often engage empathy by illustrating (with metaphors, similes and images) what we feel more intimately than “objective” reporting. Howard Zinn knew this when he wrote A People’s History of the United States; he employed poems, songs, and stories to create depth and color in his reframing of the traditional American history lesson. The result: Zinn eliminated the fustiness and made our story feel dynamic, revolutionary and immenently human once again. So does Dunn. By extending the brief article into a more in-depth re-imagining of the sea turtle rescue we are given the opportunity to be there with her, as she awakens on “her strange raft.” It is an opportunity for a unique exegesis of the human heart.

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In the biography titled Picasso, Gertrude Stein laments, “the twentieth century has much less reasonableness in its existence than the nineteenth century, but reasonableness does not make for splendor” (49). In the twenty-first century, words like splendor make most people shudder with distaste. Our time’s practicality and “reasonableness” is unavoidable; the cost of simple living keeps most running the sidewalks back and forth day in and day out. But there must be a way to allay the reason with a little lightness, a bit more splendor. For I do believe such a thing exists. Thoreau would have labelled green beans a thing of splendor. Donne would have seen magnificence in a woman leaning against the rough bark of an oak tree. We have all the humble beauties that informed the poets of earlier times, it is just our vision is spotted with the distractions of modernity: gutters clogged with litter, abandoned couches on the curbside, debris on top of debris.

Somewhere, frogs are croaking boisterously, but through my window I hear the metro, interspersed with the acute noise of cats, fire-engines, and car alarms: commonplace distractions. But no more, perhaps, than Stein and Picasso had to contend with. Picasso found plenty of splendor; consider his painting, Jacqueline with Flowers. The way Picasso paints Jaqueline’s hair reveals an intricate loveliness, and her eyes do not have stars for irises on accident.

And yet, most of us, I’d wager, still hold back: we are used to being cynical. One must wonder, however, if our discomfort with these warm, amorphous concepts, such as “splendor” –and our natural inclination towards the more “reasonable” view of things, might be harming our art as well as our psyches? (Wouldn’t it feel good, after all, to use the word ”splendor” and truly mean it?) If a gruff and demanding woman like Gertrude Stein uses such big, soft words with aplomb, it makes one pause and at least reconsider.  

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In a letter to his brothers, John Keats says, “The excellence of every Art is in its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth–Examine King Lear and you will find this examplified throughout….with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration” (Letters of John Keats, edited by Robert Gittings, 42-43).

I am interested in the word “intensity” as this the the center-point of Keats’ remark; if it is beautiful enough, he says, nothing else will matter. The piece of art will succeed because the beauty & truth of it will burn away all other, minor imperfections. The intensity of the piece creates a staring-at-the-sun effect: one becomes blinded to all else. His musings are in response to a picture he had just seen, one called Death on the Pale Horse which he deemed as “nothing to be intense upon” (42).

We do feel a rush of response when we are moved by a piece of art. We respond to it emotionally, intellectually, and physically; when art moves us, we glimpse a new glimmer of truth.  But what about the intense experiences generated for entertainment and mass consumerism? Such things are tricky: they have the glare of the sun, but don’t fit Keats’ definition of art. How do we tease out such imitations from the “real thing”? In a world of over-stimulation and eye-catching bling, we can easily get exhausted. Reponses get muted, mixed-up, lost. We start responding to false light. Like moths, we can burn in the distractions. So, how do you pause long enough to sort responses, like Keats, and decide what is beautiful & true and what is “nothing to be intense upon”? 

Without a conscious effort, it’s easy to get stimulated but still feel empty or emptied. Keats says if it is true and beautiful, “the disagreeables evaporate.” So are you left with disagreeables? Everyday, I find myself sifting through things and asking, “yes?” But we know when it’s true: the yes is declarative.

 

 In Hemingway’s seminal work, A Moveable Feast, he speaks about the methods that helped him write when he was a young writer living in 1920s Paris. At the beginning of the memoir, he reminisces,  

“It was wonderful to walk down the long flight of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going… I would stand and look over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I could hat I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written” (12). 

What is fascinating to me is that he braces himself against serious worry about not being able to produce new material, and he does so in a variety of ways. First, he broke down the process into baby steps—one true sentence at a time. Second, he says 

 ”…I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it” (13).  

He would stop only when he had a clear understanding of how he needed to proceed—and then he would do everything he could to distract himself so that his subconscious could be left alone to do its magic. He knew that if he didn’t make this off-time part of his schedule, he would become useless with anxiety.  

Finally, the less overt element of his writing schedule is luck. He recalls the feeling of leaving his work at the end of the day and “Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that need luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris” (13).  

Luck and discipline: his philosophy mixes stubbornness and hopefulness. Applying his methods to my own writing has been helpful. I’ve come to trust the work that is taking place in my unconscious mind. Right before going to sleep, I often read my latest draft. It still amazes me when the answer is there in the morning. I also find that I “solve” a lot of writing problems when I am doing something else—exercising, taking a shower, or other tasks that occupy the body, but not the mind. Consistent writing habits seem to require equanimity; we push, we rest, we push again. And hopefully, we’re lucky too.

 

 

In a 1977 interview with George Starbuck, Elizabeth Bishop recounts a story about e.e. cummings. Bishop and cummings both lived in Greenwich Village and shared a maid for a while. The maid complained to Bishop about how the other poet would say to her, “Leave a little dirt, Blanche” (“A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop” 97). Bishop goes on to describe how cummings’ wife told the “appalled” maid stories about “a little mouse that would come out of the wall and get up on the bed. They would lie in bed and watch her roll up little balls of wool from the blanket, to make her nest” (97). The way Bishop tells this story is not gossipy or snide: she seems to enjoy cummings’ fascination with the mouse, and his acceptance of its place in his house.

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems illustrate how she, too, opens herself up to wonder at the common things of everyday life. In an interview done a year later called “Geography of the Imagination,” Bishop tells Alexandra Johnson from the Christian Science Monitor, “I am very object-struck. Critics have often written that I write more about things than people. This isn’t conscious on my part. I simply try to see things afresh. A certain curiosity about the world around you is one of the most important things in life. It’s behind almost all poetry” (100). 

Bishop’s (and cummings’) enthusiasm and curiosity for the details of the world echoes William Carlos Williams’ exhortation, “No ideas but in things” in “A Sort of Song”:

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

The Lost Generation naturally swerved away from propagandizing or any kind of writing that told someone what to think or believe. It seems natural that echoes of this distrust would resonate with our current generation.  Perhaps we need to return to this line of thought and continue looking for ways “through metaphor to reconcile / the people and the stones.” But, it also seems like we are ready for poetry to move beyond the image.  We can use the methods for revealing truth that poets like Bishop et al. used, and explore with a self-conscious and critically aware perspective. Such poetry could offer a hopeful philosophy. The essential mindset of the poets who were watching mice, moose, and saxifrage is one of openness:  how can we bring this openness into the poetry of today & couple it with philosophies for survival, without layering it with the oily untruths of “rhetoric”?

For the interviews cited above and further interviews, see the book titled Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop(edited by George Monteiro, U.P. of Mississippi, Jackson, 1996).

 

Recently, a friend and I took time off work and travelled for many hours to visit our yoga teacher, Baba Hari Dass in order to glean some inspiration. I had been feeling like I needed some encouragement to re-direct my focus and get me “back on track”; practicing yoga often helps me with other reflective practices–especially writing.

But, our trip did not go as planned: the yoga center was closed for the weekend and our teacher was unavailable. Instead of getting re-focused, we spent the weekend lounging on the beach. I returned home relaxed, but a bit frustrated about not doing what I intended to do. That night, I dreamed that I stumbled upon Baba Hari Dass in my kitchen, having a midnight snack.  Perhaps this was a reminder that even the most dedicated individuals ease back and relax now and then too.

A friend of mine likes to live by the motto, “Everything in moderation, even moderation.” This seems like the right follow-up to yesterday’s posting about endurance.  Some writers, of course, don’t live in moderation. Jack Kerouac is notorious for non-stop writing. He even taped sheets of paper together so that he wouldn’t have to bother with replacing the paper when he got to the bottom of the page. But Kerouac needed major chemical enhancement to perform his long-haul trucker style of writing. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson is another one for whom moderation seemed to have played no role in his writing or life. Gonzo-style writing blazes furiously but briefly; I doubt many who practice such styles make life-long careers out of such intensity. 

I’d like my passions to burn slow and long. I’d like to think I’ll still be writing poems at the end of my life.

So here’s to endurance—and a not-so-serious tendency to loaf on occasion. And perhaps now and then a midnight snack bathed in the soft light of the refrigerator.

Lately, I’ve thought a lot about the concept of endurance. I’ve been learning about it in a fairly standard way—I’ve been training for a marathon. For months, I’ve been dedicated, practiced and gained a lot of strength and stamina. But to be honest, at the five month mark, my intensity is flagging. On the maintenance runs, it has begun to feel like plodding. One problem is my town is having a heat wave and running in it is exhausting. And partly, high levels of focused intensity are impossible to maintain forever. Also, to be honest I’m just a bit bored.

Burnout isn’t just something athletes experience: it pops up in our relationships, careers and just about everywhere else in life. Writers contend with burnout frequently. I think successful writers probably have a lot of different tricks for overcoming it. Anne Lamott argues that we need to just keep writing, to write the “shitty first drafts” and get something—anything– on the paper; it can be revised over and over until it is just right. Other writers set regular schedules, and maintain the schedules with inflexible persistence.  To a certain extent, finding ways to endure the resistant periods (or dull lulls) is the key to life.  We still get up on the mornings we aren’t sailing to Tahiti. We still put on our running shoes when we’d rather have a beer on the beach. And if we are going to be writers for more than a very limited time, we still sit down with the blank sheet of paper when we aren’t feeling the muse looking over our shoulders.

Endurance athletes use tricks to stay on track: for flagging energy on long runs, Gu and Gatorade can provide the needed boost. Running with a partner or team can be encouraging and provide structure and responsibility to a group that is harder to disregard.  Cross-training changes up the activity and challenges different muscles.  Training with a coach brings in outside expertise and perspective. How can we apply such techniques to our writing practice so we don’t simply burnout and become one of the countless writers who give up?

Meditation teaches one to sit with their emotions and observe them without attachment. This non-attachment allows a certain level of indifference; as one watches their thoughts, they don’t have to become caught up in them. For instance, when you watch your thoughts during meditation, you might realize, “oh, I’m thinking about my meeting at work again.” Or, “Jeeze, I can’t get rocky road ice cream out of my mind.” By observing these thoughts from a distance, you gain a little more objectivity, and with practice, the thoughts you observe can become non-issues: you don’t have to give in and eat ice cream every time you think about it, and you don’t have to fixate on the work issues.

Transforming things into non-issues might be the magical fuel for endurance: if exhaustion or boredom becomes a non-issue, the runner will step out the door and run. If distractions or lack of time becomes a non-issue, the writer focuses on the next line, and works at it until it comes out right.

“Failures are unforgettable” declares Philip Schultz in his poem, “Failure.” The poem addresses his father’s failures (as perceived by his extended family, community, rabbi, and others) and honors the intentions underlying his frequent goofs as he tried for greatness. He reflects: 

… not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.

The poem offers redemption; it rescues the memory of the father and allows him to be like what Jack Kerouac described as the “Holy Goof.” There is a holiness in goofing up (and goofing around). Maybe we don’t recognize it often enough. We do have literary heroes that are royal mess-ups: Miguel de Cervante’s classic character, Don Quioxote is an easy one. And clearly, Ignatius Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s novel, A Confederacy of Dunces embodies the ultimate goof. T.S. Eliot’s persona J. Alfred Prufrock is, perhaps, the anti-goof: he is so afraid to take a step that we continue to feel his extreme discomfort and hesitation along with him.

I wish I saw more literature that addresses failures. I think we need it. In a culture that is burying itself in vast quantities of rapidly accumulating waste, we need to reassess what is valuable and what is useless. The state of California just ruled that all plastics now have a “redemptive value” to encourage people to recycle more. By expanding the economic benefit of recycling, the government hopes to increase environmental returns. In a time of increasingly damaged and unstable environments, economies, communities and psyches, we might need to learn to better love failures, imperfections and damaged goods.

It seems like echoes of the old virgin/whore dichotomy in a slightly different form. Often, we still classify and separate things as pure/worthwhile or impure/damnable. Literature holds the power to change a culture’s collective myths and heroes. I’d like to set aside the hesitant Prufrockian “maybe.” Let’s see more literary heroes say “Yes,” even if, like the father in Schultz’s poem, they don’t quite get it right in the end. 

If you’d like to read and hear Philip Schultz’s poem “Failure,” go to: http://www.slate.com/id/2164575/

I wonder sometimes about how much our imaginations slip in and influence the way we experience “reality.” When was the last time you had to do a double-take to assess the veracity of something you just witnessed or you mis-remembered something so clearly you are sure it happened even though everyone tells you otherwise? The blurred edge of reality offers surprise, absurdity, and startling new vantage points for witnessing the old normal. Perhaps this is why television shows, movies, and books that use magical realism work so well—their power is based on –what shall we call it? A loose interpretation of reality? A generous interpretation of reality? One of my favorite odd moments in literature is in Isabel Allende’s novel,  The House of Spirits when one of the characters is born with a curly pig tale. That single detail reveals so much about the future life of the character.

We are comfortable accepting fantastic truth in our entertainment—but, as we saw a couple of years ago with the explosive James Frey drama after parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces were proven to be fabricated. When people want truth, they want factual truth.

I have to admit, I empathized with Frey when, visibly deflated, he argued weakly for the “emotional truth” of his story. While the public may not popularly accept this concept with nonfiction prose, what about poetry? Isn’t poetry often a reporting of emotional truth?

The imagination relies on emotional truth. Think dreams. Think nightmares. Think love. The dream world uses the language of non-linear, amorphous, shape-shifting symbolism to offer insights. It functions without the strict objectivist tools of measurement and validation we are comfortable with in the waking life.

In Ulysses, James Joyce explains “horseness is the whatness of all horse.” If done well, poetry succeeds at revealing the horseness of all horse– the truthness of all truth.