The Practice of Poetry

In a written statement for The American Poetry Review’s 1999 roundtable discussion titled “How Poetry Helps People to Live Their Lives” (published in this month’s issue of APR) Yusef Komunyakaa says, “…I am taken back to Phillis Wheatley as she muses about the sacredness of the human imagination, how she seems to link it to freedom, and this supports the reason poetry is important: It reconnects us to the act of dreaming ourselves into existence. Poetry is an action…” (32). Komunyakaa’s conceptualization of our existence as an act of dream-creation is an interesting one; it declares that one must dream to liberate themselves and moreover, making the dream into poetry is an active process of self-realization.

Komunyakaa’s philosophy that the imagination is a liberating force echoes the Zen philosophy that our thought patterns are the cause of our suffering as well as the potential source of our liberation. Poets and meditators often observe the same precepts: everything depends on how we engage our mind; when we think about what we think, we can gain great insights, and we can be free of our enslaving fears or trapped fantasies that exist within.

As an example of poet/meditator parallels, take Western Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield. Although his advice is projected towards the meditating student, it translates well for the writer too. Consider his following story:
“A professor of mathematics and topography who had come to meditation was worried because his work involved hours of thought. He asked how he could practice meditation while thinking through these complex math problems.…I responded with a simple solution: ‘First, check your motivation. Approach the math in a positive and creative way. Then, when thinking about math, just think about math. If you get competitive and worry about publishing your solution before another colleague, that’s not math. If you find yourself dreaming about winning the Nobel Prize or the Field medal, that’s not math. Find a skillful motivation. Then do the math and enjoy the creativity of the mind” (The Wise Heart 148).
Kornfield is giving advice on meditating, but he is simultaneously giving great advice on focusing the nervous creative mind that might be stalled with self-doubt, fear of failure, or any other kind of paralyzing writer’s block. His advice is simple: those extra worries aren’t the task at hand—so let them go, focus on the true work (math, poetry, whatever) and enjoy the challenge.

This act of letting go and focusing is when Kornfield believes the mind opens up and becomes more liberated. Isn’t this similar to what Komunyakaa says? When we write, when we truly pay attention to the subtle machinations of our imagination, we make solid the otherwise drifting shadows, we make real the things that are waiting for acknowledgement.

“Coming back to Jeffers after a long absence is like getting kicked in the gut,” Carolyn Kizer states in her essay called “A Note on Robinson Jeffers” (93). In the essay, she analyzes a handful of passages of Jeffers’ work which are harsh, violent, and inhumanistic but girded by “rolling orotund phrases” and “luminous alliteration” (95, 92).

To illustrate the great difference between the dark bent of the poems and the musicality, she tells how her mother used to read her Jeffers when she was very young; they were lulled hypnotically by the rhythm and rhyme, enough so that the harsh content slipped past both her and her mother with unbothersome ease. She concludes her note by admitting “It is hard not to wish that Jeffers had not hated mankind so fiercely, to the point where it deforms parts of his most distinguished work. But we have the rest, the dozens of beautiful shorter poems…” (95). “Deforms” is an intriguing word choice; she is saying Jeffers purposely mutilated the inherent symmetry and grain of poetry. As she follows up with “we have the rest…” it accepts the inhumanism in some of his work because there is much work that is easier to handle.

I wonder though, if her reaction is simply part of the grimace reaction from getting kicked in the gut. It’s true: Jeffers’ reviling voice can make me grind my teeth with complete dis-ease. But it seems important that now, as we must change our perspectives on what we value and consider ethical living in order to sustain life, we should be taking extra care with our assumptions. Jeffers’ sucker-punches are upsetting, but our desire for the little lovelies that he wrote might simply reveal our implicit acceptance of the common philosophy that literature “is reaching for the human element” as Chris Abani said in a recent, brilliant lecture at the Port Townsend Writers Conference. This is an anthropocentric notion that elides the forceful de-centering Jeffers so ardently (and harshly) sought. Maybe he was a man out of time, better suited for the more angry—and scared—listeners today, the ones worried about the quality of life for their children, the ones not having children out of fear for what sea changes may soon make unbearable living conditions. It’s true, Jeffers makes for uncomfortable reading, but to disregard the ugliest parts of his rhetoric in preference of the lyric moments seems to be similar to turning off the volume of the television when George W. is talking, and just contemplating how nice his hair looks.

Richard Hugo’s slim handbook on writing, The Triggering Town is always worth revisiting. The Triggering Town was first published in 1982, but his suggestions for the poetic craft are still very relevant.

One thing that makes the book so engaging is that Hugo writes with the voice of a buddy. The tone is conversational, contradictory and funny; it offers moments of clarity and encouragement. He argues for finding a writing style that is open to the obsessions and quirky tendencies of each particular writer. He also encourages writers to listen to the emotional truth of what they are trying to say without getting distracted by literal truths. This prodding towards inner revelation encompasses much of Hugo’s advice and writing philosophy. He explains that he intends his writing advice “…will lead you to yourself and the way you feel” (16). But he doesn’t say this in a touchy-feely way–his aim is authenticity, not therapy.

Hugo advises: “You hear me make extreme statements like ‘don’t communicate’ and ‘there is no reader.’ While those statements are meant as said, I presume when I make them that you can communicate and can write clear English sentences. I caution against communication because once language exists only to convey information, it is dying” (11). Dying language versus living language: for Hugo, the difference is language that sings and echoes pleasurably long after it is uttered. Twenty-six years later, this handbook still sings just right–perhaps to a Johnny Cash tune, something irreverant, like “A Boy Named Sue.”

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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.