Poetry

Guest post: Lisa Dordal

What is a poem?

A poem is the inside of one person becoming the inside of another. Words together, not words alone. Words alone can’t make a poem, any more than a sacred text can make the divine. A poem is strangers talking across centuries. A meal shared between two people who’ve never met. The past breaking open the present. The present breaking open the past.

A poem is not about something but is something. An experience or emotion that passes holy into cell, sinew and vein, changing us with its dark, abundant breath. A poem is a rage at bombs and the odor of death; or snow geese, lovely, coming out from every page. A poem is the eggs of monkfish knitted into a gauzy shroud, buoyant, built for dispersal. A poem is gods in low hills holding thunder and flame. A poem is one eye, round as a coin, fixing fear upon you, the other, half shut.

A poem is sound and breath and feeling, rising from the page like the heat of summer rising from a road. A poem is fear braided into the strands of sinew connecting good-girl muscle to good-girl bone. A poem is atoms, quarks, and auras and all the love that lies between.

A poem is a door through which we move and are changed. A poem is the world aware of itself, alive to its own being. A poem is the gentle pressing of heat, the perfect distance from flame.

A poem is a sudden flock of birds across a blue wake; an eye that rises and falls. Wisp of seeing and being seen. A poem is quarrel, confusion and descent. Fragment of exaltation. A poem sings about the eye, billowing as if body and sky are one. A poem dreams of birds. Dreams of rain and ruin. Wisp of seeing and being seen. A poem dreams of itself dreaming of rain, its muscle sweet to its skin.

Lisa Dordal (M.Div., M.F.A.), author of Commemoration from Finishing Line Press, teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University. A Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals, including Best New Poets, Cave Wall, CALYX, The Greensboro Review, and Nimrod. For more information about her poetry, please visit her website at lisadordal.com.

No Joke: What’s a Poem?

This month, to celebrate National Poetry Writing Month, we’re going to host a number of poets and writers and thinkers who will be sharing their response to that dreaded question: what is a poem?

Please check back periodically to see whose words are up and let us know what you think of them.

Stats

When I started reading the collection of 100 poems previously published in Poetry, put together by Don Share and Christian Wiman—called The Open Door—I didn’t intend to wonder about the publishing choices of the magazine, just read some poems.

However, the amount of rhyme really surprised me. I began to wonder how it varied with time, because the poems included in the collection were published between 1913 and 2011. Was there some pattern? I would have assumed more rhyme earlier in the history of the magazine. I mean, didn’t free verse smash formal poetry, or why did we have that renaissance of Formalism?

I am assuming here that the “best of” choices made by Share and Wiman reflect both the best poems of the time in which they were published, as well as posterity’s take, in some way. I am also assuming that the form of the poem chosen was in some way representative of what was popular at the time it was published, which is also a bit iffy.

So here’s the breakdown, with rhyming poems indicated in blue and non-rhyming poems in orange. Some years from 1913-2011 had no published poems chosen for the collection; some years had more than one.

There were 39 rhyming poems, by which I mean poems which used end-rhyme in any way; the remainder didn’t use end-rhyme.

(Click graphic for larger version.)

I think what I expected to see was a pattern.

I think I expected the first half of the 20th century to be full of rhyme and see that change as time progressed. That does happen a bit, but there’s also a surprising increase in rhyming (blue) poems near the end of the timeline.

While the number of rhyming poems does decrease as time passes in the plot, the non-rhyming poems are there pretty much from the beginning. This also surprised me. I guess I had thought that free verse got popular later than it actually did. Just my ignorance.

And something the graphic doesn’t show, but which I noticed with my eyes currently working to understand the ordering of manuscripts: the front of the collection included a number of rhyming poems, including the first one, while the ending began to pull in more rhyming poems as the final page approached, and the final two poems of the collection rhyme. Which says to me that Share and Wiman believe that a rhyme is a wonderful choice to provide closure.

the what of His countenance

William Billings’s As the Hart Panteth is a wild ride of a hymn that is once again in heavy play on my car stereo. I looked up the lyrics tonight, since His Majestie’s Clerkes were singing something other than “light” during an iteration of a phrase I’d learned as “the light of His countenance.”

Turns out there are quite a few variations-interpretations of that verse. It’s “help of His countenance” on the CD, but BibleHub shows an array of others. They include:

my Savior
my salvation
the health of my countenance
his presence
his saving intervention
the salvation of his countenance

As it happens, I am more in need of comfort than precision when I sing along to Billings, so “help of His countenance” and “light of His countenance” are in fact the best of the lot where I am concerned. I was struck anew tonight by the association of light with God’s presence; in “Praise, O My Heart, to You,” which is another hymn I turn to for solace, the first verse includes the statement “you are … my field of sky with stars that never set,” and the final sentence is “I will sing praises to you while life fills my flesh with breath; as long as life shall stream from you within me, I will sing your light.”

The mention of stars in turn brought to mind Richard Hundley’s art song “Astronomers,” which I first heard at a group recital at Glimmerglass Opera (sung by Rosemary Barenz, if I’m remembering right). It’s a very short song that blends fact, fiction, and poetry: according to several sources, the name of the female astronomer in the lied is a tribute to Hundley’s grandmother; the dates, however, are not hers. The epitaph celebrated in the song does indeed correspond — with two key word changes — to a memorial plaque in Pennysylvania ; the declaration on the plaque was adapted from a poem by Sarah Williams.

And here, too, the version that first dazzled me — the soaring song I heard in Cooperstown — is the one that remains most “true” for me.

Williams’s original (1868?): I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

On the Brashear crypt (1920?): We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night

Hundley’s lyric (1959): We have loved the stars too deeply / to be afraid of/ the night.

Nourishment

I flipped open Annie Finch‘s A Poet’s Craft with another purpose in mind but I was stung by the title of chapter 2: “Poetry as Nourishment”.

In a way, it explains why I rail so against not finding what I want in poems. I need that nourishment.

As analogy, it also encourages me: try to enjoy new types of food.

Which brings me to Diane Ackerman’s “At Belingshausen, the Russian Base, Antarctica”.

Building materials, blue ice, even bulk paper: not edible.

And yet, in the end, it was edible, it was poetry that nourished me, half for what it was and half because I let myself like the brussel sprouts. [Note: I actually do like brussel sprouts; their choice just felt iconic.]

I could wish Ackerman’s poem was really a sonnet, instead of a fourteen-line piece. I could wish that the middle six lines rhymed in some, even slant, way. But it was tastier to decide that “oak” and “echoes” had rhyme possibility. And to let the need for rhyme go because I knew it was coming back at the ending. At the end, I was full of multiple interpretations of the conceit. At the end, the cherry on top was an oft-used sentiment presented fresh and crisp and full of music.

Appreciate

I read more poetry last month than I think I did in all of 2015.

I didn’t enjoy much of it.

I want to like most poetry more than I do, and I’m trying to unpack my assumptions and standards and guilt. I have a goal: appreciation.

I feel guilty for not liking contemporary poetry as much as other people do. That makes picking up new books rather fraught. And I have no idea why I’m able to put down prose or walk away from a painting without feeling like less of a human being—but not a poem other people are raving about.

There are things I want in a poem in order to enjoy it or to want to continue reading it: music. Reach out to me with assonance, consonance, alliteration, meter and I’ll listen. I’m not saying that’s the only way to make a poem but that is what I enjoy and that is what makes me get into the space of a poem, what makes me want to rail against it and revel with it. Music plus intelligent observation is the fun in poetry.

Certainly there are things I like in prose and things I don’t, but those are less about format and more about content. I would be content to read about most anything in a poem if there were music.

So I come round to my goal: how does one learn to appreciate a piece of art?

Sandy Longhorn writes of “the value of sticking with readings that don’t particularly set one’s hair on fire” and I’m curious what that is and how it works. And why you would want to study something which brings you no pleasure. How is it that prolonged exposure teaches appreciation?

When I read Jane Hirshfield’s The Beauty last month, I was surprised at my own enjoyment. Hirshfield’s poems are beautiful for their surprisingly metaphors—which I found only worked once or twice per poem for me—not any sonic texture. How was I able to appreciate them? Or does perhaps surprise rate as high as music in my standards?

And is that the trick to appreciation? To let my standards go? And if I do, how do I evaluate or experience the art itself?

swaying willows and line breaks

Thinking about Tu Fu over at Dawn Potter’s…

hearing about here-ness

Heard during yesterday’s commute:

STAMBERG: The show, it’s called “You Are Here,” is up at L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice until February 13. It’s the work of a dedicated artist who wrote this about what painting means to her. It’s almost a poem.

CAMPBELL: (Reading) It’s about tracking ghosts. It’s about selling diamonds to poets. It’s about that slippery little idea of a connection that is deeper than butter and as long as water.

Jane Hirshfield on Revising Poetry

Last summer, I attended a lecture on “Writing Poems, Writing Books” at Vanderbilt University by Jane Hirshfield, an American poet whose honors include election to Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012 and work in seven editions of Best American Poetry. Her most recent books are Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)¹ and The Beauty: Poems(Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)².

The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield

Below are my notes on the questions she asks herself while revising (with some paraphrasing, and her copious explanatory comments left out since I can’t write that fast!).

Questions to Ask While Revising a Poem

What does the poem actually say on the page? Is it saying what it wants to say? Is it confused?
Does it follow its own deepest impulses, rather than my initial idea?
Does it go deep enough?
Would saying less be stronger?
Does the poem know more than I did when I started writing it? Did I discover anything?

Is there music? Does it need a more deeply living body of sound? Is the music helping its meaning?
Does the visual shape of the poem [lines, line breaks, stanzas, etc.] serve its meaning?

Is it true?
Is it ethical?
Does it feel?

Is there anything that doesn’t belong?
Do any digressions serve the poem?
Are the poem’s awkwardnesses and smoothnesses in its own best service?
Are there places that would be confusing to an outside reader or where I’ve assumed non-general knowledge or mind-reading?
Are there any cliches in words, images or ideas?

Is the poem self-satisfied?
Is it predictable?
Is it precise?
Does it allow strangeness? Is the strangeness it allows accessible?

Is the grammar correct? Does wrong or non-standard syntax serve the purpose of the poem?
Are the transitions serving the poem? Are the ideas and rhetorical gestures in the right order?
Does the diction [ornateness/simpleness] fit the meaning?
Is it in the right voice [first person/second person/third person]?
Do each of its moments move it forward?

Should it go out into the world or is it the seed for another poem?
Is it finished?

¹ Buy Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)¹from your local bookstore or online at Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Chapters Canada; IndieBound; or Powell’s.

² Buy The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) from your local bookstore or online at Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Chapters Canada; IndieBound; or Powell’s.

Truth. Sort of.

During the wedding featured in the NYT’s January 9 “Vows” column, the groom’s sister read Taylor Mali’s How Falling in Love is Like Owning a Dog.

I am charmed. Even though my own dog has never managed to get the hang of bringing things back. (She will enthusiastically chase after sticks and walnuts and the like, and she has been known to bring possums and turtles into the house, but it’s never the same thing back to the same place. Then again, I’ve been told that’s my own m.o. as well. That can be for a different poem on a different day…)

Vary the Line

Poetry Collective