Poetry

No Bloom

I’m working on a poem about Grace Hopper. By working I mean: reading and thinking. (There’s a wonderful biography on her by Kathleen Broome Williams.) No pen to page yet, no ideas about form.

A few nights ago I found out that Eavan Boland has written a poem about Hopper, published in her Against Love Poetry. I immediately requested it from the library and although my branch didn’t have it, a nearby one did. So tonight, the extraordinarily kind librarian went through the large stacks of unprocessed, requested books to find it for me so that I didn’t have to wait nearly a week to read it.

There are some beautiful lines. There are some places where the rhythm dies, in my opinion, and prose takes over, and I enjoy it less. But it ends on a beautiful line.

I read the poem, enthralled. I read it a second time, my mind asking, which of these lines might make a good repeton?

And I wondered again, how can a good poem make Harold Bloom feel anxious? The wonderful poems that have already been written do not stop me from writing, do not inhibit me.

Does anyone else wonder that? Are there things you don’t read because you’re worried how they will go into your Word Bucket?

One could argue, given the quotation I’m about to include, that maybe even Boland wondered this but read further, into the second quotation. Bloom does not fit here.

Let there be language—
      even if we use it differently:
            I never made it timeless as you have.
                  I never made it numerate as you did.






I am writing at a screen as blue
      as any hill, as any lake, composing this
            to show you how the world begins again:
                  One word at a time.
                        One woman to another.

still on sonnets

Just took a peek at the most recent issue of 14by14. Of what’s there, the ones that stood out for me were Michael Juster’s “So You Want to Win a Nemerov?” (which made me laugh), Judith Graham’s “25a Schumann Street” (which made me wince — some negative nostalgia there), and Christopher Bullard’s “A Pound of Feathers” (likewise).

Cures for Poetry Burnout?

Wow, it’s been a while.  My Internet was down for a while there, but I’m back now.

And I have a problem.

Since finishing my MFA, I’ve been suffering from poetry burnout.  I don’t want to write it, and I don’t want to read it.  I’m not so worried about the writing end of things, since inspiration comes and goes and all, and I’m puttering away on revisions and submissions and non-fiction in the meantime, but the lack of urge to read is getting to me.  I’m eating up novels and non-fiction, but poetry, not so much.

Has this ever happened to anyone else?  Anyone have any great suggestions of poets or books to jump-start my stalled brain?

“It is important to forget about what you are doing – then a work of art may happen.” – Andrew Wyeth

Weddings

I am working on a response to Jeannine’s comments about being able to hear a poem but my shock and sadness about California’s vote on Proposition 8 keeps getting in the way. I give you Alice Oswald‘s poem “The Wedding” which cares not at all what the biology of your lover may be.

Wedding

From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions…
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins it’s like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.

not rhyming but reading…

Mary’s cri du coeur prompted some scattershreds of thoughts I might expand on later, but for now, here’s the raw gleaning:

  • Recent poems by other people that I keep revisiting: Steve Kistulentz’s “Fuck Poem with Language from the Gospel of Mark”; Martha Silano’s “My Place in the Universe”
  • An older favorite that stole my breath in a similar way: Camille T. Dungy’s “The Preachers Eat Out”
  • A poem that, for me, demonstrates how line breaks really do matter even in unrhymed poems: John Brehm’s Sea of Faith. (I wanted to point someone else to it a couple of eons ago, and at the time the only online version I could find was one where the line breaks had not be reproduced and it made me itch. [My original notes, from — good grief, 1 November 2000 –“I recommend seeking out a copy of the printed anthology at the bookstore for the actual poem – I found it funnier with line breaks. (Why? Line breaks build in pacing. Pacing is key to comedy. Ask any clown…”)]
  • …and here’s me reading “Sea of Faith” on my cellphone a couple years ago…
  • …and here’s another poem by Brehm (“Getting Where We’re Going”) that I might use in a church service at some point.
  • Another poem Mary’s entry prompted me to look up was John Wieners’s “A Poem for Painters,” which — if I could save only one poem out of the entire Beat anthology, that would be the one. Its original ending takes my breath away every damn time, and I wrote a bit more about it for an online project….
  • …but at the moment I’m feeling more than a little at sea, because in hunting for an online posting of the poem, I came across three “new” last lines that aren’t in the printed version I own. They appear both in the excerpt in a profile of Wieners and in references to a recording he made of the poem. I dunno. My first reaction is that the new last three lines are too much, but that could be my shock speaking. But then again, Auden’s final renderings of “If I Could Tell You” and “A Bride in the 30s” make me nuts (and make me very glad indeed that both “Selected” and “Collected” editions of his work have been in print)…
  • …which brings up the old story about him disowning “September 1, 1939” (which is, I’m guessing, a major reason the “Selected” edition remains in print). And, yeah, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded in passing that even the greats had to wrestle with variations of failing better (especially after a drive across Tennessee just long enough for one to realize (finally) what-all’s not working with the 2000+ word draft one has been bleeding drop by stinking drop through one’s forehead over the past six days. What a stupid aggravating onion-y onion-esque process this is).

    • How do you classify a platypus? or Hybrid Forms

    Mary brought up an interesting point a couple of posts ago, about how to know a poem is a poem. In these days of prose-poems and flash-fiction, microfictions, visual poetry, and flarf (poems generated by Google searches,) how indeed do we define a poem?

    It made me think of my training for my first degree, in biology, which is really a science of classification. How do you classify an animal that lays eggs but feeds its young with milk? That has webbed feet and a beak but is clearly no bird?

    In my classes, it is sometimes difficult to explain to students, some of whom remain stubbornly attached to the kind of poetry they were exposed to as youngsters: typical 17th century, rhyme and meter, regular stanzas, etc. They just refuse to believe free verse is poetry, or they get frustrated when I show them a poem by a conversational poet, like Frank O’Hara, or, say, a prose poem from Matthea Harvey, or an almost broken-prose piece like Louise Gluck’s “Telemachus’ Detachment:”

    “When I was a child, looking
    at my parents’ lives, you know
    what I thought? I thought
    heartbreaking. Now I think
    heartbreaking, but also
    insane. Also
    very funny.”

    A genius of tone and unexpected line break, Gluck uses this character’s utterance to show how simple a poem can be.

    I use the analogy of a poetry toolbox. There are tools that poets use, that Mary mentioned: rhyme, meter, rhythm, metaphor, imagery, alliteration, line breaks, onomatopaiea…perhaps there are others – jumps in narrative, dream-like tone. But how do you know a poem is a poem? It usually declares itself when you read it out loud.
    I was introduced to prose poetry in my very first poetry book, which was my mother’s textbook for her first Freshman English class in college – Introduction to Poetry, by X.J. Kennedy. In the 1969 version, he includes a poem by Karl Shapiro called “The Dirty Word.” Later, in grad school, one of my teachers taught Baudelaire’s prose poetry. How did I know these were poems? Instinctually, I think, the way we learn everything. When I teach prose poetry to my students, I often use examples of haibun by Basho. His haibun combine prose and haiku in an elegant, sometimes disjunctive way. What makes these poems? Well, do they use tools from the poetry toolbox? Do they look like prose, but act/sound/read like poems? Does it lay eggs like a duck or alligator, but is warm-blooded and milk-giving, like a mammal? What are the defining characteristics of “poetry?” What is the poem’s DNA?

    Animated poetry

    In a conversation on the Poets & Writers Speakeasy forum, poet Wendy Babiak mentioned videos of poetry animations and short films, citing as a favourite “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins (animation by Julian Grey of Head Gear).

    That’s one of eleven animations of his poetry commissioned by the Sundance Channel’s Action Poetry Series, which includes: “The Best Cigarette” (David Vaio/Will Hyde/FAD); “Budapest” (Julian Grey/Head Gear); “The Country” (Brady Baltezor/Radium); “The Dead” (Juan Delcan/Spontaneous); “Hunger” (Samuel Christopher/FAD); “No Time” (Jeff Scher); “Now and Then” (Eun-Ha Paek/Milky Elephant); “Some Days” (Julian Grey/Head Gear); and “Today” (Little Fluffy Clouds/Curious), which is my favourite animation, although I think “Walking Across the Atlantic” (Mike Stolz/Manic) is my favourite of these poems.

    SamuelChristopher also animated “Angel,” which is from Hashisheen by Bill Laswell and read by Nicole Blackman, who I recognize from The Golden Palominos’ album Dead Inside.

    Here’s are some other animations and short films based on poems:

    Finally, the Poetry Foundation, in association with docUWM at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has a Poetry Everywhere series, which includes: “I started early…” by Emily Dickinson (Maria Vasilkovsky); “The Language” by Robert Creeley (Chad Edwards); “Mulberry Fields” by Lucille Clifton (Jason Walczyk); “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” by John Ashbery (Kate Raney); “Snowmen” by Agha Shahid Ali (Kyle Jenkins); “Some Words Inside of Words” by Richard Wilbur (Anna Wilson); “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden (Allison Alexander Westbrook IV); and “Tornado Child” by Kwame Dawes (Nicole Garrison).