Kiss-Me-I'm-Poetical Junk

I've been making my way through Kenneth Koch's Collected Poems (and what an odd and brilliant way that is) and thought I'd share his rules for knowing when a poem is ready for the wide open world. (Kenny, forgive the scrambled line breaks -- blogger wasn't made for long-lined poems.)


"... Just how good a poem should be
Before one releases it, either into one's own work or then into the purview of others,
May be decided by applying the following rules: ask 1) Is it astonishing?
Am I pleased every time I read it? Does it say something I was unaware of
Before I sat down to write it? and 2) Do I stand up from it a better man
Or a wiser, or both? or can the two not be separated? 3) Is it really by me
Or have I stolen it from somewhere else? (This sometimes happens,
Though it is comparatively rare.) 4) Does it reveal something about me
I never want anyone to know? 5) Is it sufficiently "modern"?
(More about this a little later) 6) Is it in my own "voice"?
Along with, of course, the more obvious questions, such as
7) Is there any unwanted awkwardness, cheap effects, asking illegitimately for attention,
Show-offiness, cuteness, pseudo-profundity, old hat checks,
Unassimilated dream fragments, or other "literary," "kiss-me-I'm-poetical" junk?
Is my poem free of this? 8) Does it move smoothly and swiftly
From excitement to dream and then come flooding reason
With purity and soundness and joy? 9) Is this the kind of poem
I would envy in another if he could write? 10)
Would I be happy to go to Heaven with this pinned on my
Angelic jacket as an entrance show? Oh, would I? And if you can answer to all these Yes
Except for the 4th one, to which the answer should be No,
Then you can release it, at least for the time being.
I would look at it again, though, perhaps in two hours, then after one or two weeks,
And then a month later, at which time you can probably be sure.

Real Sofistikated

It's been a while since I've raved about a particular book, but Tony Hoagland's essay collection Real Sofistikashun deserves a few cheers. In it he does an exceptionally good job representing a centrist perspective on poetry, keenly assessing contemporary trends while modestly advocating for poems that resonate with human experience. His essay "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment" contains one of the most insightful and balanced explanations for the tendency of contemporary poets to reject meaning and narrative that I've read yet -- as well as a persuasive argument for poets to be cautious in following that impulse:

"One can understand how disassociative poetry has become fashionable, celebrated, taught, and learned--it is a poetry equal, in its velocity, to the speed and disruptions of contemporary culture. It responds to the postmodern situation with a joyful crookedness. And one can also see why poetics that assert sensible order (which, admittedly, can be predictable and reductive) have fallen a bit from fashion: after all, the pretense of order is, in some way, laughable. Art has to play, it has to break rules, to turn against its obligations, to be irresponsible, to recast convention. Some wildness is essential to its freedom. Yet every style has its shadowy limitation, its blind eye, its narcissistic cul-de-sac. There is a moment when a charming enactment of disorientation becomes an homage to dissociation. And there is a moment when the poetic pleasure of elusiveness, inadvertently, commits itself to triviality."

Hear, hear! If you're looking for a smart, humble exploration of American poetry today, check out this book.

Tony Hoagland on Loftiness

From Tony Hoagland's essay collection Real Sofistikashun:

"And here is one explanation for the lack of rhetorical experiment in much contemporary work: we are constrained by our own belief in the precious individuality of the poet, and by our conviction that poetry equals sincerity. We are oddly ready to become poets by getting down and dirty with the details of our private lives, but oddly unwilling to get lofty and public in our speech."

This impulse towards rhetoric and public speech in poetry is one I've felt keenly over the last several months. What's interesting to me is the task of reclaiming that hilltop for poetry while engaging in the kind of personal exploration that can so powerfully propel a poem along. As usual, I want it both ways.

Attending to Trivialities

From William Stafford:

"This witness would note, confess, or assert, how small--how trivial--the elements which lead to a poem (or any work of art, or theory, or a truth) are. That is, the beginning impulse and perhaps the successive impulses too are often so colorless, so apparently random, so homeless and unaccountable, that most people would neglect them: they don't seem to amount to much. It is by lending faith and attention to these waifs of thought that we allow their meanings to develop, sometimes. And their mutual reinforcement is the composition of the poem, or the realization of any creative endeavor."

(from The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life)

Thus, the problem of stress, of busy-ness: it limits the writer's ability to attend to those "waifs of thought." Without energy, without a kind of quietude, those small voices can hardly be heard at all.

Glimmerings

After a couple despondent weeks, today I finally was able to write something worth keeping (or at least I think so), and I've got another idea for a poem in the chamber. No telling whether this spell of creativity will last but I'm happy for the time being. Check back next week for an update.

In the meantime, since I've been thinking so much about the conditions necessary for writing, here's a Friday quote for you:

"For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of mind is needed--freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away."

-- Adrienne Rich (from "When We Dead Awaken": Writing as Re-Vision)

Irritable Reaching

Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952.

"A painter like Pollock," John Ashbery writes in his essay The Invisible Avant-Garde, "... was gambling everything on the fact that he was the greatest painter in America, for if he wasn't, he was nothing, and the drips would turn out to be random splashes from the brush of a careless housepainter. It must often have occurred to Pollock that there was just a possibility that he wasn't an artist at all, that he had spent his life 'toiling up the wrong road to art' as Flaubert said of Zola."

No one wants to spend life "toiling up the wrong road." So the question becomes, how do you overcome those doubts? How do you know if you're the real thing or a sham? What separates the amateur (in the least derogatory sense of the word) from the artist?

Lately, as has consistently been my bad habit in poetry as well as in life, I have been jumping ahead of myself and thinking about what will happen at the end of A Writing Year. I can't help but dwell on what's next. Does writing become just another hobby, something to do at night or whenever I can find a few quiet moments? Do I cease writing poems altogether, having had my year to make it work and failed to find that elusive, undefinable proof that I Am A Poet And The Struggle Is All Worthwhile?

Keats would say these are all symptoms of weakness in Negative Capability, "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." What is so insidious about these questions and that "irritable reaching" is the way they infect the mind. The question, "is this poem really any good?" spawns others: "Do I know what a good poem really is?" "Do I have the passion and strength to create good poems?" "Is a 'good' poem really enough?" "Why continue when so many others can do better?" Each one adds its small white ribbon until they form a kind of mental straitjacket.

I recognize that all art requires a kind of faith. As Ashbery continues about Pollock's work, "It is a gamble against terrific odds. Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing." I agree with Ashberry that a degree of recklessness is necessary. But finding the confidence to be reckless (or again, call it faith) isn't easy. I worry I may not be reckless enough. I worry I may not be reckless at all.

Winters and Rexroth on Poetry

A few noteworthy passages. First, Yvor Winters, from the foreword to The Testament of a Stone:

"A poem is a state of perfection at which a poet has arrived by whatever means. It is a stasis in a world of flux and indecision, a permanent gateway to waking oblivion, which is the only infinity and the only rest. It has no responsibilities except to itself and its own perfection--neither to the man who may have come to it with imperfect understanding nor to the mood from which it may have originally sprung. It is not a means to any end, but is in itself an end, and it, or one of the other embodiments of beauty, is the only end possible to the man of intellect."

"The poet, in creating, must lose himself in his object. If he becomes more interested in himself observing than in his object, and still continues to write about his object rather than himself observing, he will create a mannerism but no image.... The poet who is preoccupied with his object desires a speech without idiom and a style without mannerism, that the clarity of his perception may not be clouded by inessentials."

And second, from Kenneth Rexroth's essay "Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation":

"The problem of poetry is the problem of communication itself. All art is a symbolic criticism of values, but poetry is specifically and almost exclusively that. A painting decorates the wall. A novel is a story. Music... soothes a savage beast. But poetry you have to take straight."

Stanley Plumly on Poetry

The summer after my junior year in college, I spent several weeks in a writing seminar series in Prague. The poet Stanley Plumly was the leader of workshop group I joined and, as I mentioned in a previous post, he refused to allow anyone in it to treat the writing of poems lightly, even if it was the summer, and Prague, and all very romantic. He reviled lazy writing and did not hesitate to cast judgment on the poems we brought before him. Tears were not uncommon. I recall one or two people dropping out of the class.

Having someone take my poems seriously was just what I wanted, and I quickly learned to welcome his criticism -- I figured that the sooner I could identify and understand where the words went wrong, the sooner I could set them right. He taught me that the poem matters and the poet does not, or not much. In the end, he also provided me the support and genuine encouragement to continue writing, and in that way he was kind. His guidance helped me get my first publication--of a poem he critiqued--in a national journal, the Ohio Review. I suspect he isn't aware what a difference that class made to me.

Throughout the workshop I tried to write down everything Plumly had to say about writing poetry. I forgot about all of those quotes until this morning, when I came across them in an old notebook. They're still illuminating and I think they're worth sharing here:

[On the writing process:] “I sit there a lot, in silence, like a good quaker.”

“There’s no such thing as omniscience in poetry; God doesn’t need to write poems.”

“Use form for tension.”

“The hardest thing is to resist therapy.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, poetry is about losing.”

“Poetry is about making a world, however small it is.”

“You can’t live on only the energy and emotion of your art—it will eat you alive.”

“Remember there are only small things, and you are a small thing among them.”

“The poem has to live in your world, not just in your private consciousness.”

“Embrace the object. Do not lose sight of that objective.”

“Language ought to be a transparency over experience; what we don’t want is a linguistic opacity.”

“If you write badly, it’s because you don’t know, you aren’t focused, you aren’t being honest, or you aren’t feeling it.”

“Editing is a way of rewriting, the emptying of a previously filled space.”

“Beware commentary; when you enter a poem, you’re in there—you can’t go out again.”

“Cliche comes in when we’re in a hurry to get somewhere else.”

“Work against the material.”

“[in poetry, answer:] What is your problem right now? Where does it hurt?”

“So much about writing is getting to what needs to be written.”

“Everything in a poem has to be answered... or unanswered.”

“You mustn’t treat your experience as if it only happened to you.”

More from Rilke

"Praise the world to the angel, not what can't be talked about.
You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos
where he so intently feels, you're just a novice. So show
him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation
until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours."

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from "The Ninth Elegy"

Sound advice for a poet, I think. But what a challenge it is to find "some simple thing" that can last more than a few minutes, much less generations. How did William Carlos Williams know so much depended on a red wheelbarrow? Writing something worthwhile requires so much instinct, discipline and patience, and the chances of success are so unlikely. Then again, why bother at all if that's not the goal, making something that will endure?

re:Beginning

Some odd synchronicity in this morning's reading:

"Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything. This brings us again to composition this the using everything. The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again. In these two books there was elaboration of the complexities of using everything and of a continuous present and of beginning again and again and again."

--Gertrude Stein, from "Composition as Explanation"

"When longing overcomes you, sing about great lovers;
their famous passions still aren't immortal enough.
You found that the deserted, those you almost envied,
could love you so much more than those you loved.
Begin again. Try out your impotent praise again;
think about the hero who lives on: even his fall
was only an excuse for another life, a final birth."

--Rainer Maria Rilke, from "The First Elegy"

Begin again. It makes me consider "revision." A re-seeing and so, a re-beginning in its own right. The hard part is finding the courage to begin again and again, to circle back, to make the ending a beginning also.

A Workshop Poem

William Packard, who taught creative writing in New York for more than 40 years, has a cutting section on workshops in his curmudgeonly, old-school tome The Art of Poetry Writing. I couldn't resist reprinting a poem by Norman Stock that he finds illustrative of their faults:

Thank You for
the Helpful Comments

I sit quietly listening
as they tear my poem to shreds in the poetry workshop
as each one says they have a "problem" with this line

and they have a "problem" with that line

and I am not allowed to speak because that is the
etiquette of the workshop
so I sit listening and writing while they tear the
guts out of my poem and leave it lying bleeding and dead
and when they're finally finished having kicked the
stuffing out of it
having trimmed it down from twenty lines to about four
words that nobody objects to
then they turn to me politely and they say well Norman
do you have any response
response I say picking myself up off the floor and
brushing away the dirt while holding on for dear
life to what I thought was my immortal poem now
dwindled to nothing
and though what I really want to say is can I get my
money back for this stupid workshop what I say
instead is... uh... thank you for your helpful
comments... while I mumble under my breath
motherfuckers wait till I get to your poems

Sad but true. And hilarious.

Stafford's book, by the way, is better than most so-you-want-to-be-a-poet books. He's straightforward, if distant, and he takes a back to basics approach that emphasizes reading and discipline. He's not politically correct, he's not comprehensive, and he has a decidedly Western focus, but his determined attention to the fundamentals sets him apart.

Returnings

Still making the brutal transition back from lush Negril to snowbound Chicago, so I'll steady myself on the shoulder of W.S. Di Piero today (from Semba!: A Notebook):

"Poetry doesn't have much to do with other arts, but there are coordinates. I'm bored by theatrical prophecy, by poetry that makes one fraught statement then another, without shapely sound or rhythm, without an availably complex density of phrasing and patterning, and I'm bored by poetry that achieves its effects only tonally or by clever invention. A coordinate: De Kooning's brushstroke enshrines its own passage: in its moist, elided, sumptuous impasto we see color broken down and surging. We get, as in certain kinds of poetry (Weldon Kees, Alan Dugan, Louise Bogan), both dreamily episodic eruptions and the entire shapely course of the surge, the rush and flush of the whole."

Kill the Bird

Thoughts on poetry from Charles Bukowski:

"There's too much bad poetry being written today. People just don't know how to write down a simple easy line. It's difficult for them, it's like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning--not many can do it. Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem. And it comes out the way they think a poem should be. Take a cat. He doesn't think, well, now I'm a cat and I'm going to kill this bird. He just does it."

A Few Notes Rightly Placed

From "The Trouble with Poetry," by poet (and apparent foot fetishist) Charles Simic:

"The true poet specializes in a kind of bedroom and kitchen metaphysics. I'm the mystic of the frying pan and my love's pink toes. Like every other art, poetry depends on nuance. There are many ways to touch a guitar string, to kiss and nibble someone's toe. Blues musicians know that a few notes rightly placed touch the soul, and so do lyric poets. The idea is, it is possible to make astonishingly tasty dishes from the simplest ingredients. Was it Charles Olson who said that myth is a bed in which human beings make love to the gods? As long as human beings fall in love and compose love letters, poems, too, will get written."

Quotes on Ambition

I've just finished Donald Hall's collection of essays on poetry, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, and his essay "Poetry and Ambition" seems to be resonating with me. A few quotes I find especially memorable:

"I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems."

"Poets who stay outside the circle of peers--like Whitman, who did not go to Harvard; like Dickinson for whom there was no tradition; like Robert Frost, who dropped out of two colleges to make his own way--these poets take Homer as their peer. To quote Frost again: 'The thing is to write better and better poems. Setting our heart when we're too young on getting our poems appreciated lands us in the politics of poetry which is death.'"

"Although in theory workshops serve a useful purpose in gathering young artists together, workshop practices enforce the McPoem. This is your contrary assignment: Be as good a poet as George Herbert. Take as long as you wish."

"If it seems hopeless, one has only to look up in perfect silence at the stars... and it does help to remember that poems are the stars, not poets. Of most help is to remember that it is possible for people to take hold of themselves and become better by thinking. It is also necessary, alas, to continue to take hold of ourselves -- if we are to pursue the true ambition of poetry. Our disinterest must discover that last week's nobility was really covert rottenness, et cetera. One is never free and clear; one must work continually to sustain, to recover."