Respite and Inspiration

It's amazing what a little time away will do. Although it's depressing to be back in typically cold, monochromatic Chicago, I've had a lot of energy for writing this week. That's largely the result of last week's leisure, but I think some of it also comes from the experience of being someplace foreign, doing something entirely new. Jen and I were fortunate enough to connect with someone who knew Jamaica well and showed us the non-resort side of Negril. We were hardly trailblazing, but even so it was stimulating. Since then the tensions I observed and felt have been playing out in my notebook. What remains to be seen is how much that seems flush now pales over the days that follow. Hopefully not as much as my skin.

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."

Mind the Gap

Next week AWY will endure a short hiatus while I enjoy a long-planned vacation in Jamaica. In my experience, poems written during such trips tend to resemble the palm tree-busy art you bring back to hang in your living room; what seemed stunningly beautiful there just looks embarrassingly out of place here. Nonetheless, between Red Stripes I intend to do at least a little writing to keep up my momentum. I swear I will keep the mango, rasta and reef references subtle. Mega-resorts and tourists are totally fair game, though I hope to avoid both as much as possible.

Those of you who are Chicagoans and need a lit fix in AWY's absence would do well to check out Kim Addonizio's pre-Valentine's Day reading next week. I haven't read much of her newer work, but I'm a fan of her violent and lovely 2000 collection Tell Me. Details are below.

DATE: Thursday, February 8
TIME: 7 PM
PLACE: The HotHouse (31 East Balbo Ave.)
COST: Free

Hunting

Slow-going this week, as I grapple with some fundamental questions about subject matter. Bukowski says the poet is like a cat; it doesn't think about killing a bird, it just kills it. But what if there aren't any birds around? It seems to me that writing poetry involves a lot of waiting and hunting. You find a quiet place to watch for something with a heartbeat, or stalk it in the shadows. The beginning, especially, demands patience, focus and timing. In silence you calculate what is catchable and when to pounce. If you move too quickly, the commotion scares it off and you're left hungry.

So how do you decide when to go off hunting? In the morning, before I start actively trying to write, I read for an hour or so. If I'm lucky, something will occur to me during that time, some piece of a poem or just an interesting image or idea. It's like the cat spotting movement along the treeline. It gives me something to work with later on, and that's when the words seem to flow most smoothly. The poems that result tend to be the ones I like most.

But there are so many days when it feels like I'm sitting in a quiet field, and nothing's moving. Just me and a few vague ideas floating overhead, ungraspable as clouds. A lot of people would call this writer's block, but to me the problem is not so much that there are obstacles as it is that everything is so wide open. My time is not limitless, so I can't just sit around waiting--even cats realize that's a good way to starve to death. So, always somewhat hesitantly, I trod off in search of something to sustain me.

The problem is, as I get hungrier, it becomes increasingly easy to hallucinate poems where none exists. I start pouncing on dry leaves that blow by or I waste my time chasing grasshoppers. I might catch something, but it's never very filling. It's a frustrating experience, and the question becomes, how long to persist? There are days when I spot a cardinal while stalking a cockroach, and that makes everything worth it. On the other hand, there are many more days when all I get is leaves and bugs, or I convince myself that a ragged bundle of cloth is a bird. I might as well have just given up and hoped for better hunting the next day.

What's worth writing about? What's not? It's like knowing which kind of day it will be for bird-hunting. There's no way to know until afterwards, so I go out there and follow whatever movement I find, and hope it all works out. Maybe what Bukowski really means is that you can't go into the hunt looking for one particular bird; instead, you act on instinct, not thinking about what you want, but taking what the field provides. If that's right, then maybe the real trick of it is knowing where to hunt in the first place.

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."

Poems a la Netflix

Three new poems for my readers this morning. As I mentioned in my email to them, it's all a little like Netflix. They send the old ones back and get new ones a few days later. Of course, the poems don't have quite the same entertainment value as, for example, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (currently #2 on the Netflix Top 100). Well, perhaps a Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie / married assassins poem is in the offing. Oh, it's possible. Here's a Brad Pitt poem to prove it, courtesy of Aaron Smith.

Fitting Together Shadows

It strikes me that writing a poem is like creating a picture by painting only the shadows. What the poem references is impossible to recreate, so we write around it. To work, the poem must achieve a certain volume defined by the words and, to last, the shape it makes must have a kind of movement or tension. You could also say that making poems is like sculpting pots, only the poem is not the pot but the space inside.

Whatever the case, it's been a frustrating morning. Clay, paint, shadows, words -- all I know is nothing I've started on today is holding together, much less making any space worth sounding.

Huzzah for the Readers

As I continue to get feedback from my motley crew of readers, I'm thrilled with their honest, probing assessments and their refusal to let me get away with any laziness. So far each of them has pointed out something I hadn't noticed or acknowledged before, not just in the poems themselves but in my fundamental approach to writing as well. That's a great thing, and I can't thank them enough for their time and insights.

This virtual workshop also has the interesting effect of disaggregating everyone's responses. In a typical writing workshop, it's hard to avoid the urge to arrive at some consensus about whatever is being discussed, which means that the participants may unconsciously censor any comments that run counter to the direction of the group's collective judgment or emphasize those that align with it. That's just human nature. However, my readers are all responding privately via email, so I get their undiluted opinions, and it's fascinating to see how various facets of the poems stand out to each of them differently.

Finding My Voice (Cue the Enya)

My friend Lucas observed that the first group of poems I sent to my readers span a range of styles. In his response to me, he suggested that this was either an indication of my great virtuosity or evidence of internal conflict about the kind of work I'd like to produce.

Much as I'd like to believe the former is true, his conjecture about my conflicting thoughts on what and how I want to write is probably more accurate. It's not an unfamiliar conflict for me though -- I've always been torn between various different types of writing and felt a genuine interest in the possibilities offered by them all (or nearly all). One day I'm pulled toward Frost and his focus on plain speech and sentence sounds. The next I read Kay Ryan and want to write twisting, crystalline observations. And a day later the complex grammatical mechanisms of John Donne and Carl Phillips seem the only things worth creating.

As a result, I end up exploring all of these styles and others as well. At this point, I think that's the right thing to be doing, but there is the problem of coherence, and I don't relish the thought of seesawing back and forth between styles forever.

Poetry People always talk about "finding your voice," and I despise the touchy-feelyness that encumbers the phrase. I think when most people say it, they have in mind a kind of beatific blossoming. It seems like something that a lot of scented candles and dreamcatchers would help. (Plus, how do you know when you've found it? Is there a bell of some kind? A glowing light? Enya?) Still, I have to admit that I see the basic idea behind it as a central challenge for me this year. I have a multitude of voices in my head that I need to corral together into a single shouting crowd.

And that's the thing -- I don't feel that I should have to choose between these voices or among the many schools of poetry. For me, "finding my voice" means figuring out the kinds of rhythms, sounds, words and images that blend together best, that express the way I see the world, and that approximate, if always imperfectly, the unachievable, a priori poem that is behind everything I write. The real challenge is focusing, and listening, and working hard. Maybe in the end it's not so much that you find your voice as your voice finds you. No Enya necessary.

Travels with Carl

Some observant AWY readers will have noticed that Carl Sandburg's Complete Poems has been in my reading pile for some time now. That will continue to be the case as I make my way through his 600+ page work at the pace of about 10-15 pages a day. As one of the most recognized poets of Chicago (really, the poet of Chicago), I thought he would make a good companion as I started off.

So far he's proven an able guide. Before I began reading him in earnest, I knew him only for "city of broad shoulders" -type sentiments. But he's been good company not only because of his obvious affection for the city of Chicago and its people (and in particular, its workers), but because of the humor, pathos and sheer strangeness of so many of his poems. He is democratic in all senses of the word. Back then, he was a poet of hogs, bricklayers, harbors, blood, money, jazz, boxcars, Lake Michigan, jabberers, plagues, honeycomb, beautiful women, Jesus, and the blues. If he were writing now I think he would gravitate toward much of the same, plus pay-day loans, do-rags, express buses, broasted chicken, Beamers, green cards, pawnshops, lawyers, towncars, junkies and labradoodles.

Of course, Sandburg is also a poet of two world wars, and the frustration, sorrow and fury of his poems over the suffering and death of the people he feels so much for is, in our own time of far more senseless conflict, somehow comforting but deeply sad. It reminds me what's worth writing about, and how hard it is to get it right.