Listening

How about listening to Robert Thomas's Nov. 7 reading/interview on Jan Beatty's Pittsburgh radio poetry show.

It's great!

Leaping

Glorious day to be alive and living in San Francisco. A bright 75°, and one didn't need a jacket even at Funston -- though it's almost always windy and cold there. And once again, pods of dolphins swimming south, leaping in and out of the waves. They are becoming more frequent, but still, they are amazing.

Not half the stuff got done that needs to be done. I mailed out one envelope with an upcoming deadline. I ordered shades for the windows of my office. (Too expensive, but I can't work there most mornings with the sun in my eyes.)

We picked up some stuff at the Albertson's -- a thermometer, a new corkscrew, lightbulbs. I need to get a garlic press; I forgot that.

Then John had to exchange the portfolio he bought at Flax for his big presentation in two weeks, and now he's gone to Opera. I've got plenty I can do on my own -- pay bills, for one, start cleaning …. Maybe I'll turn on Singing in the Rain later and leap around with Gene Kelly.

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Oh what a gorgeous sunset, all bruised purples and orange pinks. From my window I can see the pinpoint lights of six fishing boats out there on the ocean, like a constellation.

Unwise

I'm not sure it's wise for me to be blogging now, after drinking a glass of wine, after driving an hour and a quarter back from Alameda … The thing is, it wasn't dark when I left, but it was going to get dark; I knew that. That's why I was so steering-wheel-clenched nervous, because I don't see in the dark. And because gnarly turned into insane as soon as I hit the bridge. But that's no excuse for not remembering to turn on my headlights until I was four blocks from my hill. O mi god.

Well, anyway, I survived, and don't believe I caused anyone else any accidents. I'm not a very good grownup. Although I could be worse. I'm skipping working out because, well because it means going out there. But until John and doggie get home, I'll not have any more wine.

The presentation at my (contract) job did nor go exceptionally well. I didn't think it would, but it really didn't.

And somehow, though it's rather daunting to have work that I have to fix sitting there waiting for me to fix it, I'm going to have to forget about that for now and try and wrap my mind around cooking Thanksgiving dinner for fourteen in my tiny house. And try to not wrap my mind around the dental torture coming up in the future.

I know this post has nothing to do with poetry. I'm getting some applications out. I'm sending out some manuscripts. I emailed an old friend a couple days ago to see if he had read my manuscript but he hadn't yet.

And so it goes.

I think maybe it's time for a list.

d-

Invisible Ink

Following Diane’s post below “About Seeing,” on Linda Gregg’s essay, I read Mary Ruefle’s essay from the same collection.

I was struck by this sentence: “There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.”

And how can you resist an essay that includes this story: “In the 2001 Kentucky Derby, which I watched live on television, Keats ran against Invisible Ink. There was no way I was going to miss this race ....”

The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer

I watched The Maltese Falcon again last night for the nth time. What a movie: where is John Huston when we need him? Perhaps my great weakness as a poet is that my writing is more influenced by The Maltese Falcon and Bringing Up Baby than “Meditation at Lagunitas” or “Mock Orange” or “Howl,” more influenced by the voices of Peter Lorre and Rosalind Russell than Robert Pinsky or Adrienne Rich. Is there any news (other than the election) more exciting than the recent release of a restored version of Renoir’s Rules of the Game?

I’m exaggerating but I think one thing about these films that’s directly relevant to poetry is their rhythm and speed. How I love those fast-talking guys and gals! How I love them especially after going to one too many poetry readings in that slo-mo style we’re so familiar with: “So much depends [pause] upon [pause] a red wheel [pause] barrow [pause] glazed [pause] with rain [pause] water [pause] beside the white [pause] chickens.” Of course Williams himself (if you listen to the old recordings) did not read his poems this way at all—it’s a contemporary affectation. Do poets think the audience is too dumb to follow the poem unless they talk ... really ... slow?

I love to imagine Bogart reading the lines instead: “Yes, angel, I’m going to send you over. So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.” The film even makes fun of its speed when Bogart fast-talks the cops and then says to the stenographer, “You getting this alright, son, or am I going too fast for you?” And the kid replies, along with us in the audience, “No sir, I’m getting it alright.”

About Seeing

Okay, this post could be called About Gloating -- one feels like gloating -- or About Celebrating, because one feels like celebrating too (and I'm happy to say I did my small part to help in the defeat of the Republicans) but, after all, this is a poetry blog, and this post is about poetry and about seeing.

i was just looking at Linda Gregg's essay on poets.org. Can't remember why I went to the site. I kind of left her essay up until I had time to read it. As usual, there were things I agreed with, things I didn't, but I was struck by this paragraph:

I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically "see" things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become "old men with snow on their shoulders," or the lake looks like a "giant eye." The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, "the mirror with nothing reflected in it." This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.

I can remember many years ago when John and I lived in Manhattan -- no, even longer ago -- I lived in the Bronx and he lived in Manhattan, and I would take the subway down to visit him. I was going through a depressed period, and I couldn't write anything. John, who is and was a photographer would ask me, as one asks a child what she learned in school that day, what I saw on the subway on my way downtown. And I started looking, so I could see and tell him, and then I started seeing. And it saved me then, in a way.

About meaning

Should be working, but as always, there are better things to do. Really loved this quote by the curmudgeonly William Logan on today's Poetry Foundation blog:

" I don’t look to the poem’s content for the meanings of life, or for consolation in the losses life demands. I find solace in the language itself, in the way meaning plays through syntax and form, in the blink of wordplay or the cocked gesture of the well-turned phrase. I don’t say there isn’t meaning to be had… the life carries the language, not the other way around. The language doesn’t hold the meaning; the language is the meaning."

Hey, I would be terrified to have him review my book, but I totally agree with him here.

Very Bad Day Climate Patterns

Apparently, the weather is moving my way.

Anne says, on Rebecca's blog: "I had a Very Bad Day on Saturday. Apparently, bad days move from east to west, and took a few days to reach you. I'm sorry. If it helps, I had a pretty good day yesterday, so you can look forward to yours along about Sunday."

I hope that's a promise.

Damn.

Work in Progress

I was looking at my manuscript today, looking at it with others' eyes, I told myself (see below). Of course today, after recently getting a half dozen of the lot out, I see a glaring problem, something I can't believe I didn't see before. In my eagerness to put the most powerful poems up front, at least one poem of the first section doesn't belong at all in the first section. In another two poems, I wanted to change verb tense.

Do I make these changes now, before sending out the next batch -- or do I hope someone will take the book and I can make the changes before the book goes to print? I am weighing the pros and cons.

In the meantime, I'm feeling weary, generally discouraged about things, while just a short time ago all was bright and shiny.

Halloween (but not here)

Feeling a bit down, probably the letdown after all the excitement of one reunion and two weddings. Either that or the jetlag.

It's funny, I've given my manuscript to a few people of late, none of them poets. I feel like I have to wrap it in a plain brown wrapper -- or at least enclose a warning that it is not fact checkable -- it's poetry. But none of these people are poets and I don't know what they expect. Some of them know things about my life they will read into the poems. It's a strange vulnerable feeling.

On the other hand, I've found that it's way more important to me than it is to others. Poetry doesn't make a very loud thud when it is dropped in the real world. You can scarcely hear it.

Well, this is a throwaway post, but I thought I should check in now that I'm back from Back East.

Not much Halloween happening at my house. Young people can get free candy in far easier ways than struggling up my very steep hill.

Origins

Exploring the mountains of stuff at my mother's house yesterday, I found the first poem I wrote. I must have been all of six years old. I know I was too young to know how to write because my aunt wrote down the words for me. I guess I had a leaning toward the blues even then. Here it is:

Bees in the cupboard, cows in the corn
Bees in the cupboard, cows in the corn
I wonder where the dog was born

That's it. I could probably learn something from the economy of my early work. Obviously, I identified with the dog.

Madness in Method

I recently read Lee Strasberg’s classic book on Method acting, A Dream of Passion, and its relevance to poetry was striking. Well, its relevance to poetry was striking to Strasberg too, as he traces the roots of Method acting back to the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and also to the great Modernist writers, Eliot, Proust, and Joyce. Writing in specific sensual imagery is rather out of fashion and has become almost a cliché, but Strasberg reminded me how emotion is in fact rooted in sensual particulars (Proust’s cookie). Strasberg talks about the acting process:

The correct process of inducing a response is through the senses. He [the actor] tries to remember where he was. Say he was in the yard. The actor cannot simply think in generalities. The yard is composed of many objects that he sees, hears, touches, and so forth, to which he assigns the word yard. Only by formulating the sensory concreteness of these objects can the emotions be stimulated. It is not sufficient to say, “It was hot.” Rather, the actor must define precisely in what area he experienced the particular heat he remembers; the actor localizes the concentration in that area to create not just a memory but a reliving of that particular moment. The actor remembers what he had on: the sight, texture, or sensation of that material on the body. The actor tries to remember the event that caused the emotion, not in terms of the sequence of the story, but in terms of the various senses that surrounded it.

This feels to me so much like the process of writing a poem! It’s all about imagining the texture of the fabric one is wearing, the feel of the wind on the only spot on one’s neck uncovered by the scarf, the color of the bench at the bus stop—and not just the important details but the unimportant, because, as Strasberg says, “In the midst of severe crisis, an individual’s attention will often register the smallest details related and unrelated to that crisis.”

Again, Strasberg makes the connection to writing and says the task is the same: “Affective memory is a decisive element in most artistic creation. The only difference is that in other art forms, the affective memory is created by the artist in the solitude of his own environment. … The link between affective memory and creativity has been a constant presence in poetry.”

The phrase “a dream of passion” is taken from Hamlet’s speech about acting, and it captures, I think perfectly, the artist’s balancing act: the need for art to be passionate, but it’s not exactly passion—rather, a dream of passion. A dream without passion is not poetry, but it must be a dream. As Hamlet says, “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?”

Cooling Time

Been reading C.D. Wright's Cooling time. I actually met C.D. Wright years ago, at SF State, when she and Forrest Gander were just getting together. (I doubt she remembers.) The Associated Students were trying to close the Poetry Center, so John and I attended the hearing, said the Poetry Center was one of the reasons we came to San Francisco. People, I'm sure wondered what was in it for us, why we bothered. I'm not sure I know.

In 2004, when I was at Squaw, C.D. was one of the faculty poets. She hadn't won the MacArthur yet. More than a few people were scared of her, bothered, bewildered. She did scare me a little, though I liked her. It's always been easier for me to relate to men than to strong women.

This book though knocks me out. I could quote almost anything. I'm going to quote all that I can before I lose patience with the typing:

"I believe in a hardheaded art, an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one's own faith in the word in one's own obstinate terms... I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world...Also I think that antithetical poetries can and should coexist without crippling one another. They not only serve to define their other to a much more exacting degree than would be possible in the absence of the one or the other; they insure the persistence of heterogeneous (albeit discouragingly small) constituencies... I am not sure of where I am going...

"We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new, fat, lean, and particularly the rarely visible, nocturnal art of poetry."

"An atmosphere of depression will arouse artists' attention over an atmosphere of prosperity nearly every time. Also true, ruins are beautiful to us; blues make us feel good; it is through the wound that we perceive the body alive alive-o."

"Poetry and advertising (the basest mode of which is propaganda) are in direct and total opposition. If you do not use language you are used by it. if you do not recognize the terms peacekeeper missile and preemptive strike as oxymorons, your hole has already been dug."

" 'I think poetry must / I think it must / Stay open all night / In beautiful cellars,' [Thomas] Merton insisted. And so do I..."

"Writing is a risk and a trust. the best of it lies yonder. My linguistic skills expand on the horizon. So does the horizon. my goals are higher-minded than they once were. Once you could say, I had ambition. I never could write any old way. And like many from my generation, I desire the integrated life."

Poets are mostly voters and taxpayers, but the alienation of the poet is a common theme. Among poets there are also probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing and so forth, but this is where we live..."

I guess that's enough for now.

Yes, again

Today's mail brought notification that I am again -- this time one of three -- finalist in a manuscript competition. This is the 19th time Demimonde has been a finalist. It was called "emotionally engaging" and "marvelous." Will it ever just be good enough?

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A fine fall day in SF. Walked the dog in that pooch paradise, Funston. After I finish my Moroccan mint green tea, I'm going out again. The garden calls.

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Addendum: Monday is yet another anniversary of John Lennon's birthday. Well, I have this essay I wrote recounting my adventure meeting Lennon and working in his entourage for one weekend--his birthday weekend--in 1971. Does anybody out there know of a publication (online is fine) that would be interested in this?

Just for starters, don't anyone suggest Rolling Stone.

Mystic Word

Interesting piece about Hart Crane in The New Yorker by Adam Kirsch:

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word “myth” only for stories we ourselves cannot believe. That is why a poet cannot create myths; he can only employ and embellish the ones he has inherited. Homer could not have invented the Olympian gods, or Dante the cosmology of medieval Catholicism, and still have written as he did. By striving so effortfully to turn the Brooklyn Bridge into a religious symbol, Crane forces us to recognize that all he has really created is a vague and problematic metaphor.

Poetry Readings, NY & PA

I know I've been absent from the blog for while, but it's been a hard time. My mother passed away a couple weeks ago after a chock-full 89-year life, and next week Cheryl and I are going to Wisconsin to bury her ashes in her home town. I'd planned a small book tour, but because of these events, it's going to be even smaller. I'm keeping a couple commitments I'd already made, though, and would love to see some people at these readings!

Saturday, October 7, 2006, 2:00 p.m.
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (between Houston and Bleecker), New York City

Reading with Julie Sheehan, author of Orient Point (W.W. Norton, 2006), winner of the Barnard Women Poets' Prize, and Thaw (Fordham Univ. Press, 2001), winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
Enrico’s Tazza D’Oro Café
1125 N. Highland Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA

Reading with Lori Wilson, winner of West Virginia Writers Poetry Award, and Arlene Weiner, author of Escape Velocity (Ragged Sky Press, 2006).

Wednesday, October 11, 2006, 7:00 p.m.
Milkboy Coffee Writers Workshop
2 East Lancaster Avenue, Ardmore, PA (outside of Philly)

Reading and discussion with Ken Kalfus, author of novels A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco, 2006) and New York Times Notable Book The Commissariat of Enlightenment (Harper, 2006).

What It Takes

I couldn't sleep last night (or this morning) -- again. Something about the change of seasons, being in between jobs, two upcoming trips Back East, and still, thoughts about the reunion.

So I answered my new/old friend's question:

I say I have many questions but really it is all one: how does one sit down and write a poem?

(He is a writer, but not a poet.) This is what I said to him:

There isn't one answer, of course. Get thirteen poets and you'd get thirteen ways of looking at that blackbird. But it's a good question, nevertheless. I'm going to be teaching a five-week class this spring, a poetry workshop; I ought to be able to answer it.

Picasso, when dared as a child to draw a donkey, drew a donkey with one stroke starting at the leg. You could start anywhere, and it wouldn't necessarily limit where you ended up.

I often have to sneak up on a poem. If I face it squarely, head on, it eludes me, it disappears. (That's why the poems I've been struggling with about the reunion aren't working. I tell myself I'm writing about the reunion and they're out of here. Maybe in six months I can pull them out, tell myself they're not about the reunion but about a Robert Altman movie -- and it might work.)

For me, sound is key. It's the best and worst aspect of my poems. I often start with a phrase that just comes to my head.

I take notes all the time. I make a note in a notebook about something intriguing and forget it. These notes can be sounds, reminders of something read or said, dream sequences, ideas I need to research and pursue -- or anything. Often the notes don't go anywhere at all, but sometimes they do. Sometimes, when looked at later, the mishmash of the scribble creates the poem. A misspelling, a shape suggests something to me. I wrote a poem after seeing Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash movie. I wrote it on a narrow sheet of paper. The poem is about crawling off into a cave to die, and the poem is narrow like the paper and cramped like a cave. It is, as you said associative. It's best not explained in the poem.

Sometimes, more rarely, the note is the poem. The poem Sonhar that is on my website was a reverie, some rather disorganized thoughts that came to me sitting in my garden and drinking a glass of wine and thinking about the one boy ever who cried for me, someone back in college. I hardly wrote it; it wrote itself. He'd grown up in Brazil, which is why the Brazilian / Portuguese references, but there would be no way one would know that.

But that's unusual. More often, I write whatever and in the clear light of day edit it, look for the form it contains, remove the dead matter. When my mom was dying of a brain tumor in 2000, I wrote dozens of poems to deal with it. They were 90 percent awful. I ended up taking all the lines I liked from those poems and putting them in one composite poem. The star image you liked in Fraught With Danger was cannibalized from a poem I wrote very long ago, in the seventies, imagining my own conception.

I don't necessarily have any idea where the poem is going when I start writing it. My latest accepted poem, Conjugated Visits, which will be published in Field in the spring, started with a note about a snail and a question about styles of love. It ended up as a sort of grammar of love: she, he, they, we and so forth.

Maybe writing a poem is like any other writing, but more so, taking more advantage of the serendipitous, not necessarily arriving at answers when it asks questions.

Okay, poets out there in the blogosphere, what does it take for you?

Hot

Hot in San Francisco today. I mean you can't wear a jacket or sweater hot. This is our summer. I'm sipping Peet's coffee over ice and enjoying the feeling of my bare feet on the cool wood floor. I opened the back door. I put on shorts.

Wood floors stay cool in hot weather. In the house I grew up in, my bedroom was on the top floor under the slanting roof. It got very hot. I don't know how many people had air conditioning in those days, but we just had one big ceiling fan in the middle of the house. On hot nights in summer, back then, I'd lie in the nude on my floor.

Once I put this interesting bit in a poem. It was years ago, at Squaw, in Sharon Olds's workshop. I remember she scolded me: If I wanted to talk about masturbation, I should just say it. This I found very funny, because I hadn't thought about that at all, neither back then nor when writing the poem. I just wanted the coolness of the floor.

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Bees are buzzing. Monarchs are migrating.

Criticizing the Critics

OK, what, really, is the function of criticism, or, specifically, of most of the literary criticizing that goes on, from Poetry magazine to attack-mode blogs? To teach and enlighten the reader? To impose one's own aesthetic? To suppress what you personally dislike or consider inferior (to suppress through intimidation)? To protect your own turf? It seems like that's what it's all about. I love someone's take on a poem or a poet that gives a new angle, a thought I never had before, something that enlarges the work. I hate reading criticism driven by some form of envy or threat, or worse, that's meant mostly to make the reader think the critic is pretty damn smart. Hubris seems to be high on the list here of what characterizes literary critics.

Brouhaha over BAP

I couldn't sleep last night. I was anxious about several situations that have arisen -- mostly the usual, jobs and money. No need to bore you with the details. But I was also thinking about the recent reunion I went to and a parallel to the brouhaha (an onomatopoeic word if there ever was one) over the BAP 2006.

Years ago, in the dawn of prehistory when I was in high school, I was first literary editor and then co-editor in chief of the literary magazine, called the Compendium. I was very serious about my responsibilities, worked hard to get submissions from all six grades (the school was 7-12), did my best to find unobjectionable if not stellar work, and put together a prize-winning magazine. Upon publication, however, there was a huge uproar. A certain faction accused me of elitism, nepotism, and probably a lot of other isms they wouldn't say to my face. A countercultural version of the magazine came out, called True -- no I'm not kidding. It seems that I had rejected the work of the guy who was considered the school bard -- oh, he was cool, he was. It didn't seem to matter to his fans that what he had submitted to the Compendium was word for word copied from the liner notes of a Dylan album. I also sinned and published my two sisters, the other editors, and myself. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do you think I had a lot of other possibilities? Besides, if I didn't publish my sisters, my mother would have creamed me.

So why do I remember this many years later? Because the person who put out True was there at the reunion and still held a grudge. He still considers me to be a JAP, a person of privilege (if only he knew!), and evil to the core.

Well, why does this remind me of the BAP? The situation is different, but honestly, I don't think those editors are evil. I think, well, they must have had their reasons. I'm sure they felt and feel that the book they put out was the Best one they could under whatever circumstances they worked under. I don't think it's terrible that Lehman's assistants are published in the book. I don't even think it is so darn terrible if Lehman's wife is in the book. She is a poet. Her poem was published in a legitimate magazine. Maybe if she hadn't been Lehman's wife, her poem wouldn't have surfaced -- but there are an awful lot of ifs in the publishing world, in the art world. If Eliot hadn't known Pound, he wouldn't have been published in Poetry. If Ashbery hadn't been called to Auden's attention, he wouldn't have won the Yale Younger. The list is long.

So I don't mind that this book is out there as it is. I say that even acknowledging that I don't like a lot of what I've read of the current book so far. I say this even though I find Lehman's introduction to be inane and Collins's to be insulting. I find the BAPs interesting and usually buy them, if I can, even though I've only thought a couple through the years were really good books and sometimes find the contributors' notes the "best" part.

I agree with the bloggers who feel the fuss is way out of proportion -- and doesn't even help the situation. Honest, if you don't like the series, don't buy 'em, don't talk about 'em.