I've been trying for a long time to get a teaching gig, but run into the Catch-22 that I don't have experience teaching. Well, so, life is hard and then you die. But finally, it seems, I've got a break. I will be teaching three (count 'em) sessions with City College Continuing Education on Thursdays in June at Fort Mason. I was so excited by this, I forgot to even ask if I'll be paid for it. (I assume I'll be paid something, though.)
I'll post more details as the date nears, but please, if you live in the City or Bay Area, spread the word. If you know people of any age who want a basic Poetry Workshop experience, this will be a welcoming, informative, non-intimidating place for them to start.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Bishop / Birthday
The Bight
[On my birthday]
At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.
--Elizabeth Bishop
[On my birthday]
At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.
--Elizabeth Bishop
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Fear of the Sticky Web
I’ve been absent from the blog for a while. Blame it on a backache and a foot-ache. I’ve been reading Tony Hoagland’s essay in the March issue of Poetry, “Fear of Narrative and Our Skittery Poem of the Moment.”
I don’t think of myself as a narrative poet, but Hoagland talks about narrative as just one example of the “poetries of continuity.” More strikingly, he talks about poems that keep narrative “at arm’s length, without being caught in its sticky web,” and about “a claustrophobic fear of submersion or enclosure” and “the sweaty enclosures of subject matter.”
This seems exactly right to me, and it’s what I’ve tried to talk about in some earlier posts, where I’ve talked about poems that have a sense of an “entered” world, and their connection to mortality. This all comes together for me in Lynn Emanuel’s stunning poem “The Burial.” Even if you think what I’m saying is ridiculous, read this poem. It may be the only poem I can think of that combines the two kinds of poetry, beginning in distance and manic association (“it burns like fire on amphetamines,” in its own words) and ending in confrontation with the ultimate claustrophobia: the poet burying her father in “the cold, dark, closed places,” shoveling dirt on his casket.
Hoagland talks about poems that have a “passive-aggressive relation to meaning,” and quotes Czeslaw Milosz: “a poet discovers a secret, namely that he can be faithful to real things only by arranging them hierarchically.” That is a very curious thing to say! I think most poets, for that matter most people with any political awareness, are deeply suspicious of hierarchical arrangements of anything.
Hoagland talks about poets’ “ambivalent relation to knowledge,” and I would add an ambivalent relation to power. Most of us are deeply ambivalent about power, the possession of power, the exercise of power, and poets are particularly ambivalent about the power of language. Is using language in a “powerful” way inherently oppressive?
The issue of power divides our whole society. Is gun control a solution to violence, or is the solution that good guys need more guns to fight bad guys? Any thinking person is suspicious of solutions that depend on the exercise of power by one group over another.
But when it comes to language, and the power that writers exercise over readers, I don’t see any other way. The civil rights movement wouldn’t have gotten very far if Martin Luther King had said, “A have dream I” and congratulated himself for breaking the back of oppressive syntax. Abandoning the use of powerful language as politically incorrect doesn’t “liberate” the reader—it just bores the reader. I think this is what Milosz means when he says that a poet “can be faithful to real things only by arranging them hierarchically.” Poems need to weave a sticky web to catch the reader, not leave the reader free. Readers want to be stuck in the poem’s web.
I don’t think of myself as a narrative poet, but Hoagland talks about narrative as just one example of the “poetries of continuity.” More strikingly, he talks about poems that keep narrative “at arm’s length, without being caught in its sticky web,” and about “a claustrophobic fear of submersion or enclosure” and “the sweaty enclosures of subject matter.”
This seems exactly right to me, and it’s what I’ve tried to talk about in some earlier posts, where I’ve talked about poems that have a sense of an “entered” world, and their connection to mortality. This all comes together for me in Lynn Emanuel’s stunning poem “The Burial.” Even if you think what I’m saying is ridiculous, read this poem. It may be the only poem I can think of that combines the two kinds of poetry, beginning in distance and manic association (“it burns like fire on amphetamines,” in its own words) and ending in confrontation with the ultimate claustrophobia: the poet burying her father in “the cold, dark, closed places,” shoveling dirt on his casket.
Hoagland talks about poems that have a “passive-aggressive relation to meaning,” and quotes Czeslaw Milosz: “a poet discovers a secret, namely that he can be faithful to real things only by arranging them hierarchically.” That is a very curious thing to say! I think most poets, for that matter most people with any political awareness, are deeply suspicious of hierarchical arrangements of anything.
Hoagland talks about poets’ “ambivalent relation to knowledge,” and I would add an ambivalent relation to power. Most of us are deeply ambivalent about power, the possession of power, the exercise of power, and poets are particularly ambivalent about the power of language. Is using language in a “powerful” way inherently oppressive?
The issue of power divides our whole society. Is gun control a solution to violence, or is the solution that good guys need more guns to fight bad guys? Any thinking person is suspicious of solutions that depend on the exercise of power by one group over another.
But when it comes to language, and the power that writers exercise over readers, I don’t see any other way. The civil rights movement wouldn’t have gotten very far if Martin Luther King had said, “A have dream I” and congratulated himself for breaking the back of oppressive syntax. Abandoning the use of powerful language as politically incorrect doesn’t “liberate” the reader—it just bores the reader. I think this is what Milosz means when he says that a poet “can be faithful to real things only by arranging them hierarchically.” Poems need to weave a sticky web to catch the reader, not leave the reader free. Readers want to be stuck in the poem’s web.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Inspiration
I was interested in this article from the Guardian on “divine inspiration.” What struck me was this quote from T.S. Eliot:
I think most people would agree, or at least pay lip service to that idea, but it’s a weirder definition of inspiration than it seems at first . Usually when people think of inspiration, they think of an “Aha! experience.” For example (SPOILER WARNING), when David Chase wracks his brain to figure out how to end the first episode of The Sopranos, he must go “Aha!” when he gets the inspiration of Tony being shot by his own uncle. Once the inspiration comes, it immediately feels right. This is typically what inspiration means to scientists and detectives and cooks (“What shall I serve tonight? I’ve got it—goat curry!”) and, yes, poets.
When Shakespeare ends King Lear with Lear’s heartbreaking “We will sing like birds in the cage . . . ,” or has Lady Macbeth say “unsex me here,” it’s inspired but he understood what he was saying, didn’t he? When Dickinson imagines a fly buzzing around her deathbed, it’s inspired but comprehensible. Usually we imagine inspiration as the cliché light bulb. Suddenly we know what panel to press to open the secret door in the Temple of Doom. Eliot’s idea of inspiration that in effect leaves us in the dark is a pretty radical idea!
I’m exaggerating to make my point. Inspiration typically happens somewhere between light and darkness, in the shadowy realm of the inspired “hunch.” But poets vary widely in how far they want their reach to extend beyond their grasp, their words beyond their understanding. If it’s too far beyond, all criteria are lost. We haven’t found the secret door, but who cares? We can write “cackling sinecures behold local rumors of Arnold” and call it inspired. Why not? Maybe it is, if inspiration is by definition beyond your ability to know whether or not it’s inspired.
But genuine inspiration feels utterly right and mysterious at the same time. As someone said, it would not even have occurred to any other actor in the world to make the choices Marlon Brando does in the “contender” scene in On the Waterfront (the radical gentleness, for example, with which he pushes aside Rod Steiger’s gun), yet it feels utterly natural.
As far as how this relates to my own writing, well, I wrote “Sleepwalker,” the poem Diane links below, years ago, but I swear it was only when I reread it a couple days ago that I realized it could be about a man discovering his wife’s infidelity (“One night I found you pumping / from the neighbors’ well . . .”). You learn something new every day—especially in the dark!
“If the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning,” TS Eliot wrote, “it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something that he does not wholly understand—or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him.”
I think most people would agree, or at least pay lip service to that idea, but it’s a weirder definition of inspiration than it seems at first . Usually when people think of inspiration, they think of an “Aha! experience.” For example (SPOILER WARNING), when David Chase wracks his brain to figure out how to end the first episode of The Sopranos, he must go “Aha!” when he gets the inspiration of Tony being shot by his own uncle. Once the inspiration comes, it immediately feels right. This is typically what inspiration means to scientists and detectives and cooks (“What shall I serve tonight? I’ve got it—goat curry!”) and, yes, poets.
When Shakespeare ends King Lear with Lear’s heartbreaking “We will sing like birds in the cage . . . ,” or has Lady Macbeth say “unsex me here,” it’s inspired but he understood what he was saying, didn’t he? When Dickinson imagines a fly buzzing around her deathbed, it’s inspired but comprehensible. Usually we imagine inspiration as the cliché light bulb. Suddenly we know what panel to press to open the secret door in the Temple of Doom. Eliot’s idea of inspiration that in effect leaves us in the dark is a pretty radical idea!
I’m exaggerating to make my point. Inspiration typically happens somewhere between light and darkness, in the shadowy realm of the inspired “hunch.” But poets vary widely in how far they want their reach to extend beyond their grasp, their words beyond their understanding. If it’s too far beyond, all criteria are lost. We haven’t found the secret door, but who cares? We can write “cackling sinecures behold local rumors of Arnold” and call it inspired. Why not? Maybe it is, if inspiration is by definition beyond your ability to know whether or not it’s inspired.
But genuine inspiration feels utterly right and mysterious at the same time. As someone said, it would not even have occurred to any other actor in the world to make the choices Marlon Brando does in the “contender” scene in On the Waterfront (the radical gentleness, for example, with which he pushes aside Rod Steiger’s gun), yet it feels utterly natural.
As far as how this relates to my own writing, well, I wrote “Sleepwalker,” the poem Diane links below, years ago, but I swear it was only when I reread it a couple days ago that I realized it could be about a man discovering his wife’s infidelity (“One night I found you pumping / from the neighbors’ well . . .”). You learn something new every day—especially in the dark!
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
Snowboarding in San Francisco
For about ten minutes this evening, following violent thunder and lightning, hail came down, peppering against the windows like rocks. When it was over, the neighborhood was entirely white. Now you have to understand I live on a VERY steep hill. It was incredible. Kids came out like it was Fourth of July and New Year's and everything rolled all together. Of course cars couldn't come up. People could barely walk up. Boogie boards and snowboards appeared. One guy went the full length at least six times. I'm no photographer, but John caught the tail end of the action as he and the pooch trudged up the hill. This is the way it looked when it already had started to melt.
Right to Privacy
An interesting post by Josh suggests that there are three types of poetry: (A) social formalism (“critical, antimetaphysical, constructivist, and politically engaged”), (B) the private-romantic (“the poem as guarantee of some minimal subjectivity (legroom in coach)”), and (C) the metaphysical-romantic (“It has the highest ambitions for poetry within the private-spiritual sphere to which poetry has traditionally been allocated (whereas Poetry A seeks to explode or implode that sphere)”). As suggested by Josh’s “legroom in coach” aside, he finds it hard to take B seriously.
What strikes me is how crucial the issue of privacy has become in our lives—in so many areas. In the political arena, progressives are often the defenders of privacy, both on issues like the Patriot Act and wiretapping and, of course, abortion. The existence of a Constitutional right to privacy has become a central doctrine of the left, and it’s ironic that, as Josh says, the effort to “explode or implode” the private sphere has become a central goal of some of the most “politically engaged” artists. It also is interesting to note that “the earliest recognition of the concept of privacy is in the Muslim religion. . . . ‘In Islam the law is God-given and the right of privacy is a sacred right’” (OK, that's according to Wikipedia).
As one of those people—one of those poets—who feels “continual outrage” (as Josh says) at the attacks on privacy by self-righteous preachers (whether religious, political, or literary), I am fascinated by America’s love-hate relationship with privacy. It goes back for hundreds of years: the Puritans demanded communal, public confession (think of the witch hunts, both literal and figurative, conducted by extremists of both the right and the left throughout history), while the American founders were determined to protect privacy (and, not incidentally, private property).
Artistic privacy needs to be protected as much as political privacy, even though it’s dangerous. Just as freedom of speech protects offensive speech as well as enlightened, defense of the private sphere in art inevitably protects the sort of “fiddling while Rome burns” poetry (or perhaps “sipping my latte on a snowy evening” poetry or, as Josh nicely puts it, “culinary” poetry) that reduces privacy to self-indulgence, as well as makes possible the genuinely sublime that can only emerge from privacy.
What strikes me is how crucial the issue of privacy has become in our lives—in so many areas. In the political arena, progressives are often the defenders of privacy, both on issues like the Patriot Act and wiretapping and, of course, abortion. The existence of a Constitutional right to privacy has become a central doctrine of the left, and it’s ironic that, as Josh says, the effort to “explode or implode” the private sphere has become a central goal of some of the most “politically engaged” artists. It also is interesting to note that “the earliest recognition of the concept of privacy is in the Muslim religion. . . . ‘In Islam the law is God-given and the right of privacy is a sacred right’” (OK, that's according to Wikipedia).
As one of those people—one of those poets—who feels “continual outrage” (as Josh says) at the attacks on privacy by self-righteous preachers (whether religious, political, or literary), I am fascinated by America’s love-hate relationship with privacy. It goes back for hundreds of years: the Puritans demanded communal, public confession (think of the witch hunts, both literal and figurative, conducted by extremists of both the right and the left throughout history), while the American founders were determined to protect privacy (and, not incidentally, private property).
Artistic privacy needs to be protected as much as political privacy, even though it’s dangerous. Just as freedom of speech protects offensive speech as well as enlightened, defense of the private sphere in art inevitably protects the sort of “fiddling while Rome burns” poetry (or perhaps “sipping my latte on a snowy evening” poetry or, as Josh nicely puts it, “culinary” poetry) that reduces privacy to self-indulgence, as well as makes possible the genuinely sublime that can only emerge from privacy.
Monday, March 06, 2006
My final answer
I haven't completed the application yet, and it may take a few days. Tomorrow is a physical therapy appointment and a job interview (production editor, but something). But here is my essay about my four (and more) lessons. See below for what this is all about. Essay:
Wish I were going to Austin.
If you can (I can't) and are anywhere near Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, California, go hear Robert read! You'll be glad you did.
-Diane
If I could teach my students only four things during the semester, I would teach them to read as if their lives depended on it, that they cannot know everything, but can learn how to find what they need to know, that writing is a way of thinking, and that the right word matters.
To read as if one’s life depends on it would be my first real lesson because I think it is key to everything. Unlike some teachers, I don't think that reading need be instructional, politically correct, or of high quality to have the desired effect — to open up the world for the student to its full 360°. I think the beginning student should read everything he or she can get their hands on, that, like panning for gold, the good stuff will sort itself out, and that as the student continues to read, she or he will be drawn to exactly what she or he needs. (However, I have very strong opinions about what I think is good literature, and I can tailor a reading list to the individual, to help a student find books that will stimulate and make him or her want more.)
The quantity of information that exists in this Information Age is daunting. Sophocles didn’t have this problem, nor did Shakespeare. Beginning students in the 21st century need to learn how to use the Internet and libraries (both!) to discern for themselves what is information and what is opinion, what is fact and what is fiction, what they need and what they don’t.
Writing is thinking. It requires sorting and ordering information. It isn’t easy. To get from the beginning of a sentence to its end requires using gray matter that for most American students is flabby and slack. But writing does not have to be intimidating, with word processors as allies. Getting something (anything) down on the page is the best way to start. And then you edit.
My fourth lesson, that the right word matters, is a lesson in precision. Whether writing an essay or a technical paper, I want my students to learn to focus their writing like a lens on what they are trying to persuade or explain or illustrate. If they are writing a poem, it should be equally important to get the precise word in the precise place. Don’t say nails when you mean screws, pants when you mean jeans. I think that it is important to care to get it right, that it matters that it matters.
The above are my four lessons. But I would also teach my students that life doesn’t have an undo button, that one person can make a difference, that they must love themselves before another can love them, and that a paragraph does not have to have five sentences. These last four lessons would only be to equalize the effect of high school and Hollywood and give us a good place to start.
Wish I were going to Austin.
If you can (I can't) and are anywhere near Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, California, go hear Robert read! You'll be glad you did.
-Diane
Friday, March 03, 2006
Cheating (sort of)
As some of you know, I’m trying to find work, having been laid off from a technical writing job last summer. I’m still looking in the high tech field, but I’ve been trying to find work in teaching and publishing as well.
Today, a community college near me posted the following ad for an English instructor on Craigslist.
I love the idea of this, and it may be a way to get around the fact that I don’t have years of experience as a teacher.
I’m asking for your help to come up with the four things I would want my students to learn. I can think of two right off the top of my head:
So what were some of the things you wish someone had taught you in your early years in college? Remember, this is a developmental English class. No idea too far out or silly to consider….
Today, a community college near me posted the following ad for an English instructor on Craigslist.
Include with your application an essay (500-750 words) on the topic:
The College of San Mateo offers two developmental courses below transfer level. Imagine that you are teaching the lower of these two courses. If you could teach your students only four things in this course during the semester, what would they be? Explain your rationale.
I love the idea of this, and it may be a way to get around the fact that I don’t have years of experience as a teacher.
I’m asking for your help to come up with the four things I would want my students to learn. I can think of two right off the top of my head:
- You can’t know everything, but you can learn how to find what you need to know.
- Precision is key to the best writing, from technical writing to poetry.
So what were some of the things you wish someone had taught you in your early years in college? Remember, this is a developmental English class. No idea too far out or silly to consider….
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Air Guitar
It was an NPR day here. All week it was beautiful and sunny, daffodils blooming, springtime in February--perfect weather for our visitors from Boston, John's sister (and my old high school chum) and her youngest daughter, a high school junior, here to check out the California colleges. As soon as they left, the weather turned cold and gray, rainy and blustery. We listened to NPR on the radio in the car while we caught up on our errands and at home while we made dinner.
We listened to the Adam Gopnik and Daniel Handler talk from the Hearst Auditorium here in SF, about the New Yorker, about writing, about children's books, and eventually and inevitably through the Q and A about Harry Potter. Gopnik said one aspect of the HP books bothered him, how Harry's heroism was because of the nobility of blood and breeding (if I got that wrong, forgive--I have not read the HP books). This bothers me too--it's also a theme in the Tolkien books. It's not so much my unalloyed democratic spirit that is offended as the fact that for me reading and writing is an escape from family and background and "inheritance." I hate the idea that what we are is somehow "in our blood." I'd rather think that we invent ourselves and our fate.
This segues into the second talk we heard, a very interesting talk on the art of bullshit, including a radio performance (!) by the defending champion of air guitar. Yeah, well I used to think I was a great actress because I felt I could take on any persona someone expected of me. Okay, that was when I was a teenager. Still, my master's thesis book of poems (my true first book) was very wrapped up in aspects of this idea. I'm very interested in BS and art, not lying, but faking it, and the 360 degrees between creation and reality. How much (now don't throw things, please) of John Ashbery or Jorie Graham is art and how much is air guitar?
We listened to the Adam Gopnik and Daniel Handler talk from the Hearst Auditorium here in SF, about the New Yorker, about writing, about children's books, and eventually and inevitably through the Q and A about Harry Potter. Gopnik said one aspect of the HP books bothered him, how Harry's heroism was because of the nobility of blood and breeding (if I got that wrong, forgive--I have not read the HP books). This bothers me too--it's also a theme in the Tolkien books. It's not so much my unalloyed democratic spirit that is offended as the fact that for me reading and writing is an escape from family and background and "inheritance." I hate the idea that what we are is somehow "in our blood." I'd rather think that we invent ourselves and our fate.
This segues into the second talk we heard, a very interesting talk on the art of bullshit, including a radio performance (!) by the defending champion of air guitar. Yeah, well I used to think I was a great actress because I felt I could take on any persona someone expected of me. Okay, that was when I was a teenager. Still, my master's thesis book of poems (my true first book) was very wrapped up in aspects of this idea. I'm very interested in BS and art, not lying, but faking it, and the 360 degrees between creation and reality. How much (now don't throw things, please) of John Ashbery or Jorie Graham is art and how much is air guitar?
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Crossing my fingers
I got an email this evening telling me that my manuscript Demimonde is one of the 20 or so finalists for the Dorset Prize. This is about the 16th time it's been a finalist. Still, I'm fairly gulping for air.
Linda Gregerson will be judge.
Friends, oh, cross your fingers and toes for me.
Linda Gregerson will be judge.
Friends, oh, cross your fingers and toes for me.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
I like you a lot, but...
Note on adverbs: I've been taking a French class at Alliance Francaise in Berkeley and our teacher showed us an interesting point on using adverbs with the verb "aimer." If you say "Je t'aime," it's simple: you love her/him. But if you say "Je t'aime bien" you've altered it to "I like you." And if you say "Je t'aime beaucoup," well, the relationship's over and your lover might as well pack her/his bags: it carries the sense of "I like you a lot, but..." The more adverbs you throw on love the weaker it gets. No wonder poets hate adverbs.
Figure Skating and Poetry
I probably disagree with Ron Silliman about most things, but I couldn't agree more with his eloquent post today about the Olympics:
This year watching Coatesville’s Johnny Weir skate himself out of medal contention in the Olympics was hard to do, because you could see him fighting himself all the way. With Evgeny Plushenko, easily the best male skater now going, so far ahead, Weir committed the same blunder that has cost Michelle Kwan more than one Olympic medal – he skated “safely” which then meant that he skated poorly as well. Trying only not to make mistakes, he made more than ever.
There is a lesson in this for poetry. When I say, as I have more than once, that there are more good poets now writing than ever before in our history, I don’t necessarily mean that more great poems a la ”The Waste Land” or “Howl” (or whatever your iconic preference might be) are being written at this moment, tho that’s not inconceivable. What I mean is this: there are more poets who are not making Johnny Weir’s mistake – they are putting everything they have into the poem, not at all holding back. That to me is the test of a poet, regardless of which school they aspire to. Do they give everything to the poem? If the answer is yes, then I don’t see how you or I could ever ask anything more of them. Let’s just marvel at the effort.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Will You Be Mine?
For Valentine’s Day it’s hard to beat this anonymous 15th century poem:
Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
Or if you prefer it in the original (I especially like westron and rayne):
O westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can rayne
Cryst yf my love wer in my arms
and I yn my bed agayne
I confess I think of this poem whenever I feel discouraged about my work. Do my poems mean anything to anyone? Who would ever want to read them or remember them? I imagine this 15th century poet who may have spent their (his—or her?) whole life writing and their name is forgotten and their life’s work is forgotten except for four lines, but what does it matter? It encourages me to think that’s all it takes—just four good lines! Maybe even four words would be enough: “small rain . . . my love.”
Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
Or if you prefer it in the original (I especially like westron and rayne):
O westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can rayne
Cryst yf my love wer in my arms
and I yn my bed agayne
I confess I think of this poem whenever I feel discouraged about my work. Do my poems mean anything to anyone? Who would ever want to read them or remember them? I imagine this 15th century poet who may have spent their (his—or her?) whole life writing and their name is forgotten and their life’s work is forgotten except for four lines, but what does it matter? It encourages me to think that’s all it takes—just four good lines! Maybe even four words would be enough: “small rain . . . my love.”
Friday, February 10, 2006
No Such Luck
On Thursday morning around 8:30, I was walking my pooch, Greta Garbo, around Pine Lake, the miniscule pond west of Stern Grove and its meadow. It's a popular place for dogs and their owners, in a pocket valley like Stern Grove itself, very quiet, hidden from the street. A blue heron lives there now, and lately, an egret, though it's not yet certain the egret is taking up residence. There are crayfish (crawdaddies) in the lake, probably tasty to the heron and egret. By the way, don't ask me how I know, but a crayfish's pincers hurt like hell, they do.
Anyway, at 8:30, there were few walkers around, human or canine. It was starting to warm up, but it was still damp and shadowed. I looked down at one point, looking for the right kind of stick to toss for Greta, and there was a lottery ticket. I thought it would be an old one--it wasn't. It was for the Megalottery drawing on February 10, and Thursday was the 9th. It was a multiple ticket, ten chances at winning 102 million.
A lovely reverie. I was going to start a poetry / arts foundation, provide jobs for all my friends. A four-day week, month long vacations. A gorgeous magazine. Competitions with huge prizes for the deserving.
I just checked the ticket. Ten tickets, 6 numbers apiece, and we got two (out of 60!) numbers. Oh well. It was a nice dream while it lasted.
At least whoever lost the ticket didn't lose anything.
Anyway, at 8:30, there were few walkers around, human or canine. It was starting to warm up, but it was still damp and shadowed. I looked down at one point, looking for the right kind of stick to toss for Greta, and there was a lottery ticket. I thought it would be an old one--it wasn't. It was for the Megalottery drawing on February 10, and Thursday was the 9th. It was a multiple ticket, ten chances at winning 102 million.
A lovely reverie. I was going to start a poetry / arts foundation, provide jobs for all my friends. A four-day week, month long vacations. A gorgeous magazine. Competitions with huge prizes for the deserving.
I just checked the ticket. Ten tickets, 6 numbers apiece, and we got two (out of 60!) numbers. Oh well. It was a nice dream while it lasted.
At least whoever lost the ticket didn't lose anything.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Getting Lost
Some time ago, I read an essay in a Harper's that Robert lent me. I don't remember if this essay, by Rebecca Solnit on "The Blue of Distance," was what he had recommended or whether it was something else, but the writing stunned me. I sought out and bought her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It went on the pile of books beside my bed, I lent it to someone who kept it for months and "couldn't get into it." It got back-burnered as I started my alphabetical trek through my poetry shelves. (It's February and I'm at Bishop.)
But I picked it up and read it obsessively the last few days, the way I used to read everything but, distracted by one responsibility or another, I scarcely can read any more. This book... this book... I don't know what to say, what can do it justice or encompass all my thoughts about it. Just. Read. It.
The book is prose but has the effect of poetry, of the best poetry. It stuns, it sits there in me. I want to steal its words and have them come out of my mouth. The book is composed of chapter essays that inter-relate and tie together. One follows the stream of her consciousness, but the stream is always interesting and relevant and even when it is most personal seems to focus out at the reader as much as it comes from the self. It's also about nature and the land, love and death, art and other ways of thinking. So I've probably made it sound boring as all getout, but it's not ever boring.
I could quote from anywhere in this book to show you what I mean. Here are the opening sentences of the section called, "Two Arrowheads:"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I better get going if I'm going to get to Robert's reading (details here under news ---->).
But I picked it up and read it obsessively the last few days, the way I used to read everything but, distracted by one responsibility or another, I scarcely can read any more. This book... this book... I don't know what to say, what can do it justice or encompass all my thoughts about it. Just. Read. It.
The book is prose but has the effect of poetry, of the best poetry. It stuns, it sits there in me. I want to steal its words and have them come out of my mouth. The book is composed of chapter essays that inter-relate and tie together. One follows the stream of her consciousness, but the stream is always interesting and relevant and even when it is most personal seems to focus out at the reader as much as it comes from the self. It's also about nature and the land, love and death, art and other ways of thinking. So I've probably made it sound boring as all getout, but it's not ever boring.
I could quote from anywhere in this book to show you what I mean. Here are the opening sentences of the section called, "Two Arrowheads:"
Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wasn't particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert's invitation...."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I better get going if I'm going to get to Robert's reading (details here under news ---->).
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Some thoughts...
This post is going to be an attempt to gather my thoughts on reading Emily Lloyd's recent post (and the subsequent comments) that started with poetry's accessibility and progressed through how to teach poetry to high school students. I'm going to start at the end, as is my fashion, at what and how we teach. (As an aside, let me state that I'm about as equally annoyed with those who run the accessibility theme up the flagpole and salute it constantly--folks, instructions to operate your VCR: those, should be accessible--as I am annoyed with those who don't want to admit to the fact that words do, in fact, have meaning.)
But I was thinking about high school students. My experience with teaching one starts and ends with my own son, who survived (that is, graduated) high school six years ago. He started out liking poetry, I think. At one point, as a child, he'd asked to hear Frost's Stopping by the Woods so many times that he inadvertently memorized it. (I believe it was the combination of snow falling, which he'd never seen, and a horse sleigh that he found magical.) But despite or because he went to the best public high school in our city, his English teachers drummed the love of poetry right out of him. They, with their mandatory five-sentence paragraphs, were as determined to extract meaning from those poems as someone cooking stones for soup. What symbolized death? What symbolized sex? Discuss the blinkin' metaphors. Though I would tell him there wasn't any right or wrong about these things, that all he had to do was back it up, they were fond of the triple underlined all-cap multiply exclaimed WRONG.
But I was a high school student once too. I remember clearly the moment I fell in love--with Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence," followed by a tumble for everything written by Dylan Thomas. Neither the romantic abstractions of the Millay nor the convoluted metaphors of the Thomas were easily accessible (to me). I clearly fell in love with sound first, and to this day sound is most likely to be the way I enter into a poem.
I don't remember assignments connected with poetry. Well, wait, yes. As seniors, we had to talk for five minutes minimum about a poem or poet, and I brought in Caedmon recordings of Dylan Thomas from the library and my little phonograph. I talked for a half hour, maybe more. Clearly, teaching poetry is one way to learn to love it.
[So these are all disconnected thoughts at this point. I hope, but don't promise, to successfully connect them.]
I was interested in the comment on the post from the art teacher(?) who said that students need to learn to appreciate art and literature a lot less literally. I so agree with that, and yet, from my studies of Picasso's era, I know his contemporaries had a hard time seeing what he was doing. It takes time, distance, and education--an education of taste--to learn to see art and sometimes to read poetry.
So how do we get kids--and adults--to put in the time to pay attention? Well, I don't think there is ONE way. It doesn't come down to sound, to accessibility, to charm, to searing reality or incredible fantasy--or it does come down to ALL these things and more. The reason is: I'm not like you, and you're not like the next person, and high school students do not come in one flavor. So we need a diversity of approaches, not diverse as in one part your background and two parts mine, but diverse as in a little bit of everything, because we don't know what the next student is going to respond to.
We need to keep 'em awake, we need to keep 'em listening and we need to keep 'em reading. I don't think, despite the fact that many of my good friends make their living teaching poetry writing in the elementary schools, that teaching kids how to write at an early age is key. I do think memorization is wonderful. How else to make a poem truly yours, from your ears to your entrails?
Okay, a lot more went through my head when I tossed and turned last night, but I'll offer this up for now....
But I was thinking about high school students. My experience with teaching one starts and ends with my own son, who survived (that is, graduated) high school six years ago. He started out liking poetry, I think. At one point, as a child, he'd asked to hear Frost's Stopping by the Woods so many times that he inadvertently memorized it. (I believe it was the combination of snow falling, which he'd never seen, and a horse sleigh that he found magical.) But despite or because he went to the best public high school in our city, his English teachers drummed the love of poetry right out of him. They, with their mandatory five-sentence paragraphs, were as determined to extract meaning from those poems as someone cooking stones for soup. What symbolized death? What symbolized sex? Discuss the blinkin' metaphors. Though I would tell him there wasn't any right or wrong about these things, that all he had to do was back it up, they were fond of the triple underlined all-cap multiply exclaimed WRONG.
But I was a high school student once too. I remember clearly the moment I fell in love--with Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence," followed by a tumble for everything written by Dylan Thomas. Neither the romantic abstractions of the Millay nor the convoluted metaphors of the Thomas were easily accessible (to me). I clearly fell in love with sound first, and to this day sound is most likely to be the way I enter into a poem.
I don't remember assignments connected with poetry. Well, wait, yes. As seniors, we had to talk for five minutes minimum about a poem or poet, and I brought in Caedmon recordings of Dylan Thomas from the library and my little phonograph. I talked for a half hour, maybe more. Clearly, teaching poetry is one way to learn to love it.
[So these are all disconnected thoughts at this point. I hope, but don't promise, to successfully connect them.]
I was interested in the comment on the post from the art teacher(?) who said that students need to learn to appreciate art and literature a lot less literally. I so agree with that, and yet, from my studies of Picasso's era, I know his contemporaries had a hard time seeing what he was doing. It takes time, distance, and education--an education of taste--to learn to see art and sometimes to read poetry.
So how do we get kids--and adults--to put in the time to pay attention? Well, I don't think there is ONE way. It doesn't come down to sound, to accessibility, to charm, to searing reality or incredible fantasy--or it does come down to ALL these things and more. The reason is: I'm not like you, and you're not like the next person, and high school students do not come in one flavor. So we need a diversity of approaches, not diverse as in one part your background and two parts mine, but diverse as in a little bit of everything, because we don't know what the next student is going to respond to.
We need to keep 'em awake, we need to keep 'em listening and we need to keep 'em reading. I don't think, despite the fact that many of my good friends make their living teaching poetry writing in the elementary schools, that teaching kids how to write at an early age is key. I do think memorization is wonderful. How else to make a poem truly yours, from your ears to your entrails?
Okay, a lot more went through my head when I tossed and turned last night, but I'll offer this up for now....
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
10 Days to Go! (BFD)
Only ten days until February 10, the publication date of my book, Dragging the Lake. The question is: what the hell does that mean? Not only do I have no idea, but the publisher seems to have no idea either. Does it mean that on February 10 you’ll magically find the book at your favorite bookstore? No way! (Unless your favorite bookstore happens to be the one in Chula Vista where my sister-in-law works.) Does it mean your favorite bookstore will be able to order it for you? Well, yes, but they've been able to do that for over a month already. For that matter, you can already order it yourself just by calling the publisher. Does it mean the book will suddenly burst into existence in ten days? That can't be, because I've had a box of books on my living room floor for a month. Does the publication date mean anything? I guess it just means, "If you want to have a party with your friends, this might be as good a time as any." If it means something else, I wish someone would let me know now, before I go out to Trader Joe’s and buy a case of champagne.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Lucid Dreaming
This morning I looked at a letter I’d written to a friend almost five years ago. It’s amazing how the same issues about poetry keep coming back over and over. I could have written this yesterday:
This idea of poetry that enters the world it imagines is still important to me. I don’t necessarily mean a fantasy world. It could be Harry Potter, but it could just as easily be a re-creation of the “real” world. It could simply by a lyrical wildflower. But I think there’s a difference between poetry that makes the commitment of entering its own world—whatever that world may be—and poetry that keeps its distance.
I don’t necessarily mean to criticize poetry that “keeps its distance.” It can have tremendous energy, freedom and spontaneity. It defends its freedom to visit multiple worlds, but I think that freedom is mental freedom. Your mind can go from San Francisco to Shanghai to the moon, but if you actually get into a space capsule and go to the moon, your body is stuck there.
I think there’s a kind of poetry that makes an equivalent commitment—an entering the body of the poem. Partly I’m talking about something pretty obvious. When Rowling creates the world of Harry Potter, she has to play by the rules of that world or else ruin the book, and in the same way Milton has to play by the rules of Paradise Lost—he can’t just interrupt the story of Adam eating the apple to tell the reader about a delicious apple tart he had the night before in a London pub, or start discussing the politics of Oliver Cromwell. But if he could—it might make a very different but very exciting poem! In a sense that’s what Ezra Pound does in the Cantos, and in fact I think much of modernism and postmodernism is all about holding onto that spontaneity, that freedom of mental movement.
Part of the attraction of that freedom, I think, is its honesty: it would be so refreshingly honest to hear Milton talk for once about his evening at the pub. But there’s also something lost in poetry where the consciousness is, well, flitting, and sometimes what’s lost is the sense of death. Once you commit yourself to the poem’s world, you immediately invite death in, too. It’s all Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died.” Even if there’s no narrative, once your body is in the room of the poem, there’s no escape.
I also think of “lucid dreaming”—you know, those dreams where you know you’re dreaming. Very occasionally I have had a very brief “lucid dream,” in which, for example, I might be walking down a path and then realize I’m dreaming and simultaneously realize I can stay in the dream if I try very hard to pay attention. I know if I just keep strolling down the path, I’ll wake up in a second, but if I look very closely at the shrubs at the edge of the path and the shapes of the clouds in the sky and so on, I will stay in the dream and it will in fact become more and more vivid . . .
The point is the analogy to poetry—paying intense attention to the sensual texture of the imagery so that it becomes more vivid and you enter into it—so that it becomes a story instead of just a vision, maybe not a story in the sense of a traditional narrative, but in the sense of an entered world, the sense of entry that results from commitment to an image, following it instead of just using it.
This idea of poetry that enters the world it imagines is still important to me. I don’t necessarily mean a fantasy world. It could be Harry Potter, but it could just as easily be a re-creation of the “real” world. It could simply by a lyrical wildflower. But I think there’s a difference between poetry that makes the commitment of entering its own world—whatever that world may be—and poetry that keeps its distance.
I don’t necessarily mean to criticize poetry that “keeps its distance.” It can have tremendous energy, freedom and spontaneity. It defends its freedom to visit multiple worlds, but I think that freedom is mental freedom. Your mind can go from San Francisco to Shanghai to the moon, but if you actually get into a space capsule and go to the moon, your body is stuck there.
I think there’s a kind of poetry that makes an equivalent commitment—an entering the body of the poem. Partly I’m talking about something pretty obvious. When Rowling creates the world of Harry Potter, she has to play by the rules of that world or else ruin the book, and in the same way Milton has to play by the rules of Paradise Lost—he can’t just interrupt the story of Adam eating the apple to tell the reader about a delicious apple tart he had the night before in a London pub, or start discussing the politics of Oliver Cromwell. But if he could—it might make a very different but very exciting poem! In a sense that’s what Ezra Pound does in the Cantos, and in fact I think much of modernism and postmodernism is all about holding onto that spontaneity, that freedom of mental movement.
Part of the attraction of that freedom, I think, is its honesty: it would be so refreshingly honest to hear Milton talk for once about his evening at the pub. But there’s also something lost in poetry where the consciousness is, well, flitting, and sometimes what’s lost is the sense of death. Once you commit yourself to the poem’s world, you immediately invite death in, too. It’s all Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died.” Even if there’s no narrative, once your body is in the room of the poem, there’s no escape.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Lorca Returns to New York
“Standing the Whole World on Its Ear,” an article by Jeremy Eichler in today’s New York Times, makes me wish I could go to New York this afternoon to see Osvaldo Golijov’s new opera, Ainadamar, named for the “Fountain of Tears” near Granada where Federico García Lorca was killed in 1936. Interestingly, the main character in the opera is not Lorca, but Margarita Xirgu, the great Spanish actress for whose voice Lorca wrote some of the greatest roles in his plays.
The New York production was directed by Peter Sellars, and much of what Sellars says about it seems just as relevant to poetry as to music:
[Later attempt at clarification:] What really interests me is the idea that a lot of avant-garde music and poetry has a bloodless, cerebral quality, and Sellars' connecting that to the actual shedding of blood and persecution of Jews and other minorities in the 20th century—in effect that fascism had a destructive impact on the arts that the arts have yet to fully recover from, and the destructive impact is seen in the arts' being overly cerebral, not yet able to be fully human again, not yet able to scream and mumble and meditate and sing all at once.
The New York production was directed by Peter Sellars, and much of what Sellars says about it seems just as relevant to poetry as to music:
“The high energy in Bartok and Stravinsky’s music was this ethnic energy, a Jewish energy, a Gypsy energy, and it was precisely the energy that was literally exterminated in the death camps of Europe,” Mr. Sellars said. “It is what has been missing from most European music for a while. It’s that huge, unbearable melody of lament which is devastating and life-affirming at the same time. Which is, of course, a huge tradition of Jewish music, and which has been missing in action. Osvaldo has brought it back from Eastern Europe, through Israel, through Argentina. It is transformed but still wailing.”I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as an exciting image of what poetry could be.
Mr. Golijov speaks of the traditional synagogues he attended in Argentina and Jerusalem as a primary musical model, less for their liturgical melodies than for the churning energy he heard emerging from the semi-chaos of a restless congregation engaged in a thousand varieties of prayer. “You enter,” he said, “and somebody’s screaming, somebody’s mumbling, somebody’s meditating, and you don’t know how, but they suddenly start singing the same tune.”
[Later attempt at clarification:] What really interests me is the idea that a lot of avant-garde music and poetry has a bloodless, cerebral quality, and Sellars' connecting that to the actual shedding of blood and persecution of Jews and other minorities in the 20th century—in effect that fascism had a destructive impact on the arts that the arts have yet to fully recover from, and the destructive impact is seen in the arts' being overly cerebral, not yet able to be fully human again, not yet able to scream and mumble and meditate and sing all at once.
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