The Value of Adjectives

The value of adjectives 

Most poetry I read today falls into two "adjective categories," the spare and the spoiled. As magazine editor (Pulse Literary Journal) I get a ton of submissions. In fact I am working on the latest edition to be up by the end of this weekend. What I notice and what I always notice like some blinking red light is a tendency to overuse the adjective. Remember that this part of speech is needed to separate one noun from another and to avoid confusion. There is a difference between a red, leather-bound book and a green, soft-bound book and if you are sending someone to fetch the book you want, they need to know. BUT, in poetry does it matter? Not so much. But I see poems where the writer has strung together a long list of adjectives to modify or explain a single image. Do I need to know that the waves are thundering, forceful, dangerous? Yes, but I like to think any reader can find out those three characteristics of particular waves by what those waves wreak. Or by the metaphor or simile created for them. EX: geraniums, burst open with the colors of fireworks. Isn't that more interesting than listing the variations of colors in a plant? Doesn't that expression convey more than color?

I belong to a wonderful poetry group. We meet in our local library every other Tuesday. We meet to look at rough drafts of our poems, give suggestions for revision, and talk about what works. We trust each other to take the long view, and to scrutinize the minutia too. One thing I notice is that we all have a similar problem in our poems: over-explaining. This comes via overuse of adjectives. It is a common affliction that stems from a desire to get the image clear, to paint a lucid picture for the readers of our poems. I firmly believe however that this lucidity is best achieved with a spare number of adjectives. If we say red, red rose is the rose more red? Not so much. And using an adjective in hopes an unclear image will become clear is just nuts. Is it not better to say the river is dying of thirst than to say it is dusty and low? Adjectives are getting too much work these days, and metaphor is underemployed. So the struggle for clarity continues.

There are of course any number of poets who have the problem solved. I recommend the following 8 poets/poems:

Richard Wilbur The Writer
BH Fairchild  Brazil
Anthony Hecht The Grapes
Dana Gioia Nosferatu's Serenade (Ellen's Dream)
Elizabeth Bishop Sestina, The Waiting Room
Patricia Smith Siblings
Dorianne Laux Girl in the Doorway, A Brief History of the Apple
Carol Muske-Dukes Love Song


These poems stand for the best of sparseness and yet are rich and lucid. I go to them again and again when I am feeling that my own poems are falling into the rut of adjectives.


What about you?

so, how 'bout them Sox?

You will think this post is going to be about baseball... OK so it is a little about baseball...and just a little about ferns... and a little about weather.  My point is that poetry, in its natural state is about all of these things and more. We live IN this world and WITH all its "stuff," and can no more divorce ourselves from that than we can fly on our own. I keep going back to two issues: the signified and the signifier along with when is life a copy of a copy or is all of it a copy of some original text, some slice of the Divine? When does the "stuff" of life become poetry on the page?

Take baseball for instance:

I stayed up until 145 AM to watch it. It was the Sox and the Yankees. Most if not all sane people went to bed at a normal hour, leaving the game to itself, to its eventual swan (black or otherwise). Not me. I was fully awake and engaged until the last out. This is in part the "stuff" that makes me, well, ME. Who knows when a baseball game became a poem for me, but it did. Its sounds, its delays (last night a 3.5 hour rain delay), its gestures and habits, its energy or lack of energy. To me it is the same as my writing. Same elements, including more often than not, its late hour. Both sides in any given baseball game believe God is watching, God cares, God will come through and nudge that ball out of the park. You see Big Papi strike his chest, raise his hands to the heavenly realm whenever he gets a homer. And there are those aforementioned rain delays... didn't the Almighty Himself send down big weather to throw off one team and give the other a chance to regroup? Well, in my writing practice it is the same, kinda. I often feel that there is some opposing force (team?) out there waiting to do in my efforts. Could be the editor/publisher ultimately, but it's unfair to blame some blurry "other" with a big red pen. Mostly it is me blocking me. It is the little evil editor Carol sitting on the poet Carol's right shoulder (on the side of my "good ear" of course) doing her worst. When the writing is really in the zone however, I am like Big Papi, fist pumps to the sky and a big grin on my face. I've made meaning (for myself) and made art (for you). I've hit on a bit of ephemera that makes us teammates. Is it a poem inspired from On High? Not so much. It is likely a very common thing, like planting ferns in the heat, or daring to go outside in a thunderstorm to measure the angle of the lighting forks.

What of the "stuff" anyway? I planted ferns this morning, stifled by the heat rising up from the wet garden after last night's boomer storm. Surely these are not the only ferns ever planted, nor the only steamy day we have had or will have. Are these events mere copies of others just like them? Or, by writing about this planting thing, am I leaping the mundane, the copy mentality, and growing something unique?  If I focus the poem on the regenerative spores on the undersides of the fronds, if I see whole worlds living therein, am I in partnership with the Creator, just a step away from understanding the Divine? I think so. If I am more interested in the poetry of lightning than worried about being struck by it, do I therefore inhabit Lorca's world of the Duende? I might just. And I'm okay with that really. I like the danger that lurks around poetry, especially poetry where the person of the poem, or the poet him/herself is not just a copy of every other poet or poetical stance that has come before.

I enjoy reading what others say about "confessional" poetry, the subversive ideology of "I removal." These folks are passionate about avoiding themselves in their poems. But to be honest, do we not have to admit that if we were to take ourselves OUT of our poetry, we'd be like the androids in Blade Runner, not even knowing we were not human. I enjoy my humanity, relish it, live happily in the very messy realm of it. If I were to avoid myself, divorce me from me, I suspect my poetry would be some freakish language game, and not at all ready to touch YOU and your humanity. I want to feel your eyes on me as you read, I want the scrutiny of your wondering if the person in any given poem might just be the real me. I like to think I am unique, but I admit to being a little bit like the android Deckerd, a copy of me. I shed my outermost self frequently, keeping what seems valuable at the moment. I think my funny little verse bio says it all:

Bio, Schmio

When I was five, alive

in a little body, when I was six

picking up sticks, when I was seven, seventeen

maybe, eighteen, no seventeen, I was a version of me.

When I sat at the kitchen table, tabling

conversations too hard for my parents to accept,

tables like arithmetic were hard 

for the me I wanted to be. No bright star was shining

over the place I called home when I left,

no one waved good-bye, come again soon,

you’ll always have your room here. No one

but me on that bus, fishbowl in my lap

watching the mama fish eat her babies one by one.

Where did I go then

instead of off into normal? 

When I was seventeen, seven, five, 

alive meant towing the line, 

sitting straight, being seen not heard, 

kleenex bobby-pinned to my head

like a hat for church, 

rain pounding the windows,

caterpillars raining on the tent at Sebago Lake.

When I was 35, I’d reached my five year old’s goal:

to be 35. What was left? A world of other people

thinking they knew me, thinking they were right

about me, and me thinking the five year old me was still 

sitting under a tree on a smooth white sheet

playing teacher, making the dolls write in verse.

But even though I am a copied and remade "me," I am NOT a copy of you. So in the world of knock-togethers, intersections, pairings, poetry serves to make the human connection. Like baseball, like ferns, like weather.
And the stuff of both our lives intersects when you read a poem and think oh that has happened to me too or when a tear grows in the corner of your eye. If I am touched by that, if that makes me want to touch you again and again with more and more poems, I am not like Deckerd. I am the real me.

The beauty of poetry, poetry of real people, is that we each bring a chunk of our human experience to it. Readers or writers, we all have a stake in the reasons the poem exists on the page. We all have an interest in seeing how this life is going to come out in the end, and by what means we will arrive at that moment.

When we write about visual art, as I love to do, we get to put ourselves and our ferns and ballgames and weather into the art. We ruffle about in the images we see and ideas come, mostly from a spark of something, some "stuff" we have in our own lives. We see one of Peter Ralston's photographs, for example,  and feel a jab in the gut or an arrow to the temple. We do not have HIM there to interpret, to let us know his mood or method of seeing, or even where the photo was taken in many instances. We must enter into an asynchronous partnership with him and figure it out on our own, hoping that the copy of the copy (the poem about his photo about the place he was depicting) is somehow real, somehow not an android.

So, how 'bout them Sox? I felt every raindrop and heard every bolt of lightning, got a major headache when they were behind. I knew I was going to have my love affair with baseball, Red Sox baseball, justified. I also knew I was no android, that the game, like poetry would satisfy and parallel my writing, even in the worst of it.

Post-game note: Sox 8 - Yankees 3. Copy that.

Poets for Change and Peace

Well, here it is fellow poets and peacemakers: an event that you will want to attend, to be part of in some way, 100 Thousand Poets For Change. I am organizing locally. The event is going to be held simultaneously with the rest of the world. The idea is this: area poets gather OUTSIDE at the harbor here in Rockland (maybe the gazebo down by south beach) and read poems we write about peace and sustainability, and also read ONE poem together in a single huge VOICE. This part will be videoed and shared on the big bridge web site where all the other events will be posted. Visit this web site to see where in the world all the events are going to be held. It is an amazing project. I'm happy that the Midcoast area is one of the event locations!

Think about who you'd like to see reading, think about a poem we might read together, think about writing a poem for the event.

http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/

A favorite poem; you should read

If you  have not read the collection, Interrogations at Noon, by Dana Gioia, you might consider looking for a copy and adding it to your library. I first heard Dana read the poem below at the Teaching of Poetry Conference in Santa Rosa CA in, hmmm, maybe it was 2000??? I was absolutely gobsmacked by the poem, part of a libretto he'd written for the Nosferatu opera. The poem is part of a 3 part slightly longer piece. The other 2 parts are wonderful too, but THIS bit really gets to me. Enjoy.

Nosferatu's Serenade (aria from Act II of Nosferatu)

I am the image that darkens your glass,
The shadow that falls wherever you pass.
I am the dream you cannot forget,
The face you remember without having met.
I am the truth that must not be spoken,
The midnight vow that cannot be broken.
I am the bell that tolls out the hours.
I am the fire that warms and devours.

I am the hunger that you have denied,
The ache of desire piercing your side.
I am the sin you have never confessed,
The forbidden hand caressing your breast.
You've heard me inside you speak in your dreams,
Sigh in the ocean, whisper in streams.
I am the future you crave and you fear.
You know what I bring. Now I am here.

while downstairs...

Today is beautiful again and I ought to be outside planting the rest of my garden. I will, later. But first...

I am working to get the new website ready. I've hired a designer to get things up and done, but need to fill in the details for her. I hate this kind of thing, because it seems like me loving on me. But if the word is going to get out on my books and activities around poetry, I have to do it. Grrrr. Once it is done, with links to everything in place, I will be a happy camper. I will be once again able to focus on why I even NEED a web page for myself: POETRY.

I am pretty happy with this blog of course, but need to get people here to read, comment, participate. Again, soon all the links will be in place. I also have the webzine to manage. Needing to shore up the design and post new issue. Once the author page is up, links all in place.....

while downstairs... guy laying new tile in bathroom, in hallway leading to barn where EVENTUALLY new laundry room will be. Ahhh, at least there is SOME visible progress.

2am and I'm still at this computer

I am excited and cannot sleep; Red Sox beat the Yankees. But that is not why I am up late. I am in the midst of restructuring my existing web page, creating a new "author page" and am about to get a new laundry room. In the midst of all of this, I am ready to get back to work on submissions. I have a "bucket list" of places I'd like to see my poems and will keep knocking on those doors. I try to submit at least twice a month, an all-day procedure but worth it. The well has been a little dry lately as there is a ton of my work "out there" and no news on any of it yet. But there are amazing things on the immediate horizon, including a book launch for the new book, a couple of readings, a panel discussion/reading. I love doing these. It is so wonderful to hear the poems as they come out of my mouth, so grand to see the faces of those in the audience as they hear them for the first time. I think, other than the writing, the sharing with my poetry group, etc. I love the public readings the most. It is so wonderful to stand in front of a group of people who love poetry and let them hear what I have written. A very wise person once told me that when you read or teach, there is no need to try to please the whole room, because you are really there for ONE person who needs what you have to say. So the excitement, the mystery for me is to look out and imagine who that ONE person is.

Is it YOU?

Poem about food

OK... so we talked this morning about writing about food. I think I will share a poem that my writing group is going to look at today. Tell me what you think and let's discuss why this one works (or doesn't work).

Lemon Cake

First you need great bowls

and a big spoon. Measuring

is easier with Nana’s teacups

the ones graduated

to your kitchen after her funeral.

It was all you wanted.

She used no recipe for lemon cake, 

taught you to measure the heft 

of flour in your palm, to see 

how much lemon juice fills

the teacups, to know a pinch

from a smidgeon just by feel. 

A pinch of cardamom, one 

of nutmeg, a dusting of poppy seeds

over the wet mixture. She mixed

clockwise, said the sun travels

that way and helps the mixture

to rise just so to the rim of the pans.

For frosting, a package 

of softened cream cheese, a splash

of vanilla and one of lemon juice.

Whip in half a hand of sugar  
with the egg beater she got

as a wedding present in 1926.

Later, sitting in your chair by the window,

listening to the rain come in gasps,

you will know her love is in the recipe

she never wrote, the one pressed 

into your hands, hands she taught 

and in the teacup you use tonight for tea.


Smell the lemons, smell her verbena.

— Carol 2011

You can see that this poem is in the second person "you," a reasonable strategy for taking the obvious "I" out and making the poem more universal. It is so even if a reader doesn't have a "Nana." The "you" brings the reader INTO the poem.  

Writing about food

Thomas C. Foster, in his wonderful book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, remarks that writing about eating is hard. He says that is because not much happens. You put food in the mouth and chew and swallow. BUT, he tells us, it is all about what takes place AT the meal, who is there and what kind of interaction happens. He says that eating with others is an act of communion (like sex, passing around a joint, and dying are acts of communion). True enough. If one eats alone it is sustenance only, with the pleasure of the food added in for good measure; if one eats with others one enters into community.

So what about writing ABOUT food items themselves? I just read an amazing poem by Dorianne Laux, A Short History of the Apple, in which she not only describes the eating of it, but intersperses fragments of where the apple has fit into human history. Here is the opening of the poem so you can see what I mean:

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.
Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.
Eve's knees ground in the dirt
of paradise.Newton watching...


So we have the taste and tactile nature of eating the apple, transformed by the bits about Eve and Newton. The whole poem is like this until its end where she praises the pollinators for their part in making this treat for humans:

Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives of Britain's honeybees:
white man's flies. O eat. O eat.


The ending is as dramatic as it goes, but without being over the top or in our faces. Laux criticizes mankind for not appreciating bees and their role in feeding us, and praises the apple and its pollinators. A surprise to be sure, and a welcome one. Mid poem she lets the reader know in no uncertain terms that the apple is hardy, maybe hinting at the fact that we are not so hardy ourselves. Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew./ Cedar apple rust. The apple endures./


I have written about food many times, not nearly as well as this to be sure. But I think it is worth doing. I think by doing so we might gain some increase of appreciation for what is on our tables, or what cannot be on our tables.
Two weeks ago I suggested the topic to my writing group. We exchanged recipes to give us material. I'm excited to see what they have done with this, how hard they thought it was to do. I can say it really beat me up!! I will be bringing a copy of Laux's poem for each member of the group. I know they will love it as I do. Might just be one of my favs at this point.

Peter Peter ... ekphrastic writing

I am feeling happy today about photography. Actually CERTAIN photography. I went to the book launch of Peter Ralston's "Islands in Time" at Archipelago/The Island Institute last evening and am in a heightened state of art today because of it. I love the new photographs Peter has done and have several notes for poems. You see, that's it with me and art... for sure the photographs of Peter R. In my 2nd book there are 2 poems and in the 3rd book (just out) there are also 2 poems written in response to his work. So far, over the past four years, I have written ekphrastic poems to nearly 20 of his photographs.I hope there is a collaboration on the horizon there. Stay tuned.

So this takes me to a few ideas about ekphrastic writing. First of all, I love doing it. But the point here is that everyone can do it and ought to try it. Take out your notebook and begin.

This way of writing is not new, just often overlooked. Famously Auden wrote Mus ée de Beaux Arts from Breugel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In his piece, Auden begins with a clear, head-on statement "About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters: how well they understood/its human position." and then moves to a seemingly literal description of the painting and what it contains. But does he?  It is easy enough I suppose (in the relative lack of ease when writing a poem) to simply describe poetically what one sees. Auden does a bit of this of course but only insofar as the "stuff" of the painting and the message of the painting are heightened by his view of the larger issue: that life goes on despite tragedy overhead.

[side note] For Breugel, there was no instant media, no Wikileaks, no reporters on the scene with cameras and made-up assessment. He chose to make art his message board, his screen. For Auden, who lived in the modern time, there was certainly media reportage, but not the mess we have now, and not the intensity of reporting since 9/11. Both relied upon something that is overlooked now by many: non-electronic imagineering.


I digress. In Auden's poem, he connects the dots in a most amazing way. We get the description paired with what probably or might be going on for everyone going about their routines as Icarus plunges to the sea and is lost. In fact, the actual fall of Icarus is a tiny splash, two white legs above water in the lower right corner of Breugel's painting. Not lost on Auden is the irony of that, and keen for him the responsibility of showing us the folly of being too engaged in the mundane and missing the tragedies all around us:.

... how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash. the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing. a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to go and sailed calmly on.

It is fantastic what Auden does here with this painting and its message. No mere description at all. No mere message, but a marriage of image and message, a sense of artistic hands clasped across time for high purpose.

I'm no Auden to be sure, and Peter Ralston is not Breugel. But what is common to the asynchronous collaboration is the message and the means. Ralston has a vision through his lens and makes his statement thereby. I take what I see, my emotions or sensibilities stirred to a vision of my own, and make poems. The two of us have not discussed, put heads together on the "message" and come up with any sort of a plan. THIS, dear friends and poets, is why asynchronous collaboration is so beautiful. Sometimes the message is a set of identical twins. Sometimes fraternal.

Always richer when combined. 

What does this kind of writing do for the average poet? In simple terms it provides material. But it is not that simple. The material it provides has already been sieved through the artist's sense of what he/she saw in the first order. From that eye and heart came the art itself, now viewed by the poet. If the poet is good at what he/she does, there will be the notes, with specifics about the painting and the FEELINGS it engendered. Then the poet will step away. Step far away. It is in this removal period that the message and the intensity of the visual will form itself into word, image, and line. The process of writing takes over here and the poet sets about to identify the message for him/herself. When I view a photograph of Ralston's for example, or a painting by Wyeth, I get a jolt somewhere in my gut. I am attracted to one or two images or the way the light makes a point of emphasis. I begin to identify where, in my repertoire of experience or knowledge, there is or has been a similar jolt. The notes I take record the pairing, record the details that caused the jolt, and some ideas about a message. In my poem, In the Haul, I connect  with the hard life of an island wife. Peter's photograph, March, is a rich domestic landscape with laundry hanging on the line as a central feature of the piece and the sea beyond. I couldn't help thinking of the men and boys whose clothes hung there, and who would come home or not from their hard work at sea. I chose to focus on people NOT in the photograph, the chilled existence they bore, the underlying message of how tough island life really is. The photograph is exquisite and rich in color. The lives of the people not in the photo need to be honored in this way, to be given center stage in the drama that unfolds for them every day. As a poet, I could pull them into the photo and give them their due. What excites me here is some of the imagery that came forward to send a different message: use of the laundry as warning flags suggesting danger at sea, the use of words like chilling. Is island life romance and are these folks iconic figures? Not exactly. Not really. True enough that they are rugged (iced and hard-edged). They live a bit out to sea, and are by virtue of that self-sufficient. But their lives are also normal. Women do laundry, they meet as neighbors for coffee and chatter. My message is that. My joy in this particular poem is the people who are not in the photo. Collaboration, confabulation. Poetry does that. 

I am grateful that Peter does what he does, foraging about with his camera in places I don't get to go. He provides me with a boatload (pun intended) of "material" from which my poet brain can derive message and my poet's pen can pass that message along. 

Now it is time to get off the computer and go finish planting. Have I mentioned that the yard is another place where my poet self gets all jazzed and ready to write? Another day, another blog.

Sonnet Part 2

Now I have cooled off a bit from May 22 post when I began a bit of a rant against poets who are tied absolutely and resolutely to the five beat line in sonnets. I've had time to regain a sense of calm. In that time however I did a bit of research into the four beat line, the world of iambic tetrametry, so to speak. I wracked my brain for the sonnet I learned in 6th grade because I THOUGHT it might not have been iambic pentameter. AHA! Today I located it by searching all of Shakespeare's sonnets for the one line I readily recalled: Those lips the Love's own hand did make. Sonnet CXLV! I was very pleased to see this sonnet again.

A quick scansion of the poem confirmed my recall. Iambic TETRAMETER with some trochaic substitutions and an anapest in the line just before the couplet. Whew. Not crazy (not provably crazy anyway). Reading this sonnet again after many years was a pleasurable thing this afternoon. And it is fine indeed to have my thinking about tetrameter upheld at the highest level.

So what to do now about those who would eschew tetrameter? Well, to start with I must promote this meter whenever possible. Keep writing in this most natural of meters. Involve poet friends in use of this metric stance.
And do NOT enter sonnet contests where there is no clear acceptance of the four beat line! Ta Da! Vindication AND a plan!

MORE THOUGHTS

I had a chat today via email with a former professor and friend on the issue of historical and cultural references, specifically the inability of some contemporary editors or contest judges to recognize them. He stated that his recently published sestina was questioned by the editor who mentioned having to look up things in the poem that related to baseball and WWII. Makes me wonder about the education of this editor in the area of history and popular culture (beyond Facebook and other social networks).  There is a trend that seems to be viral in some readers of poetry: lack of ability to make referential leaps to make meaning. And just as it is a preferred stance for readers to look up words they do not know, why not look up references they do not know? What's wrong with that? It is easy to do and fast in the computer age, the age of Google. But really, who does not know about World War I or II? Who does not know where these wars took place and what the phraseology of these wars was? Who has not at least heard the terms of baseball? Will we as a people be satisfied to only understand terms that apply to warfare of our own age? And even if we do not play and enjoy particular sports, are we not obligated as writers to be aware of its certain and particular phraseology? Gone are the days when reading and knowing OUTSIDE our comfort zones was a given if we were to be teachers and/or writers. But I still admit surprise when I hear stories of this kind. I am discouraged and deflated by such narrow enterprise.

There may be something more pervasive at work here, however. I worry that in this age of teaching to testing, some students may graduate from high schools and colleges without a broad enough knowledge of the world to actually thrive intellectually IN it. In other words they might not know that they don't know. And do they then reject out of hand anything that points out their lack of knowledge? I saw this in many of my students. It is worrying to say the least.

When I was still teaching in the college classroom, I used a supplemental text to help students "catch up" with what they ought to know about reading in order to understand the way professors want them to read. I am of a mind that every high school student  should be given this book upon entering 9th grade and use it through college: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster. The book is a lively read and very helpful for the student who wants to not only know "facts" but how to connect the dots and understand literary and cultural references made in what they read. It is a code-cracking wonder of a book.  There are references made to many and varied pieces of literature, and I believe if a reader would simply list all of them and READ all of them, we'd not have such a divide between reading and education.

Now THAT is something to chew upon, reader, something very healthy for your mind to chew upon indeed!

obsessed with reading

I scratch my head, after I stop beating it against my desk, over the state rolling back child labor laws to allow 16 year olds to work later on school nights at less than minimum wage. I can hardly believe the rationale here: saving money for college, helping keep Mom and Dad off the welfare rolls, keeping them from "vegging" in front of the TV or playing video games, etc. What a bunch of claptrap. I wonder, in what universe we now live, why there is not an emphasis on MORE studying, more hours at books, more parental involvement in regulating the time and activities of kids? Really folks, you cannot manage to keep the kids off the texting, the TV, the gaming? Shame on you.

I digress slightly but am getting to the meat of it here:

I just finished reading Dawn Potter's blog entry about book obsession and take heart that I have friends who value reading above commerce. OK, so the barn needed cleaning and good for you Dawn to do that. BUT, first and foremost you are a woman of words and books. I ought to do some manual labor today myself and will later (those stacks of books need dusting, my desk needs organizing).

I too am obsessed with reading and have favorites to which I return and return. Big for me, top of my list is The Outermost House. But let me give you a few others to consider:

House of the Seven Gables, by my ancestor Hawthorn
Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett
Plato's Republic (not a novel, but a favorite read)
Fahrenheit 451 (take heed, ye education-killing-legislators)
The Scarlet Letter (another Hawthorn)


These few are but a few... of course I read poetry more than anything else, but when I want to center myself or get gone from the "usual," I go to these.

The point is we ought to want to have this kind of an obsession. We want our kids/grandkids/students to have this.

So we keep on reading and hope our example is not falling simply on our own choir. Thanks Dawn for admitting your addiction. Don't go to any 12-step programs for reading any time soon.

Well, we had a day

Yesterday was terrific... that yellow thing was out all day and I was happy to have windows down in the car again. But my attention this morning turns to gardening. I THINK I might actually get some veggies planted this weekend. I'm getting all excited thinking about it. Of course as I think about gardening, I think about my greenhouse and how it needs to have everything taken OUT and cleaned up from winter/spring. I enjoy this task. Feels so fresh when it's done. I will do that on Saturday and celebrate by writing out there. I did not do that this spring (OK, technically is is still spring) and look forward to the special feeling I get looking out through the wavery glass, a feeling of spooky color and shapes. I let all the geraniums (gerania?) die off this winter. They were so spindly and weak after 4 seasons of in and out that I decided to start over this spring. I will go to the local nursery and find special ones, with interesting shapes of petals, bright and varied colors. I have these wonderful opaque pots (all sizes) in ice-creamy colors and in red and blue. I love how it looks from the outside to see these pots lined up on the shelf, their plants a-bloom. And there is something special about the smell of a geranium. A really earthy smell. Mmm.

Eventually I need to get electricity out there. Not sure how that will work, but I would like to work out there after dark. OK, you're thinking candles. A good plan too. I'm thinking some kind of solar light that doesn't need wires and connection to the grid. I would like to be able to plug in a fan or a heater (for winter). Dilemma. Any suggestions from out-there-land?

OK ... the sonnet and other frustrations...part 1

I am ticked off. I am really frustrated. I am annoyed. I am disconcerted. Did I mention ticked off?

Don't get me wrong here, I love sonnets. I really love sonnets. But what I do NOT like is the pole-up-butt attitude on the parts of some folks regarding what constitutes a sonnet.

Yesterday's Maine Poets Society meeting featured a speaker/contest judge who took on the sonnet as his part of the afternoon's judging/activity. He totally rejected from award any sonnet that did not conform to the five beat line. OMG. The four beat line is a perfectly acceptable way to go here. AND, many many many sonnets of great repute, including some of Shakespeare's, have substitutions in meter, such as beginning a line with a trochee. He admitted that he did not consider any which did not conform to the five beat line.... really? OMG  OK, he is right to adhere to the five beat line IN HIS OWN WRITING. No problem there for me. But into what damned century is he sucking us here? We live in the 21st, thank you very much.

I can now see why so many of my professors (undergrad) and advisors (MFA) mocked the formalists and said they are "making it old." We cannot dial it back, people. We CAN use the sonnet frame to paint a newer, more contemporary portrait. Robert Bly and others have tweaked the form to make it more American. In fact many believe that the framework of 14 lines is up for revision as well. I am ok with that. My mindset is more aligned to the notion of variations on a basic. What I do emphasize in teaching others to write a sonnet is that you have to know the form before you tweak it. I was encouraged in this thinking by a few very smart teachers at Iowa and other places.

Let's face it, for most students of poetry, and not just a few practiced poets, the form is a daunting proposition. Most just avoid it altogether. They do themselves and poetry a huge disservice in this avoidance. It is not a form to fear. It is a wonderful platform from which to build skill in poetry, particularly in the realm of meter and rhyme. Many situations about which you might like to write are well-suited to this form. The obvious unrequited love theme is not all there is to writing a sonnet. Themes that are lighthearted and jovial are ok here too, especially the parody.
But there are some that are simply done in by imposition of the form on topic. Not everything can be a poem anyway. I had a professor in college who, in an intermediate poetry class, took out a credit card and read the information on the back, asking us if this can be considered a poem. One dunderhead in the class said, "oh of course...it's a manner of personal interpretation." Uh-oh. I won't get detailed about the professor's response, but suffice it to say there was a loud silence after he stormed out of the room. Yikes. My point is that not everything ought to be applied to the sonnet form if the poem is to be taken as a serious sonnet attempt.

One thing I did a few years ago was to devise a teaching plan for decreasing the anxiety of my students in terms of their willingness to try a sonnet. It was originally designed (this thing I invented) to just be a springboard to the "real" sonnet. What has happened tangentially is a new form, one that I sometimes use outside of teaching. People who have learned it like it. It is fun to do and does not mock the sonnet or parody it. It is most definitely NOT an actual sonnet. But it is a foot in the door to "Sonnetland." I call it the "perfect reversing sonnet" or the "sonnetelle."

Now that I have your attention, a break to take a little snooze. Back later with the rest of the story.

and now fog

Don't get me wrong, I love fog. I love the sound of the foghorns boop-booping. But come on... we deserve a little sunshine after the CRAPPY winter we had.

But I tell myself this may be a sign that I should be writing some fog poems. My friend Gayle has a whole collection of fog poems in her new book "fog and other atmospheric conditions." It's a splendid book, her first. If you want to order a copy contact me. At any rate, I think a few fog stanzas might be in order. Or a fog sonnet. OR.... maybe a fog pantoum or villanelle. Those are forms well suited for obsessive situations. This weather is obsessive on God's part I think. Is He in love with adverse weather? Is there a plan in all of this?

[OK, those of you who eschew God talk (you know who you are) can call this power "Mother Nature" or "the cosmos" or whatever you please.]

For me though, I am serious about fog and weather poems. I do think it is a sign. Drat! Just when I was getting up a good head of steam in "The Boyfriend Project!"

Ooops. Time to get dressed and ready to go to book group. I can't for the life of me recall which book. I know I read it right away after last month's group so I will be able to hold up my end.... brain cells are probably too WET from all this weather to work properly.

Later Gator.

and still it rains

This is starting to feel like June 2009. I am well and truly getting annoyed. I need to plant my veggies. Can't tolerate the thought of store-bought, engineered tomatoes.

So guess I have to write some more rain poems. Aaaaargh!

I actually do have rain poems in my new book... have you ORDERED my new book yet (shameless self-promotion here). Contact me by email (mainepoet@me.com) for ordering info. I have a couple dozen here at home that I can ship out to discerning readers (LOL).

So here is one of the poems about rain. It is a "perfect reversing sonnet," a form I invented a few years ago. Notice the interesting rhyme patterns.

Enemy

Rain is my enemy, I shall not forgive.

I am ever at his mercy just to survive.

I get so wet I may as well grow gills

for breathing in water like this. I’ll not likely survive.

Oh where are you sun, why won’t you arrive?

I feel I will at any moment grow ill

from all the water upon my sill.

From all the water upon my sill

I feel I will at any moment grow ill.

Oh where are you sun, why won’t you arrive?

I’ve breathed in too much water and won’t likely survive.

I’m so wet, I think I’ve grown gills.

I’m at the mercy of rain just to survive.

Rain is my sworn enemy and I won’t forgive.

You can see how rain annoys me. That said, I do love rain when it is not every day. Ahhh, how we want to manipulate nature for our own purposes. Guilty.

Must say I am in total appreciation for how green everything is getting. Flowers are popping awake, birds that have been gone all winter have returned to our feeders, the dirt smells so good right now. But sheesh... a little sun already!

more rain and more poetry

I am okay with rain, but would love a bit of a break to plant my garden. However, the rain which keeps me indoors has a side benefit: more writing time without guilt or distraction. So, you'd think I'd be hard at it... NOT. I am distracted anyway.

I should be working on The Boyfriend Project. I am THINKING about it. How many poems do I need? What is the end part of when these "boys" cease to be beloved and start being annoying or dangerous? So, here's my thought on the actual construction: boyfriend project poems and love poems in the same collection, but as a flip book. Read through all the boyfriend poems, reach the middle of the book, flip and there is a new cover and more poems heading back toward the middle. Tentatively two separate covers, two different titles. The flip side would be "The Heart as Phoenix" or something indicating a resurrection of sorts where the boyfriends are left behind and more mature themes of love, rejection, dangerous love come into play. And do the married years enter in at all as distinct from the rest, or not at all, or embedded in the love section? A few of the married poems are not so loving or tender....

I have so many poems that would fit the love part... I kinda like the notion of two books in one. But is it too childish a construct that might detract? I can simply end one part, have a second section for the others. What thinkest thou dear blog followers? This is an important decision for me as the book itself is important to me.

Here are sample poems from each "side" of things:

From The Boyfriend Project side:

3:30 a.m.

for FB

Awake since the news

of the crash, you

in the hospital, pasted together —

your parents in chairs by your bed.

No matter that you ditched me

just yesterday, another girl

wearing the ring you made in shop,

the one I hid from my father.

No sleep for me tonight, love not

a switch to flip because some girl

with a laissez-faire father

lets you get to second base.

Tomorrow, at your bedside,

your new girl on a date

with your best friend, I promise

to find you again when we’re 50.

5:30 a.m.

for BB

Daddy says I have to get up,

go to church,

do my best not to look

like I’ve been out all night.

He suggests confession.

Make it right he says.

I say no.

You’ve disrespected your mother.

I say she wasn’t there and wouldn’t know

love if it walked up and introduced itself.

It’s not rouge I wear to Mass on my left cheek.

From The Heart as Phoenix side:

There Was the Year

of learning to kiss,

positioning noses and closing

eyes. I admit to sneaking

a look to see if his eyes

were properly shut. Brown

eyes laughing, soft lips breaking

into laughter at my dare.

There was the year

of foreign boys, well a summer

that wanted to be a year.

Dark-eyed boy from Columbia,

a prince from Persia,

and a boy who spoke German

or was it Russian?

Years gone by lurk

like ghosts on the beach

and in the town. Movies

in my head, like Exodus.

The theater burned, we got fire

checks for when it was safe

to kiss in the balcony another night.

There hasn’t been a year

when I was not in love, not close

to losing myself or finding myself

because of love. Boys

became men and I loved them for it.

My eyes stayed open during kisses,

my lips a map of kissing.

But I wanted to ask,

if you don’t mind, where did that year go

when I learned to love you?

The Year I Loved You

I loved you a year

when I thought love a lie,

thought love a star

embroidered on black,

unreal as marriage vows.

I didn’t love you before

and then I did, and then not

in person, but like a star

zooming to its death

vowing to return.

I loved you with magic

and you pulled rabbits

out of hats made of stars,

cutting me in half

finally, as I knew lovers do.

I didn’t love you again

until a bus station opened

to you in the doorway, a star.

Then I loved you for three days

as if I were going to die.

I loved you like a stone

wrapped in my own skin

tossed into a pool of stars

sinking, spinning rings

of vows we never made.

I didn’t love you well

enough to make you stay.

So, you tell me: flip book format or meet in the middle with a divider format?

Pillars of Poetry 2

Day two of thinking about my "pillars of poetry" and I turn to BH Fairchild. Yes there is a bit of a theme between yesterday and today: teachers who taught me directly, plus by their poems. Eventually I will switch to indirect teachers (learned from their writing, not in classes with them). So look for Henry Beston next, followed by Bishop, Millay, and others.

Today I am focused on BH Fairchild who was my professor in my undergrad program at Cal State University at San Bernardino. I attended later in life due to a series of personal snafus (my own doing) and raising a family. I has just been laid off from a LUCRATIVE freelancing job (writing online music profiles... wrote the first one ever on Jessica Simpson by the way). I sat at my desk boo-hooing about the layoff, and the total lack of $$$$ facing me, and decided to return to college and knock off the last two years. CSUSB has a creative writing major within the English major so it was a perfect fit... and a 30 minute drive from my house. First thing I did was to sign up for three classes with Fairchild. The dept. chair worried over this, saying I would either be right in my element or rue the day I put all my eggs in this one basket. He was worried I would not get along with this man and quit. Ha! The guy did no know ME! From that point onward I was on a roll, headed toward the greatest college experience one can have: totally focused on the work, brilliant guy leading the way. Enough of that part.... on to what I learned.

Yesterday I mentioned that Jack Myers gave my confidence a jolt.... should have started with Fairchild. Confidence increased here too, but in a totally different way. I was on a mission to demonstrate competence, and in fact for some reason wanted this man to see me as VERY competent. So I dug in and did everything he suggested to a fare-thee-well. If he suggested we write ONE poem in a certain way, I'd do three. I practiced every technique he mentioned, over and over. I read every author/poet he mentioned, even those I'd already tackled before. I took more notes in his classes than I had taken cumulatively before. Simply put, I became the student I had always meant to be. This splashed off in my other classes too. I was back in love with the lover I'd abandoned: learning.

You want to know what this did for me as a poet. I started paying attention to EVERYTHING. I started really SEEING the world and grew a desire to find ways to pass that on in my poems. I was an okay poet before that, but as I read and listened and took notes, I was challenged to find much better, more interesting ways to put the world I was inhabiting on paper. I wanted desperately for other poets to say about my poems: gee, I wish I'd written that."

Fairchild showed me something new in that I saw the ordinary as beautiful, the gruesome as lovely, the mundane as miraculous. I will never again look at ordinariness as ordinary. (so, thanks for that, Pete). I learned too that we live in a world of sound bytes, cliché, and overuse of practically EVERYTHING. I no longer wanted to be in that world, coming to realize I needed to create another world in my poetry. I can make that world available to others through my poetry. I can enliven, explore, explain and not visit the same place twice, or visit it twice with a new eye to it. I learned about SOUND and discovered that, although I am completely deaf in one ear, I have sound INSIDE that is not deaf-oriented. I can hear with my eyes, with my body, with my PEN. Pete showed me that.

One great thing about studying with him that most new writers might not think so great: oh man, could he criticize, and boy oh boy, did he not sugar-coat. There were those moments when I cringed at what he said about a poem. I remember writing a "Christmas" poem and hearing the words I hated: "This poem is WAY too sappy. Can you write about Christmas without so damn much Christmas in the poem?" The hairs stood right up on my neck and I felt my face get hot, not with embarrassment, but with ANGER. Oh baby, I did not like that. Who could fault Christmas? Why is that sappy?

Well, the gauntlet was thrown down. So, I determined to write a "holiday" poem without mentioning the holiday at all. It is all about "is-ness" as Pete will say, EMBODY things, don't just put them on the page. ANYONE can do that. Result: a poem that has an amaryllis as one of the images. Nothing says Christmas season more than an amaryllis. Ta-Da! From that point on, I have striven to make things show what they are: concrete images are my best buddies.

You want to know what this did for me as a poet. Well the biggest thing I suppose was that I started paying attention to EVERYTHING. I started really SEEING the world and grew a desire to find ways to pass that on in my poems. I was an okay poet before that, but as I read and listened and took notes, I was challenged to find much better, more interesting ways to put the world I was inhabiting on paper. I wanted desperately for other poets to say about my poems: gee, I wish I'd written that."

But as Pete aways says about teaching and learning about poetry, it is the poems themselves that do the teaching. So it is here. I look to his poetry for details and find a stunning teacher there. The greatest learning in his poems is the employment of fresh language in illuminating the magic of ordinary life and ordinary human interaction. In narrative poetry there is the danger of losing the poetic in the mundane, the "this happened, then this happened" thread that threatens to turn poetry into "reportage" or simple scene setting. Fairchild's poetry shows there is another way to tell a story. This is important for my own work. But his poetry is not simple storytelling. It is always about embodiment. This keeps ordinariness from being ordinary, pushes the boundaries of simple. Look at the poem, The Woman at the Laundromat Crying "Mercy" for evidence:

And the glass eyes of dryers whirl/ on either side, the roar just loud enough/ to still the talk of the women. Nothing/ is said easily here. Below the screams/ of two kids skateboarding in the aisles/ Long white rows of washers lead/ straight as highways lead to a change machine/ that turns dollars into dimes ... In back, the change machine has jammed, and a woman/ beats it with her fists, crying "mercy, mercy."

This very ordinary scene becomes more of a life look lesson because of the unique look at this microcosm of domestic duty through the glass eyes of the dryers.

I want to do this in my poems. I ask myself constantly if I have made my poems live on the page. I use what I call the "Fairchild Test" to check my work. If a poem fails this test, I go back to work. I often go back to work. But once in awhile I am successful.

Pillars of Poetry 1

Just arrived: the final collection of poetry by Jack Myers. Jack, one of my advisors at Vermont College, died of cancer in 2009, and we've all been waiting for the "last words" so to speak. I find it heartening and heart-rending to begin the slow savor of these poems.

Late last night, sitting in my favorite chair, I began reading at the back (after a brief foray into Mark Cox's intro). Why start at the back? Not the usual way to read a book, not how I normally dig into a poetry book for sure. I figured out this morning that I started at the back because I don't want this first reading to end, knowing it ends with his death. As I read, tears began flowing. Couldn't help myself. And before you think I am sad and the book made me miss my friend (I am and it did), please know that what brought the tears was an awareness of what Jack brought to my life as a poet.

Let's start this discussion with that awareness. I've been fortunate as a poet and a person to have had Jack as teacher. More than teacher, he was a perfect example of what a poet can do and must do. He was a great poet, and one day perhaps the rest of the world will know and proclaim that. But, better than that, he was the kind of poet you need as a mentor: a person who cared deeply about others' success, ready to prop you up in times of doubt, and a technically brilliant and lyrically beautiful writer on his own. Perhaps his writing is not "beautiful" in the sense of how most people might define beauty. It is beautiful in the realm of truthful, artful expression. Even the poem about his son't suicide ("In the Dark") formed around this kind of beauty:

Anger and sorrow have split off from me

like twin tree trunks. I think I will grow in

opposite directions like this from now on,

watching the fruit of what I can hardly bear open.

Later in the poem, he says, I am struck dumb, twisted inward, and folded over

If these words are not the embodiment of beauty I don't know anything about beauty. In retrospect, one must ask if the opposite directions he speaks of are that stay/go dichotomy the dying have at the end. He may have thought that in dying he'd be reunited with his son, but at the same time gone from his wife and the world he loved. That split-off stance must be the final penance we pay for having gotten it wrong at times here in the mortal realm, a kind of purgatory so to speak if you believe in that. Now Jack would be laughing his ass off at my applying Catholic metaphors to his dying. But he'd be happy about it too because my metaphors are coming from a true place in me. Ahhhh, Jack, still you teach and evaluate! (huge grin here).

I know that as he was nearing his own end, trying to hang on, the suicide of his son was a gut shot to his strength. The poems tell me that. These final verses, one and all, show me Jack's view into that worrisome place that he had to enter, the place where we all go. Not that he wanted immortality, no he was a man of all realms already, but the idea that he had to face it with grief for his own son must have hastened his trip. But, soggy with that grief, facing the end of his mortal life, Jack's words grew in beauty. I'm gobsmacked by that. Totally. Makes me wonder if the clarity one might gain at the end ends up clarifying the poetry too, not that I am in a hurry to find out on my own.

Another thing about these last poems is his clear look at the situation in which he found himself. In "Colangiocarcinoma," he faces right into it, the desire to stay and what it would take to have a chance to stay:

transplant.

... I'll miss/ the time when they'll have shrunk cancer back down into/a word like "dyspepsia" and there'll be a pill for it. Meanwhile/my eyes have turned yellow. I need a liver immediately.

and later..

Everything has been planned for me down to the last minute.

I'm waiting as fast as I can for a stranger's fatal accident.

You have to notice here that there is beauty in these words, and not a drop of sap. Not a drop. And no reductiveness either. It is as it is. Period. Beautiful frantic dying.

Jack possessed a technical genius in his writing and teaching. His "Portable Poetry Workshop" stays on my desk or in my bag so I can access that genius whenever I need his help. The way he THINKS (I refuse to let his thinking die just because his body did) is so detailed. I aspire to that mind, grow impatient with myself not to be that detailed in my own approach to writing, and I will get better at that aspect of writing in some fashion only because of Jack's influence.

I hope this blog entry doesn't seem sentimentally off-putting, because Jack would HATE that. He was fully aware of how too much sap can ruin writing. His writing was sugar-free to say the least. BUT... how can I begin to express my loss, my joy, my exhilaration? I guess in one word: thanks. This simple, one-syllable word doesn't seem enough. It will have to do. What Jack did for me as teacher and example was to restore and instill confidence in my ability to say what is on my mind in ways that change and brighten. He was a grumble of a teacher, smiling beast of a critic, a rule-following, rule-breaking exemplar. I recall the day he and I were to meet for my post semester evaluation. He met students in his room, for their own privacy and his own comfort. He met me at the door (which stayed open by the way, for those of you who might be thinking "uh-oh!" here) He was in some kind of elegant dressing gown-y kind of get up, and was drinking wine. He had a fan going by the window and sat smoking into the fan to keep the smoke out of the room and avoid setting off the fire alarm (smoking in the rooms was strictly verboten). Even though my semester had been wonderful, I was in a funk over the poems I had written, feeling maudlin and appearing to myself as small and anything but brilliant. I really wanted him to tell me I was brilliant and just knew he would not say it. He'd more likely tell me that I was an okay poet but keep my day job. blah blah blah... on and on in my own head. Perceptive to the nth degree, Jack saw through my sour mind immediately. Before I could even get it out that I felt inadequate he stood right up and said: "listen here! there is no place in poetry for self pity. You are not the lonely 9 year old standing in the corner of the playground by herself. Get in the game, girl, get IN the damn game." He proceeded to tell me what to do in my writing practice to get where I wanted to go, to allow myself to write some shitty poems without deciding my whole life as a poet was hit... and to celebrate that I knew the difference between shit and fertilizer.

Well, wow. Just W-O-W. From that point on I stopped thinking of poetry as some kind of score sheet. I stopped doubting myself. I started KNOWING that I belong in this life. Every poem I write has Jack in the margins because I hear his voice in my editing space. I ask myself the questions about the poems he would ask. I press on and write even in the midst of chaos, maybe even loving the clarity in chaos.

So I am thankful (really more than thankful) to have had this influence. No, to HAVE this influence still. It's not just that my MFA program was the best time of heightened writing influence (it was), but of all the advisors, only Jack was there for me in ways that made my writing a grown-up thing, a serious thing that will be my life for the rest of my life.

Just now you are thinking that I have made Jack into some kind of saint... we tend to do this to the dead... but I have no such illusions about him. He was certainly not saintly in any way. But his poetry and his mentoring DID something. Maybe he was like a can opener, wrenching the lid off and spilling the contents of the can onto the table. It was no walk in the park to study with him by any means. He was blunt and not at all "soothing" and if a poem didn't cut it, he said so in the most brusque ways sometimes. But always visible behind that sharp edge was love of poetry and other poets. It seeped out from behind the eyes. Ah, Jack, you didn't fool me. And fortunately, I could NOT fool you.

It has been said (somewhat wisely I think) that we learn to write poetry not from teachers but from poems. I agree with this of course, but there are a few "teachers" who break this rule. Jack, little ole rule breaker, breaks this. I have learned from him, and I continue to learn from his poems.

So, Jack... you continue to do the work you love... poetry and teaching poetry. Way to go to have managed that in the afterlife.