ahhhhhhh, breathing day

Well, today is Sunday and I have nowhere I am SUPPOSED to be today. I will take a few long deep breaths and enjoy the final day of my daughter's visit. Off to church together and then out to breakfast then maybe a drive to Lucia Beach or to Lincolnville Beach.

I do want to take a moment to thank everyone who had fingers crossed for me in the Maine Literary Awards. Even though I did not win, I feel like a winning poet. Really, anytime you can go to a library or bookstore and see your own book on the shelves, it is a win. And anytime you are invited to read your poems and get to chat with people who want to HEAR your poems, it is a win. Yesterday afternoon I read at the Personal Book Shop along with two poet friends, Gayle Portnow and Wendy Rapaport. The owner of the shop provided tea (iced) and lovely goodies with fruit and chocolate and we sat in comfy chairs. The people who came were very good about asking questions and making comments and were so ENGAGED in hearing our poems. It was great.

So now a bit of a breather. But only a BIT... coming up are some very interesting events for me. I am in the final stages of preparing for a weekend workshop at Ripples Inn in Rockland which takes place NEXT weekend. We have a meet and greet on Friday evening and the workshop on Saturday, with a wrap-up on Sunday morning. Sandi, the owner of the B & B is a gem, a very enthusiastic person who came up with the idea that her guests might enjoy having something planned for them other than just soaking up the scenery (not that doing that is a bad thing of course). She came up with Express Yourself, a series of artsy-crafsty weekends. I am weekend #1. What I have planned for her guests (and others who signed up for the workshop) is a look at how one can use the natural or contrived (urban) landscape as material for writing. In other words, WRITE WHERE YOU ARE. I am looking forward to this event very much.

Before the writing weekend, there is one other event on my calendar. I am driving to Portland on Tuesday (19th) and meeting 2 other Native American writer-friends for lunch and an interview with Prof. Siobhan Senier of the University of NH. Siobhan is interviewing the three of us for a project she is doing on NA women and writing. I look forward to seeing these three amazing women and having a nice lunch at DeMillo's (SP?) on the wharf. It will be a refreshing time and invigorating. What will be especially good for me is that our chatter will have a native flavor and focus. I find it hard sometimes that non-native writers do not "get" the cultural tone, references, etc. in my writing. I often have to explain myself in terms of some references and certainly in the way my mind works. (really, can anyone understand my mind workings? maybe not...  LOL)

I know in advance, however, that Cheryl and Alice do "get it" and that feels so good. Siobhan gets us too and understands our culture. What is even better than just being three native women is that we are all Wabanki women (Alice is Miq'mac and Cheryl and I are both Abenaki) and our cultural base is one in common tribally. I can hardly wait. I've known these woman a long time, though I have not met Alice in person. I consider Cher a sister. One of these blog days I will talk a bit more about that.

So, time to get out of my jammies and get my daughter moving (ahh, that feels a bit like the old days getting her up for school! ha ha). It's a beautiful day here in Rockland and most of the Blues Fest folks are still abed after a lively pub crawl last night. So if we want a quiet breakfast (the Brass Compass, where else?) we need to get downtown.

More poetry tomorrow, I promise.  Again, thanks to all of you who were rooting for me in the Maine Literary Awards. I am honored that you rooted!

Pick me! Pick me! How I choose poems

I admit it: I am tired. I mean I am REALLY tired. This is a very busy time in my writing life, with a new web page just up (www.carolbachofner.com) and several reading/speaking/book signing events and an upcoming weekend workshop to teach. But I have to say this is a very good kind of tired. It is wonderful when there is so much to do in one's writing life! So today is event #3 in 3 days. I am reading and signing books with my two good friends, Gayle Portnow and Wendy Rapaport. The Personal Book Shop & Gallery in Thomaston, Maine (one town away) is having a tea and poetry event for us at 1 PM. This is a great thing, sounds relaxing and sweet. I look forward to this particularly as it is local (last two events were in Portland and S. Portland, thus a night in a hotel...thanks Marriott at Sable Oaks for a great stay!).

But every event requires preparation. Oh I could "wing it" and just pick the poems as I do the reading. NOT a good idea. I care more for my listeners than that. So this morning, after a walk and breakfast and a shower, I will sit with my books and new poems and pick out what will get read this afternoon. I know right away that Hiding Your Money will be one of the poems along with There's Something Not Quite Right at Crayola and Red, A Modern Tale. These poems are light-hearted and get lots of chuckles when I read them. I will also read Allow the Year, which opens my new book and which is scheduled for publication in Bangor Metro. I will also read a poem each from Gayle's and Wendy's books. We did this read eachother's poems thing at the book launch earlier this summer and find we love the extra zip it gives to readings. But there is plenty of time to read and I need a few more poems.

Pick me! Pick me! the poems beg. All of them want to be heard. So, how do I choose?

I use a very UNscientific method: I begin by deciding I will read 2 poems from each of my three books. OK... which ones? I think of what the likely audience will be: kids? no kids? veterans? grammas and grandpas? other writers? family? It is NOT good to read adult-oriented material if you have kids present, not good at all. (I have been to readings where this was the case and it made me nervous, felt kinda creepey actually) So I choose poems that would be okay for a mixed audience, tucking away a couple "mature" poems to read if there are no kids in the room. I also have a couple kid poems: Peas: a sonnet is a good one for that.

My next step is to pick poems that might be appealing on a regional basis. I know I can capture the attention of a Maine audience by reading The Artist Has Laid Down His Brush and is Done, an Andrew Wyeth elegy. I can read water and sky and tree and yard poems most everywhere. So, I guess I just get to the point where I am picking poems I had fun writing, or poems that caused me to grow as a poet. Today I might read some of the psalm poems in my forthcoming collection: Psalms From the Commons, Invocations For Everyday Life (expected publication in early 2012) I will not read winter poems today. I will not read my poem comparing my ex to my hubby. I will not read edgy poems about my mother. I will not read poems that make people cry... oh maybe one. I may read a couple poems I wrote out on the Isles of Shoals, and definitely will read one from there that I wrote for my husband (I try to include this one at every reading now). Polaris is a favorite of mine because of how I FELT when it was finished and how I can feel that exact same thing when I read it.

Dear readers, I just love reading to you. I want to read you into a personal space where the world makes a little more sense, feels a little safer and softer. I want to inspire you and cause you to think. So, I'd better go make eggs and toast and take my walk and get to the picking.

Dear poems, I'm getting to you shortly. Line up nicely and don't push or shove.

The Sound of a Wild Poet Writing

7/14/11  1130 PM

Back from the 2011 Maine Literary Awards event and now in the Marriott (S Portland) relaxing until tomorrow's author event at Borders. I am tired, but happy. No, I did not win in the category wherein I was named a finalist. I tell myself I came in second, but maybe it was Martin and I was third. No  matter. We are all winners when there are events like this one and organizations like Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Were there surprises or disappointments tonight? Yes. I really wanted Dawn Potter (Harry's American sister? LOL) to win for her poetry book, How the Crimes Happened. I wanted Elizabeth Tova Bailey to win for her memoir, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. I love these two books and admire the authors. Selfishly I wanted to meet Elizabeth, who actually did not attend (sniff sniff).

But the feeling in the room was wonderful, the words of Robert Chute wonderfully inspiring. What did I take away from the event? Here it is: write. No matter what else there is to do, just write.

I am often asked what it is like to find something that seems to work, in other words, if I am "in the zone" or in some altered state of cognition or emotion. I can only describe the feeling as slightly wild. I get a little buzz in my head, sometimes I feel a little heat at my core. It is never, I repeat: it is NEVER a place of calm, never serene. I get the same feeling when I am reading something wonderful, something amazing. So, when the wild, that crazy-tingle feeling comes over me as I write, it is a clue for me that I must be doing something right. I might be in the magic space where I am not me anymore, the place where the words take over, where the poem tells ME what it wants.

The funny thing about that is that the poem often wants something other than what was on MY mind when I started writing it. I LOVE when that happens! I love the feeling of having to jump out of the way or duck when something surprising shows itself.

So what IS the sound of a wild poet writing? It's something like YEE-HA!

Books Have Changed Me

I read. No, I mean I REALLY read. I learned to read at age three by sitting on my father's lap while he read "the funny papers" to me. Prince Valiant and Archie were my favorites (I now get Ballard Street daily via computer). But as satisfying as it was to read the funnies on my own, it was actual books that made a difference for me. I got my own library card when I was in grammar school and was able to walk to the library on my own to check out books by the time I was in 4th grade. I took out the maximum number of books each time (3) and never paid a fine for an overdue book except for once when I kept Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl a week longer at 10 cents a day fine because I couldn't bear to part with it (I just got a copy recently as my copy had been loaned out never to return. (I'm not mad at that person, I understand really I do).

Once I had a library card, I was on my way to a life of reading (and then writing) that has held me up in times of great travail and underscored the times of great happiness. Reading is one very large brick in the foundation of who I am. I have hundreds of books and I generally do not read them only once (so they stay). I admit to judging people a little when I go to a house and see or don't see books. (sorry, it just crosses my mind that they are either happy readers or somehow disadvantaged in that area... I don't stop LIKING a person for lack of books, just feel sorry for them a little).

Now I have an e-reader. I have devised a way of combining technology with low-tech that works for me. Most fiction is purchased on my Kindle for Mac (iPad). It simply saves shelf space and is portable in ways the actual books are not. I travel a fair amount and lugging a ton of books around can be daunting to say the least. But my poetry books have to live in my house with me. I have some poetry on my iPad (usually duplicates or really ancient works) so I am never far from my poetry. But generally fiction = iPad and poetry = bookshelves. Nonfiction can go either way.

Books have changed me from a shy girl to a confident woman. Left on my own, I might never have left Maine. I had a comfortable life here when I was growing up, enjoyed my family and my surroundings, had some excellent close friends. But reading made me want to see more, do more. I wanted to be as smart as the people I found in faraway places, I wanted to have adventures and see the world outside of my small Leave-It-To-Beaver life.

When I was in high school I read foreign books, including Camus' L'Etranger (The Stranger) IN FRENCH, along with loads of historical fiction about the British monarchy. In earlier years I read Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl and Heidi and Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. All of these books made me want to travel beyond my hometown and my state.

I should say here that not only did I read, but I was read to ALOUD by wonderful teachers from 3rd grade through high school. My fondest memories are of Mrs. Emery, Mr. Libby, Mr. Harrison, and Mrs. Parsons reading to our class. There was another teacher whose name I cannot quite recall but whose beautiful cashmere skirt and sweater sets I will never forget along with her 4" heels and her beautiful diamond ring. Her voice was like liquid chocolate. I listened raptly and got lost in the world of The Raven by Poe as she was reading it to us, perched on the edge of her desk. Mr. Libby was my first man teacher and he read Little Britches (Ralph Moody) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to us. He had a low, rumbling voice and a chuckle that was infectious when he'd get to something funny. By the way, it never occurred to me that there was "boy literature" and "girl literature," just wonderful stories. Mrs Parsons read to us from a serialized story by Daphne Du Maurier, The Glass Blowers. We'd get it as the story came out week by week in either Red Book or Ladies Home Journal until the whole thing was finished. We looked forward to each installment. She also read aloud from Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice) and read poetry to us. Mr Harrison read to us from our country's documents and from people like Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln. Mrs. Emery read to us from Little Women and House of the Seven Gables.

See how darned lucky I was? What a childhood/girlhood I had in books. Of course I was reading on my own too, outside of school. In grammar school I read the Judy Bolton mysteries. I was never a Nancy Drew girl for some reason, maybe because everyone else was reading her. I recently bid on and won a 10 book set of Judy Boltons and am re-reading them. They are as good as I remember.

By the time I had children of my own, reading had become a habit. I don't ever remember thinking that books were a waste of time or money. My first husband was VERY critical of my having books in the house, thought they were wasteful purchases. Why not just get books from the library? We fought about this. We fought bitterly about this. When we met in college, he bragged about his "reading skills," saying he only read the first line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael") and yet understood the whole novel. Bah! I thought that was awfully arrogant (should have been a clue!). I later discovered he faked a lot of things and bragged about doing so. Aaaargh!

But not for me. I savored every page, every dialogue, every line of every poem. It was like breath for me. In 1968, I was living in Burlington, Vermont (college interuptus) and found the book that would propel me into a lifetime of writing poetry. McAuliffe's on Church Street (now gone, sadly) was a magical place of fine paper and writing instruments and books (upstairs). I was browsing by my usual method of running my eyes and my fingers over the spines of books. A little yellow binding caught my eye and there it was: The Outermost House by Henry Beston. The cover was pretty, a drawing of a dunes cabin, a window out onto a beach. I forked over the $1.45 and headed home to my apartment to read. OH MY! As I read though the whole night, I became intrigued with the way Beston wove a true story with poetical language and Latin words and details of his life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. He had built his dune cabin himself (the fo'castle) and lived an entire year there through every kind of weather, writing and observing nature and finding out about his own nature as a human being. I cannot say for sure how many copies of this book I have bought and given away over the years. Dozens. I scour used bookstores for them. I have paid as much as $10 for a copy. Mostly they are in the $3 range. No matter. And I have my original copy which has gone everywhere with me since 1968. I describe this book as my all-time favorite. No kidding, it changed me from a wanna-be writer into a writer. I wanted to SAY things and say them well and beautifully. I wanted my words to matter to other people. I noticed how he used multiple approaches to his storytelling, and how his words stirred my heart — sappy sentiment, but true. It was devastating to me to find out that his shack washed away in a big storm decades ago. I wanted to go there, sit on the dunes nearby, and write something wonderful. I wanted to breathe in the same air he breathed, to be there at night and see the swinging flash of the Naussett Light. Sigh. But part of the beauty of writing and reading is that one can do those things anyway, by reading and re-reading. By being open to allow the words to enter.

Happily my reading habit has infused my family as well. My eldest daughter read Beowulf aloud to her son starting at age 6 or so. He later read Grendel on his own. My granddaughter Alyssa has a book in hand most of the time. (her dad once "laid down the law" that there was to be no "nose in a book at the dinner table" and she rebelled. I'm with her on this one of course). My grandson Justin was read to by me at age two, the same book over and over (God Made the Puppies) until he could recite it with sound effects as I read it to him. I recently found a copy of that book and sent it to him (he is 21) and he was THRILLED, noticing a missing page and reciting it to me over the phone! My grandson Christopher loved when I'd read Muskrat Will Be Swimming as he'd take his morning bath before going off to kindergarten. He has his own library card here which he uses when he visits us from college. My daughter Erin and her husband read to their two kids and there were always stacks of library books by the comfy chair for them to enjoy. Many trips to the library for those kids. We send books to people in our family when we find things that might be of interest. We just sent daughter Gina two of Kate Braestrup's books for example, and I am sending grandson Alex a book on clouds.  My legacy: a life of books. I couldn't be happier than to leave this to my family.

So, get yourself a copy of the book you loved the most when you were younger. Find copies of your kids' old favs, get them, send them. Discover what huge adventures you can still have by reading and reading and reading. Today I will return to The Outermost House. It's a great place to be.

Baseball and Poetry

Well, let me just say that it is glorious to be living in New England where one can watch baseball nearly every day or night all summer long. Yesterday afternoon my husband said something like "why don't we watch a movie tonight?" and I gave him my one word answer: BASEBALL. Really, honey? A movie when we can watch a hockey game fight break out in Fenway? Good sport that he is, we watched the game. Hubby retired in the 5th inning, sent himself to the showers. I on the other hand stuck it out until the after-game wrap was over. It's like this for me since moving back to Maine in 2006. I love the repartee between Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy, the tarp rolled out on the field during rain delays, the crack of the bat, seeing the Yankees lose in a spectacular fashion, seeing Jacoby Ellsbury's cuteness, watching Papelbon give the batter "the face" when he's set to pitch, the opposing fans fleeing the stands to avoid humiliation, our fans staying until whatever o'clock even if we're not winning, and Big Papi jacking one over the Monster. It just doesn't get any better than this (except for 2 WS wins in my lifetime!)

So how does baseball (btw, the actual word baseball for me always means RED SOX baseball) connect to poetry? You have to ask? It is nuance, tension, some interesting symbols and images, a few colorful words in various meters, and an overall setting where, due to long delays and hitless innings, one can take out a favorite book of poems and READ, or one can whip out a notebook and WRITE. Now now, lest you start thinking I am mocking baseball... I love the game. I would rather watch baseball than anything else on TV. Last night's game was a really exciting one and fulfilled its basic promise to fans everywhere: a fantastic single inning (8 runs in the first) followed by some rain (we did not roll out the tarps), a minor but scary pitcher injury (Beckett ... minor hyper-extension of left knee), and a full-on bench-clearing, bullpen-clearing brawl (8th inning), and a win over the O's 10-3. I did read poetry during the game (innings 5-8) and I did take notes for a new poem (inning 7... hey! its called the 7th inning stretch for crying out loud!).

Let's talk about "the fight." Big Papi gets thrown AT by pitcher Gregg (big snarl, spit-filled sneer to him). Not once but twice did the lug try to take Ortiz out at the gut, but then to add insult to injury he smart-mouthed him when he hit a fly ball that was obviously an out, telling him to run to first insinuating Papi was too lazy to do so... I take umbrage with that but a whole other story....

WELL, as soon as Gregg flings the words at BP, the ump throws the "yer outa da game" signal at Gregg, who doesn't pay attention to it at all, and instead throws a punch at BP who has headed to the mound for a "nice little chat" on etiquette (oh yeah sure! LOL). BP returns the punch and it's on! Both benches, both bullpens empty onto the infield and start the melée in fine fashion. It was a lot like watching hockey (another fav!). Of course we don't quite notice that the guy on 3rd who is waiting to be hit in for a score, also joins in the fray by leaving 3rd. Ha! New idea here.... he "abandoned" 3rd base and is now considered out. We find out about this in the ensuing minutes when the umps get together to decide who is ejected and when the game might resume. Oh dear. Ejected are the pitcher, Gregg (jerk) and BP who were duking it out. Also ejected are Johnson, a relief pitcher from the Orioles, and Saltalamacchia from our bullpen. Salty later said he has no idea why he was picked to eject as "I ran out of the bullpen, ran back to the bullpen, and then I got bounced." Guess the umps needed a couple of sacrificial ousters here. Whatever. The fact of the base runner's being out is announced and we head to the 9th, me on my feet by now waiting for the next fight or some kind of retribution from our guys. Calmly, we get the inning done and everyone goes home. Whew! So I go to bed with a satisfied grin on my face and wake up the hubby to share. He utters an "Oh, wow" and rolls over.

Isn't this just pure poetry? We play these guys again today... stay tuned.

Sleep Your Way to New Poems

It's a funny thing about taking naps and dreaming... one can get ideas for poems. I know many poets who find inspiration in their dreams for poems they get up and write later (or at least they get up and make notes for writing poems later). This happens to me occasionally.

I admit I have a really vivid dream life. I've often wondered if this is a gift of gratitude by the "gods of night" for honoring the fine art of sleeping. Ha, ha! I do love a good long nap, that is for sure. I do not really take those little power naps others seem so adept at taking. When I go down for a nap it is for two hours at a minimum. I wake up groggy if the nap is too short. Faced with the comment about "wasting the day" or "how many years of your life have you slept?" I am quick to say that I am working while sleeping. True. The "stuff of my dreams" is poetry. No, I do not dream poems. But what I do dream is material or ideas, narrative impulses, characters, settings. I dream in color, in detail. I REMEMBER my dreams. I incorporate the material from my dreams into poems. How lucky I am to have this gift of dreaming.

So try keeping a journal next to your bed to record the last dream you have just prior to waking. I don't do this myself as I am so used to the process that I don't need to write anything down to jog my recall. But if you are NEW at mining dream life for poetry, go ahead with the dream notebook. And yes, we ALL dream. Maybe you have to train yourself to recall your dreams, but they are there. So, if you keep a journal of dreams, you might begin to notice a trend of topic, setting, etc. This is very helpful when you sit down to write and think you have nothing about which to write. There, right next to your bed is your material!

Well, time for my nap. See you tomorrow.

Haiku, a grumble and then growth

I used to avoid haiku. Really, I avoided it like some kind of bacterium I didn't want to infect me. Frankly these little three-liners got on my last nerve. Too sappy was my usual comment. They seemed like little emotional bundles I'd rather not read.

I actually went to a haiku workshop of sorts five years ago, given by a man who was supposedly "the" haiku guy in the US, Bob Somebody-or-Other. I bought his book (as one ought to do at a writing event) and listened to his talk about what makes a good haiku. For me it was like listening to someone tell what makes a good chickpea salad (don't get me started on that one!). I came away from the experience convinced that haiku were best left to the Japanese unless Western writers were willing to commit to the NATURE and INTENT of the form. I read and then gave away (donated) Bob's book. I did not want to give it space on my bookshelves.

"Well, WOW," you must be thinking, "How negative!" Guilty as charged. I was indeed negative about this poetic form. I vowed not to write any, keeping my writing time to more "important" kinds of poems. Well, as is the case with any extreme position, I needed to get a grip and figure out what about the haiku might work for me, whether I might indeed come to appreciate (although maybe not actually embrace) these little poems. I needed a bit of an attitude adjustment. That's when (by FATE's ironic turn) I found and bought a book of Japanese death poetry. I bought it because I was fascinated and intrigued, not by the haiku therein, but by the notion that people actually took the time and had the impetus to write a poem as life was slipping away. By the way, this is always a good condition (fascination/ intrigue) for me to be in for buying books that turn out to be gems. I wanted to know more about writing death poems. The trade-off: haiku. It was there and it was good and I needed to revisit my previously dug-in position.

As a result of reading the book, I have a new respect for haiku. I enjoy it in its pure (read pure as Eastern) forms. However I still have a bit of a grumble. My "point of irk," if you can call it that is that many English speakers/writers do not GET the point of a haiku: to make comments on human condition through observance of nature, and to show an element of surprise connection or a volta of sorts in the third line. What I see mostly in English language haiku is simply a thought or observation cut into the 5-7-5 syllable format of three lines. This was not the intent of the form in ancient times. By the way, written in English, it is written in 3 lines, whereas in Japanese it may be a single line. And there are other elements of haiku that are often ignored or changed by Western writers:

• Rather than counting syllables, the Japanese haiku counts sounds. 
• Haiku requires a natural setting. It is designed to suggest a single season, however the poet makes that happen. It could be done in a direct manner, using a symbolic word for the season such as ice for winter, blossom or plum or bamboo for spring.
• Haiku should also have a bridge in the final line or a somewhat vaguely linked thought, a leap if you will that makes the reader think beyond the written words or to consider an outcome or result that is beyond the poem itself. This may seem disconnected or disparate, but if done well, it is far from that.

Here are a couple of haiku (yes the same in plural as in singular) that show the bridge thought:

The blossom falls soft,

drifts down to her waiting hand.

Doves drop from the trees.

In this poem (haiku) we see a natural setting wherein the woman or girl is in the springtime of her life (blossom) but that is about to change (falls, waiting hand). In line three, the change is shown and the hint is that this change may not be positive.  We see the loss implied in line 3. It leads the reader to consider that doves drop, They do not fly but drop. Her spring (her virginity) is dead, her life as a maiden (young girl) is over. Dropping is a sign of ending, while drifting is a sign of leisure and languor. The dove is a symbol of her once peaceful life and uncomplicated existence. Trees are a symbol of long life. Girlhood is brief, agedness is long.

The cherry opens,

showing its womb filled with seed.

Laughter of children.

This is clearly a birth/motherhood poem. Cherries are symbols of fecundity, speak of a blooming/fruiting season. The opening of the cherry exposing its contents (the seed) speaks to the process of birth, something that is needed to be able to bring the seed to fruition. The bridge is a positive one: after this rending of the womb, there are the pleasures of children and their easy play.

OK... so now let's talk about what YOU think of as haiku... I'm waiting to hear from you.

Symbols

The Greek word symbolon meant something "put together." This was originally a coin or potsherd that was broken into 2 parts and given each to the parties of a legal contract or agreement. The significance was that there was something to come later, some kind of promise that would be fulfilled. In other words, there was a missing element needed to finish the deal, to complete the meaning. The potsherd was a symbol of that promise. It was also, literally a broken coin.

This is true of symbols in poetry (and in other kinds of writing). There are natural symbols and contrived symbols. Natural symbols are those we take on universally, such as the heart for love, the apple or rose for beauty, the dove or olive branch for peace. A danger in poetry writing is to make these natural symbols clichés. In using them as direct symbols, we risk this: I hand him the olive branch is one of these. What if the line were written instead showing a single olive on a plate, lying on its leaf next to a handwritten note? What if the line never was a direct reference to the olive branch at all? Can the reader get there, make the leap to a peace offering? The astute reader, one well-versed in symbolism, will do so with ease, or at least after reading IN CONTEXT. However, there is risk in writing and in reading when symbols are over-thought, over-used, or just plain exploited for meaning. Sometimes an olive is only that, a green fruit on a plate. It may be mere window dressing to the poem, lending texture to a line, setting a scene richly. Or it may be a symbol of loneliness or a symbol of peace-offering.

Finding symbols where there are none can lead to great distortion of reality in the poem. A symbol that needs explaining is a sick symbol, an apology for itself. We don't want to fill our poems with those. What makes symbols so wonderful is the surprise of connections. Making one thing stand for another can accentuate or actuate meaning. Poets who work in symbols are careful of the images they employ, prefer oblique connections of images to any abstraction. It is also true that being too overt, lacking in symbol, can flatten out a poem or make it "too much what it is," that is totally without subtlety or layers. A wise poetry professor told me that for every abstraction in a written piece, there need to be at least two concrete images. In other words, don't write the word love, write about the things that show love is present. He scoffed at a "Christmas poem" I'd written, saying it risked sappiness by being so overt and "Christmassy." He suggested I write the same poem, using an image that would lead the reader TO Christmas, rather than being so obvious. I needed a symbol, something subtle in the poem that would do this. I chose to use the word amaryllis to describe the color of the skater's cheeks. It is common knowledge when the amaryllis blooms. I had my symbol, my image, my half a potsherd. My readers could make the connection for themselves and place the poem at Christmastime.

Images are real, are the "things of the world." As poets and readers of poetry, we take a risk in that images can be taken at face value and not be seen as symbols when they might indeed be symbols. Sometimes they are just what they are: strong images on their own, not symbolic of something deeper. The poet ought to make the difference clear in her/his own mind before sending the poem out into the world. Images that are indeed symbols carry on their backs far more than their physical references. If a poem is seemingly a description of an object or objects, and yet transcends its physical self, we call it a Dinggedichte, a thing-poem. The details of such poems may be vivid, realistic, grounded, but HINT at something more, stand for something more. Consider the following: A poem describes a room devoid of people, but rich with details of images such as an empty chair, a table with a glass or cup turned down, a broken pencil, a lone feather, a curtain blowing at an open window, peeling wallpaper. Is this mere description of place and quietude or a dinggedichte of loss? A bitten yellow pear (lipstick visible on the skin around the bite) on a highly polished table, next to a wedding ring... still life or dinggedichte? It's intriguing to peel back the layers of poems to see what might be lurking there.

The extension of symbolism is metaphor, a forest of symbols (Beaudelaire) that serve together to make a larger portrait, or perhaps in some cases oblique meaning. And where does symbolism give way to allegory? We all know that allegory is a narrative in which characters and events stand for ideas and/or actions on another level. One thing happening may be standing for another deeper truth or event. Animal Farm is a good example of an allegory, where out of control, yet controlling, behavior of animals stands for the same kind of societal behavior of humans, in this case totalitarian society.  Poets are not excluded from narrative or allegory. Indeed, narrative poetry is making a comeback in a big way. I for one am happy about this. People are interested in connecting themselves with the stories and experiences of others. We all love a well-told story. Poets tell these too, perhaps more succinctly, in fewer words.

I leave you today with a poem, written a few years ago when I was thinking about how our words either support others, or are perhaps insensitive to others. Have a look. Get back to me.


See if you can determine the symbolic from the overt in the following poem (HINT: there may be both working here). Is this an allegory?

After Your Divorce

I asked you to read my poems

I wrote table and forced you out

into the woods to choose a tree,

maple, oak, or maybe an exotic teak.

You had to decide the shape too,

round or rectangular or oval. I wrote 

a cobalt bowl filled with orange day lilies 

and a white coffee mug, rim smudged 

with Dior’s Infra Rose. I might have 

written an apple on an ivory table runner 

from Brazil, but I wrote a half-eaten 

nectarine set on a white paper towel the way 

she did to keep from messing up a plate 

for just one item. I knew about your divorce

and yet I wrote table, leaving so much 

for you to do. I should have written door.

My Two Dylans

I keep pictures of Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas on the bookcase in my office (along with a collection of antique inkwells and some other interesting little items). I keep the Dylans at hand to remind me about what it is that makes me keep writing. For me, these two Dylans represent what is good in poetry: image and music, heart and gut. I began my relationship with these two brilliant writers when I was in high school, reciting Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and listening to A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. Even now, when I get into a tough spot with my writing, I can put Bob Dylan on the iPod or computer (Nowadays I listen to Rainy Day Women or The Man in the Long Black Coat) and haul out my collection of Dylan Thomas and get back on course. I offer you here the poem I wrote about these two influences on my poetry:

My Dylans

       after Bob and Thomas

I’ve been ten thousand miles too,

hell and back in your hard rain,

been screaming into the good night 

a few times and wrote it down like you

just to keep from throwing it all away.

My hands were blazing, my face to the hard 

light of my own rainy days, smoking 

late but freed still from an obscure childhood.

Been wounded, been down the road

a few times and wrote it down. I needed to

look at your tweed face, your hair 

billowed like some fuckin’ angel. Look at me

here with a hard rain fallin’ on me, few

colors shining, ten thousand silver moments ringing. 

You knew the grave before it opened to you.

Times change, time stays toxic. Too full 

of blood to taste the way out, too much dust

to see where I’m going. Formed of sand, I too

will trickle away, one grain at a time, and change 

is the curse that’s been cast; first let me be last. 

Dylan Thomas wrote only 6 poems in the final 6 years of his life. He had done what poets everywhere do: taken on other work to support himself and his family. He had gone to war as a tail-gunner and had taken on the job of writing for the BBC. His poetry was never far from his mind, but he lived life outside of that mind too. Of course POETRY is the lifeblood of Wales. I understand that recitation of poetry is common as fish and chips. One of these days I will do a poetry residency somewhere in Wales and immerse myself in the sensibilities of Thomas' countrymen and their love for poetry. It's on my bucket list, close to the top.

Thomas once said that his poems were written "for the love of man and in praise of God." He was a man clearly in love with language, with all its crudities and confessions. His imagery shines with freshness and vivid light. His poems are a celebration of the divine purpose he saw in human and natural processes. He took on the cycle of birth and flowering, death and dying, love and brutality. He was pastoral in a sense, celebrating the sea, the fields and hills and towns of his country. He often (in later poems) tried to highlight a childlike innocence of the the world. One of my favorite pieces of his is A Child's Christmas in Wales, which I read every Yule.

He was fiercely dedicated to his art, making over 200 versions of Fern Hill before being satisfied with it. His earliest poems are somewhat mysterious in sense, but simple and straightforward in form as contrasted to later poems which are complex in sound and simple in sense. What I find very interesting is that he felt a need to create for himself an image, a public persona. He called this image "instant Dylan" and felt that it gave him mystery or attraction, that of the hard-drinking messed-up poet. It is said that his image became who he was at the end. In fact that image prevails to this day in the notion that he drank himself to death. It may well have been that he suffered from brain encephalopathy. But it is more intriguing to have the death of instant Dylan that the death of a man with a brain malfunction.


I am also interested in his ideas of poetry as a way to comment on the human condition. He was influenced by Freud and saw the inner mind as a place from whence poetry comes to heal or reveal. He stated: Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitable narrative, movement from an over-clothed blindness to a naked vision... Poetry must drag further into the clear nakedness of light more even of the hidden causes than Freud could realize.  Certainly his poetry is that: dragging into clear nakedness of which he spoke. His images and rhythms are clearly explorative of the inner struggles of the human dilemma and the aftertaste is at once sweet and acrid. In Do Not Go Gentle... we see his admonition to his own father to stay the course and not give up. He is didactic while being the loving son. Rage, rage against the dying of the light is how I want to exist as a poet. When I am up late working on a poem, that line runs through my head. It is okay to keep on when others sleep. Also the line says what I feel in terms of ever giving up on poetry: I want to keep writing until the pen falls from my hand. I never want anyone to say "she only wrote ____ poems in the last ____ years of her life."


And what of my other Dylan: Bob Dylan? He is as big an influence on my writing as Dylan Thomas because they are so much alike in what their words do. Of course Bob Dylan is more of a political animal than Dylan Thomas. His lyrics not only comment on the human condition, the psyche, but also on the political and social condition. He is unafraid to make blunt observation and to tinge his words with a sultry and acerbic flavor. He will take on topics others mock or avoid. He will lace tender stories with irony and salt any wound. I listen to his music frequently. It takes me into an honesty and bluntness that every poet ought to seek. I feel empowered to say what needs saying and to say it plainly, with images that cut to the chase. Like Thomas, Bob Dylan is somewhat a persona of his own making. His lyrics and the time frame in which he came to the public eye lead us to see him through the lens of substance abuse. His "everybody must get stoned" lyric (Rainy Day Women 12 and 35) perpetuates this. However, there is so much more substance to Dylan than that. I find his lyrics to be rather timeless (and isn't that what we want our poems to be?). They are a commentary on our nature, flawed yet sympathetic. I offer you here the lyrics to Man in the Long Black Coat. You'll see what I mean:


Crickets are chirpin' the water is high
There's a soft cotton dress on the line hangin' dry
Window wide open African trees
Bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze
Not a word of goodbye not even a note
She gone with the man in the long black coat.

Somebody seen him hangin' around
As the old dance hall on the outskirts of town
He looked into her eyes when she stopped him to ask
If he wanted to dance he had a face like a mask
Somebody said from the bible he'd quote
There was dust on the man in the long black coat.

Preacher was talking there's a sermon he gave
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it's you who must keep it satisfied
It ain't easy to swallow it sticks in the throat
She gave her heart to the man in the long black coat.

There are no mistakes in life some people say
It is true sometimes you can see it that way
But people don't live or die people just float
She went with the man in the long black coat.

There's smoke on the water it's been there since June
Tree trunks unprooted beneath the high crescent moon
Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force
Somebody is out there beating on a dead horse
She never said nothing there was nothing she wrote
She gone with the man in the long black coat.



I find especially poignant the first three lines of the penultimate stanza. I see these words as a distillation of the "Dylan attitude" as I call it. In this very simple lyric about a woman who's had enough, he gets to the meat of the human condition.  When he says, Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force, he is honoring the forces of nature that exist in us all, whether we actuate the connections or not. When I listen to Dylan sing this in his scratchy voice, I get goosebumps. I can see clearly the harsh emotional and physical landscape and the dress on the line left behind without so much as a good-bye note. What was she leaving that she bolted like that? I can imagine and I can feel the leaving in my gut. This lyric definitely influenced my poem of 3 years ago, written in response to Girl in a Punt (Winslow Homer). I looked at the painting on display in the Farnsworth Art Museum here in Rockland and the words to this song began playing in my head. Don't you just love when that happens, when visual and auditory art forms get together to feed poetry? At any rate, I can trace the roots of that poem backwards from Homer's painting to Dylan's lyrics and voice. It is a gift. I am blessed by it. I cannot think of my world of poetry without both my Dylans.

Here is the poem I wrote fed by Homer and Dylan:

There is some strange power

that brought her to the reedy shallows,

girl in a punt, slipping her left hand

into the cold water to release

her wedding ring, to watch it sink slowly

where a fish circles, gold

eye catching sight of the prize settling,

wavering as the girl herself, 

hand hesitant above. Retrieve or row?

I am so very thankful

for all his tender mercies. She feels the flutter

of the ribbon under her chin, breathes

in her former life, exhales it slowly.

Homer might well have painted her husband

tomorrow, slitting the belly of his fish,

finding her decision there in the entrails,

a divining in what he scoops into the barrel.

And she, sailed out with the tide, casts

her new life upon it.

There is some strange power

that lets us leave sometime.

after Girl in a Punt, Winslow Homer

Romantic Era and Emotion

Some scholars of the Romantic Period (British Romantics) argue that this era of poetry began with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Therein are contained Wordsworth's Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisitng the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798 and Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Others believe the period started with Burns' poems or Blake's Songs of Innocence or even Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. (GREAT reading by the way) These scholars also would include the following authors as part of the First Generation of Romantics: Charles Lamb, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.

However we might settle the argument, these authors were one and all worthy examples of Romanticism. This is perhaps my favorite class of poets and writers along with the Second Generation of Romantics, which includes Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818). Nearly everyone who studies the period agrees on one thing:  it ended with the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837. 

According to Wm Hazlitt, in Spirit of the Age, the period (The Wordsworth School) had its origins squarely in the French Revolution, a time of promise, a renewal of the human world — and consequently of letters. Indeed revolution served as a hallmark for the period. Rather than embracing politics however (which some writers did), the Romantics used Nature as their backdrop, embracing the ways Nature provided self-fulfillment and emotional satisfaction. This was indeed a new stance. It was a time for these poets when the powerful overflow of emotion provided by observing nature could be distilled and passed on to others after that emotion had cooled significantly enough to touch. The focus of the writing of the period was not on reason and intellect, but on the radical idea of the self and individual freedom and expression. Gone was the religious striving for perfection and in its place was the glorification of the imperfect. Head was replaced by heart. It was fine indeed to be a flawed human being, as nature was perfect. It was a worthy partnership indeed. It is of note here that one difference between the 1st and 2nd generation Romantics was that the 2nd generation writers believed the 1st generation was not revolutionary enough, did not go far enough in making it personal and natural. Still though there was a solid focus on being alive in the poems, being willing to show nature as a model for humanity. This is perhaps best exemplified in Lyrical Ballads. W & C liberated the poetic aesthetic from its previous stodginess in a revolutionary manner, declaring that poetry ought to show genuine human experience through personal emotion and imagination. They were certain that this true emotion was found in Nature. Herein we see the concept of the Sublime strengthened. After all, was it not in wild nature that the Sublime felt immediately and with a tug at the wildness within the human heart? Searching for the Sublime, the Romantics wrote about the supernatural, the marvelous, the exotic, and in the lives of simple rural people and the details of the everyday world. All of this was to reflect the breathtaking beauty of being alive, fully human. Of my favorite pieces in the period is Wordsworth's Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, his great autobiographical poem. It serves me well when I lose heart about my writing. I love to read it and get myself refocused. Another great poem of the period is Frost at Midnight, wherein C compares his sleeplessness with the calmness of his baby's sleeping, nature's steadiness with his own restlessness. If you recall my earlier post about leaping, you will see the influence of this poem. I love how C leaps from nature to himself and his baby, making solid the relationship between outside influences and the emotion he felt. No matter the religious overtures in the poem, it is a poem of nature and mankind (humankind for those of you whose gender references are offended by "man"). I am unabashedly in favor of the Romantics' stance on the connections between Nature and humanNature. Maybe it is, in part, my Abenaki lineage and intrinsic tribal thinking that has me squarely here in this period. Not sure. But be that as it may, I tend to think of myself in a yet reviving Romantic trend. My writing is more often than not a pairing of nature and human nature. I do not see myself as detached from nature, do see nature as a Great Teacher. I know (for myself) that lessons are to be learned, comfort is to be had, and humanity is to be saved by keeping in sync with Nature. We are of earth, we are of water, we are of air. No one will convince me opposite. My own writing is a testament to that thought school. My writing keeps company with the principles of Romanticism: that emotion, expressed by observing Nature, can be experienced, cooled to the touch, and expressed in such a manner as to share the experience of it with readers. I do mean share the emotion of the experience of emotion induced by Nature. It is not a copy of a copy here... it is the thing itself, revived on the page. When I write, I want to put the thing on the page for you, to embody the experience and the feeling of the experience. It is my goal, always. I can only strive to accomplish that. Sometimes I do.

If you have a few minutes to do so, I suggest reading some of the wonderful poems of the period. Start with Frost at Midnight or Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, or the Lyrical Ballads themselves. You can't go wrong there.

Patriotism

Have you noticed how many more flags have been flying in the ten years post 9/11 and wondered where they were before? I have been. At first it was a nice thing to see such nationalism. Then it got to be a little nauseating for me. There were flags everywhere, ON people, pasted onto various items where flags usually are not found. I grew suspicious and curious. I wondered about all the folks who had flag shirts, flags on the butts of their jeans, flag hats, flag pens, flag pocketbooks, flag golf balls.... the list goes on and on. I decided to investigate where and when the flag is legally flown or used as a symbol. I was fairly certain a flag coffee mug or a flag golf ball was not exactly kosher. Now I admit I have been bothered for a LONG TIME by the various "renditions" of the National Anthem, which is only supposed to be sung as written. But the flag thing was now bugging me too. (some of you are shaking your heads now and saying I ought to take meds and lighten up... really, I know you're out there thinking that!)

I digress. I needed to know about this uber-patriotism. I found the US Flag Code. (Who knew there was such a thing?) According to the Flag Code, all these "items" are not okay. The flag is supposed to be flown, not worn. Yes, a tasteful flag lapel pin is very okay. But grandma's flag sweatshirt is not. Here is a section of the Flag Code:

§ 8. Respect for Flag.

No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing. Regimental colors, state flags, and organization or institutional flags are to be dipped as a mark of honor.

(a) The flag should never be displayed with union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.

(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.

(c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping in front of the platform, and for a decoration in general.

(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.

(f) The flag should never be used as a covering for a ceiling.

(g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.

(h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.

(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.

(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.

(k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.

I fly a flag from my front porch. It flies free and unfettered. It represents something sacred to me and it is a honored part of my home. I take it in when it rains, keep it lit at night. I do not wear flags or drape them on things for Fourth of July. I stand with my hand over my heart when the flag passes by and respect what it stands for in our history. My father was willing to give his life for what it represents. When I saw his remains under the flag at Arlington Cemetery in 1993, when I heard taps played, when I recoiled from the guns saluting his service, I knew that the flag was way more than a symbol. 

On this 4th of July, I will write a poem about the flag. I will stop for a few moments and think about my father. I will give thanks for being able to live here where my opinion and my vote are as free as the flag on my porch.

Poetry and visual art

Today is sunny and cool, but will get hot later. I welcome the nice weather, feel the call to the beach. No beach for me today though. I am driving to Portland to take my eldest daughter to a bus/train to head off to University of VA where she will do some scholarly work at Monticello. She's wonderful at this history thing, a real treasure to her students. Kudos to her for the grants she is working under this summer (this is her second). Last summer she had a grant to retrace a portion of the Underground Railway. Amazing.

It is 7 AM here and my hubby just headed off to golf, daughter still snoozing. For me, poetry is on my mind. Poetry and visual art. Last night was Art Walk/Open Gallery Night in Rockland. I look forward to these Fridays, the chance to stroll Main Street and see what others do with their hands, how their own visions or demons create art. Looking at paintings, sculptures, etc gets my engine revving. I find myself making notes (thanks to iPhone I can do this without a notebook!) for poems I want to write. No exception last night. I've got a few ideas buzzing.

So what about ekphrastic writing? I'm surely not the first poet to mine ideas or become inspired via someone else's art. Look at W.H. Auden's famous poem, Musée des Beaux Arts, after Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In the poem, Auden comments on what he sees (literally) and adds his interpretation. He is stirred enough by the painting that he has something to share about it that goes beyond mere description. He begins the poem with a judgement call about art:

About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters: how well they understood/ its human position; how it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along


Opening the poem this way defies mere art critique and gets the reader in immediately. We are challenged to read onward to find out more. This is what poetry does anyway, but when it connects to visual art, we can make so much more of both the visual and the written. Auden's whole first stanza is the set piece to the second wherein he makes his point about the human position via Breughel's painting. He gets right to it: In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away. Then ends with the dramatic, but understated: ... the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.


Throughout the poem, Auden fills in details of the painting, without simply admitting "these are the things I see." He upholds his position of qualifying and quantifying suffering. He shows the details by using the various images in Breughel's painting in his poem as details to underscore his "take" on anonymous ignorance.

When I write to art (love doing this), I try to emulate Auden and others on whose strong poetic shoulders I stand. I do not want to simply describe, to give my readers the experience I had when encountering the art. I want to demonstrate the emotional impact the art had on me and put on paper the human connections that occurred to me at the gut level. My poem, The Artist Has Laid Down His Brush and is Done, is an example of what I mean. On the day of Andrew Wyeth's death (my birthday!) I went to sign the condolence book at the Farnsworth Art Museum here in Rockland. I sat before a painting of his that I had never seen before (or that I had not noticed deeply before) and got that prickle on the nape of my neck that tells me something profound is happening. I took out my trusty notebook and began to compose a poem. The words rang in my head like a funeral bell. I could FEEL the suffering his widow must have been feeling. I knew at a gut level the emptiness she was living at that moment, the long days ahead with his absence. It was not enough to recreate the painting in words. I had to recreate the emptiness, the quiet, the stillness of his brushes gone to dry forever.


The same scenes are never to be the same again without his careful eye
The conch will go silent, the chair unmoved and dusty.
Somehow a shaft of sudden sun slanting the floor won't be
the same kind of light he saw. Even the dog will not snore the same.


To be clear, there is no dog in the painting. But when I felt the emptiness of the chair, the conch, I could extrapolate, pull details of grief into the poem. This is the beauty of poetry. This is the beauty of connection that poetry affords both writer and reader.

When I write to art, I allow myself to be captivated by image. I then try to go deep into imaginary worlds where those images tell me a story that I may or may not find in the visual art I have experienced. If possible I avoid looking at the title the artist has given his/her work. I like to go in clean when I begin. More often than not, and surprising me for sure, the title is fairly close to the place I inhabit in the poem. A little chilling sometimes actually, but thrilling along with chilling.

So today's advice/challenge:

Find a piece of visual art and sit with it, look at it. Take as long as you like until you are stirred by it. Then make copious notes. Then write. You will NOT be disappointed.

Leaping and Tweaking

I love to take leaps. If this body were in better shape I might take them physically. OK, so I'm not THAT athletic, never have been. A good reason to be a sports FAN, not a participant. LOL

What I mean by leaps is leaping in poetry. I used to think (high school era) that poems needed wrapping up at the end. They needed to land on their own two feet. I tucked the edges in like hospital corners and felt satisfied. Not so much anymore. I am quite sure I will never end at an end or tuck in the edges again, not on purpose anyway. I enjoy leaving the reader a little mystery, a trail of breadcrumbs to follow off into the forest, a question or head scratch. Why indeed should the reader get left out of the process, the denouement? I recommend a couple books that helped me to stop putting a nail in every poem:  Robert Bly's Leaping Poetry and Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town. Bly's book was out of print for a while and I had to track down a used copy. It is now back and available (with a new cover...I admit that I like the old yellow one better as it is easy to find in my PILE of books, my SHELVES of books). What Bly is saying in his book (briefly) is that we poets take mental leaps all the time and then proceed to tie our poems up with bows as if we were wrapping for Christmas and that this is not really a gift to our readers. He suggests that those head leaps are exactly what make poetry so wonderful, so appealing to the inner reader. I'd have to agree.

It is not that we ought to be vague in our poetry, not at all. That kind of thinking led to a generation of people who avoided poetry as "too hard" to understand. No, we want our readers to "get" our poems, to feel there is a connection between the poems and their lives, a shared human experience. But we do want readers to have some ideas added or enhanced by nuances in our writing. We don't want to deny them the opportunity to grow as readers, to have the "aha moment" we had while writing.

For me, when writing along on a new poem, there comes a moment when I get an idea for a line or a stanza that seems to jet in from some other part of my brain. Maybe it is a word or phrase, or maybe it is something that my brain has dug up from another time or another experience. I am often shocked by this. I wonder "where did THAT come from and what am I to do now that it is here?" Am I being distracted? Should I jot it down to explore later?  I often do that. But as I continue to work on the poem at hand, the idea might keep poking in. It is at this time I must pay attention. I do not believe much in coincidence. So I need to explore and include, to give the intruder its due. What's the worst that could happen? I could end up jettisoning the thing and going back to my original plan for the poem. No harm in checking out the possibilities. So I leap. Mostly I am happier once I have done this. Mostly the poem benefits from my leap. Mostly I sit back at the end and smile a satisfied smile. If I read the thing aloud and get the prickle on the back of my neck, I know the leap might just have worked. If I don't get the prickle, maybe I need to go back and tweak other parts of the poem to make sure the leap was not just a wild move to veer off in another direction. Bad. Whiplash for readers is BAD.  It is a matter of letting go and being free enough to take and make connections. The great thing about writing, unlike doing a watercolor painting (something I used to do) is that there is revision. You can take a leap and connect seemingly disparate elements, and then undo, redo, move, tweak until you get it the way you want it to read. Or the way the poem wants itself to read.

Hugo makes a good point (several) in his book about leaping. He says in essence that the thing you think you're writing may not be the thing you are writing. In other words (my bad analogy here) the poem is the bullet, not the trigger. When I read Hugo's little gem of a book, I felt immediate relief. For a long time, I had the notion that when I was writing "about" something, it was not really "about" that at all, or at least it was obliquely about something deeper, more interesting than the thing that made me want to write. If I was writing about a summer camp haircut, was I REALLY just painting a Rockwell-type scene? Or was there something else lurking below the surface of the images I was using? COULD there be something else. What ripples from the stone thrown into the pond did I want to follow? With leaping or oblique writing, there is no limit to which ripple one might choose to follow.

This reminds me to stop a moment and digress a bit to talk about first stanza boo-boos. I know for a fact that many poets write first stanzas as a way to get INto the poem they really want to write. They may be doing it totally unconsciously. I see these ploddy beginnings all the time in submitted work, in the work of my poet friends, in my own poems. Sometimes one or more of the first stanzas are the poet(s) wandering around inside his/her/their head(s) figuring out what is up with a topic and what there is to think about that. But do we need to haul our readers INSIDE our heads and make them help us figure it out? I don't think so. As a reader, I do NOT want the writer to tell me what to think or consider. I want the writer to put it on the page and let me decide. Call it stubborn independence if you will. I just want to do it myself. LOL

We writers all have to start somewhere and start we do. But I ask: are we married to the first bits or can we see them as the triggers, and go ahead and chop them off or remarkably alter them later when we get to revision? Yes. We can and should look hard at a first stanza (or line) and see if the poem needs that "set-up." Oftentimes, a first stanza presents an opportunity to take a leap, to move rapidly beyond the impetus for the poem to the actual poem itself. One of these first may indeed be the trigger, not the bullet. One way to determine the need for a first stanza or line  is to change it around to end the poem. See something strange happen here. You could suddenly discover the new ending is reductive and lands the poem with a big dull thud. If this is the case, toss it out entirely and see what you have with the next stanza as the first. Hmmmm. Interesting.

I've decided not to quote from Bly or Hugo here (I had planned to, but changed my mind) because I want you to read these wonderfully helpful tiny texts on your own (adverb, two adjectives...yikes!). But I will say that I am not to be without either of them. I need to be reminded to be willing to shake up my writing every day by taking leaps and looking at my triggers. I do NOT want to end up writing the same poem over and over. I want to become a new poet as often as possible. Don't you?