Month: August 2022

The Essay Project: Bits About Value, Confession, Intimacy, the Poetry Buffet and the Unconscious

August 26, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re getting down to the bottom of the Sarah Lawrence essay class stack. It's hard to estimate how many we have left, but a lot of it is probably unbloggable. Below is a short-stack of five single paged items that are not necessarily related but some are.

Value

The first is a Time Magazine Art section piece from February 1996 by Paul Gray called "Attention Name Droppers." At the time, a formerly obscure and newly attributed 16th century Michelangelo statue of Cupid had set philosophers of value into a tizzy. The same thing had also just happened with a newly found Shakespeare elegy.

“It is easy to see why people who make their living studying Michelangelo and Shakespeare should be agog at the possibility of more material to occupy their attention….[but] neither the Cupid or the elegy is intrinsically different now, in the full glare of worldwide publicity, than a few weeks ago, when both enjoyed obscurity.”

Exactly. And this is what make these valuations problematic…always. They're based on social ideas, not objective ones. We all think we're objective, but…

I’m always referencing this book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom because it exposes just this kind of illusion we have about what good judges we are of things like music, food and art. There’s a similar story in the book about a painting that had one value before being discovered as belonging to a famous artist and one afterwards. Or maybe it happened the other way around, that what was deemed a brilliant thing was suddenly discovered to be not so brilliant because it suddenly wasn't attached to a famous person anymore.

“Aesthetics,” Gray says, “for all the millions of words that have been written on the subject, remains an inexact science. We cannot say why a painting once supposed to be a Rembrandt loses face when its connection with the master is disproved, even though it looks just the same as it did when we admired it before.”

Perfectly said. Except that we can say: judgement is social, judgements are made based on social pressures, social aspirations, social likes and dislikes, even if they’re subconscious.

Confession

There’s a three paragraph excerpt of Muriel Rukeyser from her 1949 book The Life of Poetry about confession and revelation: “Confession to divinity, to the essential life of what one loves and hopes, on a level other than the human, is full of revelation. The detachment, here from conscious to unconscious emotion values, has the power to change one’s life.”

“But there is another confession, which is the confession to oneself made available to all…the type of this is the poem in which the poet, intellectually giving form to emotional and imaginative experience, with the music and history of a lifetime behind the work, offers a total response. And the witness receives the work, and offers a total response in a most human communication.”

Very similar to her earlier statements from the Digital Poetry post I made back in June. I’m just beginning to understand Rukeyser. Baby steps. Powerful stuff.

Reading as Intimacy

The next piece is from Donald Revell’s book The Art of Attention where he talks about poetry being a form of attention, “itself the consequence of attention. And, too, I believe that poems are presences.”

He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to say, “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing…the creative act is continuous, before, during, and after the poem. An attentive poet delights in this continuity…I am speaking of intimacy, which is an occasion of attention. It is the intimacy of poetry that makes our art such a beautiful recourse from the disgrace and manipulations of public speech, of empty rhetoric. A poem that begins to see and then continues seeing is not deceived, nor is it deceptive.”

He then quotes this from Walt Whitman:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Revell says, “the poem of attention is not merely a work in progress; it is a work of progress in the most natural sense.”

Something for Everybody…or Not

The next is a grumpy little column from W.S. DiPiero called “One Paragraph on our Poetry.” It’s a long paragraph of which I’ve only excerpted about half, starting where he says,

“what’s wrong with it is that it’s worried about being right. Heart-throb platitudes, huggy acecdotalism, outraged stridencies over injustice in countries to which the poet migrates in search of worthy subjects, scrupulous self-censorship….agonies endured (or sworn to) entirely for the ‘appropriate dramatic fulness’ of a poem….valiant eloquence in defense of poetry…Does it matter? Poetry which exists in all of its words but which does not need only words for its existence…”

and then he takes on the new formalists.

Not much to say about this except that maybe it’s just best to just skip the dishes in the buffet you don’t like, instead of railing at all the eaters. Pea soup isn’t for everyone.

The Unconscious

The last piece is a collection of two blurbs about the unconscious. The first is “Writing and the Unconscious: The Imagistic Leap” from The Portable Jung that relates analytical psychology to poetry:

“the writer’s conviction that he is creating in absolute freedom is an illusion” and that artists are swimming with an 'unseen current' and guided by it and that it is a psyche 'which leads a life of its own' and that only a writer who 'acquiesces from the start' can begin to function.

The other little piece is from Robert Bly’s book Leaping Poetry.

“a great work of art often has as its center a long floating leap from the conscious to the unconscious” and possibly many leaps. He also says that “powerful feeling makes the mind associate faster…increases the adrenalin flow, just as chanting awakens many emotions.”

A Book About Trauma: Writing as Therapy, Writing as Witnessing

August 22, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

A few weeks back when we were reviewing some revision essays, a few teachers remarked on the issue of poetry as therapy for those poets who weren’t keen to do the work of revision, as if this was the cut-off between professionals and therapy-seekers. The topic came up again as I was finishing Richard’s Gray’s history on American poetry. Gray's second-to-last section was entirely about the act of writing poetry after trauma, specifically the collective trauma of the 9/11 attacks and the kind of group therapy that occurred when hundreds of poems found themselves tacked up all over New York City and every living poet of note took a turn at trying to speak about the 9/11 tragedy in verse.

These poems holistically challenge the ideas that “politics kills poetry” (Tim Scannell) or that therapy has no place in poetry.

Gray says the 9/11 poems are a mark of witness, a mark of despair or rage from a single voice in an effort to join a collective experience of sense making. Gray talks about the tropes of these poems: falling, ‘the’ moment of a disaster, the moment just before, the helplessness of words, the unsayable, transfiguration of the ordinary, nostalgia for innocence, and a community’s sharded fall into the depths of psychic harm. These poems also call in question the lines between private and public spaces and explore tools we have as humans to map the loss, the very particular coordinates of loss, and also trauma’s heavy burdens of impotence and exhaustion.

Gray explores a large group of 9/11 poems in an attempt to determine which ones are shallow and cliched and which ones are meaningful in order to understand how we can find meaning from trauma and strategies for writing about it.

To me, the 9/11 poems seem to operate like other trauma poems of our time (school shootings, for example) or like trauma poems from our past (most war poems).

Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon is a book about a set of personal traumas, which in many ways makes it a hard book to review. It is first and foremost an exercise in listening more than reviewing. The scenarios are pretty harsh and their ramifications are felt everywhere throughout the book. Which, as a second point, makes it hard to know which poems are “succeeding,” especially when reviewing the book from a very different life experience.

I feel you have to read a book of trauma in two ways at once: listening in the Brene Brown sense, a kind of human-to-human sense, and also reading with an ear to craft and execution. But even that is not easy.

Reading from a craft perspective, I want to say Canyon's simple poems were more impactful than the more complicated poems, and yet the complexities in those poems were an important representation of any confusing and entangled experience.

The first poem, “Involuntary Endurance,” is a good introduction to what you’re going to get. In fact, the hardest poems seem front-loaded in the book: “I Wish I Could Tell You This Has a Happy Ending,” “I Felt My Brother’s Wrists,” and “My Pain Is Sculpted into Art for You to Consume.”

Her titles are particularly good.

She explores deep wounds, like in “Thoracic Biology” where she says, “most times when I sleep, I dream of/my hands, clutched tight around something/I cannot see, and I cannot let go.”

Her poems are mostly conversational and she works with sensory feelers into the terrain of her Los Angeles past like in the poem “My Life Map” or poems about her mother: “Small Bear to Great Bear” and “An Afterthought of a Netflix Show” (with an uncanny appearance by Carol Burnett).

But there are also some experimental pieces, like “The Tyger, Interrupted” with literal interruptions into the William Blake poem, “The Tyger.”

There are some faint light beams of hope here too, some short reprieves for both Canyon and her readers: “Aunt May” which references Z.Z. Hill’s song “Down Home Blues" and “The New Hope” where “I kick the crust between my soles,/This is where I will find a picket fence/Painted white like dandelions.”

Which brings us to another point about experimental poetry and poets who express disdain for the political act of witness or explorations of trauma: the choice to go fully experimental or dismissive is an opportunity provided a privileged writer. Poetry of witness and therapy are less valuable to people who don’t need it. You don’t value the picket fence when you don’t need to; you can have it or not have it. I can have it or not have it and so this poem challenges me to understand what the symbol means to Canyon. What symbolizes a fantastical cliche to me takes on an out-of-reach realism for someone who has no easy path to the symbol and cannot take it for granted. So poetry like this challenges the very idea of cliches themselves. Symbols are cultural and relative.

Which leads us right into her poem “Authority Questions” with the lines “would it have been different/if I were white, and if I had blue eyes/and I lived on a ranch with 500 head of cattle? Would the doctor have still called me a liar?”

It gets worse from there.

The traumas here are racism, physical abuse, (being locked in the closet “All Day Long” with her autistic brother), drug trauma, (“Trifling with Heroin” which opens with “She learned to cut lines at eight”), “The Consideration of the Black Bear” where she says about her father, “I was raised to be/the perfect fault–/to take the blame/to allow you to be King.”

Even a poem called “Blessings” seem mostly ominous. There are quite a few meditations on god and godlessness, a school shooting poem, (“A Petition for Unrecognized Children”), a few Trump poems, poems about Sojourner Truth and Harvey Weinstein.

And this probably speaks to my GenX love for kind of new structures but my favorite poem in the collection was the “I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’ Written with a Little Help for Websters Dictionary,” a dictionary poem about (ominous) words and phrases born the same year Canyon was born, (which I'm guessing from the tool below was 1968). This makes me think we should all consider the words born with us and what vibrations, legacies and ramifications their ideas had on the world (similar to all the ramifications of our beliefs and actions); and isn't exploring ourselves and our words, and exploring ourselves in words the whole point of writing poems really.

Use this tool to help you search for your own birth words: https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/

Digital Literature: The Medium

August 12, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

What is a Digital Poem

I want to start this digital catch-up by saying I’ve been thinking a lot about what separates digital poetry from digital art which happens to be using words as material. I think this is the main point of contention for paper poets around pieces labeled digital poetry, especially when few if any of the aims of poetry-as-meaning are involved. Many digital artists use words as material and since there’s no narrative element to the thing, they want to put it in the digital poetry bucket (as if poetry is just that nebulous thing that is not narrative or sensical, which is a pretty small view of what poetry is).

So I’ve been trying to come up with some parameters in my own head just to understand it myself. And here’s what I’ve come up with:

If the piece uses words (language) that are un-readable, or not even meant to be read in the traditional sense (to come to a meaning as a phrase or sentence would): this is digital art,
If the piece uses words and their meaning is the primary driver of the piece, meaning the piece is meant to be read in a traditional sense: this is digital literature, digital poetry or digital story,
If the piece can be read in a traditional sense but that’s not entirely the point of the piece or a secondary benefit of it (maybe there is a balance of meaning from both visuals and from words): this is a digital hybrid of art and literature.

The New Media Reader

We’re almost done with the conceptual essays about computers and it looks like we’ll be going into actual essays about art and hopefully examples of interesting things. These two are by Marshall McLuhan and you know we’d have to pass through McLuhan because he’s the one who famously said, “the medium is the message” which has digital art all over it.

The introduction to two of his essays talks about what the “medium is the message” means, that the delivery medium of any content influences our understanding of it in profound ways we do not often realize. (You can see this clearly with social media arguments on the internet; the internet medium had transformed the way we argue and the ways we tolerate ((or don’t)) opinions that differ from our own).

But McLuhan’s statement was made for television not the internet and his examples go back to the first printing press and how mass-produced books changed the way people thought about…well everything. The introduction also quotes Neil Postman (who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death) who said, “the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”

Oh boy.

The first essay is “The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of the Mass Man in an Individualist Society” (1962) where McLuhan talks about “sense rations” and changing patters of human perception, using William Blake’s “Jerusalem” and how our imaginations acclimate to new technologies, how they change how we think, how technology actually facilitated changes from gothic to renaissance to realism in literature. The printing press (or the idea of a popular press) brought to us the idea of a mass consciousness, a group vision, the lack of one single vision, and that all endeavors became “a mosaic of the postures of collective consciousness” and then we started to question, ‘what is truth?’ and then the sheer volume of voices gave us “mental anguish.”

The task of the individual artist became to “tap into the collective consciousness” even if the forms were individualistic and private. He says this occurs both with music and writing technologies. We “behold the new thing” and are “compelled to become it.”

And then he goes into capitalism and market economics and self-regulation of markets and feudal societies confronted with technology. But then he comes back around to how technology can isolate the senses and hypnotize society. How we become what we behold as we are swept away by the novelty. He says, “the most deeply immersed are the least aware.”

We are often lured by the idea of an improved future. And in some cases the new technology does provide improved future (think of the washing machine, for example). Another example is the printing press which brought us the novel itself and the sustained tone of a long story which produced in readers a “feeling of living in the world.” Not too shabby.

The invention of the novel lead us to study the new reader which led to Edgar Allan Poe writing "The Philosophy of Composition" and inventing the detective story (all good there), then symbolist poetry, the reader as co-author, and the nineteenth century mass surrender of unique selfhood, the assembly line, the unconscious, the non-logical.

So that happened.

His second and famous essay is “The Medium is the Message” (1964)

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividng all things, as a means of control, personal and social consequences of any medium technology is an extension of ourselves.” He says machines usually fragment and decentralize.

Interestingly, he talks a lot about the invention of the electric light, pure information without a message. And he uses this to launch into talking about how the content of the medium is just another medium when you pull back the layers. Writing is really a medium for speech, which is just a medium for our thoughts, which is then a medium for our nonverbal impulses.

Technology changes the scale, pace, and pattern of human affairs. The railroad accelerated time and enlarged the scale of previous human functions. New kinds of cities came to be, new kinds of work and leisure that evolved to be independent of location. Then the plane came and dissolved the railway city.

There are independent consequences in the use of any technology. Again his example of the electric light: what it’s used for is irrelevant; it dramatically changed our lives and our behavior. "Content tends to blind us to the character of the medium." Content is a distraction.

He quotes something my father used to always quote as well because he worked for IBM for many years, probably the original 'thinking outside the box' idea: "IBM is not in the business of making machines, but in information processing."

And McLuhan insists light is a communication medium and it's no coincidence they called light companies “light and power." Electric light eliminates time and space just like the radio, the telegraph, the phone, the TV (and now the internet).

He criticizes technology apologists for being disingenuous when they say technology is the scapegoat for the sins of the world. It's like saying “apple pie is neither good or bad. It is the way that it is used" (and "guns don't kill people…")

There are consequences of innovation. These apologists speak "in the true narcissistic style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form."

But it's more complicated (as it always is) than good or bad. The printing press gave us trashy novesl and nationalism, but he says, it has also gave us the Bible (and Choose Your Own Adventure books). Movies brought a world of illusions and dreams, point of view, then cubism happened, the idea of perspective, the interplay of planes, contradictions, instant sensory awareness of the whole…

Like all cultural things, it's not always easy to unravel: “Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.”

That's a lot of omelet to chew right there.

Poetry Maps

August 11, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Soo…I was doing something I definitely shouldn’t be doing…and I came across this very cool website called Poetry Atlas. You can look up poems connected to or referencing cities and towns around the world. You just type in the city and you're off to the races: http://www.poetryatlas.com/

This week, I used it to look up poems about the city of my birth.

(An aside, I was the one-hundredth baby born at a white skyscraper hospital in downtown Albuquerque called St. Josephs, which is now a brown medical building called Lovelace. My parents got a steak dinner. My brothers were born across the highway at Presbyterian and there were no steak dinners for them.)

Anyway, two really lovely poems about Albuquerque are on the site. And I think they resonated with me for a few reasons. One is that New Mexico in general and Albuquerque specifically can be a very harsh place to live. Even today. It’s a tough city and it can be a rough place.

A lot of people are drawn to New Mexico for the natural formations and the spirit of the place but it's not for the light of heart. The weather can be harsh. Half of us are allergic to the Chamisa and the juniper pollen. The spring winds can drive you mad (or if you're like my grandmother you can become addicted to them and forever need the sound of a draining wind to fall asleep). Medical care here is absurd. The public schools aren't very good. I guess there are some building codes. And mañana is the motto of the land which you will either learn to love or not.

And I am made of this place. These are my people. And the word love doesn’t quite express my connection to the rocks and trees and mesas and people here. It's really, really foundational for me. But sometimes I wonder if humans were meant to habitate this place.

My big family loves to say wherever they live is "God's country" and my little nuclear family loves to laugh about that. My grandparents and parents and brothers have always believed New Mexico is God's Country. Living far away in St. Louis, that is what we always said to each other. And when I found myself back here about 12 years ago, it dawned on me what that really meant was: 'good lord' and 'for the love of God' and 'for Christ’s sake!"

Sometimes you need poems to remind you what you love about the flawed city and country and world you are from.

And I must say, in reference to the first poem below, Albuquerque's airport is one of its lovliest things here, as airports go.

"Gate A4"
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
"If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately."

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. "Help,"
said the flight agent. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this."

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
"Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?" The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, "No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him."

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

"Passing Through Albuquerque"
by John Balaban

At dusk, by the irrigation ditch
gurgling past backyards near the highway,
locusts raise a maze of calls in cottonwoods.

A Spanish girl in a white party dress
strolls the levee by the muddy water
where her small sister plunks in stones.

Beyond a low adobe wall and a wrecked car
men are pitching horseshoes in a dusty lot.
Someone shouts as he clangs in a ringer.

Big winds buffet in ahead of a storm,
rocking the immense trees and whipping up
clouds of dust, wild leaves, and cottonwool.

In the moment when the locusts pause and the girl
presses her up-fluttering dress to her bony knees
you can hear a banjo, guitar, and fiddle

playing "The Mississippi Sawyer" inside a shack.
Moments like that, you can love this country.

The Essay Project: Five Takes on Revision

August 10, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We're getting down to the bottom of the essay stack–lots of little pieces down here. I found four in a row on the topic of revision. Three of them begin with basically the same idea:

Richard Tillinghast says, "The willingness, the ardent desire even, to revise separates the poet from the person who sees poetry as therapy or self-expression."
Kim Addonizio says, "If you don't think your work needs revision, here's a tip: Don't try to be a poet. You will never–I mean never–be any good…Revision separates the professionals from the amateurs and wannabies."
Mystery writer: "Revision is what separates the poet from those who see poetry as therapy."

I'm always surprised when I talk to writers who hate the editing part of the process for some reason or another. Editing has always been one of my favorite parts. You've regurgitated the raw material into a formless shape and the shaping part is effort for sure but that’s where the magic starts to happen.

It's also where the sweat happens and without the idea of work, writing would be too fluffy to me. Besides, if I wasn’t wanting to do the work, I'd rather stretch out on the couch and read the fruits of someone else's hard labor, which is a lot less work.

I feel writers tend to fetishize first thoughts. But thinking is bigger than first thoughts, awesomely less simplistic that first thoughts. A first thought is a seed. And if you’re satisfied with seeds over flowers…

Editing is long process that happens over a lifetime. Editing is also relationship-building, not just with your first readers, but with yourself, all your other self(s).

The first of these five notes on revision is of unknown origin. I think an old friend of mine went to a workshop one day and gave me a copy of their notes but I'm not sure. It's a one-sheet thing about how revision is a "re-visioning" or a "re-imagining."

Get some distance from the poem, a "half-forgetting" distance that disconnects you from "the initial impulses" so you can see what "the poem is revealing." Then ask these questions:

What can you remove to still keep the poem's "thrust/energy/drama"?
Does the poem have enough images, ideas, metaphors, sounds, silences…often what is left out of a poem is the most immediate and powerful."
Are line lengths and line breaks doing their work to "push the poem's rhythm?"
"Have you been too concerned with what the poem is saying (some kind of wisdom-epiphany), as opposed to how it is doing?…letting local brilliances and discovered surprises…nudge it toward some unexpected inevitability?"
Have you let yourself get lost in the poem, "to grope about in the unknown, using only your peripheral vision."
Is your tone consistent?
Is there a balance of "philosophical and psychological" with enough "emotional intensity?"
Have you learned or received something from this poem you didn't have when you started writing?

The second sheet is also a mystery essay but along the margins is written Best Words, Best Order which is the title of Stephen Dobyns' popular writing guide. This sheet asks a few other interesting questions:

Does the poem destroy chronological time?
Does the poem create in the reader a desire to know? "You release a particular Logos energy…a transference…much like a pitcher releases a fast ball toward home plate that the hitter is compelled to smack with his bat over the fence. One of your core tasks as a writer is to make the reader want to swing…strong art awakens the spirit of the other."

The next essay is "Household Economy, Ruthlessness, Romance and the Art of Hospitality: Notes on Revision" by Richard Tillinghast from the book The Practice of Poetry. It begins with a quote from Dorothy Wordsworth in 1800, "Intensely hot, I made pies in the morning. William went into the wood and altered his poems."

Along with his comment about poetry-as-therapy, he states, "the impulse to improve is also a sign of humility" which he admits is "naturally rare, particularly among young writers, for whom the value of doing something remarkable is vastly increased when they can say it only took them fifteen minutes."

Snap.

He talks about Elizabeth Bishop's worksheets and Robert Lowell's drafts and how there were "few sparks of genius, few notes of originality or distinctive voice" in them and how different their initial thoughts were from what the final poems ended up to be. A perfect poem could have started as "a series of dispirited and formless reflections."

Tillinghast advises to "apprehend the poem's field of energy…Get a sense of the poem as something not defined by or limited to the words you have written down…a good poem, even in a potential form, has a shape, a life that floats above the words: 'the light around the body,' as Robert Bly put it."

He says, "savvy writing is a way of staying flexible." Metaphors he uses to describe the process: (1) getting off the freeway and going through an unknown neighborhood, (2) entertaining like a good host.

He also says revising is a "revision" but one that doesn't "knock the bloom off your original excitement." Give it just enough distance to "allow the poem to suggest new moves."

"Revising," he says, "is not so much a task as it is a romance." But he doesn't go on to define what that means. He just lays that out there.

The next mini-essay is "Waiting and Silence" by Susan Snively also from the same book, The Practice of Poetry. She starts like this:

"Franz Kafka is said to have kept a sign above his desk that read WAIT. Kafka's sign could serve as both the first and the last word on the subject of revision. But it is not a command to be passive. On the contrary, waiting is an active state of mind in which important work may take place–perhaps the most important work in the life of a poem. The most exhilarating, and therefore treacherous, moment in a poem's composition comes when the first draft is done."

She talks about the discipline of "leaving the poem alone" and how "no rules exist for how long the poet must stop fiddling with the thing." She suggests, like many do, reading the poem out loud to find "awkward enjambments, unwitting repetition and accidental howlers. Casting a cold eye on mingy little words (and, it, but, which, that) shows how to clear the underbrush from the living roots. Keeping both eye and ear alert for dead phrases and cliches."

She admits it could take months and years to finish a poem and recommends David Kalstone's Becoming a Poet. She ends with the following questions:

"What am I not allowing myself to say? Should it be said? Why do I want this poem to end? Is it a false resolution?"

In any case, she says, a poem can be "rescued by silence and waiting."

I've saved my favorite for last, Kim Adonnizio's "do-overs and revisions" from her book Ordinary Genius.

Addonnizio is such a great teacher (a very popular teacher) because she operates on both the mechanical and mysterious levels, where many poems believe you have to choose between the two ways of thinking. (Why should we have to choose?) She's also very cool and so when she says something, (I've seen this at writing festivals), the students lean in.

"A lot of people get hung up on revision," she says. "How can you be objective about your work, so you can figure out what it needs? How do you know what to let go of and what to keep?…How do you keep from losing interest in the process that felt so great at first, but now feels like you're hacking through vines with a butter knife for a machete? Welcome to the jungle."

"It's not so much a process of editing as of making unexpected discoveries."

Editing helps you build your decision-making skills, how to take what you need from books, from the "contradictory suggestions" of your readers. You can revise toward mystery; you can revise toward clarity. Here are some guidelines she's come up with:

Leave it alone for a while.
"Find the heat" – that part that makes the poem run, "the pulse"
Review your diction, word choices, tone. Are they right?
Check your sensory details and imagery. "You may think you are being quite specific when you're not” and “Sometimes you'll have plenty of detail, but it's pointless."
Review your rhythm, rhyme, sounds, syntax. "You can't look at rhythms without looking at your line breaks." She says, "Get your ear down to the poem and listen."
Review the poem's tension and surprise, the oppositional elements: "If your poem is too pretty, it needs edge. If it's graphically violent; it may need some tenderness."
Is the poem intellectual vs. intuitive: all head or all heart? "You want balance."

Things she suggests trying:

Change the tone/mood, go from funny to serious or vice versa. Make an earnest poem ironic.
Change the syntax/sentence lengths. She even talks about how to diagram your sentences like a good mechanic!
Get rid of extra adjectives/adverbs, put some back in.
Copy another poet's style in a rewrite and see how that goes.
If the poem opens with an image or statement, try it the other way.
Intensify the operating metaphor of the poem.
Reduce a long poem to less than ten lines.
Extend a short poem to two pages.
Take a narrative and focus on one moment.
Tell the true story behind a metaphorical poem.

Work through a few of these exercises even if you don't feel like it, she says. The point is to jumpstart your mental processes.

You'll find your dead ends, she says. She talks about the editing "comb-over" that is "taking thin areas and adding in more texture, more detail, more energy of language."

The part you can't teach, she says, is the mental leap, the epiphany that sometimes comes from playing around (editing). Her final advice is to "learn strategies, be stubborn, and wait–pray–for the leap."

Month: August 2022

The Essay Project: Bits About Value, Confession, Intimacy, the Poetry Buffet and the Unconscious

A Book About Trauma: Writing as Therapy, Writing as Witnessing

Digital Literature: The Medium

Poetry Maps

The Essay Project: Five Takes on Revision

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