Category: Craft (Page 18 of 19)

Moment of Craft Fridays: Acclimate to the Question

October 19, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

So who hasn't had this book recommended to them about fifty times in their poetry studentship? Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke must be the most-recommended book for young poets…heck, the title implicitly begs to be read by novice bards.

I pulled off my copy (that I bought in Westchester, NY, back in the mid-1990s) from the bookshelf and opened a page randomly for some craft advise for today.

Bingo! That's how easy this is!

"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

What a good focus goal: to write about one of your questions, letting go of all possible answers.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Poetry & Horror

September 16, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

At poetry writing conventions and conferences, you can easily call out the poetry snobs right away because they will consistently provide disparaging comments about either Stephen King or Billy Collins if one of their names is somehow brokered into the conversation.

They are discerning after all. They would never read Stephen King.

But I am a fan of pop culture (as well as a student and a victim of it) and I prefer the company of other pop culture gutter rats.

Although I wouldn't say I'm a fan of Stephen King. I have grown tired of movies based on his books, his style as a columnist can be off-putting in a Dave Barry kind of way (and yes I saw their band once, The Rock Bottom Remainders, at the Los Angeles Book Festival) and I once had the misfortune of reading the first pages of his wife's somewhat awful novel galleys when I was an intern at Penguin in New York City.

That said, I have read three or four King novels and have appreciated them (Skeleton Crew, The Stand, Pet Cemetery, Carrie and, best of them all, The Shining) and after seeing King read in St. Louis on his Insomnia tour I found myself with a signed copy of his book that I carried around for ten years before selling it for $130 a few months ago on eBay.

King has written two books on his craft (On Writing and Dance Macabre) and I've read and learned things from them both. And I loved The Shining. I loved how he weaved elements from one chapter into major events of the next. I felt that book had real craft about it.

As I feel the presentation of horror has ultimate craft about it: the chilling level of aggression, writing that sinks into your bone marrow, the genre itself a representation of poetic form. The same demands are made: how will the artist break out from this form's structure? What thrilling things can you find in the text and subtext? In your own scary unconscious imagination?

It takes balls to write scary. And sometimes I wonder if poets are ultimately intimidated by it.

From Dance Macabre:

"One of the things that makes art a force to be reckoned with even by those who don't care for it is the regularity with which myth swallows truth…and without so much as a burp of indigestion."

Isn't this the eternal dilemma of Truth or Beauty? Which is again why I love a good ghost story. If it's true, far out. But if it's a lie, well then I love how a well-placed lie can contain the truth. And a truth not usually found from the text, but in the vulnerable mind of the reader.

Reviewing my scribbles in Dance Macabre, I found where King quotes the poet Kenneth Patchen:

Come now,
my child,
if we were planning
to harm you, do you think
we'd be lurking here
beside the path
in the very dark-
ness part of
the forest?

Okay, I'm not so sure about those line breaks but I'm intrigued by the short scare, enough that I just ordered Patchen's Collected Poems. Reading his bio on Amazon…

Kenneth Patchen, 1911-1972, was born in Ohio, fought in WWII, and spent the rest of his life invalided by spinal disease. His was a powerful, angry voice that could sing some of the most beautiful love poems of the past century. He moved easily among the San Francisco poets, a contemporary of Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the famed City Lights Book Store.

…highlights how exciting it is when anger and pain really go for the jugular. It's scary to read. I admit that it's not always peaceful and illuminating. But when you experience it, you feel like you're living in a more present way. You're breathing in a more active way, the way that allows you to notice your own living and breathing.

Sort of like shock-Zen.

I dissed King's wife Tabitha earlier but she's a crucial figure in the world of horror fiction. In On Writing, King writes:

Someone once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of the story, the writer is thinking, "I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part. For me that reader is my wife, Tabitha.

So without Tabitha we probably would not have gone through the thrilling horror of The Shining and we know for sure we wouldn't have read Carrie because Tabitha dug it out of their trash can. Can you imagine a world without these popular melodramas of high school, marriage, neighborhood communities and all their entourage of fears?

Imaging all the crazy inane things that scare Americans? Without Stephen King would we have ever seen the likes of the brilliant F/X show American Horror Story? Don't get me started on those Jessica Lange performances.

For my dollar, I like poetry that shoves me back into the corner of my couch with an afghan pulled over my head.

But maybe that's just me.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Avoid Self-Deceptions

September 9, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

In his 1997 book, Best Words, Best Order, Stephen Dobyns begins with a chapter called Deception where he states:

"the writer must give up all theories and be a complete pragmatist. He or she must ask constantly: What am I trying to do? He or she must measure the words against intention and demand how each word, sentence or image contributes to the whole."

However, self-deception is the most powerful and insidious kind and many writers don't have the psychological strength to meet their own deceptions head on. In fact, for many writers, their writing is just another self-deceptive coping mechanism. Why would they want to change that?

Writer/psychotherapist Charles Harper Webb talks about psychological blocks in the October/November 2011 issue of The Writer's Chronicle that I picked up in a waiting room where I'm working at IAIA.

Webb says to succeed a writer must "approve of expressing personal power and powerful emotions…must lower his psychological defenses…cast off modesty and deference….[and] be willing to be harshly criticized." He says this is the "price of power." I think he means poetic power.

He also lists possible "power sources" of a healthy poem:

Effective technique
Authenticity
Religious/spiritual overtones
Seriousness (with room for humor)
Good stories dramatically told
Cinematic action-writing
Willingness to tackle big themes
Explosive metaphors and imagery
Truth-telling/insight
Compassion
Vulnerability
Healthy sexuality
Accessibility

I'm sure many experimental poets would take issue with many of these (including #13 but possibly #10 too).

What power sources are crucial for you? What self-deceptions hold you back?

Stay Connected

September 1, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

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Moment of Craft Fridays: Your Relationship to Language

August 31, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

My father tells this joke often: there are two types of people–the type of people who put everyone else into types of people and the type of people who don't.

Reading Real Sofistikashun by Tony Hoagland, I'm often hitting the question of what type of writer I might be. These questions are good to think about.

I see it this way: there are two types of poets–the type who feels well served by their language and the limits of words and the type who feels the language fails them profoundly. Do you write about how words fail you or do you write about how they succeed to describe your living experience?

Some writers aim to share and connect through their poems. Others are dealing with disconnection and alienation.

How accessible should you choose to be might be related to your relationship with language itself and your feelings about your abstract reader.

There's no right answer. It's a temperament, your unique temperament.

And further, are you trying to express your one essential self or do you want to explore your many selves. Hoagland talks about the differences. He quotes Cszelaw Milosz from "Ars Poetica?"

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.

Later he considers Guillaume Apollinaire and says,

"The purpose of poetry," Apollinaire might have said, in response to Milosz, "is to remind us how unnecessary it is to remain just one person."

Which one of these statements do you feel more confortable with?

Moment of Craft Fridays: Define Your Characteristic Emotion

August 17, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

I just began to read Real Sofistikashun by Tony Hoagland, his book of essays on craft. Right away he begins with an exercise which he uses to begin workshops with his students:

"Describe your work in terms of its most characteristic emotion, or "humour"– whether you write from a taproot of rage, pity, love or grief. It seems as important to know this about yourself as to know your country of origin.

I'm struggling to define my voice today. I think facing your "taproot emotion" is challenging because it may show you an emotion you're not comfortable with. For example, I'm a bit concerned that my predominant emotion is derision with a slight contempt. I can be sarcastic.

The last chapter in the Hoagland book is called "Negative Capability, How to Talk Mean and Influence People." The back cover elaborates on this idea: "Meanness, the very thing that is unforgivable in human social life, in poetry is thrilling and valuable. Why? Because the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless observer in all of us, the spiteful perceptive angel who sees and tells, unimpeded by nicety or second thoughts. There is truth-telling in meanness."

Instinctually I agree with this because I've always had a queer sensibility. As a catty Cher fan, I've often joked that I'm a gay man in a woman's body. But the truth is, I sympathize with the most bitchy, irreverent, flaming martyr in the room…because this is fundamentally part of my personality, but one that only finds life in my writing and with my husband (poor feller).

On the one hand, the "sweet Mary" side of me is not happy about this manifestation of myself as a writer, the emotional tone I gravitate toward, the one with the meaner edge, disdainful and cutting. My inner Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain.

If only I could write aphorisms as well.

"When an honest writer discovers an imposition, it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence."

Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880

"I shall not write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers."

Mark Twain as editor of the Buffalo Express in 1869

"Even prophets correct their proofs."

"There are two ways of disliking poetry, one was is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope."

"Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honor."

Oscar Wilde

Moment of Craft Fridays: Critical Thinking

August 10, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

So we've been talking about how working on thinking skills can help your poetry. I know there is some resistance to this idea, as if the creation of poetry is only natural thinking, without effort. I agree that some degree of organic inspiration is involved, however thinking about thinking is still a crucial component of both gaining wisdom and communicating your wisdoms. Consider the competitive runner. Although "getting into the zone" is important, so is practice and the harder she pushes herself (within safe limits), the more races she will run.

Which brings me to the next point: reading essays and books about theory and thinking can be dry and difficult. "It's too hard! It feels like college!" my fellow writers whine. Don't fret over the stuff that's too dense to penetrate right away. Read through it and glean what you can. As long as you're always learning, as long as your mind is always working and thinking and making some connections–you don't have to understand all of it. The next babble of theory will get easier.

I hit the same wall when I started reading pop-culture theory this year (I am also, after all, Cher Scholar). Pop culture books can be even more esoteric. But if you keep coming at concepts and ideas from different angles, the better you'll run.

Thinking in Writing by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan is, as I've mentioned before, a good overview on ways we organize our thoughts.

For years I've had Literary Theory, A Very Brief Introduction by Jonathan Culler on my bookshelf. Last week I started reading it and although it was a hard slag at first, it should be required reading for all writers, especially poets.

To understand how the car runs, it's always good to know how the parts all work together. How do poems create meaning?

"…theory involves a questioning of the most basic premises or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted: What is meaning? What is an author? What is it to read?"

Although you may not think these big ideas matter to your little poems, thinking about these things can take you down some new and amazing intellectual paths. And it's helpful to know how the critics and theorists qualify various rhetorical tropes.

Many lament the fact that college curriculums (not to mention bookstores and large book-fest events) focus almost entirely on fiction, while poetry (once the definition of literature) gets the short shrift. Culler elaborates on why this is:

"This is not just a result of the preferences of a mass readership, who happily pick up stories but seldom read poems. Literary and cultural theory have increasingly claimed cultural centrality for narrative. Stories, the argument goes, are the main way we make sense of things."

So you see, this is what we are up against as poets, this is what our own intellectual peers have surmised about the value of poetry versus fiction. Ignoring the reality won't help poetry as a art form and it probably won't serve your individual poems much either.

Sitting on my desk at IAIA, stuffed behind one of those ancient phone-message books (the ones with carbon copies no less), I found a little blue mini-book called The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking, Concepts and Tools. What a find! I haven't cracked it yet but I did skim through the graphics, great overviews of thought like this one (so sorry my scanner sucks!):

Moment of Craft Fridays: Variations on Rhythm

July 20, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

Theodore thinking about his worrisome rhythms

One thing I've learned from many poetry workshops is that the sections of my poems that really hit it off with readers are those lines or phases which dramatically break a previously set rhythmical pattern. Like an orchestral piece of music, you take comfort in the ever-predictable musical phrases. However, it's the line that varies from that predictability that stops the show and turns out to be a crowdpleaser.

I figure it works like the architecture of a good joke. Subverting expectations creates a laugh, creates a little heart squeeze.

In the book, On Poetry & Craft, the compilation of Theodore Roethke's essays and random thoughts, in the essay called "Some Remarks on Rhythm," Roethke explores the ways rhythms work to serve our poems:

While our genius in the language may be essentially iambic, partially in the formal lyric, much of memorable or passionate speech is strongly stressed, irregular, even 'sprung.'

What about the rhythm and the motion of the poem as a whole? Are there ways of sustaining it, you may ask? We must keep in mind that rhythm is the entire movement, the flow, the recurrence of stress and unstress that is related to the rhythms of the blood, the rhythms of nature. It involves certainly stress, time, pitch, the texture of the words, the total meaning of the poem. We've been told that a rhythm is invariably produced by playing against an established pattern….It's what Blake called "the bounding line," the nervousness, the tension, the energy of the whole poem. And that is a clue to everything. Rhythm gives us the very psychic energy of the speaker…

It's nonsense, of course, to think that memorableness in poetry comes solely from rhetorical devices, or the following of certain sound patterns, or contrapuntal rhythmical effects. We all know that poetry is shot throughout with appeals to the unconsciousness, to the fears and desires that go far back into childhood…"

Moment of Craft Fridays: Doing it Like Hart Crane

July 13, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

Well, turns out the book from 1937, Hart Crane, The Life of an American Poet by Philip Horton, was a regular page-turner. I read it in four days and loved how Horton gave Crane's life-events an evenly-spread psychological context, something I'm missing from the more recent poet biographies (Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford, for example). Which reminds me, Edna was only given a throw-off mention in Crane's biography (on one page as "that girl poet") when in fact she was in her prime contemporaneous with Crane in New York City, although she swam in different circles.

Otherwise the biography was pretty open about Crane's life, including his sexuality (although the author treated it, albeit sympathetically, as a mental disorder). Much theory was made over Crane's dramatic childhood and his relationship to his work. Horton provided a very strong defense of the more difficult aspects of Crane's poetry, aligning him more with T. S. Eliot in spirit and technique, as opposed to the other famous writers of the Lost Generation, his contributions including:

his revival of Elizabethan blank verse
his use of unusual words
his incorporation of complex machinery and mechanical activities of his time, the industrial age, (the spiritual values of airplanes, subways and skyscrapers), and understanding these developments as both oppressive and corrupting versus freeing and enlightening.

Interestingly, Hart Crane wrote a poem to Emily Dickinson and among his more popular poems were excerpts from his opus "The Bridge" (compared by Horton to T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" as a great epic about America) and his Voyages poems. In Hart Crane's life, he only published two books White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930) before he committed suicide in 1932 by jumping off a steamship sailing from Mexico to New York. His body was never found.

Craft talk in the book

Quote from his letters:

"I can say that the problem of form becomes harder and harder for me every day. I am not at all satisfied with anything I have thus far done, mere shadowings, and too slight to satisfy me. I have never, so far, been able to present a vital, living, tangible–a positive emotion to my satisfaction. For as soon as I attempt such an act I either grow obvious or ordinary, and abandon the thing at the second line. Oh! it is hard. One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment."

"Let us invent an idiom for the proper transportation of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!"

"One works and works over it to finish and organize it perfectly–but fundamentally that doesn't affect one's way of saying it."

Horton discussing the poem "Faustus and Helen:"

"Technically, it showed important extensions of craftsmanship: the long rhythmical lines approximating the pentameter without, however, committing themselves to any distinct pattern; the enrichment of language and music fused by syntax and assonance into an idiom unmistakably his own–these things brought him a sense of power and confidence….a milestone for him, making the step from minor to major intention. It's subject matter indicated an expansion of consciousness, a shift of interest from the particular to the universal. He had achieved at least a partial realization of his long-standing desire to write of the 'eternal verities'…to ally his work firmly with tradition and still to express fully the spirit of his own times."

Horton talking about Crane's circle of literary friends:

"For almost a year the four met [Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank] frequently, tacitly recognizing a kind of spiritual brotherhood that bound them together in a unit distinct from other factions of the artistic world. Their catch words were 'the new slope of consciousness,' the superior logic of metaphor,' 'noumenal knowledge,' the interior rapports' of unanimisme, the doctrine of Jules Romains."

Horton talking about Crane's use of words:

"His attitude towards language was much like that of a painter to his pigments. He gloried in words aside from their meaning as things in themselves, prizing their weight, density, color, and sound; and gloated over the subtle multiplicity of their associations."

"Crane appears to have built up his poems in blocks of language which were cemented into coherent aesthetic form by the ductile stuff of complex associations, metaphors, sound, color, and so forth. This would account for the juggling about of lines from one context to another with what seems to have been a kind of creative opportunism. Actually he was doing no more than the painter or sculptor who strives for what has been called 'significant form.' His enthusiastic study of modern painting was having its own influence…he considered [his poems] not as vehicles of thought so much as bodies of the impalpable substance of language to be molded into aesthetically self-sufficient and complete units….Crane intended these poems not as descriptions of experience that could be read about, but as immediate experiences that the reader could have…The reader was not necessarily expected to derive any more rational meaning from these poems that from those state of consciousness, experienced by everyone at the same time, which forever elude the conclusive grasp of reasonable understanding and expression."

For Horton, this is why Crane can be classified as a mystical poet, for his search of the elusive consciousness.

Speaking of mystic poets and that which "forever elude the conclusive grasp of reasonable understanding and expression," I went to my local Santa Fe performance space last night to see the documentary Rumi, Returning. It was an awful mess. A room full of baby boomers grunting over Rumi poetry, so many of them the theater ran out of chairs and one elderly lady tried to sit on my lap (not kidding). The film was convoluted, pompous and looked like something shot in the 1980s, complete with bad sound, camera jumps and travel footage of Turkey overused in all the wrong places.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Think Like a Dickinson

July 6, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry

I just finished reading The Editing of Emily Dickinson, A Reconsideration by R. W. Franklin and Emily Dickinson, The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi. Franklin's book turned out to be interesting in detailing the problems in publishing a complete edition of Emily Dickinson poems: she created so many different variations of many of her poems, scraps left unfinished and alternate word choices expressed on many of her original papers. Defining a final "author's intent" proved impossible.

Gelpi's book attempted to place Dickinson's mindset and evolving philosophies in the context of her struggles with Puritanism and the major thought-leaders of the day, New England's writers Emerson and Thoreau. But Gelpi also had interesting things to say about how a poet-creator self-defines and he included a laundry list of craft-techniques he felt made Dickinson unique.

Gelpi believed a poet could identify as one of three kinds of a creator:

a passive see-er
an assertive genius
a skilled craftsman

Gelpi's list of Dickinsonian craft, I feel, is useful to any poet who reads Dickinson or wants to add a flair of Emily to their work:

Use unique, fresh language
Use New England colloquialisms (or your local alternative)
Drop the S from the third-person singular of the present tense
Emphasize nouns by striking the articles
Use singular nouns where plurals are expected
Make parts of speech perform unorthodox functions
Coin words
Write in hymn stanzas (quatrains of short lines with 3-4 beats)
Use dots and dashes as breathing points
Use slant rhymes
Use mostly monosyllable words

Gelphi also surmised that Dickinson liked to exist in a constantly yearning state, never to have her desires fulfilled because, as Gelphi said, "Fulfillment is static; desire is a process."

Interesting food for thought.