Category: Craft (Page 2 of 17)

The Essay Project: Different Takes on the Prose Poem

July 21, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So there was this kind of event that happened at Sarah Lawrence when I was there where fellow poetry students would put out flyers for little gatherings outside of classes and workshops, like impromptu discussions. I went to two of them, (that I remember anyway). One was on making a living as a technical or business writer organized by the poet Ann Cefola. I never did persue a professional writing career, (as soon as I discovered I had quite limited amounts of creative energy reserves), but Ann I became friends at that event and have remained supportive colleagues ever since that day. The other gathering was organized by a poet named Karl. I still have his flyer: "The Common Table: The Prose Poem." A bit pretentious sounding but I was always curious about prose poems and how they diverged from fiction shorts or shock fiction. At this event we were to determine the borderlines were actually very fuzzy.

The flyer quotes Charles Baudelaire, (considered the first prose poet and the one who coined the term), and his preface from Petites Poemes en Prose about the "miracle of a poetic prose…supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses."

Oh la la. The flyer then goes on to talk about this "confounding form" that is not an "unstructured monster" but "subtle" and how "you know a prose poem when you find one."

Or write one. I have written many pieces over the years I consider somewhere inbetween prose poems or fiction shorts. I've also been known to perform prose-poem opportunism, like for this poem "Orgasmic Orange" which is truly a three stanza lyric poem but here is masquarading as a prose poem.

And then I have many, many poems that intially came out as prose but they don't seem rightly prose and so were changed into verses (sometimes going back and forth a few times to figure out what they really were). "Fortune" is a recent example of a poem that initially came out like a longish prose poem and then was shaped back into tighter verses. And I think "tight" or "loose" here are my personal keywords when determining which direction to go in.

But nobody seems to agree on what the rules or the tools are or how to define the prose poem.

There's an excerpt in this packet from Introduction to the Prose Poem: An International Anthology edited by Michael Benedikt who agrees we are "in the midst of" an exploration on what prose poetry is," a genre "self-consciously written in prose" and forgoing the device of the line break. He says a key word for him is "intense," and says the form has a structure with its "own independent internal logic…metaphor and analogy" using "a music more internal" and "subtle" where the "line is not present to underline musical effects."

He notes that some of "the major poets in verse" worked with prose poems toward the end of their careers "when their command of poetry and their sense of its possibilities were presumably at their most practiced and acute:" Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme and Valery.

The packet then includes a deep dive into Michael Benedikt's poem "The Meat Epitaph" and how he drafted versions. He was very organized and kept each draft coded in file folders! My notes on this section quote Princeton Encyclopedia's definition of the prose poem as a form of contractions that undermine the action, how over time, poetic devices have become less effective and what does a line by itself mean; often it contradicts the sentence it is in ," [which is what I've always liked about it].

Anyway, Benedikt talks about the contradiction he was working with in his poem: how an "impious human" can write "morally concerned…poetry without betraying either the impiousness of the Self or the seriousness of the subject."

Benedikt talks about aspects of his process and whether prose poetry is "freely associative" and how structure finds its way into free verse and what poetic divices are still in play in the prose poem but that prose poems often read with a kind of "flat" style and borrow qualities from the surrealists.

My marginalia from the conversation has extra definitions:

Self-consciously a poem in prose using poetic devices: sound, meter, repetition" [but short fiction can also do this]
"5 elements: (1) logic of the unconscious; (2) every day speech; (3) relativity, the idea that reality is questionable [more an idea of modernism really]; (4) wit and humor, black humor; (5) politically and socially skeptical, questioning of fixed ideas [again, modernism really]

We also talked about how pieces like "A Potato" by Robert Bly have a kind of fable-like quality, that these pieces are not always linear, not always "about something" or to "further some idea."

One question remains for me based on one note toward the end of the conversation: "form of prose poem is rectangle (box); pack only essentials."

Is this true? Or is there room for more superfluous storytelling in prose pieces than verse? Because usually when I convert something back into verse, a lot has to go and I shave out quite a bit. So are prose poems more economical than verse poems? In some ways they might need fewer words than a long-form poem but have more breathing room than a short lyric poem has or a haiku obviously.

Packet poems:

"Bloating and Its Remedies" by Jim Heynen
"Cows in Trouble" by Steve Martin (one of my favorite shorts/prose poems)
"The Meat Epitaph" by Michael Benedikt
"The Five Fingers of the Hand" by Aloysius Bertrand
"The Old Woman's Despair" by Charles Baudelaire
"The Sirens" by Franz Kafka
"The Victory Burlesk" by Margaret Atwood
"A Potato" by Robert Bly (another one of my favorites that I typed out here)
"The Wheelbarrow" by Russell Edison
"The Broken" by W. S. Merwin
"Vespers" by W. H. Auden
"Clocks" by Julio Cortazar
"Pretty" by Jayne Anne Phillips
"Laura's by Gunter Eich

At the meeting, Karl also provided a bulleted list of poets who have tried the form, a list which is too long to recreate here but here are some highlights not already mentioned above:

Charles Mallarme
Arthur Rimbaud
Juan Ramon Jimenez
William Carlos Williams
Jorge Luis Borges
Tomas Transtromer
Charles Simic
Pablo Neruda

I would add to this list:

Gertrude Stein (why does she always get left out of these things?)

The Essay Project: Childhood Trauma in Art

July 12, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The next essay is a bit of a departure from the other SLC class essays, It’s the preface and two chapters from The Untouched Key, Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness by Alice Miller (translated from German).

In the book, psychologist Miller explores the way childhood events affect paitners and writers and how she can see childhood influence in pieces of art. She considers these clues to works “lost keys.”

The first chapter is on Pablo Picasso, particularly his “late works in Basel” painted when “he was 90 years old.”

She talks about how he “disregarded all convention as well as his own technical ability and attained what he had wished or all his life: the spontaneity and freedom of a child, which his perfectionism robbed him of in childhood…I seemed to be sensing a man’s last strenuous efforts to express the most hidden secrets of his life with every means at his disposal before it’s too late, before death takes the brush from his hand.”

Miller says, “a great deal has been written about the sexual themes…attributed to his declining libido” but she feels the sorrow exhibited in his late work reaches back to childhood trauma and not “an aging man’s regrets at his waning sexual vitality.”

She sensed this, she says, from “the themes," “the force of the brush movements,” “the vehement way he sometimes applied the color and conjured up new feelings that had to be given form,” his “haste to produce the unsayable, to say it with colors.”

But then again, these things could indicate almost anything.

But Miller continues, “since the efficiency of defense mechanisms decreases in old age, since repression works with less ingenuity, it was possible, I thought, that traces of childhood trauma not evident before might become visible in his late works.”

And the trauma Miller explores was based on his intense “reluctance to go to school” which was presumed to have been caused by a 1884 earthquake in Málaga when he was three years old. His parents had to flee with the family and the stress of the escape possibly caused his mother to go into premature labor days later before the family could safely return home. She sees implicit support in a poem Picasso wrote in 1936 about a cacophony of screaming (children, women, birds, flowers, beams and stones, bricks, chairs, curtains…paper, etc.) Miller sees a visual depiction of the earthquake (as seen by a child) in Guernica (1937) with its “horror, terror, and helplessness…total destruction…he even painted himself over to the right as the bewildered child in the cellar.”

Miller says Picasso “always abandoned a style once he had developed it…but the theme of the distorted human body haunted him all his life.” She says “little children often express their traumas in a painting….it took forty years before he was able to paint like a child, that is, to let his unconscious speak.”

She admits most biographers gloss over Picasso’s childhood in total, and this earthquake’s significance in particular.

I’ve been exploring childhood myself (in some subconscious ways, too) so this was an interesting topic for me. But like all things, I half believe it and half don’t. She’s probably right in general but she simply doesn’t have enough evidence in Picasso’s case to make a definitive, convincing case; so she just rehashes the same arguments multiple times and across many pages as if rewording the few pieces of evidence will prove a theory to be true.

Very sketchy biographical information does not equate to threads drawn out from years of therapy. As a psychologist and psychoanalyst, Miller would know this.

In the other chapter included in the set, Miller talks about an exhibit of Chaïm Soutine. She draws parallels between the childhood's of Soutine and Hitler and how one man became an artist and the other a despot.

She talks about Soutine’s paintings filled with “strange, twisted, tormented figures…houses, streets, and squares…that looked as though they might start to quiver at any moment…I asked myself whether the extremely threatening situation of the Nazi Holocaust had motivated, or even compelled, Soutine to paint the work as shaking and falling apart.”

She talks about how Soutine and Hitler were both punished severely with “brute force” for wanting to become artists, Soutine because his family were Orthodox Jews and Hitler because his family was totalitarian. In Soutine’s case, he had an advocate in his mother which helped “him develop a sense of justice.” Hitler had no advocates.

Miller then goes on to talk about the childhood of Paul Celan and “the witnesses who rescued him” from his yard-locked life where “the world lies on the other side of the chestnut trees” and Dostoyevsky whose father “treated his serfs with such cruelty that in 1839 they murdered him” and Stalin and his childhood of extreme poverty not dissimilar to Charlie Chaplin's but whose “experience of being loved can be sensed in all the Chaplin films. In spite of hunger, misery, and calamity, there is always room for feelings, for tears, for tenderness, for life.”

Miller says, “the truth won’t allow itself to be silenced completely, even with the help of poetry, philosophy, or mystical experiences. It insists on being heard, like every child whose voice has not been completely destroyed.”

It’s possible these conclusions are too simple in the face of an annoyingly tangled and complex lives. But that doesn’t mean her ideas might not be on to some clues regarding these artworks or that we can’t use this to explore our own ideas and executions, to explore our own childhoods.

Over a year ago, my mother sent me a box of things she had collected from my childhood. Confronting that box was a bit shocking and eye-opening for me. It opened a door to my childhood that is still bearing fruit. And it also has me thinking about the ways in which childhood and young adult events are still shaping my behavior and reflections today.

The Essay Project: Three Haiku Masters

July 7, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The last time we discussed haiku we were working through 52 weeks of haiku meditations (and that seems like a lifetime ago!).

I have no idea where this little packet came from, I'm guessing not from the Sarah Lawrence essay class, if only because it's not an essay, but the introductory chapters of The Essential Haiku, Versions of Bashō, Buson and Issa by Robert Hass. It could have been distributed at a poetry conference workshop from somewhere or even from another class somewhere. Not sure. But it's in the essay stack now so…here we go.

Robert Hass did a lot of work to reinterpret the haiku tradition and this book has been a popular place to dig into haiku traditions.

The packet includes the full Introduction chapter and then the separate biographical pages introducing each poet, along with some curated poems from whomever put the little packet together. I’ve culled a smaller set in each section below.

All of these poets spent "years in travel, sleeping at monasteries and inns…[as] poet-wanderers…for whom travel and its difficulties were a form of freedom and a way of disciplining the mind…All three became teachers of poetry."

Hass explores three core Buddhist metaphysical ideas about nature:

Natural things are transient
They are full of dependencies
They suffer

Many of the season references reflected "a Japanese way of thinking about time and change." For example, snow itself had many associative meanings particular to Japanese culture having to do with exposure and bareness. Spiders were a "traditional mid-summer theme." Seasons gave "a powerful sense of a human place in the ritual and cyclical movement of the world. If the first level of a haiku is its location in nature, its second is almost always some implicit Buddhist reflection on nature. One of the striking differences between Christian and Buddhist thought is that in the Christian sense of things, nature is fallen, and in the Buddhist sense it isn't."

Hass explores three core Buddhist metaphysical ideas:

Natural things are transient
They are full of dependencies
They suffer

What appeals to us, Hass says, is the "quality of actuality, of the moment seized on and rendered purely, and because of this they seem to elude being either traditional images of nature or ideas about it….this mysteriousness…they don't generalize their images…mysteriousness of the images themselves." Hass quotes Roland Barthes in noting the poems' "breach of meaning" as post-modern objects, as "deconstructions and subverters of cultural certainties" and the "silence of haiku, its wordlessness."

Hass then talks about how in particular Zen Buddhism "provided [these poets] training in how to stand aside and leave the meaning-making activity of the ego to its own devices. Not resisting it, but seeing it as another phenomenal thing, like bush warblers and snow fall."

Individually, the poets break down like this:

Matsuo Bashō
(1644-1694)

Bashō was the calm ascetic and seeker who wrote what was then called hokku. Many of his poems dealt with "the transience of things" and "spiritual loneliness…profound loneliness and sense of suffering." His poetry centered on "a sense of sabi…loneliness, or aloneness, or the solitariness akin to no-mind, which gives intense concentration, and curious lightness, and a tragic sense to the work"

Bashō "insisted on poetry as a serious calling…that it amounted to years of immensely subtle thinking about how to give resonance and depth to the image"

He was credited with reinventing the form and studied Chines poetry, Taoism and Zen. One of his students brought him a gift of a banana tree (bashō) from which he took his name. In a big city fire in Endo, his house burned down.

"He thought about giving up poetry, but confessed that he couldn't do it."

Deep autumn–
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?

An autumn night–
don't think your life
didn't matter.

Even in Kyoto–
hearing the cuckoo's cry–
I long for Kyoto.

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.

First snow
falling
on the half-finished bridge.

Yosa Buson
(1716-1783)

Bunson was an artist of painterly precision who loved the of materials of art and color and the shape of things, according to Hass. He was a distinguished and successful painter and his poems Hass describes as painterly, "visually intense" with a "aesthetic detachment…in love with color. There is a sense in them also of the world endlessly coming into being."

Hass says Bunson’s haiku are like early poems of Wallace Stevens ("The Snowman" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.") Buson was critical of contemporary haiku masters and said:

"These days, those who dominate the kaikai world peddle their different styles, ridicule and slander everyone else, and puff themselves up with the title of master. They flaunt their wealth, parade their ignorance, and promote themselves by arranging their students' innumerable wretches verses in anthologies. Those who know better cover their eyes in embarrassment and are ashamed of such behavior."

So not much has changed.

Hass says scholars like to compare the objective Buson and the subjective Bashō.

Tethered horse;
snow
in both stirrups.

Coolness–
the sound of the bell
as it leaves the bell.

His Holiness the Abbot
is shitting
in the withered fields.

The mad girl
in the boat at midday;
spring currents.

Green plum–
it draws her eyebrows
together.

A gust of wind
whitens
the water birds.

The owner of the field
goes to see how his scarecrow is
and comes back.

Morning breeze
riffling
the caterpillar's hair.

Old well,
a fish leaps–
dark sound.

Escaped the nets,
escaped the ropes–
moon on the water.

The old man
cutting barley–
bent like a sickle.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky–
the moon steals it.

Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.

Kobayashi Issa
(1763-1827)

Issa was the humanist of pathos and humor and anger.

Issa means "a cup of tea" or "a single bubble in steeping tea." He has been described as "Whitman or Neruda in miniature" and has also been compared to Robert Burns and Charles Dickens with his "humor and pathos, the sense of a childhood wound, the willingness to be silly and downright funny, and the fierceness about injustice." He could also be "didactic and sentimental" but in his best work he was "quite unlike anyone else, the laughter cosmic, the sense of pain intense…with no defenses against the suffering in the world."

Like Buson, he was a Pure Land Buddhist and he could be "inclined to moralize" but that there is an "edge of rage in his poems, something very near cynicism." He often wrote about "the smallest creatures….flies, fleas, bedbugs, lice" and his work has been described as "countrified haikas" with "vernacular language" and "local slang."

As it happened his house also burned down.

Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

(For many years I had a NYC Metro placard with that poem on it, which I picked up one night from a stack of donated Metro posters at a poetry event in NYC.)

New Year's Day–
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
but slowly, slowly.

Under my house
an inchworm
measuring the joists.

I'm going out,
flies, so relax,
make love.

Even with insects–
some can sing,
some can't.

Don't know about the people,
but all the scarecrows
are crooked.

Blossoms at night,
and the faces of people
moved by music.

The gorgeous kite
rising
from the beggar's shack.

Cricket
chirping
in a scarecrow's belly.

Autumn evening–
it's no light thing
being born a man.

The holes in the wall
play the flute
this autumn evening.

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

Last time, I think,
I'll brush the flies
from my father's face.

Autumn moon–
a small boat
drifting down the tide.

Here,
I'm here–
the snow falling.

Insects on a bough
floating down river,
still singing.

The Essay Project: Creative Writing MFAs

June 29, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

It’s possible I sorted these essays together one day when putting them away or they’ve surreptitiously found each other in the stack like long-lost frenemies: “The Limited Value of Master’s Programs in Creative Writing” by Jay Parini from The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 1994) and “In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes” from the book The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. In any case, they were not submitted by the same students. I only know this because “Robert/Ray” is handwritten on the Hugo essay and not on the Parini essay. So this must have been an essay argument occuring within the essay class while we were all working our ways through the $$$ Sarah Lawrence MFAs in Creative Writing. It doesn’t surprise me that the “Robert/Ray” packet was in support of MFAs as the Robert refers to Robert Fanning, the poet who would go on to become a creative-writing professor.

Both make their case. Let’s start with Parini:

“How does one learn to become a writer? The answer now put forward by many universities—and one that that I must question—is: Enroll in a masters-of-fine-arts program in creative writing. The old answer, of course, was that you learned the writing trade in the marketplace, under conditions that forced a certain economy of style and fostered self-discipline.”

Parini mentions journalists like Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Updike. He also lists poets who had what we would think of as ordinary jobs: T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frost, and poets who found “shelter in universities and colleges” — Nabokov, Roethke, Saul Bellow, Malamud, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell. (Every respectable literature department needed to boast a famous writer after all.)

He says there's “nothing intrinsically wrong” with the “tour d’ivoire.” He quotes Saul Bellow in saying defensively, “the university is no more an ivory tower than Time magazine, with its strangely artificial approach to the world.”

Parini talks about the incompatibility between literature departments and creative writing programs that live within them, “hermetically sealed” where students “sign up in droves.” They do.

Parini asks an important question, “Is what students demand actually being supplied? If not, should universities be held responsible for failing to practice truth in advertising? Given the extra time and expense of master’s programs, I doubt the M.F.A. degrees in creative writing are generally worth the investment.”

Now Hugo will go on to argue that students don’t get what they demand, but they do get something valuable. Like Tom Lux on our first day at Sarah Lawrence when he told us quite brutally that the best we could hope to get out of the program would be a circle of friends who would be our lifelong readers.

Parini argues for writing classes at the undergraduate level instead (as where he teaches). He says in undergraduate writing classes are like piano lessons are to music appreciation. “There is something about actually trying one’s hand at a sonnet, for instance, that makes one appreciate exactly why Shakespeare’s are great.”

Great!

Parini says,

“Let us assume (generously) that a hundred people in any generation become poets whom someone might want to read a hundred years from now. That leaves a lot of others writing poetry for their own ‘self-development,’ as we say…[however] few students enter such programs for spiritual nourishment. They hope to improve as writers, to be sure, but they also want to get a leg up in a the world of publishing and…acquire a credential that will be of some use when they apply for a job as a teacher of creative writing.”

“An M.F.A may help someone find a good job once in a blue moon, but I would never send one of my undergraduates on for the degree…so that he/she might wind up employed as a teacher of creative writing. Such advise would be tantamount to malpractice, since the chances of [them] finding employment in this field are minimal.”

And do the programs even produce good work? No, Parini says, they produce

“perfectly competent but essentially uninspired poems, stories and novels…often between hard covers…selected by prize committees established by the M.F.A. programs themselves, so that their graduates can have an outlet for their work…It may well be that graduate study in creative writing actually damages potentially good writers, making them too aware of what is fashionable and too fearful of developing in the idiosyncratic ways that make for genuine originality, if not greatness, in a writer.”

Learning to write, Parini says, “takes a lifetime, as it is always difficult, and the rewards are ultimately personal. All that matters in the end is that you find a language adequate to experience, and that is terribly hard to do.”

Next we move on to Richard Hugo’s chapter of defense in The Triggering Town. I think it’s mildly interesting that Richard and Ray thought to put their names on the essay but not Hugo’s. If you have The Triggering Town (which lots of poets do), I guess it’s considered self-explanatory.

Hugo says Ezra Pound successfully taught Eliot, Williams, Hemingway and Yeats and says it’s just a fact of life, “as long as people writer, there will be creative-writing teachers. It’s nice to be on the payroll again after a century or more of going unemployed.”

And like Parini, Hugo draws some stark differences between literature/English departments (which are so critical and expository) and creative writing classes. He says lit departments take good writing for granted and often produce theoretical papers with very poor writing (if you’re a nerdy member of JSTOR you know this for sure). “I’ve seen sentences that defy comprehension written by people with doctorates in English from our best universities.”

Good reading and good writing can be related, Hugo says, but are not always related. Creative writing “feeds off its own impulse….sometimes I talk about a triggering subject…the impulse to the poem” but there's also “a genuine impulse to write…so deep and volatile it needs no triggering device” (no reading to inspire its creativity), nothing but an “urge to search [that comes] from need, and that remains mysterious…”

Hugo sees actual “contempt for good writing among some scholars…common to hear a published scholar who wrote clearly referred to as a popularizer.” Writing, Hugo says, is not a “natural reward of study.” It takes work and practice.

“We creative writers are privileged because we can write declarative sentences and we can write declarative sentences because we are less interested inbeing irrefutably right than we are in the dignity of language itself…to use language well requires self-sacrifice, even giving up pet ideas.” We are “cavalier intellectuals” and “scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.”

In direct contradiction of Parini, Hugo says he has about 40 ex-students “now publishing” and that many teachers can list more than that.

Hugo is a bit worried though: “I’m not sure the sudden popularity of creative-writing courses is a privilege. It may be our ruination. It is becoming a sore point in English departments. The enrollment in creative writing increases and the enrollment in literature courses is going down. I‘m not sure why and I’m not sure the trend is healthy.”

He says many theorize this is due to “the narcissism of students, the egocentric disregard of knowledge, the laziness, the easy good grades to be had in the writing courses.”

“If I had to limit myself to one criticism of academics it would be this: they distrust their responses. They feel that if a response can’t be defended intellectually, it lacks validity. One literature professor I know was asked as he left a movie theater if he had liked the movie, and he replied, ‘I’m going to have to go home and think about it.’ What he was going to think about is not whether he liked the movie, but whether he could defend his response to it. If he decided he couldn’t, presumably he’d hide his feelings or lie about them. Academics like these, and fortunately they are far from all the academics, give students the impression that there’s nothing in literature that could be of meaningful personal interest….

I still consider academic professors indispensable to an English department. Whatever the curses of creative writing, it is still a luxury. If there’s a choice between dropping Shakespeare studies or advanced poetry writing, I would not defend retention of the writing course.”

He then lists problems of graduate writing programs, including how to judge students for acceptance, “I think Yeats was right when he observed that what comes easy for the bad poet comes with great difficulty for the good” and that “a piece of writing is a hard thing to judge” and “most writers haven’t learned to submit to their obsessions” at that level.

And here is the meat of his argument where he explains what programs can do: “A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time. Writing is tough, and many wrong paths can be taken…we teach writers to teach themselves how to write.”

One of my favorite paragraphs was this:

“It is a small thing, but it is also small and wrong to forget or ignore lives that can use a single microscopic moment of personal triumph. Just once the kid with the bad eyes hit a home run in an obscure sandlot game. You may ridicule the affectionate way he takes that day through a life drab enough to need it, but please stay the hell away from me.”

He then makes a good case for narcissism (at least against a dehumanizing system):

“You are someone and you have a right to your life. Too simple? Already covered by the Constitution? Try to find someone who teaches it. Try to find a student who knows it so well he or she doesn’t need it confirmed.”

“In the thirty-eight years…I’ve seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and bad politics and odd court decisions that our lives don’t matter [This was published in 1979]…modern life says that with so many of us we can best survive by ignoring identity and acting as if individual differences do not exsit. Maybe the narcissism academics condemn in creative writers is but a last reaching for a kind of personal survival. Anyway, as a sound psychoanalyst once remarked to me dryly, narcissism is difficult to avoid. When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do. A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. Your life matters, all right. It is all you’ve got for sure, and without it you are dead…Oblivion needs no help from us.”

I will pay off my 30k Sarah Lawrence creative writing MFA shortly. But then I chose Sarah Lawrence for its proximity to New York City. Was it worth it? Possibly. It did change my life in ways that are still unfolding. Do I wish it had been cheaper? Definitely but then I haven’t exactly had to starve myself paying it off. Are my parents disappointed in my creative writing MFA (that I paid for) and the much cheaper English BA (they paid for). They unfortunately are.

But here is where I would quote Philip Levine (who I’m in the middle of a long journey through) from his essay “Class With No Class.” He talks about not following the family business like his twin brother did and his mother’s joking admonitions that his life has proven the case for social mobility (in a downward sense). I agree with Levine whole-heartedly, especially where he talks about ‘blessed time.’

“I am pleased I did not fulfill the expectations of my class…my years in the working class were merely a means of supporting my own. My life in the working class was intolerable only when I considered the future and what would become of me if nothing were to come of my writing. In once sense I was never working-class, for I owned the means of production, since what I hoped to produce were poems and fictions. In spite of my finances I believe I was then freer than anyone else in this chronicle.

In order to marry and plunder a beautiful and wealthy woman I did not have to deny I was a Jew; for the sake of my self-esteem I did not have to reign like a chancellor over my family and my servants; in order to maintain my empire I did not have to fuel it with years of stifling work; in order to insure my legacy I did not have to drive my sons into the hopelessness of imitating my life.

Of course it meant years of living badly, without security or certainty, what I have called elsewhere ‘living in the wind,’ but it also meant I could take my time, I could take what Sterling Brown called my ‘blessed time,’ because after all, along with myself, it was the only thing I had.”

Creative writing programs are, in no small sense, buying time. And I’m often saying I value this blessed writing time above money, so much so that it’s the only thing I’ve ever stolen.

The Essay Project: Art Has Taken a Life

June 20, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This is an interesting little essay that kind of messed with my head yesterday. It looks like it was an essay from a long-time writing group I’ve been in from college and not the essay class of Suzanne Gardinier. I can only tell from the marginalia notes. One member has noted that this is Chapter Eleven from Muriel Rukeyser's book The Life of Poetry. Another person has noted the essay is dense and annoying, from a fascinating book but not warm and inspiring. At the end another member of the group said they had to work too hard to get there.

Even I joined in saying Rukeyser sounded "so full of herself" and "what does it all 'mean?" I've added a new note on re-reading this essay 25 years later: "so was I apparently." [What a shit!]

The interesting thing about this group is how stranded I feel from the other members. In a recent experience, we were reading a Haruki Murakami book that just blew me away and moved me a great deal and before the group met to discuss the book, I discussed it with my old boss and friend Kalisha (who has worked with me on some recent poetry projects and who picked the book as one of her favorites books last year). I told her I anticipated, with some heartache, that my group would not like this book. We had come to appreciate books very differently and I wondered if this was because my life experiences had been different than theirs or if, like for this particular book, maybe you had to live through something similarly difficult and painful (something hard to write about). Could someone appreciate his nuanced take on tangled love relationships without having felt them? Which is not to say members of the group haven’t felt love pain in relationships, but maybe just not Murakami’s particular type of relationships or maybe not a pain of just loving, but a pain of loving and being loved. I'm not sure where the disconnect is, but it's somewhere in there.

And just what I expected happened. The members were unenthused about the book. One of the them called the book flat linguistically and emotionally. Which is the opposite of what I experienced. I then went back to Kalisha to report that I felt maybe some human subtlety had been missed because I found it all very moving and piercing. Kalisha said, "Yeah, I found the muted, emotionally detached aspects of the characters touching and often devastating. He does that so well."

And now I can’t help continuing to feel a bit like an outcast in the group since I agreed with them 25 years ago when I read this essay here for the first time and today it seems painfully clear to me.

The essay is about the exchange of energy between people who write and read poetry.

"Exchange is creation. In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions…the gift that is offered and received…"

I'm sure 25 years ago I was like WTF does that even mean? Today I'm somewhat awestruck by the idea.

"…the symbols themselves are in motion…we have the charge, flaming along the path from its reservoir to the receptive target. Even that is not enough to describe the movement of reaching a work of art."

Rukeyser talks about how how poetry (and all arts) have become compartmentalized and intellectualized:

"We have used the term 'mind' and allowed ourselves to be trapped into believing there was such a thing, such a place, such a locus of forces. We have used the word 'poem' and now the people who live by division quarrel about 'the poem as object.' They pull it away from their own lives, from the life of the poet, and they attempt to pull it away from its meaning, from itself…prepared to believe there was such a thing as Still Life. For all things change in time; some are made of change itself, and the poem is one of these. It is not an object; the poem is a process."

She quotes Charles Peirce in saying, "All dynamical action [dynamical?], or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects…or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs."

Rukeyser corrects this to say a poem is a "triadic relation. It can never be reduced to a pair…[but is instead] the poet, the poem and the audience."

And then she goes on to define what she thinks of as 'audience' as 'reader' or 'listener' or better yet 'witness' with its

"overtone of responsibility in this word…not present in the others; and the tension of the law makes a climate here which is that climate of excitement and revelation giving air to the work of art, announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done of the self. These three terms of relationship–poet, poem and witness–are none of them static. The relationships are the meanings, and we have very few of the words for them."

She's trying to locate where poetry is here, where it is located, not in the words but in the relationships between readers and writers.

She talks about the oddness of personality tests, Rorschach tests (which since this essay have been fully discredited). She says that instead we need a test where "we could begin to see how changing beings react to changing signs–how the witness receives the poem."

It's like stepping outside a very limiting matrix. She says we are like a "juvenile learner at the piano, just relating one note to that which immediately precedes or follows. To an extent this may be very well when one is dealing with very simple and primitive compositions; but it will not do for an interpretation of a Bach fugue."

She talks about how the witness of a poem is "the entire past of the individual" and how the reader experiences a poem with their entire past.

She talks about running a workshop with a group of students where they try to locate where a poem exists. She has them start with a blank piece of paper "with its properties and possibilities." She talks about the "process of reaching a conclusion." She asks a volunteer poet to create a poem "on the spot" in their head, to remember it and recite it to the group. Then the poet leaves the room to write the poem down on paper in the hallway. So the group has heard an early, unwritten version of the poem. She then asks the class whether a poem has occurred and where the poem exists? What is the poem made of, what material?

The student poet returns and reads the poem as composed on the paper. It was remarkably similar, Rukeyser says, maybe one word was different. Then she asks the poet to tear up their poem into small bits. "Now where is the poem?" she asks.

The group thinks the poem lives in the imagination of the poem and the group. Rukeyser asks if the poet had died in the hallway, would there have been a poem?

"We have all gone through an experience," Rukeyser says. "We have seen something comes into existence."

So it was here that I stopped reading for a while. Rarely do I finish an essay in one or two sittings or days. But after putting this essay down, my mind was hot with an idea that I didn't know where to place. So I wrote this:

This is going to make me sound crazy but I feel I am in the middle of something bigger than I can fully comprehend yet, something powered by art and words and music and feelings and technology. It’s come to feel like a whirling cyclone of all those things; and one of its most amazing features is that it's unfolding right out in the open and nobody knows it's happening.

Rukeyser is saying that art is life and that possibly a life of the mind is not a full life, one that is missing the electricity of feeling and, most essentially, its feedback [feedback is actually a word Rukeyser will use later in the essay].

Most creative people I know (including once myself) tend to compartmentalize life and art and relationships, as if art is a reflection of this or that, a commentary to the side, appreciated as distinct experiences with distinct goals and motives. But when you see them all binding up together in your own life, it's shocking and you are no longer able to discern the borderlines.

Life and art are directing each other and technologies are getting tangled up in there.

This definitely refers back to my struggles with the writing group and not all of us being able to see similar things happening in the same piece of writing. Not everyone can see it. Which is, on one level, very crazy-making. But on another level its what Rukeyser is talking about, something that is happening not on paper or in a text, something not in any one thing but in a realtionship between certain writers and witnesses.

And you have to get to the other side of the phenomenon to understand it.

Yeah, so those were my notes to myself halfway through re-reading this yesterday. Now we continue with Rukeyser:

"The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form…the process has very much unconscious work in it." [I feel like a lot of my work of late has had plenty of unconscious aid as well.]

She talks about various 'surfacings': (1) the initial idea "which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off…meaning;” (2) another deep dive, stillness; (3) making notes of images, a first line, final self-work; (4) the actual writing; and then you change to a witness to do the (5) rounds of editing.

"We know that the poetic strategy, if one may call it that, consists in leading the memory of an unknown witness, by means of rhythm and meaning and image and coursing sound and always-unfinished symbol, until in a blaze of discovery and love, the poem is taken. This is the music of the images of relationship, its memory and its information."

That is…like crazy.

She then quotes Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics [whom we've just been talking about discussing digital poetry!] who talks about "problems of entropy and equilibrium…and she talks about some stuff about particles and containers that is above my head, but she brings it back to poetry:

"Now a poem, like anything separable and existing in time, may be considered a system, and the changes taking place in the system may be investigated. The notion of feedback, as it is used in calculating machines and such linked structures as the locks of the Panama Canal, is set forth. The relations of information and feedback in computing systems and the nervous system, as stated here, raise other problems. What are imaginative information and imaginative feedback in poetry? How far do these truths of control and communication apply to art? The questions are raised…like Proust's madeleine, still setting challenges to the sciences."

I can't fully get my head around all of that, but I can see clearly that technology and feedback are a big part of it. And human technology.

"The only danger is in not going far enough," Rukeyser says. "The usable truth here deals with changes. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility."

I mean.

"If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion and several kinds of death. All we can be sure of is that our art has life in time, it serves human meaning, it blazes on the night of the spirit; all we can be sure of is that at our most subjective we are universal; all we can be sure of is the profound flow of our living tides of meaning, the river meeting the sea in eternal relationship, in a dance of power, in a dance of love. For this is the world of light and change: the real world; and the reality of the artist is the reality of the witness."

Oy vey. And I didn't realize this yesterday when I read the essay but last week I wrote a poem after a visit to Chama, New Mexico, for a future print book. It's a poem about "living tides of meaning, the river meeting the sea" (!) another magical spark of serendipity that has occured in this essay that is a bit astonishing. I'll preview it here:

If You Want To Know

If you want to know where I’m going,
I’m going with the river.

I will not be pulling out water with a bucket.
I will not be swimming upstream like a salmon.

If you want to know,
I’m going with the river.

I won’t be standing on the bank like a bystander,
(Well, I mean maybe literally but not figuratively).

If you want to know, I’m going with the river
and at the end we will come to the ocean

and the ocean will push us back, push us back,
push us back until we are ready,

until the ocean is ready
and then we will be gone.

It's getting very hard to distinguish between art and life (and essays about life and art) right now.

The Essay Project: How Modernism Has Given Us Who We Are

June 16, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Incredibly this is our 54th essay!

I haven't done an essay in a few weeks because this particular essay took forever to read. Partially this was because I had company coming and I only clean the house before company comes so it took a while to get the house up to my mother's standards even though she's not the company coming.

Then there was the dry, academic essay itself. Then there was the fact that the Sarah Lawrence student who photocopied it from a book back in the early 1990s didn't notice there were unreadable words at the bottom of every page due to their bad copying job. (It was also maddingly stapled so that you have no idea which direction you should be going turning pages). This didn't stop me from reading it, however. It just made me stop after every three pages and take a brain rest.

The essay is an introduction called "The Idea of the Modern" by Irving Howe, most likely from his book The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts (1968). And it is good summary of what modernism is. But the essay was very interesting to me for another reason.

First I want to say there's always been something that has bothered me about modernism and I've never been able to put my finger on it (its un-scalability??) Although I did (as I was taught to) love many of its practitioners. I've felt this way for as long as I've known what modernism is/was (I think like we're still obsessed with it), going back to college or back to when we read "Prufrock" in high school.

I absolutely cannot read this essay and not think about the vitriol of politics today and how what was once a modernist fringe point of view has become a mainstream way of thinking. So the challenge for today's essay is to read it on two levels: (1) historical modernism and (2) listening for things you've heard people say on Twitter, Facebook or protest rally signs or the crazy Uncle or Aunt narc-splaining at holiday dinners or wherever you hear these basically nihilistic spews.

This is en example of how dry the thing is:"…historical categories are helplessly imprecise and that the unified style or sensibility to which they presumably refer are shot through with contradictions."

Any sentence with contains the phrase "to which they presumably refer" is a little soul crushing. But we slog on! Because we're literary warriors!

Another one, "Historical complexity and confusions are seldom to be overcome by linguistic policing." Who could argue with that? Except the linguistic police. "…the important thing is not to be 'definitive' which by the very nature of things is unlikely, but to keep ideas in motion, the subject alive."

I actually agree with the sentence but I've spent no small time wondering about how 'the nature of things' works.

The whole essay is about the "sensibility" and signs of modernity, which "seems willfully inaccessible" with its "unfamiliar forms" and "subjects that disturb the audience" and "threaten its most cherished statements."

This is what we like about it, it's revolution and irreverence. From 2022, however, we have what I would call 'mercenary modernists.' They don't care about the struggle. They're professional disturbers and threateners. In some cases they've picked a side to work for and they don't even know what the issues of the struggle are. Or in some cases, they're just trying to draw focus back to themselves for purely narcissistic reasons.

This is why we can't have nice, revolutionary things right now. Think about the caricature of the angry white male (or female) in America as you read the rest of this.

"The prevalent style of perception and feeling….is a revolt against the prevalent style, an unyielding rage against the official order."

"A modernist culture soon learns to respect, even to cherish, sigs of its division. It sees doubt as a form of health."

"It cultivates, in Thomas Mann's phrase, 'a sympathy for the abyss.' It strips man of his systems of belief and his ideal claims, and then proposes the one uniquely modern style of salvation: a salvation by, of, and for the self."

Wow.

"Subjectivity becomes the typical condition of the modernist outlook. In it's early stages, when it does not trouble to disguise its filial dependence on the romantic poets, modernism declares itself an inflation of the self, a transcendental and orgiastic aggrandizement of matter and event in behalf of personal vitality…freedom, compulsion, caprice."

"Modernism thereby keeps approaching–sometimes even penetrating–the limits of solipsism."

There you go. He just said it. And then goes on to quote a prediction from Herman Hesse:

"a whole generation caught…between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence." And Howe emphasizes, "Above all, no simple acquiescence." Howe says this "posits a blockage, if not an end, to history."

"The consequences are extreme: a break-up of the traditional untiy and continuity of Western culture, so that the decorum of its past no longer count for very much in determining its present, and a loosening of those ties that, in one or another way, had bound it to the institutions of society over the centuries."

That doesn't seem all bad though, right? Some of that traditional unity was kind of sexist and racist. But there's that scary law of unintended consequences…

"Culture now goes to war against itself, partly in order to salvage its purpose and the result is that it can no longer present itself with Goethian serenity and wholeness. At one extreme, there is a violent disparagement of culture (the late Rimbaud), and at the other, a quasi-religion of culture (the late Joyce). In much modernist literature, one finds a bitter impatience with the whole apparatus of cognition and limiting assumption of rationality. The mind comes to be seen as the enemy of vital human powers. Culture becomes disenchanted with itself, sick over its endless refinements. There is a hunger to break past the bourgeois proprieties and self-containment of culture, toward a form of absolute personal speech, a literature deprived of ceremony and stripped to revelation. In the work of Thomas Mann, both what is rejected and what is desired are put forward with a high, ironic consciousness: the abandoned ceremony and the corrosive revelation."

I'm getting exhausted reading this.

"But if a major impulse of in modernist literature is a choking nausea before the idea of culture, there is another in which the writer takes upon himself the enormous ambition not to remake the world (by now seen as hopelessly recalcitrant and alien) but to reinvent the terms of reality."

Here we go. We are there. Politicians are doing this as we speak.

"…the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs has charged, "modernism despairs of human history, abandons the idea of a linear historical development, falls back upon notions of a universal condition humane or a rhythm of eternal recurrence, yet within its own realm is committed to ceaseless change, turmoil and recreation."

Ceaseless change, turmoil and recreation. In business-speak this is called 'disruption." It makes me so tired I need to go lay down for 30 minutes.

Ok I'm back. Howe says, "…always the hope for still another breakthrough, always the necessary and prepared for dialectical leap into still another innovation." The "predictable summit…violates the modernist faith in surprise" so "culture must all the more serve as the agent of a life-enhancing turmoil."

And then we have our modernist ideas of the artist, the Genius,

"…declares Hegel in a sentence which thousands of critics, writers and publicists will echo through the years, 'it must be the public that is to blame…the only obligation the artist can have is to follow truth and his genius."

Stick a fork in it.

Modernism, Howe says, is devoted to raising questions, not answers. "We represent ourselves, we establish our authenticity, by the questions we allow to torment us." We embrace uncertainty, "the makeshifts of relativism" because "men should live in discomfort." He quotes Eugene Zamyatin: "Revolution is everywhere and in all things; it is infinite, there is no final revolution, no end to the sequence of integers."

He then lists some basic attributes of modernism:

Rise of the avant-garde as a special caste
"an avant-garde marked by aggressive defensiveness, stigmata of alienation….Bohemia both as enclave of protection within a hostile society and as a place from which to launce guerrilla raids upon the bourgeois establishment, frequently upsetting but never quite threatening its security…the avant-garde scorns notions of 'responsibility' toward the audience; it raises the question of whether the audience exists, of whether it should exist."

It's a ready made pose for any artist seeking their artist otufit. So convenient and attractive. Just speaking for myself. But here's the thing, the bourgeois have adopted it and contorted it and now here we are.

Howe goes on to say as much, "the avant-garde writer or artist must confront the one challenge for which he has not been prepared: the challenge of success. Contemporary society is endlessly assimilative, even if it tames and vulgarizes what it has learned, sometimes foolishly…the avant-garde is thereby no longer allowed the integrity of opposition or the coziness of sectarianism; it must either watch helplessly its gradual absorption into the surrounding culture or try to preserve its distinctiveness by continually raising the ante of sensation and shock."
The problem of belief
"Weariness sets in, and not merely with this or that other belief, but with the whole idea of belief. Through the brilliance of its straining, the modern begins to exhaust itself."
Self-sufficiency of the work
a move "toward an art severed from common life an experience…The Symbolists, as Marcel Raymond remarks, share with the Romantics a reliance upon the epiphany….For the Symbolist poet…illumination occurs only through the action of the poem…And thereby the Symbolist poet tends to become a magus, calling his own reality into existence and making poetry into what Baudelaire called 'suggestive magic.'"
The idea of esthetic order is abandoned
"it downgrades the value of esthetic unity in behalf of even a jagged and fragmented expressiveness" because "formal unity implies an intellectual and emotional, indeed a philosophic composure; it assumes that the artist stands above his material, controlling it…After Kafka it becomes hard to believe not only in answers but in endings."

Or feelings.
Nature ceases to be a central subject
Nature becomes an idea, a "token of deprivation," a "sign of nostalgia."
Perversity–which is to say surprise, excitement, shock, terror, affront–becomes a dominant motif.
"The modernist writer strives for sensations…he has little use for wisdom."
Primitivism
"Sophistication narrowing into decadence–this means primitivism will soon follow. The search for meaning through extreme states of being reveals a yearning for the primal….the turning upon one's primary characteristics, the hatred of one's gifts, the contempt for intelligence, which cuts through the work of men so different as Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, and Hart Crane….is always haunted by the problem of succession: what, after such turnings and distinctions of sensibility, can come next?"
A new sense of character
"Character for modernists like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, is regarded not as a coherent, definable, and well-structured entity, but as a psychic battlefield, or an insoluble puzzle, or the occasion for a flow of perceptions and sensations…into a stream of atomized experiences, a kind of novelistic pointillism."

The hero's struggle is a lack of belief in anything. "In Hemmingway's novels, the price of honor is often a refusal of the world. In Malfaux's novels, the necessity for action is crossed by a conviction of its absurdity."

Is this why we see such a lack of the heroic in our current culture? Our movies are filled with superheroes that don't seem to translate into heroic actions in real life. Maybe this because we have a subterranean disbelief in heroism and "the meaninglessness of the human scheme" and "the joke of progress."

And in the end, ourselves.

Howe quotes D.H. Lawrence, "I am weary even of my individuality, and simply nauseated by other people's."
Nihilism, boredom
"Dostoevsky tries to frighten…by saying that once God denied, everything terrible has become possible. Nietzsche give the opposite answer, declaring that from the moment man believes neither in God nor immortality, 'He becomes responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life."

I'm with that last guy.

"Nihilism lies at the center of all that we mean by modernist literature, bothe as subject and symptom."

Ok, so that's all very heavy and depressing. But Howe predicts a kind of vague end to all of it. "How do great cultural movements reach their end? It is a problem our literary historians have not sufficiently examined, perhaps because beginnings are more glamourous."

What will end modernism, Howe says in his closing sentence, is "the kind of savage parody which may indeed be the only fate worse than death."

Fingers crossed. Taking another nap now.

Ellipsis, Joan Didion and Me

June 13, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This recent Atlantic article by Caitlin Flanagan, originally entitled "Chasing Joan Didion," was interesting to me in that it was both a fan account as Flanagan visited the places Didion had once lived and, in moments, an illuminating description of what Didion does best.

Like this, for example:

“This is Joan Didion’s magic trick: She gets us on the side of ‘the past’ and then reveals that she’s fully a creature of the present. The Reagans’ trash compactor is unspeakable, but Jerry Brown’s mattress is irresistible.”

And this,

“People from the East often say that Joan Didion explained California to them. Essays have described her as the state’s prophet, its bard, its chronicler. But Didion was a chronicler of white California. Her essays are preoccupied with the social distinctions among three waves of white immigration: the pioneers who arrived in the second half of the 19th century; the Okies, who came in the 1930s; and the engineers and businessmen of the postwar aerospace years, who blighted the state with their fast food and their tract housing and their cultural blank slate.”

Since I am very different from Joan Didion, I often wonder what appeals to me about her. Flanagan is seeking a similar objective in this essay. For me I think one thing is Didion’s hardline, constant re-evaluating of her family history (especially its myths and legends) which, like mine, seems inseparable from her family state’s very history:

“In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, there’s an essay called “Notes From a Native Daughter”—which is how Joan Didion saw herself. It’s generally assumed that she began to grapple with her simplistic view of California history only much later in life, in Where I Was From. But in this first collection, she’s beginning to wonder how much of her sense of California is shaped by history or legend—by stories, not necessarily accurate, that are passed down through the generations.”

And a certain aura around her in the idea of writing being a performance:

“Heading to the seminar that most freighted and engaged her: the writing class of the great Mark Schorer, whom I knew very well when I was growing up. He was a very kind person and also a peerless literary critic, and he found in Didion’s early work evidence not just of a great writer. 'One thinks of the great performers—in ballet, opera, circuses,' he said. 'Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything'…

Her grand achievements:

For years it was known as the greatest leaving–New York essay of all time. It’s about the revolving door, the way you can arrive there young, innocent, and new, but the very process of adapting to the city will coarsen and age you.”

And in this famous first line,

“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

As Flanagan says, “Everyone who loves Joan Didion remembers that sentence—the shock of it, the need to race back up to the top of the essay to see if you’d missed something. ‘I had better tell you where I am, and why,’…When I fell in love with Joan Didion, it was just the two of us and all of those electric sentences, and that was enough.”

Flanagan also talks about how this aspect of performance felt empowering for women:

“She was in Berkeley as a Regents’ Lecturer, and because my father was then the chair of the English department, he was sort of serving as her host. She came to our house for dinner, and she hardly said a word. But a week or so later, when my father said, 'There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,' that got my attention. Apparently, her office hours—usually the most monastic of an academic’s life—were being mobbed. Not just by students; by women from the Bay Area who had heard she was there and just wanted to see her. All of these women felt that Slouching Towards Bethlehem had changed them.

It wasn’t a book that was supposed to change anyone. Not only because that was by no means Joan Didion’s intent, but also because—look at the subjects. How can an essay about Alcatraz (as an attractive, mostly deserted place, not as a statement on either incarceration or the land theft perpetrated against California’s Indian tribes); an essay about a baby’s first birthday party; a forensic investigation of the marital tensions that led Lucille Miller to kill her husband—how can all of those add up to something life-changing?

Because in 1968, here was a book that said that even a troubled woman, or a heartbroken woman, or a frightened woman could be a very powerful person. In “Why I Write”—which was, in fact, the Regents’ Lecture—she famously described writing as an act of aggression, in which a writer takes control of a reader and imposes her own opinions, beliefs, and attitudes on that reader. A woman could be a hostage-taker, and what she held you hostage to were both shocking public events and some of the most interior and delicate thoughts a woman can have. This woman with the vanda orchid in her hair and her frequent states of incapacitation could put almost anyone under her power.”

Flanagan relates this back to her own childhood:

“I had no power growing up, but I did have books and ideas, and I could be funny. I know I could have ended up being a magazine writer without ever having that chance experience. But what Joan Didion taught me was that it didn’t matter that I had such a messy, unenviable life—I could sit down, all alone, and write enough drafts to figure out what I thought about something and then punch it out into the culture.”

Although I'm sure the idea of power through writing would have sounded appealing, there were instead for me very specific rhetorical devices of Didion's style that just seeped into my writing almost unawares, such as her use of ellipses, not just those little three dots at the end of a thought but, as Oxford dictionary defines it, "the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues."

Or as others call it, Didion's

ellipses and evasions
ellipsis charged with irony
a certain calculated ellipsis
“Her art has always been," says Joyce Carol Oates, "one of understatement and indirection, of emotion withheld."

In Joan Didion, Sentence and Style, Kathleen M. Vandenberg goes into some detail about the ellipsis thing:

“Writing, Didion notes, is ‘an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding, rather than stating.”

In 2005, Didion described her process as “discovering what’s on my mind and then hiding it.”

Why would she do that? There’s a whole chapter on women doing this kind of subterfuge in Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia Ostriker, a chapter which is all about male/female power dynamics and I’m assuming Didion was caught up in this very thing from her own mythologizing of male power, trying to write around it, and her ideas about her own ‘fragility.’

Vandenberg says as she wrote about politics, “she focused on the use of language as ‘an obscuring device’” and her writing is often about the “rhetoric of gaps” which occurs as a “deliberate withholding of interpretation and commentary at the level of the sentence.” Vanderberg shows examples of connected sentences without and transitional words or phrases in between. And she explains how Didion's various grammatical tricks gives us the impression that Didion’s voice is “both forceful and understated.”

It’s hard to know where our influences come from. As Charles de Gaulle once said, "Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life." All I know is I enjoyed reading Didion’s reserve and evasion just as much as I enjoy my own.

So it would seem to follow…

But late in her life Didion herself felt it was her writerly evasion that possibly wrote her self. And she tells us this with predictable understatement that is not quite a warning but a matter of fact:

“I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or who I have become.”

In any case, I don’t believe writing is all that powerful in that it can forcibly change another's mind like a hostage. Although I do think there is a level of intimacy in making the attempt to change a mind.

Rather, for me, Vanderberg gets to the crux of the truth right here:

“What is withheld, what is omitted, is in many ways more powerful than what is present…her reflections on pivotal moments are inevitably pared down, set in sentences deceptively short and simple given the complexity and weight they are meant to convey”

The unsaid develops a certain power like a vaccuum of air.

Toward the end of the book, Vanderberg quotes the end of Didion's book Blue Nights which deals with the death of her only daughter, a poem-like string of sentences that are full of many typical Didion rhetorical strategies, including ellipsis:

“Go back into the blue.
I myself placed her ashes in the wall.
I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.
I know what it is I am now experiencing.
I know what the frailty is. I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
You may see nothing still to be lost.
Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”

Digital Poetry: More Predictions and the OuLiPo

May 31, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So plugging along with The New Media Reader. The computer-prediction essays are getting a little bit tiresome but we have a few more to slog through. Some of these predictions of automation now seem a bit sad, especially reading from the tired, old future.

"Augmenting Human Intellect" by Douglas Engelbart" (1962) https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/

Englebart divides new media concepts into:

Artifacts or objects.
Language symbols/concepts
Mythologies/strategies
Training ("to be operationally effective")….geez, sounds so chilly when you say it that way.

Englebart came up with ideas of the computer mouse, application windows, the idea for the word processor and he helped establish the Internet and video conferencing. He is called "one of the great inventors of the 20th Century."

This paper is about rethinking how we organize information and he talks a lot about note cards, sorting links, concept packets and the serial progression of ideas not being how the human mind really works. Our brains are more of a scrambled, interconnected, linking tangle (aint that the truth). The human mind wanders down paths and crisscrosses itself. Engelbart takes us through how the mind diagrams a sentence or scans complex statements.

He also talks about how hard it is to get people to see how hard-wired they are in doing things in a certain way. And that changes doesn't come as a big shift, but in lots of little shifts we make. You have to wait to see a big impressive change. He believes the computer can help us "add-up" to something impressive.

"Sketchpad" by Ivan E. Sutherland (1963)
http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/sutherland%20(1963)%20sketchpad.%20a%20man-machine%20graphical%20communication%20system.pdf

This article basically predicts much of what became Photoshop.

"The Construction of Change" by Roy Ascott (1964)
https://www.academia.edu/740569/The_construction_of_change

Acsott was first to use the word cybernetics and this is one of the first essays about new media art. Ascott goes back to the 1960s happenings which he says felt more like taking part in rituals and an interaction that was 1:1. He sees the participation in new media art differently, as "loops of creative activity…fusion of art, science, personality." He differentiates between the act of making art and the end result and how happenings and new media are both about the act of making more than the end results. This was actually an interesting essay about the curriculum for the art students at the Ealing School of Art and how students were encouraged to experiment even with their self-identified personalities and how this led to thinking outside the self-box.

"A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Intermediate" by Ted Nelson (1965)

Nelson is credited for inventing the idea of hypertext and this essay deals with the changing nature of text, pieces of text in a state of flux, links to ever-changing text and separating the changeable elements out of larger texts so they will always be current. If you were ever an admin in a legal offrce or a paralegal, you might remember the stack of monthly update pages that endlessly needed to be swapped in and out of legal binders. In this way Nelson was predicting micro-content and the buzzworthy "headless CMS."

The Internet as it exists apparently doesn't really do what Nelson envisioned, but is described in this essay as "a monumental public publishing space" which gained critical mass by employing a subset of hypertext concepts.

Nelson sees technology as an "adjunct to creativity…offering a data structure in a changing world."

The essay also informs us that a "small computer" would be a good corporate or educational investment for $37,000. (Yikes!) Nelson then goes into some interesting theories about writing is: outlines, editing, word processing and "handling information."

After this essay, we get into some early experimental pieces, specifially around the French group OuLiPo (pictured above). and this subsection begins with a great quote from Alan Turing: "Only a machine can appreciate a sonnet written by another machine" which states exactly what I mean by saying people seek out art to communicate with other people and the content of that communication is only interesting to most of us if it has originated from the mind of another human being who might be having the same human experience we are.

But in any case, new media likes to test this premise all the time and a French group of artists formed in 1960 around ideas for creating art with constraints and procedures. The "Brief History of the OuLliPo" by Jean Lescure differentiates between intentional literature and random literature. The OuLiPo were interested in mathematical constraints, failures of language, language games and paintings that involved "the dissimulation of the object of reference."

The first OuLiPo piece we look at is "A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" by Ramond Queneam (translated from French by Stanely Chapman). The New Media Reader presents the poem as strips of a sonnet and invites you to cut up the pages to recreate physical horizontal page strips which are basically the separate variations of lines of a sonnet. You can swap out various lines in endless combinations to create an almost-infinite number of rhyming sonnets. This took planning to get the various lines to rhyme in French and English.

Examples of swappable lines:

With breaking voice across the Alps they slog

Lobsters for sale must be our apologue

No need to cart such treasures from the fog

Bard I adore your endless monologue

French versions:

Barde que to me plais toujours tu soliloques

On regrette à la fin les agrestes bicoques

The strips would look like this:

More about the making of the poem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Thousand_Billion_Poems

These experiments are curious and interesting but ultimately senseless and unmoving. No ideas but in structure.

The next piece is maybe the first Choose Your Own Adventure, a piece called "Yours for the Telling" by Raymond Queneau.

There are only 21 pieces of content to read but what was intersting to me were the word choices upon the presentation of the alternative narrative path, for example: if you don't want to follow this path, here is another:

if not
if it's neither here nor there to you
If it's all the same to you
if you don't care
If it's immaterial to you
If you wish
If you prefer
If you rather
If so
If you have no objection

The next essay in the section is "For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature" by Claude Berge. He creates poetry graphs to describe narrative combinations. (The art of data). He groups combinatory literature in three buckets:

Machine procedures that help you create art
Machine procedures that transform existing content
The transposition of concepts of mathematics into the realm of words.

He says the first combinatory art forms were musical dice games, some by Mozart. He lists the current players:

George Perec (poems without an e)
Noel Arnaud's "heterosexual rhymes"
J. Queval novels
J. Ben's irrational sonnets
J. Lescure's S+7 method
Francois Le Lionnais boolian algebra poems
Jacques Duchateau's intersecting novels
Saporta's novel in unbound pages
Eugene Sue's episodic stories

He uses terms like plastic arts, Fibonaccian poems and Exponential poetry.

The next essay is "Computer and Writer" by Paul Fournel. He talks about how the computer aids in combinatory/random literature (for example it makes the lose strips of 100 million poems easier to read).

He divides machine-aided literature into three buckets too:

Machines that help build a pre-created narrative to be read by a reader (Author > Computer > Work)
Machines that help read the reader read a pre-created narrative (Author > Computer > Work > Computer > Reader)
Machines that work with the reader to build unique narrative (Author > Computer > Reader > Computer > Work)

The last essay is by Italo Cavino, "Prose and Anticombinatories"
http://www.creativepiecemeals.com/plotor7.html

Cavino provides an example of a crime story and like most of these experimental computer-based fictions, there's too much exposition at the expense of other important narrative elements (dialogue, character development, place building).

These stories are heavily actions after actions, logistics of choice, subsets of options and random options. Not much thought is given to how motivations and plot are crafted to move a story forward, which makes these stories completely uninteresting.

But that's a problem for another day.

The Essay Project: Ruthless Creativity (Roethke Teaching and Memorizing Poems)

May 11, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Two essays this time around to catch up a bit. The first is “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching” from Richard Hugo’s great book of essays on writing, The Triggering Town. This is an interesting comparison to Philip Levine’s essay on taking a class with John Berryman.

In his class Theodore Roethke focused on reading poets with “good ears” like “Yeats, Hopkins, Auden, Thomas, Kunitz, Brogan" [who interesting Roethke was once in a relationship with….so must have had something better than good…ok I’ll stop].

He talked about “falling in love with the sounds of words” and “the heart and soul of poetry” which sounds a big vague.

Hugo continues about the reputation of Roethke's classes: “One sad thing about university reputations is that they lag behind the fact. By the time you hear how good an English department is, it is usually too late to go there.” Hugo says that despite this rule, Roethke got better as a teacher as time went on. Roethke talked about taking risks, “a lot of poets don’t have the nerve to risk failure…you have to work, and you had better get used to facing disappointments and failures, a lifetime of them.”

Hugo talks about the crazy hard final exam Roethke would give to his students: a list of 10 nouns, 10 verbs and 10 adjectives and you had to use five words from each list, write four beats to a line, six lines to a stanza, three stanzas, two internal and one external slant rhyme per stanza, a max of two end stops per stanza and the poem must have clear and grammatically correct sentences that made sense….and finally the poem must be meaningless (that last one was Hugo’s own masochistic addition)!

The point of the exam: “Two many beginners have the idea that they know what they have to say—now if they can just find the words. Here, you give them the words, some of them anyway, and some technical problems to solve. Many of them will write their best poem of the term….the exercise is saying: give up what you think you have to say…”

“The second half of the Roethke final usually consisted of one question, a lulu like, ‘What should the modern poet do about his ancestors?’”

Hugo talks about Roethke explicating a line from Yeats’ “Easter 1916” poem, the line “Stumbling upon the blood dark track once more” and how “blood dark track” according to Roethke “goes off like rifle shots.”

Hugo says this is

“simple stuff. Easily observed. But how few people notice it. The young poet is too often paying attention to the big things and can’t be bothered with little matters like that. But little matters like that are what make and break poems, and if a teacher can make a poet aware of it, he has given him a generous shove in the only direction. In poetry, the big things tend to take care of themselves.”

Later Hugo says,

“A good teacher can save a young poet years by simply telling him things he need not waste time on, like trying to will originality or trying to share an experience in language or trying to remain true to the facts (but that’s the way it really happened). Roethke used to mumble: ‘Jesus, you don’t want to say that.’ And you didn’t but you hadn’t yet become ruthless enough to create. You still felt some deep moral obligation to ‘reality’ and ‘truth,’ and of course it wasn’t moral obligation at all, but fear of yourself and your inner life….Despite Roethke’s love of verbal play, he could generate little enthusiasm for what passes as experimentation and should more properly be called fucking around.”

[Oy, I just said that.]

But Hugo says that the

“quest for self is fundamental to poetry. What passes for experimentation is often an elaborate method of avoiding one’s feelings at all cost. [Yes!] The process prohibits any chance the poet has to create surrogate feelings, a secondary kind of creativity but in most poems all the poet can settle for. The good poems say: ‘This is how I feel.’ With luck that’s true, but usually it’s not. More often the poem is the way the poet says he feels when he can’t find out what his real feelings are.”

Hugo then talks about people who struggle to appear interesting,

“There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual.” It doesn’t surprise me at all when the arrogant wild man in class turns in predictable, unimaginative poems and the straight one is doing nutting and promising work. If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.”

Hugo says James Wright “was one of the few students who was writing well in Roethke’s classes.”

Then Hugo moves to talking about the future of American poetry, quoting Mark Strand who “remarked recently in Montana that American poetry could not help but get better and better, and I’m inclined to agree. I double that we’ll have the one big figure of the century the way other nations do, [William Butler] Yeats, [Paul] Valéry."

Hugo ends by giving us Roethke’s thoughts about the pressures of publication:

“’Don’t worry about publishing. That’s not important.’ He might have added, only the act of writing is. It’s flattering to be told you are better than someone else, but victories like that do not endure. What endures are your feelings about your work [Oy, Feelings again]. You wouldn’t trade your poems for anybody’s. To do that you will also have to trade your life for his, which means living a whole new complex of pain and joy. One of those per life is enough.”

Whew. I don’t know about you but I feel better right now.

The second essay is a short article from Poets & Writers in 1988 called “Poetry on the Run” by Arthur Roth who learned to memorize poems while he was out on long runs around the neighborhood.

As an aside, one of the interesting things about this 1988 issue of P&W is that there is only one ad for an MFA in all the pages of this article (Warson Wilson College in North Carolina). The rest are for two workshops, a prize-winning announcement and a writing conference. Times have changed.

Anyway, since running (and swimming after developing an arthritic hip), Roth has memorized about 76 poems. “Memorizing—like running—gets easier the more you practice.”

And he claims the practice often “halts him in his tracks” with the discovery of a new meaning in lines he previously thought he knew very well.”

I am terrible at memorizing even the basic life things so I don't see myself doing this….or running.

The Essay Project: Checklist for Poet Newbies

May 4, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The next essay in the stack is actually the introduction of the book Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell. I remember we were assigned this book in a high-school poetry class and the teacher went off on a weird tangent about writing detective screenplays (I think she was having a breakdown) and we never ended up reading it. Then the book was again assigned in a poetry class I took in college and we never read it then either. So I've had this book twice and never read even so much as the introduction of it. And every time I read the title I want to start singing "No Night So Long" with Dionne Warwick, although the lyric is "living on the wind" not "sleeping on the wing." That doesn't seem to matter in the situation.

The material in the intro is pretty basic for advanced poets, but it's probably useful for teachers running poetry intro classes. And then again, sometimes coming back to basic is a good opportunity for a beginner’s mind reset.

And oddly these precepts kind of track to life in general, too. The intro is divided into three sections as follows. My peanut-gallery comments in parenthesis.

Reading Poetry

Don’t read poems like a newspaper article but like listening to a friend telling you a story, like the way you overhear a conversation among strangers, or like the way you listen to music, “that part of your intelligence that includes your feelings, imagination and experience."
Think about what words excite you?
Don’t get freaked out by:
- a word or words you don’t know,
- a person or place you are not familiar with,
- a sentence that is long and hard to follow,
- a sentence that is incomplete,
- words ordered in an unusual way.
Read the poem slowly (I actually read a poem first fast and then slow the subsequent times).
Use what you do understand to help you with what you don’t understand (This is also helpful when reading stupidly-academic essays).
A poem may not have “a point” in a conventional sense. (Or, I would add, that point might seem smaller than you think is worthy of a poem).
Not all meanings are hidden. (Some are though.) You might be disappointed trying to find the “deep meaning” when one isn’t really there.
Keep focusing on how a poem is affecting you. (In this case it really might help to "make it all about you.")
Don’t worry about technique at first (unless that comes naturally to you). Sometimes the form and style can be distracting on the first read.
Read a few poems by the same poet to get a sense of their style and voice.
How to frame the adventure: “Think of the rather pleasant process of figuring out a part of town you’ve never been in or an interesting person you’ve just met.” Reading poetry is “something like traveling—seeing new places, hearing things talked about in new ways, getting ideas of other possibilities.”

I thought this was good, too: “Poets are not big, dark, heavy personages dwelling in clouds of mystery, but people like yourself who are doing what they like to do and do well. Writing poetry isn’t any more mysterious than what a dancer or a singer or a painter does.”

Talking About Poetry with Others

It’s like talking about sports in that “you admire different qualities, you watch for and are excited about different things, you even use different terms when you look at soccer and when you look at baseball. And, of course, you only find out how to talk about all that by watching the games.”
(This reminds me of learning to watch NFL football and how my comments have changed over the years from confused questioning and mocking of the gravitas of the TV announcers to actually seeing the plays as they happen and being able to express admiration for some feat of skill. You don’t have to be an expert in a week or a month. In fact, the malfeasance of innocence and ignorance isn’t such a bad thing at first. It can help you see outside the matrix and often advanced users cannot do this.)
You can express your own sense of things….your way of seeing or your own particular experience.
Concentrate on the poem (and what it might be trying to do not what you think it should do).
You may need to pay less attention to detail in a long rambling poem than is required for a 13-line poem.
Don’t worry about finding the one true thing of a poem. A poem could have many complimentary or competing truths. (In fact, a lot of poems can be reduced to “it’s complicated.”)
This is a good reading tip too: notice how you are feeling when reading a poem. Sometimes other life events can influence your interpretations. Were you preoccupied with some other thoughts?
Preface comments with “I think” and “It seems to me” (although that should go without saying, it bears repeating when debates start up).
Don’t try to say everything at one go. Sprinkle thoughts throughout the conversation, (which is what a workshop poetry discussion is, a casual conversation not a presentation of genius in front of a thesis board).
Don’t be afraid to be critical, “there’s nothing sacred about it.” (This is debatable. Some people take this shit very seriously).
Don’t be afraid to ask questions instead of asserting answers all the time.
If you do assert a theory however, “to be convincing, you need to refer to a particular part of the poem—to words and lines.”
If you're not sure what to say, talk about the kids of words in the poem, the title, the beginning and ending.
See every conversation as practice.

This was good too: “Sometimes because they find poetry difficult and complicated, people make the mistake of talking or writing about it in an abstract, general, overcomplicated way. They think that being abstract and general is more serious and is the way to talk about difficult and important things—that being simple means you’re 'shallow' or uncomplicated or unintelligent. In fact, abstraction is often a way of being evasive…”

Writing Your Own Poems

Don’t write about “things you think you ought to care about.” (Write about what you do care about.)
Don’t worry about trying to “transform” what you care about into something abstractly meaningful, (or Poetic with a capital P as Tom Lux used to say, which is another way of saying, write small).
Plan it all out in advance or don’t, let the poem take you somewhere it wants to go. Sometimes beautiful accidents happen this way and you are taken to a much more meaningful place, along with your reader. (Another way is to plan and then be willing to abandon the plan if some other magic starts to happen.)
Remember that nothing is set in stone. (You have the rest of your life to change and revise it all.)
Put the poem down for a few weeks after finishing it, even months and then look at it again with a fresh head.
Read a lot of poetry. (Like Billy Collins says in his delightful Masterclass, this is the only way to find your unique voice….by encountering other unique voices over and over again.)
Try stream of consciousness writing. Let go of sense. (But then shape the result into some sense; the world is packed-full with nonsense poems so push farther. Make the poem sweat a little.)
Try rule-based and formal projects. Try your hand at translations.
Find friends who you can share poems you write with. Give each other encouragement and feedback.

Category: Craft (Page 2 of 17)

The Essay Project: Different Takes on the Prose Poem

The Essay Project: Childhood Trauma in Art

The Essay Project: Three Haiku Masters

The Essay Project: Creative Writing MFAs

The Essay Project: Art Has Taken a Life

If You Want To Know

The Essay Project: How Modernism Has Given Us Who We Are

Ellipsis, Joan Didion and Me

Digital Poetry: More Predictions and the OuLiPo

The Essay Project: Ruthless Creativity (Roethke Teaching and Memorizing Poems)

The Essay Project: Checklist for Poet Newbies

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