Category: Whole Life of the Poet (Page 3 of 18)

A few weeks ago I was so proud of myself. I wrote my first short story. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wrote two short stories in college and they were both terrible. One was a humorous ghost story I wrote at Sarah Lawrence and the other was an undergrad story so terrible it had no plot or subject that I can recall.

But anyway, this was a significant milestone in that I’ve been struggling with my fictions since childhood when my friend Krissy and I embarked on our first novels at age 8. Unfortunately, we had no life experiences to cull from and so our epics petered out pretty quick.

In fact, my problem writing fiction goes back to that very young me, back to when I started doing what I call “calibrating towards reality,” in other words obsessively worrying that I am thinking from an unrealistic perspective.

It all started with a tween diagnosis of anorexia, most likely tripped off from a condition called body dysmorphia (although I wouldn’t know what that term was for another decade): an inability to correctly see with my own eyes what was in the mirror in front of me.

And this dutifully led to a distrustful questioning of anything I saw or experienced, basically. Great.

My “calibrations” developed like an over-correction and led to an irritating habit of always asking  surrounding people these things: “did that really happen?” or “are you seeing what I’m seeing” and basically disregarding, whole hog, experiences I have alone.

Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans just did a podcast this week about ghosts and I was thinking about whether or not I’ve had any ghostly experiences. And then I remembered I don’t believe the experiences I’ve had because there wasn’t any corroboration. There’s a mental bucket in my head for those experiences: questionable.

This calibrating is also a problem in some social situations. Like someone will be spouting off their fictions and I’ll say, “But that’s not how it happened” or “but that doesn’t make sense because…” or “but what about this other evidence that contradicts everything you’re saying?”

And then I think, “Oh crap, this person is just coping with their fictions right now or this person is just talking in marketing mode.” Leave them to their realities.

But then I think, “Wait a minute, we all have the same reality. There’s no point in the universe where their reality ends and mine begins.”

See? I can’t stop. It’s like a buffering wheel. It’s always going in my brain: “Is that right? What you’re saying?”

This is why I find deep fakes so terrifying. And why I’m hyper-sensitive to gaslighting. Stop trying to fuck up a very fucked-up experience I’m already having over here.

Anyway, here is where these calibrations have a detrimental effect on my attempts to write fiction:

Recently I was in Kansas City and I met up with my grade school friend Jayne from St. Louis. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Jayne since we started Junior High and went into separate social groups. So we had a lot of catching up to do over dinner. And at the end of the night, out in the parking lot as we were saying goodbye, she said something like, “What about that piano teacher we had, huh!” We then told our spouses the gory story and I told Jayne I was trying to write a short story about it but was struggling.

I had just recently come across a photo of this piano teacher and had looked up a newspaper article about the murder she was involved in. Because the story involved a real family, I didn’t want anything I wrote ever getting back to harm the survivors. So I decided to fictionalize everything. Easy enough. I made changes to some of the sexes of the characters, pumped up the sex drama (as you do), added some disguising plot points and boom, I was off to the races.

Except that after a little while I suddenly stopped and said to myself, “But that’s not how it happened.”

“Am I for real right now with this?” I thought. Of course that’s not how it happened. That’s the whole point of changing everything from how it happened, so that it wouldn’t be how it happened!

And so I’ve given up on that story for a while.

Telling stories doesn’t seem to be a problem for me if they’re based on reality and I’m depicting an ostensible reality, even if my memory fails me or I need to embellish for the sake of humor or someone’s privacy or, as my great-grandfather would say, to make it better than it was. Those kind of detours feel acceptable because I know the difference in my head. The core reality is clear and stories aren’t obligated.

I’ve also written two books of narrative poems and I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is there. Why was I able to do that? My Mars poems aren’t a fully realized narrative, but instead little narratives tossed in among personal lyric poems. I was still figuring out how to write narrative poems back then and could only carry a story for the length of a poem. That seemed do-able.

The next book of cowboy poems was actually a fully-drawn out, start-to-finish plotted story. It took forever but again, living in those stories was accomplished poem by poem. I always thought I could transfer that trick to short stories or a novel.

But it’s not the same. Like at all. Those genres demand you be more immersive in their fictions. And that is not a very comfortable place for me to be.

There’s a common prescription in fiction to base characters on people you know, à la Proust. As part of a fiction exercise in a fiction writing guide, I tried to make my novel characters an amalgamation of poets and people I knew. And the result was the same exact mess. My brain kept wanting to default to one real person or another. “But so-in-so wouldn’t do that.”

The new short story had the benefit of being the product of a funny dream. I was able to basically transcribe the dream, clean it up and embellish it where needed. It was subconsciously delivered almost intact and that make all the difference.

I’m thinking the problem comes with stories based on even a semblance of a true story but are not true stories, per se. And I’m leaning toward the idea that I’m to be a Donald Barthelme kind of fiction writer, veering heavily toward nonsense. Because I’m not haunted by the idea of discovering folderol, the uncanny or ghostly things.

I’m haunted by the specter of reality.

Happy Halloween!

Organizing my stack of essays last year I found a group of Atlantic essays in various locations. The first one was “The Mad Poets Society” by Alex Beam from the July/August 2001 issue which was basically a review of all the poets who had been through the McLean Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, “for years America’s most literary mental institution,” the hospital having touched (no pun intended) such poets as Ralph Waldo Emerson (his brothers were there), William James (maybe he was there), Sylvia Plath (was a patient), Robert Lowell (was a patient) and Anne Sexton (was both a patient and a seminar teacher).

Beam says, “Madness came out of the closet in their writings and even acquired a certain cachet.” In fact, “McClean chic” culminated when the memoir and movie Girl, Interrupted referred to it in the 1990s.

Beam gathers up poems of Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton dealing with the hospital and  their experiences there as covered in the books The Bell Jar, Life Studies and The Awful Rowing Toward God.

In light of that article, it was interesting to also find this Atlantic piece from January 1965 by Peter Davidson called “The Madness of New Poetry,” a piece that traced trendy madness in poetry back to the French Revolution’s “roster of mad poets” and the madness inherent in Modernism.

“Poetry has suffered long from the preponderance of the idea that it exists to scratch the poet’s itch. When madness enters in, the poet may try to cure himself upon the page, or to drive himself on to further intoxications of madness. If madness damages poetry, poetry must be defended. The poet as poet bears responsibility for the excellence and wholeness of his poem more than for the self’s wholeness, no matter how mad he happens to be. In examining some of the books of verse published in the last year, I have kept in mind poetry before madness. Let us watch the outcome of each struggle.”

And so the article turns into an interesting first impression of some of our most famously mad books of contemporary poetry: John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, now known as The Dream Songs, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, William Meredith’s The Wreck of the Thresher and Other Poems and Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field.

Then there was a March 1999 article by David Barber called “What Makes Poetry ‘Poetic” about how poetry isn’t what it used to be since (blah blah blah)… the talkies….and it’s all now just secret societies…and then he goes into a review of then-Poet-Laureate Robert Pinksky’s book The Sounds of Poetry, which he says, “emerges as an invigorating session of talking shop. Why are poems written in lines, and why do the lines break when they do? How do the mechanics of English meter operate and why is it that artful verse measure is seldom strictly regular. How can a reader acquire a reliable feel for the qualities of rhythm, tempo, and cadence that give a memorable poem its visceral appeal and expressive resonance? Is ‘free verse’ really free – and if so what has it been liberated from?”

Then in April 2000 there was an article about poets celebrating these newfangled things called audio files, “High-Performance Poets” by Wen Stephenson.  This was an interesting review of how poets read their poems as Stephenson judged from the newly-released audio recordings on err…cassette tapes from The Voice of the Poet series put out by Random House. It bears repeating this was the year 2000. Compact discs were still a thing, as were CD-Roms and the Internets were still young. Stephenson says, “such a conspicuously low-tech approach might seem quaint, populist, or retro depending upon one’s inclination.”

Last year I just bought a small stack of poet recordings of their readings on vinyl. So I can’t say anything. I was trying to imagine a character for a story who would only have sex to recordings of poets reading their poems on vinyl. I think this needs testing out.

Stephenson reviews some Dylan Thomas recordings and Thomas’ thoughts about reading poems aloud. He also reviews W. H. Auden recordings which he describes as “studious flatness and semi-detachment.” He compares an early and late readings, Auden’s 1939 reading of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” and a later reading of “As I Walked Out one Evening.”

He then covers Sylvia Plath’s 1962 readings where “she does not exaggerate or melodramatize—she lives the poems, and the intensity is almost unbearable.” Sounds fun. This particular recording might have damaged him because at the end Stephenson decides the authorial reading “can become the ‘authoritative’ reading” and that can become “a tyranny” so he felt he had to read poems aloud again to himself to break the spell.

My copy of the article links to many recordings but the now-archived online version of the piece dispenses with maintaining those links because like…YouTube.

Next was the April 1996 article “The Matter of Poetry” also by Wen Stephenson. This article was meant to mark the first annual National Poetry Month, initiated by the Academy of American Poets and the poet laureate at the time, Robert Hass. The Atlantic resurrected the discussion in Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?“ and Joseph Epstein’s screed “Who Killed Poetry?” and determined that “Like priests in a town of agnostics, [poets] still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.” Stephenson quotes W.H. Auden who famously said “poetry makes nothing happen” but then maintains in the end that “nevertheless [it’s] also true that individuals do make things happen and surely poetry makes something happen within individuals.” Fair enough.

And finally a few months ago, I received an email from someone stating they hated poetry and were looking for other people hated it too. So I suggested a book called The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner which I found out about in this October 2016 Atlantic article “Why Some People Hate Poetry” by Adam Kirsch.

This article also references the Dana Gioia article but also Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam: Or, the Decline of American Verse.” Kirsch (based on Lerner’s book) determines that “poetry is a gauge of our mutual connection. If we can’t speak the language of poetry, it is a sign that human communication has been blocked in a fundamental way. This feeling of failure is what explains why people tend to hate poetry, rather than simply being indifferent to it. Poetry is the site and source of disappointed hope….not just individual and spiritual, but collective and political.”

Ben Lerner, in The Hatred of Poetry, since we’re talking about it, traces his experiences with poetry back to an uncomfortable incident with poetry in his 9th grade English class in 1967.

By the way, one of the best parts of the book are the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” inspired sign-post notes sardonically dotting the outer margins.

Lerner places the problem with our high expectations that poems will be transcendent and yet they remain so earth-bound. “The poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure.”

Poetry is one of those things. You love it or hate it. I read plenty of poems that take the top of my head off. And I hear that sentence, “It took the top of my head off” from a plethora of other poetry readers. But I get what Lerner is saying. We’re sort of trained to all the subtle epiphanies, as longtime readers. The general reader might find disappointment right where I’m searching the shag rug for the top of my head.

“I am convinced,” Lerner says, “that the embarrassment, or suspicion, or anger that is often palpable…derives from this sense of poetry’s tremendous social stakes (combined with a sense of its tremendous social marginalization)…’poetry’ denotes an impossible demand.” This explains why it is often “periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed.”

In light of the lack of fame to be found as a poet, (“no poets are famous among the general public”), he talks about the baffling need for some aspiring poets to see their work in print at any cost and the imploring letters editors receive declaring things like, “I don’t know how long I have to live.” He questions their attempts to “secure and preserve their personhood in a magazine that no one they know will see. It is as though the actual poem and publication do not matter; what matters is that the poet will know and can report to others that she is a published poet [yea, he goes with a ‘she’ there], a distinction that nobody–not Death, not the social death of exclusion from the Law–can take from her. Poetry makes you famous without an audience.”

He’s describing the narcissistic contemporary thirst of our time, at least among aspiring poets.

Lerner goes on to talk about Plato’s belief in the nefarious power of poetry and poetry under totalitarian regimes. He covers Sir Philip Sidney’s belief that poetry can move us, “put us in touch with what’s divine in us.” Lerner admits John Keats has never taken him into a trancelike state like for so many other readers, but then he admits he prefers the dissonant sound of Emily Dickinson. He talks about the avant guardes and how manifestos are more widely read than actual poems. And then he also laments “poetry’s failure to achieve any real political effects” either.  “The avant-garde is a military metaphor that forgets it is a metaphor.”

Lerner laments the lack of oratory in caucasion poetry (poets are general where they should be specific and specific where they should be general) but then later comes back to the fact of marginalized poets and their performances. By the end, he takes aim at some of the very critics who make claims such as his. He identifies that somehow, Robert Lowell speaks for everyone but Sylvia Plath speaks only for women. These “readings lead us to suspect [their author’s] believe that white men will fail better.”

He reviews Claudia Rankine’s work to show what lyric poetry can do in our time and quotes her  to say “If we continue to think of the ‘universal’ as better-than, as the pinnacle, we will always discount writing that doesn’t look universal because it accounts for race or some other demeaned category. The universal is a fantasy.”