Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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Moment of Craft Fridays: Avoid Self-Deceptions

September 9, 2012 /

Dec

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Effective technique
  2. Authenticity
  3. Religious/spiritual overtones
  4. Seriousness (with room for humor)
  5. Good stories dramatically told
  6. Cinematic action-writing
  7. Willingness to tackle big themes
  8. Explosive metaphors and imagery
  9. Truth-telling/insight
  10. Compassion
  11. Vulnerability
  12. Healthy sexuality
  13. Accessibility

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

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

Poet on Wire

September 5, 2012 /

MowSo sometimes it’s good to step outside of your art form, see what other impassioned artists are doing what keeps them going, and how they articulate their ideas of beauty.

Current TV last summer aired a list of 50 documentaries you should see before you die. My two Sarah Lawrence compatriots, Julie and Christopher, got me hooked on documentaries back in the 1990s. So I had seen a big chunk of the 50 on the list. But I made note of about 12 more I should see. Netflix just sent me Man on Wire, the documentary about frenchman Philippe Petit who walked a tightrope back and forth eight times between the top of the World Trade Center towers back in 1974.

The documentary was made in 2008 and lovingly describes the building of the World Trade Center towers without mentioning their demise on September 11, 2001. This gives the subject understated melancholy.

Petit was obsessed with walking across the highest landmarks without a net. A tightrope walker with great technical skill, physical strength and beauty, sometimes you forget you’re looking at a man on a wire and believe he's walking out into the open thin air…like something in a Dali or Magritte picture. Petit’s ballet performances also detracts from the fact that he has huge cajones to perform these walks illegally and without a net, risking his life every time.

Pulling off the tightrope performance in 1974 was tantamount to a bank heist. Planners and schemers were involved from France, America and Australia (one working inside the towers) and the movie recreates all the strategy sessions required to figure out crucial details like how to get a wire from the top of one tower to the other.

One thing that frustrated me about the recent documentary on Rumi was how blow-hardy the experts were when pontificating about Rumi’s motivations and inspirations. Petit is a marvelous contrast to this. His is articulate and deliberate, shows pure enthusiasm without being obtuse and excluding; and although you can see he’s pretty full of himself, he still connects with you (artist to artist) as he declares who he is and why he must walk the rope.

As soon as he was arrested after his 1974 tower walk. New York City reporters descended on him, wanting to know why, why, why he did it?

So American, Petit said. There is no why. He did it because it was beautiful.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Your Relationship to Language

August 31, 2012 /

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later he considers Guillaume Apollinaire and says,

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

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

Ron Koertge

August 29, 2012 /

CouchI missed blog posts this week due to adopting our second dog  Saturday morning. Our fur-kid Franz Alanzo now has a sister-mate, Bianca Jean, a shelter dog who had been seriously neglected, the result of which she has had two litters of puppies (one litter a few months ago) and a severe shoulder injury.

Meanwhile, our lives have been close to chaos since the weekend while we've all been sorting out the new arrangements. Like my husband's classmate warned him, with two dogs the house gets very doggie.

But I want to talk about one of my favorite poems ever, one by Pasadena poet Ron Koertge. Getting a degree from Sarah Lawrence College, most of my exposure to living poets were to East Coast writers popular in the 1990s like Mark Doty, Stanley Kunitz and Molly Peacock. 

RonMoving to Los Angeles in 2002, I was pleased to encounter West Coast voices.  Now I have Koertge's selected works, Making Love to Roget's Wife. With similarities and connections to Billy Collins, the titles are always meandering, compelling and his poems are humorous, irreverent, and often about pop culture subjects like "On the Anniversary of His Death, the Men of the Village Meet to Talk about Frankenstein;" and yet he can be just as ecstatic and reverent with "What a Varied Place the World Is So Trusting and Strange So Deserving of Praise" or a poem called "Lazarus" that ends, "God's name in vain on his cracked and loamy lips."

He has wonderful short poems like this one, "Diary Cows" (and you know I love me some poems about cows!)

Got up early, waited for the farmer.
Hooked us all up to the machines as usual.
Typical trip to the pasture, typical
afternoon grazing and ruminating.
About 5:00 back to the barn. What
a relief! Listened to the radio during
dinner. Lights out at 7:00.
More tomorrow.

I found the favorite poem one day while working at The Prostate Cancer
Foundation, Mike Milken's cancer charity in a Santa Monica building I used to dub The Castle. I was sitting at my desk hating my boss at the time (an incompetent blowhard who issued insults office-wide to hide his mistakes) and I was depressed about the situation when I found this poem online, "A Guide to Refreshing Sleep"

 It is best to remember those nights

when grown-ups were singing and breaking

glass and someone who smelled good

carried you up hushed stairs toward strange

cold bedrooms to be launched on a dark

lake of coats.


If Memory does not suffice, you may

summon the obvious mascots of sleep,

but forego counting. It is miserly. They

will come and stand by your bed, nodding

their graceful Egyptian heads, inviting you


across the crooked stile to one of those

hamlets nestled between blue hills

where the curious are curious about sleep,

the enthralled are enthralled with sleep,

and the great conclusion is always,

Its time for bed.


Look–a cottage door stands open. On the night

table is a single candle, yellow sheets are turned

back, and in the garden are marshaled

the best dreams in the world. Lie down.

The horrible opera of the day is over.

Close your eyes, so the world which loves you

can go to sleep, too.

More about Ron Koertge

Marylu Terral Jeans

August 22, 2012 /

JeansWho?

Yes, Marylu Terral Jeans published two books of poetry in her lifetime, Statue in the Stone  (1966) and Moonset (1971) and she's my only related (out-of-the-closet) poet.  Terral is the name of my great-great-grandfather, a circuit Methodist preacher who moved around Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico founding Methodist churches back in the mid-to-late 1800s. He founded the town of Terral, Oklahoma, and the Methodist church in Roy, New Mexico, my family seat. He is buried all by his lonesome in the old cemetery in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Marylu was my grandmother's first cousin. My Aunt Jane recently explained to me Marylu's place on the family tree. Aunt Jane said when she first married and moved to Walnut Creek, California, in 1944, Marylu's father, Ernest Terral, invited her to come visit them nearby. 

Personally, I always pictured Marylu to look like a dotty old lady because that's what I think of when I imagine women poets who are related to me from somewhere back in time. However, Aunt Jane tells me Marylu lived in a trailer park and made herself up like Zsa Zsa Gabor every day and wrote poetry "sitting amidst the dirtiest house I had ever been in."   

But remarkably, her poems were published in Better Homes and Gardens, California Farmer, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post reminding us of a day when poems were actually published in these magazines. Aunt Jane gave her copy of Statue in the Stone  to my mother
who a few years ago gave it to me. It was published by The Golden Quill
Press and her book jacket oozes over the power of her sonnet-making. The book is divided into somewhat staid but funny sections like Death of a Dream, Mute Testament, Valley of Stars, Love Match and Love-Armored. She uses words like "threnody."

I expected to hate the book's old-style rhyming verses but I didn't. I was intrigued by lines like this from her poem "Ghost:"

So love's sweet ghost, with undiminished art,
Remains to haunt each hall-way of my heart.

In fact, there's a melodramatic 18th-century novel reader in me who loves stanzas like this from "Dark Fire:"

Not that I love you in a smaller measure,
Not that I seek to hide my love from view,
But I no longer have a dream to treasure,
And lacking dreams, what could I offer you?

Although most of the poems have the rhythm and musicality of Dr. Seuss, some transcend the singsong, as in this little gem, "Hepzibah Higby:"

Hepzibah Higby fought the devil,
Fought his image, fought his ways;
Railed at sin, denounced all evil,
Had no time for words of praise.

Hepzibah saw a world in darkness,
Lost to light from up above;
Wept about the foolish sinners,
Never spoke a word of love.

Hepzibah Higby died, bemoaning
Man, the weakling and the dunce;
Gave her life to fight the devil,
Never saw an angel once.

I read Aunt Jane's story and some of her poems to my husband tonight.

He says he accepts living with a lazy poet.
He could even accept my dressing like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
But he refuses to live in a low-rent dirty trailer,
No matter how good my sonnets are.

Self Publishing Poetry: Caring About Kerning

August 19, 2012 /

KerningIn the first post about self publishing, we talked about educating yourself about the challenges and advantages of self publishing, creating a marketing plan and gathering up all your book assets, which include logos, permissions, ISBN and LCCN numbers.

The next big project is getting the book into shape. This means copious rounds of self-editing, followed by finding a professional editor/proofreader. You don't have to follow every grammatical rule but you need to be aware of the ones you are intentionally breaking versus the ones you are unintentionally breaking. A professional editor for a book of poetry is very inexpensive. Spending a mere $100 could save you real embarrassment. A good editor will also point out formatting mistakes you may have missed. Typos compromise your credibility. Invest in your credibility. 

Last year, my husband encouraged me to connect with artists to illustrate some of my poems. He felt this might jump-start my project. I put an ad out in the Santa Fe Craigslist to find artists interested in my theme. In this way I found two artists I wanted to work with, one who is currently working on inner sketches and my book cover. An artist is invaluable to helping you bring your poems out into the world. And I personally love seeing my poems come to life in someone else's imagination.

As for the interior, CreateSpace (through Amazon.com), provides a template to help you create the innards of your book. Here again, Catherine Ryan Howard and her book Self Printed was indispensable in showing me the way through this process of making all sorts of decisions, from planning out the front and back matter to adding page numbers. I created various samples of font and size styles for poems and their titles and had to make some tough choices when many of my poems stretched to just one lonely line past a book page. Creating a book causes you to rework and give up words, line breaks and, in some cases, entire lines to fit the realities of a physical book.

One of the harsh truths of self publishing is the fact that you do not have all the tools in your arsenal that a professional publisher does, such as rare and expensive fonts that "class up" your words.

Self publishing means you have to start caring about line spacing and character kerning. You start to become intimate with the idea of your book as a physical object.

Joy Harjo Speaks to the Incoming Class of IAIA

August 19, 2012 /

JoyWhat a thrill it was for me to be able to attend the welcoming ceremony for new students at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe on August 16th. Teachers, students and staff all gave very emotional speeches welcoming and inspiring the new art students and it was hard not to be moved, even if you are someone like me, not Native American but with a somewhat fractured cultural identity that includes both Mexican and Native American culture…a long story that involves where both of my parents grew up, but one that might explain my being such a visceral fan of Joy Harjo. (A quote from Harjo closes out my wedding program!) So it was doubly thrilling that she would be at the welcoming ceremony as the keynote speaker. She just has this energy that is hard to describe. I felt similarly about Alice Walker when I saw her read in New York City. They're both very demure I guess which is an energy that jazzes me up.

Harjo said two things I found interesting. One, she talked about the value of failure, saying this was primarily what her memoir Crazy Brave is about. The book talks about her early struggles and mistakes from early childhood up through attending IAIA as a high school student (saying the school saved her life) and early relationship abuses. The book talks briefly but emotionally about how writing poetry saved her soul, but the book does not give us a happily-ever-after ending, on purpose I think, to illustrate the value of struggle through failure.

Failure is something I feel poets fear to such a great extent it keeps them from forming close relationships with one another. Because any other poet's success ultimately reflects back on another poet's failure. And so mutual encouragement is virtually nonexistent. If a poet can't be actually discouraging, he can be silent.

Failure in poetry has many levels: the failure of the respect in both the culture and academia, the failure of sales, the failure of the individual poet (before and after publishing), the failure of an individual poem. It's a sad state. And the paradigm has to change, maybe by reinterpreting failure.

Failure, as Harjo says, teaches you everything. You learn more from failure than from success.

Taking on my first book project, I feel at peace with its failure because this practice teaches me the entire road map of assembling a book. And inside that cloud of failure lies either the secret to success or the path to the next enlightened failure.

Secondly, Harjo also implored students (and aren't we all students?) to ask for help. Another difficult thing for poets because we believe ourselves to be the magic, embodied kernel of all enlightened thoughts (even when we pretend to question ourselves). To admit we need help is to admit we are not ordained by God to speak the truth.

Can we accept the idea that each of our poems is a community project and that maybe we didn't build that business by ourselves?  

Moment of Craft Fridays: Define Your Characteristic Emotion

August 17, 2012 /

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only I could write aphorisms as well.

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

Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880

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

Mark Twain as editor of the Buffalo Express in 1869

"Even prophets correct their proofs."

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

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

Oscar Wilde

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