Very Like A Whale

I have to write something but don’t know what it is, or how to unlock it.  Usually reading works but hurling them across the room is all I seem to want to do to books today.

Long time readers of this blog know that xkcd strips fill me with frustration and angst as I can never understand them but have to read them. Today’s is an exception. So cute.

Scavella - who writes the best sevenlings - has been busy.

And is making me think about what I’m doing.

I got more or less serious about studying and writing poetry just about two and a half years ago. My first publication - submitted on a monumental dare to myself - came in November 2006 (thanks, Shit Creek Review!) Subsequent submissions were made cautiously, in great trepidation and greater angst.  Fourteen months later, I have a total of 22 pieces either published or accepted for publication.  (Full list here.) I’ve tried to submit only to places I will always be happy to claim as a publication credit, and I think I’ve succeeded.

Rejections were never any surprise. Acceptances always were. Which remains true today.  But the paradigm has shifted over the last year or so, and so therefore has the quality of the surprise.  At the beginning, the rejection of a piece signaled to me a flaw in the piece, and it was dashing for that reason.   Now – after having a number of pieces rejected several times before going on to find good homes – I find I am dashed by rejection more as evidence of failure to connect, than as evidence of a flawed piece. And, conversely, delighted by acceptance as evidence of successful connection, rather than of a perfect piece.

And, now, confused about just what a “flawed” piece is. Or a “perfect” one.

I don’t think either is what I used to think it is.

Julie has some unhappy thoughts.

I sympathize. What can you do? Poetry is a changeling kid with burning eyes. You can’t treat it like the other kids. If you put it on your to-do list, it will sit right up with its straight straight back and laugh at you. Between the eyes. With a laugh you think sounds like a spoon stuck in the sink garbage disposal until you realize it sounds like jasmine rice spilling over a glass table.  

And it’s moved in to stay.

How do you live with something like that?

A real diehard, indestructible, irresolvable obsession in a poet is nothing less than a blessing. The poet with an obsession never has to search for subject matter. It is always right there, welling up like an Artesian spring on a piece of property with bad drainage.

- Tony Hoagland, Real Sofistikashun

One of the things I did this summer was to look at all the poetry I have written as a body of work, rather than as disparate, random poems. Put it in piles, sort it by themes. I ended up with five main piles — poems of human dysfunction; relationship poems; motherhood poems; God-shaped poems and existential/human condition poems.

I was certainly surprised by the first and the fourth categories. But I wouldn’t call any one of them an “obsession.”

Sometimes I convince myself that all this time I’ve only been picking at the edges of a scab with this poetry lark and that somewhere there is indeed an obsession lurking.  And that I should just bite the bullet and rip it off.

The scab, I mean. To get the Artesian spring of obsession going.

Me being a property with generally bad drainage and quite suitable, I think.

Hm. Still many months to go before Christmas, but no harm in looking ahead. How about a Sony Reader? Here’s a user review and here’s another.

Don’t know, don’t know. I’m a paper book lover, but often think I am just because it’s what I know.  Something to be said for being able to carry 80-plus books in the palm of your hand…

Decisions, decisions.

My relationship with punctuation in poetry grows ever more strained. I now feel, when I punctuate a piece in standard fashion, that I am stringing pink neon bulbs or shouting polystyrene sandwich boards onto it that say STOP HERE or TAKE A BREATH HERE or THIS IS A QUESTION HERE.

Oh dear.

Update: Gravitating like a good homo sapiens towards what supports my position, I lose no time in pointing out this interesting essay which says, among other things:

What this all really comes down to is that punctuation is up to the poet. Moreover, do not let punctuation get between you and the art of writing poetry. Unlike in writing prose, punctuation in poetry exists as a secondary function and sometimes is not even incorporated into the body of work until the poem has been completed. And always remember when it comes to poetry punctuation, less is better.

Then there’s this agreeable site which says:

Every poem you write has the possibility of being a new poem with the addition (or deletion) of just a few punctuation marks.

And finally, this lesson plan, which lets you know that students will:

..experiment with line breaks and how they affect rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance, and can substitute for punctuation in poetry.

And so on. (Hat tip: Those links were provided by a very cool moderator at a workshop site in response to a critiquer who said in so many words that a piece submitted to the workshop was fatally flawed because it was not ”properly” punctuated.)

On a more general note, there is this brief essay (look in the comments) on punctuation graciously added to this blog by C.E. Chaffin.  

You know what this means, right? Yep.

AGCHA!

Found Poem
Source: Cato Unbound

human beings have a tendency
to adapt quickly to
pleasures at hand

to be too happy for too long
is not, apparently, an effective
adaptive trait - better to be a little bit
anxious a little bit
unhappy much of the time
so that we are motivated
to continue our pursuits

it is by no means clear that humans
have a natural capacity
for ever-rising levels of happiness

<><><>

As I have so been saying forever. No-one ever listens to me.

look at us we trudge muttering
through thick clay all yellow
on the riverbank while beside us
the water runs high and clear it runs
blue

<><><> 

just bleh

A chain snapped.

Who knew there was a chain?

The Vigil

by Yvor Winters

To grind out bread by facing God!
The elbows, bone wedged
into wood with stubborn grief; the hard face
gripping the mad night in the vision’s vise.

The floor burns underfoot, atomic
flickering to feigned rigidity: God’s
fierce derision, and outside the oak
is living slowly but is strong; it grips
a moment to a thousand years; and it
will move across our gasping
bodies in the end.

This is no
place to wait out Time. To see you
strikes my heart with terror,
speeding Time to violence and death.

The thought, the leap, is measured: madness
will return to sanity. The pendulum. Here.
Trapped in Time.

<><><>

Don’t ask me why I periodically feel the compulsion to enter the desperate headache chamber of Yvor Winters.  So bleak and pipe-clanging and Sisyphus. And so creepily Thérèse Desqueyroux, as anyone knows who ever suffered through French Lit and Mauriac going on about un pouvoir départi aux créatures les plus chargées de fatalité [..] ce pouvoir de dire non à la loi qui les écrase. Il leur est demandé seulement de ne pas se résigner à la nuit.

Which basically means: here’s a study of sustained obstinate ability to live banging one’s head against a brick wall.

Thank-you, Yvor.

Et al.

Scavella has me thinking again.

Some rooting around on the web dug up a rather wearisome argument about who said the personal is political first. But then, what does it mean? The phrase was coined in the context of feminism, to a great extent in relation to intimate uses and abuses of the body. Does it stop there? Some more or less random excerpts from this site:

every part of our personal lives [can] be affected by the political situation

what [the personal as the political] was really meant to do was create an awareness of how our personal lives are ruled by political forces

it took me some time to acknowledge that ordinary daily events could be political

Hell, these are some huge definitions. Just what is meant by “political forces”? The mind boggles. The three branches of government at the local, state & federal level? The paths and repositories of authority in any given culture? The way cultures interact (or don’t) with each other? The way nations interact (or don’t) with each other?

And let’s not even begin with “personal.”

Then if we scrunch things down (quickly and arbitrarily) to poetry, one question might be: what is engaged poetry? In the existentialist sense — being aware that one creates one’s own meaning and values, refusing convention, choosing and deciding minute by minute, living in doubt, regarding nothing as ever settled? Or is engaged poetry merely advocacy – soap-boxing for the rights of one or another of a range of oppressed social groups?

In either case one could write good or bad poetry.

And what if one intends neither, but one’s work is read in one or the other way? Is one then “engaged,” willy-nilly?

Time to go away and think. Meanwhile, here’s a quote from Tony Williams’ answer to No. 1 of the Ten Questions, which I think is pertinent here:

1. In this 2003 interview, Canadian poet George Bowering quotes Shelley: “The poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world.” Do you think the poet has a specific role to play in human affairs in this century? If so, what is it?

This is difficult territory to traverse because there are two activities going on, the theoretical/political/social and the technical, what you think and how you write. The irrelevant poet is someone who is only interested in poetry and not in the relations that poetry might have to the world. The earnest boring poet is someone who is primarily driven by the theoretical/political side. But it isn’t a question simply of avoiding those extremes. The relation of craft and content, or of practice and theory or however you want to phrase it, is delicate and inscrutable.

It seems to me that the poet needs to be basically in thrall to technique, interested in how to write and in what makes good writing, but part of what makes a good writer is bringing one’s intelligence and writing skill to bear on the world outside poetry. The best poets re-imagine the world, or imaginatively reconfigure the world, and it seems to me that neither the poets who bang on about their own feelings and personal relationships nor the ones who seek to make political points or exemplify political systems are doing that to any appreciable degree.

It’s very difficult for a poet to write well in the light of a perceived responsibility to engage with matters outside the poem – whether these are political, historical, moral, theoretical, aesthetic, etc – because as soon as you have a conscious desire to do so, you’re serving two masters. The poems I write with too fresh an impression of an extra-poetic idea in my mind tend to be uniformly dreadful. I am increasingly impressed by Louis MacNeice’s prescription, ‘I would have a poet able-bodied [able-minded]…a reader of newspapers…informed in economics…actively interested in politics’. That is, you have to be interested in the world as well as in poetry, and somehow and somewhen the poems will come.

• And, also relevant, I think – Paul Stevens’ answer to the same question:

The poet’s specific role is to tell the truth, or to uncover the truth, as he or she sees it, using memorable and precise language. This happens in a number of ways. Poets may tell the truth in openly political poetry, as Tom Paulin has done. But when poets make poems, truth-tellings, then that has political implications no matter what the apparent subject of the poem. Politics is based on twist-speak, on the perversion of language to purposes other than truth. If poetic enactment is proper use of language, it must also be a political act - a legislation, a coding of the law, and a liberation from untruth - even in the twenty-first century.

I think this may be really sad.  But true.

the hours rise up putting off stars and it is
dawn
into the street of the sky light walks scattering poems

- e e cummings

That line-break and that no-punctuation hit me just square just right just now.

Tomorrow is looking huge and dangerous. I wish it wouldn’t.

is what (or who?) I am thinking of writing a poem about. At some point. Not at all sure what it will about, although I expect shades of pain and twisted forgotten things will feature and it will be exhausting to write.

Suddenly I feel I’ve only ever written hullo clouds, hullo sky fotherington-thomas type poems.

I’m trying to be a good mother, a good employee, a good boss and a good poet.

What degree of good is achievable when so many goods are sought?

PS I would also like to be a good friend, a good citizen, a good reader, a good cook, a good hostess, a good tennis player, a good knitter, a good fiction-writer.

Where the bee sucks there suck I:
In a cow-slip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On a bat’s back I do fly
after summer merrily,
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

I played Ariel in a school play once. I remember vividly how much I disliked both Miranda and Prospero because I never once lost sight of the fact that they were really Claire and Philippa, a totally evil Lower VI pair if ever one existed. I also had to wear a gray leotard and prance around playing the recorder while singing Ariel’s song according to Arne. I expect you wonder, as do I, that I’m still around to tell the tale.

Christmas coming up. Making gingerbread cookies for the boys, listening in my really nice kitchen with the red tile floor to the Psalms of David in Anglican chant from the King’s College choir. No. 122 comes on (I was glad when they said unto me) and: Oh, lovely! I’ve picked that one out to be sung at my funeral, says my visiting mother.

?

I’m up to swap mothers, if anyone else is.

We have perhaps seven Nativity sets from all over the globe set up through the house and this may be why my six-year-old son chose to draw a very detailed Nativity scene in pencil and crayon this evening. We have Mary, Joseph, Jesus-sleeping-in-a-manger, a shepherd, three wise men and a sheep, all nicely arranged under a possibly rather sketchily angular but perfectly adequate stable canopy. He forgot the star.

Or did he replace it?

With a rather impressionistic drawing of a lean, snarling, crouching thing poised to leap, on a rocky overhang above the stable.

Oh my. What’s that?! I asked, startled.

Oh, just a hungry mountain lion. It smells Jesus, he said.

?!?

from one place, state, form, or appearance to another. That’s the elemental definition of ”translate”, according to Merriam Webster. Losing my way with poetry translations these days. The English translation of so much stuff just sounds stupid now. Flipping last night through a bilingual volume of Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati and just gagging at the inadequacy of the English. Flipping just now through  Poetry International Web - largely English translations of poets from all over the globe - and the same aack reaction. Perhaps I’m reading and studying myself into a sick, narrow definition of enjoyable poetry. I’m pretty sure that all the translated stuff that makes me gag now felt fine, if not actually great, a year ago. Does fine-tuning your perceptions mean narrowing your capacity for enjoyment?

Poetry as fun just got a whole lot smaller.