The Contemporary Poem

francine j. harris’ poem “what you’d find buried in the dirt under charles f. kettering sr. high school” depicts exactly what it says it will in the title, and shows the debris and remnants of student life at a Detroit high school, presented as a series of images in a stream-of-consciousness delivery that almost overloads the reader with the sheer amount of objects and the histories and implications that each of those objects carries. Try to imitate harris in delivering a surplus of images – how can we present a multiplicity of objects or ideas and maintain coherence within that excess? How can we create a linking narrative between images without becoming caught up in any particular image? This exercise can be done with ideas or events serving as the image, but push yourself to try for tangible objects. If you need help starting, look for ten objects that you could hold in your hands in the book you are following and describe the context in which they might all be found together, and proceed from there.

I love Carolina’s question: what kind of poet do we want do be? For me, another way to word it would be “what do we want out poems to do, and what kind of relationship do we want to have with our poems?” Personally, anything I do must be honest and sincere. That is an expectation I hold for myself, because I have found that whenever I am not honest or produce something not out of honesty, it results in either guilt or disconnect between me and the product. Sometimes I don’t intend to be dishonest in my writing, but sometimes my writing is not skilled enough to or crafted in a way that represents my honest emotions and thoughts in their true meaning and depth.

Just as I finished typing that paragraph and checked my Facebook messages, I see this photo of a poem by Rupi Kaur that a close friend sent me:

How interesting….and timely…

And as I clicked onto the homepage of Facebook, I see this post from my dear friend Louis Marzella (Geneseo alumni) whom some of you might know:

*warning: midnight linguistic relativist rant ahead*

I truly believe that writing is an almost magical process and one of the most powerful things a person can do. When you are able to apply language to subconscious thoughts, feelings, and instincts, you not only come to more thoroughly understand those abstractions – you also arrive at totally new insights that conceptually may never have existed without language. I so often zip through life on autopilot without taking the time to reflect on my state of affairs, but I find that the times that I engage in deliberate verbal reflection – beyond passive, vague mental reflection – are the times I most consciously, clearly, and intimately know my self. If it’s your thing, I would encourage everyone to keep a journal or at least talk to yourself in the shower or the car. I really believe it can empower you in a concrete way and help you to see things differently.

I think Louis makes a great point. Writing is an act of self-discovery as is reflecting, except that it’s a concrete way of reflecting – there’s something about being able to see your thoughts visually and not just hearing them in your head. You realize things about yourself you wouldn’t have known if you didn’t write them down. You are able to step further away from yourself and look at yourself in a new light. Why we must know ourselves truthfully is another packed question, basically alluding to “is there an unchangeable truth ” and “what is the meaning of life”… Personally I don’t think any writing (or anything, actually) matters if there is no constant truth we can hold on to, if anything we do is permissible and if all boundaries are empty, meaningless or even harmful social constructs. But I digress.

If those are the two things that are most valuable about writing – the healing and the self-discovery – then I would say Kaur is right in his poem (although as Carolina has suggested, we cannot be sure whether those are Kaur’s true thoughts). Personally I think that is the kind of relationship I want with my writing – my writing serves as a mirror, sometimes a painting (this involves more manipulation and intention than the mirror), as therapy, and if none of those apply to me, that they would be those things to the reader. I’m fine with people relating to writing that I may not relate to or agree with anymore, but that piece of writing will probably lose value in my own eyes (unless the difference between what I write and who I am or think I am is so notable and telling of how I’ve changed).

So to summarize, what matters most in your writing (Amanda’s question) depends on what kind of poet you want to be (Carolina’s question). I value honesty in my writing since I have found that honest writing brings me the most healing, freedom from hurt/narrow-mindedness/shame/apathy, and joy, and so I want to be the kind of poet that either heals/frees/brings joy to me or the reader.

This past Friday, I spent the night collaborating on an art project with a buddy of mine, something we’ve been promising ourselves we’d do for rhe past several weeks. We thought it’d be fun, seeing as his mediums of choice are sculpting, wire, and jewelry making, and mine are pointism, charcoal, and monoprint work. unfortunately, we didn’t get far. We got lost in conversation on an artistic delima of his:
During the past year, his art has become something therapeutic. I asked what was wrong with this, for isn’t art supposed to have therapeutic elements for the artist? Rather, aren’t the first versions of pieces, the first drafts of poems or the first outlines of paintings, supposed to be raw in emotion to at least a certain extent before the create goes back and softens or sharpens the image?
I’m asking genuinely because he didn’t seem to have an answer, and I’m wondering if he felt that art sold have some sort of message rather than pure emotion. Or rather, if the message o the task away of a piece is more vauable than the emotion or thought from which it came? I’m not sure that I know even my thoughts on this.
I can say that when it comes to poetry, I do sit down to second and third drafts with the question of, “why should the reader care?” Or “Why do I feel the need to tell the reader about x, y, and z.” But second draft still feels as though it is built on the foundation of the first, the one which, for me, is emotion or thoughts or memory thrown down on the page in words that are coherent to me. Does that then make the emotion more important, if I’m only spending the next few drafts polishing the poem and making it coherent to the reader?
I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud.

There is a question we must all ask ourselves as poets, even though it might not be a question that begins outright more than it is one that develops as we move through the genre. That is, what kind of poets do we want to be?

When I ask this, I don’t mean in a moral sense, or in a competitive sense. I don’t think the kind of poet you want to be is determined by your level of skill, or on your morale as a person. You can have no sense of morale and write wonderful poems that relate to other human beings on the planet. And you can have beginner level skills, compared to other poets, but still be pretty good at the craft and still have your own voice and purpose in a poem.

To argue with myself, maybe we are asking all these things with the question, “what kind of poet do I want to be?” I don’t want to narrow the question to one sole answer, but when I ask this question, what I mean is, what reputation do I want my words to give me? Perhaps, it’s shallow to think of our image as poets as a reputation, but isn’t it somewhat inevitable because of the society we live in? Our reputation, whether we know it or not, has a great impact on how we are received by others. I could be a terrible person and write pure, beautiful poems, and this will be my reputation (not my character). We can re-create ourselves on the page and become someone entirely different from our real life self. In a strange way, it seems the writer has the gift of leading a double life—and of exploring the pros and cons of different characters.

Take for example, old school poets who wrote everything in complex metaphors. They could have been dialoguing their everyday lives but we would have never known, because their poems didn’t allow us to know. Many of their poems became a puzzle for readers to decipher, break down and analyze. And what this says to me is that they wanted to be the kind of poets that flaunted their skill through their words, while telling good stories and lessons, instead of documenting their lives in current time.

And then of course, there are poets who try to communicate emotion through seemingly incoherent wordplay, and there are poets who try through very complex, but decipherable wordplay. And then there are those who tell their stories in casual language in order to incite emotion in their reader.

So, what kind of poet are you? And what kind of reputation do you want? I’ve been thinking about this myself, and struggling with choosing. It might very well be that we do not have to choose—and that we can practice each method, move through our identity as poets as we move through our identity as humans—but there is the reality that choosing can sometimes be less stressful and much more gratifying than consistent change.

After Pam and Lily spoke last night about how philosophy related to poetry, it made me think about how the sociology class I’m in now, and how it relates to our class/poetry in general.

Recently, in  Sociology of the Individual and Society with Professor Eisenberg, we’ve been learning about Social Exchange Theory. This theory states that we interact with others when we’re looking to fulfill some sort of personal need, because, “Much of what we value and need in life (e.g., food, companionship, approval, status, and information) can only be obtained from others” (taken from page 210 in Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology). 

So what is it that we get from interacting through poetry,  through crafting images like we’ve been trying to do?

One of the reasons I write poetry is to capture a feeling that I don’t otherwise know how to express, and to share that feeling with someone. The first thing I want to do after writing a poem I’m proud of is read it to someone.  For me, this is because I have a lot to gain from an interaction like this: knowing that I’m not the only one who’s had that feeling, the pride from gaining praise on my work, etc. But what else do we gain from sharing our poems?

I always ask so many questions in my blog posts (so of course this one is no different) and most of them are for myself–things I’m trying to work out on or that I’ve been mulling over, but I am curious what all of you are thinking, too: it’s often discussed why we write, but not why do we share that writing?  Do you agree with the social exchange theory’s view of it?

A couple weeks ago, I asked Lytton about how to concisely produce sound in poetry and his advice garnered an intimate approximation to the words that you choose and how they relate to one another in a line. He referred me to Gary Lutz’s “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” where this relationship between words in a sentence, a line in poetry, is examined. To use Lutz’ own words, “the words have to lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up.” In the process, a sort of sensual relationship between the words is formed and they fit into each other, almost as if they originally belonged together. Lutz argued that a writer must work and rework a sentence so that the outcome produces “a series of departures from what you may have intended to express; a language may start taking on, as they say, a life of its own, a life that contests or trumps the life you had sponsored to live on the page.” And in saying this, Lutz breathes life into a sentence/line/whatever partnering of words you compose like a trumpeter exerts his last aching breath to produce its echoing resonance.

In reading this paper, I began to visualize myself as the writer that I have always been – knit-picky about the words that flow out onto the pages in my stories, and now in my poems. My initial hesitation was considering myself a musician. I had always been terrible at choosing words that went together like a melody. Spoken word did not flow from the tip of my tongue like it would a rapper. In fact, I remember freestyling with my brother as a kid and completely sucking. But Lutz changes what I believed at my core and challenges what it means to be a conventional writer when he resuscitates the heart of a melodist and equates it with the heart of a writer: “In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround.” Here is where I found my sound.

Hopefully, those reading will look up the essay I’ve read and learn a thing or two about the art of making sound beautiful.  

This Thursday at a Guerrilla meeting, after going over some ideas, plans, and hopes for future projects, we had a talk about trigger warnings. I realized during that discussion that I didn’t think that much about trigger warnings, or rather that I was not aware of the complete range of reasons for using them. Although I have used them before, I’m still not fully cognizant of how important they can be to certain individuals who have experienced a traumatic event or suffer from PTSD, since I can’t say I’ve had such an experience.

During the discussion, we highlighted the fact that a lot of the hype around trigger warnings as the symptom of an annoying  “social justice warrior” generation is due largely to a general lack of information or knowledge about the purpose of the trigger warning.  Although I have encountered individuals who would still oppose them despite this fact, mostly due to a staunch philosophical defense of free speech, I’m sure that more people would be open to them if they were understood for their purpose.

I can see why people would be doubtful of trigger warnings, and would like to engage in discussion with people who do believe that by tagging the work before being read, or by providing warnings, that the trigger warning is in fact a work of censorship. I think this is an important discussion to be had. My defense for the trigger warning is that it can’t be censorship due to the fact that the content is still there, it’s just a little tucked away under a safety barrier for those who would react to the content in a way that’s painful and potentially dangerous for them.

Someone at the meeting said something about trigger warnings that I won’t forget: they are like allergy warnings. Certain common allergens, like wheat or eggs, should be listed simply for consumer safety. A panic attack for someone with mental illness is in this way something very similar to an allergic reaction, something that is presently innate and hard to control without direct avoidance. It’s time we start thinking more about how we can start taking into account people’s reactions, in every sense of the word.

A comment in our last workshop reminded me of a question Dr. Asher once asked us in our Philosophy and Literature course a year or two ago (side note, great class. Highly recommend). He put forth a poem about a man whose son died in one World War I, and asked if the poem would have any less meaning if the son in the poet’s piece did not truly exist.

As I’m unfortunately blanking on which poem he showed us, I will instead point to “Common Form” from Kipling’s Epitaphs of the War: “If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

This poem, or, rather, couplet, has stayed with me (haunted, may perhaps be a better word) since I was sixteen and speaking to my father—a major history buff, whose favorite war was WWI—about Kipling’s life.  For those who don’t know the details, Rudyard Kipling was a well-known English writer, big fan of imperialism, and who worked with the English government to write pro-WWI propaganda, an offer he immediately accepted. Much to his delight, his son John attempted to join the Royal Navy, but was rejected on medical grounds due to his terrible eye-sight. He then tried to join the military, but again was rejected for the same reasons. Finally, he was accepted into Irish Guards, but only because his father, who was close friends with the commander and chief of the British Army, pulled strings to get him in. Sadly, John died in battle, and sources say he was last seen stumbling in the mud in search of his glasses, which had fallen off during attack. Shortly after his death, Kipling wrote the famous lines: “If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Likely in reference to his grief in being the one to get his son into the military, despite his son’s repeated failed medical exams.

Obviously, there are countless stories and poems about death and loss of loved ones, but part of what makes Kipling’s poetry, particularly these two lines, so haunting to me is the tragic nature of his son’s death and the guilt he suffered for the rest of his life due to the role he indirectly played in causing it. In essence, it is Kipling’s experience that comes through in these lines that gives legacy to the poem. Even if Kipling did not have a son, and is instead an incredibly empathetic writer, I believe that true experience still must come into play in order for the poem to stick with the reader the way “Common Man” had for me. In the case of “Common Man,” the true experience came from knowing Kipling’s life, but I’m sure if it were a fictional poem read by an individual who had Kipling’s level of guilt for losing someone, and who read these lines, the reader’s true experience would come forth and take hold of the lines more than a reader who lacked that guilt… if that makes any sense.

Something about what philosophers in our readings have been saying is bothering me – they seem to think reason and emotion are two opposites, that the truth is independent of emotions, that having your emotions affect your actions is a sign of weakness. But to me that is simply not true.

The truth cannot be apart from emotion. We experience satisfaction when we do a good deed, and it is part of what drives us to keep carrying out good deeds. Emotions convey truth, and to me they are proof that a truth exists (the fact that different people can relate to a certain thing together but in individually unique ways too is a miracle; it’s like we are parts of a whole). For example, when I feel the joy my mother’s banana bread gives me, to me the emotion stems from the knowledge that I am loved by her (and also from the knowledge that she makes really good banana bread). When I learn something from new from class and get excited about it, it is from knowing that I have learned a new truth, and that I love learning about truth. When I feel empty despite all the work I’ve done to be a good person/student/friend, it is pointing at the truth that I need something other than myself to fill me up and fuel me. Without emotions, how would we know from right and wrong? Righteousness would then become mere rules and legislation, and there would be no joy in learning what is true.

So often people see truth as a boring, inflexible thing, something that puts people in boxes and limits them. I have a friend who refuses to commit to one truth because she thinks it will limit her ability to relate to people and appreciate art. But I think truth involves action, and that is the action of loving others, which of course involves and is often aided by emotion. We may have differing views on what truth is, but I think most people can agree that things like being kind, being generous, being encouraging, being patient, and so on, are good things i.e. things that align with our truth/our view of what is good. And all those good qualities come from a love for others.

Professor Ashley Pankratz (who, sadly, is not in Geneseo anymore) once shared a quote that talked about writing as an act of love. It is the writer’s attempt to make the world a better place. If so, writing that conveys strong emotion and reveals the weaknesses and struggles of the writer must not be seen as fallacy so much as an act of love and of truth.

Like Isabel mentioned in her post a few weeks back about Guerrilla’s display at the Fringe Festival, I’ve also been thinking about poetry in different ways; specifically, I’ve been thinking on the interaction words have with their environment.

One of the things Guerrilla tries to do is put poems in unconventional places -bathroom stalls, trees, chalked on the ground, etc., – to make poetry more a part of everyone’s daily lives, and surprise poetry* is a side effect of that. When we’re not expecting to encounter poetry, does it mean something different to us? And how is the environment altered?

In my experience, I’ve found myself having a stronger connection to poems when I’ve stumbled on them accidentally. There’s something about surprise poetry that really strikes me in a way I’m not sure the poem would have been able to accomplish on its own.  It’s like how words graffitied on a wall sometimes seem more profound than if you were to be reading them in a book.

But the environment is altered too.  Poetry becomes an agent of change, in how its presence can take something ordinary – a wall of a building, a sidewalk, a public restroom – and give it meaning past its intended purpose. A bathroom stall becomes more than just a bathroom stall when there’s a poem in it. (I also just really love reading poetry while I pee, but that’s me)

 

*This makes me think of poetry ninjas. Which would be awesome.