The Contemporary Poem

One of the things that first attracted me to creative writing and reading/writing poetry was the notion of it as an almost otherworldly, sublime escape from the rigidness and mayhem of daily life. One reason that until now, I have not (purposefully) brought my history major or my political views very far into my writing is because I tended to separate my “material” and methodical thoughts about history and politics away from my writing, which I saw as living in its own world: a world that is strictly personal, unhinged, almost spiritual in itself.

I’m realizing that although not a fallacy, this impression wasn’t one where I was being completely honest with myself about what I wanted to write. Perhaps I was trying too hard to create this separation, because now I am developing a notably different relationship with my writing. As I’ve become more comfortable with poetry as a discipline, all of my heated rantings and ravings have begun to start to take lineated form inside the deep and dark corners of the “poetry” folder on my desktop. Lately, all of my writing exercises, and even my most recent workshop pieces, have been delving deeper into identity politics and my thoughts on history—not because I’ve been trying to change my writing, but because my bubbling frustrations and concerns about myself and the world have, for some reason I cannot yet pinpoint, started to take lineated form.

My poetry is becoming more political because I am political, my academic studies are political, and integral parts of my identity are political in nature. I think my voice comes through stronger when I don’t hide this due to a semi-archaic and self-imposed mindset that poetry is more “pure”—a rule that just separates me more than what I could write. My most recent piece, where I tied together the election, womanhood, and my history research project on 20^th century Jewish girlhood is a good example of my recent tendency to tie in identity, politics, and history into the poetic—

 

“The other day my coworker said that

in political discussion,

I tend to attack people and that I

am intimidating. Trump interrupted Clinton 51 times

in the debate. Marion Metz leans on her friend

in her shortcut bathing suit, laughing.”

 

Perhaps I’ve avoided the political because of discomfort, because of fear, or perhaps because of an even deeper fear of offending people. But as my voice has gotten bigger, so has my desire to write about big things.

While I am open about my double major in my writing classes and do include on my resume that I study both creative writing and psychology and ultimately become a LCSW (you’d be amazed how many social workers/counselors/therapists don’t know how to write their own damn case notes…), it’s not something I typically broadcast in the workplace. I’m sure every writer has gotten Are you going to write about this/me? question at some point; however, there seems to be an added layer of ignorance and flat out stupidity whenever someone asks, So, you plan to study sick people and then write about them?

…Where do I even begin explaining how offensive that question is to both me and my future clients?

Yes, imaginary person standing in for every person I would like to slap—you caught me. That’s the only reason I’m studying to be a therapist. It actually has nothing to do with wanting to help people or anything weird like that. I just want to take advantage of other people’s trauma and misfortune.

Yes, typically writers borrow from the experiences or traits of those around them, and if I am a therapist, I’m going to be around a lot of people with a lot of different experiences all day. So, yes, some aspects of the stories I hear may seep into pieces of mine (although, let’s not forget every confidentiality contract I ever signed with every treatment center/organization I’ve taken part in). But the question seems to carry a certain stereotype occasional seen in writers: That everything we do has the alterative motive of just looking for another story idea; that we care more about our work than those around us. Or, and this is probably the worst, we only involve ourselves with others to use them for our own benefit.

Unfortunately, there have been therapists and social workers looking to make some cash or find some fame by telling the stories of their clients (CoughCorneliaWilburCoughCough), who have made a mockery out of field of social work—and I don’t believe I’m exaggerating in claiming they make a mockery out of a field that’s still put down by other sciences. On top of it, the question implies a writer has no other goals or life outside of writing. Yes, writing is a passion, but so is working with trauma victims. It puts the writer in a box and forces the single title of writer when there are more aspects to a person.

But that’s all I have to say. Thanks for reading that little rant of mine.

“Clearly a divide separates the disciplines of science and poetry.  In many respects we cannot enter one another’s territory.  The divide is as real as a rift separating tectonic plates or a border separating nations.  But a border is both a zone of exclusion and a zone of contact where we can exchange some aspects of our difference, and, like neighboring tribes who exchange seashells and obsidian, obtain something that is lacking in our own locality.” – Alison Hawthorne Deming in “Poetry and Science | A View from the Divide”

I’ve been dealing a lot, both on this blog and in my poetry, about how I relate science and writing. This line from “Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide” might best represent my feelings on the subject “The divide is as real as a rift separating tectonic plates.” I’m biased, probably. Definitely. It’s a geology metaphor, how could I not be biased? But Demings also has a large point here with her metaphor, whether it was intentional or not.

Continue reading “Response to “Poetry and Science” Pt. 2- The Mid-Atlantic Ridge”

This past week I signed up for daily poems to be sent to my email on behalf of the poetry foundation. It pleases me to wake up with a poem every day because it helps me interact with the poem more closely—and my day begins on a pensive note. Today’s poem was called “The Poem You’ve Been Waiting For,” by  Tarfia Faizullah. The poem is beautiful and seems to be about a reflection—within or outside of oneself. The lines reflect one another, and move across moments seamlessly in a sentence. It’s feels like a train, passing destinations within seconds. Except Faizullah accomplishes this technique with a subtlety that feels like a whisper, and readers are left to dwell on what they just read, why it makes them feel nostalgic, and how it felt like a magical blur. For example:

to take me. I saw then the gnawing

sounds my faith has been making
and I saw too that the shape it sings

in is the color of cast-iron mountains
I drove so long to find I forgot I had

Notice how the speaker moves from one line to the next, without hesitance or ending. The lines move fluidly. Everything she speaks about such as “the shape” or the “the color” are vague and are only used to create an outline of an image as opposed to a real image. This allows the reader to fill in the outline with their own associations. This poem gave me goosebumps because of it’s ability to create universality. I can relate this poem to many aspects of my life. The “you” could be an older version of myself, or it could be a lover, or even a family member. The magic of this poem is that it applies to whoever reads it, and leaves a significant message. It encourages readers to think about their lives in a deeper way and to consider re-evaluating the moments that have led up to their current self. It is very much a poem that someone might have been waiting to hear, an extra push forward or a symbol of hope. There’s a lot more to be considered here that I will continue to think about. And I am intrigued by Faizullah’s skillful use of language.

I saw then the white-eyed man
leaning in to see if I was ready

yet to go where he has been waiting
to take me. I saw then the gnawing

sounds my faith has been making
and I saw too that the shape it sings

in is the color of cast-iron mountains
I drove so long to find I forgot I had

been looking for them, for the you
I once knew and the you that was born

waiting for me to find you. I have been
twisting and turning across these lifetimes

where forgetting me is what you do
so you don’t have to look at yourself. I saw

that I would drown in a creek carved out
of a field our incarnations forged the first path

through to those mountains. I invited you to stroll
with me there again for the first time, to pause

and sprawl in the grass while I read to you
the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting

to hear. I read until you finally slept
and all your jagged syntaxes softened into rest.

You’re always driving so far from me towards
the me I worry, without you, is eternity. I lay there,

awake, keeping watch while you snored.
I waited, as I always seem to, for you

to wake up and come back to me

I found an article the other day, while looking for a quote on crafting CNF, titled “Poetry and Science: a view from the divide.” Being the person that I am, I’ve been playing with and reading this article for a good week now, trying to decide what parts of it to respond to. Truth be told, this may be an article that I write multiple blog posts about.

One of the things that Alison Hawthorne Deming does in this article is try to define science and poetry in terms of each other to figure out what is different about them. One of my favorite paragraphs on this subject, which I’ve quoted at the bottom of this post, compared them in terms of language and word use. Deming says that the two disciplines “use language in a fundamentally different manner.” She claims that science uses it as “a tool of measurement” and an “auxiliary tool.” Language, for poetry, is at the forefront of everything. It is the emotion and driving force behind a poem. In both cases, though, scientists and poets use language carefully to tell stories and to explain. The stories they create and explain are very, very different.

Over the summer I had to write a proposal for a directed study. In this proposal, I was talking about pits in the Laki lava flow, a large lava flow in Iceland, and one of the comments that my professor wrote back was about the precision of language. He told me that I could not call some of the pits, which I hypothesized where formed by a collapse of the rock, collapse-pits, because it implied that I already knew they were collapse features. I did not know this, obviously, it was what my entire study was going to be on. Likewise, I find myself reaching for precision when writing poetry, because every word counts when you only use 83 of them. My take away, at least from this part of the essay, is that language use is one of the ways we can define disciplines. Furthermore, the way language is used for interdisciplinary writing requires care, because it combines the original disciple, the everyday understanding of that word/ discipline, and whatever metaphor/ wordplay the poem is suggesting. Scientific words sometimes require that you unpack and understand them to use them. Poetry words require that you think about them within the context of the poem. Both ways, language asks its users to remember that they are part of a subgroup, to use the language of this class, and that they and their poetry doesn’t exist within a void.

 

Quote from the article “Poetry and Science”:

“But science and poetry, when each discipline is practiced with integrity, use language in a fundamentally different manner.  Both disciplines share the attempt to find a language for the unknown, to develop an orderly syntax to represent accurately some carefully seen aspect of the world.  Both employ language in a manner more distilled than ordinary conversation.  Both, at their best, use metaphor and narrative to make unexpected connections.  But, as Czech immunologist and poet Miroslav Holub points out, “for the sciences, words are an auxiliary tool.”  Science–within the tradition of its professional literature–uses language for verification and counts on words to have a meaning so specific that they will not be colored by feelings and biases.  Science uses language as if it were another form of measurement–exact, definitive and logical. ”

 

The first thing that pops up when I google “how to write a poem” is Poetry Writing: 10 Tips on How to Write a Poem. Here is an excerpt from the website:

If you are writing a poem because you want to capture a feeling that you experienced, then you don’t need these tips. Just write whatever feels right. Only you experienced the feeling that you want to express, so only you will know whether your poem succeeds.

If, however, your goal is to communicate with a reader — drawing on the established conventions of a literary genre (conventions that will be familiar to the experienced reader) to generate an emotional response in your reader — then simply writing what feels right to you won’t be enough.

These tips will help you make an important transition:

• away from writing poetry to celebrate, commemorate, or capture your own feelings (in which case you, the poet, are the center of the poem’s universe)
• towards writing poetry in order to generate feelings in your reader (in which case the poem exists entirely to serve the reader).

This made me wonder which type of poetry we are leaning towards. I’m guessing we’re leaning towards the latter type, where the objective is to “generate feelings in your reader.” It doesn’t say “make your reader feel your own feelings,” but instead it just leaves it at “generate feelings.” This then makes me think that perhaps a poem could still be successful even if the reader does not understand the poet’s original motives or reasoning behind the poem, just as long as the poem moves the reader in a way that is meaningful to the reader him/herself.

How many readers does the poem need to move in order to be counted as successful? What if the poet is completely emotionally detached from the poem but is still able to move the reader deeply? Does the poet put the soul into the poem or does the reader?

The poet is the one who creates the poem and causes its existence, but the reader is the one who fulfills the purpose of the poem (if we are talking about the sort of poem that is written to communicate to an audience other than the poet him/herself). A creation without purpose can still exist, but purpose is what makes the creation alive. By alive, I mean the creation has a real impact on other people’s thoughts, feelings, values, and actions – it has a living effect on the world.

It’s funny how our sense of purpose relies so much on how others receive us. I think many people in American culture (I don’t want to generalize, but it is a trend I’ve noticed when I compare the American culture to other cultures) are often taught to promote self above all else – just “do you,” as long as it makes you happy. But there seems to be more to purpose than just doing what makes you “happy” – somehow our joy isn’t complete until we share it. We need others to help us find our purpose, because if there were no other people, there would be no one who needs us.

I don’t know how to explain how I ended up here..I tend to link everything to large philosophies and my personal knowledge of truth…it’s how I make sense of life, I think.

 

Since we’ve been discussing poetry as it relates to the physical image, I’ve been considering the existence of poetry without language. After all, it seems that art in itself is poetry, as is photography. A new kind of book has emerged in contemporary literature, where we have, in a way, returned to childhood—a book accompanied by a few lines or a caption and then an image, sometimes lacking direct relation to the words, but more often than not establishing some other kind of relation through mood, composition, etc.

So, it is very clear that poetry CAN exist without language, that is when we are speaking about the very broad definition of it, where almost all things complex with some sort of sense become a poem. The song, the photograph, the drawing, the tradition, the life of a person, science, etc. But then, what about us poets of language? Do we become useless? Since the whole world can practice something that we hold as dearly as we do with just as much precision through a different form, does that require us to step OUTSIDE of language and, as students of the poem, take up multiple forms, so that we may truly master the ‘poem’?

I’m not sure. Maybe, we can consider the traditional form of the poem. How it began, how it evolved. It’s almost like my desire to invent the typewriter because it facilitated the storage of knowledge, the creation of the computer, and thus other complex methods that exist because of our ability to work at a faster pace than before. The traditional form of the poem informs the other forms of poetry that exist outside of language. And art informs the poem, photography informs both, and so each form becomes the other. This confuses me. Is the word poem then supposed to be more narrow than we are considering it to be? The word poem is used to explain the creative use of language to create a specific form on the page or when spoken, and the word art is used to describe the creative use of drawing or other methods to bring about an image or form on a canvas, etc. With these words, poetry, art and photography, are we describing the same thing in different forms? In other words, are these words a substitute for something larger, intangible and then presented through different forms?  I don’t know, what do you think? As you can see, this question is driving me a little nuts.

Although it’s probably less sophisticated than the kinds of texts we usually talk about in this class,  I’ve been thinking about doing a blog post on children’s poetry for a while, so when I got Eloise Greenfield’s 1978 book of children’s poems Honey, I Love and other love poems in the mail from my mom it seemed like a sign. Honey, I Love was one of the first books of poetry we read in my first grade class, so I wanted to see if I could approach it from a new perspective beyond simple enjoyment, thirteen years later. The book is a collection of sixteen poems having to do mostly with the love the speaker, a young black girl growing up in the 70s, has for her family and friends, and some of her meditations on travel and poetry.  Most of the poems span a page or two and are spoken in a declarative tone, the way little kids talk, so as I went through Honey, I Love
I took note of “Aunt Roberta,” one of the shortest poems in the collection and the only one phrased entirely as a question.

What do people think about
When they sit and dream
All wrapped up in quiet
and old sweaters
And don’t even hear me ’til I
Slam the door?

Although audience is something we’ve all been told to keep in mind, I’m not sure how consciously I make an effort to appeal to a certain audience when I write. “Aunt Roberta” seems to me to have been developed with an audience very much in mind — the language and line breaks would be easily understandable to a child reader. At the same time, though, the poem doesn’t seem childish, and there does appear to be method in how the line breaks are utilized: “Slam the door” being on its own line, for instance, emphasizes the silence broken and recalls the sounds itself. The poem as a whole being phrased as question I find interesting, not only  contextually with its being the only such piece in the collection, but for how well it creates a realistic narrative voice in replicating the sort of question that a child might ask. The narrator draws no conclusions, leaving the interpretation of meaning entirely up to the reader, and doesn’t even use specific names (Aunt Roberta only being named in the title), which invites the reader to project their own experience into the question asked of them.

My best friend and I have grown up in artistic households. Both of our mothers are writers, painters, and musicians, and encouraged the two of us to follow in their paths. Today, my friend is an actress and a painter, and I am a writer and an artist. This past summer, we talked about the different forms of art we find ourselves drawn to–her, preforming, acting, and abstract paintings, me, writing and surrealist ink/charcoal drawings–and where we gathered inspiration for our separate mediums. My friend talked about observation of other people’s actions. She can mimic the speech patterns of someone after speaking to them for a few minutes, she can master their small tics, the gestures they make with their hands while they talk. She can mimic what they do, but does not always think of why they may act in a certain way. At least not to the extent that a writer would. She described writers as being more internal, going out of their way ton understand both their own feelings and the feelings of others, and allowing that to be the guiding force in both the thoughts and actions of their characters. She went on to make this analogy:  a writer is a self-sufficient island, while an actor requires attention and aid from the outside world. (It’s been a few months, so I may be misquoting her)

I’m not sure if I agree with this, so I’m taking it to this blog to see what other’s think.

Given that we talked about ekphrasis last week, I wanted to suggest this youtube channel, “The Art Assignment,” to everyone on this blog. “The Art Assignment” is a youtube channel founded by PBS and hosted by contemporary art curator of the Indianapolis museum (2007-2013), Sarah Green, that interviews contemporary artists about their work. Green will then provide some background art history on a topic related to the one the artist is talking about. The neatest thing about this channel, though, is that the artists create an assignment  (does the channel name make sense now?) for the viewers. There’s an interactive community around this channel as well, because viewers will take on these assignments, submit them to the art assignment social media accounts, and then the channel makes compilation videos from some of the submissions.

The channel also does interesting work in challenging it’s viewers’ perception of art. The first video uploaded to the channel was about an art project where two people would measure the distance between them and find the exact middle point. Then they would both travel (and document their traveling) to that point. There are also videos about art that we could “conventional.” It’s a nice mix.

I also feel like this could be a good resource for us poets, because it can get us thinking about art in a dynamic (rather than static) sort of way.  It also allows us prompts that we could use to do the art assignments or for our writing. I’d highly recommend checking out the channel, and, specifically, the video “Episode 9: Off,” which is a personal favorite of mine.