The Contemporary Poem

I recently went to listen to writer/activist Jayne Thompson speak and I found her work to be really intriguing. She is a creative writing professor, but also runs writing workshops for incarcerated men. She even published a book titled “Letters to My Younger Self,” which is an anthology of some of their work. During her presentation, she played a few recordings of men reading their own poems, and I was amazed to see how powerful their voices were. Here are men, many of whom have very little formal education, who are able to produce writing that evokes such a strong reaction. Literacy issues aside, I think what most got me was that they refuse to be silent despite their imprisonment. Thompson works with them precisely so that their voices are heard, voices that are so often forgotten in our country with THE highest incarceration rate in the world. Working with prison populations is not something I’ve ever thought about doing, but after hearing Thompson speak, I think it would be really interesting to be able to run similar workshops.

What is it that makes poetry such an enigma for students? Recently, one of my classes discussed our fears of poetry. Many of us remarked that in high school, there were seemingly two approaches to poetry: the first is to view it as something we all can create and there is no such thing as “good” or “bad” because it is subjective, and the second is to view each poem as a riddle that we must analyze in order to decode the writer’s intent. Both of these aren’t very helpful perspectives in fostering self-confidence in our abilities as readers. I remember having instructors in both of these categories. And neither made me feel any better about my writing.
A high school poetry class offered a space for supporting each other’s work, and also an easy elective for the seniors who wanted to glide through their final semesters. Unfortunately, I never walked away from one of my workshops with much to propel me forward. After so many years stifling creativity for the sake of testing form, students were afraid to give critiques. You either got a questionable amount of half-hearted compliments or murdered-cricket silence. You didn’t feel challenged –thus, I suspect that the quality of my poetry did not improve.
Meanwhile, most of the typical high school English classes that I experienced followed the second approach. We’d sit down with a poem, usually a very well-known one, and pick it apart line-by-line until students started coming up with “imaginative” answers to the question “What does it all mean?” Sometimes, we would focus on one line so much that, in their interpretations, students would disregard the rest of the poem. But these interpretations, unless they got lucky, only made sense in the context of that one line. Often, I would just refrain from participating because I didn’t want to stop liking the poetry we read.
To make matters worse, after reading poems using this second approach, it appears to be a common mindset of students that they have to write a poem that’s as well-crafted as the most famous poets and contain some earth-shattering, riddle-like hidden meaning. I won’t say that I didn’t succumb to this fear at one point. I mean, it’s no wonder so many people experience a fear of poetry! Certainly, this calls for an alteration in the teaching methods of poetry in schools; reading poetry should not breed fear, but provoke the desire to read more of it and to write.

I would like to propose that Cecily Parks, author of O’Nights, is an environmental sociologist. Last semester I took an Environmental Sociology class in which we explored the history of the way that humans have thought of and interacted with the environment, and the way that that history has cumulated in the current human-environment interactions. In the collection O’Nights, Cecily Parks explores the tension between the “natural” and the “human.” She expresses a sense of envy of characteristics and activity of the non-human world that she is excluded from simply by the fact of her species. She writes of a swallow that she follows, “She dips her wings in her reflection/but I cannot.” She also points out the absurdity of her human thoughts and desires when set in the context of the ecological system of the earth. She writes, “I asked the stars, will you be my jewelry?” This reveals her desire to possess what is impossible to possess, and the absurdity and impossibility of human desire.

Parks also questions whether human concern with the environment is part of a desire to possess. She writes, “My fields were ill. They weren’t my fields./My trees were being killed. They weren’t my trees.” Environmental sociologists have proposed that theories of human-centric environmental conservation have damaged the ecosystems that they hoped to help. She writes, “We ask the snow to be wool for us.” Some of the ineffective environmental reform was the result of the assumption that a state of nature is perfect, simple, and predictable in the realm of human logic. Parks has a revelation that escapes many environmental theories when she writes, “Wilderness isn’t paradise.” Parks acknowledges and unpacks her own sociological biases, intellectually examining her relationship to nature but never shirking from her inherent human bias.

Parks’ poetry seems an appropriate, though unexpected medium for environmental sociology. The poems are aware that their content is shaped by the fact that they are poems, just as Parks is aware that her feelings about the natural world are shaped by the fact that she is human. In the second section of the collection she writes about her daily habits in contrast to those of the world outside the human world, acknowledging her insignificance in the context of the greater system of wilderness. She is able to synthesize her observations with a calculated awareness of her lens being shaped by her place a human and as a poet. She writes

 

if I in our dining room

dressless

dance, wheezily

singing so not even

our infestation of moths can hear: I will never be daughter

of the maple tree! I will never be

sister of the leaf!

A simple yet crucial concept, especially when it comes to poetry, is the position of the author and the speaker. I’ll provide a brief recap: the author is the person who wrote the work, the speaker is the narrator or who is telling the story to the audience. In poetry, I think of the dramatic monologue by John Donne My Last Duchess, in which the author is Donne and the speaker is a fictional character. You can find the poem here.

I won’t belabor a straightforward idea, but I want to draw attention to it to remind writers of the possibilities of perspective and that “We lose vast amounts of possibilities in writing when we only focus on ourselves as subjects” (quoted from a blog that goes into further detail).

Something I’ve struggled since the beginning of this workshop course is the audience I write for, more specifically one who doesn’t know my background. I find myself writing very specific and abstract poems about certain situations in my life that aren’t backed up by concrete imagery, something pointed out in my latest critique by Professor Smith. With my latest pieces (most recently “As I watch the seagulls fly away;”), I have been trying to stay away from such specific stories.

This one was about drifting apart from a friend, a poem crafted not out of a real conversation but our stances on 1) our drifting apart and 2) my leaving at the end of this year. I think that’s where the vague stance of the “you” and “we” came out especially.

Something else is that the connotations I have in my mind aren’t what everybody else has. For example, the connotation of seagulls might bring up summer walks along Port Jeff or Robert Moses Park in Long Island for some people, or the Atlantic City boardwalk, or a rocky beach along the coast of Oregon for some. Personally for me, the line

“what calls these grey-streaked,

curved beaks with scratches

from lunch-hours spent

hunting bread-crumbs ”

was written from a few moments watching seagulls (or gulls, as Evan pointed out) just happily go from bread crumb to bread crumb at lunch in front of Southside Cafe one day during freshman year. With this in mind, I think research as well as just broader consideration of what certain images (such as seagulls) might have for others.

I think the bottom-line is that it’s hard to juggle the line between concrete imagery that might have the wrong connotations to what I am trying to portray/the story I am trying to tell and abstractions that tell, rather than show, what I am trying to accomplish.

The former, with the wrong imagery, would be a poem with the wrong story and the latter would be a badly written poem that tells rather than shows its story. I hope by the end of this semester I can juggle this line better.

Something we’ve talked about in class recently has been stuck in my head: form reflecting content, specifically shape poetry. It appears that there is a serious divide and debate about this, and it is something I never really thought about. While I have read many a shape poem, I didn’t particularly consider myself capable of crafting one of worth, one that transcended its shape. Sometimes, though, I agree that they might go too far.

The argument has been made that, possibly, shape poetry makes it easier to comprehend for those to which poetry is less accessible. Although I see where those arguing this are coming from, I also wonder why we shouldn’t utilize a visual aspect to our poetry as well? One of my favorite kinds of poetry, and subsequently one of the forms that began me on a poetry-writing journey, is ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrastic poetry is that which is inspired or incited by a work of art. It might be another point for debate, but at times I think that it behooves an ekphrastic poem to be printed alongside that which inspired it. Is this going a bit overboard? Beating the reader over the head with this image? I don’t know. I think it depends on how far from the original work of art the poem takes the writer –how much it deviates from the visual.

Last week, I posted on the blog about novels which combine literary forms, specifically an example from a book by Zadie Smith. For those who are not inclined toward shape poetry, do you dislike shape poetry when it stands by itself? Does it make a difference when there are connotations to characters and plot line of a novel?

Not only do I think that shape poetry is visually interesting, but I think it can be done well. It depends on whether or not the content is more insightful than a reflection of the shape. If the poem is simply describing the shape in which it is contained, with nothing to take away from it besides its existence, then I would agree with those against shape poetry. However, it does have its strengths. We shouldn’t completely discount it as being “gimmicky.” Doesn’t it make sense to fuse artistic mediums sometimes in order to create something stronger than it would be on its own? Thoughts?

From Propa Propaganda by Benjamin Zephaniah

They put a leather belt around her
13 feet of tape and bound her
Handcuffs to secure her
And only God knows what else,
She’s illegal, so deport her
Said the Empire that brought her
She died,
Nobody killed her
And she never killed herself.
It is our job to make her
Return to Jamaica
Said the Alien Deporters
Who deports people like me,
It was said she had a warning
That the officers were calling
On that deadly July morning
As her young son watched TV.

 

I first read this poem by Benjamin Zephaniah when I took a course on literature of the African diaspora. Zephaniah is a British-Jamaican artist who has written a number of poems that explore what it means to be black and British in a culture that includes systematized racism.  Although his collection of poems Propa Propaganda was written about 20 years ago, I feel as though it’s content is still highly relevant today. The above section from “The Death of Joy Gardner” is one such example; the full text can be found here if you are interested.

Joy Gardner was an undocumented Jamaican living in London at the time of her death. Police came to her home and, in their attempt to restrain and arrest her, accidentally suffocated her when she resisted. She suffered severe brain damage and was placed on life support, but died a few days later from cardiac arrest. The police officers were acquitted from all charges.

I just want to stop here and point out the language I used in my above description of Joy Gardner. When you Google Joy Gardner, that is the first result that comes up in relation to her death. However, when I originally was trying to write a description of her death, bearing in mind Zephaniah’s poem, it went something like this:

Joy Gardner was a migrant Jamaican woman living in London when she was killed by police officers in a raid. They restrained her with handcuffs, leather straps and 13 feet of duct tape. She suffered severe brain damage from the attack and died four days later in the hospital while on life support. The police offers were charged with manslaughter but were acquitted on all counts.

While I’m personally more of the opinion detailed in description 2, it’s still interesting to me to see how many accounts there can be of a single experience. Think of your Facebook feed, and how two different friends can share different new articles about the same remark made by presidential candidate. You might only read 1 of the 2 articles, and now your opinion is unconsciously shaped in some way.

Of course when you want someone to see things a certain way, you’re going to adjust your language accordingly, as Zephaniah does in his poem. Clearly he wants us to see that Joy Gardner’s death was no doubt consequential of her alien-status in England at the time. However, I can’t help but think about the alternate account of this poem, as told by say, a police officer who was there or the person who makes laws concerning deportation of immigrants. Especially concerning a real event in history, I’m always curious to see what the other side has to say. While I don’t necessarily want to be swayed by the other side, I think it’s interesting to think about how we use language to do precisely that. No one wants to read a poem or listen to a speech that isn’t trying to get some point across. But, I think it’s important to at least consider the opposition.

 

 

I’ve been interested by one of the two modes of poetry that is brought up in class.  That of Robert Lowell: why not tell what happened.   I think mostly because in my poetry, I struggle to tell what happened— too often getting lost in an blind attempt to create beauty through cerebral language and fancy romantic predictable style.

It should be noted, however, that my essays often get bogged down by spending too much time telling what happened.  But when a poem can convey a precision in story or scene, there’s a lot more room to play with language.  One of my favorite poems of all time is “Skunk Hour” if you haven’t read it recommend it.    In the spirit of not unintentionally violating copyright law, I’ll examine three non-sequential stanzas.

The season’s ill–
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

…….

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull,
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.

………

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

 

Okay! The first stanza is the poem’s third and seems to establish the first few pangs of anguish that crescendo toward the middle before we are left with the revoltingly dignified image of a mother skunk and her flock of kittens.   We know it’s the dead of fall, signified by the loss of the summer millionaire and red fox hill.  The poem weaves a nautical thread throughout, a nine-knot yawl, is a boat capable of traveling nine-knots , not a particularly fast boat.

He manages in our second stanza to revert the observant narrator who notices things like missing millionaires into a voyeuristic creep.  But look how beautiful the language is.  It’s something like make out point that shelves the town, it is  nautical and naughty, exactly how it happened and deeply confessional.  That confession points to a sickness that subverts the narrators authority, but Lowell’s mode of telling what happened ensures that we don’t doubt the exactitude of it all.

The last stanza I’ve included includes one of the best phrases to read in poetry (in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth) read everything after the colon in one breath and just about as quickly as possible. The phonetics at play are almost too pretty to talk about with clunky metaphors.  Just read them and tell me that’s not good poetry at play.  And, the keen observer coming home after a late night in Geneseo can catch a skunks marching along to the beat of all our trash. Hammering home telling what happened.

 

Go read the whole poem.

A few moments from our workshop have stayed with me and I have come to notice that they all speak to the same idea: poetry is a matter of picking the right words.

Well, obviously, but what intrigues me further is how we go about doing this once, and then again, and again, and again, ideally. The first moment worth considering is our sestina word gathering exercise. We all have words that float closer to the surface of our thoughts, words that we need to express our ideas, and this exercise helped us scratch the surface and gather a morsel of our lexical materials. So, first, I encourage this exercise along with other generative writings. Make a list of words that resonant, gather 10 new words from the dictionary, write a letter to someone and circle words that repeat or extract ideas (don’t plan on sending the letter, just write!)

An example from class has become a laughable phrase, but actually teaches a useful lesson about diction and syntax. In reference to Rachel C.’s “cosmic latte,” Lytton said: “There is a coffee in your poem.” The point is that each word stands alone as much as it stands together, and some words are more willing to coalesce than others. In this example, we found that “cosmic” and “latte” met with friction. Perhaps our goal is having every word be in conversation with every other word in our poems.

Once I built a rock path to maintain a hiking trail. I learned that a rock is more stable and unmovable the more surfaces it makes contact with. So, first we found the best rocks, boulders in some cases, and rolled them down the hill and into the hole we’d dug. That took a few days. Then, we arranged and rearranged the rocks to make sure they were locked in place, that they touched on at least seven surfaces. That took a couple more. When we walked the path the next day, even though I’d worked with each rock separately, I could barely tell them apart.

I hate to be that guy, but ah what the hell…

Last semester I took a course on James Joyce with Dr. Doggett, and it blew my mind, since we read Ulysses. It’s impossible to quickly the form and content of the whole book, but you can pretty much understand it as Joyce’s attempt to construct an epic out of an ordinary day of ordinary in Dublin in 1904.

Ulysses shows us, among many things, that every person is infinitely complex, elusive, sensitive. The novel illustrates, criticizes, and deconstructs modernity, and ideologies like Irish nationalism, masculinity, sexuality, marriage, British imperialism, romanticism, the growth of modern capitalism, masochism and victorian pornographic novels…it’s about everything. Beyond the various complex explorations of political and ideological structures throughout the book’s 700+ pages, Ulysses also makes a beautiful and subversive political point too–that nobody can truly be categorized or understood as one thing. That point finds its expression on the formal level too, by blurring the lines between prose and poetry. The novel begins in a somewhat regular realistic fiction mode, and descends through a number of modes (parodies of newspapers, parodies of nationalist rhetoric, etc), into a forty page eight sentence stream of consciousness at the end, from one of the only female voices in the book, where the difference between poetry and prose seems to break down completely.

Here’s the end of the book (no spoilers, I promise, but sorry for the huge block quote (not really sorry though because it’s beautiful)):

…and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

So this comes after 650 or so pages of tightly controlled form, lifting off of the page from the protagonist’s (Leopold Bloom) wife’s (Molly) point of view, when she can’t sleep after he returns home from his travels around Dublin during the day. From the outside (Leo’s view) in the scene before this, she’s silent. From inside Molly’s mind, poetry breaks out of the novel’s form, and lifts off of the page in this last sentence, expanding to encompass multiple landscapes and people, ending in an affirmation of life in all its sensuous detail. Notice how image-based this is, how particular they are to this narrator (Andalusia, the seedcake, the straw hat), but how you can see the world extending out from this singular point of view, becoming almost infinite. I think this is a good goal for which to strive with poetry–expanding out to show life in its beauty and complexity.

More than anything, Ulysses changed the way I think about writing and poetry, how we can use language to illustrate our complexities, and to subvert the structures that would categorize us.