The Contemporary Poem

In class the other day, Evan mentioned the intersection between politics and art, and Oliver and Mary mentioned the intersection of music and poetry. This got me thinking about the inherent healing power of the arts. I started thinking about the outcome of intersecting two distinct disciplines like politics and art—and how, many people view poetry as a way of writing about something in a “fluffy” or “softer” way—but it’s super interesting to me that the opposite is usually true. I like to think that what we hear in poetry is always more universally accessible because there is room to stretch across both imagination and interpretation.

But, I digress. I’m super interested in how poetry functions to highlight larger issues that may be political or sociological in nature; just as I am about the intersection of psychology or medicine to art and creative expression, specifically poetry.  Last class, we discussed which books we will be reviewing, and I didn’t have one chosen at the time. After much thought, and a burst of analytical thought sparked by my peers,  I’ve decided to include in my post a book I am leaning towards using for the book review. It is a collection of poetry (self-called a ‘poetic memoir’) that captures a lifetime of recovering memories erased by traumatic events, and is very self-reflective in nature.

The book is called “Overexposed: A Poetic Memoir,” written by Terri Muuss. Muuss is a poet from Long Island who is also a school social worker, inspirational speaker, and actor. I discovered Terri unintentionally—my best friend back home and I had gone to a poetry reading of Jeanann Verlee at a local bar in Patchogue. Terri was one of the performers—although she does not call herself a slam poet, many of her poems she acts out, which I found to be very animated and all the more poignant and emotional for the content of her poems. One of her poems, a litany called “If” describes all the ways we try to find a way out of our sadness or to avoid problems; for her personally, they are all the ways she tried to forget her trauma—her life.  After the performances and readings, my friend and I approached Terri after the show for some words of gratitude and appreciation, and I was struck by how HAPPY she was. Seriously. She had such a full, bright smile and it was entirely contagious, and she gave the biggest hug to both of us. I bought her book here, and met her husband, Matt Pasca, who is also a published poet.

Here is the book trailer that she released prior to the publication of her memoir. The video gives a great insight into the content of the book and also touches on how it was an act of healing and recovering:

Since this poetry reading I have kept in contact with Terri, who I like to refer to as one of my writing inspirations, or, rather, my powerful female friends that I want to be just like, in some aspect, one day. Ok whatever. Well, Terri and her husband would invite me to poetry events on Long Island all the time, so I got to see both of them perform many more times, met her children, and came to understand her story and history all the more.

Terri is an incest survivor, having lived a childhood where her own father was responsible for her first traumatic event. When she was an adolescent, Terri was raped four times. She battled addiction and alcoholism, depression, suicidal tendencies, and more. Knowing all of this and having read her memoir, and seeing where she is now, and especially how happy she is—it’s truly inspiring.

Terri Muuss and I have talked many times about the importance of art and therapy. Having undergone intensive therapy and treatment throughout her life, she can attest to the power of writing to open doors within our minds and to uncover a piece of information or memory that maybe we can’t find the words to express in regular therapy. Once we uncover these little pieces, we can start to talk about them out loud—facilitating the healing process.

I’m very interested in the connection between poetry and trauma recovery. Often times, distance is needed in order to write about something you have experienced; I feel it is this very distance that also makes it near impossible to retrieve memory about the experience, especially if it was a traumatic one.  But even free writing will resurface some things, not dependent on time or distance. I’m sure there are many more advantages of writing in relation to recovering from trauma.

I hope to learn more about this when I re-read Terri Muuss’s poetic memoir.

Last week I typed out a frantic post equating poetry and essay in a highly convoluted and not particularly articulate manner.  This week I intend to do the same, but plan to add an extra layer of pretension by suggestion that above all, I’d like my poetry to be the music of Mozart.  I say this knowing full well that my essays (in my belief and for what it’s worth) come out as rock ‘n’ roll: jagged phrasing, subversive language against The Man, and a voice akin to a shotgun’s blast.

There’s an element of formal balance to Mozart’s requiem mass that I’d like to be able to emulate in my  poetry.  He knows all the rules and how to use them but bends them to his will.  There’s subtlety and rolling thunder between each well punctuated cadence.  Each movement advances the theme while simultaneously distinguishing itself from the last.

Each phrase is inventive and actively gorgeous in both rhythm and sound.  The prescribed Latin text of the mass is reflected in the sound, the equivalent of form as an extension of content, I suppose.

I don’t necessarily think that this means I should align myself with “The Tradition,” I think that’s a dangerous game.  The idea of following another dead white guy should, frankly, be avoided.  Any viewing, of Amadeus tells us that the royalty often disregarded performances for having too many notes, for being too radical or obscene. This sort of appeals to me.  The balance of tone, the precision of effects.  The rests and swells and reinvention of something that everyone already knows.

I don’t know if this makes sense to everyone.  I’m not sure that it makes sense to me.  Music and poetry aren’t the same thing, music passes moment to moment as the composer decides.  Poetry can choose words that read a little quicker, but we can choose to re-read lines and read them at our own speed.  Symbols can be misinterpreted and rhythm might be missed by imperfect punctuation. But turn on the record and the sounds sound the same to everyone—even if they might not sound as pleasurable.

It is here that I have to ask, what kind of music is your poetry and what would you like it to be?

On Rain

It was blacker than olives the night I left. As I
ran past the palaces, oddly joyful, it began to
rain. What a notion it is, after all—these small
shapes! I would get lost counting them. Who
first thought of it? How did he describe it to
the others? Out on the sea it is raining too.
It beats on no one.

Anne Carson

From Anne Carson’s 1995 book Plainwater, “On Rain” is part of a series called “Short Talks.” While there were also short talks that drew me in such as “On Charlotte,” discussing the Bronte sisters, and the standout one line “On Gertrude Stein at 9:30,” this poem’s first line was a lasso. It’s unorthodox to compare night to an olive. I love olives. My friends hate olives. It’s one of those things that doesn’t have a grey area; you either do or you don’t. Such a bold statement captures and enthralls, and this one does the trick.
As silly as it sounds, I can wholly relate to the speaker throughout the poem. I distinctly remember trudging up the hill to my four pm Wednesday physics lab this past fall semester in the pouring rain under a flimsy, red umbrella. I wondered if each drop were a different shape, or if they changed shapes as they fell. How many drops actually battered against the fabric? How many did it take to make that stream running down the sides of the road toward the nearest drain?
It’s a cycle; everything goes back to water. It falls, and it rises, and then it falls again. “On the sea” the rain falls on the tides and “beats on no one.” It makes me question the speaker’s tone throughout the poem. At first, he/she appears to be “joyful” in the rain, observant and inquisitive. But this final line, “it beats on no one,” implies that he/she views it as violently beating on him/her. The more rain that falls, the heavier clothes become in getting soaked, the more weighted down you can become both physically and emotionally.
Also, it can be assumed that the speaker is experiencing a sense of freedom at the beginning of the poem. It is “the night [he/she] left” and is running “past the palaces” in the rain. Maybe he/she is running from an abusive household or relationship in which he/she was beaten. Maybe the rain doesn’t hurt. Maybe the rain heals, instead.

From Sci-Fi
By Tracy K. Smith

In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001
When Dave is whisked into the center of space,
Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light
Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid
For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,
Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,
Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent
And vague, swirls in, and on and on . . . .

In those last scenes, as he floats
Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,
Over the lava strewn plains and mountains
Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked
Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,
Who knows what blazes through his mind?
Is it still his life he moves through, or does
That end at the end of what he can name?

On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,
Then the costumes go back on their racks
And the great gleaming set goes black.

I discovered this poem in a collection of poems entitled Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith; it is part of a much longer poem entitled “Sci-Fi”, which includes 5 very distinct (and quite long) poems. This poem could read like prose if we got rid of the line breaks. It also reads like the speaker could be talking aloud about her favorite movie and we just happen to be listening in. I’m a big fan of science fiction and have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, so the references made in this poem were accessible; however, I feel that even without that background knowledge, the images created are still so tangible. For anyone who has seen this movie, the scene she is talking about is one that has been discussed and argued among movie critics and fans over and over again (Watch it here and see for yourself). It’s super abstract and to be honest, I don’t think anyone quite knows what to make of it entirely. But she takes that scene and recreates it for the reader using vivid images. She still acknowledges the mystery, but she doesn’t leave us entirely in the dark with even more abstractions. This poem makes me think about other famous scenes from movies, and how those can be incorporated into new art through poetry. It’s almost like a call and response; someone creates something, and then someone else is so inspired they create their own interpretation. It will definitely be something I’ll try out in the near future, whether it be a movie, image or song. I think it would be a good exercise in seeing how much of the original you take and understand, and how much of your own interpretation can be melded in.

Something that workshop does is help me to isolate what exactly turns me on or off in a poem. **HOWEVER, I often find a very annoying and peculiar phenomena occurring during class. It is difficult for me to isolate exactly how I feel about certain aspects of a poem. It doesn’t mean that I’m wavering around not knowing how I feel, it means I convince myself I feel one way and then I am able to convince myself I feel the exact opposite. This can get rather frustrating. One second I am so sure that I don’t like the placement of the punctuation in the poem and then the next second I find that there may be merit to that exact aspect. I’m constantly changing my mind about how I feel about almost everything in a poem that we receive for workshop. I think this may have a lot to do with the setting. For instance, if I stumble on a poem in the Poetry Foundation app, I think I might be less likely to be as critical of it. I am told that this poem is supposed to be at least “good” or “worthwhile”, so I am already perceiving it in that mindset. It’s difficult for me to be less judgmental and picky with a poem if I know it was written by one of my peers. I think this is a good thing in the context of workshop, because that’s what workshop is for…however, I don’t think it’s good for me to be more or less critical of something because of knowing who wrote it. I think it’s ideal to try to read a poem as is, blind to knowledge of the writer.

This also doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things that are 100% clear to me. There are always aspects that I can really be sure I love and things I just hate. These are often the strongest and weakest parts of the poem. I find that these gut, deep-seated feelings, are the ones that are most valuable and important for the writer. They also help me out the most. Deciding how I feel about other people’s poems helps me to identify what I am trying to achieve with my own poetry.

A phrase from workshop continues to ring in my ears:
“Prose is not the opposite of Poetry.”
And how thankful I am for that. Moving abruptly from a year and a half of writing prose into poetry has been difficult, but remembering that I am not starting from scratch has been helpful. So…

What have I learned in writing prose that I can translate into poetry? From my short experience, I saw that prose was based in streams of images, based more deliberately in certain environments (settings, cultures, timeframes) than poetry. However, inevitably, it seemed that prose was exploring these realities, which seems to be how poetry is functioning as well. Prose remains realistic (literary fiction) and, simply put, it presents a story that leaves room for interpretation.

Now, there’s poetry, and how similar it is. Poetry thrives on streams of images that interpret and recreate realities in order to probe social aspects of our lives. David Foster Wallace says, as optimal advice to his fiction workshop students, “the reader cannot read your mind,” and he repeats it again and again in an interview with Bryan A. Garner, transcribed in a highly recommended book, Quack This Way.

Moving from prose to poetry, or residing in poetry, we must not forget that we are writing sentences, changed primarily by line breaks.

I’ve been thinking (and talking) a lot about the image recently, so I thought I might as well write a post to get us started on talking about it outside of workshop.

I’ll start with this big ol’ block quote from Aleksandr Voronsky:

“First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader―good feelings. Like science, art cognizes life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. But sciences analyzes, art synthesizes; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognizes life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.”

Voronsky was a Marxist critic who participated in the Russian Revolution (and was later executed in 1937 under Stalin). What he’s saying, essentially, is that art cognizes reality (life), and therefore it serves an objective social purpose. I think, in this quote, is a statement about the ethics of art too: that art ought to think about life through images corresponding to reality, in order to communicate with society (consequently, bad art fails to do all these things).

Agree or disagree with this (I really want to see what everyone thinks about this quote!), I think it’s an important argument to consider, especially since we’re meeting weekly to evaluate and and improve our own art. So that quote is my way of prefacing this two part question for us:

1) What is art’s function? Why do we write poems in the first place?

2) How can art most effectively communicate?

To put it another way, why do we create art, what should we create, how do we create it?

These are large questions that artists have been debating for quite a long time, but they’re important, and I think we should all be working with these, since we’re in a class about creating art.

I don’t want to preach necessarily, but I do think it’s very important for all of us poets to learn to write through images that correspond to the real, lived, observed world. If a poem consists of images that come from the lived world, and if the artist is thinking through these images to examine or constitute abstract concepts that relate to the real world–to humanity–I think a poem is on its way toward being good, evocative, thoughtful piece of art.

What do you think? Is art a means of cognizing life? Is image the way? Is all good art social?

Something that was said in class was that a stanza is always in movement, that it is like the coast of a sea, coming back to the same point with one constant message. I think we discussed on the 27th of January about this phenomenon, specifically how Chaucer kept coming back to a single message in his writing.

I think this is particularly true of my writing, because I often pose a question in the beginning of my writing (as I will with my first workshop piece, “Memorials in March”) and work to answer, denounce or prove that question.

I think the seeds or genesis of a poem is in a question we pose to ourselves or even to the world, because as writers or in a broader spectrum as people, we are curious beings that seek to find out more and more each day. Scientists do this through the scientific method, mathematicians do this through equations and artists do this by creating art and writers do this specifically by posing a question. A question in a poem need not come through the use of a question mark, but a situation that is not ordinary that creates questions in the reader’s mind.

When writing this post, I thought of John Donne’s The Sun Rising, where the speaker poses a question to the Sun why it disturbs and interrupts two lovers.

Whatever the message is in a poem, I think it is particularly true that as a writer, we seek to come back to a certain message that we pose, most often as a question.

The first poem that I knew intimately was “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” The poem was written by Robert Service, a banker who moved to the Yukon Territory in the early 1900’s, around the time of the gold rush in Canada and Alaska. Everyone in my first grade class memorized the opening of the pages-long poem, which reads,

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee.

The poems of Service, who has been called “The Bard of the Yukon,” detail the charm of the harsh Northern wilderness and the bravery of the rugged men who sought riches and adventure there. Service is rarely celebrated for of exemplifying literary originality or even authenticity. He has been criticized for misrepresenting himself, a banker and a townsperson, as a participant in the gold rush, thus romanticizing a life of hardship that he knew little about. His work has been critiqued as prioritizing appeal to a broad audience over literary integrity. From a literary criticism point of view “The Cremation of Sam McGee” is not great poetry, but it is powerful in that it defines a collective history.

In interior Alaska, where I lived, everyone knows the poem. My Great Uncle Laval whose parents moved to Alaska from the west coast soon after Service wrote the poem recites the whole poem, children like me learn it in school, and books of Service’s poems sit on the shelves of nearly every household that I enter. Why is poetry, and bad, common poetry at that, the medium that carries this memory? Of course there are songs, stories, and visual art from the era that Service writes about, but it is his poems that are at the forefront of the common memory of the gold rush pioneers who many Alaskans identify as part of their heritage.

It appears to me that despite critical scorn for Service’s poetry, his poems fill a need for common representation. The form of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” features easy rhythm and rhyme, which lends the poem to retelling. The relatable language, simple emotion, and sweeping romanticism give voice to a specific, isolated experience. “The Cremation of Sam McGee” conjures sensations that are specifically important to those who live in Alaska. The poem builds a clear picture, weakly constructed as it may be, of the hardy, daring history that Alaskans want to believe themselves a part of. We can critique Service’s style, or accuse him of selling out to the masses, but it is important to avoid equating popularity with weakness. In this case, the power in Service’s poetry is rooted in its easy accessibility, the closeness that many feel with the heart of it.