National (USA) Poetry Month

[Piscator]

Thanks for sharing, it brought back some memories.

 

[Tzara]

Here's another poet most closely associated with the Seattle area, Crysta Casey. She was born in Pasadena, graduated from SUNY Stony Brook, joined the Marines, and eventually moved to Seattle where she also, like Dennis Caswell, studied with David Wagoner, among others. She also suffered from schizophrenia and cancer, and died from the latter in her middle fifties.

While Casey is not well known, probably even in the Seattle area, she made a remarkable impression on those who knew her--if you google her name you'll get a significant number of comments on her and her poetry from people whose lives she touched.

As one might expect from her life history, her poems were often very personal observances of what to most of us would be extreme situations--being a female Marine recruit in boot camp, dealing with life as an inpatient for both cancer and for mental health issues, portraits of people she met in some of these situations.

Here's a poem from her posthumous chapbook, Green Cammie:

The Sane and the Insane
Crysta Casey

My thoughts are more exciting
when I'm not on meds.
On medication, I think
of vacuuming the carpet
to get rid of any bugs
Bonnie may have left
when she curled into a fetal position
on the rug last Sunday.
At three a.m. she lit
three cigarettes at the same time,
put them in the ashtray
and watched them burn,
said, "Kaw, globble,"
so I called 911. The medics were nice
when they took her to the hospital.
She put on her boots
without socks, did not lace them--
I had to give a poetry reading
the next night. "Don't rock,"
I reminded myself, "that's a dead giveaway."
I think it was Robert Graves who wrote
in The White Goddess, "The difference
between the insane and poets
is that poets write it down."

Source: Green Cammie (2010)​

One of the things that poems and other forms of creative writing can do is to give a reader a sense of what life is like, what experience is like for people different from oneself. Poetry, because of its immediacy and its particular focus on imagery, is especially good at this, and we are all the richer for that.

 

[Tzara]

Here's a sonnet for today by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who became famous as quite a young woman for her poetry (she won the Pulitzer Prize while still in her twenties). Her poems, particularly for their time, are often focused on feminist themes, including women's sexuality, though as one would expect given when they were written, they are more suggestive than explicit:

"I, being born a woman and distressed"
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Source: Selected Poems (1992)​

One thing I particularly like about this poem is how Millay acknowledges her sexual attraction to the "you" of the poem (notably, neither identified as male or female--she had affairs with both sexes), but in the end essentially states that the (presumed) liaison was merely a sexual thing and that "you" should not expect Millay to be further interested in a relationship. This from a poem published in her 1923 collection!

Millay's own life was rather racy and bohemian (again, for the time) and she attracted quite a number of (now) rather famous admirers. She also lived in "the narrowest house in New York," recently put up for sale.

 

[Tzara]

I had mentioned a couple of posts back something about "outsider poets," by which I meant poets who were outside of the prestige periodicals, be they the New Yorker or The Atlantic or the various university associated journals like Prairie Schooner or the Georgia Review. Poets, who if published in book form at all, are published by organizations named things like Dying Starfish Press rather than publishing heavyweights like Knopf or W. W. Norton.

But mainly what I meant by "outsider" was writers who don't have a place in the academic poetry community--the kinds of writers who don't get taught in MFA programs or who aren't invited to writing retreats.

Charles Bukowski is something of the patron saint of outsider poets, though he published tons of books and ended up (eventually) fairly well off, due to his being championed by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press and, ultimately, his popularity with a wider range of readers than most poets find. His work has obvious debts to the Beats, both stylistically and thematically, and some critics don't think of his poems as being "poems" at all.

I happened to read one of his posthumous volumes the past few days and rather enjoyed it. Here's a selection from that collection:

notes on some poetry
Charles Bukowski

to feign real emotion, yours or the world's,
is, of coourse, unforgivable
yet many poets
past and present
are adept at
this.
these are poets
who write what I call the
"comfortable, clever poem."
these poems are sometimes written by professors
of literature who have been on the job too
long,
by the overly ambitious,
by young students of the game
or the like.
but I too am guilty:
last night I wrote 5 comfortable, clever
poems.
and if you aren't a professor of literature,
overly ambitious,
a young student of the game
or the like,
this can also be caused by too much
success with your writing,
or even be the result of a life gone
soft.

to make matters worse, I mailed out
those 5 comfortable, clever poems
and I wouldn't be surprised if
3 or 4 of them were accepted for
publication.
none of this has anything to do with
real emotion and guts,
it's just word-slinging for the sake of
it
and it's done almost everywhere by
almost
everybody.

we forget what we are really about
and the more we forget this
the less we are able to write a
poem that
stands and screams and laughs on
the page.
we just become like the many writers who make
poetry magazines so dull and
unreadable and
pretentious.
we might just as well not write at all
because we've become
fakes, cheaters, poem-hustlers.

so look for us in the next issue of
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse,
look for us in the table of contents,
turn to any of our precious poems
and yawn your life
away.

Source: The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain (2005)​

Bukowski is interesting because he doesn't give a rip about niceties like end word choice or techniques like alliteration, consonance, metrical balance, or damn near anything else normally associated with poetry--he seems to only be interested in dumping his feelings, opinions, and experience onto the page as directly as possible, which I think is a large factor in his success with readers. You don't need to know anything to appreciate a Bukowski poem. And speaking as someone who has read a lot of overly academic claptrap, there's a lot of value in that.

Angie posted one of his poems last year in this thread, also on the subject of writing. Check that one out too.

 

[Tzara]

What do poets do for a living? With few exceptions (Bukowski in his old age, maybe Billy Collins now) poets cannot live on their earnings as poets. Mostly, they teach poetry at universities, if they can get a job.

Ted Kooser solved that problem by working in the insurance industry, rather like his predecessor Wallace Stevens. He retired as a vice-president of Lincoln Benefit Life at the age of 60.

He then, predictably, taught poetry at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

This poem is from his Pulitzer-winning collection Delights & Shadows:

A Box of Pastels
Ted Kooser

I once held on my knees a simple wooden box
in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.
It was a set of pastels that had years before
belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,
and all of the colors she'd used in her work
lay open before me. Those hues she’d most used,
the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,
while the cool colors—violet, ultramarine—
had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.
She’d had little patience with darkness, and her heart
held only a measure of shadow. I touched
the warm dust of those colors, her tools,
and left there with light on the tip of my fingers.

Source: Delights & Shadows (2004)​

What I love about this poem is the feeling of reverence about touching an object once owned by someone whom one admired. I for years held onto a ticket stub for a concert of the music of one of my idols, the experimental composer John Cage, where he left the stage mid-concert to sit quite close to me in the audience.

This is why, I think, we have museums where we display objects that either famous people or people living many years ago might have touched, used, or depended upon. It somehow connects us to them, helps us understand them.

Here's an informative page about Mary Cassatt's pastels, if you're interested.

 

[Angeline]

It's funny Tzara that you and I have, unknowingly, been reading some of the same poets of late, notably Ted Kooser and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I've been marvelling at her sonnets which are equally feminine and feminist.

This sonnet of hers is especially moving to me because it makes me think of my dear eagleyez, who was always very much in tune with the natural landscape. And he is gone eight years this month. I miss him so.

"Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring"

​

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
And all the nests that the bared branches show,
And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring.
You go no more on your exultant feet
Up paths that only mist and morning knew,
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
Of a bird's wings too high in air to view,--
But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair,--and the long year remembers you

 

[Tzara]

I have just been through one hell of a week, emphasis on hell.

So forgive me if I'm feeling kind of aggressively, well, challenging with this post. Charles Bernstein, the poet whose work I am featuring today, was/is one of the major figures in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, which was (is?) a kind of avant-garde movement in poetry beginning in the late 60s and early 70s.

Anyway, here's the poem (sorry I can't format it better):

Questionnaire
Charles Bernstein

Directions: For each pair of sentences, circle the letter, a or b, that best expresses your viewpoint. Make a selection from each pair. Do not omit any items.

1.a) The body and the material things of the world are the key to any
knowledge we can possess.
b) Knowledge is only possible by means of the mind or psyche.

2.a) My life is largely controlled by luck and chance.
b) I can determine the basic course of my life.

3.a) Nature is indifferent to human needs.
b) Nature has some purpose, even if obscure.

4.a) I can understand the world to a sufficient extent.
b) The world is basically baffling.

5.a) Love is the greatest happiness.
b) Love is illusory and its pleasures transient.

6.a) Political and social action can improve the state of the world.
b) Political and social action are fundamentally futile.

7.a) I cannot fully express my most private feelings.
b) I have no feelings I cannot fully express.

8.a) Virtue is its own reward.
b) Virtue is not a matter of rewards.

9.a) It is possible to tell if someone is trustworthy.
b) People turn on you in unpredictable ways.

10.a) Ideally, it would be most desirable to live in a rural area.
b) Ideally, it would be most desirable to live in an urban area.

11.a) Economic and social inequality is the greatest social evil.
b) Totalitarianism is the greatest social evil.

12.a) Overall, technology has been beneficial to human beings.
b) Overall, technology has been harmful to human beings.

13.a) Work is the potential source of the greatest human fulfillment.
b) Liberation from work should be the goal of any movement for
social improvement.

14.a) Art is at heart political in that it can change our perception of
reality.
b) Art is at heart not political because it can change only
consciousness and not events.

Source: Girly Man (2007)​

Is this even a poem? is probably one's first reaction to it. And, probably, if the answer is "yes," can one simply quote a section of the GRE or MMPI and publish it as a "poem?"

I don't know.

But I do know that art pushes boundaries, and this whatever-it-is pushes the boundaries of what we might consider poetry.

Which is, I think, a good thing.

Wikipedia has a good discussion of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets here.

 

[Piscator]

Thanks to you and Angie for sharing this rabbit hole, but I'm biwfurter behind on my April poem a Day;

 

[Tzara]

In my last post, I featured a poem that probably did not much look like a poem to many people, though it more or less seemed to be in verse form. Today, I'm leaving anything resembling verse form out by displaying a couple examples of concrete poetry.

The Getty Institute describes concrete poetry as "objects composed of words, letters, colors, and typefaces, in which graphic space plays a central role in both design and meaning." As such, they often more resemble artworks than traditional poems.

This one by Mary Ellen Solt, for example, provides a pictorial representation of its subject, rendered graphically:

It may be a bit hard to see in this image, but the "stems" are composed not only of the respective letter (F-O-R-S-Y-T-H-I-A) but also the Morse Code for that letter (··-· for F, --- for O, etc.). The text across the bottom is "part of the design" per the poet, but can almost be read as a vestigial traditional poem:

Forsythia
Out
Race
Spring's
Yellow
Telegram
Hope
Insists
Action​

By contrast, Richard Kostelanetz's "Tribute to Henry Ford 3" is more purely graphical:

Kostelanetz comments on its conception in the preface to Wordworks: Poems Selected and New (1993): "The thought of writing my own poetry initially came to me while bored with Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up in 1967. The next day, I wrote--rather drew--my first visual poem, 'Tributes to Henry Ford,' using rulers, french curves, and stencils found at a neighborhood stationery store; the fact that this five-image (two-letter) poem remains among my most reprinted works both pleases and depresses me." I remember seeing this poem in a high school literature textbook in 1971, so it apparently became relatively famous pretty quickly.

Concrete poetry's heyday was probably in the mid to late 60s, though some was produced in the 50s and some is probably being produced, somewhere, even now.

 

[Tzara]

One of the ways in which poems invoke feeling is through basic word choice. In the case of the following poem, the word choice is not to create images but rather to simply portray the ordinary, somewhat disjointed way in which ordinary people speak and think:

I Know a Man
Robert Creeley

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

Source: Selected Poems (1991)​

I've listened to a couple different recordings of Creeley reading this poem (one can be found here) and he treats the line endings almost like punctuation in that he creates a very distinct pause at the end of each line, including breaking the word "surrounds" almost as it were two distinct words. The effect, at least for me, is to give the poem a kind of halting, jerky rhythm as if the narrator were rather confusedly working his way through the thoughts he is speaking. The use of the odd contractions like "sd" and "yr" further seems to colloquialize the speech, signalling that the narrator is just some guy, not a Poet with a Capital "P" nor a hyperverbal savant like, say, Ginsberg. The narrator might even be a little drunk, which would help explain the jerky syntax.

It's a very different approach to writing a poem, at least from the kinds of poems I usually am reading, but I've always liked this one.

 

[Tzara]

I really like poems about music and musicians. Generally, my musical preference is for classical music, but I've read (and written) several poems about jazz and even some about rock music. This poem really kicks it into gear in the last strophe:

The Original Sun Recording
Fleda Brown

What is coming has to wait
until the mind quits looking. I am trying not to watch this poem.
I am trying like hell to keep track of Elvis
to follow him on the other side of the sound booth glass.

It is late, after their regular jobs,
hot as a sweat lodge in the sound booth.
They have tried dozens of tunes.
Sam Phillips stands off, making suggestions.

A poem has to be glass.
I know that, Robert Francis.
I know that, Julian of Norwich. I know that Gautama Siddhartha.
Elvis on one side, me on the other.
I bring the saints in to help me make my words invisible.

I ask them to give me a curve ball, something unexpected,
that looks like a screw-up. I remind them how easily
they have flown through physics, story line, musical notation.

What keeps Elvis and me going is
we don't know whether to laugh or cry.
When the music takes off, it is almost grief.
He tries the old blues song, "That's All Right, Mama,"
He starts jumping around like a kid, wiggling his leg.
Bill Black starts pretending his bass is a pogo stick.
You can hear Sam at the end of the original cut,
his astonished whoop.

Source: The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (2004)​

"whoop"--what a great ending word, and so true how one feels when musicians hit something just right. It doesn't matter that I have never been very fond of Elvis (I'm a little too young, I think); it's the feeling I had first hearing, oh, "Ticket to Ride" or "Eight Miles High" or, for that matter, the overture to Tristan und Isolde right when the orchestra plays those beautiful, dissonant chords.

And, as Brown says in the poem, the job of poetry is to show us those moments--to "be glass."

 

[Tzara]

Frederick Seidel is rather an odd duck in the poetry world. Independently wealthy (from an inheritance), decidedly outré in attitude and subject matter, considered brilliant by some and contemptible by others, he is certainly a different poet.

But not exactly an outsider. His work has been short-listed for the Griffin Prize, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and twice nominated (with one win) for the National Book Critics Circle award.

Here's one of his poems:

Me
Frederick Seidel

The fellow talking to himself is me,
Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see
Him every morning shave and comb his hair
And then lose track of him until he starts to care,
Inflating sex dolls out of thin air
In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair
That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track
Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack
With racist, sexist outbursts. What a treat
This guy is, glaring at strangers in the street!
Completely crazy but not at all insane.
He's hot but there's frostbite in his brain.
He's hot but freezing cold, and oh so cool.
He's been called a marvelously elegant ghoul.

But with a torn rotator cuff, even an elegant fawn
Has to go through shoulder seizures to get his jacket on.
He manages spastically. His left shoulder's gone.
It means, in pain, he's drastically awake at dawn.
A friend of his with pancreatic cancer, who will die,
Is not in pain so far, and she will try
To palliate her death, is what her life is now.
The fellow's thinking to himself, Yes but how?
Riding a motorcycle very fast is one way to.
The moon and stars rapidly enter you
While you excrete the sun. You ride across the earth
Looking for a place to lay the eggs of your rebirth.
The eggs crack open and out comes everyone.
The chicks chirp, and it's begun, and it's fun.

You keep on writing till you write yourself away,
And even after—when you're nothing—you still stay.
The eggs crack open and out comes everyone.
The chicks chirp, the poems speak—and it's again begun!
Speaking of someone else for a change, not me,
There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely,
Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird
Circled forever around us and then without a word
Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there
And you burst into tears. I was unaware
That ten years before the same thing had happened just
After your young daughter died and now it must
Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak
And receive the recognition we all seek.

Source: Widening Income Inequality (2016)​

The combination of somewhat depressing subject, (faux?) confessional style, and almost sing-songy rhymed couplets doesn't seem like anything one could imagine another poet writing. In the profile of Seidel at the Poetry Foundation website, New York Times poetry critic David Orr is quoted as comparing Seidel to "a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 to smash his instrument against the wall … [such a] combination of barbarity and grace is one of Seidel’s most remarkable technical achievements."

As I said, an odd duck.

 

[Angeline]

Frederick Seidel is rather an odd duck in the poetry world. Independently wealthy (from an inheritance), decidedly outré in attitude and subject matter, considered brilliant by some and contemptible by others, he is certainly a different poet.

But not exactly an outsider. His work has been short-listed for the Griffin Prize, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and twice nominated (with one win) for the National Book Critics Circle award.

Here's one of his poems:

​

​

Me​

Frederick Seidel​

​

The fellow talking to himself is me,​

Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see​

Him every morning shave and comb his hair​

And then lose track of him until he starts to care,​

Inflating sex dolls out of thin air​

In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair​

That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track​

Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack​

With racist, sexist outbursts. What a treat​

This guy is, glaring at strangers in the street!​

Completely crazy but not at all insane.​

He's hot but there's frostbite in his brain.​

He's hot but freezing cold, and oh so cool.​

He's been called a marvelously elegant ghoul.​

​

But with a torn rotator cuff, even an elegant fawn​

Has to go through shoulder seizures to get his jacket on.​

He manages spastically. His left shoulder's gone.​

It means, in pain, he's drastically awake at dawn.​

A friend of his with pancreatic cancer, who will die,​

Is not in pain so far, and she will try​

To palliate her death, is what her life is now.​

The fellow's thinking to himself, Yes but how?​

Riding a motorcycle very fast is one way to.​

The moon and stars rapidly enter you​

While you excrete the sun. You ride across the earth​

Looking for a place to lay the eggs of your rebirth.​

The eggs crack open and out comes everyone.​

The chicks chirp, and it's begun, and it's fun.​

​

You keep on writing till you write yourself away,​

And even after—when you're nothing—you still stay.​

The eggs crack open and out comes everyone.​

The chicks chirp, the poems speak—and it's again begun!​

Speaking of someone else for a change, not me,​

There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely,​

Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird​

Circled forever around us and then without a word​

Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there​

And you burst into tears. I was unaware​

That ten years before the same thing had happened just​

After your young daughter died and now it must​

Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak​

And receive the recognition we all seek.​

​

Source: Widening Income Inequality (2016)​

The combination of somewhat depressing subject, (faux?) confessional style, and almost sing-songy rhymed couplets doesn't seem like anything one could imagine another poet writing. In the profile of Seidel at the Poetry Foundation website, New York Times poetry critic David Orr is quoted as comparing Seidel to "a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 to smash his instrument against the wall … [such a] combination of barbarity and grace is one of Seidel’s most remarkable technical achievements."

As I said, an odd duck.

This is equal parts good and strange: one doesn't expect the simple rhyme scheme to fit with the confessional and shocking content. Which I guess goes to show that crazy experimentation can produce unexpectedly good results, even in poetry.

Thank you Tzara for this labor of love.

 

[Tzara]

In my first post this month, on "Yi-Fen Chou" (Michael Derrick Hudson) and the controversy spawned by her (his) inclusion the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry, I wanted to talk a bit about how some poets feel that editorial bias keeps their work from being published and the (stupid and dishonest) extremes they might adopt to get the recognition they think they deserve. In Hudson's case, he effectively blew up whatever career he might have had by his franky racist and sexist adoption of a Chinese woman's name as a pseudonym for the sole reason that it "helped him to place poems."

The other side of that editiorial bias is that people famous for reasons other than poetry can sometimes get their work published, even by the more important presses, simply because of who they are. Musicians like Billy Corgan, Jewel, and Ryan Adams (and, before them, people like Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison) have had books published, one suspects, because of their popularity as recording artists more than their talent as writers. This is hardly surprising--publishers are in the business of selling books and if something like Fifty Shades of Grey looks like a sure-fire bestseller, the fact that it is not very well written doesn't much matter.

Which brings us to my choice for today's poet: James Franco.

Before he blew up his own career over accusations of sexual harrassment, Franco was seen as a kind of wunderkind--actor, director, novelist, poet, even visual artist. He completed graduate degrees in multiple arts disciplines (including poetry) and was enrolled as a PhD student in the Yale English department. So he had some credibility as someone serious about his (various) art(s).

His first volume of poetry, Directing Herbert White, was published by Graywolf Press, one of the more prestigious independent poetry presses. My impression of the book was pretty much echoed by David Orr in his New York Times review: "Is it, you may be wondering, good? No. But neither is it entirely bad. 'Directing Herbert White' is the sort of collection written by reasonably talented M.F.A. students in hundreds of M.F.A. programs stretching from sea to shining sea."

Actually, some of the poems are quite bad, especially the ones about Lindsay Lohan, which seem to me to be closer to something out of National Enquirer than American Poetry Review, but that's just my take. Orr cites the six "Film Sonnets" as being among the best, and since I agree, I'm posting one of them:

Film Sonnet 6
James Franco

You, Monica Vitti, with your lips, like fruit, how could
That guy in L'avventura be blamed for forgetting
The other pouty bitch? If I got a new life I'd pray for
A girl like you. The island where you lose your friend,
Deserted and mysterious. And then after looking
All over Italy for her, you fall for him. And what is
It that compels him, in the aftermath of that party?
In the destroyed room, strewn with plates, silverware,
Food and candlesticks, he with her, on the dislodged
Couch? And what is it that compels you to let it pass,
Just like you let pass the death of a friend?
A mystery. Like in your other Antonioni film, L'eclisse,
Which ends with a series of unchanging images:
The building, the sky, a fence, a street.

Source: Directing Herbert West (2014)​

That is, I think, a pretty good poem. Not Yeats or Auden, but not bad for a recent MFA grad. The last line, evoking the sterility or emptiness of experience works really well, even if it is copped directly from the film visuals.

The publication of Franco's book generated a lot of envy/jealousy/anger focused on the impression that, as I suggested above, it got published because of who he is rather than how good his writing is. But, as Orr points out, "It's easy to sympathize, even if one suspects some of the complainers are no better at writing poems than Franco is. Yet the annoyance this collection will inspire is rooted in a deeper anxiety: The attention commanded by James Franco's poetry has everything to do with 'James Franco' and almost nothing to do with poetry. And that cultural wealth is not transferable. Attention withheld from Franco's poems will not instantly devolve upon some worthy but obscure poet; it will go to another actor, or singer, or commercial nonfiction writer, or memoirist — or even to James Franco in his novel-writing incarnation."

It's a tough job getting published, but if one really wants that, one has to just slog away at it.

Or star in a really popular movie.

 

[Tzara]

What, exactly, is a prose poem?

I like the initial line of Edward Hirsch's entry in his A Poet's Glossary, where he states a prose poem is "[a] composition printed as prose that names itself poetry."

OK, then. No fussiness about whether some piece is flash fiction, prose poetry, or some kind of postmodernist collagist thing that is "challenging the poetry establishment." It's just a poem that lacks line breaks and self-described as a poem by its author, or some other authoritative person.

Hirsch, and others, go on to say that the prose poem is more than just "prose that names itself poetry." The Poetry Foundation website also notes that it "demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry." Not that fiction would ever employ such techniques.

Whatever.

Here is my all-time favorite prose poem, by the incomparable Robert Hass:

A Story About the Body
Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn’t understand, "I’ve lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I’m sorry I don’t think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.

Source: Human Wishes (1989)​

The story here seems both sad and perfect. But is this a poem or, as its own title implies, a story, however brief?

That is, I think the problem with prose poetry (or flash fiction) and why I think the qualification in Hirsch's definition, "that [it] names itself poetry" is so correct.

It's a story if the author says it is; it's a poem if the author says it is.

 

[Tzara]

My last post mentioned that "symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech" were common elements of poetry. Today's poem uses ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, as an extended metaphor for the elaborate procedures a young Asian bride goes through to beautify herself for her husband/husband-to-be:

Ikebana
Cathy Song

To prepare the body,
aim for the translucent perfection
you find in the sliced shavings
of a pickled turnip.
In order for this to happen,
you must avoid the sun,
protect the face
under a paper parasol
until it is bruised white
like the skin of lilies.
Use white soap
from a blue porcelain
dish for this.

Restrict yourself.
Eat the whites of things:
tender bamboo shoots,
the veins of the young iris,
the clouded eye of a fish.

Then wrap the body,
as if it were a perfumed gift,
in pieces of silk
held together with invisible threads
like a kite, weighing no more
than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums.
Light enough to float in the wind.
You want the effect
of koi moving through water.

When the light leaves
the room, twist lilacs
into the lacquered hair
piled high like a complicated shrine.
There should be tiny bells
inserted somewhere
in the web of hair
to imitate crickets
singing in a hidden grove.

Reveal the nape of the neck,
your beauty spot.
Hold the arrangement.
If your spine slacks
and you feel faint,
remember the hand-picked flower
set in the front alcove,
which, just this morning,
you so skillfully wired into place.
How poised it is!
Petal and leaf
curving like a fan,
the stem snipped and wedged
into the metal base—
to appear like a spontaneous accident.

Source: Picture Bride (1983)​

Picture Bride, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award, is a series of poems Song wrote about her Korean grandmother who was a "picture bride," essentially bound in marriage to a man she had never met in another country (Hawaii, probably around the time it became a US territory), the couple known to each other only through photographs.

The poem not only uses the metaphor of the young woman being artfully arranged as if she were herself a flower, it is filled with floral imagery, with lilies, iris, chrysanthemums, and lilacs all mentioned specifically, the emphasis both on the beauty of flowers but also on their fragility. Indeed, the book is divided into five sections, each given a flower as title.

The book particularly speaks to me as my own grandmother travelled by herself from Norway to Washington state as a very young woman (she graduated high school in Seattle), though not as an arranged bride. But that experience of leaving one's birth family to journey to a new country, more or less alone, is I think a not uncommon experience for many US citizens to have in the family history.

That it is still common today, with the immigrants from Central America, Ukraine, and other countries, should remind us of how typical the experience is.

 

[Tzara]

Today's poem might sound kind of familiar to you, although maybe a bit off:

Fun
Wyn Cooper

"All I want is to have a little fun
Before I die," says the man next to me
Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. He says
His name's William but I'm sure he's Bill
Or Billy, Mac or Buddy; he's plain ugly to me,
And I wonder if he's ever had fun in his life.

We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday,
In a bar that faces a giant car wash.
The good people of the world are washing their cars
On their lunch hours, hosing and scrubbing
As best they can in skirts and suits.
They drive their shiny Datsuns and Buicks
Back to the phone company, the record store,
The genetic engineering lab, but not a single one
Appears to be having fun like Billy and me.

I like a good beer buzz early in the day,
And Billy likes to peel the labels
From his bottles of Bud and shred them on the bar.
Then he lights every match in an oversized pack,
Letting each one burn down to his thick fingers
Before blowing and cursing them out.

A happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close
To one another, like this is a motel,
But they clean up their act when we give them
A look. One quick beer and they're out,
Down the road and in the next state
For all I care, smiling like idiots.
We cover sports and politics and once,
When Billy burns his thumb and lets out a yelp,
The bartender looks up from his want-ads.

Otherwise the bar is ours, and the day and the night
And the car wash too, the matches and the Buds
And the clean and dirty cars, the sun and the moon
And every motel on this highway. It's ours you hear?
And we've got plans, so relax and let us in—
All we want is to have a little fun.

Source: The Country of Here Below (1987)​

If it sounds familiar, it's because it's the source of the lyrics to Sheryl Crow's All I Wanna Do, the Grammy-winning breakout hit from her 1993 first album.

Crow and her band had been rehearsing a new song and she wasn't happy with the lyrics. One of the band members went into a nearby used bookstore and came out with a number of poetry books, including Cooper's The Country of Here Below, which had had a 500 copy print run from a small press. After getting Cooper's permission (and credit as co-writer), the band adapted the poem into the new lyrics for the song, making some additions and cutting some of the lines. The song was so successful, Cooper was able to write full time and has continued as a lyricist, working with various artists.

Here's the lyrics, for comparison:

All I Wanna Do
Wyn Cooper / Kevin Gilbert / Bill Bottrell / David Francis Baerwald / Sheryl Crow

Hit it
This ain't no disco
It ain't no country club either
This is L.A.

"All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die"
Says the man next to me out of nowhere
It's apropos of nothing, he says his name is William
But I'm sure he's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy

And he's plain ugly to me
And I wonder if he's ever had a day of fun in his whole life
We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday
In a bar that faces a giant car wash

The good people of the world
Are washing their cars on their lunch break
Hosing and scrubbing as best they can in skirts in suits

They drive their shiny Datsuns and Buicks
Back to the phone company, the record store too
Well, they're nothing like Billy and me

'Cause all I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I'm not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I'm not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up
Over Santa Monica Boulevard

I like a good beer buzz early in the morning
And Billy likes to peel the labels from his bottles of Bud
He shreds them on the bar then he lights every match
In an oversized pack letting each one burn

Down to his thick fingers before blowing and cursing them out
And he's watching the bottles of Bud
As they spin on the floor

And a happy couple enters the bar
Dangerously close to one another
The bartender looks up from his want ads

But all I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I'm not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I'm not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up
Over Santa Monica Boulevard

Otherwise the bar is ours
The day and the night and the car wash, too
The matches, and the Buds, and the clean and dirty cars
The sun and the moon

But all I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I'm not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I'm not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling, the party has just begun
All I wanna do is have some fun
I won't tell you, that you're the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up
Over Santa Monica Boulevard

Until the sun comes up
Over Santa Monica Boulevard​

See? Here's another way to become a well-known poet--get some up and coming rock star to use your poem as lyrics for their big Billboard top 10 smash.

 

[Tzara]

Forms in modern poetry are often altered significantly from their traditional requirements. The James Franco sonnet I posted a couple of days ago has very little in common with either the Italian or Shakespearean sonnet, other than it is fourteen lines long. As I mention in my Thread of Forms entry on the ghazal, modern ghazals in English often ignore most or all of the traditional components of the form (the Wikipedia link in my Forms post takes one to a really good description of the traditional elements of the form).

Today's poem not only ignores most of the traditional elements, it uses three line stanzas (or sher) instead of the normal couplets, which seems odd:

Dawn
Robert Bly

Some love to watch the sea bushes appearing at dawn,
To see night fall from the goose wings, and to hear
The conversations the night sea has with the dawn.

If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.
Now you know why I spent my twenties crying.
Cries are required from those who wake disturbed at dawn.

Adam was called in to name the Red-Winged
Blackbirds, the Diamond Rattlers, and the Ring-Tailed
Raccoons washing God in the streams at dawn.

Centuries later, the Mesopotamian gods,
All curls and ears, showed up; behind them the Generals
With their blue-coated sons who will die at dawn.

Those grasshopper-eating hermits were so good
To stay all day in the cave; but it is also sweet
To see the fenceposts gradually appear at dawn.

People in love with the setting stars are right
To adore the baby who smells of the stable, but we know
That even the setting stars will disappear at dawn.

Source: Collected Poems (2018)​

In this poem, Bly does keep the radif, or refrain of the traditional form, though in others he drops this element. Some of his ghazals feature his name in the last stanza, but this is relatively rare.

What is interesting is how he justifies the three-line stanza form: "The line that poets use most often in both Persian and Arabic tends to be sixteen or eighteen syllables. So if you have two eighteen-syllable lines, you really have thirty-six syllables. By contrast, the typical line in English, in the sonnets, for example, is ten syllables. A line in English becomes unwieldy if it's extended into eighteen syllables. If one adopts three eleven- or twelve-syllable lines, you end up with about thirty-six syllables. I think the Islamic writers felt that thirty-six syllables is a useful and completed unit of expressiveness. That's why I went to three lines."

One of the elements that seems to attract modern poets to the form is how the stanzas act as if they are thematically separate from each other, which often gives the ghazal a kind of disjointed feeling. This is one of the aspects that appealed to Adrienne Rich, whose ghazals eliminate all traditional elements except for the couplet form and the separateness of couplet to couplet, which she felt helped her give voice to the sense of fragmentation she was feeling at the time.

But Bly's and Rich's alterations of the form lead one to wonder if their poems really are ghazals or simply an idiosyncratic form inspired by the traditional form.

 

[Tzara]

Here's another poem that is fundamentally an extended metaphor, but which also makes brilliant use of occasional end- and internal rhyme, solid and simple language, by someone whom Robert Pinsky called "an engagingly nasty poet":

Love Song: I and Thou
Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:
....the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
....any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
....dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
....I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
....for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
....hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
.... at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
....Oh I spat rage’s nails
into the frame-up of my work:
....it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
.... for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
....skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
....but I planned it. I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
....will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
....to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can’t do everything myself.
....I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

Source: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (2001)​

Dugan isn't as well-known as he should be, despite having won the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and two National Book Awards. I suspect his "acerbic wit," to use another of Pinsky's phrases, was perhaps a little off-putting to many readers.

I tend to find his work uneven--he wrote a lot of antiwar poems and I tend to find political poetry, especially poetry from earlier times, unengaging--but many of his more personal poems, like this one, are just outstanding.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

This is the only thread I can find to post this, sorry, but I just wanted to say a big thank you. It is a great source for poets new to me and the history or info included is fascinating.

 

[Tzara]

This is the only thread I can find to post this, sorry, but I just wanted to say a big thank you. It is a great source for poets new to me and the history or info included is fascinating.

Thanks, Tess. As Angie implied in her comment earlier, it's something I enjoy doing.

And anyone is free to either post their comments in this thread. I'm not trying to keep it purely poems.

 

[Tzara]

A couple of days ago I talked briefly about how poets adapt forms to their own interests or needs. Sometimes, they just go ahead and invent new forms such as the poet Marie Ponsot, who invented the tritina which, interestingly, she called "the square root of the sestina." (So is it a wholly new form or an adaptation of an existing form?)

Given that a standard (i.e. not double or triple) sestina is 39 lines or six stanzas with a three-line envoi and the tritina is ten lines in three stanzas and a one-line envoi, one can see why poets do not teach mathematics, even at the elementary school level.

Nevertheless, if the sestina is particularly difficult because of its continual repetition of the same six end words, the tritina seems nearly as difficult even though there are many fewer repetitions, due to there being such limited space in which to work (each word appears four times in the space of ten lines). Easy to do, but not easy to do well. Here's one of Ponsot's tritinas:

Roundstone Cove
Marie Ponsot

The wind rises. The sea snarls in the fog
far from the attentive beaches of childhood—
no picnic, no striped chairs, no sand, no sun.

Here even by day cliffs obstruct the sun;
moonlight miles out mocks this abyss of fog.
I walk big-bellied, lost in motherhood,

hunched in a shell of coat, a blindered hood.
Alone a long time, I remember sun—
poor magic effort to undo the fog.

Fog hoods me. But the hood of fog is sun.

Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002)​

A very tight little poem, as it must needs be, made even tighter by Ponsot's choice of the three teleutons (the repeated end words) as near rhymes(!). "Fog" and "hood" are both actually used five times in the poem, though Ponsot uses the common sestina/tritina device of using the variations of childhood/motherhood/hood to lessen the potential staleness of repetition on that teleuton. Note also the the lines are all ten syllables in length, with the exception of the eleven syllables of line two; French metrical poetry (the sestina is an old French form) is typically syllabic, so Ponsot is perhaps adding another restriction as an homage to the parent form.

 

[Tzara]

Due to life circumstances, I wasn't able to post a poem every day this month, and since some of those circumstances are ongoing issues, I won't be attempting to post past today in an attempt to "catch up" to the full 30 poems I would have like to have shared.

Oh well. I always like to end National Poetry Month with a poem I particularly like, so here's my ending choice for this year:

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Galway Kinnell

For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Source: Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980)​

Nothing cosmically profound nor philosophically deep here, just a very grounded poem about ordinary life experience. Such wonderful, yet mundane, details—the baseball pajamas that must be screwed on over the son's head, the lovers touching arms across the "startlingly muscled" body of their child. It's a poem that is erotic but not ecstatic, reminding the reader that sexual love is a bonding experience not only for the lovers but one that can produce the further bonds of children and family.

Sweet, kind of funny, and very quiet.

 

[Angeline]

Thank you for these poems. You've introduced me to new poets (or new poems to me by those I recognize). And you've given each poem a context that helps me understand them...lol or at least why you like them.

You really are a terrific teacher. Your love of poetry and the poems your curiosity leads you to explore enriches this forum. Well me anyway! Please keep writing and sharing with us.

 

[Tzara]

Thank you for these poems. You've introduced me to new poets (or new poems to me by those I recognize). And you've given each poem a context that helps me understand them...lol or at least why you like them.

You really are a terrific teacher. Your love of poetry and the poems your curiosity leads you to explore enriches this forum. Well me anyway! Please keep writing and sharing with us.

Thanks, Angie.