The Eye of the Beholder

“What is literature? Is it different than other kinds of texts that we encounter? If so, what’s the difference?”

Friends, I’ll admit it: asking teenagers questions that are, in a word, bonkers is one of my new favorite hobbies.

Some of you already know this, but I recently took the plunge into teaching upper school English at a rigorous new charter school. As I type this, we’re well into our second week of school and I’m positively dizzy from the newness, the excitement of it all (and it’s not just the fresh paint, I promise) because, as it happens each and every time I gear up to teach a new batch of students, I find myself seeing poetry from a new perspective. This time, I’m seeing it through the eyes some odd hundred of 13, 14, and 15 year olds.

So I asked them, “What’s literature?” I didn’t have an answer in mind, which is perhaps a terrible thing to do to a wonderfully bright bunch of 8th graders. I’ll admit, I just wanted to see what they came up with, how they’d respond to a Big Question. I put them in groups and eavesdropped.

“It’s just a feeling, you know? That feeling? At the back of your neck?”

“It’s not just anything. It has to do with story, but not, like, entirely and just stories, right?”

“I feel like literature is really in the eye of the beholder. Like, Harry Potter is literature to me, but maybe not to some of our teachers?”

“The language is fancy.” “No, it’s sophisticated.”

In short, I’m feeling lucky. So far, we’ve read a tangle of poems (like a murder of crows, you know) and are working on finding our best way to talk about poetry. For me, it’s an opportunity to get back to a place where using language to examine language is an altogether new and thrilling thing. Reading Sara’s post on workshopping and Brian Teare got me thinking back on my own workshops, what they did for me, and how much the voices of my colleagues—my friends—have become inextricably linked to certain poems, certain moments.

May this be a year of new links. Here’s to chain after chain after chain of them.

“Evidence as I am/ of imagination’s end in the flesh”: How I Found Brian Teare

I’ve been in a lot of poetry workshops–over fifteen, maybe? I’ve lost count, but you’ll have figured out by now that I’m of the MFA-mill/scholar-writer-blurred-lines generation: I was an English major with a “Creative Writing Cluster” (Seriously!– It was awesome), and I recently graduated from a three-year MFA program. Most people in my program didn’t take workshop every semester, because, well, they can be freaking exhausting. After awhile, you want to thump the next person who says you didn’t *earn* something-or-other on the nose. Have I already complained about this on Beak & Wave? Probably. Anyhow, I did take workshops most semesters (all but one)– because I really liked having weekly deadlines, not to mention the amazing stories I got to hear from the crazy good writers leading those workshops.

But it was a lot of workshopping– too much, probably. So why did I (voluntarily!) enroll in a summer workshop the month after I graduated? It probably has something to do with panic (a post-apocalyptic sort), as well as with habit. I’m literally trained to polish my writing in a workshop setting, which doesn’t, unfortunately, mean I’m not cynical as shit about them. On my way to Port Townsend (lovely, by the way– and yummy! Remember that clam chowder?), I have to admit I wasn’t expecting to care much about the workshop I’d signed up for. I needed a week to focus on my writing, which changed a lot– and unexpectedly– in my last semester MFA-ing. I wanted to sort some things out, learn a few good things from conversations with other writers, but more or less to stick to myself and revise, write, and revise.

Luckily, a few folks recommended that I take the class with Cate Marvin. And of all the things I’d completely tired of from workshop classes over the past few years, she put up with not a one. Throw a bunch of writer-teacher-scholar-know-it-alls in a room, and you don’t necessarily have an ideal student set– but Cate handled us all with attitude and grace. Moreover, she didn’t let the class get side-tracked from what she called her “agenda”: to make us better writers. The workshop focused on problem poems– the peskiest of poems we’d each been trying to write for years, the poems about the hard stuff, the poems that we (certainly I) have f’d up at every turn– afraid of our own emotional stake in them, most like. This focus, in itself, was refreshing: one of my biggest pet peeves in a workshop setting is the show-and-tell aspect– that many writers come to the table not wanting to learn or revise, but rather to present.

All this to say: I’m grateful for a workshop when I least expected to be, and I took any recommendations given me (reading-/exercise-/revision- wise) to heart. So when Cate suggested– after I brought in a very sloppy poem that could potentially fall into the realm of the southern gothic– that I read Brian Teare, I wasted no time finding a copy of The Room Where I Was Born.

The book is devastatingly beautiful, so I’d like to talk about it briefly as part of my “poets-who-are-new-to-me” series. Devastatingly beautiful, but (or: and so) difficult for me to pat into a palm-sized summary to hand to you. The University of Wisconsin Press describes the collection, which remembers– or describes the act of remembering– trauma: “Though the poems are borne out of the intersection of violence and sexuality, they also affirm the tenderness and compassion necessary to give consciousness and identity sufficient meaning.”

I’m not sure what that last part means precisely, though it seems an accurate description of the book’s surprising hopefulness. I get the sense that, though Teare’s poems shed a harsh and honest light on an upbringing in Alabama– are blunt about the experienced world’s darkness, they are not as harsh on the humans that navigate that world, not even necessarily the named “perpetrators” there. Because that kind of harshness wouldn’t have aligned with what seems to be the ultimate driving force of the book– not an isolated or straight-blazed anger, but the question of how one can go about figuring out one’s own place in relation to that world and its dark matter. In a line from “Agoraphobia: A Reply,” Teare writes of the self “like heavy clothes/ shrugged off when hot.” And in a much-needed caesura from the poems’ hotter violence, he gives us a brief lyrical pause in the form of a “floating poem”:

At the edge of the glade
where flanks of felled deer fade,

there I lie, defy description…

& I would touch now nothing

but you, evidence as I am
of imagination’s end in the flesh.

–“The Dead Boy to the Scholars in the Library of the Fairy Tale” (1-3, 6-8)

I was completely startled by that line: “evidence as I am/ of imagination’s end in the flesh.” Because whatever the story you have to remember is– and no matter how painful it is– there’s always an even more pressing struggle: navigating the world in the body you’ve got.

So read the book, if you can, and I’ll leave here you with a few of Teare’s poems up on Blackbird (that they’re from the Spring 2005 issue only reiterates my former emphasis on poems that are new to me).

Up in a few weeks, by the way, will be my readings of a few poems by Norman Dubie, Cynthia Hogue, & Sally Ball– all amazing poets (and teachers) whose newer books I’d been waiting to read for the past three years. A good piece of advice I got from another teacher-writer I was lucky enough to study with in college: wait to read your teachers’ books until after you’ve finished their class, so that their voice isn’t in your head all the live long day.

The Poetry of Reality

One of the last science classes I took in college was an Astronomy course that I almost failed, a fact I would blame on poetry. Astronomy, as freshman-me was stunned to learn, was a lot more than memorizing constellations or charting the phases of the moon; it was math and equations, and plenty of other things that, as a diehard English major, simply weren’t in my wheelhouse. I spent each class period so mesmerized by the language of physics, the sense of an ever-expanding universe, and all that stuff about attraction between bodies in space (because college) that the course concepts never really clicked for me in that way. Yeats said that a poem “comes right with a click of a closing box,” which has always made sense to me: there’s that moment when a poem goes from being language strung together to being a mechanism of feeling, something spring-loaded, near-alive.

More than most summers, this has been a transitional one for me, and I’ve been lucky enough to do some writing for the Science Center. A big part of what I’m up to involves reading around the internet to learn (okay, “learn”) enough about certain physics concepts to articulate them for the viewing public. I’ll admit, this initially put me right back in that old Astronomy mindset, where I feel my eyes glazing over as I scribble scraps of things I don’t understand into a notebook (but truly, get a load of this discussion of the differences between ellipses and parabolas: “When using the word ‘is’ be aware of the logical difficulties associated with ‘verbs of being.’ Gorgeous, yes?!).

So this NPR article, “Physics and Poetry: Can You Handle the Truth?” came at kind of a perfect time for me:

Poems and poetry are, for me, a deep a form of knowing, just like science. Yes, obviously, they are different. But each, in its way, is a way to understand the world.

But what does it mean for a poem to be hard? Is it the same thing as when science is hard? Should we expect to need a class to help us understand poetry, just as we expect needing one for electromagnetism? Where, exactly, do we expect to find our truths and how hard should we expect to fight for them?

Now, in my last week of this summer writing project, I realize I’ve been making metaphors where there shouldn’t be metaphors. My fervent desire to arrive at that click had me translating in an effort to seek a fluency I don’t have, but science, according to Richard Dawkins, is the poetry of reality, which doesn’t need my translating. I suppose what I’m getting at here is that I, too, have become aware of the logical difficulties associated with verbs of being, but some things just are, and, sometimes, I feel like I’m trespassing when I cherry-pick language from another discipline to suit my poetic designs.

Am I the only one to feel this way? I’m not saying it’s wrong to adopt and adapt and outright steal; just that I’m realizing I have a more thorough perspective on deploying certain materials in poetry after spending a couple months with people who possess what I recognize as the exact same sense of passionate inquiry that I miss since my MFA program: it’s just that their atoms are atoms and ours, alas, have to settle for being words.

And while I have your attention, I just have to share that this video made me all emotional and this song has been stuck in my head for weeks. Enjoy!

—Rachel

Have you met…?

In the interest of being candid: Recently completing my MFA has not made me feel Eminently Well-Read. It has only made me feel even more keenly aware of how many amazing poets there are out there that I’ve never heard of, just writing away, making poems that are probably capable of doing things to me I shouldn’t describe here for fear of your confusing said poems with pornography. This is, of course, the less depressing way to feel. And in the interest of sharing my newest discoveries with you, dear readers—(A few of you, I know, have easiest access to poetry at Barnes & Noble’s, which offers up a very meager poem diet at best. You can fill up on Wallace Stevens or Emily Dickinson, and you should! But you should also really try this fucking good clam chowder I’m currently eating in Port Townsend. Yeah, I know I got side tracked on my metaphor run just there, but this chowder* is seriously so. Damn. Good.)—I’m going to, for the rest of the summer, write exclusively about poets I’ve never read before. I’m well aware that these poets’ being new to me does not necessarily mean they’ll be new to you (I would never have really read even a B&N staple, the magnificent Edna St. Vincent Millay, had it not been for Cameron Hardesty, so, seriously, thanks for that, girl).

Today, I’m bringing up a poet that I have missed out on for far too long. I’m sure that, at some point—probably while I was finishing my undergrad thesis in Davidson, North Carolina—somebody whispered into my ear the name Irene McKinney. Because one of my incredibly smart writerly teachers over the years must have known I was meant to read her: like my good-souled, tough-as-nails Granny, Irene was raised in West Virginia and lived in the Appalachians all her life; moreover, she’s quoted on the Poetry Foundation website thusly: “I’m a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet, and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.” Irene, I’m listening. I don’t know where my mind was roaming when your name flitted in and out of poetry workshops and committee meetings, but thanks to TPF’s Off the Shelf podcast, the following poem found me when I needed to be found by it most. (Sigh-worthy admission: at this point during my post-MFA summer, I was so lethargic that I didn’t even want to read poetry. I wanted to be spoon-fed poetry by my iPod speakers while I cooked my breakfast).

The Appalachian Poetry episode is a really good listen—Idra Novey and Curtis Fox chat about McKinney and James Wright, poetry from the region, and all kinds of questions of concern for poets like me who have some kind of connection to that land. But the following poem bowled me over, and as the text is also available online, I’m going to post it in its entirety here. You should read it.

Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia
Irene McKinney

Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead
at once, I listened to my father’s urgings about “the future”

and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view
of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below.

I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out
in the middle of a big double bed.— But no,

finally, my burial has nothing to do with marriage, this lying here
in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine

for who I’ll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back
and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot

on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low
in a little plane and when I looked down at the church,

the trees I’ve felt with my hands, the neighbors’ houses
and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew was,

it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs
at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted

to reach down and pat it, while letting it know
I wouldn’t interfere for the world, the world being

everything this isn’t, this unknown buried in the known.

Holy shit, right? The poem is so rhetorically well-wrought: It’s seemingly restrained but really visceral and emotionally honest. What gets me is how she uses This to describe not the gravesite, not her future burial nor her future death, but the creepier scene of simply lying here. And this here, my laying sack of bones, ladies and gentleman—this is the subject of the poem, a subject her imagination allows to take place, for the space of that line, anyway, in the present tense, concurrent with the author in all of her fleshiness, in a gerund, no less—this continuous action of me lying here. We understand she is pondering her body’s future, which holds up grammatically at the turn of the line; but her clever use of enjambment there brings the far-off event so disturbingly in front of us, it’s practically laid out for us at our feet. She has made her death into a this and not a that: “This lying here/ in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine/ for who I’ll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back/ and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot/ on earth I really know.”  

She comes back to that this after the beautiful description of seeing her home from so far away, after describing what it’s like to see how small your home really is; it’s then I’m completely done for: “the world being/ everything this isn’t, this unknown buried in the known.” This lying here in these bones, yes, is the unknown— because, as we know, she’s alive and has no idea what it’s like to die; it’s also wrapped in the unknown, because, as we know, she does understand that she’ll find out. But oh how she skirts the potential melodrama of the much sought-after duende!—because at the same time that she uses the final metaphor to describe her own future death/how her own mind is starting to work through that conundrum (a popular subject in poetry), she also allows that metaphor to go beyond the immediately recognizable puzzle. She allows her poem to go into a much, much, larger area of questioning: the world being everything that this is not, she says—

Now, I can walk around in that briar-bush for days. Is it: The world having really very little to do with my death—and how I think about my death?; is it: the world having really very little to do with knowing/perception at all?; is it the world being the reverse—a larger unknown, wrapped in a little tiny familiar known? Phew. I don’t know. But I feel like these are all reasonable and exciting paths to follow her down, and I’d love to know your thoughts.

*Signing off in Port Townsend, where I’m hanging out for a writer’s conference. More new poet discoveries to come from my time here, soon. For now, feast ye eyes on:

—Sara

“What We Offer Up:” The MFA, One Year Later

You think to yourself, You should update the blog. It’s been a week!

But, the mulish, most Netflix-loving part of you snaps, You just defended your thesis! You got your MFA in poetry! You deserve a break!

And you do: because the semester—your last—was grueling, because now it’s summer, and you just graduated, finished your manuscript, celebrated with and said goodbye to your best friends, and those backlogged episodes of The Vampire Diaries aren’t going to binge-watch themselves, now are they?

And 53 weeks pass and Sara updates the blog and you think, It’s been a year. Wow, it’s been a year. Writing is super hard to do after your MFA.

In the immortal words of Britta Perry: duh-doy. Sara’s post on life after the MFA has so much to do with my own experience after finishing my program last year: the grappling with, anxiety over, and avoidance of how difficult it all is, and how much meaning there is to be found beneath the cleverness, the show-offy games that language can inspire if I just sat down to do it. Sara got me thinking about how Writing—the idea of it, the chase, the gimme gimme gimme of it all—has changed for me a year out from my MFA.

At its core, pursuing an MFA is about time and structure, those two priceless, glittering things that Real Life™ simply can’t provide for the emerging writer. I’ve spent the last year holding down at least two jobs, and most weeks, I couldn’t even think any interesting thoughts, let alone write them down and craft them into something worth reading. I’ve been quiet this last year, but not that important kind of Quiet that means Letting the Fields Lie Fallow. No, for a long time, it was a busy, breathless quiet, an at-the-end-of-my-rope quiet.

This quietness led me to Larry Levis, for the first time. I’ll admit to having avoided him because his writing always seemed to unfurl in every direction in a way that intimidated me with its associativeness, its sheer scope. But something important clicked for me when I first read “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern In It,” a poem that begins in an orchard, with a spider web, which is “nothing’s blueprint”—which begs the question: no blueprint at all, or a blueprint toward the construction of nothing?

The poem has a conspiratorial quality as Levis addresses us, the reader, at times (“…I’m going to let you / Keep your eyes on him as he lifts & swings fifty-pound boxes of late / Elberta peaches…”), which I think I needed at the time: this poem is one about making, about being made, and about attempting to articulate what the importance of either is.

For me, “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern In It” goes from poem to prayer in its final section, and it’s a moment I’ve been keeping in my back pocket as I attempt to burrow my way back to poetry.

Today you were lying in bed, drinking tea, reading the newspaper,
A look of concentration on your face, of absorption in some

Story or other.

It looked so peaceful, you reading, the bed, the sunlight over everything.

There is a blueprint of something never finished, something I’ll never
Find my way out of, some web where the light rocks, back & forth,
Holding me in a time that’s gone, bee at the windowsill & the cold

Coming back as it has to, tapping at the glass.

The figure in the hourglass & the body swinging in the rhythm of its work.
The body reclining in bed, forgetting what it is, & who.

While the night goes on with its work, the stars & the shapes they make,
Cold vein in the leaf & in the wind,

What are we but what we offer up?

Gifts we give, things for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.

It’s a rhetorical question, of course, one that asks us to consult our own “nothing’s blueprint.” What are we but the sum of what we do, which we do in spite of oblivion. It’s brave, isn’t it, to do in the midst of something so vast?

So if I have any advice for Sara, for any other newly-minted MFAs reveling in post-school stupor, it’s this: enjoy it for a little while, then get back to work. If you’re feeling discouraged at the prospect of getting back to work: good. It means you’re paying attention. It means, if even unconsciously, that you’re preparing yourself for the long haul. So pull up a chair. Get comfortable being exactly this uncomfortable, because isn’t there something kind of lovely about knowing that it’s always going to be this hard? That it won’t suddenly become inconceivably harder because isn’t it already difficult beyond reason?

There will always be dishes to wash and phone calls to return. But if we are what we offer up, then we know what has to happen, how to get there. Sit down. Let’s go.

—Rachel

Levis, Larry. “Elegy for Whatever Had A Pattern In It.” Elegy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. 33-39. Print.

Lines for a post-MFA summer: “remembering blue/ just when she needed to be startled most”

Two months ago, I graduated from a three-year MFA program. When I sat down today to consider what my life looks like with my shiny new degree, I became a little anxious. I was sitting at my desk, behaving how I imagine my composition students behave the night before a rough draft is due– my inner dialogue was going something like this: Hm, what do I think about the question at hand? What is the writer’s life like post-MFA? I don’t know, who else can I follow on Spotify? And, also, if something really depressing is going on in the world and I only just learned about it from my Facebook feed, I can’t not read about it, right? Because then I’d be a horrible person, and in that case I should probably just give up on writing poetry?

But then I thought, hey, I know what to do in these situations! I’ve been schooled. So I picked up a back issue of The Believer and re-read each of the poems—poems I first looked at sluggishly on a plane in May (directly post-grad, y’all); poems I could barely remember. And thank goodness I did, because Bob Hicok saved me from a downward spiral into a dark abyss where I become the version of me who has no idea what poetry is or why I used to say I wanted to write it. If it helps, you can picture Borges’s Aleph here, and be thankful I’m not walking straight into it.

Actually, Hicok’s poem, “Blue Prints,” reminds me a bit of Borges in the way it juxtaposes the idea of art-making with how we talk about art-making (very different things– a dizzying difference, sometimes, and potentially the most frustrating side-effect of MFA-ing and being an artist-academic in general). If you haven’t read “The Aleph,” by the way, you should, it’s hilarious and brilliant.  But for today, the beginning of Hicok’s poem: 

Up and up the mountain, but suddenly a flat spot
exactly the size of the house they would build,
and when they went to dig the foundation, the foundation
appeared, just as the beams for the floor, as they started
to set them in place, revealed that they had always been there,

“It was like coming into the room to find your diary
writing itself,” she told the interviewer, who wanted to talk
about her paintings but she kept coming back to the house,

I’m not sure the poem is an ars poetica, but I can liken what happens in this passage to my own writing process. When I write a draft that eventually becomes an actual poem, the experience feels very similar to what Hicok’s narrator describes—it feels as if I’ve been walking up steep land in order to try to make space for a thought and suddenly I realize that, though I’m a bit out of breath, the space is already there and has always been there. I am sure that my poems need to exist, that they’ve maybe always existed in some abstract way. When I say my poems, I should add, I mean the ones that really feel like poems to me– not the many drafts I’ve made that read like a hodgepodge of ideas spritzed with some strained am I clever or what? lines (which, unfortunately I’ve crafted too many of).

Which brings me to what, I have a feeling, this poem is really about: trying to talk about the process of creating art, the supposedly sturdy questions we are taught to ask an artist, the degenerative questions we actually tend to ask the artist, and how easy it is to get off track when you involve yourself in these situations (this probably happened a few times over at AWP). Hicok’s artist/narrator keeps coming back to the image of her impossible house and the impossible world it exists in, while her interviewer, flummoxed, tries to intervene:

…“Don’t you think

it odd that my life has always had just enough space
for my life,” she asked the man’s recorder,
as much as the man, hoping the recorder
would consider the question and get back to her, “Then you moved
to Madrid,” the interviewer was saying, “and started painting
your invisible landscapes,” “I remember the first window

we lifted into place,” she replied, “that the view of the valley
it would hold was already in the glass when we cut the cardboard box
away, we just lined them up, the premonition
with the day,”…

The danger of academic study of writing poetry, I think, is that the hard questions are really hard—i.e., why is a poem not successful yet? What brought the writer to this content and this form in the first place? Why does the writer think this poem needs to exist? And too often, in workshop or conference discussions, as the conversation starts to open up to this admittedly abstract level of thought, it immediately hits a lag; feet shuffle. The participants look away from the harder questions—what is the house? Why is she talking about it?—in favor of answering the easier ones: Where did she study? Who did she work with? Or even—what was it someone else has said about her work? I can actually remember a couple of occasions chatting amongst other MFA students when a fellow writer became visibly agitated that we were talking about the ideas in a poem rather than the poet’s credentials.

What I really love about Hicok’s poem is that we witness the interviewer’s agitation (hilariously, he wants his recording device to get him out of the fix), and his exhaustion is something we can recognize. Because, like I said, the hard questions are hard! I actually have no idea why the artist is talking about this surreal house-‘building’ experience, and I would be hard-pressed to come up with a response if I were myself interviewing this artist of Hicok’s imagination. Thankfully, I’m just reading the poem; I get to see the interviewer’s exhaustion– and then I get to see him overcome it:

…,” he had twenty more questions

but crossed them off, “I have always wanted to build a room
around a painting,” he said, “Yes,” she replied, “A painting
hanging in space,” he added, “A painting of a woman
adjusting a wall to suit a painting,” she said, “Like how the universe
began,” he suggested, “Did it begin,” she wondered, “is that
what this is?”

In his “Blue Prints,” Hicok consistently denies us any kind of blueprint. In order for the interviewer to have a good conversation with the artist, he leaves behind his agenda and reacts with his own imagination. I am liberated and revived by this.

At the end of the day (or the MFA, as it were), all I’m really left with is the art I came here to make in the first place. This has been hard for me to focus on as I look for jobs, consider how and when I may try to publish my manuscript, and do, I’m ashamed to admit, the MFA-graduate song-and-dance routine that is comparing my current and potential success with that of other writers. But today I’m able—and hopefully the next time I sit down to work on poems, I will be able—to leave that agenda behind.

*

As a PS thank-you-note, I’d like say that I have respect and affection for the teachers I’ve been lucky to work closely with and for many of my MFA peers, who have helped me to consider the harder questions of life, art-making, poetry, and the universe.

—Sara

Hicok, Bob. “Blue Prints.” The Believer 11.3 (2013): 49. Print.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Aleph.” The Aleph and Other Stories. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.

 

A Heart-Felt Attempt: A Stab at Translating Lorca’s “Deseo”

I’ve been thinking about poetry in translation, this week, as translating a poem feels a little like writing a love song to somebody else’s poem. This exercise is it, for now, folks! Enjoy.

Deseo

Sólo tu corazón caliente,
Y nada más.

Mi paraíso, un campo
Sin ruiseñor
Ni liras,
Con un río discreto
Y una fuentecilla.

Sin la espuela del viento
Sobre la fronda,
Ni la estrella que quiere
Ser hoja.

Una enorme luz
Que fuera
Luciérnaga
De otra,
En un campo de
Miradas rotas.

Un reposo claro
Y allí nuestros besos,
Lunares sonoros
Del eco,
Se abrirían muy lejos.

Y tu corazón caliente,
Nada más.

Wish

Just your hot heart
and nothing else.

My paradise: a field
with no nightingales
and no lyres,
but a discrete river,
a little fountain.

Without wind spurring
through the leaves
or the star that would like
itself to be a leaf.

An enormous light
that was once
a firefly rising
for someone else,
in a field of
halted glances.

A still calm
from which to let our kisses go,
sonorous circles
of echo
that will open far away.

—Sara

“but I can give it a silly answer”

I promise to resuscitate this blog soon, but, until later this week, enjoy this fun byte from Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand:

“A writer, or, at least, a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: ‘Whom do you write for?’ The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover, I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author” (Prologue, 12).

It’s in direct conversation with Rachel, of course; and while we’re both swamped lately (I’m reading Auden for my Comps, you guys!), it’s a conversation I didn’t want to trail off completely into the great big blue. Up next: my rambly thoughts about historical poems, the poetics of local legend and myth, that witnessy thing we do, and the challenges I’ve faced trying to write about my travels in Vietnam and Cambodia– and what tenuous connection to those places I had as a tourist.

Hasta pronto.

—Sara

Why We Write

Between Sara’s post on Marianne Moore and my bit on Wallace Stevens, I’m thinking a lot about what is it that brings us each, as writers, to the page: what is that singular, propelling instinct? Because even amidst writers—even those who may, on the surface, resemble one another in aesthetics or subject—the question of why we do what we do varies so widely, so wildly, that you can Google the words “why we write” and I bet a billion blog posts just like this one pop up.

Chris Huntington wrote on this idea in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers in his article (ahem) “Why We Write,” in which he likens his central reason for writing to a crush—possibly requited, possibly not—he had on a girl in high school:

For most of my twenties, I wrote because I thought about the world the same way I’d thought about Kari.

There is a moment in On the Road when the main character (“so lonely, so sad, so tired”) is sitting on a bus next to a pretty Mexican girl and starts silently beating his thighs with his fist, whispering, “You gotta, you gotta or you’ll die! Damn fool, talk to her!” I read those lines at twenty-two and thought, “That’s how I feel every day, about everything.” It was how I saw the world. Every word I’ve ever written has been a kind of valentine to the world. “Please look at me. Please be mine.”

And his reason deepens, becomes more complicated, from that place of asking for love after he becomes a father, but this is the moment in the article where I found myself at once profoundly moved and somewhat disagreeable, though I didn’t know how to express why. Because while I understand where he’s coming from—there is a sense of that Dickinsonian “This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me” to my own shape-making impulse—that’s not quite the way I feel about it, not exactly.

In that completely predictable way, I’m predisposed to color my life lately with shades of my recent graduation and a trip back to my old college town for my 5-year reunion; things feel at an apex, which I don’t mean in the “highest point” way so much as a culmination: streams gathering into a bigger stream, which will likely meet up with a river somewhere down the line, but it’s impossible to tell where or when. It’s exciting, we say to each other in frenzied, three-page-long emails, and it is. Exciting like an earthquake must be if you’ve never experienced one before. Exciting like petrifying.

Which is why Mary Ruefle’s essay, “On Fear” felt so important when I read it yesterday on my parents’ front porch in South Carolina, where I’ve gone to escape the 110 degree-and-rising temperatures in Arizona. The June issue of Poetry took forever to make its way to me, forwarded from my home address to this, what’s likely to be my last summer vacation. But I like to think it got here when it needed to:

Fear is the greatest motivator of all time. Conflict born of fear is behind our every action, driving us forward like the cogs of a clock. Fear is desire’s dark dress, its doppelgänger. “Love and dread are brothers,” says Julian of Norwich. As desire is wanting and fear is not-wanting, they become inexorably linked; just as desire can be destructive (the desire for power), fear can be constructive (fear of hurting another); fear of poverty becomes desire for wealth.

Oh, this. When I think about Ruefle’s sense of fear and wanting, of that inexorable connection, I think of a bike tire: alternating spokes jutting from a center, the whole thing helping us trundle on from one place to another, necessarily and with purpose. In her post on Marianne Moore, Sara wondered, “Is this why I write poetry? To be in control—to ease fears that I’m not?” No, that’s not the only reason, but the fear is there, as much as it is for Stevens’ speaker in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in his attempt to make sense of the juxtaposition of the ocean’s chaos and the lights of the town, wondering,

…Why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Are we trying to “master the night” out of fear? Is that what writing is? Sure, sometimes, but fear is also a conversation, a desire to participate in, to deepen through that participation, the world around us. Maybe that’s why I write: related to Huntington’s valentine, it’s an urge to be included, to be enveloped, to feel cherished by Creation in the way we cherish it as writers, and to have this interaction with the world add something that wouldn’t have happened without you.

The best fortune cookie I ever received said, “The moment you were born, a problem was solved.” And maybe that’s the clearest way to say what I mean about why I write: yes, it’s arrogant, it’s over-the-top grandiose, it’s presumptive as hell. But there’s something altruistic there, too: a desire to alleviate, to add, to give in the midst of all this passionate taking.

So, friends, I’ll leave you with this question, which I hope you’ll answer in the comments: why do you write? Why DID you write, and what keeps you writing? What’s changed over time? You know, just a little question, no pressure.

Sound and Substance in Wallace Stevens

When was the last time you read Wallace Stevens’ “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words?” If the answer is “not recently,” or (worse!) “never”, get thee to a library or your preferred book retailer (or the one that will send you stuff in two days?) and fix it! Fix it fix it fix it! 

For me, sound is the deal-breaker in poetry, as it seems to have been for Stevens (“…above all else, poetry is words; and that words, above all else, are, in poetry, sounds”):

The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them. (“The Noble Rider” 32)

“That unalterable vibration” is what we want, that physical connection with this thing that has emerged from another mind and, all of a sudden, we find coursing through our own minds, our own bodies. For Stevens, sound often occupies his poems as a presence, as a galvanizing influence in several of his most famous poems including “The Snow Man.”

In “The Snow Man,” the sound of the wind is the force that transforms the “one” from the beginning of the poem (who “must have a mind of winter”) into “the listener, who listens in the snow”: a perfect observer ennobled by his refusal to impose himself upon the landscape. His virtue is his ability to allow the sound to remain just sound and the poem rewards him for it: his identity shifts from being an anonymous “one,” one of those abstracted, euphemistic Stevens-speakers to an entity entirely characterized by his listening. And it’s in this state of heightened perception—a kind of divine perception, really—that he’s capable of recognizing himself as part of the landscape.

And that’s just the way sound behaves within the landscape of poem; the poem also has so much going for it in terms of its rhythmic play. That first line (“ONE must | HAVE a | MIND of | WINter”) scans to a perfect trochaic tetrameter, giving it this proverbial authority, that Stevens immediately subverts with dactyls and anapests throughout the rest of the poem. Ultimately, we wind up in a place of rhythmic balance (“NOTHing | that is | NOT there | and the | NOTHing | that IS”) that mirrors the the equilibrium the listener experiences with his surroundings.

I could babble about this poem forever (seriously, read it out loud—the way the rhetoric of Stevens’ argument aligns with the music of the poem is tremendous), but I’m thinking about sound in poetry this summer in a different way than I have before: in the fall, I’ll be teaching a workshop focused on Forms in poetry and as I prepare that syllabus—terrified, exhilarated—I’ve been reading a lot of primers on form and meter, like James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry, Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance, along with several others that create lovely stacks all around my small apartment. In this post-graduation haze, when temperatures here in Arizona carry on their hellish flirtations with nearly 110 degrees and I burrow deeper indoors, I’m wading knee-deep in the stuff, essays on sound and rhythm in poetry, and loving every minute.

Because it’s a strange, primal kind of magic, the way sound and rhythm turns words into not-quite-music but not-quite-just-words anymore, one that I’m not sure I can quite wrap my brain around yet, let alone communicate succinctly to students in a classroom. It doesn’t seem something you just figure out. Today, I’m rereading Donald Hall’s essay “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: The Psychic Origins of Poetic Form” because it encapsulates the sense of satisfaction that exists in the way poetry sounds:

[The poem] exists as a sensual body. It is beautiful and pleasant, manifest content aside, like a worn stone that is good to touch…. This sensual body reaches us through our mouths, which are warm in the love of vowels held together, and in the muscles of our legs which as in dance tap the motion and pause of linear and syntactic structure. (145)

And this is what I want to tell my students in the coming semester: that sound isn’t about counting syllables, circling all of the vowels in a poem to suss out the assonance, or knowing how to count dactylic hexameter off the top of your head (though we’ll certainly figure out how to do some of these things)—it’s about seeking delight, of relishing in the pleasures of a carefully-built thing, which is what brought me to poetry: the how as much as the what, that endless quest to be gladdened by the physical substance of words.

For the love of vowels, go check out, this great episode of Poetry Off the Shelf, which takes a look at “The Idea of Order at Key West” and what the heck it’s about. Also, the new edition of Stevens Selected, edited by John N. Serio, is pretty beautiful, as is this review of it by James Longenbach.

*

Hall, Donald. “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: The Psychic Origins of of Poetic Forms.” Claims for Poetry. Ed. Donald Hall. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1982. 141-150. Print.

Stevens, Wallace. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. Print. 3-36.

—. “The Snow Man.” Selected Poems. Ed. John N. Serio. New York: Knopf, 2011. Print. 7.