In Other Words: A Poetry Blog

Weighing In: Helen Vendler Vs. Rita Dove

Mon, 2 Jan 2012 22:29:38 -0500

Like many of my fellow poet and critic friends, I have spent the past few weeks following the virtual Vendler / Dove fireworks that first began on The New York Review of Books with Vendler’s less-than-flattering critique—both of Dove’s editorial selections and her highly alliterative introduction to The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Followers of all-things-dramatic in the poetry world no doubt noticed the linkages between this nail-biting situation and the Hoagland / Rankine epistolary back-and-forth that sparked a bevy of pro-Hoagland and pro-Rankine blog posts.

The interesting thing about the Vendler / Dove imbroglio, seems to be, though—at least in terms of everything I’ve seen and read—that no one has taken Vendler’s side. While the literary critics I’ve spoken with have all said they revere Vendler’s critical acumen and courage to stand by such a controversial review, the fact that it made her appear in the wrong has yet to be questioned.  For the purposes of this post, I am not concerned with passing judgment either way—although I recommend reading both Vendler’s review and Dove’s response to it. If you haven’t thought about the issues raised by their virtual interaction already (e.g., race, privilege, and poetry’s intersection with race and privilege), then you should. They are some of the most important in contemporary poetry today.   As a young, aspiring academic, I come away from the Vendler / Dove debate with a particularly vexing question to ask: How will I navigate the pressures and pitfalls of establishing my own ideas and writing without writing/saying something I someday come to regret?   This is what gives me most pause, I think—all issues of critical authority and who-has-the-right-to-critique-what aside. I’m afraid, given the seduction of the title of “editor,” or “endowed professor of _____,” or “winner of prize _____,” that I might lose my way. And that’s scary. I’m afraid of becoming a poet and/or critic of poetry that, gazing into the mirror on a daily basis, I don’t very much like—and then not having the ability to atone for that transformation, at the risk of losing my reputation—or, more crucially, my job.  Luckily, I’m years (if not decades) away from even possible involvement in a scholarly entanglement similar to Vendler’s and Dove’s. Perhaps there is a good reason for that pesky tenure-track system, after all. Given a lectern as large as theirs, I don’t trust myself to know what I would or would not say—depending on who was listening to me, and for what duration, and why.

Mentoring Past the Workshop: Potential Pedagogies of the “New MFA”

Mon, 2 Jan 2012 21:31:56 -0500

The other day over margaritas, I discussed with my friend Carrie, an education grad student at Stanford, our respective plans to spend our lives in classrooms as teachers. She wants to end up at the junior or senior level of high school, impacting students in that crucial time between secondary school and college—while I am particularly interested in teaching poetry at the college level, both in introductory and advanced courses. During our talk, I pitched to her some of the ideas swirling around in my head about how the current Iowa-inspired workshop model might be improved upon in future iterations of the creative writing classroom.   I emphasized the need for a new model, in part, because during my time as a student of poetry, I have often found the workshop useful—but have always been one to question its limits as an effective means of developing new poets into competent writers themselves. While I spent two years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying library science, I also commuted sixty miles roundtrip to Raleigh, North Carolina, so that I could study under Dorianne Laux and her husband Joseph Millar—both of whom have played key mentoring roles in my development as a young poet. While I definitely benefited from “crashing” Dorianne’s poetry workshops for several semesters at North Carolina State and felt lucky for being able to do so, my own writing and ideas about poetry were much more heavily influenced by the time I spent one-on-one with both her and Joe.   Sometimes this time was extremely informal—casual to the point of hilarity. On one occasion, for instance, I helped Joe wash dishes while he talked me through William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Modernism, and how he envisioned his own work aligning with the American poetry written during the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s. “You are kind of like the karate kid, I guess,” I remember him saying as he handed me another wet dish to dry. “Wax on, wax off.”   Perhaps I have been a student too long, and my interest in critiquing / improving upon the current MFA workshop model is a result of that, but I don’t think so. The time I spent learning about poetry and life from Joe and Dorianne—essentially hanging around their house picking both of their brains whenever I had the chance—was some of the best “classroom” time I’ve ever had, despite the fact it definitely did not come while sitting around a table discussing another poet’s work, pretending that poet wasn’t present when in fact he or she was, and trying to say something useful about his or her writing when I was in reality a pretty immature goof, and didn’t really know anything about poetry per se, but very much wanted to, and so tended to say ridiculous things about post-modernism or Foucault or whatever else I could muster up in order to appear “learned” and/or “workshop savvy.”  While I look forward to leading and participating in traditional creative writing workshops for the rest of my life, both as a student and teacher of poetry, I also think that, given the opportunity to develop my own MFA program in the future, I would focus its pedagogical core on one-on-one time between mentor master poets and their student mentees. Considering the fact that workshop time takes up three to four hours a week, I think it would be useful to re-allocate at least some of that time to one-on-one conferences—since these allow for a deeper relationship to be developed between student and teacher. My own study of other contemporary poets’ development has taught me, if nothing else, that all of the really great ones also had great mentors. Laux had Levine. Levis had Levine (and Levine, later in their relationship, Levis). Levis and Dunn had each other while students at Syracuse. Plath and Sexton had Lowell. I had and continue to have Laux and Millar (although I certainly don’t belong on that other list yet). These are only a handful of the crucial, life-long relationships established between poets that, I think, may come out of the workshop environment, but generally persist in spite of it.   If you read ten other poets’ poems for a semester (say approximately four or five poems each) in workshop, this seems (at least to me) an insubstantial sliver of work. Four or five poems don’t provide any sense of trajectory—of how a poet is working and in what direction. The mentor / mentee relationship I envision replacing or at least substantially augmenting the workshop, however, has the potential for an intimate sharing of work between mentor and mentee that I find particularly fascinating. If we want young poets to find their own feet, it seems essential that they be placed in environments in which their teachers’ own current writing is as critique-able, rough, and on-going as theirs. Doesn’t it?  If Dorianne shows me her manuscript, for example, and I can actually read it and talk to her about it outside the context of a classroom where every student is trying to one-up the other students in an attempt to assert their own poetic autonomy, I get a much better sense of how exactly to go about putting a manuscript together myself. If Joe explains to me a problem he’s having with the shift at the end of a poem he’s currently working on, and I can relate that problem to a similar issue in my own poem, I’m playing the role of both reviser and revisee simultaneously. That, I think, is ultimately what the ideal creative writing pedagogical model can (and should) do.   Granted, funding sometimes prevents MFA programs from making one-on-one mentor / mentee relationships possible—which is why the workshop may currently be the best cost-effective creative writing teaching model in academia. Even so, as a former and prospective student of creative writing classes, I have often found myself attending workshops with a feeling in my gut that precious time was being wasted with off-the-cuff comments and tangential posturing. While I realize that the workshop model is probably here to stay, and will someday probably lead one myself, I will continue to seek out mentor / mentee relationships outside the classroom environment—waxing on, waxing off, mowing lawns, mopping floors . . . doing whatever it is I have to do to get one-on-one time with master poets. So far that strategy has worked fairly well—although, who knows? Perhaps my time in an MFA program, assuming I get into one in 2012, will help me revise and improve upon these initial ideas, especially if I have the opportunity to lead a workshop myself and see firsthand the pros and cons of the workshop model as a pedagogical tool.

In Search of Meaning, or Just a Compliment like, “You’re Writing Is Pretty Good”: On Meeting (and Not Meeting) Famous Poets

Fri, 8 Apr 2011 23:08:53 -0400

One of the first poetry readings I ever attended was at the University of Texas at Austin back in 2008, where Marie Howe read to a packed auditorium from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. She came to Austin because she was one of the poets being courted by the Michener Center for Writers, which was looking for a nationally-recognized poet to fill its newly endowed William Livingston Chair in Poetry.

I remember the reading distinctly because it was the first time I had been exposed to poetry in a contemporary context. High school had been all Browning, Chaucer, and Shakespearean sonnets, so it was very exciting (and illuminating) to hear Howe read. She's got a great voice, some really sexy, curly hair, and an ability to intertwine humor and dark, serious moments in her work.

I came away from the reading glowing with the prospect that I might go home and write something, too. Her reading had such a strong impression on me that I still remember the last line of the final poem she read that night, in which she imagined what it must have been like for the Virgin Mary when an angel descended to tell her she was pregnant: "That was the last time, for a long time, she thought about the past."

I'm not a "religious" person, really, but hearing Howe that night definitely gave me a fortunate introduction to the emotional power and life-affirming process that reading and writing poetry can bring. At 21, there were a lot of other equally appealing ways to distract myself in Austin, Texas, where the crowded bars, eateries, and house parties stay packed even on weekday nights. But I lived alone (which made finding time to write easy), and I had always felt a knack for writing and a desire to write that existed independently of any class I'd taken or book I'd read. Becoming a poet seemed like the natural thing to do.

Realizing that other poets have their own stories of how poetry found them (or vice versa), I definitely think that our surroundings impact whether we're pushed toward or away from the form and all of the artistic pleasure it offers. Even though I would only write poems intermittently after hearing Howe read, the seed was planted. And from that point on, it grew.

Failing to develop into the Iowa Writers' Workshop fiction writing all-star I dreamed I could become after crashing and burning in a class I took at UT (where my stories, much to my chagrin, weren't praised—let alone understood—by the other students) I somehow had the good fortune of stumbling into the seemingly loopy-doopy sounding liberal arts elective class called "In Search of Meaning"—the kind of course parents with a kid in the business school would probably have frowned at if they saw it on their kid's schedule.

The first day of the course is firmly implanted in my mind because the professor went around the room and made us all introduce ourselves. Standard fare, right? When one girl mentioned that she was a writer, he asked her, bluntly, "Well, are you any good?"

Great, I thought. Ten minutes in, and this guy is already trying to make us look like arrogant, twentysomething idiots.

My initial presumption of the class, however, turned out to be inordinately wrong. In Search of Meaning became by far the most personally valuable course I took as an undergraduate—mostly because the course's title ought to have been "Read a Lot of Really Awesome Books and Think About Your Life.” That's essentially what we did. The professor, who had initially seemed off-putting and intense, turned out to be an incredible teacher and mentor to me. He's someone I still stay in contact with. Every time I publish a new poem somewhere, he's the first person I inevitably want to tell.

Several weeks into the course, this professor also took the previously mentioned young female writer under his wing, encouraging her to write philosophically dense, metaphysical poetry no one else in her workshops understood or appreciated. No matter the cost to her in-class reputation, he encouraged her to “keep writing it.”  
After showing him some of my less-than-stellar fiction, I showed this professor a few "poems" I had written without any understanding of the form. "These are pretty good," he said. "You should keep writing them." So I did. Several months later, I was coming into his office hours several times a week turning in poems.

One of them—I fancied myself at the time able to channel the voice of God—was in the voice of Jesus, and since Marie Howe had emphasized quite a bit of Catholic wonder and intense religiosity in her latest book, my professor recommended that we show it to her. We were at dinner one night talking when he said that he didn't want to waste her time and that we had to be strategic about it, but that the next time he saw her, he was going to show her my poem, "Golgotha's Plea.”

Imagine how large my already inflated ego became at this point. Clearly, I am being groomed to be an Iowa Writers' Workshop poetry writing all-star! I thought.

It turned out, however, my mentor's meeting with Howe got canceled, so the inflated version of myself that almost spilled beer on itself that night diminished significantly. Suddenly (again), I was just another regular twentysomething poet like all the other twentysomething poets struggling for recognition and approval. I wasn't getting into Iowa, Michener, or anywhere else, and would most likely live in a box under a bridge reading my soiled copy of Howl and drinking spoiled peach schnapps from an oily plastic cup the rest of my life.

Even though the meeting with Marie Howe fell through, my professor invited me to two more big Michener readings, where I was shown "the room" where Michener students met for workshop and had the opportunity to awkwardly meet two "famous" poets (famous, at least, in the poetry world). The first was Natasha Trethewey, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize. I honestly didn't know what the Pulitzer Prize was when I went to her reading. That must sound pretty ridiculous, I know—but remember that I was an oblivious 21-year-old living in Austin, Texas, and there were many other distractions to be had besides poetry. When I met Trethewey near the end of the party, the discussion went something like this:

Awkward introduction about how great I was from my professor. . . .

Natasha Trethewey: "Oh, so you want to be a poet?"

Me: "Yes."

All of that pent-up frustration, that seemingly epic struggle of wanting to be recognized and gain the approval of a famous poet, and all I could say was, "Yes."

When I met Dean Young a few months later (who ended up becoming the William Livingston Chair in Poetry at Michener), I was afraid he would think I was an immature goof, so when he said, "You should stop by my office sometime and show me some poems," I didn't. By this point, I had a vague idea what the Pulitzer Prize was, and I knew that his latest book Elegy on Toy Piano had been a finalist for it. I also noticed that he was wearing a hipster Hawaiian shirt, had an earring, and didn't seem to care that he wasn't wearing a tweed jacket like most of the other literati wandering through the after-reading minglers. For some reason, this made him seem even more intimidating to me.

I've since come to realize how stupid it was for me to awkwardly not navigate those first few opportunities I had to find poetry mentors. When I should have gone to Dean Young's office post-haste and talked shop, when I should have told Natasha Trethewey what I thought about critical race theory and its relationship to her work, when I should have not been intimidated by the Michener workshop room my mentor showed me, saying, "This is where the students meet," I was too young and immature to understand that poetry wasn't necessarily something that was going to bolster my ego. I was too self-absorbed to realize this wasn't the point of it—not to mention the fact that I should have been more grateful for having already had more opportunities than about 99% of the other aspiring writers my age. There were famous poets everywhere that year, it seemed. They were showing up on a monthly basis, passing in and out of my life like so many easily-within-reach lovers or delectable Austin food options, but I was too afraid of my own potential failure to talk to them.

One of my friends, whose name I won't mention but who is a spectacular poet herself, had a bit of a different experience at one of the Michener readings she attended. After hearing Brigit Pegeen Kelly read, she went up to her and said, "Hey, that was great. I enjoyed it. I've loved your poetry, now, for a really long time." Kelly ended up inviting her to the after-reading mixer at the Michener house, and it wasn't because my friend—out of all the trendy people Kelly could have invited that night—was a famous poet. It was because she was a sincere admirer of Kelly's work who had actually read and appreciated it without any ego-associated reason. She just liked the poems.

Here's to hoping that—two years later and without the same Michener crowds to mill among—even a brown-noser like me can express that same honesty, too.

County Lines: The Case for Texas Poetry

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:22:35 -0400

Perhaps more than any other poetic concern I have covered or will cover in these posts, place remains a fixture in my mind around which all other poetic concerns orbit. This has to do, obviously, with my own poetry, which is rooted in a concrete sense of place rather than a linguistic system of New York School anti-logic (i.e., a poetry of surprises!) or Old School logic (i.e., "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the formal one"). Splitting the difference between the two, the poetry-of-place that interests me most as a poet from small-town Texas is one in which the center, rather than falling apart, holds together according to the linguistic structures (in my case, Texas twang) of a people who occupy a real physical place with real physical outcomes that can be brought to life by poets who have either grown up in that place or spent a significant amount of time living there. Notice that I throw the word "real" around quite a bit because one of my primary concerns in my own poetry is to establish a connection to a particular place that, through the surprise of the "Texan line" (a line emphasizing Texan speech, culture, and geography) can be made a reified poetic object worthy of critical discussion and further inquiry.

What I'm arguing for, essentially, is a Texas poetry rooted firmly in a concrete sense of place.

Up to now, there hasn't been a definitely "Texas" poetics, but I am particularly interested in changing that. In a discussion I recently had with Betty Adcock, we talked about the unfortunate characteristic we shared of being Texas poets without a critical center against which to push, pull, or re-orient ourselves. The irony of this is that a city like Austin, with its vanguard of practicing poets and powerhouse MFA program, The Michener Center for Writers, ought to conceivably be able to compete with other hip literary Meccas like Iowa City. My belief is that, if Iowa City can be a relevant literary powerhouse in the American Midwest, surely Austin can play a similar role as "the literary city" in the Southwest.

In order for this belief to become a reality, a number of things beyond a single poet's control (particularly a young one's) will have to occur, in no particular order, off the top of my ten-gallon head: 1) get the critics on the East Coast and West Coast (and at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago) interested in Texas poetry 2) some arbitrary wine and cheese "benefits" of some sort to get the funding necessary to promote activities for new writer's collectives (hopefully with fancy names like Texpoetic) on par in terms of their national recognition with groups like Cave Canem 3) more writers from Texas advocating on behalf of Texas as a relevant place in terms of its culture, people, and literature 4) luck 5) big endowments from wealthy benefactors 6) Willie Nelson concerts in support of the arts? 7) things I haven't thought of yet but probably need to be thinking of, since Austin's keeping-things-weird mentality fosters a creative bubble in the heart of an otherwise conservative state, a bubble Texas writers need to be living in, writing in, and taking advantage of if Texas is ever to become the literary Mecca I believe it could be.

Belief is a far cry from reification, y'all, but I can at least hope, right—drawl and all?

Poems that reference Texas (a continually updated list):

“What I Staked What Was Left of My Life On”
by Arthur Smith

"Cymothoa Exigua"
by Roger Reeves

"Grief"
by Matthew Dickman

"The Road into Cuyabeno"
by Michael Dowdy

"The Waltz We Were Born For"
by Walt McDonald

"the great american yellow poem"
by Frances Chung

"Fayette County, Texas"
by Jake Ricafrente

"Aunt Cordie"
by Carlos Ashley

"Route 7 Outside Nacogdoches, Texas"
by Joe Wilkins

“Hank Williams Sings Songs of Lonely Love”
by Carol Ann Johnston

“Laundry and Cigarettes”
by Dorianne Laux

Taciturn, Oblivious, Until the End of Time: The Life and Legacy of Larry Levis

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 01:04:40 -0400

I was first introduced to Larry Levis's work my senior year of college at The University of Texas at Austin while studying under Michael Adams. I found myself in Professor Adams's office holding an old, 1980's edition of Winter Stars that fall semester because I had taken a course with him the year before, and he had agreed to give me a one-on-one crash course in poetry. Although I had to read several other poets and write a few sonnets and odes before I got to take Levis home and start reading him, looking back on that experience, I realize now that perhaps more than any other poet I have ever read, Levis had and continues to have a significant impact not only on my writing, but on the way I perceive the world (i.e., how I conceptualize my place within its larger political, philosophical, poetic, and aesthetic frameworks). That's obviously a mouthful to say, but Levis is definitely the sort of poet that gets you thinking about the world outside yourself and your relation to that world as a poet, revealing to you just how large and difficult it ultimately is to navigate.

I still remember reading the title poem for the book, "Winter Stars," while listening to a song by The Album Leaf and thinking that I had just discovered something incredibly beautiful and important. It felt very much like waking up for the first time in an unfamiliar place, and was probably one of the few points in my life that I realized I had just been granted access to something, the secret world of poetry, that was far larger and potentially interesting than I had ever dreamed it could possibly be. That too probably sounds like an over-embellished sentence at face value, but I really do mean it. Reading Levis for the first time was just as, if not more important than, anything I had ever encountered before in my study of modern literature. Since I was an English major who had spent the last four years reading, thinking, and writing about books, I think that's saying quite a lot.

Some of the first poems I wrote were Levis tributes. One of them, an Anne-Sexton-type piece about living alone in my then dark, spectral West Campus apartment, was called "My Dog Levis" and was essentially a poem describing how, if my apartment complex had allowed dogs, I would have bought one and named it after Levis (which is actually something I plan on doing a few years down the road, after completing graduate school). At the time, I thought it was the greatest poem that had ever been written, although I've since come to realize that it was actually pretty terrible. It was, however, a first attempt for me, an initiation, if you will, into the world of poetry and all of the potential that world might (with a lot of elbow grease and late-night grief) contain.

I also remember very clearly sitting outside of the six-story undergraduate library on campus reading Winter Stars before I had to go to class and having Larry Levis begin to convince me that I probably ought to skip class and write poetry instead (something I didn't do, but in retrospect, should have). Whether you pick up Wrecking Crew, The Dollmaker's Ghost, Winter Stars, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, Elegy, or The Selected Levis, a compilation of his work, you are in for a real treat. The guy decided at the age of eighteen that he was going to be a poet if he could write a single line of verse that wasn't bad. Thank goodness he convinced himself that one of the lines he wrote back then was good enough, because the result of that initial test was a body of work that matches up with any poet of his generation, and, in my opinion, leaves most of them in the proverbial Iowa City dust, where Levis spent quite a bit of time as a graduate poetry student.

Perhaps even more interesting than Levis's poetry, however, is the life he lived which led to such consistent and imaginative literary production. I'm particularly fond of a book poetic on craft called The Gazer Within that is a compilation of Levis essays and interviews and also includes a lot of interesting anecdotal stories that help flesh out Levis's life, and, subsequently, his poetry. While I realize that the intentional fallacy requires that we don't attach meaning to poems based on the biographical details of authors, I don't completely agree with the intentional fallacy and so will disregard it when I say that knowing about Levis's biography really helped me make sense of his poetry. Too often we are encouraged to close read and close read only in literature classes, but after becoming proficient at close reading early on in college, I inevitably found myself coming back to texts with biographical details and using those biographical details to help inform my readings of those texts. (Essentially, I think I just made the argument that New Criticism is incorrect in its assumption that the author and text are separate entities, but more of that sort of academic banter later.) Suffice it to say that the Levis biography in The Gazer Within is funny, witty, and often clear to the point of almost seeming omniscient. Levis has a tone that is one of the most distinctive in contemporary poetry, and it shows throughout this book and his other books. It's a tone that, after only a few paragraphs and a hilarious story or two, you inevitably start to believe.

I was so interested in learning from and responding to Levis's work that I wrote a poem called, you guessed it, "The Gazer Within." This one dates back to 2008, and although it reflects the fact that I didn't quite understand line breaks yet, it's interesting to look back on as a poem marking a point of transition in my life from a fan of poetry to an actual practicing student of it:

"The Gazer Within"

My mouth, savant, will tell you that
I have forgotten my way back home.
Another ordinary prodigal's: this life.
And yet there were so many times
When the city inside my chest was
A metropolis of bees, teeming with
Energy and life. The honey-liquid
Of a life sweet with regret. I sing.
It isn’t easy with a mind like this.
The other day while walking,
I saw a blue jay eating quickly
Another bird. But then I did not feel
That feeling they call sadness
For the bird. No, I was happy only
For the jay. What I felt was joy
Inside the city of my heart: the
Honey-liquid thirsting of its bees.
Joy for the sadness in the blue jay's
song. Joy for the hunger of suffering.

The poem came out of an idea I stole from Levis about totem animals and how many contemporary poets have totem animals they tend to mention in their poems. Mine, as you can see, is in this case a blue jay (which at the time I thought was a clever pun on my own name). In retrospect, it's perhaps a bit too easy an association to make, but it's still one I keep coming back to when I think about the muteness of animals, them being a-linguistic, and how poetry is at its root (at least in my own mind) an attempt to get back to that pre-linguistic silence. This is something Levis probably addresses most directly in his long narrative poem "Linnets," which he discusses at some length in The Gazer Within.

By this point, you've probably noticed that I haven't quoted Levis's work at all in this post, which is intentional. My hope is that, after you read a few of his poems (Winters Stars is an excellent place to start) for yourself, you will quickly discover the same sorts of reasons to keep reading him that I did. In closing, just let me reiterate that, if you haven't had a chance to consider it already, his poetry is certainly well worth your time. If he was still alive, I would probably be in my car right now, driving to wherever it is that he was, with a six-pack and plenty of poetry.

ABC of Reading Redux: Poetry Re-made Through Ezra Pound

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 23:33:22 -0400

Per the recommendation of my poetry teacher Joseph Millar, I recently read Ezra Pound's highly influential book ABC of Reading for the first time while soaring 30,000 feet up in the air. I didn't have anything else to do during the plane ride from Raleigh to Austin, so I began thumbing through the slim volume to see if Pound had anything useful to say. As it turns out, he did.

A classicist, minimalist, and firm devotee of the modernist cause, Pound at first glance seems like someone with whom I have little in common. I am, at least in terms of personal interests, his exact opposite: a contemporary poet interested in contemporary poetics, maximal writing (as you can tell from this blog, I love em-dashes, parentheses, and super-saturated clauses), and post-modern discourses (most particularly the question of how we find stable meaning in the absence of any tenable absolutist-based approaches to living). Even so, while thumbing through ABC of Reading, I found that, when it comes to our poetic aesthetics, Pound and I share a love for both necessity and sound.

By "necessity" I simply mean an insistence on a poem not containing any unnecessary language or content which does not fulfill the poet's intended purpose for the poem. If it's a poem about baseball, for example, then I want it to be entirely about baseball. Pound, I think, with his leanings toward the image-based aesthetics of Chinese poetry, would agree, saying something to the effect of: If it's a poem about baseball, I want every single image in the poem to in some relate back to baseball. Pound would probably also add that the poem should proceed and develop from the images it contains rather than any sort of context exterior to the poem. If I had to sum up the first portion of ABC of Reading in a few lines of verse, my own response would be:

Image first and image last,
precision all the way,
and if you do not waste a word,
you're writing poetry.

I tackled ABC of Reading without the firm (and seemingly inexhaustible) understanding of Romance languages Pound has, which I think ultimately limited what I could get out of the book in terms of the examples he uses to explicate his points. Much like Robert Lowell, who I've also just started to read, as well as Pound's close friend and confidant T.S. Eliot, Pound is quite literally in love with the classics and the capital-p / capital-t Poetic Tradition. For Pound, the writing of a poem is more than a basic linguistic exercise: it is one of the few holy activities that modernity has left.

What I think I take away most from Pound's discourse on poetry, however, isn't what he has to say with respect to poetry's utility and necessity in modern culture. (I already agreed with him about these points prior to picking up the book.) What I gleaned instead was a new appreciation for a few simplified rules Pound lays out in the book that I think we would all do well to consider, if not consistently include, in our own perspectives on writing poetry.

The first is an insistence on backing up the general statements in our poems with concrete images as evidence. Pound lays out what he means by this in the form of an analogy:

"Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value. If it is taken seriously, the writing of it becomes a criminal act."

While I might not take this rule about general statements to the extreme that Pound does, or spell "check" the way the British do, I can certainly appreciate what he is saying, particularly when I think back to my earliest writing and how I struggled with the over-use of general statements about truth, knowledge, love . . . all of the other big ideas I had buried deep in my head that were most easily exhumed by verbose, blanket statements that made me and the poetry I was writing feel lofty and important, at least at the time. I guess, if you want to have a bit of fun with this idea, most poets go through a "Wordsworthian phase" during which we think that waxing poetic means saying something as dramatically, confusingly, and deeply as is humanly possible. The end result, however, tends to be that overdrawn check Pound points out: writing that is so concerned with its own beauty and value that it is in a sense "counterfeit" because it assumes its own beauty and value without first conceptualizing a reader to whom that beauty and value can ultimately be made real.

The second point Pound makes that really struck me is what he refers to as the "Dichten = condensare" phenomenon. You don't have to know German or Italian, however, to get what Pound is talking about here. Thankfully, he explains this handy little punctum in plain English when he says that "poetry is the most concentrated form of expression." Although this is an inordinately simple rule, Pound goes to great lengths in ABC of Reading to convince us of its truth-value.

I think that, growing up and reading poetry on an occasional basis, a rule like "Dichten = condensare" is something that hadn't occurred to me yet and simply could not have occurred to me yet. Before I had actually taken the time to sit down and write poems on a regular basis, the notion that poetry could and should be the most condensed form of language eluded me, perhaps because I was far more interested in the self-importance of what I was doing while writing those first poems. Generally, I was engaged in the activity of writing them in order to get the attention of a woman I liked, impress a friend with my intellectual acrobatics, or simply because I was feeling incredibly self-important. In a sense, I guess you could say that during such formative instances, I wasn't myself a concentrated form of anything yet, and so was not yet prepared to do something concentrated, well-thought-out, and well-executed with words on what was then an empty page.

All stabs at self-understanding and my old college poetry aside, Pound makes two other primary points in ABC of Reading that bear mentioning. The first of these is that when we craft verse we should listen to vowel sounds in the words we are using because vowels are the primary semantic building blocks of the English language. When I first read Pound saying this, a bell went off in my head because it was something I had already gotten into the habit of doing while listening to music. In a lot of my favorite songs, the meaning of a particular singer's lyrics is often secondary to what is going on in terms of vowel sounds and the subsequent patterns those vowel sounds create. It's nice sometimes to catch yourself doing something an old, dead, white guy says you should be doing. In this case, at least, I was, although I don't think it was because I'm the "Second Coming" of William Butler Yeats. On the contrary, it's probably just human nature to pay attention to vowel sounds. This seems tenable enough to conclude, even without a background in linguistics, doesn't it?

The final Pound point worth considering is the simple idea that poetry ought to have an inherent musical quality built into it, since the oldest forms of poetry were essentially words put to song. When I read a poet who is really in touch with sound (e.g., Robert Lowell, John Keats, Anne Sexton, Paula Mendoza-Hanna, Mike McGriff, Robert Hass, etc.) I tend to get a bit of a shiver up my spine. Additionally, I also tend to remember what I've read much more clearly and with longer duration than I would have otherwise. While I'm a big fan of formal acrobatics and poets that do strange, experimental things with both words and ideas on the page, Pound's insistence on the necessity of music in poetry really sticks with me after finishing ABC of Reading. Several weeks after the fact, I still find myself saying lines aloud and listening intently to the music in them. Most recently, my favorite lines come from a poem by Robert Lowell called "Waking Early Sunday Morning":

Oh to break loose now. All life's grandeur
is something with a girl in summer . . .

What I take away from Pound, if nothing else, is that it's okay to be obsessed with and even captivated by poetry and all of the joy poetry can bring us, despite the fact that it may not be the most popular or "hip" thing we can study and appreciate over the course of our lives. I thoroughly enjoy Pound's rule-based approach to poetics, I think, because unlike many other poetry writing guidelines, Pound's are simple enough to actually understand and put into practice. I don't find myself up in the clouds plucking a harp after reading Pound. On the contrary, I feel very grounded and prepared to write: if not to set the world on fire, to set a world on fire in me. And that, I think, must be the legacy Pound leaves us each and every time we try to write good poetry.

-for Joseph Millar

Googled Verse: Poetry, Preservation, and the Internet

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 23:38:25 -0400

One of the great things about the Internet is that it has made poetry easily accessible to anyone with access to a computer. During our pub talks at Mitch's, a bar across the street from NC State, I remember my friends and I sitting down one day and getting into a discussion as to whether or not the Internet was "good" for poetry or whether it was watering the form down. It was an interesting discussion, one that I think we will continue to have as the Internet itself continues to evolve over time. In particular, I'm curious to see what effect new forms of html coding will have on the way poetry can be presented, performed, archived, and indexed online. It's obviously an exciting time to be writing poetry because we have such a variety of perspectives, tones, and poetic structures at our fingertips from which to choose.
Some of the best resources, if you're trying to find the work of a contemporary poet, or gain a bit of insight into a poet's biography, are also some of the most obvious. The Poetry Foundation's archive is easily searchable, rich in terms of its content, and also, perhaps most importantly, free. If I hear that one of my friends is reading someone I've not heard of before, this is generally one of the first places I look because, chances are, The Poetry Foundation Web site has obtained the legal rights to at least several pieces of that poet's work. Copyright being what it is these days, in concert with the trend of print literary journals providing only small samples of their published content online, means that The Poetry Foundation's archive is one of the most complete you're going to find on the Web, particularly if you're trying to find examples of a more recent contemporary poet. The farther back you go in history, it seems, the more readily available content is, which is a real shame, I think, if not a bit ironic.
What I would like to see someone in the federal government or at the university level do is create an open source digital archive for poetry. As a library science graduate student, digital preservation is something I think about a great deal, although I'll spare you the specifics of that interest during the course of this post. Suffice it to say that I think it might be feasible, assuming we could get everyone to buy into the concept, of establishing a digital reservoir of all of the published poetry (both in print and online) in America. Granted, that reservoir would need to have some sort of time delay on it to insure that publishing journals could display their work in either print or online formats and still sell subscriptions for a profit, but I think it's particularly important that, if we see poetry as something we want as many people to be reading as possible (per Whitman's democratic ideal for poetry) that we start to consider what it would mean both as editors and poets to make past work available rather than having it gather dust in a warehouse somewhere. As an undergraduate, I worked at a historical archive, where we kept old copies of The Southwest Review. The same guy came in to look at them every once and awhile, but other than his use, they remained essentially untouched. Imagine a future, however, in which those currently neglected poems could be accessed online in real-time for both teaching and personal use.
We're at an important juncture in the history of poetry with respect to its preservation, since the choices we make now about how we store all of the poems currently being written will ultimately determine whether poetry becomes a recognized activity in the national consciousness or instead remains something that few Americans know about or engage with on a regular basis. I'm in firm agreement with Tim Green, the editor of RATTLE, who has a blog post about The Poetry Foundation's attempts to broaden and sustain poetry's place within American life. I hope that, no matter which poetic camps we identify with individually, the idea of making poetry more popular and, perhaps more importantly, better understood by the general public, is a concept we can all get behind.
A great example of a digital archive that is trying to collect and safeguard poetry for the long term is From the Fishouse, which started out as a few people with a small archive that has since become one of the best poetry resources on the Web. One of the cool things about FTF is that it places an emphasis on collecting audio as well as text. I don't know about you, but I'm often reading a poem online and really want to be able to hear the poet read his or her work to help give me a better idea of how the poet intended it to be read in terms of cadence and tone. This is something that, particularly with a modern poetry that has gone away from rhyme and emphasized tone instead, we're missing when we read a poet's work. My argument is simply that capturing audio, while certainly a bit of a hassle, isn't all that difficult and provides a historical artifact we can preserve for future poets' use. Imagine your children being able to grow up with a huge poetry database they could freely access with millions of poems and sound files only a few clicks away. Then, imagine what some of poetry's greatest historical voices (insert your own favorite poet here) would have done with that very same technology.
If you're a young poet, you're literally growing up in a world where poetry has the potential to become ubiquitous: on your cell phone, on your stereo, streaming on your television, on YouTube . . . essentially everywhere. In concluding this post, I'll leave you with a prime example of what I mean by this in the form of a poem recently featured in Linebreak. You may already be aware of Twitter being used to write poems, but I definitely wasn't until I saw this.
Just imagine . . . Leaves of Grass . . . in 140 characters or less. I guess anything is possible, if you really think about it.