A Wee but Potent Thing

In the United States, a small collection of poems is published in a chapbook. In the United Kingdom, a small collection of poems is published in a pamphlet. Small here means anywhere from 18 to 28 poems, if most of the poems fit on one or two pages. Typically a chapbook will be no more than 30 pages altogether. In the U.S., the chapbook is not at all unusual. In the U.K., the pamphlet is finding its way back into acceptable circles. As this article by Jackie Kay in The Guardian points out, Ted Hughes made use of the pamphlet years ago. Here is an excerpt which doesn't mention Ted Hughes:

The poetry pamphlet has always been a good way for new poets to reach an audience. Many of today's well-known poets were first published in pamphlet form – or have at different times in their career enjoyed the delicacy and artistry of a small pamphlet. They are the connoisseur's version of a very tasty starter. Straight away, they give you a sense of somebody, an idea of their voice, just enough to make you know that you'd like more – or not. Oh My Rub!, for example, made me want to read more, as did many of the wonderful pamphlets published by Smith/Doorstop. (Poetry Business run by Peter Sansom et al has been doing great pamphlet work for years.)
Read the full article at The Guardian.

Many thanks to Carrie Etter who posted about the article in the Guardian at her blog.

Susan Settlemyre Williams has reviewed four chapbooks at Blackbird which is a joint venture of the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and New Virginia Review, Inc. You can read the reviews online.

202 Craft of Poetry

In the Fall of 1988, I was enrolled as an undergraduate at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. The University is just off interstate 75, about half an hour drive South from Toledo. The football stadium is visible from the highway.

One of the classes I took that Fall was English 202 Craft of Poetry. The teacher was John O'Connor. His father was also a faculty member there. His name, I think, was Phil O'Connor. Our teacher told us early on that he wanted the class to have a workshop feel to it. We were expected to engage each other with our poems and welcome constructive criticism from our classmates. I still have the texts that were required for this class: The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets and Writing Poems by Robert Wallace with Foreward by X.J. Kennedy.

One of the assignments for this class was to select a book of poems by one poet and write about the poems in that book. Also to say whether we thought the book we chose was worth recommending to other readers. I wish I could remember the assignment details better than that. I do remember that the teacher announced to the class that he would look at an early draft once if we wanted and offer constructive criticism.
I chose the book by John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I have a vague memory of showing him a draft of my essay which mentioned seven elements used variously throughout the poems. He said the categories were good ones and that it would be enough to provide an example of each element.

Recently, while I was looking for my 2007 tax return, I happened to find the essay I wrote for the poetry class in the Fall of 1988. I showed it to my friend Jack when we met to discuss the Ashbery poem "Voyage in the Blue" which is in the book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. When he read my essay, Jack remarked that, back then, I read idiomatically. We agreed that that was probably the best reading strategy I knew at the time, and that's why I read those poems that way. Mind you, in the Fall of 1988 I was 22 years old. I offer my essay here as an example of a young poet struggling to put things together. Here's what I came up with. The paper is dated October 19, 1988.

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Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a book of poems by John Ashbery, has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The thirty-four poems in the book describe thoughts, systems of thought, emotions, and a few relationships with friends. Platonic thinking, existentialism, and the perception of time as a day-to-day prison of sorts appear and reappear in various poems; in the title poem, these things are considered as artistic expressions and as artistic tools. The impressive thing, I think, is that the author has taken it upon himself to consider and express what seems to me to be a vast quantity of information, and has assembled it consistentlhy and coherently.

Helping to keep coherence from one poem to the next are seven recurring elements. Typically, a poem will have from two to four elements helping to express the poet's meaning. The elements I identified, to be described subsequently, are as follows: the poet's personal expression, his personal view, the idea of encompassing, the discussing of the creative process, existential thinking, Platonic thinking, and what I call mental microprocessing.

The poet's personal expression is probably the most straightforward for me to describe, but probably the most difficult of the elements to understand. What I took to be direct personal expression appeared fairly often, in nearly half of the poems. Consider this brief poem, “Tarpaulin”:

Easing the thing

Into spurts of activity

Before the emptiness of late afternoon

Is a kind of will power

Blaring back its received vision

From a thousand tenement windows

Just before night

Its signal fading

The poems are usually three times this length; however, this is one of the few poems to employ no other element but personal expression.

What I call the personal view of the poet is one degree more sophisticated than personal expression. Personal view expresses a thoughtful opinion or observation of something that is, in all likelihood, important to the poet. This element appears nearly as often as that of personal expression. One poem, “Worsening Situation”, describes his opinion that our world continues to devolve when the attitude of “going along for the ride” (not a quote) prevails. But it really isn't that clear, because he asks “...what else is there?” besides riding along. Puzzling thoughts are frequent throughout the poems, and are expressed in a variety of ways.

Coalescing in poems with the idea of encompassing are the remaining elements; in order of the frequency in which they appear, they are: the discussing of the creative process, existential thinking, Platonic thinking, and what I call mental microprocessing. Mental microprocessing occurs least of all the elements; still, I think it is distinct and noteworthy.

In discussing the creative process, I felt involved in simply reading. Hopefully this excerpt from the beginning of “Oleum Misericordiae” will illustrate my meaning:

To rub it out, make it less virulent

And a stab at rearranging

The whole thing from the ground up.

Yes we were waiting just now.

Yes we are no longer waiting.

I found this element to be prominent in eight of the thirty-four poems. In six of the poems, I thought existential thinking was the most important. An example of this can be seen “Sheherezade”, near the end of the poem:

...it is we who make this

Jungle and call it space, naming each root,

Each serpent, for the sound of the name

As it clinks dully against our pleasure,

Indifference that is pleasure. ...

Four of the poems seemed to be primarily concerned with Platonic thinking. The first stanza of “All and Some”, I think, evinces this element:

And for those who understand:

We shifted that day, until there was no more

Coming out of the situation we had so imitated.

And now we had talked of it

Not as a human being, deeply polite and intelligent

Coming forward to speak things of dark concern

But as merely interesting description of itself.

The least used element, mental microprocessing, is dominant in “Grand Galop” and “Lithuanian Dance Band.” This element seems at first to ramble, but after considering it, I think the form may be an argument for the presence of a limit to that which can be expressed by an individual (after all, one can take in only so much information at a time). Here is a representative sample from “Lithuanian Dance Band”:

Nathan the Wise is a good title it's a reintroduction

Of heavy seeds attached by toggle switch to long hoops leading

Out of literature and life into worldly chaos in which

We struggle two souls out of work for it's a long way back to

The summation meanwhile we live in it “gradually getting used to”

Everything and this overrides living and is superimposed on it

As when a wounded jackal is tied to the waterhole the lion does come

The remainder of this poem is like this, a rambling run-on-sentence pregnant with thoughts and thinking.

The idea of encompassing appears in more than half of the poems, more than any other element. This idea brings together such things as the past, the present, and the future in one case; individuals and groups in another; existentialism and Platonic thinking in a third. Consider this example of the first case in “Hop `O My Thumb”:

... . No worse time to have come,

Yet all was desiring though already desired and past,

The moment a monument to itself

No one would ever see or know was there.

An example of the second case can be found in “De Imagine Mundi”. It begins thus:

The many as noticed by the one:

The noticed one, confusing itself with the many

Yet perceives itself as an individual

Travelling between two fixed points.

An example of a passage encompassing Platonic and existential thinking will be seen in the discussion of the title poem. The idea of encompassing is, I think, the one most important to the poet.

The last and title poem makes use of each element and makes a major combination of the elements of Platonic and existential thinking. The poem is in six sections, the last one being two to three times as long as the previous sections.

The first section is primarily the poet's personal view of a painting by Parmigianino. The painting is a portrait of the artist himself, as seen in a convex mirror. The diction here, as in all the poems, reveals a complexity of thought that kept me “on my toes”. The second section is primarily a personal expression of the poet's. Here he thinks of his friends and of his past. This section I thought was a little less interesting than the first. The third section expresses the idea of encompassing past, present, and future. The fourth section contains elements of encompassing as well as the discussing of the creative process. The fifth section is the poet's personal view of the very poem containing it. This is expressed by considering possible motives Parmigianino had in making the painting. The poet also considers the painter's abilities and limitations as an artist. The poet decides that his poem, like the self-portrait of the painter, is “... a metaphor/Made to include us, ...”. The sixth and final section of the title poem shows the bringing together of Platonic and existential thinking. Here is the best example of this that I could find:

... One is forced to read

The perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose

Into the smooth, perhaps even bland (but so

Enigmatic) finish. Is there anything

To be serious about beyond this otherness

That gets included in the most ordinary

Forms of daily activity, changing everything

Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter

Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation

Out of our hands, to install it on some monstrous, near

Peak, too close to ignore, too far

For one to intervene? This otherness, this

“Not-being-us” is all there is to look at

In the mirror, though no one can say

How it came to be this way. ...

The careful reader should be able to recognize a similar expression in the sample provided as an example of mental microprocessing, the beginning of “Lithuanian Dance Band”.

The coherence of the whole I found to be amazing. The complexity of thought as revealed in the presentation of ideas and descriptions I thought was relentless and involved me as I read. Each poem seemed at least somewhat conversational; i.e., the poet describes, almost in an offhand way, his opinion on the variety of subjects present in the seven elements I identified in his poetry. I think this collection of poems is worthwhile reading.

Submitted October 19, 1988 in 202 Craft of Poetry, John O'Connor, Bowling Green State University. There are no comments from the teacher on the essay. There are some marks in the margins that look like plus signs. This paper earned an A- grade.

Diane Lockward

Diane Lockward's poem "Linguini" was recently featured at Garrison Keillor's radio show "The Writer's Almanac". With generosity and good humor, Ms. Lockward writes at her blog about the poem. Here is an excerpt:

The idea for "Linguini" came when I read a poem called "The Blended Family," by Carol Potter. I found Potter's poem in [Winter 2003] Prairie Schooner. What I noticed about that poem was that each line ended with the word "spaghetti." I started thinking that I'd like to write a poem about linguini. Initially, I tried ending each line with that word. But soon I abandoned that effort as the poem took on its own life. It, too, wanted repetition, but the repetitions are scattered throughout the poem and in the different forms of pasta that appear. I seriously doubt that anyone would draw a connection between the two poems, but I remain grateful to Potter for her poem which served as my muse.

And now I'm thinking I might like to try a poem about ravioli.
Read the full blog entry at blogalicious.

Read a nice interview with Diane Lockward at Eclectica.

Mark Doty Contributes at AWP

Mark Doty, recent winner of the National Book Award for fire to fire, contributed to a panel discussion at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in Chicago. He has since generously published his comments at his blog. Here is an excerpt from that contribution:

. . . I left high school when I couldn't stand it any more and signed up at the University of Arizona, where they didn't find out for a while that I had no high school diploma and didn't seem too worried about it when they did. I went right to the poetry workshops, which I loved. We read a very specific group of poets, who were writing the fashionable poems of the day. They were neo-surrealists, or the later flowering of deep imagists, and they were largely men: Robert Bly, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand, W. S. Merwin, and my teacher Richard Shelton. I very much wanted to write in this mode, but it wasn't because I wanted to imitate them, but rather a larger matter than that: I thought that's what poetry was. We did not read, for instance, Robert Lowell, or Mina Loy, to name just two of a great number of poets who'd have thoroughly messed up our parochial vision of the art.
Read Mark's contribution in full at his blog.

I appreciate his honesty. Take heart, beginning poets. Learn from your imitations. Read more poetry. Listen to people as they talk about poetry. Tell them what you think about poetry. Expect to grow. And keep at it.

Stephen Dobyns

Stephen Dobyns was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1941. He graduated from Wayne State University and has an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Dobyns has published ten books of poetry and twenty novels. His books of poetry include Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides (Penguin, 1999); Common Carnage (1996); Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992 (1994); Cemetery Nights (1987), which won a Melville Cane Award; Black Dog, Red Dog (1984), which was a winner in the National Poetry Series; Heat Death (1980); and Concurring Beasts (1972), which was the 1972 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. His most recent novels are Boy in the Water (Holt/Metropolitan, 1999), The Church of Dead Girls (1997), Saratoga Fleshpot (1995), The Wrestler's Cruel Study (1993), and Saratoga Haunting (1993). His novels have been translated into more than ten languages. Dobyns is also the author of a collection of short stories, Eating Naked (2000) and a book of essays, Best Words, Best Order (1996). Among his many honors and awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Iowa and Boston University. Stephen Dobyns lives in Boston with his wife and three children.
From http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/743 accessed 2/15/09

[Dobyns] was born on February 19, 1941 in Orange, New Jersey to Lester L., a minister, and Barbara Johnston Dobyns. Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967. He worked as a reporter for the Detroit News.
He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.

As a professor of English at Syracuse University, he was involved in a sexual discrimination scandal. Francine Prose defended him with faint damning of his accuser and the neo-Victorian victim-feminism policies of the school in an article that cast all parties in an unflattering light.
Dobyns' poems are deeply personal, precise renderings of a speaker informed by but not limited to his [Dobyns'] experience. Though the personae in the individual poems differ, they blend together in the collections to act as a voice in wonder of the beauty and cruelty of the world we live in. One might gather that, to Dobyns, the world is a woman he falls in love with who breaks his heart but who is so beautiful that he must fall in love with her again and again.

In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He does not shy from the low, nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason. This voice is strongly informed by his journalistic training.

For example, in the poem "Missed Chances" in Cemetery Nights, the nameless speaker wanders through a metaphorical city in which those who missed their big opportunities futilely rehearse for when that moment will next arrive.

His poetic works count among them the 1971 Lamont Poetry Selection (Concurring Beasts), a National Poetry Series award winner, and a Melville Cane Award winner (Cemetery Nights).
Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Dobyns accessed 2/15/09

Yellow Beak by Stephen Dobyns
A man owns a green parrot with a yellow beak
that he carries on his shoulder each day to work.
He runs a pet shop and the parrot is his trademark.

Each morning the man winds his way from his bus
through the square, four or five blocks. There goes
the parrot, people say. Then at night, he comes back.

The man himself is nondescript—a little overweight,
thinning hair of no color at all. It's like the parrot owns
the man, not the reverse. Then one day the man dies.

He was old. It was bound to happen. At first people
feel mildly upset. The butcher thinks he has forgotten
a customer who owes him money. The baker thinks

he's catching a cold. Soon they get it right—the parrot
is gone. Time seems out of sorts, but sets itself straight
as people forget. Then years later the fellow who ran

the diner wakes from a dream where he saw the parrot
flying along all by itself, flapping by in the morning
and cruising back home at night. Those were the years

of the man's marriage, the start of his family, the years
when the muddle of his life began to work itself out;
and it's as if the parrot were at the root of it all, linking

the days like pearls on a string. Foolish of course, but
do you see how it might happen? We wake at night
and recall an event that seems to define a fixed period

of time, perhaps the memory of a beat-up bike we had
as a kid, or a particular chair where we sat and laughed
with friends; a house, a book, a piece of music, even

a green parrot winding its way through city streets.
And do you see that bubble of air balanced at the tip
of its yellow beak? That's the time in which we lived.
From http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16845 accessed 2/15/09

ASIDE: In your poem, "Bleeder," the perverse desire to make and watch a hemophiliac bleed provides a group of kids at a summer camp for retarded and crippled children a moment of shared meanness, a temporary escape from private spite. I'm interested in cruelty, the suffering, the spectacle, as used to unite people, and as very religious dimension, and reminds us that communion is a coming together to re-experience the suffering of Christ. Would you speak of this poem, which seems critical to the religious dimension that is operating in your work?

Dobyns: For two summers when I was fifteen and sixteen, or was it fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, I worked at crippled children's camps in Pennsylvania. They were camps run by the Easter Seal Foundation. Both lasted eight weeks. The first summer I was paid fifty dollars for eight weeks. The next summer I got a ten-dollar raise, I got sixty dollars plus my room and board. It was something that the first five minutes of, when the kids arrived, was horrifying, because they were so crippled. Many of them had polio; there'd be braces, and kids who were mobile. There was another camp for people who were not mobile at all. But many were crippled; many had Down's syndrome. They didn't call them that at this point; they were called mongoloids. Others were hemophiliac. Kids from the age of six to twenty, actually. And then you began to deal with it. After five minutes they were human beings. You stopped seeing their limitations, their physical limitations.

That's one part of the answer. Another part of the answer is, after I finished writing, I spoke of the Balthus Poems, which precedes the book Black Dog, Red Dog, from which the poem "Bleeder" comes. I found myself wondering, "Whom am I writing for?" What do I see, what do I expect from the things that I say? I realized that part of me was still writing for that grade school teacher, from whom I learned writing. Miss Day was a great woman from East Lansing Michigan. She had a pet canary in the classroom and if you were a good kid you got to take the canary home on the weekend. I never got to take the canary home on the weekend. She made us all sign the pledge that we would never smoke or never drink. I went home and tore up a carton of my parents' Camel cigarettes, which irritated them immensely. And I poured out a bottle of sherry. At nine years old I was tough. I had a moral fiber that you couldn't break with a Swiss Army knife.

I realized that part of me was writing to be liked. I was censoring my writing - that I wanted the reader to think that this writer is sensitive thoughtful, responsible - a good citizen. I realized that this was really destroying my writing. That it was inserting in that process an act of censorship, that I was making a judgment within the act of writing of what was proper material, what was improper material, what was a proper approach, what was a proper tone, what was a proper subject matter, etcetera. So, in Black Dog, Red Dog, I try and overturn that urge, and take subjects from everything.
And "The Bleeder" becomes part of that honest exploration. Here's this innocent kid, who is a severe hemophiliac who comes to this camp and who can't do anything. The camp has taken him by mistake. He gets the slightest cut; he'll just drain out like a broken Coke bottle. So he's put in safe places. Well, if you're in the woods of Pennsylvania, there are not a lot of safe places. Suddenly, you realize that you and everyone else would just like to see it happen. What would happen? This perverse "what would happen if he started to bleed? Wouldn't that be interesting? I mean, take this out of any morality, what would happen? And you realize that you and everyone else are thinking the same thought. And you feel immensely guilty--"Oh, God, I shouldn't think this. I should never think this. What an awful thing to think." "Wouldn't it be interesting to see him bleed? No! Don't say that again!" The poem is not the event; the poem is taking that event and turning it into something else. And the actual events of the poem did not occur except the fact that there was a hemophiliac in this camp.

Well, for me, in the writing of that poem, I had to get away from any sense of "Jesus, they're going to think ill of me for this. They're going to think that I was the person. My stock's going to go down. They're going to think, I may not get that gold star next to my name, after all." The poem also was written in a kind of loose blank verse. More blank verse than I'd tried before. And trying to give the subject matter, the kind of, if I can call it that, roughness, antagonism, and soften nature of the subject matter with an iambic pentameter, a loose iambic pentameter.
Excerpted from http://www.alsopreview.com/aside/dobyns.html accessed 2/15/09.

Over a cup of coffee by Stephen Dobyns

Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or
walking the dog, he would recall some incident
from his youth—nothing significant—climbing a tree
in his backyard, waiting in left field for a batter's
swing, sitting in a parked car with a girl whose face
he no longer remembered, his hand on her breast
and his body electric; memories to look at with
curiosity, the harmless behavior of a stranger, with
nothing to regret or elicit particular joy. And
although he had no sense of being on a journey,
such memories made him realize how far he had
traveled, which, in turn, made him ask how he
would look back on the person he was now, this
person who seemed so substantial. These images, it
was like looking at a book of old photographs,
recognizing a forehead, the narrow chin, and
perhaps recalling the story of an older second
cousin, how he had left long ago to try his luck in
Argentina or Australia. And he saw that he was
becoming like such a person, that the day might
arrive when he would look back on his present self
as on a distant relative who had drifted off into
uncharted lands.

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=30558 accessed 2/15/09

Poetry critic Ralph J. Mills, Jr. suggested that Dobyns's verse contains "wit, intelligence and surrealist obliquity . . . [and] these dimensions of his work are sustained throughout. . . . Dobyns's combination of humor and the bizarre or sinister displays itself most obviously—and to considerable effect—in his socio-political poems, where the odd, seemingly irrational constructions match with terrifying rightness the absurdity and violence of our public life, our foreign wars." Assessing Dobyns's Lamont poetry selection, Concurring Beasts, Saturday Review contributor Robert D. Spector wrote: "Dobyns looks warily at the chaotic world, dislikes what he sees, and responds to its disorder in crisply controlled verse keyed to a sardonic wit one scale above cynicism." In the New York Times Rook Review, Andy Brumer praised Black Dog, Red Dog, the 1984 National Poetry Series winner: "While many of the poems have the illusion of an almost documentary objectivity, they reveal instead the soulful confessions of one individual in turmoil. . . . This is a harrowing book, not meant to please but to instruct."
Excerpted from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1804 accessed 2/15/09

It’s Like This by Stephen Dobyns for Peter Parrish

Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible
cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark,
the cord that makes him always dissatisfied,
has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes.

He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes,
but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with
different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men
that people who hardly know him often mistake
for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus.

He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank
or a library or turning a piece of flat land
into a ditch. All day something that refuses to
show itself hovers at the corner of his eye,
like a name he is trying to remember, like
expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone
were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress
whom he has never met, would never meet again.
And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor
is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can
almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge
of a burning field with smoke swirling around it
like white curtains shot full of wind and light.

When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see
what person he should be that evening. He wants to say:
All day I have been listening, all day I have felt
I stood on the brink of something amazing.
But he says nothing, and his family walks around him
as if he were a stick leaning against a wall.

Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed.
He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure
of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water
drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him.
Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress,
and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him.
Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more,
until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me.

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=23627 accessed 2/15/09

Theodore Roethke: Where Do The Roots Go?

Theodore Roethke, born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, is Michigan's only Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. The River Junction Poets, Saginaw's poetry group, narrate this video introduction to the man and his poetry. Additional contributors include Keith Taylor, Jim Crissman, Jay Steelstra, Chet Rogoza, Al Hellus, Jeff Danhoff, Pam Stump and Diane Hobson. This video took 2nd place in the 2001 Philo T. Farnsworth regional video competition in the documentary category. The video was recorded in Saginaw and edited at Midland Community Television in Midland, MI. Many thanks to Mary Ellen Roethke for access to the family photos.

The Situation of Poetry Readings

Tree Risener wrote in her blog about poetry readings and her attitude toward them - as a participant and as an audience. She posted "Poetry Readings as Sacred Space" in October of 2008. Here is an excerpt:
Readings, whether in subterranean drippy caverns or lofty rooms where through Palladian windows you see the tops of trees, are sacred places, where we gather to enact over and over the rituals that we hope will open the numinous to us, even as do churches, theatres and maternity wards full of newborn babies.

Read the full post here.

If you haven't been to a poetry reading, what are you waiting for?

Galway Kinnell Birthday Reading

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WhatA poetical celebration of Galway Kinnell’s birth, life and poetry.
When
Monday, February 2, 2009 at 7:00 PM
Where
Barnes & Noble Bookseller
3311 Tittabawassee Rd.
Saginaw , MI 48603
phone 989.790.9214
Who should comeJoin us if you love poetry or are curious as to what poetry is all about. Join us if you'd like to talk to people whose hearts and minds are more open than closed. Join us if you can agree or disagree with someone's opinion respectfully. Bring a book if you can. It’s OK if it’s from your library. Note: Galway Kinnell will not be joining our group.
Why
Find out what poems sound like out loud. Listen in on the group and then find a place where you can jump in and read something yourself. Great fun for the whole family. If you have specialized knowledge regarding our poet, do not hesitate to regale us with your story. Don't expect to leave our event with a definitive understanding of the poet or the poems but please do seek to experience and communicate the joys of poetry with others. Join in our informal discussion of poems we know and love and poems we are only just discovering. Better readers make better writers. Visit with our group where everyone's poetry is valued if not appreciated. If you have a smile to share be sure to bring it; otherwise be prepared to leave with one on your face and in your heart. If you're too far away to join us, create your own Birthdays of Poets Reader’s Workshop. Speak up now and forever share your peace. Tell (bring!) a friend.
How to find the organizer(s)We are in the Poetry section, near the window that affords a view of Tittabawassee Road. The staff at Barnes & Noble will put up a sign that says 'This space reserved for The River Junction Poets at 7 p.m.' We'll be getting a few folding chairs to add around the coffee table there.
Details

Kinnell, Galway (1927- ), was born in Providence, Rhode island, and studied at Princeton and the University of Rochester. He served in the United States Navy and then visited Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. Returning to the United States, he worked for the Congress on Racial Equality and then travelled widely in the Middle East and Europe. He has taught at several colleges and universities, including California, Pittsburgh, and New York. The poems of his first volume, What a Kingdom It Was (1960), were informed by a traditional Christian sensibility. However, while retaining a sacramental dimension, his later work burrows fiercely into the self away from traditional sources of religious authority or even conventional notions of personality. 'If you could keep going deeper and deeper', he has said, 'you'd finally not be a person ... you'd be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone could read poetry would speak for it.'

The poems issuing from this conviction may be found in such collections as Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), Body Rags (1968), The Book of Nightmares (1971), and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980). Short, chanting lines, a simple, declarative syntax, emphatic rhythms, bleak imagery, and insistent repetition: all are used here to generate the sense of the poet as shaman who throws off the 'sticky infusions' of speech and becomes one with the natural world, sharing in the primal experiences of birth and death. Walking Down the Stairs (1978) is a useful selection of interviews with Kinnell; he has also published a number of translations.

From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press.

From http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/kinnell/life.htm accessed 1/26/09.

1 
In late winter 
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam 
coming up from 
some fault in the old snow 
and bend close and see it is lung-colored 
and put down my nose 
and know 
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.  

2  
I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends 
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out 
on the fairway of the bears.  

And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks, 
roaming in circles 
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.

Excerpted from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19851 accessed 1/26/09

In Galway Kinnell's poem "The Bear," a hunter stalks the bear to its death, falls asleep exhausted, dreams he becomes the bear, and then awakens somehow changed into a creature half-bear, half-man. The poem's strength and its problems hinge upon the hunter persona Kinnell adopts, attempting to fuse the consciousness of a modern man with that of a primitive Eskimo. This persona means that the poet must move through the technical realism of hunting to its metaphysical implications without spoiling one or the other, as he tries to illustrate man's sacred bond with nature by the simple, brutal hunting of the bear. Given the distance from Kinnell's ordinary experience, it may be helpful first to examine the literary contexts of the poem—its sources and analogues—in order to see how the poet resolves these conflicts between meaning and realism.
Speaking of the origins of "The Bear" in an interview, Kinnell said,

I guess I had just read Cummings' poem on Olaf, who says, "there is some shit I will not eat." It struck me that that rather implies that some of our diet, if not all, is shit. And then I remembered this bear story, how the bear's shit was infused with blood, so that the hunter by eating the bear's excrement was actually nourished by what the bear's wound infused into it.

Kinnell's poem transcends this excremental level, but it is worth looking at the transformation-what he got from the Cummings' poem and the bear story, and how he used it to fashion the poetic world of "The Bear."

Excerpted from http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/kinnell/bear.htm accessed 1/26/09.

All best and see you Monday,
Andrew Christ
Legal stuff
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Parting Thoughts
Research indicates that better readers make better writers. Maybe this is why, in the Poet's Market, editors of literary magazines often recommend poets read more poetry. Are you not aware? You are a cultural event, and so is everyone else.

Recommended Reading: One Poet's Notes

In case you missed it, Edward Byrne of the Valparaiso Poetry Review has recently posted, at his One Poet's Notes blog, about

• the life, poetry and recent death of W.D. Snodgrass
• the poetry of William Stafford (one of my favorite poets)
• Edgar Allan Poe's writing
• Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, including Barack Obama's comments on that address as the time was nearing for Obama to give his own inaugural address
• Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem "Praise Song for the Day".

As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Byrne is swinging for the fence and batting 1000. Take a few minutes to take in these essays. You'll be glad you did.

Dorianne Laux Birthday Reading

-->What

A poetical celebration of Dorianne Laux’s birth, life and poetry.
When
Monday, January 19^th, 2009 at 7:00 PM
Where
Barnes & Noble Bookseller
3311 Tittabawassee Rd.
Saginaw , MI 48603
phone 989.790.9214
Who should comeJoin us if you love poetry or are curious as to what poetry is all about. Join us if you'd like to talk to people whose hearts and minds are more open than closed. Join us if you can agree or disagree with someone's opinion respectfully. Bring a book if you can. It’s OK if it’s from your library. Note: Dorianne Laux will not be joining our group.
Why
Find out what poems sound like out loud. Listen in on the group and then find a place where you can jump in and read something yourself. Great fun for the whole family. If you have specialized knowledge regarding our poet, do not hesitate to regale us with your story. Don't expect to leave our event with a definitive understanding of the poet or the poems but please do seek to experience and communicate the joys of poetry with others. Join us as we talk about the craftsmanship of poems, the effect(s) of the poems and how those effects are achieved. Better readers make better writers. Visit with our group as we read poems we know and love and poems we are just discovering. Everyone's poetry is valued if not appreciated. If you have a smile to share be sure to bring it; otherwise be prepared to leave with one on your face and in your heart. If you're too far away to join us, create your own Birthdays of Poets Reader’s Workshop. Speak up now and forever share your peace. Tell (bring!) a friend.
How to find the organizer(s)We are in the Poetry section, near the window that affords a view of Tittabawassee Road. The staff at Barnes & Noble will put up a sign that says 'This space reserved for The River Junction Poets at 7 p.m.' We'll be getting a few folding chairs to add around the coffee table there.
DetailsFor this installment of the Read Write Poem Poet Interview, I [Dana Guthrie Martin] interviewed Dorianne Laux via e-mail. I had the pleasure of meeting Laux the summer of 2006 when she was teaching at The Tomales Bay Workshops Writers’ Conference.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by the Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005.

Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994) and Smoke (2000). Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January 2008.

Co-author of The Poet’s Companion, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Best of the Net, and she’s a frequent contributor to magazines as various as the New York Quarterly, Orion, Ms. Magazine and online journals.

Laux has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Petaluma, Calif., and as far north as Juneau, Alaska. For the last 13 years, she has taught at the University of Oregon in Eugene and since 2004, as core faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. Her summers are spent teaching poetry workshops in the beauty of Esalen in Big Sur, Tomales Bay, Aspen, Spoleto, Italy and Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. In fall of 2008, she and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, will move to Raleigh, where she will join the faculty at North Carolina State University as a Poet-in-Residence.

* * *

You have called yourself, in part, a poet of personal witness. Can you explain what that means?

There seems to be a general discomfort right now with the personal, the private, the confessional and the narrative. Of course, poets have been writing poems of personal disclosure since the beginning of poetry. And since the beginning, people have suffered through great historic upheavals, war, geologic disasters, famine, and enjoyed great times of renaissance, scientific discovery, political change, explosions of art, culture, philosophy.

We know some of what happened. We keep records, diaries, logs, news reports, pictographs, paintings, photographs. But it’s poetry that informs us of what we felt while those times and events rained down, and it’s poetry that recalls us to our selves. It’s our emotions that are in danger of being left out, and it is poetry that accounts for, is responsible to, the human element.

I’ve been re-reading a favorite book of poetry with a student in the Pacific MFA Program. The book is called The Moon Reflected Fire, by Doug Anderson. He was a medic during the Vietnam war and the first section of the book recalls that experience in vivid narrative poems that introduce us to the narrator as well as to the men and women he worked with and for and the Vietnamese people we were making war against. The next section is filled with short, lyric persona poems about Goya struggling to create art during the Inquisition. The third section contains poems in the voices of minor characters from the Odyssey and the Iliad, the voices we didn’t hear in the first telling. The final section returns to the narrative, poems about recovery, from the war, alcohol and drugs, damaged relationships, those broken by the war.

The poems are gripping, wrenching. One of the most arresting and heartbreaking lines is when Doug Anderson, the soldier, the medic, asks a wounded soldier slipping in and out of consciousness: Hey, what’s your mother’s maiden name? He’s trying to keep the man tied to the world though memory.

That seems to me what poems do. They call out to us, not by just any name, but by our particular name, and keep us tied to the world by accessing our memories. Poems keep us conscious of the importance of our individual lives. There are many ways to do this, and combinations of ways to do this, but personal witness of a singular life, seen clearly and with the concomitant well-chosen particulars, is one of the most powerful ways to do this.

When we write a poem of personal witness, a poem about an ordinary day, an ordinary life, seen through the lens of what Whitman called “the amplitude of time,” we’re struggling to find the importance of the individual who is stranded in the swirling universe, a figure standing up against the backdrop of eternity. I think of the fisherman’s prayer: Dear Lord, be good to me / the sea is so wide / and my boat is so small.

You realized you were meant to write poetry after hearing a poem by Pablo Neruda. Some poets have that feeling when they first start writing but aren’t able to sustain it, at least not all the time. Have you been able to sustain that sense of being meant to write ever since you started writing, or have you ever had times when you felt poetry left you?

I don’t think we ever get back the energy of our youth, the idealism and innocence of that time. But with that loss come certain gains: experience, patience, a sense of wholeness. Once we’ve begun the journey of a reading and writing life, we begin to see certain familiar themes, ideas, language, returning again and again, in our own work and the work of others, and we can sometimes tire of it.

But there is nothing like finding a new love at an old age. Poetry will go underground for a time, but will also pop up when I least expect it, fresh and new again, and more importantly, when I seem to most need it. Poetry saved me early on, and it continues to save me, just at longer intervals.

I also look around at the poets of the generation before mine, now in their 70s, 80s, 90s — Stanley Kunitz just died at 102 and was writing the best poems of his life. Adrienne Rich and Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone. All poets who still have something mighty to say and are saying it with power. These poets inspire me and help me to see again, to feel a life sometimes buried by habituation and stagnation.

And younger poets coming up all the time who give us all a fresh way of looking at the world. I’m moving soon to North Carolina after living on the West Coast most my life. It’s a big move for a 56-year-old woman, and I welcome the adventure of it. I know it will shake me out of certain mental ruts, enliven my art.

I also have a stint this summer at VCCA. I haven’t been to a writer’s retreat in a few years now and just knowing I’m going there has motivated me. Looking forward to a time when I can be quiet and alone with my inner life. I think many times when we think we’ve lost poetry, it is a matter of lack of solitude, lack of support. Poetry is always there, waiting to be unearthed. To be necessary again.

I’ve spoken to people who think we have too many poets and aspiring poets in this country, and not enough ways to sustain those poets — or enough readers to read their work. Others have a different view, seeing this as one of the most vibrant times for American poetry. What are your feelings about the state of poetry today and its future?

I think a bit of both visions are true. Everyone seems to want to be a poet, though I think this has been the case for a good long time. At some point in a life something happens that is just so incomprehensible and emotionally powerful that it seems the only way to process it is through poetry.

If you went out on the street and asked people if they had ever written a poem, I think most would say yes, at least one. If you asked if they had ever painted a portrait or composed a musical score or sculpted a bust or thrown a pot you’d get fewer yeses. Poetry is the art of the people. Anyone can write a poem. And that’s a two-edged sword.

On the other hand, there can never be enough poetry. It would be like asking a drunk if he’s had enough wine. What’s too much? And how will we find the next Whitman or Dickinson, the next Neruda or Akmatova? One could be living right now, hidden away in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in the middle of America. A young Etheridge Knight in Corinth, Miss., or a Gwendolyn Brooks in Topeka, Kan. That’s the kind of democracy that makes way for genius.

It also makes way for mediocrity, but you take the good with the bad. So yes, this is a vibrant time for poetry simply because so many people are interested in reading and writing it. And no, we don’t have enough support for all these people, but there is also more support for poetry now than there has ever been in the past.

The expectation here is a bit skewed as well. Most of us don’t enter this practice with material gains in mind. The university system has helped to create this expectation of fortune and career, as though poems were a commodity. A good book to read to disabuse oneself of this mindset is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which has just been reissued on Vintage Books. When it first came out in 1983, the subtitle of the book was Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. That’s been changed to Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

Lewis Hyde* uses anthropology, economics, psychology, art and fairy tales to examine the role gifts have played and continue to play in our emotional and spiritual life, and describes how poetry is the one art that resists commodification and holds tribes of people together.

You’ve talked about being drawn to, and about writing, poetry with some blood in it. Can you describe what that means, both in terms of your own work and the work you are most drawn to?

Yes, blood. In other words, poems that possess a heart beat, the blood pumping, flowing through the veins. Poems with energy and drive, force and counterforce. Poems speaking with directness in the telling, where the reader can feel the human need from which the poem emerged. Hot-blooded poems. Which doesn’t preclude quietude. But a weighted silence, in which you can hear someone breathing. Poems with tension, velocity and vigor.

We get born from salt water into blood, we suffer injustices and loss. Sometimes unfathomable injustice, unbearable loss. And we die. Sometimes quickly, quietly, sometimes slowly, painfully. Always alone. I want a poetry that acknowledges this. I want to be broken into, like a house. I want to have everything stolen from me but my life and I want to wake up grateful for being spared.

I want poetry that tells the truth with compassion. I see so many poems of which anyone could say: There is absolutely nothing wrong with this poem. Or this poem is interesting. Or this poem is so smart. What does that mean? Smart? Was Neruda a smart poet? Or this is so well-crafted. I’m looking for poems that leave me speechless. Breathless. Slayed. My spell check says there’s no such word as slayed. And this is what I mean. I’m less interested in the right way than the only way.

When I read a Sharon Olds poem I think, this is the only way she could have written this. She’s our D.H. Lawrence. When I read a Philip Levine poem I think, this is a poem that has some sweat on it, some muscle and bone in it. Lucille Clifton, daring to tell us what we don’t want to hear, with power and anger. Yes. These are my heroes, not because they have mad line-breaking skills, but because over and over they are trying to say something important about what it is to be human.

Gerald Stern. Talk about energy, force, drive. He’s our Whitman. He cannot be contained! You can’t coolly appreciate Stern. C.K. Williams, his forward momentum, his brooding vision. Adrienne Rich at her fiercest and most direct, Ruth Stone beating out the singular loss of her husband over and over again, struggling, at 93, to get to the heart of it.

Galway Kinnell’s rawness, riskiness and originality in a poem like “The Bear.” Jack Gilbert, a poet of great compression, bearing the weight of his loneliness, his bleakly romantic vision. Stanley Kunitz, the pressure of that early cruelty, injustice and grief forging a poetry of compassion and tenderness. When you read these poets you don’t say, Gee, isn’t this a great line break, you say, Jesus!

And craft is important to all these poets, but it’s not why they sat down to write or why I have to sit down to read them. Craft is important, a skill to be learned, but it’s not the beginning and end of the story. I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of living. Sexton and Plath. Yes. And I expect no less from myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t write poems that fall far short of my own expectations. Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t. I want blood.

* * *

1. You can find Lewis Hyde’s The Gift at www.lewishyde.com/pub/gift.html.
   

This interview was conducted by Dana Guthrie Martin and is online at http://readwritepoem.org/2008/03/14/poet-interview-dorianne-laux/ accessed 1/17/09.

The following three poems are from Smoke, 2000 BOA Editions.

HOW IT WILL HAPPEN, WHEN 

There you are, exhausted from another night of crying,
curled up on the couch, the floor, at the foot of the bed,

anywhere you fall you fall down crying, half amazed
at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry

anymore. And there they are: his socks, his shirt, your
underwear, and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile

next to the bathroom door, and you fall down again.
Someday, years from now, things will be different:

the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows
shining, sun coming in easily now, skimming across

the thin glaze of wax on the wood floor. You’ll be peeling
an orange or watching a bird leap from the edge of the rooftop

next door, noticing how, for instance, her body is trapped
in the air, only a moment before gathering the will to fly

into the ruff at her wings, and then doing it: flying.
You’ll be reading, and for a moment you’ll see a word

you don’t recognize, a simple words like cup or gate or wisp
and you’ll ponder like a child discovering language.

Cup, you’ll say over and over until it begins to make sense,
and that’s when you’ll say it, for the first time, out loud: He’s dead.

He’s not coming back, and it will be the first time you believe it.

ABSCHIED SYMPHONY

Someone I love is dying, which is why,
when I turn the key in the ignition
and the radio comes on, sudden and loud,
something by Haydn, a diminishing fugue,
then backed the car out of the parking space
in the underground garage, maneuvering through
the dimly lit tunnels, under low ceilings,
following yellow arrows stenciled at intervals
on grey cement walls and I think of him,
moving slowly through the last
hard day’s of his life, I won't
turn it off, and I can't stop crying.
When I arrive at the tollgate I have to make
myself stop thinking as I dig in my pockets
for the last of my coins, turn to the attendant,
indifferent in his blue smock, his white hair
curling like smoke around his weathered neck,
and say, Thank you, like an idiot, and drive
into the blinding midday light.
Everything is hideously symbolic:
the Chevron truck, its underbelly
spattered with road grit and the sweat
of last night’s rain, the Dumpster
behind the flower shop, sprung lid
pressed down on the dead wedding bouquets—
even the smell of something simple, coffee
drifting from the open door of a café;
and my eyes glaze over, ache in their sockets.
For months now all I’ve wanted is the blessing
of inattention, to move carefully from room to room
in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.
To eat a bowl of cereal and not image him,
drawn thin and pale, unable to swallow.
How not to imagine the tumors
ripening beneath his skin, flesh
I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,
pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights
so hard I thought I could enter him, open
his back at the spine like a door or a curtain
and slip in like a small fish between his ribs,
nudge the coral of his brain with my lips,
brushing over the blue coils of his bowels
with the fluted silk of my tail.
Death is not romantic. He is dying. That fact
is start and one-dimensional, a black note
on an empty staff. My feet are cold,
but not as cold as his, and I hate this music
that floods the cramped insides
of my car, my head, slowing the world down
with its lurid majesty, transforming
everything I see into stained memorials
to life—even the old Ford ahead of me,
its battered rear end thinned to scallops of rust,
pumping grim shrouds of exhaust
into the shimmering air—even the tenacious
nasturtiums clinging to a fence, stem and bloom
of the insignificant, music spooling
from their open faces, spilling upward, past
the last rim of the blue and into the back pool
of another galaxy. As if all that emptiness
were a place of benevolence, a destination,
a peace we could rise to.

LAST WORDS
For Al

His voice, toward the end, was a soft coal breaking
open in the little stove of his heart. One day
he just let go and the birds stopped singing.

Then the other deaths came on, as if by permission—
beloved teacher, cousin, a lover slipped from my life
the way a rope slithers from your grip, the ocean
folding over it, your fingers stripped of flesh. A deck

of cards worn smooth at a kitchen table, the jack
of spades laid down at last, his face thumbed to threads.
An ashtray full of pebbles on the window ledge, wave-beaten,
gathered at day’s end from a beach your mind has never left,

then a starling climbs the pine outside—
the cat’s black paw, the past shattered, the stones
rolled the their favorite-hidden places. Even the poets

I had taken to my soul: Levis, Matthews, Levertov—
the books of poetry, lost or stolen, left on airport benches,
shabby trade paperbacks of my childhood, the box
misplaced, the one suitcase that mattered crushed

to nothing in the belly of a train. I took a rubbing
of the carved wings and lilies from a headstone
outside Philadelphia, frosted gin bottles
stationed like soldiers on her grave:

The Best Blues Singer in the World
Will Never Stop Singing.

How many losses does it take to stop a heart,
to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?
Each one came rushing through the rooms he left.
Mouths open. Last words flown up into the trees.

Four poems from http://www.poetrymagazine.com/archives/2001/April01/laux.htm accessed 1/17/09.

Expect more at the Birthdays of Poets Blog. Go now.

All best and see you Monday,
Andrew Christ
Legal stuff
Your e-mail address will not be sold or used by me for any purpose other than to promote these special events and the Birthdays of Poets Blog. If you prefer to not receive these messages, reply to this e-mail address and include the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the text of your message.
Parting Thoughts
Research indicates that better readers make better writers. Maybe this is why, in the Poet's Market, editors of literary magazines often recommend poets read more poetry. Are you not aware? You are a cultural event, and so is everyone else.