Review: Poetry Magazine (Oct. 2015) – Part II: Eleanor Hooker, Franz Wright

The October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine can be found here.

links to individual texts:
Eleanor Hooker, "Nailing Wings to the Dead"
Franz Wright, "The Raising of Lazarus"
section headers are also links

 

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the other posts in this series

• Part 1: Introduction, Matthew Sweeney, Guillaume Apollinaire
• Part 3: Corey Mesner, Katie Peterson, Rae Armantrout
• Part 4: Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Cruz
• Part 5: Matt Hart
• Part 6: Randall Mann, Reginald Gibbons
• Part 7: Christine Gosnay, Claudia Emerson, James Longenbach
• Part 8: Quickly Now, Through the Rest
• Part 9, Finale: Head Shots: Crash Davis vs. the Zombies

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breaking lines vs. writing lines

– editing and an added footnote, Apr. 3, 2016

 

This was slow in coming. In part, I have been in that peculiar situation of being in a bout with an illness whose medications create more and more severe symptoms than the illness. Though, also, there is that this is yet the beginning of the project from the writing side: as such, there is not only the exploration of the texts but also the search for the ideas and themes will be carried forward through the project. Hopefully, the tempo will pick up after this, as the texts in the issue are used more and more as examples to points already made than used to the much longer effort of establishing the points.

I am exploring two texts from the October issue in this part. Since Eleanor Hooker, the author of the first, "Nailing Wings to the Dead," is another holdover Irish author, I want to add to it the first text by a U.S. writer, "The Raising of Lazarus" by Franz Wright. The two also create a usefully contrasting pair: the first is loosely formal verse, the second free verse; as well, the second is a much stronger piece than the first.

The primary effort here will be toward the groundwork for exploring lines and line breaks in the texts to come: it is one of the greatest weaknesses in contemporary verse culture, and perhaps the most tell-tale sign of writing sophistication – or absence thereof – in contemporary verse. For the moment I set aside the question of a work's being ideationally dead or living and focus on technical issues. Though, with both works, I will also look at some moments in their construction. I will start with examing such issues in "Nailing Wings" then turn to such in "Raising Lazarus." It is in the latter I will turn to the exploration of lines, carrying that exploration back to "Nailing Wings."

Yet, the central thesis of this exploration of an issue Poetry Magazine is that contemporary verse, unlike Leavis's description of the popular verse of his time, is not merely dead but indeed bad, so I will begin – as I generally will throughout the project – speaking to the quality of the works. In keeping with the thesis of this blog, however, the approach will remain exploratory, from the viewpoint not solely of a general reader but also of a writer.

 

 

Eleanor Hooker, "Nailing Wings to the Dead"

 

I start, right at the start, at the first word, with a very common event in contemporary verse: the incorrect use of connecting words: here, "since."

Since we nail wings to the dead, she calls ravens from the sky to inspect our work. "For flight," they say, "first remove their boots."

Using the wrong adverb or conjunction or using one where one is neither needed nor wanted is a common error in writing, verse or prose. (It is one I have to constantly watch for in my own writing.) Either the trend has been increasing over the years or I have become more and more alert to it, for it seems the mis-use of such adverbs and conjunctions has become sloppier and sloppier both in speech and in the writing of persons supposedly intelligent and alert enough to catch the event. The worst is with the word but. On television, especially live, in news broadcasts, sports channels, and commercials, you will very frequently hear the word but used where there is no 'but' relationship, where either an and or nothing at all should have been used. I am sure that most of these errors exist by way of spoken speech habits invading the drafting of texts. Frequently, the words are used as filler material, something similar to ums, a means to connect one thought to the next without letting any silence appear in between. Though, I also believe, considering commercials and most broadcasts are not free-wheeled but scripted, that they are also, simply, symptomatic of a lack of attention and poor language skills on the part of writers: poor skills because they are exactly the type of thing that good editing would catch.[FN]

"The Other One" by Nadine Botha -- Verse Daily, 05/26/2013

from The Commons
poem found here

 

First lines:
I could find a million nuances for how to improve me and influence my life,
as though, if I could just identify that one—like The One, the love—

 

abstraction and control

— edited 5/27/13; expanding explanations beginning at "For example:"
— reformatted 9/30/15

What I would like to show here is how excessive abstraction is not just poor writing because it iss excessive abstraction, but also how abstraction opens the door for other poems throughout the poem. Specifically, I want to try to show that when a person is too abstract in their writing, they tend to have less control over their ideation and wording.

The more effort that is put into filling a poem with solidity, the more those solid elements create, within the writing mind, points of control. By "solidity" here I mean moments of ideational strength, moments where ideational energy is put into the poem, energy that will then seek to interact with other moments of ideational energy, both to build on each other and to weave the micro-cosmos of the poem.

To take a nearly wholly random example, look that the first two verses (and half a line) of Thomas Hardy's "Channel Firing" (full poem found here):

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow drooled.

Look at the second stanza, both at the ideational energies developed and how they interact. The first stanza sets up the event: the guns firing in the Channel. The second is the immediate consequences in the graveyard/church. But also it is in the second stanza that the actual scene is established. Notice the difference in response of the characters present: the skeletal dead sit up in positive anticipation, while the mice, worms, and hounds -- and the utterly uncaring cow -- react in rather quotidian responses.[FN] This opposition is the primary place where the energies of the falseness of the dead's belief in Judgement Day lie is developed. Also, it is in this opposition that one finds the birth of the humor of the poem -- that humor that takes play in the later lines about Parson Thirdly: "I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

-------------------------------- [FN] It is worth pointing out, as well, how Hardy emphasised both the humor and the opposition by dropping the action of "and sat upright" down into the second stanza: out of the stanza about the noise of the guns, and into the stanza of the reactions to the noise. --------------------------------

But look also at how the strength of the lines also create ideational stability and an anchoring in the poem. You have four animal responses given in opposition to that of the skeletons. Four moments across five lines given to establish the actual scene (as opposed to the imagined scene) of the poem. And four moments that, though equivalent in their quotidian response, are also different in their particulars (dogs are disturbed, mice skittish, worms burrow to their safe homes, and the cow could care less). So it's not just an abstract "but the world did not so much care," it is an interweaving of concrete moments and demonstrations of that idea.

So do you see what I mean as to how that second stanza grounds the whole poem, and establishes a moment of control in its concrete ideational strength -- even while generating the overarching humor of the false belief of the dead? But also, how that concrete strength demands and creates control over the flow of the poem, not only in the early verses but throughout?

"The Other One," however, offers no such moments. it is almost entirely abstract. (To be honest, I can't find a concrete moment anywhere.) And it is because of that over-dominant abstraction, I argue, that the poem never gains control over itself.

(Now, I recognize I am asking you to see in the final results what, really, would best be evidenced in watching the actual writing of the poem. As such, there is something of an argumentative leap I am asking of you. You'll just have to trust me. If you pay attention to your own writing, you will see it demonstrated.)

So, now, the lack of control. Obviously, there is absolutely no notion or control of line in this poem. There is a loose idea of stanza, in that each stanza is in a way a contained moment. (Every stanza ends in a period.) Grammatically and syntactically there are problems all over the place:

• The phrase "how to improve me" should be "improve myself" -- not only because of grammar but also because the rhythm/sound is so much better.
• The "it" in line 5 has no natural referent (the sentence changes in mid-stream from "I have not grasped one" to "I have not come close to wondering if it is the One").
• The fourth stanza haw two sentences that change subject: "one has in my whole life" and "one realizes that [. . .] I had no idea.
• Let's write the second sentence in the seventh stanza out:

  I can be grateful for getting more than I thought I might have or could try for, and didn’t.

  So what do have we have with that?

  I can be grateful for getting more than I thought I might have and didn’t.

  which makes no sense, and

  I can be grateful for getting more than I thought I could try for, and didn’t.

  which makes less sense.

Semantically, ideationally, and structurally:

• The first sentence contradicts itself at line 2: "I could find a million nuances as though, if I could just identify that one": how can it be "if I could just identify that one" if you start the sentence by saying "I could find?
• In line 2, why is "The One" capitalized, and not the immediately following "the love"? By not capitalizing it you have changed the idea, so that "the love" is no longer equivalent to the individual who is The One, but is now an abstract notion of love: which creates an ideational conflict in the poem.
• So, exactly how does one "come closer to wondering" (line 5)? That does not mean what Botha wants it to mean. What it means is the speaker is not yet wondering, but is very close to beginning to wonder.
• I have a feeling line 13 does not mean what Botha thinks it means: "I still don't always like to get my feet wet" means that most of the time the speaker does like it: which doesn't fit with the general idea of the mostly forgettable adulthood.
• Indeed, the whole of the sixth stanza makes little sense.
• And, possibly, the worst moment: the last line: "So where, then?" Which is exactly my question: Where previously in that poem is there anything that at all relates to "where"?

Now, if I had to make a guess, I would say this poem was written rather in a spurt, rather blurted out upon the page (describing the manner of production, not the time taken in production), and the only "development" of the poem in writing was in organizing the thoughts and stanzas and some editing. Which actually goes to my point: with the poem being so abstract, it is very easy for the poet to so blurt. When a poem is anchored in the concrete, there is in the words themselve the demand for attention to detail. In the abstract, that demand-on-the-page is mostly lacking: and thus the tendency to loss of control.

For example: do you see how the argumentative "conclusion" in line 6 really comes out of nowhere? I don't think anybody else on the planet would have arrived at that conclusion considering 1-5. If everything is abstract and loose, it's very easy for a poet to lose track of what is on the page; it is quite easy for the poem (or whatever text) to exist more clearly in the writer's mind than on the text. Much of this is because, if the text is too abstract, it is usually loose also in the writer's head, so it ends up even looser on the page. Also, the more abstract, the more difficult it is for the writer to keep focused on the words on the page. If I had to make a guess why, it is because the writer does not really have in their head a precise and controlled way to say what they want to say, so it cannot be translated onto the page, and because of the disconnect the action of their writing never really leaves their head.

But, also, the more abstract the text, the far more difficult it is to write the text. Every writer of theoretic texts will attest. But it is not just on the writer's side, the scam. In an highly abstract text, it is easy to write down such a fallacious statement as that in line and expect the reader to accept it: because with all the sloppy abstraction, the reader has, really, been given nothing by which to reject it.

But, more importantly, neither have they been given anything by which to accept it! And that is the key point. An overly abstract poem, in the end, offers nothing to the reader. The reader will glide through with little effort, little necessitated thought, in fact following a demand on the poem's part for little thought (because once you start to think, you realize what it is your reading), and in the end get very little in return for the attention spent. As well, as I argue, as a result of all the abstraction, a poem will then toward being wholly out of control. And you cannot justify the language of this poem with the claim of "style": it's just bad writing.

Our concluding results? Two ideas:

1. Over-abstraction is bad because it offers the reader very little on its own.
2. Over-abstraction is very bad because it creates, on its own, the opportunity and impetus for sloppy writing.

Kind of rather sounds stupid when you wind it down to two sentences. And yet the issue of abstraction is so very fundamental to poetics: not as rules of writing, but as rules of how words work during writing (especially when you are not even paying attention to the aural nature of language, or playing with poetic elements of structure and phrase, which is what raises the philosophical content of Pope into the accomplished). Even in non-fiction prose these come into play: the more abstract the subject, the more precision is demanded in aspect of the writing. Or the presentation quickly disintegrates.

 

•
I would think very arguable that the issue of abstraction and concreteness (and the heightened requirement of control with the abstract) is the first great hurdle a writer must overcome -- with any medium, but especially with poetry. If you look at amateur poetry on the web, you will see it is overwhelmingly abstract: even, curiously, when the subject of the poem sits in the concrete. To choose a banal example, an "I find you beautiful, let me say why" poem prompts direct approach to concrete example; yet the amateur poet will still set those examples in the abstract. You do not find "Your arms are the swaying reeds at the river's edge" but "You arms are like a reed," or "Your arms are lithe and flowing." Metaphors fall into similes, and similes disappear into basic adjectival description. This is part of why I think beginning poets should stay away from emotion-oriented and I-oriented projects, and move to narrative or situational or scene-oriented: to get their heads into the concrete and out of the abstract, and to get them to see what they can do with the concrete when they concentrate thereon.

 

•
As a last thought, it should be apparent by now that this a not very good poem. Indeed, it's flat bad. So I am brought to wonder why Verse Daily would decide to put it on their site? And it's not just Verse Daily: I've seen such poems presented on other such sites. As I've asked before: was there not something better? But, more to the point, if you are wanting to be a site whose purpose is to promote poetry, why would you post sub-par poetry? Is there a justifiable answer to that question? One that is not defeated by the simple counter: "Why not give the praise inherent to your "choosing" of a poem to poems that merit praise?"

"Dominion Over the Larger Animal" by Sophie Cabot Black -- Poetry Daily, 5/7/2013

from The Exchange
poem found here

 

First lines:
How many times I have provided
For your death; the apple turned one way

 

abstraction and pretty emptiness

— reformatted 9/30/15

Before I forget: that semi-colon in line two is incorrect. There is no reading that validates its very ungrammatical presence. It should be a colon, or a dash.

It is curious to me how, for as long as I can remember classes that even touched on poetry writing, or listening to people speaking about poetry writing, or reading about poetry writing, one of the primary rules has always been "abstraction = not good." It is, actually, one of the few rules of poetry one comes across that may be universal. And yet, so much contemporary poetry is little more than abstraction, or, in their concreteness, little more than "breath leaving," as this poem (inadvertantly) puts it.

When you read through this poem it may sound pretty, and may seem to be saying something emotionally deep or profound. But any actual effort or attention to the content of the poem reveals quite the opposite. Look at all the phrases that are either empty because of their abstraction or lack of concrete content:

How many times I have provided for your death; To hold your head as if this mattered, to say what I think essential into your ear, to watch the eye look everywhere to find what it does not know it looks for. To fasten you down in the one place where no one can say anything more, being nothing else but breath leaving, To believe I know what will happen next, as if I understood all I was capable of.

None of these phrases bring any degree of substantiality to the poem. The ideas in each of them are paper thin -- indeed, they read more like paraphrases rather than poetry. Or, they read like what might be jotted down on a draft page, with an arrow pointing to it and a comment "This is the idea: can you flush this out? make it real?"

And it is not like these lines are even building upon each other, with whatever construction materials they have to offer. At best, this poem can be described as a quick and shallow run through of some event, pointing toward some intended emotional effect (though, for myself, whatever I come up with I recognize I am the one in fact supplying the majority of the energy and ideation, not the poem). This poem, ironically, can very well be described as "nothing else than breath leaving."

Now, I dislike talking about "schools" of poetry in terms of their being "schools," mostly because the word is so inconsistently -- if not inaccurately -- used. One of its worst characteristics is that people think -- and students of literature are, unfortunately, taught -- that "schools" are momentary things. That they come up, the notion of poetics (or literature, or art) that they promulgate lives for that moment, and then both the school and the idea dies. Yes, "schools" can be loosely divided into two groups, and one of them very much is far more faddish that scholarly. But where that body of work seems to gain credibility if it can muster identitication as a school, the other body of "schools" suffers for the term. These are the group of people that are identified not by some passing fad in the arts, but in that they all are exploring some fundmental aspect of their art, concentrating their creative efforts upon that single aspect. They suffer in that people identify them as a school, and, then, when their time is past, so their ideas are discarded as well.

Perhaps the greatest example of this is Modernism. Modernism is spoke of today as though it was a passing moment in literature and the arts, and their ideas have now also become something of the past. Yet, when you really come to it, the central idea of Modernism -- whether in poetry, literature, art, or music -- was the exploration of the art object as and aesthetic object: which, when it comes to it, is the core idea of the arts.

(Hopefully, you ask here "but is that not always the idea of the arts? No, in fact. Primarily, the cultural idea of the arts is, actually, the faddish idea: art should be made according to the customs and rules of the art-world at that time. In fact, while Modernism is generally identified with the early 20th century, the Modernist project actually began much earlier, with the Romantics; and, much of the Modernist's theoretical efforts were aimed at pointing at the universality -- in time and place -- of their core beliefs. But I am digressing, so . . . .)

Objectivism also is such a school. (In fact, it is a branch of Modernism.) The objectivists, in essence, recognized the necessity for concreteness in poetry, and in their creative explorations took that necessity out of the loose concepts of a fundament and into the more directed ideas of a school (as it were) of poetics: putting in their explorations high emphasis upon the object, upon the poem as object, and upon the subject of the poem as object. But now that the era of the school of Objectivism is passed, that does not mean their ideas also slide away as some mere moment in poetry. The fact still remains: concreteness is a necessary element to the aesthetics of poetry, and that cannot be brushed aside without detriment. What has ended is only that broad moment of hyper-emphasis upon concreteness.

Of course, how that concreteness is brought to the fore is another issue altogether; and it is in that question and exploration that concreteness moves out from a general, fundamental concept and into the practice of poetry.

Unfortunately, contemporary poetry is riddled through with a plague of abstraction. (This is in no way the first moment of it since I began this project: it is merely the first time I directed my attentions to it.) Efforts toward eliminating this one bad habit alone would do much to improving the state of poetry in English today.

"Necessity Defense of Institutional Memory" by Camille Rankine -- Poetry Daily, 3/3/13

from Tin House (14.3)
poem found here
 

First lines:
So the free may remain free

     say the nightmare is
 

poetic structure, and poetic grammar

-- reformatted with some editing 1/26/2014
 

What I like, or find interesting, or say “good job!” to:

The use of spacing as a kind of punctuation.

They are well placed; there is not a one that is spurious or flippant in its use (which, as other poets seem to demonstrate, is harder than one might think). But they are not merely well placed: they are effectively used. Functioning even better than would commas, most likely because (1) the terseness of the statements (emphasized by the absence of a “that” after the “so”s), and (2) because of the visual lightness of the poem. This is related to:

The use of double line breaks as a kind of punctuation.

Before the indented lines, the double line break works in the manner of a comma, or a dash, or such. Coupled with the tab it creates a reading where it is not simply line, response, line, response; but, rather, isolates the lines to de-emphasize the line-response pairing, and give each part a bit more life of its own. (This also utilizes the lack of “that”s.) While the semantics (as guided by most of the pairings) is of line and response, the punctuating of the poem with space brings the lines more into juxtaposition rather than pairing. Note that this also means that it creates justapositions/pairings out of the indented lines and the non-indented lines that follow them, which might arguably be a weakness in the poem, disassembling, a bit, the ideational development. (I question whether that weakness could be cured, or if it is an understanding that can only be carried into the next poem-writing.)

The three-lined stanza (“so I may be replaced . . .”.

I tell you, I really really like how this stanza works. And you have to note how the effectiveness of this stanza is set up by the sparsity of the lines above it. The aural pauses created by the breaks and the gaps are perfect to the pacing of the poem, creating (in a musical sense) a kind of flourish, a momentary rise to fortissimo, though without making any more of the lines than they can bear.

The use . . . . no, not use, but presence of the colon.

It is the only formal punctuation in the poem. Many poets would leave it out, thinking that the rules of the poem are that there must be no punctuation. But the poem demands it, and you must listen to the poem. Why is it demanded? Because the colon is being used to announce a change in the reading of the poem: the lines are no longer soft line-response pairings. The colon announces the final statement, announces to reader to ignore what is the norm up to then, something different is happening. And, in that it is a colon, it naturally, in the normal nature of the colon, announces a concluding explanation or explication or expansion, often seen presented as a list, so you are ready to join together the final lines into a single statement. It is a small thing, but it is an excellent thing.

 

What I don’t like, or question, or say “what?!” to:

A weakness in the structure of the poem.

Because the line breaks create an equality between the margin-lined and indented lines, coupled with that the first pair does not readily cue to me the nature of line-response, I am choosing to read the poem as line-response. Which may not be the intent. Not every time I read the poem can I get the first pairing to work that way, and many times it wants to completely buck the idea of line-response. I think this is a weakness that should have been avoided at the beginning: if it is not meant to be line-response, then do not let it fall into such. And once a rhetoric is decided on, stick to it. Which leads to:

The lingering question of whether I am correct in reading it line-response.

Which should not exist. Once I figure out line-response (or whatever reading), the poem should be assuring me (even if subtly) that I am correct. The poem should, to wit, open up as a unified whole because of the decided approach. If it cannot do so, then either I have the wrong reading, or there is a problem with the poem. And, especially because of the first pairing, which I do not think works terribly well, I still, after however many readings, have doubts. Which leads to:

Abstractions.

The poem is too abstract. Let me restate that: because the poem is so abstract, there is only so far you can go with it. Depth, organic depth, the resonances of depth, are developed with ideation; and over-abstraction makes for shallow ideation. When it comes to it, the “preserved” in “so we are preserved” could mean many things, both positive and negative in nature. (The only way the poem is stabilized is by taking the most shallow, generic, conventional meaning of the word.) Walking away from the poem I find a very intriguing idea for the structuring of the poem, but one that was failed by the abstractions in this particular use of that formal idea. Abstractions are almost always laziness, and that is undeniable. Abstractions are but a loose paraphrasing of what should be being generated by fuller, more complex ideation. (Do not confuse sparsity with abstraction: the “so I may be replaced” lines are sparse, but far more concrete than the opening pairing.) Now, the challenge here: what would make this poem a true “Hey, wow” poem, would be if there could be such development without losing the general feel of the poem. Verbless phrases seems a potential path to explore.

And, for that thought, credit to the poem: something was attempted that speaks aesthetic creating, that creates and carries literary energy, that prompts in other writers the thought “that is an interesting idea . . . .”, whether or not this poem itself can be said to wholly succeed.

The title.

I hate it. I think she shot for something big and failed. Even at its most basic traits, I think it doesn’t fit the style of the poem. And, if that much explanation has to go into the title to make the poem work, it is a dead giveaway that either (1) the poem is too abstract and unanchored, and/or (2) the poem itself misses its intended mark, and the title is being put forward to aim the poem in the right direction (because it can't get there on its own). (I rather repeated myself, there, didn't I.)