Suzanne Batty, "Jesus on a Train from Mumbai"

unity and effect

 

"Jesus on a Train from Mumbai" is found here.

 

First lines:
I was dragged from the train by English tourists as the tall man
from Tamil Nadu called “coffee coffee” in his soft, sad voice.

 

Words coordinated in a poetic way create an effect when read. I am not talking about an emotional effect. Emotional effects are simple effects simply evoked by the narration itself. As the saying goes, a puppy can bite your ear and you will experience an emotion. We are talking about something a little more sophisticated than that. We are talking about an aesthetic effect. And not every combination of words creates an aesthetic effect. A brute narrative, a tale that offers merely what happened in the sequence that it happened, will offer no aesthetic value whatsoever. Thus: words coordinated in a poetic way. Which does not mean I am only talking about verse. And which also does not mean that all verse is poetic.

Take a look at these well-known lines by William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheel Barrow":

so much depends upon   a red wheel barrow   glazed with rain water   beside the white chickens

We begin with its physical characteristics. Four stanzas, each with two line, the first, three words, the second, one. Each stanza is its own thought, though the four combine to a more complex thought. As well, it is worth noticing that the two lines of each stanza break in between two words that go together: depends/upon, wheel/barrow, rain/water, white/chickens. It creates an aural effect because the verse is asking you to stop where you would not normally want to. The verse fights against a reading that would string the words together into a single sentence, even though it is a sentence. It fights against the words being read like:

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

"Congenital" by Amy McCann -- Verse Daily, March 12, 2014

from West Branch (Fall 2013)
poem found here
 

First lines:
Inside every heart
slumps the same
 

exploring structure

 

An interesting poem here, worth exploring.

And since I'm thinking structure, I have the sudden thought to stop and look at that sentence what I just typed. Not everyone may have thought about why that sentence uses a comma. The reason is because it is a list of adjectives: the poem is (1) here and (2) worth exploring. This may be pointing out the obvious but it is worth the pointing out so as to take it to the next step. A less sophisticated writer sees the need for the comma because of the rules of grammar -- or, more likely, an intuitive understanding that a comma is used in such sentences. But a more sophisticated writer does not look at the comma, but looks at the underlying relationship of words: it is a phrase that links two adjectival phrases to one noun. What is the difference? The first is technical mimicry; the second is seeing the medium.

But back to the poem.

Let's start with lines. The lines here read mostly as two beat accentual meter (two stresses per line, number of syllables irrelevant). That is, up until the last stanza which is three beats per line. Though, there are a couple of lines that do not quite work, as in the eighth stanza:

inflames the slack-winged birds, our half-mast tails slapping the base

The issue arises in that the natural reading of the second line is "BIRDS, our HALF-mast."

"Bad Sheep" by Hailey Leithauser -- Poetry Daily, 10/6/2013

from Swoop (Greywolf Press)
poem found here
 

first lines:
Midnight's merely blue,
but me, me, me, I'm
 

wording and context, and poetic gameplay

"Bad Sheep" is playing a game by running the poem through with synonyms and metaphors for the color black. Which is wholly a good thing. Games are good; it is through games that we organize our world and be creative. To be honest, I don't understand why some people hear the word "game" and immediately think pejorative intent: it is unfortunate for them that they have condemned the word, so.

I am sure that a large percentage of poets have played, whether successfully or not, or whether or not the results go any farther than their desk, synonym games like the one here. And, with reason. There is definitely something fun to it, even when the intent is merely to play around and not strive for quality. (It is, after all, very much is the same game as list-making.)

But when you are striving for something beyond goofing-with-words, you should realize that a game, in itself, is not enough to the success of a poem. You still have to create the poem. Always this means that the synonyms game has to be embedded within an ideational matrix, that which turns the game from a list to a poem. Here, you have the play with the idea of black sheep, and the simple idea of "search as you might, you will find me black through and through."

"We Come Elemental" by Tamiko Beyer -- Poetry Daily, 6/22/2013

from We Come Elemental
poem found here

 
first lines:

We step into the humid light. It sticks to our skin

 

the good of sound and form; the bad of ideation

Here's a poem with a scientific slant -- and you would be surprised how hard it is to write a scientifically oriented poem without it becoming aurally clumsy or turning into Tom Lehrer's Elements song. (Here's a good animated youtube spot, because it's worth the click. Notice the dischord in the opening measures, and how it forwarns the unavoidable silliness of the effort.)

There's some good stuff here with sound and form. Form wise, the lines are created out of the wording; the stanzas created with the lines (and all vice versa), so that the stanzas and lines each have purpose and self-resonance. And then there is the use of the indent to mark a thought within a thought (that is, stanzas 3 and 6 are ideas within the ideas of stanzas 2 and 7, and 4 and 5 are within 3 and 6) -- something I like, though I wonder if the indentations might be too large, visually.

With sound, this poem is a live with rhyme and aural repetition. Let me see if I can chart out the play here, including rhymes, slant rhymes, and repetitions (whether I like the repetition or not). I'm doing this half to see if it will be an effective way to display this. Because of the narrow margins of the blog, I am going to shrink the indents. I'll only do about the first half of the poem.

We step into humid light. It sticks to our skin and microbes gorge in greywater runoff pools.

"Never the Twain" by Partridge Boswell -- Verse Daily, 6/8/2013

from Some Far Country (Grolier Poetry Press)
poem found here
 

First lines:
Perfect pearl suspended
           in the crosshairs of my apotheosis
 

text and form: an exploration of organic vs. conventional nature

— reformatted, with some editing 8/2/2014
 

Short one today, one that follows out of the three on contemporary poetic convention just previous.

Simple question: Does the form of this poem (i.e., arbitrarily broken lines in three-line, progressively indented stanzas) add to the poem, subtract from it, or accomplish nothing?

What I'm hoping for you to do is look at the poem, look at the line breaks, look at the lines, and decide if this form succeeds, or if this poem is a text forced into a structure that really doesn't fit the words. Do the words and form find organic unity, or is the structure merely a result of following contemporary poetic convention? You must notice also that there is almost no punctuation in the poem except for the period at the end. Yet both "Perfect" at the start and "You'll" near the bottom are capitalized; and "Memphis," near the middle, being at the start of a line, seems to signal a third place where a 'sentence' starts.

To get you going, let me point out a couple of moments in the poem that are problematic. (I say "problematic" in the sense that, if given the poem to edit, I would ask for justifications for these moments.) First, here:

your finger on something irresistible                         & not to be trusted in his johnnyroy elvisjerrylee swagger & Lansky's

Notice how that single word — "johnnyroyelvisjerrylee" — has been broken in two. Is there a reason why that had to happen?

Earlier:

not with the sun there             glaring you have to be-                         have under winged

My want here from Boswell would be: justify the hyphenated word when (1) there's no apparent restrictions on lines to force it, and (2) it leaves me constantly reading the next line as "hav" (as in "I have a box") not "heyv" (to use Dictionary.com's phonetic spellings). There's a second hyphenated word later, with "juxta-posed."

Another:

babelsong our safe house                         roof now googlable from space— remember that place? frozen

My issue: does not the line ending eliminate the need for the em-dash? (This one is half about form and half about punctuation, but the two are interrelated.)

Finally:

funambulist arc across             summer's final panel                         the only clue to loss her

Here, I wonder if the form is getting in the way of the reading of the last line in the stanza, the cluster of words on the line do not seem to gel, and I want to misread "loss" as "lose," especially in that "lose" rhymes with "clue."

As I said: they are problematic, and if put in a questioning duty I would ask for answers. But I put them here not as spot things to question, but as issues to be used to develop the question that involves the whole poem: does the form work for or against the poem? Is the form in natural engagement with the words of the poem, or are the words forced into an arbitrary structure? Or, what degree to either side?

 
•

Let me throw in one more question on form: do you find those indents to be workable, or too large?

 
•

Ok, one spot I absolutely do not like, just to bring it up. But I'll ask it as a question: Does the second line really work? Is this a moment of apotheosis? Does the moon being in the "crosshairs of my apotheosis" make sense in the context of the poem? Or is this just a pretty thing that you're not supposed to actually think about?

(Can something be "suspended in the crosshairs"? Or is that a problem created by the absense of punctuation, in that "suspended, in the crosshairs" makes more sense?)

By happenstance, the day after writing this, I came upon this usage of the word apotheosis while reading Moby Dick, in the paragraph closing the brief chapter on — the "six-inch grave" of — the helmsman Bulkington. For the coincidence, I put it here. But also to ask a question: should it be that some words can only be used in a context that itself speaks the word? and without that context, can the word only suffer bathetically?

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better it is to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

(Chapter 23, pages 97-8 in the 1967 Norton edition.) —- added 6/9/2013

"Spook House" by Benjamin Myers -- Verse Daily, 5/12/2013

from: Lapse Americana
poem found here

 
first lines:
The first. I heard of Dante
was at the county fair when I was ten,
(Obviously, Verse Daily has shown us again their love for laxity.)

 

ideation, depth, and bombs

-- text added, 5/16/2013
-- reformatted to current style, and italicized text added up front, 9/23/13

---

Note: this post, and the comments that follow it, spawned a full-length essay on poetry culture posted to this blog: "#Poppoetry: The Unsurprising Culture of Poetry in the U.S." The essay can also be found on my website, here.

---

 

Another poem with a emotion bomb, here. It's probably obvious of what I am speaking: the single-lined, fifth stanza, "But there wasn't a war then." Though, unlike your most blatant bombs this bomb does have some ideational play within the rest of the poem. I still identify it as a bomb, however, because of the structure of the poem.

I'll start on why it is not a pure bomb (a line that has no or trivial ideational unity with the rest of the poem): the obvious presence of death throughout the poem: there is Dante's Inferno; there are the cars like gravestones in the sixth stanza; there is the suicide in the fifth; there is the drought and its dead grass; and there is the executioner; and, finally, the final lines:

as we watched our friends before us disappear around a dark curve.

So there is a fudge swirl of death throughout the poem. But, there is still that the war line is one line, a lone-lined stanza, sitting in the middle of the poem all by itself, very much heavily accentuated by the structure. So let's explore:

First, take out the line. Does the poem significantly change outside of giving it an historical moment? In all the references to death, there is only one that can be said to engage a pre-war historical moment: that of the final image of the disappearing cars in the dark of the ride the Inferno. As such, the entirety of the "war" energies lies only in those two moments. Because of that, such things as the suicide moment lose their potency.[FN] Indeed, if you keep the war idea fully in mind while re-reading, the suicide moment feels quite out of place, as though the poem has a split identity: is it a war poem? or is it a mild suicide poem? (I don't think it can tell.)

----------------------------- [FN] Indeed, if you take out the war line, is there anything else in the poem that engages the suicide moment? Is there anything about the drought that moves beyond basic scene setting? One could say the Inferno, but then really the drought just becomes a hell-like scene-setting: but still nothing more than scene-setting, since the Inferno idea is never taken anywhere. -----------------------------

Or is it that the poem is only supposed to be a poem generally about death? and all the death ideas are supposed to be equal in power? Which is a possibility, but it fails against the fact that the structural isolating of the war line gives it so much power that it nigh demands to be the ideational locus of the poem. (And I do see the structure of the poem as stating that everything is meant to flow out of and into the war line.)

But then there is the problem with the reference to the Inferno. There is the bookended references of the fair ride, and then at the end there is the reference to the multiple translations on the speaker's shelf and desk. That reference, actually, is never flushed out. In fact, it is so thin it makes me wonder if Myers has even read the Inferno, or, if he did, whether he understood what it was. Because, in truth, nothing in this poem flows out of the nature and ideas of Inferno. In fact, when I look at the end of the first stanza:

and booths with stacks of old-fashioned milk bottles: two dollars for three throws and you could win a mirror painted with the rebel flag or with a half-naked lady, or with a naked lady half-wrapped in the rebel flag. [. . .]

I am rather taken with how much energy and time that one little moment gets. It's not like it goes anywhere: what does a naked woman and a rebel flag have to do with war? Or death? But that one scene gets more energy even than the Infernos owned by the speaker. In fact, it gets far more effort and energy than the contents of Dante's Inferno: and you would think that if the poem intentionally moves to emphasizing that since the time of the primary scene the speaker has now collected multiple translations of the work, then the text of the Inferno would actually have influence on the poem.[FN]

----------------------------- [FN] And, in truth, the closing idea of the cars going into the dark of the ride -- in its metaphoric energies of death -- really could not be said to exist at all within the Inferno. -----------------------------

Finally, it should be noted that there is a problem with the line that exacerbates the bomb aspect. A conjuctive "but" works in the idea of "X, but Y." So here, Y is "there wasn't a war then." What is the X? What in the previous lines sets up a "but"? With what can the "war" idea interact with through a "but"? In fact, the immediately preceding stanza is the suicide and drought. So we have

suicide and drought . . . . . . BUT . . . . . there wasn't a war yet

That is not a negative, but a positive: there was suicide and drought, yes; but at least there wasn't the war. Not exactly the idea that is meant to be carried forward into the final scene. (Or into a book on a desk.) And however I try, I cannot get the "but" to work any other way.

Let's bring it together. Hopefully by now you can see that while there is effort within the poem to have ideas flow into and out of the "war" idea, the poem itself betrays and defeats that effort in a number of ways. As such, the war line becomes a bomb: the single line's ideational and emotional energy works in an attempt to make up for the poem's poetic and ideational failures. (And if the poem was not meant to flow through that one line, the structure of the poem brings that in turn to failure.)

The curious thing is what if the war line were taken out? Let me refer you to another poem: James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," which can be found here.[FN] It is a short little poem flooded to the fill with the ideas of ego and humility, in both their positive and negative aspects. And what is present in "Spook House" that is absent in "Autumn Begins"? The overt, anchoring statement. "Autumn Begins" is a powerhouse of ideational energy: precisely because it avoids explicative statements, and it weaves together, quite delicately, the ideas that are presented. Yes, it can be said that the "All the proud fathers" equates, in a way, to the war line in "Spook House." But the line is not isolated by the poem's structure (in fact, it is immediately brought into balance with the two following lines), and the line does not attempt to become a focus of the poem. The fathers, the wives, and the sons all play equal ideational roles; and, they all serve the ultimate goal of the unified poem.

----------------------------- [FN] I am going to here talk about "Autum Begins" through an assumed stance of it being a perfect poem. I leave it to you to question just how effective is the ideation of "Autumn Begins." Though, you have to admit, it is a damn good poem. -----------------------------

"Autumn Begins" is a great poem to intruduce the idea of depth. Depth in common parlance -- and by common I include MFA/workshop parlance -- refers to some emotional poingancy, or some socio-political statement, or some form a moral that lies beneath a text. In reality, at best, that nature of "depth" never achieves more than a second level signification (what Barthes talks about in Mythologies), or a pallid second level metaphoricity, or sentimental emotionalism. True depth, organic depth, aesthetic depth, is a depth that is best described as that ideational/emotional field created by the words of poem (or whatever work), that exists as an ideational field that does not lie in the surface of the words themselves.

And I am dissatisfied with that statement, but it will have to do for now. It's an idea difficult to paraphrase or make compact. But imagine if you will two forms of text, one each for the two modes of being/thinking/language, the aesthetic and the nomic. The latter functions as a plane: everything operates on the surface; and, if there is depth, that depth is merely a second plane lying on the first. The aesthetic, however, is better pictures as a sphere of finite surface area (the actual physical words on the page) with infinite radius (the ideational field of play created out of those words). Critical to this geometric metaphor is recognizing that the surface of a sphere has zero depth; and that the depth is not visible from above the surface.

Again, not really going very far right now, but I'm only beginning my presentation of this idea. So it is enough for now.

"Risk Management Memo: Small Enterprise" by Mary Biddinger -- Verse Daily, 5/9/2013

from Gulf Coast
poem found here

 

First lines:
You wanted to open a café called
Rimbaud’s Helicopter. I just kept telling

 

clothesline poetry and unity (with a bit about Surrealism)

— reformatted 9/30/15

This is a good example of a certain kind of poetry, what I have called and what I have heard called "clothesline poems": called such in that it is, essentially a list of phrases or sentences clipped to a clothesline. (Do not expect to find that word in any poetry dictionary or glossary: the term is wholly conversational.) And, as far as these kinds of poems go, it is cleanly written (except for the problem with the "Our entire city" line, which is either suddenly surreal or has an issue with its construction; and then the minor problem with the italicized "look loveable" – which I don't think works as well as it could as internal dialogue what with the "to.")

I would very much like to hear Ms. Biddinger defend this poem. In fact, this poem would make a launching point for a wonderful discussion on poetics and aesthetics, either in printed word or in person (though, if in person I believe it would take some mad projection screen skills).

This would be my framing question for such a debate: In the general, what makes this poem of merit? In the more specific, how does this poem function, and does it at all rise above the poetic level of somewhat arbitrary sentences strung along a clothesline?

So let's take a look. Structurally, the lines are arbitrary as regards the words (they are quite obviously broken for their length, and that alone), and the stanzas are also an arbitrary application of three line stanzas. (It is curious to me how the final line came in within tolerations.) The content of the poem is entirely made of grammatically normal sentences, at times related to each other in idea.

My critique of this poem is that it goes nowhere fast. There is no development of any nature – ideational, aural, structural, whatever. Reading it is like reading a laundry list, or like listening to my daughter tell me about her magazine cut-out, Christmas list: "I want this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this." There is no development; no one sentence has any more or less importance than any other sentence; and all the sentences pretty much have only one type of importance: "I exist." As such, by the time I get to the fifth stanza (and rarely with these poems do I get farther than about 15 lines) I don't care anymore. Why should I care when every burgeoning moment of development is thwarted, almost at its inception, by a subject change?

I am exaggerating a touch, so let's pause and actually look. The poem can actually be broken, fairly easily, into its constituent ideas. (I put it back into sentences, since the lines are purposeless. I number them for reference.)

1. You wanted to open a café called Rimbaud’s Helicopter.
2. I just kept telling myself to look loveable.
3. We watched Apocalypse Now in two sleeping bags zipped together incorrectly.
4. I confessed how I was making a bejeweled saddle for a racehorse I would never own. His name would be Look Loveable. He would think about killing all the other jockeys because I rode him so right.
5. And this was the only true benefit of being small.
6. In camp they buried me first, then poured the curdled cider into my hair. My mother joined in, but only in my imagination.
7. You wanted to give me an outrageous hickey and to drown yourself before turning twenty.
8. All my friends knew better than to try swimming in hayfields.
9. I met you at the gun house.
10. Somebody had put new curtains up, but nothing could take away the head-marks on the walls.
11. Our entire city became a place that turned its back on coffee, even marzipan ducklings.
12. There’s a reason everyone loves the same things. That reason will never be you.

(Since the last thing is the most recent, I want to here quickly point hout how the end lines of the poem an emotion bomb: which is usually an attempt to bring something emotionally profound (that said tongue-in-cheek) to an otherwise blasé poem. It's not a huge bomb, as far as bombs go; but the character of the lines is somewhat different than that of those preceding it.)

I split #5 from #4 even though it flows out of #4, because there is in #5 a strong sense of stand-alone-ness. (That is, while it flows out of #4, it tries to declares a new idea.) But, I would equally accept having it as part of #4. Similarly with #9 and #10, except that I think the tie between them is much thinner, and would argue against bringing them together. Similarly again, my argument with #4 and #5 could be used to separate #12 into two statements: but to me the energies speak more to their needing to be together.

Now, it is easy to come to the idea that the first three are tied together by setting, one established in #3. In fact, it could be argued that the whole of the poem occurs in the setting. Except for three points:

1. The sentence of #3 is in the same past time – and same past moment – as every other sentence. Verb-wise, time-wise, all the sentences are equal, and as such there is no real justification in picking out #3 as that establishing the narrative setting.
2. The same argument to have #3 be setting can be used to have #9 be setting. Since both are equal, and you can't have both, then are struck as scene setting moments.
3. Even if you do accept #3's setting as the establishing of a narrative scene, it is irrelevant to the reading of the poem: that scene does not engage with any other element in the poem to generate new ideational energies. You might as well have written "in the grotto of the centaur Charon" as a epigram under the title to set the scene: it would still be irrelevant to the ideation of any of the lines. Scene only functions as ideational energies with the other elements of the text feed and feed from those energies. But, here, there is no such energy created.

So there is no narrative flow connecting the sentences, and the ideational connectivity exists only in brief spurts. #11, to chose an easy one, can not be said to bring any development to #1-10. There is an idea there, but that idea is lost in the chaos. Perhaps a better phrase is: that idea falls limp among the clutter. There is no point to any sentence except to read it, be done with it, and move on to the next sentence.

So the, as regards the sentences, I must ask, is there really anything present poetics-wise other than the oddity of the words, the pseudo-surrealist play. (I say pseudo- there not in any negative sense.) For example, #three is a simple sentence – "We watched Apocalypse Now in two sleeping bags zipped together." – given a twist with "incorrectly." But that twist has no energetic play outside the moment of the singular sentence. So what poetic energies created by the twist, ends as soon as you get to the period.

Now, Surrealism is very much to the point her. And anyone who at all has studied poetry should be familiar with the experiments of Surrealism, experiments that would result in poetry with disjunctive lines, like these, the opening lines from Breton's "Blotter of Ash":

The birds will be bored If I'd forgotten something Ring the bell of those last schooldays in the sea What we'll call the pensive borage

The success of the Surrealist experiments is that they are demonstration of how abutting (nearly) any two ideas will create new energies that exist in neither of the ideas independently. (To give but two examples of how this idea is not "Surrealist" specifically, but more accurately that fundamental aspect of the aesthetic upon which Surrealism focused, this is the same idea behind EIsenstein's techniques in film, and the same idea that played (if in smaller degree) in Symbolist painting in the 19th century.) Such experiments were (and are) interesting – indeed, important – techniques, methods, and explorations within the worlds of the aesthetic and the poetic. But, that does not mean that these methods result in successful poetry. In fact, the argument over whether such poems were successful poems or merely demonstrations of technique was part of the split between Breton and Batailles: Batailles being the one that argued that a successful aesthetic object still required a sense of unity, still required that sense of the creator creating a microcosmos. (These are his ideas, but not his words). And, later in life, Breton would come around to accept such.

This is the idea of unity that gives success to what is, perhaps, Breton's most well-known poem: "Free Union."[FN] Yes, "Free Union" is a list poem, but it has two elements that pulls it out of a mere list of elements and into a unified, organic (if surrealistic surrealistic) poem: (1) it is about a single woman; and (2) every line conveys an aspect of the nature of the speaker's desire for that woman. While the descriptive element of the specific lines may seem to be random, they come together in that they are not, in the end, a list of metaphors for body parts, but in that they are about about the experience of the beauty of a particular female body, spoken through desire, if not also lust.

–––––––––––––––– [FN] I prefer the Zavatsky/Bogow translation, which begins "My woman with the forest-fire hair" – not that I am saying it is more representative a translation, rather that I think the result is aesthetically better. The translation is found the collection Earthlight, wholly translated by Zavatsky and Bogow. To note, some may argue it is really about a specific woman's body, and not about the actual woman as a whole being. I think that artificially shrinks the reading of the poem and artificially categorizes and restricts the nature of the idea of desire that energizes the poem. But that's a different discussion. ––––––––––––––––

Now, does "Risk Management," here, offer such a union? Or does it fail to escape the status of mere list? That is my primary question. And, my answer, is that it does not. Yes, these poems carry the same curiousness and interest as do the Surrealist experiments; but it is not a successful poem. In fact, it might as well be broken up in into twelve separate poems, as I have done above; even if under one grouping title. (But, then, that would make arbitrary line breaks and three line stanzas rather difficult, no?)

And this point would be where, in the imagined debate, I would turn to the other party.

Though, it should be recognized, there is a second question, which should not be confused with the above, through which one can find a different path to discussion. That is, is there some other way that this poem unifies and I am missing it? Or, what I would argue in response, is the poet saying that this form in itself is justification for the poem? To which I would respond: yes, it is justification for the poem. But, that is not saying terribly much. Which is what Batailles would have said to Breton: yes, surrealist experiments make for at times interesting results, and there is much to be learned about ideation and metaphoricity through those experiments, and you can justify the results as poems because what they demonstrate. But as poems, as created objects, they are in the end rather unsophisticated things, perhaps with a lot of bluster but not really going anywhere, because they lack the over all unity of being a thing created, of being a thing calculated.

"Here Be Monsters" by Katherine Coles -- Verse Daily, 5/3/2013

from The Earth Is Not Flat
poem found here

 

First lines:
We could fall off one
Edge or another. Water

 

playing with wording and ideation

— reformatted 9/30/15

I am glad this one showed up because I was in the mood for something like this. Let's just explore wording: both to query the wording given, and to play around with alternatives.

Now, addressing the poem as a whole I should say I don't think it works. I don't think the two primary ideas are successfully brought together into organic unity: those ideas being the opening idea of a kind of mythical, mappa mundi-type edge of the world, and that of "As soon as we arrive at any point / We're headed out the other side." (On their face they are about opposite to each other.) And even on the smaller scale, thought by thought, the poem doesn't meld. "unknown/ But fully imagined" never gels with "headed out to the other side": there is nothing between mediating the two ideas. Ideationally, I find the poem wholly out of control.

For example, in the first lines the poem says "we could." It is establishing a situation. It is scene-setting. And yet, can you follow the poem through to "at any point / We're headed out the other side" without conveniently forgetting that set scene? The poem begins by asserting the idea of "there is no beyond," but ends with the conclusion of there is always a beyond. Why begin, so assertively, with an "edge of the world" idea if you are going to move to its exact opposite: a world that never ends? The one does not inform the other the way it is presented.

My guess is really the intent was only to bring in the idea of the terra incognita, of "beyond here, we don't know," and the "edge of the world" slipped in. But even with the terra incognita idea it rather falls to the floor, mostly unrealized, by two-thirds through the poem. Which is too bad, because the idea of turning endless same-ness into a land of imagined monsters is an interesting idea.

And how does "Where surface will not hold / We must shatter" fit into anything that precedes it? What is so important in a surface that will not hold? I am guessing that what is being aimed at is where the unknown will not hold then the unknown must be shattered: except that still really has no union with the rest of the poem, especially a poem that seems to try to turn the unknown into an endless sameness: in such a realm there is nothing to shatter.

I might make more jots to that end here and there; but, I really want to play a little with words, so:

We could fall off one / Edge or another: Note that there is a difference between "one edge or another" and "one edge or the other": the latter only has two edges, which means the former has multiple edges. I am not sure how that idea of multiple edges fits in the poem. And then water "roils . . . as if it would throw itself over": if that means "over the edge" -- which, in context, it does seem to so -- then you have only one edge. She how clashes in ideas are being established?

Now, the idea comes to me "throw itself over" could be meant to mean something in the sense of "flipping itself over" -- which might be a little easier to make fit in context in that it is simply increasing the energies of "roil." But, the whole of those energies have no use in the rest of the poem. Especially, when, at the end, the poem is describing a sea of ice, and endless sameness. No roiling there. In fact, it's (again) the opposite: it is a world that is trying "to hold."

and glacier / Meets sea by pushing into / Erosion's demand and response.: I have absolutely no idea what that is supposed to mean, or even where that is trying to go. How did we get from a roiling sea to glaciatic erosion? I can come up with erosion's demand: which would be "erosion." But what is erosion's response?

Fissure / Could swallow a body whole / Then close on itself, sucking its tongue: See the failure to meld? We've moved from the edge of the world, to the sea (which could maybe be at the end of the world but is not described as such, and with "as if" pretty much pulls wholly away therefrom), to a glacier (very much not the edge of the world), and then to a fissure: which is off the sea, on land (so obviouslly we were not at the edge of the world, and is described as a whole, not just an edge, so there's both sides, and it's no longer the end of the world but merely a crack. And the sea's no where to be found.

But, let's play:

Fissures -- they'll swallow a body whole.

That sounds like a "got milk" commercial.

A fissure will swallow you whole, Suck you down and close tight. Fissures like to swallow you And suck upon your passing taste.

Eh. You know, I have a hard time doing something with "close in on itself" because it seems only to repeat "swallow." (After all, the difference between falling into something and being swallowed by something is the latter carries the sense of that something closing upon you.) And I have no idea what to do with "sucking it's tongue." I guess that's better than "with a num-num-num," but that's about it.

Feel / The earth's end old maps . . . . : This is my favorite part. There are fun words and ideas to play with here, but the execution is not that great. In part, it's contextual. For one thing, "earth" is not capitalized, so it's the end of the land -- which is a problem since we started off at sea. Now, knowing how sloppy Verse Daily is, it could very well be it was supposed to be "Earth." But even then, "tooth and claw" puts us back on land.

Now, perhaps someone by now is saying "it's on a boat approaching the land": which is probably what is meant. Except that that idea is not continuous in the poem. That idea is an "oooohhhh, I get what you were trying to do" idea. But, still, to the words:

[. . .] Feel The earth's end old maps Elaborate with what's unknown But fully imagined, voracious Tooth and claw White to the bone.

I see nothing gained in "feel." (Everything it has to offer already exists in that the lines are written and meant to be read.)

The Earth's end. Old maps elaborate with What's unknown and fully imagined --        The voracious,        The tooth, the claw, and white bones. Old maps elaborate at the Earth's end With the imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

("white, white" because it's snow-world; and if we move the "end" down, the lines are smoother)

Old maps elaborate at the Earth's End with the imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

(let's complete the tercet:)

Old maps elaborate at the Earth's End with the weirdly imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

(Yes, obviously it's not free verse anymore. But (1) you can have metered verse in the middle of free verse (if you don't know that, you need to seriously expand your reading); (2) why pass up on something aurally lovely when the opportunity arises?; and (3) it's far more interesting than prose-with-line breaks. Just answer me: how is it that all these poets out there are writing lines of poetry, yet so very few of them are writing lines? Yes, this poem uses line breaks a touch as grammar; but that's it. And that's not very much. Especially when you consider all that was missed out on.)

Just beyond the horizon . . . .: Another mess. The words just before are solid objects (tooth, claw, bone), so when the poem says "right over / There" the ideation is that of look at a thing right over there. (Well, duh.) Yet, immediately after, the entire idea shifts from the thing that is over there to "trouble trying to picture." Put it in a sentence:

Just beyond the horizon, right over there, is the trouble trying to picture our progress straight and flat.

See how the sentence changes what it's about half way through? how "over there is the trouble" is a thing that is over there, but "the trouble trying" is an abstract concept of difficulty that occurs in a person's head? and how, because of it, the sentence -- and the lines in the poem -- makes no sense whatsoever?

Just beyond the horizon, right over there, is what causes the trouble with our trying to picture our progress straight and flat.

That makes much more sense. It still doesn't flow out of what preceded it, though. The sentence before was about the idea of a very tangible if very unknown world before them. Now, all of a sudden, the entire poem jumps tracks and tries to be about that it is difficult to picture "progress straight and flat." What at all does that have to do with "tooth and claw"? Not good. Not good at all. And, then, "is what causes the trouble with our trying to picture" is not exactly elevated language. So instead we have in our poem something more "poetic" that doesn't make much sense. No wonder the poem's a mess.

I also want to point out the issue with the missing comma after "There." The poem as a whole tries to establish a grammar where line ends can suffice as a comma (as with "At the wave's top[,] / The body hangs weightless"). Which is wholly legitimate. But you have to nail it: both in adhering to it, and in creating the energies at the line breaks that reinforce the usage. (On rereading, the reader should be naturally hearing those line breaks-as-commas.) Unfortunately, there are a couple places in this poem where the grammar weakens the system, as with the missing comma here. And the one missing in "It runs out[,] the body after all." And there is a general weakness in that the poem gives off the quality that the line breaks were mostly arbitrary, anyway, so let's continue.

"Right over there" sucks, so I'm killing it:

Not before the horizon, or at the horizon, But beyond it -- There lies the trouble Of picturing progress straight and flat.

Let's bring in an idea from the end of the poem:

Up to the horizon, difficulty        In the ice that strives to hold. Beyond, trouble        In picturing progress straight and flat.

Hopefully you see here yet another ideational clash: if, at the end of the poem, there's ice before them that they are breaking through, how is it difficult to imagine flat beyond the horizon? I could continue, but I think you get the point. The far-too-looseness of the poem's ideas gives even discussing it the risk of falling into absurdity. And the 'moral' at the last third of the poem does little help to resolve any of it. "As soon as we arrive at any point / We're headed out the other side." How is that not a simple description of movement? It's rather like a Dummies verson of one of Zeno's koans: "as soon as you get there, you're leaving." (The opposite of "wherever you go, there you are"?)

And, really, that is my point here. That you are able to not be tricked by the assumption "this is a published, therefore it is good," and are able to see for yourself what is going on in the poem. Which is, here, a lot of chaos. Because, believe me, when, say, Eliot published The Waste Land, he very much was hoping you would see for yoursel, and experience for yourself his efforts.

Anyway, really, I mostly wanted to play with the "Earth's edge" lines. They're the best bit this lump of strings has to offer.

"Learning to Live With Stone" by Kelly Cherry -- Poetry Daily, 4/9/13

from The Life and Death of Poetry
poem found here

 
first lines:

A shore of washed stones A sky the color of stone

 

poetic unity, and internal contradiction

 
trivial edits, and reformatting to the newer style: 9/9/13

Look at line 5, which says, in this little poem's most deeply profound voice, "There is nothing." And yet, the sentence can't even make it to its period without giving you things that are most definitely there, including a very active and (what with the oppositional nouns being "sea" and "land") very large something. Not at all a nothing; not at all something that you would miss if you weren't really looking. And, if you have read more than 100 poems in your life, a something that is usually brought up so as to intimate very much a something (if intimate it softly), as with Arnold's quiet irony:

Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back,

And then, there it is again in lines 9-10: "There is nothing / Here between us but stone." I am still perplexed: the poem yet insists there is nothing there -- even though the opposite was just stated. When I can't bring the conflict into agreement, I come to the only conclusion: the poem is at odds with itself. 

Now, line 10's "stone" does bring us back up to lines 1-4, where there is stone all over the place, every noun associated with stone: stone sky, stone water, stone land, stone face and heart. But are any of those things that one would think of as being "between"? Definitely not sky, water, or land. Nor face, nor heart, when it comes to it, unless in some way one of the people of the "us" is holding the stony heart or face between them. But that idea is nowhere to be found in the poem, so the poem is, again, at odds with itself.

Then the last four lines brings us back to stone. So, in the end, you have a poem with this structure:
              lines 1-4: stone
              lines 6-8: not at all stone
              lines 10-14: stone

And what with the rain and the sea's "taking back," it's not only not stone, but the very opposite of stone.

So, let's ask the question: How do the two "there is nothing here" phrases work within the poem?

First, they do not work "with" the central part. They are directly at odds with the central part. So, within the idea of the unified poem, they are standing in no small part as correctives to the central part:
              stone
              stone
              stone
              no matter what you read there is only stone
              NOT stone!
              NOT stone!
              most absolutely NOT stone!
              despite what you just read, THERE IS ONLY STONE
              stone
              stone
              stone
Doesn't quite work, does it.

In fact, the purpose of the "nothing" lines is to assert an idea that the rest of the poem fails to establish. The ideas in the final lines (bed, step, carve) work only to their intended end if the "nothing" idea is previously established. And, since the previous series of lines, lines going stone, stone, stone, not-stone, not-stone, not-stone are unable to pull of the feat, the poem has to revert to overt statement, telling the reader, as though they were two crib notes inserted into the poem, what the reader is supposed to be getting out of the poem. So, in essence, the full weight of the poem is carried in two lines, lines which are overt statements of meaning, lines which are meant to function despite the rest of the poem. In fact, lines which do not even need the rest of the poem to function.

Makes for a mostly empty poem. In fact, let's edit:

There is nothing here between us but stone. Carve.

That's a nifty idea for a poem there. 

Take a look at H.D.'s "Oread," another shoreline poem with an "us" (though optimistic in tenor):

Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines.  Splash your great pines  On our rocks.  Hurl your green over us—  Cover us with your pools of fir.

Not a single abstract statement. And, specifically, successful because it throws, overtly, all the work of ideation onto the image-words in the lines. Yes, the speaker is using verbs to create the idea, but the verbs themselves are also part of the scene, inherent to the over-arching idea of the sea. Everything comes out of the sea; nothing is abstractly overlaid upon it. 

(I know you want to say "show don't tell" here, but don't. Yes, it does go to the point, but that phrase is really a false crutch for writers. How it is used in normal creative writing conversation is, in truth, counter to the idea of the aesthetic. So I'll stay away from it for now, a least until I find fruitful means to its explanation.)

Another aesthetic example, should you want something longer, is William Carlos Williams' "By the Road to the Contagious Hospital" (here). Though statements there occasionally become abstract (as with "One by one objects are defined"), they serve to feed the development of metaphoricity, not to define it. These poems (H.D.'s and Williams') are unified. Everything in the poems work to the experiential end of the poem in concert with everything else in the poem; and nothing ever has to stand out and give definition to the reader.

"What Befalls You" by Ethel Rackin -- Verse Daily, 4/4/13

from The Forever Notes
poem found here
 

First lines:
I could no longer stand the trees
when a stand of them began to blossom.
 

poetic structure

— reformatted Mar. 8, 2015
 

There is something very worth pointing out in this poem. Notice the apparent contradiction that arises in line 3: The first two lines are about trees beginning to blossom. Not a summer image. And yet line 3 states "summer."

But is this a contradiction? Yes, but only up until line 5, and "fall." At that point, the words of the poem reveal an overarching structure. As I read it:
        lines 1-2 = Spring
        lines 3-4 = Summer
        line 5 = Fall
        lines 6-7 = Winter
And, then, the last two lines, which are the end of the year, a kind of summing statement. (I believe it can also be read in a sense that lines 5-7 are Fall, and 8-9 are Winter & the end of the year combined. This idea and the previous rather blur together; I don't think the poem requires fixing on either.)

What is worth pointing out is that there is no need for the word "Spring" in the poem. Just as there is no need for the word "Winter." In truth, if Ms. Rackin did not wish it, she could have also left out "Fall" and "Summer." All that was need, all that is ever needed, is (1) wording enough to speak to the reader the structure of the poem; and (2) for the poem to actually have and support that worded structure. You do not need to spell things out for your reader: the 'things' need only be present ideationally. In fact, the more you spell it out, the 'easier,' and, usually, the less interesting, the poem gets. Generating ideas is far more interesting, far more sophisticated, and far more enjoyable, than having the ideas simply laid out before you.

The second point there sounds rather obvious, but it is not. I have seen plenty of poems that establish a structure with the ideas generated, but fail to follow that ideational structure with the actual structure of the poem. (Or vice versa.) It is not enough to say "Well, the ideas establish the structure, so you are supposed to overlay that structure on the poem." In such a case the poem is at odds with itself. Not a good thing: it is clumsiness, a failure to pay attention, a failure to generate poetic unity. It results only in a lesser poem. The ideas and the structure must work together. (And, need I say, it is always best when they are both working.)

 
•

To be honest, for all the above, I don't think the poem succeeds wholly. It's a little loose (and occasionally trite) in the words chosen, by my reading. For example, it took a number of readings for me to realize that the first line was not about the moment the trees blossomed (which is the natural reading of the sentence), but meant to say:
       I could no longer stand the trees;
       then, a stand of them began to blossom.

"A Road in the Sky" by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers -- Verse Daily, 3/23/13

from Chord Box (University of Arkansas Press)
poem found here
 

First lines:
It wouldn't be held—
this notion, slipknot
 

on multiple readings, and entrances into poems

— modified 3/26/13
— reformatted with minor editing 4/23/14
— this post has been added to the "Best of the PDC" page on my Hatter's Cabinet site.  

First time I read this poem, my response was PPPPttt. I didn't know what to do with "slipknot spring." And the ending seemed trite sexuality. Second time, PPPPttt again. Perhaps it was because I did not find the day's Poetry Daily offering much to consider, and it had tainted my palette. But instinct said give it another go: "O North / I've never understood" gave me a ring, and pulled me back in for one more go.

And happy therefore, too. For then I saw, clearly, "or lace that ripped / if spoken too soon." And the whole poem came alive.

(OK. Except for "slipknot spring," which I still do not know what to do with; and because of it the lines up to the period.)

It's a wonderful idea in that line, and a nice delivery thereof : what with the three s-sounds, the iambic rhythm, the length of "too soo" to close it off — its all good. But why did that line — of all the lines — open up the poem? It's not exactly a key line ideationally (though, it is very much an important part of the microcosmos of the poem). Somehow, it was my invitation in, my entrance into the workings of the poem.

I have often said that people who do not like or understand poetry most likely have never found an entrance into poetry. And, I tell you, what they teach in high school is usually a piss poor choice for developing appreciation of poetry — no entrance material, only the stuff you are "supposed to be familiar with." Why the hell would you teach E.E. Cummings in high school, especially when you are teaching his more difficult, experimental poems. Teach his earlier stuff — I've had great success opening doors with it. Teach "Who," not "she being Brand / -new." What does it matter that your are teaching Shakespeare's sonnets — which are difficult — when your students do not even a basic appreciation for sound, meter, play of words. Teach "My Last Duchess." or "Terrence, This Is Stupid Stuff." Something fun. OR, what I've had the most success with: "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti. Of course, you have to be able to deal with all the wet, dripping sex . . . . but that wonderful, imaginative, sing-songy, supposed-children's poem (wink wink nudge nudge) never failed for me in gathering up some new poetry lovers.

There are parts of this poem I have small issue with. Yes, "slipknot spring." "Buttercups' fevered form" is not my favorite phrase ever. (Really, if face to face, I would simply want to ask "so why did you do it this way?" just to hear the answer, not to critique the choices. Ok, except for "slipknot spring.") In fact, once the poem opened up, the end of the poem took on whole new life. The sexuality got pulled into the poem, lost its life as mere sexuality and became energy within a greater ideation, a greater experience.

But, really, my point with this poem is to give both permission and warning. Permission in that it is normal to come upon a poem and, simply, not 'get it,' as it were, for some reason that has nothing to do with anything but the pointing of the weather vane. Sometimes, you need to find a doorway in; sometimes, the poem has to open itself too you.

And thus, in turn, the warning: give poems a second chance, even a third chance, to speak. Sometimes you aren't in the right place, psychically, to get into the poem. Sometimes, the poem is too sophisticated for you, or sophisticated in a manner you are not, or perhaps you are missing knowledge the work requires. There are many possibilities why a poem is not always immediately accessible. Sometimes, it is, simply, that you just need to find the entrance. (This happened with me recently with Atsuro Riley's collection Romey's Order. The poems were, simply, not working for me. Until I got to "Tablet": for whatever reason, that was the poem that invited me in, brought me to look closely, to read the poems the way they want to be read. For it I was then able to understand Riley's rhythms, and the whole of the book came alive.)

Basic aesthetic philosophy (re Barthes): no text can be read the first time. It has be known before it can be really read, known from first to end before it can be experienced. An aesthetic text, after all, works as a microcosmos, as a unity: the beginning can not be understood without also understanding the end; the middle cannot be experienced without that which comes before and after. (A nomic work, however, basic narrative, conventional genre, an ordinary work meant for consumption, to use Barthes's words in "From Work to Text"[FN]), is linear, which means also surface only, without depth, without resonance. Indeed, without life.) Since the more aesthetic a work is, the more it is a unity, you might be able to see how you have to find an entrance into that world, and that that entrance may not be in the beginning.

--------------- [FN] Barthes's essay is readily found on-line: here is but one link. The essay is from Barthes's Image, Music, Text. It is, actually, a rather worthwhile essay to read for anyone interesting in literature. And, near essential for anyone interested in writing literature. ---------------

 
•

(You know, while typing the sentence about needing to read the whole to understand the part, I was suddenly brought to mind of the story of Sir Richard Burton examining the body of his future (or was it present?) wife Isabel by candlelight in the film Mountains of the Moon. Whether or not it actually did happen — and I have faint thought it might have, but no proof on hand — it is a curious, sudden association.)

"Augenblick" by Mark Irwin -- Verse Daily, 3/19/13

from Large White House Speaking (New Issues Poetry and Prose)
poem found here
 

First lines:
By the drainpipe beneath the viburnum, just
giving way to small white flowers, the open eye
 

unity and energy

— reformatted 4/23/14
 

Let's do a little exploration of lines 7-8:

glances: mine, and its—gone, though a tiny gong of light still lingers, one I must squint to see,

Primarily line 7; specifically, "tiny gong." Here's the question: does it work?

Obviously, there is the aural effect of the rhyme between "gone" and "gong." Plus, you have the repetition of the hard g thrice (extended even onto the next line's "lingers"), and of the terse i twice. You also have the homonymic pun working in "its": that coupling "its — gone" and "it's gone." All in all, it is a poetically lively line, with a lot of goodness going on.

Except for the conflict between "tiny" and "gong." Generally, perhaps even overwhelmingly, the word gong carries with it a connotation of bigness. Even if a person does not naturally associate the word with a physically large instrument — as with the huge, temple gongs of the orient — then they at least will think of the large sound of a gong (even a small gong will overwhelm a room with its sound). Gong's are large. Very large. When you go with "gong" rather than "bell" it is because you want to bring into your text largeness.

Now, above, in line 3, you have "wherein the sun, minuscule": a very large thing brought down to tininess. Except that the ideation of "sun" is rarely to the purpose of largeness: it is either simply in identification of the circle in the sky, or to present the idea of light, or warmth (or other weather concepts), or other such as that. Unlike with "gong" and "bell," there is no natural and common comparative that attaches to "sun" an unavoidable or immediate connotation of largeness. If you want to ue "sun" to carry in the idea of largeness, you generally have to establish that intent through the text. Also, in this poem, "sun" is being used literally: the sun is visible in the dead bird's eye. But "gong" is being used metaphorically. There is no gong.

But, now that we say that, if gong is metaphoric, what is its purpose? What is it carrying into the poem?

First, notice that in line 8 you have "squint": the only word or phrase I see in the poem that is connected to "tiny gong." And yet it is about tininess, not largeness. Nor about sound. After line 8 you have the confusing "while the red arm of a wound, its wing will / not veer, never, except into a closer far." I have no problem with "closer far"; the "while" phrase, however, creates all kind of problems. Looking beyond the semantic issues, I read the lines as being about the deadness of the bird. Then there is the jump to remembering Katherine, which concludes — which is pulled into the ideation of the poem — with "Some things you can never hold," which I read as tying back into the deadness — or, more accurately, the absence and or brevity of life — of the bird.

So what about "gong"? It is a metaphoric insertion into the poem. But does it feed the poem? Does its energies enter into a unity with the energies of the rest of the poem? If it doesn't, then it is disrupting that unity and those energies. And that is the point, here. With literature, and especially with poetry, you have to pay attention to how your words interact with the rest of the poem. If it is not part of the poem, if it is not creating energies in unity with the rest of the poem, it is not merely empty calories (so to speak): it is creating conflict. A good reader will see "gong" and want to do something with it, something that will increase the aesthetic energies of the poem-as-a-whole. If there are no energies to create, the reader has a dead spot — dead pixels on the screen, as it were, which does effect the viewing of the image on the screen. Yes, "gong" helps to create the nice sound-play in the line. But, this is not Dada, nor is this poem solely for the purpose of sound: ideation is central to the poem. And gong is generally used twith the intent of either bringing in a cultural reference or bringing in the idea of largeness, and to no trivial degree.

For example, what if "gob" was used instead?

glances: mine, and its—gone, though a tiny gob of light still lingers, one I must squint to see,

There is no entrance of any largeness, the g sounds are preserved, and the b of "gob" is as aurally innocuous to the line as is the ng of "gong" (if not more benficial, with ending the line with a solid but unintrusive b). Plus, "gob" brings in the idea of being unformed, or, in context, of a thing having lost its form, which would fit well with the coming remembrance of what once was but no longer is.

So I leave it to you: is "gong" successful or detrimental?

"Two Poems" by Charles Simic -- Poetry Daily, 3/18/13; and "Ealuscerwen" by Edward Mayes -- Verse Daily, 3/18/13

Simic's two poems ("Fear" and "Note Slipped Under a Door") are from Selected Early Poems
and is found here

"Ealuscerwen" is from Crazyhorse (Fall, 2012)
and is found here

 

line breaks

— reformatted with editing, April 8, 2014
 

OK, I admit it, I am perhaps over attentive to line breaks. Except that, it seems to me most poets today are severely if not chronically under-attentive to line breaks — if attentive at all. In that vein, the poems offered today on the two sites (Poetry Daily and Verse Daily) make for an interesting contrast. So let me look at both.

Yes, the poems are different in style. I want to focus only on line breaks and poetic flow. Yes, Simic's poems are, perhaps hyper attentive to flow: but it is to an end, which we will see.

I should also say in effort to maintain transparency that I am not a terribly big fan of Charles Simic, though that is more a statement about taste than anything else. He is, simply, not a poet that floats my boat in the manner such that I would pull him off the shelf solely for pleasure's sake. (Though, I will sooner or later purchase and read his collected/selected. And, actually, I rather like "Fear," for the short little thing it is.)

 

Let's start with Simic's two poems.

"Fear" is a short, imagist poem. It uses one image, moving of leaves on a tree, to generate an idea: that of the self-energizing contagiousness of fear. What I love about the ideation of the poem is that the core idea generated by the image: that of fear being self-energizing (when caught as a contagion), is never directly expressed in the poem — ergo the imagist aspect. (Something people who study H.D., particularly Trilogy, very frequently forget.)

The structure of the poem also emphasizes that imagist flavor: the first stanza setting up the image, the second opening the image to reveal the idea being generated thereby. But let's look specifically at the lines.

First stanza: four lines of four stress, two stress, four stress, two. Stanza two: two five stress lines. No, it is not necessary that you as a reader notice that on the first reading. What is necessary is that you look for it, as you should be looking to every poem for structure in meter and rhyme. Why? Because once you see it, it should then modify how the poem sounds. This is the musicality of the poem, and it should not be missed, otherwise, you are missing a great part of the poem. Poetry is an aural art. To not look for aural structure is tantamount to playing sheet music with no attention whatsoever to the length of the notes.

Let me see if I can describe it. Even though the lines can be called accentual meter (though, to me it reads as though the lines were designed by sound, not by meter), it is sort-of-kind-of iambic, and four-beat lines have that certain sing-song quality that is utilized by ballad measure. (Popular music, after all, is primarily 4/4 measure, no?) Of course, the shortened, two-beat lines create a kind of staccato-esque emphasis: this made all the greater because of the structure of the lines and the line breaks. Each four-beat line (and the two-beat lines) stands naturally as a poetic phrase (the second slightly less so, but within the norm). The two-beat lines are modifiers of the idea in the 4-beat phrase. The end result is that the stanza's structure is not merely visual, nor is it merely aural, but it works with the reading of the poem to emphasize the ideation of the phrases in the poem.

Then you have a stanza break, and the more conversational sound of an iambic pentameter couplet (even with a soft rhyme). It creates an aural difference from the first stanza. It also gives nod to sonnet form, and the two line couplet that closes such in Shakespearean sonnets. In such, it also gives nod to the idea of the volta, which the two line couplet is meant to emphasize. Finally, in that the stanza is a well crafted unit, soft rhyme and all, it gives emphasis that it is there that the central ideation will be worked; in turn, giving aural echo to the ideational structure of the poem.

In sum, line structure, rhythm, rhyme, stanza forms, stanza breaks, the linear flow, and image and ideation, all work together to generate an organically whole poem, a poem with experiential depth and aesthetic pleasure. Even though the idea presented is relatively simple (it is, after all, only a twenty-syllable poem), I enjoy reading it, I get pleasure from reading it, again and again, to experience how it all comes together . . . . . which is not quite the right phrase, but it is difficult not to fall into phrases that beg the question of what it is that is being experienced. If I may risk it: it is the pleasure of experiencing a whole and vital poetic microcosmos.

"Note Slipped under a Door" is a list poem, and as such will from the start probably be not as tight as "Fear"; but, then, I don't think it tries to be. The experience here is more linear, the following of a list; there is not very much ideational development up and down the list, not very much development into unifying the list elements into a whole (outside of the flow of a non-random list). But, that's ok; that is not what it is trying to do. It is being its list-self, and should be accepted as such. (In fact, it works for me quite well.)

But let's look at stanzas and lines. Simply enough, notice how, again, every line is sufficient in itself, and in itself defines itself as a line. Also, every idea has its own stanza. There is no attempt or want to force the poem into a regularized stanza length. To say it again, there is no need in the poet to force regularized stanzas upon a poem that does not require or want it. There is no attempt to break the lines into lines of generally equal length. The decisions on lines and stanzas was generated from within the creating of the poem, not applied to the words as a kind of forced structure.

Which leads us to "Ealuscerwen."

(But, first, I can not help myself to point out "from a great purple distance." It's a simple idea, but wonderful. Do you get it, in that at a distance mountains, hills, whatevers, tend to move into purplish hues? It's a natural event. But, here, completely unexplained. And dammitall if poets and writers would strive figure out that you do not have to explain everything. Actually, you rarely have to — or should — explain anything. Poems are so much more fascinating when you do not. This event in its larger, prosaic forms it is called an "information dump" in creative writing circles. (Its origin lies, I believe, in science fiction/fantasy, where the need and want to explain are often greatly felt by the writer.) Information dumps are a no-no in prose. Likewise, and even more so, in poetry, where it occurs just as often, but on a smaller scale. But I've digressed. My point is, merely, what a great line, that.)

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So, "Ealuscerwen." A quick look reveals no rhyme. Also, no meter or measured stress count. Also, no apparent relationship between semantics and lines. It is a sentence/paragraph organized text broken into relatively even lines and four-line stanzas. (Should I have pointed out how sentence/phrasing and line structure informed each other's creation in Simic's poems? Too late now.)

Here are the questions to be asked:

• Is there anything in the poem's text, semantics, flow, or ideation, that gives purpose to the presented structure?
• To say it a different way, as a reader, what attention can be seen, here, to have been given to the line breaks and stanzas outside of the application of some arbitrarily chosen visual structure?
• Is it not a natural assumption that, if a poem is broken into lines, then there should be some purpose behind those lines?
• What effects on the reading of the poem is created by the line and stanza breaks?
• Do the line and stanza breaks contribute to the reading and reception of the poem? Or do they hinder it?
• Can there be said to be any poetic (or organic, or aesthetic) unity generated with the structure, the text, the sound, the ideation, etc.?

Consider this idea: if you are not using line and stanza breaks to an end that will generate an even more pleasurable reading of the poem, are you "using" them at all?

The follow-up to that: if you are not using them, why the hell not?

Inattentiveness is the accusation. An arbitrary structure applied to sentences/paragraphs is not "writing" lines, it is applying lines. (In fact, to me it looks like the visually clumsy hyphenated breaking of "hellkind" was generated out of the want to control visual line length.) Such structuring is, in its purest labeling, nothing less than striking lines and stanzas out of the writing process completely. As I have said in previous posts, this is little more than writing prose and shrinking the width of the page.

And the thing is, there is a proven negative effect to such writing. When a person reads, they are not moving from letter to letter, word to word. The mind naturally looks forward and back in order to generate a sense of the semantic and grammatical structure of the text, which permits the mind to more accurately and fully read the text. If it were not so, people would not be able to read a text without first reading the whole of the paragraph and getting the long list of words and their structure half memorized. (In fact, in a book, when you are reading a line, you mind is also giving faint attention to the lines above and below.)

The more you contract the length of the line in prose, the more and more difficult it becomes to read out of the structure and phrasing of the sentences. So, by breaking this poem into short lines like this without giving any thought to the lines themselves (or to the syntactic and grammatical structures of the text), the only thing being accomplished is making the text difficult to read.

For example, if you restructure the poem into normal prose, you will find that there is a very natural paragraph break right before "What we missed" (the first line of the fourth stanza). That very natural pause – that reading affected and reading effecting pause (I think I got those vowels right) – is lost, entirely, in the application of this arbitrary line/stanza structure. The line breaks also create problems with the flow of the sentences in the second half of the poem: especially with the last, beginning with "And we," in the third to last stanza.

Also, the fact that there are line breaks present creates in the reader an expectation of pause at the end of the line: the mind naturally looks for structure and organization; presenting organization through line breaks tells the mind there is a reading-structure to be found there. When that structure is not found, in fact when that structure is working against the natural reading of the words (as it is, so much so, with that last sentence), only bad things can happen.

Really, to read this poem successfully, you have to do what I said above: read it a couple, three, four times until you have a loosely memorized idea of how the sentences work, and ignore everything visual.

Another question: what value, what purpose can be said to exist in a chosen line structure when alternative choices have no real effect on the poem? Is there any difference to the reading of the poem if I make the lines slightly shorter:

We weren't there that fall in Rome, 476. Our terminus a quo for our Middle age was much later, and Ended with our terminus a quem, Later too. Time to take the hem Down again, we'll tell someone With the sharpest pair of scissors, Or take up the hem again we'll Ask someone with the quickest Stitch. Although we ourselves have Starched our crinoline collars, we've Never wanted to do anything more

or so that there are three lines per stanza, and the lines in each stanza decrease in length:

We weren't there that fall in Rome, 476. Our terminus a quo for our middle age Was much later, and ended with our Terminus a quem, later too. Time to take The hem down again, we'll tell someone With the sharpest pair of scissors, or Take up the hem gain we'll ask someone With the quickest stitch. Although we Ourselves have starched our crin-

or if we do this little visual shape:

We weren't there that fall in Rome, 476. Our Terminus a quo for our Middle age was much later, And ended with our terminus a quem, later too. Time to take the hem down again, we'll tell Someone with the sharpest Pair of scissors, or take up the Hem again we'll ask someone with the quickest Stitch. Although we ourselves have starched our Crinoline collars, we've never Wanted to do anything more Exuberant than, let's say, the cancan. What we've

So the final question: if there is no apparent purpose to the chosen line and stanza structure, how are you not saying to your reader, "You know, poetically speaking, there isn't that much here; so, don't expect too much; you might even just want to move on to the next poem."?

 
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(Final little note: the final little definitional paragraph is fun. Except for one point: at the very end, after the word canard, there is a colon. Seeing that, I immediately went back over it. "Did I miss other colons?" Not finding any, I ask, "Do I see places that would be a typo, where the Verse Daily people left out a colon?" And not finding any of that, either, I am then perplexed. "Why is that colon at the end of the line? Why wasn't that structure used throughout the list?" Well, perhaps that colon is the typo, and it should be a semi-colon (which is possible since they obviously typoed the italicizing of "our" in line 4). If so, what an unfortunate typo, because it throws the whole of the list into chaos.)

Three Poems by Sarah Arvio -- Poetrty Daily, 2/27/13

from night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis (Alfred A. Knopf)
poem found here
 

First lines:
there are still the bad dreams I have to say
a dram in the thought of a bad bad night
 

poetry and the dream; technique and the poetic whole

— reformatted, minor editing 1/26/2014
— this post has been added to the "Best of the PDC" page on my Hatter's Cabinet site.
 

Now, if you haven't looked it up yet, the book from which these poems come is a collection of poems created from actual dreams, with accompanying notes as to how those dreams played out in psychoanalysis. As such, the poems within the book as a whole probably has a context that is not carried outside the book. As such, there is no reason not to permit that the poems do not work as well outside the book as they would within. (Same as often happens when a chapter is excerpted out of a novel.) In fact, and especially because of the nature of the book, I rather expect it to be so. (Possibly, even, dramatically so.)

Nonetheless, I believe these poems offer something of interest for discussion as they stand on their own, either singly or as a triplet. But before that, a comment on dreams and creative writing.

As a general rule, it is a false step, a very poor approach, to translate your dreams into stories or poems. While the dream may have -- and obviously will have -- unity in your head, where is is an extension of your unconscious, that unity rarely translates onto the page. The exceptions to this rule prove the rule, because in most every exception the writer has used the dream as material to the making of a work (as opposed to simply writing down the dream). (If I remember correctly, Yeats's "The Cap and Bells" is such a poem.) And notice here I am not in any way saying do not let your dreams be source material. In fact, I insist that a writer should be listening to their dreams for source material -- it is in your unconscious, after all, where true creating originates. What I am saying is do not simply transcribe a dream onto paper and expect it to work some dream-like, mysterious effect. That effect must be created by the writer; it won't simply be carried in as dream by the mere fact that it originated as a dream. (There is also the obverse of this: don't write stories or poems that are, in context, a dream. It rarely works, almost always is a bad idea from the get go. Do it to try it out if you want. But recognize it will probably be far more interesting to you than to any sophisticated reader.)

 

That said, what do we have here? Most obviously, they are not dream journal. They are worked poems. She is not transcribing: the events of the source dreams are, for the most part, but raw material to a creating of micrcosmoi. (Let's hold for the moment the question whether or not they are wholly successful in this creating.) Narrative, such as the dreams offer it, is not at the forefront of these poems. And it should be acknowledge that narrative is not a necessary constituent of a poem-as-microcosmos. It is but a tool, and raw material, to such creating. In fact, when narrative becomes the central point of a creative writing, it will lead you away from the aesthetic, not toward it. (Such is genre, after all.)

What, then, is the nature her creating? There is, of course, a degree of control over the lines: the Amazon blurb calls them "irregular sonnets." Though, in that they hold to sonnet form only in their being fourteen lines, and in the lines hovering around but in no way clinging to five accented syllables per line (I wouldn't even say they were iambic), I have trouble calling them sonnets of any manner. What makes a sonnet is less the count of fourteen lines and more what happens within those fourteen lines. But that quibble is with the blurb; there is, nonetheless, a formality to these poems. (Perhaps my quibble is with the need to call them anything? Why can't it simply be that she is playing with a form of her own?)

But the real energy of Ms. Arvio's poems -- and looking at the Amazon preview of her second book, Sono, it may be this is very much her style -- is in the play along the lines. There are three techniques, here. First, stringing out sounds, as with "a bad potion potent with impotence" in the first poem, and "in a quarrel a quarrel of squirrels / showing their teeth I feel queasy & sick" in the third. Second, there is stringing out ideas, as with "cat . . . wildcat . . . manxman . . . catpal . . . kittened" in the second poem, or the play with "heart," "hole," and "hell" in the first.

But, what for me is the dominating technique (or should I say over-arching, or over-guiding technique) is the syntactic stringing together of phrases, as with the first poem's first four lines. On this, it is not simply that she eschews punctuation. She crafts the lines so that not only is punctuation not needed, but is not wanted. (There is a huge distinction between leaving out commas and writing lines that do not want commas, something which so many poets do not seem to understand.) 

What is the result? Obviously, every poem has a running, non-stop flow to it, without pause, without break. Also, the continual presence of her techniques creates a kind of mesentery that pulls the various elements of each poem together into a unity: they are not best described as a running, linear flow of words. The words, the sounds, the ideas, all interconnect within each poem. They are, to use Joyce's word, a great word (and these poems do remind me of Joyce's own manner of play), wordspiderwebs, something which very much gives description to the organic nature of the aesthetic work.

What I am inartfully trying to get at is that these poems are not merely technique. Three comments on technique:

1. Technique is but a tool. I have seen many works (in literary and other media) that are built with attention to technique but to no purpose of a greater creating. This very often with artists playing with mixed media, as though they believe that the technique of mixing the media is sufficient to a successful work. (And while we're here, let's accept it, people: most of John Cage's works are experiments of technique: essentially, he was a creative explorer, constantly asking, "what happens when I do this?", but not equally concerned with the unity of the result. They are often wonderful, intriguing, thought provoking experiments; but, still experiments.) The idea that technique is not sufficient to itself to art is why it is said, in the plastic arts, that mere reproduction of life is the lowest form of art (so also as I say with mere narrative and reportage): such art is, in the end, nothing but technique. 
2. Nonetheless, there can also be true creativity in technique, in that without technique, without interesting technique, the poem (or whatever) will rather lack in life, and become extremely vulnerable in its making to banality or conventionality. This may be what distinguishes the accessible to the inaccessible composition: the more complex, the more irregular the technique, the less easy it will be for someone unsophisticated in the medium to enter the experience of the work. (Consider the difference in compositional technique between Brahms, who is very accessible, and Mahler, who is less so, and then Schnittke, who is far less yet again.)
3. Technique made a purpose unto itself falls into conventionality and genre. Genre works are readily accessible to their readers because their technique is readily recognized and understood, and rarely changes. (U.S. drama is ridden with technique substituted as art. As a quick example to that rather sweeping statement: listen to the music of Rent; listen to the music of Hair. The former is a direct descendant of the conventions that were created out of the techniques brought to play in the latter. I will admit I have only seen the film and perfmormed scenes/exceprts of the play: but to me it is apparent Rent is a remarkably un-creative, derivitive, generic play.)

The question always to be thrown at technique is, "ok, there is a technique; but what are you going to do with it?" Which is the question which must be cast upon these three poems. There is fascinating technique here, very playful, very experiential; and the poems are brought into a kind of unity with those techniques. But do they truly succeed as individual and whole poems? or, are they more what I call "five-finger exercises": works imperfect in that they are not unified, independent creations, but which still perform to a somewhat-worthy degree, usually as a demonstration of some technique or form of play? A more common word is to call them fragments rather than poems. 

(I pause to remind you we are artificially taking these poem as we find them, outside the context of the book as whole.)

In that they play with dream-like experience, are they of the nature of surrealist experiments: interesting, but (as Batailles would point out to Breton's consternation) incomplete and insufficient as true poetry (true literature)?

Art, that is, the aesthetic when it is concerned in the creating of art (including literature and music), is inextricably about medium. This is much of what lies behind the truism that an aesthetic painter paints (in the end and most honestly) for other painters, a writer writes for other writers: that is, for the people who would most be able to appreciate their creations out of whatever medium, those people who themselves have dedicated themselves to the study and exploration of that medium. A poet, a writer, is supposed to be a lover of words and language. If not, then they are not a literary person, they are a diarist, a documentarian, a reporter merely. So, when someone does things like the play you see in these three poems, true literary people get off on it. It goes to the jouissance of literature; it is the very pleasure of literature (see Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads if you don't believe Derrida, Barthes, et al), it is the experience of the aesthetic. More simply, it is the point of it all. But not only: there is also -- there is more greatly -- the making of the microsmoi that are works of the aesthetic, the enjoyment of that wholeness, of the being, as it were, of the work. More accurately, the engagement of the individual with that work.

Literature as an aethetic endeavor is the attempt to create a cosmos out of words. (I resist the want to say 'create something new' because, in aesthetic creation, every work is, by definition, something new, is its own microcosmos, is its own experience. Thus the distinction between the aesthetic and the generic/conventional/cultural: the aesthetic creates microcosmoi, the generic reproduces the set conventions of the nomoi.) It is in organic that creative works have the most to offer the reader.

Thus the question: are these poems successful poems, or are they fragments? Do we have, here, three successful microcosmoi? My answer to that question is no: I believe the true microcosmoi being attempted here is not the individual poems but the book as a whole: and, as I said, I am very interested to see if that whole is successful. But, irrespective of that question, these poems (and we'll permit the word) are fascinating, enjoyable experiences, carrying even with only this small number of them much to discuss about poetry and the aesthetic, as I hope I have demonstrated. So, while I may not accept them as successful wholes, I gladly accept them as successful explorations of the aesthetic.