"Dear So & So" by Beth Marzoni -- Verse Daily, 4/9/2013

from Hayden's Ferry Review
poem found here
 

verse daily sloppiness

— reformatted Mar. 14, 2015
 

Note after the fact: I see today (4/10) the error was fixed.

This is really for the Verse Daily people:

Line 15: a collared shirt on the off-chance Pd be saved. I'd shave.

In case nobody else has yet told you, it is embarrassing how many typos turn up on your pages.

No, it's not exactly like you are replete with them. But you are making one page a day. You can't bother enough to get one page a day -- one poem a day -- correct?

Not only embarrassing, insulting to the authors. Pay attention, already. You're a sponsored site. You should be getting it right.

"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.

"The Bladder" by David Keplinger -- Verse Daily, 4/7/13

from The Most Natural Thing
poem found here
 

First lines:
He who'll lose his bladder calls it Three Days Down, or
The Haunted Mere. It must be reconstructed from other
 

how grammar works within the poem's system

— reformatted Mar. 14, 2015
 

Just a quick one this Sunday morning.

Good writers are always watching wording and grammar in the things they read: especially grammar (and syntax), since that is fundamental to any writing, of whatever form. They will always be on the look out for the incorrect, the curious, the perplexing, anything that might prompt thought, consideration, and, in turn, development. Even when you are establishing your own version of English syntax/grammar (or whatever language), your text still has syntax and grammar, and should. Your are still creating a microcosmos out of words, and that microcosmos needs a system, and needs to keep to that system. (And, needs to speak that system to the reader.)

So, here, merely a question on which to ponder: Should line five be "mushrooms begin to grow"?

Is one correct? Incorrect? or just more or less correct? or does it only create a different reading? Better, worse, or just different? Different how, and why?

"Wander" by Andrea Hollander -- Poetry Daily, 4/6/13

from Arts and Letters (Spring 2013)
poem found here
 

First lines:
What we don't know we don't know,
so accept it. If your mother wandered
 

poetic structure

— reformatted Mar. 8, 2015
 

To note, I originally posted this with Ms. Hollander's name as Adrian. My apologies for the mistake.

Let's explore the first four stanzas. First, let's write them out in sentence form:

What we don't know we don't know, so accept it. If your mother wandered when your father was stationed in France during the war before you were born, before you were even conceived, so be it. No matter what her sister told you years later, after your mother died, what does this matter now?

First, and quickly, notice how clumsy that third sentence is. (The same clumsiness exists in the poem, not just in sentence form: the line breaks do not save it.) Part of the reason is because the "what" is semantically irregular, perhaps even bordering on bad writing, even when you remove the middle "after" phrase:

No matter what her sister told you years later, what does this matter now?

The "what" issue, however, may be side effect of the greater issue: there's also a major problem with time, with a clash between "years later" and "now." The phrase "no matter what her syster told you" generally is read to be a lead-in to a comment about the time of whatever it is about which the sister is speaking. For example:

No matter what her sister told you, your mother did not shoot the sherriff.

For this you should also be able to see how the "years later" does not fit smoothly within even that sentence:

No matter what her sister told you years later, your mother did not shoot the sherriff.

Throwing in the middle "after" phrase just makes it all the weaker. It is a sloppy sentence, and I would not be surprised if when writing the poem, if the author had written it in sentence form, she would have seen it herself. It is very easy to hide clumsiness from yourself when writing sentences as poetic lines -- especially when you are arbitrarily breaking the lines (which means you are not paying much attention to the rhythms of the text). To me, it seems the author here is trying to do too much in one sentence, and it using the idea of 'poetry' to try to get away with it.

The issue is that the sentence has far too many times in it:

1. the now of the poem
2. the time of the mother's action
3. the time of the mother's death
4. the time the sister spoke about the mother's actions

That's a lot for one sentence. It needs to be broken up to fix the chaos. First: recognize how "years later" is superfluous. The context itself creates the idea. So let's just leave that out. Second: why say "no matter" twice? Doesn't the "what does this matter now" only repeat the first "no matter"? I broke it up, but killed the superfluous parts. So, in the end, there still need only be one sentence:

What does it matter now what her sister told you?

See how the "years later" is rather implied? Granted, it only works if the idea that it was, in fact, years later is not essential. If it is, we can bring that back in. But now we do need to break up the sentence:

It was years later her sister told you. What does it matter now?

Let's get wacky sophisticated and use a semi-colon:

It was years later her sister told you; what does it matter now?

So, how does this effect the poem?

What we don't know we don't know, so accept it. If your mother wandered when your father was stationed in France during the war before you were born, before you were even conceived, so be it. It was years later her sister told you; what does it matter now?

The "what does it matter now?" remains its own line, and we've removed a ton of clumsiness.

Let's move to the second sentence. I take issue with "during the war" and "stationed in France": I find them redundant. One or the other can readily be gotten rid of, when looking at just the sentence. (I'll add the missing comma.)

If your mother wandered when your father was stationed in France, before you were born, before you were even conceived, so be it.

Or,

If your mother wandered during the war, before you were born, before you were even conceived, so be it.

Much better sentence, that, and I do find this latter option the much more interesting because of what it does not take time to say. What with the later lines about the field hospital and the nurses, the poem does make it clear that it was the father who went to war, and the mother stayed home. (Remember: the assumption that everything in a poem must be wholly understood when it is first read, each line and stanza understood when it is first read, is wholly fallacious.)

So what do we have now?

What we don't know we don't know, so accept it. If your mother wandered during the war, before you were born, before you were even conceived, so be it. It was years later her sister told you; what does it matter now?

Has the tone of the poem changed? It doesn't seem so to me. Just a bit more condensed. But, when you realize that that which was removed served no great positive purpose in the poem (and did insert no small negative), condensation is less condensation and more tidying up. So the next question: was anything lost in that tidying up. (Actually, a rather important question.) What the lost phrases did add was an extension of the rhythm of the stanzas.

Which is, actually, what first brought me to talk about this poem. There is in those first stanzas an aural effect of listing phrases:

If your mother wandered    when your father was stationed in France    during the war    before you were born,    before you were even conceived, so be it.

My thought when reading it was, what if the structure of the poem recognized this? What if the structure of the poem both played on and emphasized the structure of the phrasing? (Of course, now we are rewriting – exploring different, new possibilities and potentialities – so it is not longer merely the same poem tweaked.)

What we don't know we don't know,       so accept it. If your mother wandered during the war,    before you were born,    even, before you were conceived,       so be it. (Years later her sister told you.       What does it matter now?)

(I like the period over the semi-colon in that form.) Makes for an interesting idea, no? The rest of the poem would get thrythmically boring (if not flat out silly) if this was the only structural idea of the poem. Though, perhaps, the rest of the poem could be reworked in a way that flows out of this. Could be an interesting experiment (an experiment in a form other than that of arbitrary line breaks).

 
•

A note:

I decided not to put a comma in the first line, like this:

What we don't know, we don't know,

It's not necessary. I would argue (though without much force) that it is permitted since it does help with the reading. But, I actually think it changes the meaning of the sentence. With the comma in it, it becomes a list, as though this was the opening phrase of a sentence such as:

What we don't know: the guy's name.

and you were repeating the first "what we don't know" for emphasis, as with this:

What we don't know – we don't know –: the guy's name.

Obviously, as I wrote it it is something of a silly idea, so we read it the way it is intended, as statement and clarification. But, that 'list-ness' – to me at least – still lingers.

"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.

Three Poems by Anne Carson -- Poetry Daily, 4/2/13

from Red Doc> (Vintage Contemporaries)
poem found here
 

poetry as exploration of language

— reformatted, with minor edits 4/23/14
 

OK. I'm a fan of Anne Carson. (Have to be transparent.) I wish I knew Attic Greek so I could see more into her translations. (I have a feeling they are such that Pound would approve. Though, really, I don’t know.)

What I like about Carson is not only her attention to word, sound, and meaning, but also her experimentation. And that in that experimentation she doesn't rest on letting the experimenting itself suffice to give the poem merit: she still pays great attention to word, sound, and meaning. Not always do I think her experiments are successful. (I am not a big fan of The Beauty of the Husband. I think she lost control with it. And, to be blunt, some of her I see printed I think is just bad.) But she is exploring language, which is far more than I can say for most of the works published in the poetry mags.

And, you need not be trying radical and strange things to be "exploring" language. Ciaran Carson, for example, is constantly exploring language. But I wouldn't call "Dresden" (here), or Shamrock Tea (to give a book example) terribly radical. They are attentive. They are attentive to beyond the point that they merit the word "attentive." They are exploring — in different formats — "what can I make out of language." What they are not is telling tales, narrative for the sake of narrative, emotional diaretics. They are, to use Wordsworth's word, texts which were written through some calculation.

Again, far more than most of what gets published today.

 
•

Curious— Simply because this is a web page (though, also because of errors previous), I do not trust the layout as presented. Are the title/first-line combinations supposed to change like that? Or did they botch the html? (This is a little more problematic since on my ipad, even though I am using the same browser, the first poem has a definite formatting glitch.) Merely curious, in how there is less faith in the web page than in the written text.