Category: Poets and poetry

Writing about craft, poetry book reviews and appreciations, and anything else that isn’t an original poem.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Mutating the Signature

Submissions are open for a new qarrtsiluni theme, Mutating the Signature. This is a process- rather than a subject-oriented theme, requiring all submissions to spring from a creative collaboration between two or more people. Be sure to study the theme description carefully before submitting. The deadline is January 15, and we expect to start publishing the first pieces for the new issue shortly after January 1. It seemed like a good way to kick off the new year. The guest editors, Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore, have been going great guns at their own collaborative poetry experiments, as readers of their blogs will know, so they seemed as qualified as anyone to edit such an issue.

The current issue, Journaling the Apocalypse, will continue through December. In fact, we’ll have to pick up the pace of posting if we’re going to fit everything in. Suffice it to say that we have many more good things in store — and if the holiday season doesn’t seem like the best time to contemplate the apocalypse, all I can say is you haven’t gone shopping lately.

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Shortly before Halloween, I tried my hand at collaborative poeming with Dana. We used Skype IM, and followed a procedure based on the surrealist game called exquisite corpse, which seemed appropriate to our subject: vampirism. Or, as Dana would have it, hemotophagy. We wrote alternate lines, and each of us saw only the second half of the preceding line. Here’s what I saw:

Hemotaphagy

We walked arm in arm on the sunset strip, red at night
___________________ inside me, my mouth parts
like a coffin lid lined with velvet & redolent of formaldehyde
___________________ carotid, its point of bifurcation
the wye-shaped crossroads of all my midnight appointments,
___________________ my hands, how I lap up
everything your heart has to say in its simple syntax.
__________________________without enormous effort,
like typing a heart smiley in lieu of using that dread word
____________________ attack, my bending over you,
mother of my suffocation nightmares, homeothermic swamp.
________________________ handkerchief, stuff it in my blazer.
It’s a gloomy affair, this filling of my coffin-sized hole
__________________________ My desires coagulate near your wounds,
plaster for that red fresco where my shadow lost its way.

Then came the reveal, as they say in TV land.

Hemotaphagy

We walked arm in arm on the sunset strip, red at night
blood the only hunger inside me, my mouth parts
like a coffin lid lined with velvet & redolent of formaldehyde
I feel for your common carotid, its point of bifurcation
the wye-shaped crossroads of all my midnight appointments,
skin pulled taut between my hands, how I lap up
everything your heart has to say in its simple syntax.
This is living: to take you without enormous effort,
like typing a heart smiley in lieu of using that dread word
fang. This is not an attack, my bending over you,
mother of my suffocation nightmares, homeothermic swamp.
I wipe up the access with a handkerchief, stuff it in my blazer.
It’s a gloomy affair, this filling of my coffin-sized hole
will never bring satiety. My desires coagulate near your wounds
plaster for that red fresco where my shadow lost its way.

I found this quite a bit wordier than I was used to dealing with — which was more my fault than Dana’s — so when we finally returned to the thing a couple weeks later, I left all the heavy lifting up to her. After half an hour or so, she came up with the following edit (ignore her account of events at the link):

Hemotaphagy

I
My mouth parts to reveal velvet lining
redolent of formaldehyde.

II
I feel for your common carotid,
its point of bifurcation,
the wye-shaped crossroads
of all my midnight appointments.

III
Skin taut between my hands,
I lap up your heart’s simple syntax.

IV
To take you without enormous effort,
without using that dread word “fang.”

V
Mother of my suffocation nightmares,
homeothermic swamp.
I wipe up the excess with a handkerchief.

VI
This gloomy affair. This filling of my coffin-
sized hole will never bring satiety.

VII
My desires coagulate near your wounds,
plaster for that red fresco
where my shadow lost its way.

Being the contrary sort, I tried to see if I could make a poem using the words that didn’t appear in her edit. I had to add a bunch more words. I’m not sure the result could still be considered a collaboration. But it was fun!

Now You See It

We walk arm in arm
on the sunset strip,
red at night like a plush coffin lid,
like a cartoon heart used as a glyph
to stand in for that dread word
as I bend over you in my blazer
& count to ten.
The only hunger that matters now
can hide in a silk handkerchief
& reappear in a deck of cards:
club, diamond, spade.
You learn to dig.

In one final transmogrification, I ran the text of our rough draft through Wordle to produce the image at the top of this post, symbolically releasing the words and ideas we’d been playing with. That’s kind of what “mutating the signature” is all about, I think.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Inaugural poet: people’s choice winners

The votes are in, and we have a clear winner. “It’s late but everything comes next” garnered 16 of the 165 votes cast, for 9.7 percent of the total. The author is Naomi Shihab Nye, and the line comes from her poem “Jerusalem,” in Red Suitcase. As the following video also demonstrates, Naomi Shihab Nye’s poems are full of just the sort of advice an incoming president might find useful.

A president-elect who’s also an international celebrity might benefit from the reality-check provided by Nye’s poem “Famous,” which begins:

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

Read the whole poem here. Also worth checking out is an interview with Nye at Pif magazine, conducted by Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi fame. And in another, more recent interview at Foreign Policy in Focus, the Palestinian-American poet had some specific advice for the incoming president regarding Israel/Palestine:

Melissa Tuckey: You wrote in an email that Barack Obama needs to evolve in his positions on Israel/Palestine. What course of action would you recommend for the future president (be he Obama or McCain)?

Naomi Shihab Nye: Balance. Respect for all human beings. All stories. All pain. Recognition of what the Palestinian people have been through in the last 60-plus years. Honest recognition that the violence has hardly been a one-way street.

Melissa Tuckey: Do you believe peace is possible? What are your hopes for Israel and for Palestine? Do you support one state in Israel/ Palestine or two?

Naomi Shihab Nye: Yes, I believe peace is possible. As my father kept saying toward the end of his life, people will have to become exhausted enough with fighting to embrace peace. From what I hear, many, on both “sides” have been exhausted enough to try something better for quite a long time. My hopes are for a one-state cooperative solution (because the territory is simply so small) in which Palestinian and Israeli citizens may share their strengths and resources in mutual respect. I don’t see, at this point, how a two-state solution could work as well. The wall must go down. Don’t bring it to Texas, either, we have enough problems with our own stupid wall!

“Jerusalem” is too long to quote in its entirety, but it ends:

There’s a place in my brain
Where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.

Runners-up

Six other quotes garnered 12 or more votes each.

Minor-party candidates

  • “Take
    your time. Take mine
    too. Get into some trouble
    I’ll have to account for.” (8 votes)
    —Tess Gallagher, “Instructions to the Double” (Instructions to the Double)
  • “Still
    there is a population
    that likes mistakes and
    indecision, guarding
    atavisms and anatomical
    sports, the hips of snakes,
    the wings of the horse.” (8 votes)
    —Kay Ryan, “Les Natures Profondement Bonnes Sont Toujours Indecises” (Flamingo Watching)
  • “Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings,
    feelings are always about more than one thing.” (8 votes)
    —Adrienne Rich, from “Contradictions: Tracking Poems,” #13 (Your Native Land, Your Life)
  • “Salmon lie at rest in the riffles,
    their sea-silver changing,
    as they ascend to the
    cold, still water of stars.” (7 votes)
    —John Haines, “Doors that Open” (Where the Twilight Never Ends)
  • [Removed at author’s request] (7 votes)
    —Bill Knott, “Minor Poem” (found online)
  • “we must learn to suckle life not
    bombs and rhetoric
    rising up in redwhiteandblue patriotism” (7 votes)
    —Sonia Sanchez, “Reflections After the June 12th March for Disarmament” (homegirls and handgrenades)
  • “If you’re gonna bet on cards, Ben says,
    You might as well play harmonica.” (6 votes)
    —Tom Montag, untitled (The Big Book of Ben Zen)
  • “There is nothing one man will not do to another.” (5 votes)
    —Carolyn Forché, “The Visitor” (The Country Between Us)
  • “The thing you have to remember
    about hot water cornbread
    is to wait for the burning
    so you know when to flip it, and then again
    so you know when it’s crusty and done.” (4 votes)
    —Patricia Smith, “When the Burning Begins” (Teahouse of the Almighty)
  • “America needs a beating.” (3 votes)
    —Gary Soto, “Our Days” (Who Will Know Us?)
  • “Cigarettes are the only way
    to make bleakness nutritional, or at least useful,
    something to do while feeling terrified.” (3 votes)
    —B. H. Fairchild, “Cigarettes” (The Art of the Lathe)
  • “Great are the Hittites.” (3 votes)
    —Charles Simic, “Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites” (Dismantling the Silence)
  • “If you laid out all the limbs from the Civil War hospital
    in Washington they would encircle the White House seven times.” (3 votes)
    —Jim Harrison, from “Ghazals,” XXXIX (The Shape of the Journey)

There were also three write-in candidates which garnered one vote apiece, though none appear to be from only one was from a living American poet.

Thanks to everyone for voting, and don’t forget to support poets by buying their works.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Inaugural poet try-outs

UPDATE: I’ll continue to count votes up through midnight tonight, Nov. 12, EST. If you have alternate quotes to suggest, you’re free to use the comments, but they won’t be included in the vote tally unless you use the “Other” option in the poll, because I’m way too lazy to figure percentages myself. And of course if you’ve already voted and are curious to see how your choices are faring, click on “View Results” at the bottom of the poll. You may have to refresh the page first.

The blogosphere is abuzz with ideas about which poet Obama should invite to read at the inauguration. He is, however, a rare example of a politician who actually reads poetry for pleasure, so I imagine he doesn’t really need any help from us. But I thought it might be fun to hold some try-outs in any case. The following poll (which subscribers can only see by clicking through to the post, or by going to the page on PollDaddy) consists of randomly ordered pieces of advice from 20 different, living American poets. (At least, I think they’re all living. If not, we may have to summon Nancy Reagan.) You can vote for more than one quote, but please select only your favorites. Tomorrow or the next day I’ll count up the votes and reveal the authors.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

In a yellow wood

yellow wood“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”: that’s as far as I ever got with Frost’s best known — and most poorly understood — poem. Oh, sure, I finished reading the words, but my imagination never advanced beyond that initial image, which delighted me. To hell with the figurative meaning; the literal one was quite enough for me. I suppose I should be ashamed to admit that I often engage with poetry on such a superficial level, but you have to understand that we have several miles of old woods roads here on the mountain which seem much like the “roads” in “The Road Not Taken,” moss-covered, sometimes grassy, and ankle-deep in yellow (and orange and red) leaves this time of year, which whisper as you walk. And in any case, a yellow wood on a bright October day invites careless wandering. You can push regrets and fears of failure to the back of your mind for a while.

Archery season for white-tailed deer began last Saturday, so we do share the woods with a few hunters, who sit camouflaged in the trees, alert and focused on a single goal while we amble past, heedless as only an unhunted non-predator can be.

chestnut oak leaf

The yearly mulch is underway. I walk admiring the woods with a lazy gardener’s eye, willing myself to ignore multiple ecological wounds and see everything as if couldn’t be better arranged, as if each bush and tree were perfectly shaped and situated, as if every stone and clump of ferns stood in an aesthetically optimal relationship with its surroundings. It’s not a bad habit to get into, I think. The problem with the narrator of “The Road Not Taken” is that he’s too concerned about destinations. “Somewhere ages and ages hence,” he might think back on the choice he made, but what he’ll really miss, I’ll bet, is what he missed that day: the option to stay and revel in all that yellow.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Rockin’ new links

International Rock-Flipping Day, September 2, 2007 International Rock-Flipping Day 2008 is now only a week away: Sunday, September 7 (with an alternate date for public schools on the preceding Friday, September 5th). If you missed IRFD 2007, or have forgotten how much fun that was, my mother’s nature column for September will tell you all about it.

Please help spread the word. For more information, see the complete Rock-Flipping Day file.

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Festival of the Trees #27 is up.

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Postal Poetry shifts to a M-W-F posting schedule, starting today with a postcard from Tom Montag and Marja-Leena Rathje, “blue.”

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After briefly alighting at WordPress.com, the dynamic group of female online poets calling themselves the Poetry Collaborative have settled into beautiful new digs at thepoetrycollaborative.org. This is an exciting, ground-breaking site: where else can you watch collaboratively written poems grow by the day and by the hour, and be privy to side discussions between the authors? Start following the PoCo now and you should have clear bragging rights in six months or so. Because it’s gonna be huge, the Huffington Post of the poetry blogosphere. You read it here first.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Things not seen: reading Pattiann Rogers

They may have eyes the color
of mirrors that stare with the steadiness
of glass. They may have porous bodies
like ponds in rain, like the diaphanous
wings of dragonflies in sun. They may have
tails indistinguishable from the skeletal
blades of dead grasses, move on feet
as quiet and precise as cobwebs.

That’s the fourth of seven stanzas in a poem by Pattiann Rogers entitled “A Mystic in the Garden Mistakes Lizards for Ghosts and Extrapolates on Same,” from her recent book, Generations, which I am re-reading for the first time. Isn’t it marvellous? What impresses me here as a writer is the way she uses imagery from nature to describe things that are themselves natural (though the narrator imagines it otherwise). The usual rhetorical strategy in contemporary, image-driven poetry is to try and highlight the strangeness of a thing in one realm, natural or human, by comparing it to something in the other — see, for example, the opening lines of yesterday’s poem at Poetry Daily. But in this stanza, as so often in Rogers’ work, the similes are all intramural.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do more of myself for some time, so I’m happy to have found a model. Last week, I was enthusing about Pattiann Rogers to some friends via email, and said I felt as if had graduated from Mary Oliver and John Haines and entered advanced studies. I hasten to add that that’s not meant as any kind of objective evaluation; all three are brilliant poets, very different each from the other, and it would be absurd to try and rank them. I am simply saying that for me, right now, this poet, this book is what I need to read. I’m sure I have plenty more to learn from Oliver and Haines, too — but not now, when the mental excrescences formed by my too-frequent readings of their works largely prevent me from seeing them in a new light. Writing teachers are fond of advising beginning poets to let their work ferment in a bottom drawer for a few months before revisiting it; why should a reader’s approach to poems be any different?

“When the student is ready, the master appears” — so goes the saying. I’ve apprenticed myself to many masters over the years; Rogers is simply the latest. I’m not too good at the art of literary criticism, which is why I so seldom engage in it here, but one other thing that really impresses me is the way Generations advances an argument, or series of related arguments, in a very subtle way that doesn’t dominate the collection, but simply provides a connective string for those who choose to read the poems in order. I like thematically unified collections in general, but I also like the freedom to read poems at random and not feel completely lost. With Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, for example — surely one of the greatest books of poetry in English written in the last three decades — if you don’t start from the beginning, you’re not going to understand who is speaking when and where all the anguish is coming from.

“A Mystic in the Garden Mistakes Lizards for Ghosts and Extrapolates on Same”: I’ll admit the title made me raise an eyebrow at first. In my own poetry, with the exception of the recent Public Poems and Odes to Tools series, the title is almost always the last thing I write, and I like titles that are reasonably brief and as allusive as possible: “Generations,” for example. That’s obviously not an uncommon preference among contemporary poets (I’m such a conformist). But quite often, as here, Pattiann Rogers turns her titles into a kind of stage direction. If I’d written this poem, my focus would have been on the slow discovery of who the narrator is and the way her perceptions don’t quite jibe with reality. It would have been all about that revelation. And I dare say that would’ve been how an Oliver or a Haines would have approached the subject, as well. One can also imagine a more urbane poet — a May Swenson or Charles Wright, say — dwelling on the mystic’s mistake, and one can be reasonably sure that all of these poets would have used the third person narrator to establish ironic distance.

After the title, though, this poem is able to dispense with irony and delve more deeply into the nature of perception and revelation. We are led to wonder how it is that clearly erroneous beliefs can lead sometimes to profound understanding. After speculating on the sort of ghostly, “eternally vanishing” god that the ghosts must worship, the poem concludes:

The ghosts of this garden are like
the emptiness of pods and husks
under midnight snow when the moon
has passed, like the pause following
the clank and lock of the gate
at dusk, like the inevitable in motion
beyond the cosmic horizon. Strange,
what void these ghosts would leave
should the garden ever be without them.

And the environmentalist in me nods emphatic assent.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poem Dissection 101


Via bubbl.us, via Never Neutral.

Poem dissection, like frog dissection, isn’t as straightforward as it may at first appear. Take, for example, Matsuo Basho’s famous haiku about a frog. Are the relationships between the ideas in the poem generative, associative, or a mixture of both? Here are two possible ways to map them, which strike me as equally valid.

So obviously with longer poems, many of the routes become quite arbitrary indeed.

bubbl.us diagram of a poem
Click the image to see a larger and more legible version.

The best I can say about this exercise is that it helped me discover a relationship between two ideas in the poem that I hadn’t consciously recognized, the one between ‘it wants to go home with you’ and ‘there are no motels in this vacancy.’ Whether this will be of any real use to me if/when I get around to revising the poem, I don’t know, but in general I do find that, while the intuitive mind ought to be paramount during the original drafting, the analytical mind should take over during editing and revision. So as far as the author is concerned, this sort of exercise can’t hurt, even if it looks like a bloody mess to everyone else.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Fly in a Broken Window

fly-in-a-broken-window

Via Magnetic Poetry Online Kits (hat tip: sister AE). Also influenced by Tiel Aisha Ansari. Yes, I know I’m not an artist!

I was honored to have inspired the prompt at Read Write Poem this week with my “Blue Jeans” magnetic poem. You can find links to the other responses here.

While Shuffle Words compositions are constrained by the small number of total words, the problem with Magnetic Poetry Online’s Poet Edition (which sounds redundant, doesn’t it?) is the limited number of good verbs. Whoever put their word collection together seems to have been under the impression that poetry is chiefly concerned with nouns and adjectives.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Public Poems: condensed version

Public Poems word cloud
(click on image to enlarge)

[audio:https://www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/public-poems-condensed-version.mp3]

Some people don’t “get” poetry because they’re exclusively visual thinkers. For many others of a more practical frame of mind, the seemingly arbitrary arrangement of words into lines, stanzas, and units of meaning constitutes the main stumbling-block. Debates about how to reach those kinds of folks are anything but academic if you’re on a committee charged with selecting and presenting poetry to an indifferent public.

Well, I’m here to help. I’ve taken the complete texts of the first ten poems in my Public Poems series and run them through Wordle (thanks, John) which discards the most common words (a, on, the, etc.) and puts all the others into a configurable word cloud, a variation on the tag clouds familiar to anyone who spends an appreciable amount of time online. I then made an audio recording of the cloud (here’s a download link for those who can’t see the Flash player above). This sort of thing could be broadcast over a public address system at regular intervals wherever the poetry clouds are displayed, with results perhaps comparable to the well-known consequences of backmasking on vinyl records of heavy metal music back in the 1980s, only without the sacrifices of family pets. From these dense clouds a kind of condensation would take place, poetry falling like rain on the parched soil of the imagination. Or not.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Morning porch noodling


Video link

What is wrong with me that I so rarely listen to recorded music anymore? It’s not that I prefer to make my own music; weeks can go by without me picking up the harmonica. But I don’t feel especially deprived, either, because I hear birdsong all day long, interspersed with train whistles and other sounds. And I do love that.

Even more pleasurable, to me, is the feeling of what I can only call musical sobriety. Back in the days of my musical addiction, 15 and 20 years ago, if a record wasn’t playing in the background, I didn’t feel right. And it seemed as if I had to play tunes I liked in order to drown out the annoying tunes that would somehow get lodged in my head on infinite repeat — so-called ear worms.

That turned out not to be the case. Now that I rarely make a point of listening to recorded music, I rarely get ear worms, either. When I do pick up the harmonica, I generally play the same couple dozen tunes, but that’s O.K. I’m quite comfortable with the idea that I’ll never be a real musician. Even at the height of my music addiction, I could never stomach the endless repetitions that true practice entails.

By the same token, I don’t suppose many musicians can fathom how we writers can stand to go over and over the same few words until we get them right. Writing poems and practicing songs seem as if they should be closely related practices — they have, after all, a common origin, and are still closely allied in most oral traditions. But for me, as a free verse poet, melody is a serious distraction. Now that I’ve finally gotten the incessant tunes out of my head, I’m able to hear the sounds and rhythms of language much more easily. Poems come to me now like they never did before.

I’m not trying to suggest, however, that what works for me might be good for anyone else. British poet-blogger Dick Jones says that playing in bands for a few decades improved his writing enormously. It sounds as if his initial motivation differed a bit from mine; I never had much ambition to “set the world alight with my deathless prose and incandescent verse” the way Dick says he did when he was young. Playing bass in public sounds like just the medicine he needed.

Audiences identify with the vocalist or adulate the lead guitarist; they don’t notice the bass guitarist. He plunks alone, shadowy & monosyllabic behind the fireworks. So I stood on the left of the drummer, laid back on the rhythm and just enjoyed the simple process of getting to grips with a musical instrument.

And, over time, this attention to the medium over the message had its kickback into writing. For the first time I started to write poems principally for the sake of the statement made and the craft of putting it together.

Dick and I may have been following parallel courses, though. Because it seems to me that we’ve each stumbled on a discipline that has taught us a little better how to listen.