Don’t you just hate it when a blogger writes a provocative title for a post that turns out to be little more than a link? Me too — sorry! But there’s kind of an interesting discussion going on at Open Micro, and I think it would be helpful to those of us who try and write haiku (or 17-syllable American sentences, for that matter) if we could hear from a few more perspectives. If you’re primarily a reader, for example, what makes a haiku satisfying to read? Do you even notice how many syllables it has? Stop on over and let us know.
“A dusky train of ink”: Darwin in Cape Verde
What if, instead of brilliant naturalist, Charles Darwin had been an epic poet? Actually, he may have been both. Here’s how The Voyage of the Beagle begins.
After having been twice driven back
by heavy southwestern gales, Her Majesty’s ship
Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command
of Captain Fitz Roy, R. N., sailed
from Devonport on the 27th of December,
1831. The object of the expedition
was to complete the survey of Patagonia
and Tierra del Fuego, commenced
under Captain King in 1826
to 1830, — to survey the shores
of Chile, Peru, and of some islands
in the Pacific — and to carry a chain
of chronometrical measurements round the World.
On the 6th of January we reached Teneriffe,
but were prevented landing, by fears
of our bringing the cholera: the next morning
we saw the sun rise behind the rugged
outline of the Grand Canary island,
and suddenly illuminate the Peak of Teneriffe,
whilst the lower parts were veiled in fleecy clouds.
This was the first of many delightful days
never to be forgotten. On the 16th
of January, 1832, we anchored
at Porto Praya, in St. Jago, the chief
island of the Cape de Verd archipelago.
The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the sea,
wears a desolate aspect. The volcanic fires
of a past age, and the scorching heat
of a tropical sun, have in most places
rendered the soil unfit for vegetation.
The country rises in successive steps
of table-land, interspersed with some
truncate conical hills, and the horizon
is bounded by an irregular chain of more
lofty mountains. The scene, as beheld
through the hazy atmosphere of this climate,
is one of great interest; if, indeed,
a person, fresh from sea, and who has just walked,
for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees,
can be a judge of anything but his own happiness.
Continue reading ““A dusky train of ink”: Darwin in Cape Verde”
Open Micro
Yes, I know my photo blog is down. Shutterchance, the host, sent around an email saying they had experienced massive server failure, and were working hard to try and reconstruct files. It doesn’t sound too encouraging. And I know that Via Negativa was out of commission for close to a day. My blog host and patron, Matt, suggested that’s because I had over 30 active plugins, and the server couldn’t take it. So I’ve been cutting plugins right and left and holding my breath. No more ShareThis, no more silly word count in the footer, no more Table of Contents. (Did anyone ever actually use ShareThis? If so, for what?)
There for a few minutes yesterday morning, even The Morning Porch was down for maintenance, which meant that all three of my personal blogs were MIA at the same time. Scary. What to do?
Well, create a new site, of course. Check out the new group blog for micropoetry, Open Micro.
Most people use microblog services like Twitter and its open-source counterpart Identica for updates on their daily activities, and that’s fine. Some people use them for hilarious bon mots — I try to follow as many of those as possible. At qarrtsiluni, we use Twitter and Identica to help disseminate news about the magazine and our contributors. There are even some novelists taking advantage of the medium, trickling out new work one or two sentences at a time — enough of them that a new word has been coined for the genre, twitterature. But some of us simply enjoy the challenge of trying to create complete poems or prose-poems within the strict confines of a single microblog post of 140 characters, spaces included.
There are actually quite a few haiku writers on Twitter, though of course not all of them take the art too seriously. But it was actually the much less populous Identica whose recent addition of groups sparked the creation of Open Micro. Some of us on Twitter and Identica had long been favoriting other people’s most lyrical notices and hoarding them in our Favorites pages (mine are here), but with the ability to create a Poetry group page came a new idea: wouldn’t it be cool if we could somehow combine all our favorites pages into one?
That’s essentially what Open Micro will do. We’re trying to be careful to get permission for everything we post, though this isn’t as onerous as it sounds, since any micropoem by a fellow contributor is fair game. The group will probably add a few more members, but what we really need now are readers. Stop on over! And be sure to bookmark it, so that the next time Via Negativa vanishes into the ether, you’ll still have something to read.
Tight and Highly Musical
some very helpful guidelines for submission, culled from actual literary magazines
We seek work of the highest literary quality. Our only criterion is excellence. If your writing has an original voice, substance, and significance, send it to us. The main criterion for selection is quality. We like alliteration, extended metaphors, image, movement and poems that can pass the “so what” test. We look for the best writing available and are often pleased to introduce new writers. Poems should emanate from textured, evocative images, use language with an awareness of how words sound and mean, and have a definite sense of voice. We are looking for edgy, original poems. Our only fixed requirement is good writing. Each line should help carry the poem, and an individual vision must be evident. Be sure you read contemporary poetry. English poetry is a continuum in time, and the practice as well as the reading of poetry benefit from a broad knowledge and understanding of the development of the art and craft. Writers should expect their work to be considered within the full context of old and new poetry in English and other languages. [Our magazine’s] intention is to publish the best writing available, both from beginning and established writers. We prefer poems that are between 8 and 80 lines; serious, well-crafted, and full of imagery; tight and highly musical. We seek the very best work whether by Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners or by little-known (or even previously unpublished) writers. Work that conveys a sense of necessity and implores readers to pay attention is what belongs on [this magazine’s] pages. We are interested in any strong writing of a literary variety, but are especially partial to poetry that engages the reader through a distinctive voice—be it lyric, narrative, etc. The editors are especially interested in original writing that engages in the work of honest communication. We always ask “What’s at stake in this writing?” “What’s reckoned with that’s important for other people to read?” Send work that has a strong jab, work that knows how to sing, work that can endure long nights and early mornings. Originality and precision of language are important for us. Take us someplace new. Move us. Transport us. Run us over with a locomotive of brilliant imagery and voice. The most successful work is exciting, new, fresh, creative, carefully-wrought. We’ll use our intuition and a keen sense of smell to guide us in the right direction, and we’ll know what we want when we find it. [Our magazine’s] core equation: Idea + Imagination x Craft = Lasting Poetry. Poetry submitted for publication in [our magazine] must be typewritten. We suggest you familiarize yourself with our journal before submitting.
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.
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.
- “When the wind is right you can hear, even at this distance, the crying of those who have fallen and are unable to rise.” (14 votes)
—Louis Jenkins, “Somersault” (from No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets) - “Acknowledge that you are mute
without expecting the reward of speech
for your honesty.” (12 votes)
—Irene McKinney, “Losing Purpose” (The Girl With The Stone In Her Lap) - “come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.” (12 votes)
—Lucille Clifton, untitled (The Book of Light) - “Does love move mountains? No, but something does,
and never as we wish…” (12 votes)
—Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “After the Reunion” (The Crack in Everything) - “No sign of safety
in the darkness coming on,
no direction but hickory and oak,
the unsliced bread,
and all the zones of terror and love.” (12 votes)
—Harry Humes, “Safety Zone” (Winter Weeds) - “Water
drips till it sculpts a cup
into a slab of stone.” (12 votes)
—Yusef Komunyakaa, “Rhythm Method” (Thieves of Paradise)
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.
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.
In a 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.
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.
Rockin’ new links
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.
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.