final class, blank verse

Blank verses is like a wall on the page, long edges, little white space.  And perhaps, in an effort to comply with iambic pentameter, poets stretch out an idea to make the line, flush out a point they might otherwise have left to interpretation.  It seems a suitable format for the dense “Directive” by Frost.  I hadn’t read it before class and was unsettled by it’s reading.  It sounded like list of my own bad habbits – habits of perseveration, not uncommon, I’d guess, for writers. 

As Frost moves through the woods and “all this now too much for us”, he continually re-introduces us to what are, most likely, his own confusions.  I’m tempted to say, “Go kiss your grandchildren.” 

I’m sure I share with many writers insomnia and a nagging need to understand people – motives, emotions, experiences – and existence – meaning, morality, faith.  But at some point, aren’t we ill-equipped to comprehend it all?  Frost suggests that there is a point at which “you’re lost enough to find yourself.”  But just when you find orientation for your values and identify, your mind can start wandering to the past, the dissipation and loss of what we care for… the “house that is no more a house” just a little dent in the landscape that’s “now slowly closing like a dent in dough.”

This reminds me of a cab ride in Dublin many years ago with my mother.  I remember we were, as we tend to, talking about many things at once, including my grandfather’s quip that, “There’s got to be a heaven because this is a bag of shite.”  “Everyone's got a bag of shite,” she said… “We just have to keep moving though, don’t we?”  But writers dig through their bags of shite.  This is how we come to learn.  We cull through emotional memory and then dream up images, landscapes, and characters… let them mingle, see how things play out.  Sometimes we find a sense of resolve life didn’t allow.  Sometimes we reveal a truth.  But I suppose we also torture ourselves.

In any case, we got the cab, and the cabbie, Donny Sullivan, without prompt, began telling us about his family.  He was one of sixteen and whenever a boy turned sixteen (and they were mostly boys), they were sent out of the house.  They had to find a job, a place to sleep. 

When we got out of the cab, my mother, dry as ever, says, “You don’t think he doesn’t have a bag of shite.”  I laughed.  She was right.

So, as I read directive, I think of what a luxury reflection is, time to comprehend (or try as best we can).  But on the other hand, I wonder how much more peace Donny Sullivan has known because his life didn’t allow him a certain kind of artistic self-absorption.  He had to go out and make a buck.

To quote my mother again… “We really can’t be happy without being of service.”  And maybe that is the final, balancing note.  Be a writer, investigate the emotional terrain of life, reveal existence and, as Colum McCann says, "the anonymous corners of life," but do it to make other people’s lives better.  Do it to reveal injustice, beauty, humor, courage, trauma, whatever truths you can find.  And, among others, do it for the Donny Sullivans of the world who didn't get to go out an explore.  But if you turn too far inward, if writing becomes too much about your own need to pick scabs, as opposed to seeking life, and an arrogant desire to comprehend creation in its entirety, you’ll find yourself many years later picking through the woods with a broken goblet hoping to “drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”  I think I’ll take a more humble route and accept my confusion along with family, friendship, and service to my fellow man.

the open form class

I complain about form but when given the chance to write in open form, still find some rhyme, some repetition etc.  But it’s not regular rhyme, meter, line length, or number of lines per stanza.  It just now and then finds order, which is how we find life isn’t it?  Life comes with occasional poetry – meeting the right person, at the right time etc.  But in even in this open form... the editing process felt the same as editing everything else, including prose.  I pulled out a lot more than thought I would.  With editing in general, I often remove what was the seed of the thought – grown itself into redundancy. 

It is a chaotic world, but we do occasionally find order.  The God I believe in gave us brains to sort out our universe as best we can… and perhaps much of the meaning we find in our existences is from this discovering of occasional poetry – creating families, art, relieving suffering for our fellow humans.  Perhaps chaos, like our own mortality, is the sweetener of our lives - and poetry would not be possible without it. 

Paul says to seek great images.  What a great way to think of language… and doesn’t it help conceptualize voice.  If what we recall are not phrases but images, necessarily it let’s us prioritize effect over words.  And doesn’t an image express an emotion so much better than describing the emotion… picture worth a thousand words etc, Maybe the more a writer focuses on effect, image, mood, the less likely he/she is to stray into exhibition, the less tempted he/she will be by lovely metaphors, which don't serve the story. 

However… when seeking this image, I have to remember that poetry doesn’t have to tell a story.  In a story, you necessarily root it in time, place.  Without these roots, you get no mileage from the uncertainty you conjure with suggestions, hints, ambiguous winks to the reader.  But a poem may have a lyrical strength, unanchored by scene.  This seems an obvious point when you read Neruda or to some extent Langston Hughes – both have a staggering ability to freeze an instant, spin it on it’s side, expose it.  But, on the other hand… would the Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock be the same without it’s loose fitting story, the momentum it rolls out with even with its simple “Let us go then, you and I,” isn’t this a narrative device?  Doesn’t a collection of short stories boil away in Ginsberg’s America?  Doesn’t Levertov’s Uncertain Oneiromancy read like a story?  So... note to self... don’t be afraid to prioritize the lyrical.  Don’t be afraid to discard the narrative?  Just know what you’re doing.  

the sonnet class

Following up on last week, I felt very confined by the Sonnet.  And it apparently was clear in class.  At first, I was unusually proud of my piece, but in class it came off more as a collection of nice lines than something cut of whole cloth.  There was so much emotion bubbling between the lines and I felt like Paul was giving me permission to relax my adherence to the rules… or at least such emphasis on formal presentation.  So, I literally went immediately to the library and wrote the poem I wanted to write… which in many ways deals with finding my own life… but sounds quite a lot like finding my own voice. 

Maybe finding your own voice requires the same kind of self-confidence it takes to find your own life.  There are many smart writers who seem to have the same voice… or at least unoriginal voices.  There are many good people who seem to have similar lives.  In some cases these are beautiful lives of their own choosing… but in other cases these are lives witch just happened… perhaps like a derivative voice.  A friend once told me that life is, at its best, dull and good.  I struggle with this.  But perhaps you have just have to ask yourself what kind of life you want, and what you’re willing to risk.  Maybe all good lives eventually do become a bit dull.  If public service is the rent we pay for life (something I firmly believe) than maybe a bit of dullness is the price we pay for home.  Perhaps having the life you want, like finding your voice as a writer, has much to do with allowing yourself to be dissatisfied, taking a look within and saying, “Ah-huh!”  Well... in any case... as scattered as that is... I think that's what my sonnet is about.  

the villanelle class

Not to beat a dead horse, but now as I read more and think more, I see how voice can be more complex than I originally suggested.  As Paul pointed out, John Ashbury uses parallel registers.  In Daffy Duck in Hollywood, do we accuse him of using inconsistent strategies of dealing with his material merely because he references La Celestina and Speedy Gonzalez in the same poem?  A voice, like a personality, may be complex but not maladaptive.  Aren’t the most interesting people complex, eclectic?  This is relevant for the novelist as well, who unlike the poet in most cases, may have to conjure many compelling voices, not just the narrator’s or narrators’, but characters. 

It’s so easy, isn’t it, to want to write “like” someone else because they impress you.  But ultimately, I think that could only ever be as satisfying as being in a relationship with a person because they impress you… or think it’s expected.  There is a unique lens of experiences and personality with which I must view the world, and only through that lens can I see the stories, images, truths that I need to see.  The same is true for my characters.  If you have compassion for your characters, I think, you notice they arrive with heads full of vocabulary and hearts full of need.  And when you have the humility to set yourself aside, a siren goes off when you put foreign words in their mouths, or ill-fitting motives in their hearts. 

Now, to tie this back to the Villanelle.  If it’s hard enough to find your own voice, how do you squeeze this complex collection of vocabulary, attitude, style etc into rigid patterns of repetition and rhyme?  Well, I am only a student.  And if finding my own voice is the priority at this stage of my development,  I think I can nudge a few conventions just a bit to make room my voice.

the pastoral class

One issue Paul brought up today, and has several times before, is a poet’s voice.  And a poet discovers not just a voice but a shape – there’s a distinctive shape on the page that a poet’s work takes.  I can’t claim to know these shapes.  Although, it seems more obvious with Neruda or E.E. Cummigns, maybe Yeats, than others.

What is voice?  What’s the difference between voice and style?  Style, it seems to me, deals with a writer’s bag of tricks – devices, techniques, emphasis – maybe style has to do mostly with strategy.  I will convey this emotion using emotive language.  I will create tension by conjuring a relevant distraction - Levine’s use of repetition in Smoke for example.  He gives us new images of smoke and light, reminding us of the dual images, the tension – can you imagine in the air filled with smoke? - the light came from nowhere and went nowhere – objects turned one way then another to catch the light - the light overflowing with smoke – why is the air filled with smoke? - just like the sun, hidden in smoke.  Keats uses personification – the foster child of silence – unravished bride of quietness.  But are these examples of the poets’ voices?  Actually, yes… they are, aren’t they?  But only because they’ve made them so.   

My piano professor, who follows this blog, used to say that much virtuosity was unnecessary.  It doesn’t affect sound, it plays no role in interpretation.  It’s for show.  But some of a concert pianist’s “voice” may come out in his virtuosity – his adagios, forte, pianissimo etc. 

Maybe style, then, is a bit like an attitude.  We can adopt attitudes to suit situations… but it is in a collection of attitudes we find personality.  So, you and I may share an attitude about Jazz but have very different personalities.  Similarly, poets may share strategies/styles and have very different “voices”.  For example don’t Janet Lewis and Yeats both employ a similar strategy of evoking place (and emotions tethered to it) via sounds, particularly sounds associated with water?  But this is more like shared attitudes, because considering the big picture, they’re very different poets – they have different voices. 

So, to conclude - maybe a practical way to distinguish between voice and style is just to ask yourself, as John Gardner does, is it working in service of the poem.  If a poem is of a whole, beats with one heart, and rings true, than it has an authentic voice.  I, the writer, am saying something the way it has to be said.  Therefore, I am not saying something because I have found an interesting way to say it.  I am not playing Rachmaninoff’s C# minor prelude with my hands drifting or flying above the keys.  I am not inserting a clever, adjective laden metaphor.  Or, to paraphrase Aristoltle, I am not adding parts on to a person as I carve a statute (a third arm).  The statue, like the poem, need only have the parts of the idea.  Everything tacked on is empty style, not part of an authentic, unified artistic voice.  

the ode class

I think, at it’s best, an ode should just reveal, expose a barely hidden treasure, a true but maybe obscured or over-looked beauty.   That is what Keats does with Autumn.  Exposing for us the “mellow fruitlessness”… Autumn as mystic Swelling the gourd, plumping the hazel shells.  Summer, this torrent of life too much for the Earth to contain, as sunshine brims over the “clammy cells” of the flowers and plants.  

But sometimes what the ode is revealing is within us, exposing to us a potential to see beauty.  The ode is a teacher.  Hart Crane teaches us how to look at the Brooklyn Bridge and all that surrounds it.  The ode says to us… see how aspirational those sails are, grip those images of freedom now, before “elevators drop us from our day…”  See that “silver-paced” city as the Oz that it is, it’s very being announcing “implicitly thy freedom staying thee!”  What a special thing.  But don’t stop there, as you move toward Manhattan.  Look up!  Look up to the “immaculate sigh of stars” over the sleepless bridge, over the sleepless river “vaulting to the sea.”  How much richer our lives can be, if we allow ourselves to be mesmerized.