SubscribeFebruary 1st, 2012
Roberta Spear, a poem
Mostly this post is about a single poem written by Roberta Spear, but I can’t help but read it through the introduction by Philip Levine in A Sweetness Rising: New and Selected Poems.
He introduced the poems because he is a champion of her work, and rightly so. She’s brilliant, if I don’t always agree with how she sees the world.
He says of her, “in a singular way she envisioned herself as another aspect of her environment, the one gifted with the language to speak for all the individual creations that made up her world.” Oh yes, I do think she must have understood herself as one of Earth’s moments. This is where her poetry undermines my perceptual limitations and is also the reason I am very glad I picked this book up when I was at Powell’s recently. She has much she can teach me.
So Levine is perceptive about her work and her sensibility as a poet, but he also says this: “Thus she was back in the Central Valley where she’d grown up in the town of Hanford, some thirty miles south of Fresno. Now she was not only a poet but also the mother of a son and soon a daughter. For as long as she lived she gave herself totally to the roles of wife, mother, poet, and friend to the cluster of poets settled in and around Fresno.”
I’m not sure why that bugs me so much but it does. If you look at the website dedicated to her memory, you’ll see her defined like this as well.
1948-2003
Mother,Wife, Poet, Dancer, Friend
I have no idea how she thought of herself, but to be defined in this way seems in direct opposition to the spirit that comes through the poems.
1928-20??
Father, ex-Husband, Poet, Teacher, Friend
Is that how Levine would have his posthumous website read?
Meh.
Does it matter? Except in the fact that it irritates me. Does it irritate you?
Anyway, to something more inspiring…
here is “Adrift”
Like one of da Vinci's clam shells, this church came to a rest on a lip of granite overlooking the lake. After the glaciers had vanished into themselves, the shifting of continents slowed to a halt, it settled here a thousand meters up, its rosy windows still perfectly hinged, each hand-cut Romaneque stone perched so precipitously that this morning no one can leave Mass and wander aimlessly into the sunlight without dread of plummeting to their death. And yet, this is not about the fear or the intimate prayers of the people trapped inside. If St. Catherine, carved in oak and painted blue, could speak, she would point to the power of speaking one's mind, to the holiness stiffening the legs of an old woman making her way up the path now, a cane on one hand, a basket of greens in the other. She would praise the steady spirit of the wind that blows open the door to the church, filling the sleeves of each man, woman, and child so that they can float slowly down to their cottages in the village below. All in all, words she knows by heart just as she knows the taste of bread or the chill of these stones. Just as she knows that other girl Caterina, the wool dyer's daughter who, after the last person is gone, climbs up to the roof of the church where the tile layer is dozing in the afternoon heat. There she passes the time with those who never believed that the world was flat--the swallows, the unwavering branches of the chestnut, a tongue of smoke rising from the valley. Still young enough to count her years, she has no idea where she'll go next. But at least beyond those clouds which, like ashes or feathers, have been drifting on the lake since the beginning of the millennium.
I mean really, does the woman who wrote that seem like someone who would be explained with the catalogue: Mother,Wife, Poet, Dancer, Friend?
Anyway, pffffffft to Levine. I’m going to try and push that away and just concentrate on how Spear achieves what she does in that poem. The thing that first jumps at me is the way time is both of incredibly long duration and also continually in the present. I so deeply admire that.
Oh yea for wonderful things to think about, and wonderful writers to learn from!
January 31st, 2012
poetry humour
I’m part of a reading soon so I found this “how not to” hilarious.
I solemnly promise not to mimic this guy, although he will be in my heart.
January 28th, 2012
Philip Levine, a poem
Here is the poem that got me in this collection:
Ask For Nothing
Instead walk alone in the evening heading out of town toward the fields asleep under a darkening sky; the dust risen from your steps transforms itself into a golden rain fallen earthward as a gift from no known god. The plane trees along the canal bank, the few valley poplars, hold their breath as you cross the wooden bridge tht leads nowhere you haven't been, for this walk repeats itself once or more a day. That is why in the distance you see beyond the first ridge of low hills where nothing every grows, men and women astride mules, on horseback, some even on foot, all the lost family you never prayed to see, praying to see you, chanting and singing to bring the moon down into the last of the sunlight. Behind you the windows of the town blink on and off, the houses close down; ahead the voices fade like music ever deep water, and then are gone; even the sudden, tumbling finches have fled into smoke, and the one road whitened in moonlight leads everywhere.
It was the “tumbling finches” that got me. But even so, there is something about it I cannot be easy with.
On the whole I don’t react well to Levine’s writing. I am not really sure why exactly that is, except it feels facile somehow, too perfect, without blood.
Take this one for example. Typing it, the lines were so easy to remember. The words, each and every one, seemed perfect, like some perfect set of cogs that whirred without any metal rubbing against metal. And I did like it, but it left an after taste of bitterness.
Can I be so awful? Like Levine’s in the business of being a poet and not the business of being human.
Probably not at all fair, but it is how I react.
January 23rd, 2012
writing advice received
I found a wonderful article.
I knew it was wonderful when I read this.
Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscious is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing.
Before that it was just great.
January 22nd, 2012
apparently Philip Larkin wrote bad poetry
Of course I know that he must have done so. I know Shakespeare must have done so, but it remains, in some ways, astonishing to think about.
There is a new book of Larkin’s poems – a “complete collected” by Archie Burnett. There is also a rather good article about confronting what “completes” reveal about a poet.
Burnett’s edition includes “all of Larkin’s poems whose texts are accessible.” These texts, meticulously checked against primary sources, are offered under four rubrics: the four volumes published in Larkin’s lifetime “preserved as collections” (117 poems); other poems published in the poet’s lifetime but not included in any collection (36 poems in order of publication date); poems not published in the poet’s lifetime (403 poems in chronological order determined by the date on which Larkin stopped working on each poem); and undated or approximately dated poems (10 poems).
Of the total, then, of 566 poems (some as brief as two lines), 413 are poems Larkin did not publish himself. Fewer than a dozen of these poems could conceivably make their way without Larkin; for the approximately four hundred remaining poems, their only claim to anyone’s interest is that they were written by Philip Larkin. He said himself, “If one is interested in a poet one wants all of his poems in the order they were published, not a selection according to his own idea reshuffled to conceal how bad he was when he started, the whole with lots of alterations to suit the latest fashion in adjectives.”
When I read that bit “how bad he was when he started” was both aghast and amused. I mean who wants to express one’s horrible clum-bustedness to the world at large? Everyone knows one has to learn greatness – I don’t care how much talent one has at birth, the language still needs to be learnt – but to display one’s early ineptitude?
Gack.
I suppose it comes down to allowing great poets to be human first and great poets second, but the desire to keep them as icons is rather strong. I suppose that desire is about as strong as one’s own when it comes to not seeming like a blithering idiot if one is fond of one’s intelligence. For example, imagine reading Ayn Rand at 12 and being taken by the ideas. Forgivable, I suppose, if just barely. But in a 40-year old? Gawd.
Still. I think I’ll buy Burnett’s book. It may give me hope that I might one day produce at least one really good poem.
There are a number of Larkin poems online. Try here, here and here for a sample.
January 14th, 2012
a writer’s daemon
A friend sent me the link to Elizbeth Gilbert’s youtube/Ted Talk vid “A new way to think about creativity”.
In in she talks about her relationship to writing now that she’s had tremendous success with Eat, Pray, Love. I’m glad I watched the video, because she has some interesting things to say about writing, about fear, and about one’s sense of self and the creativity that erupts outside the self’s control.
I should say that I recognize some of her examples from personal experience – my mind does odd things that are well outside conscious control. But when she creates a narrative to explain where the source of that creativity must therefore be, we diverge. Widely.
I should mention that I haven’t read her book. It was the title that made sure I didn’t pick it up. Eat. OK. Love. Yep. Pray? No. I mean to whom? But more of that in a minute.
Early on in the video (01:05) she says that now she’s had this amazing success everyone asks her if she isn’t afraid that she won’t ever be able to match that experience. In short she says, yes, she’s afraid of failure, but she keeps on going. And I’m with her here. Fear is just a sign post. As long as you are still able to think outside the fear, you get to decide if you run from the page or stay.
The bulk of the rest of the video describes the story she tells herself to keep on going in the face of that fear. The first thing she does is explain the fear by asking the question why be afraid – should anyone be afraid of the work they were put on the earth to do?
Here the explanation begins to wind down traditional Western supernatural/dualistic paths. Why be afraid is a good question, but then to redefine the question as afraid of the work they were put on the earth to do (02:25) transforms the query’s ground into a realm where work is purpose and people are “put” on earth – which of course suggests a “putter” if we are the “putees”. Her god has snuck in. This particular narrative is one of the most fattening in the cookie jar of easy explanations; probably explains its popularity.
She does make a special case for creative work. She mentions her father (a chemical engineer) who was never asked the question about fear of failure. That was delightful, and true. Creativity does have a special place in our lives. We do think of it differently. Our society has decided that creativity and suffering are somehow linked – this is where she goes with this. She doesn’t like it. She feels this kind of assumption is dangerous. In part this is because – as she says – it is exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me.
How does one go on writing with a mindset like that? And what does it imply about the reasons for writing?
The way she goes on is to externalize responsibility for her creativity and to accept only that personal responsibility that she can meet. She calls it a (05:38) protective psychological construct.
Her model for that is the daemon or the genie.
Creativity, in this model, comes from the divine attendant spirit. The artist’s job was to show up at the page/canvas/stone/clay.
This puts part of the credit for a success or failure outside the self (notice that this is a singular notion – the assumed unitary Self). She sees externalizing creative genius as protecting creative types from death by narcissism. She goes on to say that with the advent of the Renaissance human beings become the center of the universe and creativity becomes seen as part of the Self and she feels this is the source of the inordinate death rate of artists.
Probably wrong but it’s part of an explanatory rubric to explain why we need “mystery” of the supernatural sort and a lay audience’s desire to have causal explanations to explain (and put to rest) mental illness and creativity.
And that’s the heart of it I think – we want a safe psychological construct / a narrative / to circumscribe our duties, our responsibilities, our role in life. She goes so far as to say that (08:19-09:10)
allowing somebody, one mere person, to believe that her or she is the vessel, the font and the essence and the source of all divine creative unknowable eternal mystery is just like a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos and creates all these unreasonable expectations about performance and I think that the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.
Gack. As if artists pre-Renaissance didn’t off themselves. They just did it because the “daemon” abandoned them – a being over which they had no control at all except through begging rites.
To be fair, Gilbert does realize that many people will argue with the idea that there are “fairies flying about rubbing fairy juice on their projects” (09:33). She asks though, why not explain things this way.
Well, because it’s wrong, and it won’t do the job she wants it to.
I agree with her that the artistic process is maddening and capricious – or at least that it can be. But I doubt that’s because of the absence of fairy juice. Gilbert does have a delightful story of the poet Ruth Stone (10:17-11:45).
As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming…cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, “run like hell” to the house as she would be chased by this poem.
The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would “continue on across the landscape looking for another poet”.
And then there were these times, there were moments where she would almost miss it. She is running to the house and is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her. She grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In those instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first.
And here it is – the physical symptoms of creativity tied to the supernatural narrative.
I have some oddball symptoms myself – but here’s the thing – there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means. An example: when you walk on a prairie you experience a flat earth. This does not mean the earth is flat. You see the shape of a woman on your neighbor’s wall. This does not mean it is a visitation from Virgin Mary (or from Cthulhu’s wife – does Cthulhu have a wife? Is Cthulhu the wife?). You see the sky as blue. It doesn’t mean the sky is blue.
Other reasons for voices, the steam train of creativity?
I was diagnosed as an epileptic as a teen. I also had odd experiences. In the past (or currently in some people’s ideologies) these experiences would have been externalized as demons (not daemons). The doctors dealt with it through behavioural advice and pills. The other solution? Demon expulsion. Painful demon expulsion.
This is the problem with externalizing creativity – the wrong kinds of solutions to problems.
If you have an external daemon that is kind of “lame” what do you do? Beseech another I suppose. That could lead to trouble and probably not to a decent fix.
If you have an internal “daemon” – that is you see the Self as actually a series of selves over which your finite and relatively powerless aware-self has little or no control – then other solutions present themselves.
But to start that you’d have to start thinking about what those other “selves” actually are; you’d have to give up the notion that you have one “Self”; you’d have to attend to the world of those many selves as if those “world-views” mattered (despite the fact that most cannot be said to think, or to live) as much as your aware-self. This is a lot of work. Reality often is. Living in the narrative cookie jar is much easier, even if less healthy.
(Thanks Qunqun for the link.)
January 10th, 2012
it’s amazing how
moving can clear my head. Such a lovely day here, so I spent the daylight portion out-of-doors. I drove for part of it then, later, walked.
What I “discovered” is that to a large degree intent has much to do with where my mind goes – whether it is into dream-land or otherwise.
I need to get back on the page and write more now that I’ve had my holiday break, so I just packed my book bag with a notebook and nothing else. No novels, no easy escape fun-books. When I stopped for lunch during the drive, I pulled it out and – voilà – the words started popping.
When I was driving again (actually waiting to cross the border) I just kept going, and despite being mobile for most of the day I produced more yesterday than in the previous two weeks.
I think it’s a bit like clearing the blockage in the sink – once you do that the water goes down hill. Surprise!
December 27th, 2011
poetry and What does “meaning” actually mean?
I’ve been trying to read Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Susan Stewart and frankly I’m having trouble getting past the introductory chapters which, amongst other things, lay out the assumptions that are likely to underpin all further argument.
Here’s the fundamental question it makes me ask: What does “meaning” actually mean?
And yes I get that it is somewhat of a meaningless question – a tautology, as it were. But you see that’s, what the book feels like.
For this post, let me back up for a minute and give you a very basic image that I use to imagine abstraction and how it works. It is my hope that the image will make explaining my problem with this book’s set-up more obvious.
Image a black screen. On the screen near the lower center is a white globe. That white globe is the human body and all its doings, including the apprehension of the world, its assessment and consequent behavioural modification – those things we normally call a mind. Now imagine that the black screen is full of energy packets zooming around. Each of those packets has a very specific shape – triangles, cubes, rhomboids, etc. The white ball has a number of openings that conform to some of the shapes but not to others.
Here is the first layer of meaning. The shapes of energy packets in the black screen beyond the white ball that are not matched by the shapes in the white ball are meaningless. They are invisible, untouchable, silent, tasteless, etc. This layer of meaning is shared by all forms that endure for any length. Complex chemicals “recognize” some other chemicals and not others. Those ones are meaningful to the complex chemical because it can recognize them. This is not self awareness, but it is recognition.
In human beings this layer of meaning is ever present. In this sense there is no moment in the life of a human being in which the universe is meaningless since there is never a time when the basic chemical and sensual recognitions and processes are not ongoing. This has a good deal of impact on Stewart’s fundamental image of darkness and night as formless, with no boundary and therefore not allowing any intersubjectivity or an ongoing dialectic.
Second image: Along with the white sphere there is now a smaller blue sphere. The two spheres are connected; the blue sphere is dependent upon the white one. At the level of mind that starts to create self-aware abstractions (that is meaningful recognitions that endure long enough for those recognitions to be called aware, and be manipulable by the imagination), mini “worlds” are created. A mentally constituted mini world is a blue sphere. The first order meanings that are always ongoing go through a further process if they are neurologically active enough (firing time crosses a time threshold). This later process is founded on the earlier processes but are projected onto a screen of their own – and a mini world is created to rotate, grasp, assess, manipulate the few “recognitions” that are part of the being’s current concern.
What the body does is posit a smaller “body”, limiting the “variables” so that a specific concern can be addressed in a simplified, but still recognizable “field”. This is an abstraction and the blue sphere.
The thing is that once inside the world of the blue sphere the same process can be accomplished and a new tertiary set of spheres be postulated and manipulated. By their nature, these imitation “bodies” – which are abstractions and simplifications – feel like a total world in themselves. But these small blue worlds cannot function as whole worlds, anymore than a virgin can know what sex is like by reading the Kama Sutra. The risk is that the blue sphere “forgets” its connection (and dependency) on the the white sphere. This is when abstractions take on a life of their own and often get completely outside the bounds of reality – and, often, polite society. (Think about the abstraction – women are the source of trouble in men’s lives – when you create a world out of that, you can easily forget that women are also the source of new men (baby boys), the source of much pleasure, and posit a world in which women don’t need to exist – e.g. monasticism. Look at the trouble that has got the Catholic Church into.)
Here is a real world example: Ask yourself the question, How can I live a meaningful life? An abstract-generating question. You might think about ethics, or pleasure, or narrative, or a number of other areas in human life, but in an attempt to answer such a question you are unlikely to include questions like what shall I cook for dinner tonight or I wonder who’s scratching at the door. These last two are concerns of the white sphere, but not of this particular blue sphere generated by my question.
But imagine now that you get caught up in this particular blue sphere and your connection is something deep and profound. Then your tummy rumbles. The concern for supper becomes not a concern temporarily set aside, but an intrusion, even a threat to the integrity of the small blue “world”. If you cannot “remember” that the abstract blue world you created to deal with this question of meaning is just an abstracted small portion of the larger real world (the white sphere), then any “foreign” thoughts threaten the new world. In that moment, the unknown presenting itself becomes an act of war.
So back to Stewart: Her abstract world – her blue sphere – is language devoid of bodily sources of meaning.
But I disagree. Night is not formless. The unconscious is merely unaware, not empty. Language is not “a counter to the oblivion of darkness”. I doubt whether language (or poetry) counters anything at all – that is, it isn’t in a combative relationship with the body from which it originates. What combat is created, what need to counter the unseen, comes from this abstraction taking its role as a “world” literally and forgetting to dissolve in the face of the larger needs of the originating body.
December 19th, 2011
a spell in a raindrop
I was given a Kindle recently (yeah!).
The first thing I did was move a few pdfs, buy a non-fiction title and a book of poetry. I wanted to see how these various things would read in the small screen.
Reading the prose is interesting, but not truly transformative, but the poetry!
Goodness. I suspect changes will come of this move to reading digitally.
But before I get to that, just think for a moment of the crisis brought on by the Gutenberg printing press. Before that, all poetry was pretty much strictly aural. It was also a group affair. Verses were recited to live audiences and in a way the distance between minds and bodies was the “white space” of the time.
Gutenberg put a pretty big stopper in that. White space became the margins – and the real space between poet/reciter and audience were pushed out into limbo. Do we bitch about this today?
Well I suppose some of us do, but not enough to stop reading those heretic paper books.
So back to the point – ereaders essentially eliminate white space in poetry as a means of communication. There are no margins and the size of the page is (at this point) pretty fixed.
Poetry is going to have to be written for the new “page”. But so? Poetry, once the paper page was an ubiquitous reality, was written for that space. It was only then that margins really became an issue and some bright spark decided that they were part of the meaning space. (It was, apparently, a copyist’s mistake to make margins into limbo – I’m sure someone will creatively fuck up again and make an enormous leap sideways into a new creative mythology.)
As I was driving yesterday thinking about, this an image came to mind. It was a spell worker weaving a delicate set of threads—a dynamic system shimmering in a momentary perfect balance—and set humming in a raindrop ready to fall.
This is what, I think, poetry will have to become to make adequate use of the small space afforded by an ereader screen.
December 15th, 2011
Susan Pakenen Holway, two poems
Susan Pakenen Holway is a poet I met during my recent trip to south east coastal Washington. An interesting woman, with an interesting history, I decided to try and find her book of poetry. You can often tell so much about a person by what they write—not the subject matter exactly, but how the author handles the information, how he or she speaks to you the reader, how (and if) the characters are respected.
I popped into the town bookstore and, as luck would have it, the store owner happened to get two copies of Remember Where You Stated From into her store in the last few days. The book of poems forms a story of Finnish-American life from initial immigration until today’s life in and around the town of Naselle, Washington. I really didn’t know what to expect but I really had a hard time putting the book down to go to sleep later that night.
It’s astoundingly lovely.
Here’s a poem from the early phase of the book.
Up Crooked Creek Dad escaped the Russian Conscription mined iron in Sweden then set off to the land of plenty and he sent for us. We came from Finland when I was six long days on the boat worse than they tell about. Movies gloss it over me so seasick I could die, men using cow manure to keep their feet warm. Squeaky cheese, homemade sausage we brought— potatoes, herring, pudding, and a loaf of bread they gave us. Eat! mother said. Lots are dying Eat and drink. Who died? I asked, sat right up and started eating. Wyoming—the ugliest place in the world, Mother thought—wind, dust, mud, dirt. We never went hungry. Mother always milked the cow, made butter and fed the family. I chased that cow all over the prairies of Wyoming. That same cow was first on the fish boat from Knappton to Empi's Landing me carrying the lantern whe we finally came over the hill to Crooked Creek and our own Eden Valley.
Here’s another poem from the same section.
Lower River Boys Damn! I love Whiskey! And if I'm not in a fight by Saturday night, I'm drunk. Some say we died with our boots on Naah, that was John fell over the side, his boots stuck in the net but we hauled him out boots and all. There were 15 or 20 of us down there on the lower river Depression times and nothing to do but gillnet full time for dog salmon — all of us chums looking for chum. We lived in a shack or a houseboat. Once Gus beached his boat house got looped and neighbors woke him up with water up to his neck. Fishing in the dark we'd look out over the river, the boats had them Swede stoves going for coffee or soup something to keep a guy warm till our nets were full. Fight? God we'd fight. Once the boys got in a row and a stew pot went flying over walls, floor, then overboard, nothing but stew. Go to a dance Saturday night everybody out on the floor till somebody hollered, "Fight!, Fight!" We left the women there and out the fellows would run to join in— one side or the other. Springtime, blood's up, a little restless, we'd hell for the hills, prospecting I don't know as we ever found any gold but I've known a few go as far as Alaska and never bring any back either. One time we had beans cooking in the pot we always took beans with us up in the hills and be damned but a mouse jumped right in. We ate him, too. John used to swim the river, clothes and all summer winter fall Wen his boat swamped he hauled his wife and child to shore, swimming and wading into shore. Us guys weren't afraid of the water. The chums, the nets, the boats, the salmon the fellows — all gone after '42. Even the drinking preacher didn't die sober. Everybody had to go down some way. Asleep in the barnyard a jug in each hand Henry died of exposure. Afloat for a month Jack they finally found dead in a skiff down by the South Jetty. Yeah, we lived helluva fast and hard, but don't you think on a spring night breeze coming off the river moonlit waves with fish tails flapping you might see our silver souls playing with the seals?