SubscribeDecember 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?
December 6th, 2011
I survived
The class is over and today was pretty much a wash. I had two naps; it’s not even 9PM and I’m tired.
I did find a book that speaks to Jayne’s bicameral mind theory that is interesting (I think Jayne’s theory is intriguing but almost certainly crack-brained). I’ve read in that today. And a book about poetry and the senses that is deeply interesting.
Tomorrow is a bit of a blow-away-the-cobwebs road trip. After that I hope to return to what counts as normal for me.
December 4th, 2011
hall-e-frakkin-lujah
I think I just stumbled on the solution to my poetry assignment problem.
How do I know? Once I got that sense of Oh now that works! with the basic graphic elements and design (the details and fine fixes will get sorted after the words), the words just started surfacing. (I’ve been playing with the spatial design of the thing for about 3 weeks now. Did I mention that writing is very hard work?)
Cool. And with a whole day before class!
December 1st, 2011
just got a rejection
I’ve had one rejection and several acceptances but the rejection still stings way more the the acceptances sing. Why the frak is that?
December 1st, 2011
I’ve fallen back down the obsession hole
So I finished that delightful book on the Queen learning to love reading (man what a delight) and I’ve done with Hollis (talk more about that later), and now I am back inside the poem sequence I’m wrestling with for the last class on Monday.
I’ll surface once in a while to post stuff here but for now I’m back to an angry Narcissus. (I can feel him trying to climb out of a dark hole into which he fell, and boy is he pissed. I”m off to help him out.)
November 27th, 2011
poets think sideways – literally
Cathy sent me a link to this article called “Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language” by Julie Kane.
This is the abstract:
Though the brain’s left hemisphere is commonly believed to be the “seat of language,” the right hemisphere processes a number of subtle linguistic functions. This paper will argue that the degree of right-hemispheric involvement in language is what differentiates “poetic” or “literary” from “referential” or “technical” speech. It will suggest that the absence of left- hemispheric dominance for language in the brains of preliterate and illiterate persons may explain why those populations exhibit so-called “magical” thinking rich in right-hemispheric features. Finally, it will link studies demonstrating high rates of mania and hypomania among poets (but not other types of writers or creative artists) to other studies observing a temporary shift from left- to right-hemispheric dominance for language during the manic phase, suggesting that overactivation of these brain regions may underlie the compulsion to write poetry.
The article goes through a series of attributes found in poetry – like personification, synecdoche, metonymy, paradox – and explores how the right brain might be involved in its production and comprehension. For example, for paradox the concluding sentence of the first paragraph:
What all of these devices have in common is their essential ambiguity: they require the mind to hold two contradictory versions of ‘reality’ in tension at the same time, in order to arrive at an understanding that goes beyond literal or semantic meaning. As one might suspect, the ability to comprehend such figures of speech seems to reside within the brain’s right hemisphere.
Interesting isn’t it. And while most prosodic aspects of poetry are integral to the right-brain , rhyme is not. It’s a left-brain activity, related to technical speech rather than metaphorical gestalts. Interesting that.
Here about pauses and neural processing time:
That there were ten such ‘reactive’ intervals, and an average of ten syllables, in the typical three-second-long metered line, seemed highly significant to the researchers. They went on to suggest that three seconds, the length of the average poetic line and the next power-of-ten step up in the progression, corresponds to the length of the human present moment (which they also termed the auditory present, neural present, or subjective temporal present). They also asserted that a pause or ‘buffer’ every three seconds or so is necessary for a speaker to gather what he or she will say next and for a listener to comprehend and integrate what has just been said.
And wowzer – “right-brain-damaged adults, despite having supposedly ‘normal’ verbal abilities as measured by standardized intelligence tests, cannot understand stories.”
Here’s one of the paragraphs from the “discussion” portion of the paper.
If left-hemispheric dominance for language is not the ‘natural’ condition of human beings aged eight and older, but rather, a side effect of print literacy, then it stands to reason that the qualititative changes in consciousness between oral and print cultures—from communal identity, ‘magical thinking’, pervasive animist spirituality, and poetry to individualism, science and rationalism, faith-based religion or agnosticism/atheism, and prose — may be the outward signs of a fundamental shift from right- to left-hemispheric structuring of conscious thought processes and memories. Magical thinking, for example, can be understood as the interpretation in terms of parataxic, synedochic, metonymic, and metaphoric thought strategies of the relationships among events occurring in time and space. A mind that is primed to process modules of received speech such as idioms, proverbs, and oral poetic formulae but not complex, ‘original’ propositional thoughts would of necessity be communal in its orientation. To view inanimate objects, plants, and animals as endowed with conscious agency and will, and to grasp abstract ideas in the form of concrete images which embody them, is to inhabit the mythic world of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Native Americans, and countless other cultures prior to the introduction and proliferation of phonetic alphabetic print literacy.
Hah! – “…poets, as a group, may be subject to temporary reversals of ‘normal’ laterality.”
So essentially, like small children, those with an oral language (no written language) and those with some form of left brain damage, poets are those who tend toward a strong right-brain imaging capacity. Creativity is literally thinking sideways? Har!
November 25th, 2011
philosophic poetry at its best
Someone recommended poetryrepairs.com to me so I went over and started reading. I think I’m smitten. See what I found by Paul Hostovsky…
It was a Buddhist lecture on the Self.
There must have been fifty people
in that room with the eight Vicissitudes,
six Stages of Metta, four Noble Truths,
three Kinds of Suffering and two
ceiling fans spinning, spinning. She was
sitting on the other side…
go over there to read the rest. It’s a true delight.
November 25th, 2011
apparently something about me upsets some people
For lots of reasons I’m a basically aggressive kind of person. In my case that aggression tends toward the intellectual, I mean you use the gifts you’re given right. In the last few years, illness and other things have slowed my mind, but in the last couple of months I’ve begun to feel the snap-snap-snap of my mind turning back on. It’s frakkin wonderful.
However, apparently not everyone feels that way.
Here’s an amusing example.
I recently joined a poetry group on a professional networking site. I just watched the threads build for a couple of weeks, to get a feel for what is discussed, etc. I commented on a few posts – “nice use of form to support meaning” etc. I went to check out a couple of the attached blogs – writers that post in forums often have blogs of their own as well. In one case I left a question about that very poem to which I had appended the comment “nice use of form”.
The thing about forums and blogs is they have different “rules”. A blog is a sort of personal space. It is run by a group or a single person with the right to think and speak their point of view. You open yourself to dissenters of course, but it is your “home” and you can dis-invite at will. But a forum is something else. It’s more like a classroom where rules of collegiate discourse apply. That’s why when you get a silly-assed commenter just there to fart in public, one calls them a troll. (Sorry to Troll folk out there.) On a personal blog one simply “deletes”; the blogger is his or her own moderator. On a forum that job falls to someone specific – or it should do.
My comment on the writer’s blog seems to be what started this.
His poem had a stanza that said (essentially) that the world would adjust to your “tune”
I said:
Love the way you use form here, but…
You know how when you go swimming in a lake and if feels like, after the horrible cold shock of plunging, the water rapidly gets warmer? Nope. You get colder and fit yourself to the temperature of the lake. So really eventually you will harmonize to the world’s tune.
The comment was not well received. But OK. It’s his blog, so I just left and didn’t go back, just like if I was in a lecture hall and I didn’t agree with the speaker’s conclusions. I can speak to it, but essentially, for the duration, the hall is his or her “home”. So you leave if you don’t like it. That’s what common courtesy (and democracy) demands.
There was another commenter on that personal blog (we’ll call him Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name) that tried to shut me down. Rather rudely. The owner of the blog, to his credit, said that all commenters were welcome.
Mr Odd Online Name is also a member of the poetry group I just joined.
A few days after this incident I posted my first question for the group. I decided to go with very, very basic poetics and thus be non-confrontational.
I said:
Anyone here have a strong preference of poetic orientation? Lyric or mimetic? If you do have a preference, do you know why? Curious is all.
Apparently Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name had been lurking. He responded to the thread with this:
Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name • First of all, I request you to kindly mend your tone and tenor Mr. (portion of my actual birth name). You are not a chilled bottle of Beer I suppose. Please don’t denigrate yourself. What is your credibility to talk about strong preference of poetic orientation? Here there are no lunatics under the guise of poets. If anyone is a lunatic he would answer you. Finally, I should say that have nothing personal against you. I have seen many who crave for instant popularity at the cost of the real poets. I will not tolerate anyone who insults the honorable poetic community.
I laughed. LOL’d for quite a while. Then I waited for a day to see what the group would do.
Nothing at first.
Here’s what I wanted to post in response:
Dear Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name,
Thank you for your reply to my question. I will assume that you are simply ignorant of the basic terminology in my query, and so will direct you to a resource where you can remedy your problem. I suggest you start with The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which has an entry called “Poetics” and addresses Western and Eastern forms of poetry, broadly the terms I used, mimesis and lyric respectively.
I am glad to hear that you have nothing against me, but such a protestation of friendship as you made does make me wonder if you use comparable language with all strangers who ask questions about poetic preferences. Perhaps you just need a better translation program so that you can be clearer in your use of English? Since it seems absolutely crazy to attack a perfect stranger on a professional networking site, and even madder to attack another poet in a poetry group for talking absolutely basic poetics, I will assume you are just incapable of accurate or sensitive use of language at this point in your education. Such and interesting thing in a “real” poet.
I suppose I should address the question of “credibility,” but I’m quite sure my two graduate degrees, publication credits and status as a educator give me no position of any real importance; I am quite sure whatever your background happens to be is of much greater importance to you.
As for asinine posturing and those who crave popularity, I am quite sure you know much more about that than I, so I will leave that to your clearly practiced hands. I feel quite happy, even gleeful, at the image of you protecting “the honorable poetic community” so I wish to offer you my sincere thanks for such an entertaining welcome to this group.
And finally, Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name are you really making fun of my name?
Yours sincerely,
(My other name)
But I didn’t. Moderation in all things, yes?
And of course, some of the group members posted remonstrations. But really, what sets people like this guy off?
November 23rd, 2011
shape, space and meaning in poetry
This post responds to Qunqun’s query in the comments on an earlier post (obsess a lot? November 21).
The class talks about white space and its impact on meaning. One of the things about white space is that it can be a passive space, its shape completely determined by the text. In this example the white space is determined by the characters. The space, as the text says, makes meaning possible but it doesn’t actively provide meaning in and of itself.
Imagine “30 spokes” presented differently – in some way that would create white space that represents the insight of the poem.
As for my bitty, the exercise in the class asked us to create a poem in which the white space was considered as important as the text. There are many ways to do that of course but this is the one that I took to class.
This kind of poetry is not my natural metier but there is much to be learnt from attention to what is not normally seen.
November 21st, 2011
obsess a lot?
I’m taking a short (4-week) course on space and silence in poetry. I think I told you about it last week. Tonight was week 2 of 4.
You may have noticed significantly less posts here in the last week. Blame it on the course.
As in most short courses, this one is intensive. I tend to be a slow writer and it can take me a week just to get a seed of poem planted – and months to get it to a stage where I consider it blooming. But last week we had to write 2 new poems and figure out how to utilize space on a page in order for the energy of the poem to adequately express itself in spatial terms.
And I do not naturally think in visual terms.
So I spent the week obsessing. I’d go to sleep thinking in shapes, in architectural volumes, about public space, foreground and background. About how ASL utilizes signing space. Trying to translate signing space into sign space. 3D into 2D. Maybe 4D into 2D since one needs to consider velocity as an aspect of meaning in ASL.
And now I have to do the same again, except this time I have to also have a sense of where it is going – as if were a project, a suite of poems, a larger space, a collection of related smaller spaces. Pay as much attention to negative space as I do the positive space and the actual words.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh
I may go mad.