Muses and Other Mythic Beasts: A Short Rant

Dec26

Budding writers and poets sometimes talk about the muse, most often to complain about her absence. Although the urge to write can feel uncontrollable at times, I think the greater urge is not to write but to have written, to have a physical ream of paper with lots and lots of words, that you can wave around (literally or metaphorically) and say, “I did this!” And if more folks actually acted on that desire, then the Library of Congress would have to be a hundred times bigger. But mostly they don’t and in my professional opinion, based on working at the MIT Writing Center for almost twenty years, there is a really good reason why they don’t: writing is hard.

It is hard for students and professionals, for people who don’t think of themselves as “Writers” and for people who do. The difference is that experienced writers don’t sit around waiting for the Muse to show up with a big lantern to light their brains up with shiny ideas and pretty words. Experienced writers bitch and moan like everybody else, but then they sit down and write. Butt to chair is the only way, as NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) has clearly shown. (Google it if you don’t know. If I stop to explain it to you, I will get distracted and never finish my idea.)

I once wrote a poem titled “There Is No Muse” for a poetry reading at which I was going to be reading beside three poets whom I knew were going to read poems about the muse. They all did. Possibly not coincidentally, they were all male. Not sure what that’s about.

The Greeks believed in the Muses (three or four or nine, depending on which writer you look at) mainly to explain poetic, artistic and scientific inspiration, because let’s face it, it is pretty awesome when it happens to you. Divine spark? Nice way to wrap our brains around something that is pretty mysterious. Just don’t use it for an excuse not to do the work.

Humans believe in a lot of strange things, when you get down to it. Some of them we have let go of over the centuries. Take the unicorn, drawn to virgins, especially female virgins, the beloved objects of patriarchal desire and control. Teddy bears protect children with the ancient spirit of the bear. Most people in the modern world don’t believe in unicorns anymore. It is much harder to stop believing in teddy bears. Maybe the muse should be left somewhere in between those two.

I will leave you with a video that explains why I still kinda believe in teddy bears:

A Call for Solstice Carols

Dec22

The dark has been darking too early, too often and too darkly this past month and I am here to say that I am heartily sick of it.

I don’t mind the cold. That is just weather, and cold is easier on my arthritic bits than heat is. I don’t mind Boston weather, whether that means snow or icy rain, although I could do without the slush in intersections after all that sort of melts. Wading through four inches of ice water just to cross the street is part of the price we pay for getting to live in New England, where my heart is happy much of the time, although not particularly lately.

One of these days, I will have to write an ode to my Verilux HappyLight box, but I probably won’t have the energy to do that until spring, which only really gets here in April anyway, by which time (Please God!) I hope not to need to use it anymore.

I like my brother’s tradition of celebrating the Winter Solstice for what it is: the end of the increasingly short days and long, dark nights. He lives in Maine, which should really be its own time zone, so his winters are longer, darker, and colder than mine. Building in a celebration like that makes sense to me. Usually I light a candle, pick up my cat, Musashi, and dance around singing, Happy Solstice! Happy Solstice! until Musashi politely lets me know that he is quite done with the dancing. Then I put him down, blow out the candle, and go on with what I was doing, which is probably being depressed about how damn dark it is.

Surely, people, we can do better than that. So I call on all the poets and songwriters out there to start writing, publishing, YouTubing, and concerting Solstice Carols. Spread them wide across the land. Give me something to build into my year that talks about the return of the light and not just how many toys we can get.

Thank you for your attention. Now go take a nap to avoid thinking about all that darkness happening.

We will now take a break through Christmas. See you again on Boxing Day!

More on Line Endings: Twofers

Dec20

So I was thinking more about line endings while reading Nancy Willard’s book In the Salt Marsh and I came across some twofers (two for the price of one) in her poem “The Snow Arrives After Long Silence.” A twofer is what I call it when you read a line of a poem one way and then when you read the next line, you get a second meaning to the first line. For example, the poem starts:

The snow arrives after long silence

from its high home where nothing leaves

and you think that snow is coming from a place nothing can come from because nothing ever leaves there. But read those two lines with the third line:

tracks or stains or keeps time.

Then it makes sense that in the homeland of snow nothing leaves tracks, since snow covers tracks. This kind of careful writing invites equally careful reading to get all the possibilities. Here is another:

All day the snow sets its table

with clean linens, putting its house

in order. The hungry deer walk

on the risen loaves of snow.

So the first sentence is a simple image, but by enjamming the last two words of it with the beginning of the next sentence, we get a second image of the deer walking in order. Nifty, huh?

Willard, Nancy. In the Salt Marsh. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Line Endings, Line Beginnings

Dec19

I was first made aware of the importance of line endings in the mid-1990s, when a friend of a friend was taking a class with Bill Knott, a professor at Emerson College. Apparently, this young man was sitting in a workshop and Bill was reading his poem. Bill looked at him over his glasses and asked, “Why do you break your lines where you do?” Baffled, the young man just shrugged. Bill balled the poem up and bounced it off the young man’s head.

Whether or not that caused enlightenment for that student, the story of it sure did for me. I spent the next two years studying how different poets broke their lines. I read somewhere that the last lines of a poem should, on their own, sound like a poem. (Obviously, they were talking about free verse, since formal forms or even Hallmark Card Crap have their own logic for ending lines, whether with rhyme or with repeated words, etc.) Here is an example taken at random from one of my college textbooks, Beginning with Poems: An Anthology, the end words of Wallace Stevens’ “The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man”:

baths soul clouds leaves gold white wind sky

suddenly rays myths gods grenadine occurs stars alone life life bronze

That is the easy part of line breaks. What took me much longer to realize is that, just perhaps, the first words of the lines might also be a poem, though they rarely are. Let’s take the first words from the same poem:

one’s one’s occur occurred of as came threw

could would around the to and and it has that that.

You see the problem. We get so caught up with our last word that our first words tend to be articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions and conjunctions–grammar words, not sensory words. Now there is nothing wrong with grammar; we couldn’t very well communicate without it. But if I am going to put a word in a power position of a poem, I probably don’t want that word to be “of.” Or at least not often.

HOWEVER, having just looked at the few poems I have in a file on my computer here at MIT, I realize that I have not been paying very close attention to this lately. (Bad poet, go sit in the corner!) So I wrote a new poem.

“My cat is a poem with claws,” she said,

mopping up the blood that still spilled

from her arm where that fluffy ebony

ninja clung hard before leaping off the bed

and onto the dresser. “Most poems,” I said,

hesitantly, “do not draw blood.” But she

laughed and threw the tissue away. “Most

poems also do not eat kibble and poop in a small

sandbox. But some poems snuggle up to you,

tangled in the blankets of a Sunday morning. Some

poems see your hands resting on the keyboard and lie

down upon them, purring. Some poems will even

pat your face to wake you up at four in the morning

on a day when you didn’t need to rise early.”

Her cat watched me with narrowed, golden eyes.

Brower, Reuben A., Anne D. Ferry, and David Kalstone, eds. Beginning with Poems: An Anthology. New York: Norton, 1966. (Its date explains why the examples are mostly British with a few Americans and why, out of 62 poets, only 3 of them are women.)

Bonus points if you recognize the pun in the picture.

Assignment: How to Make a Poem out of a Blah Day

Dec16

Okay, recently I was bored and depressed by the lack of sunshine while I was at work, and in between helping engineers and students with their writing, I wrote this, to redeem the day:

Begin by changing the title, so that the verb Make becomes Cut, something edgy and sharp to contrast with the soft grey of the sky behind the flurries as they fall to the parking lot tarmac and melt into puddles. Find one beautiful thing, like the shiny blue car or the dark-haired woman holding her brown coat closed against the cold. Imagine her destination, the cancer she will beat and the young man she will marry, whole futures you will never know. Return to your own office chair, twirling you from present to future as the desk alternately waves goodbye and hello. Shake crumbs out of your keyboard and see what words fall to join them: speculate, December, winter, winter, winter.

Okay, that is nice, but is it any less a poem than:

Begin by changing the title, so that the verb

Make becomes Cut, something edgy and sharp

to contrast with the soft grey of the sky

behind the flurries as they fall to the parking lot

tarmac and melt into puddles. Find one beautiful thing,

like the shiny blue car or the dark-haired woman

holding her brown coat closed against the cold.

Imagine her destination, the cancer

she will beat and the young man she will marry,

whole futures you will never know. Return to

your own office chair, twirling you from present

to future as the desk alternately waves goodbye

and hello. Shake crumbs out of your keyboard

and see what words fall to join them: speculate,

December,

winter,

winter…

They history of prose poetry as a subversive form suggests that this poem is probably not crazy and exploratory enough. The French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who coined the term “modernity,” is one of the form’s great-grandfathers. He thought of it as a way to rebel against traditional formal uses of the line, which in that period of French poetry were very strict. He wrote:

“Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.” —Dedication of Le Spleen de Paris

More recent writers of prose poetry include Americans Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsburg, Charles Simic and Mary Oliver, so it seems to have moved from the edges to the mainstream. A friend of mine recently attended a workshop on the lyric essay, so when I find out more about that, I may start trying that form too…

Meanwhile, out of a depressing morning, I got a little tiny piece of art. And that is another of the uses of poetry, in whatever form you write it.

Poem Made Out of Questions

Dec14

Why, if trees are grey, do we color them brown? Why, when the sea is green, do we color it blue? Why do whales, so lonely now, still sing? How is it possible that on the cold ocean floor there is lava flowing up and out, hot and fiery? Why do anvils love gravity so very much? How does a clock always know exactly what time it is, and why do its hands always use sign language to tell us? Where do fools fall in love and will someone give me a lift there? Has anyone ever been stranded like Gilligan on the Isles of Langerhans? Did they send a message in a bottle? Was the bottle blue like a bluebottle fly or green like Robin Hood’s hat? If whiskey from Scotland is Scotch, why isn’t whiskey from America Amertch? And if a very large truck is called a semi, what would we call one twice as big? These are not questions that keep me up at night. This is only a paragraph of prose that yearns to grow up to be a poem.

What Poetry Has Been & Could Be

Dec13

During the 1960s, when the Civil Rights, Peace and Feminist Movements were all in full swing, protesters often read poetry as part of their protests. The American poets who came of age during that time are much more likely now to continue to write didactic poetry. People like Marge Piercy, Amiri Baraka, and Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsburg, Denise Levertov and Nikki Giovanni are just a few noted for their poetry that takes on social issues. You might remember Nikki Giovanni’s poem that she recited at the end of the memorial for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. This is poetry in the service of people.

Right now, American is a difficult place, with the haves owning government and the have-nots working three jobs just to barely get by, with school shootings and police violence happening at home and a war we seem to have forgotten still happening on the other side of the world. It is no surprise that Suzanne Collins books turned movies are so popular now. Bread and Circuses, or fast food and reality shows, are failing to distract us from the real problems when they are so obvious and repeated every day.

So where are the protest poems? We need them. We need strong voices giving rhythm to the marching of peaceful warriors and concerned citizens.

voiceseducation.org

What Poetry Is Not: A Short Rant

Dec10

These days, going to the gym gives me indigestion. I blame the Food Network. You see, some days the only thing on the TV on the elliptical machine is food shows. So I watch Giada De Laurentis or Ina Garten or Robert Irvine making magic with food. And then there is the dreaded commercial.

I get it. It is now Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, and everybody wants to Get Into the Spirit of the Season, but why do they have to do it by sounding like a stupid Hallmark card? The ad for a new holiday dessert competition tells us about the show that will apparently give chefs only an hour to make their cookies “and dust them with flour.” (Which they say while actually showing a chef dusting a cake with sugar. But you know how it is with rhyming poetry: the only thing that really rhymes with sugar is…wait for it…booger.) At Christmas, cheesy rhymes, especially rhyming couplets (an AA rhyme), come out of the woodwork to make my blood boil.

Now it is one thing if you are under the age of consent to still believe that a rhyme makes a poem. And especially if you do not think of yourself as a poet and you are not trying to become a professional poet, you can believe whatever you want. I don’t care. But I have seen too many badly rhymed pieces of crap labeled poetry. And if that weren’t bad enough, you also get the other side of the coin: prose broken up into very short lines, usually broken right before prepositional phrases, with no rhythm at all, not even conversational or, failing that, blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). It’s like the writers aren’t even trying. And they justify it by saying anybody can write poetry.

Well, you know what? They are right. Anybody can write poetry. Sometimes it is going to be bad poetry. Ted Sturgeon, a science fiction writer, famously said that 95% of science fiction was crap, like everything else, and Ursula K. Le Guin commented, “The Quest for Perfection fails 95% of the time but the Search for Garbage never fails” (223).

So if you are going to insist on writing poems and calling it poetry, then do yourself and the rest of us a favor. Invest in some Peterson’s Guides and a really good thesaurus, so that you know the difference between a birch and a sycamore and you have lots of different words for green. And if you insist on rhyming then also get a good rhyming dictionary so that at least your rhymes will be more original…

…and less boogery.

Le Guin, Ursula. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Berkley Books, 1982.

Practical Poetry

Dec8

You might think, if you are not a poet, that poetry isn’t practical. You might recall Ernest Hemingway’s assertion that “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration,” and think, well, maybe poetry is interior decoration… You would be wrong. Or, if right, not in the way you think.

Poetry won’t keep the rain off your head and unless you have a really thick hardback book of it in your breast pocket, it probably won’t save your life. (Teddy Roosevelt once survived an assassination attempt because he had a thick speech in his pocket, but bullets were slower and smaller back then.) Poetry does not protect us the way architecture does. But what is the practical purpose of interior decoration?

Many of us, when thinking of interior decoration in the abstract, might think of the crowded Victorian parlor with its innumerable mementos on tables and mantles, and walls so filled with pictures that the wallpaper is invisible: lots of things that have little value and serve mainly to distract the viewer and make the room feel full. Abundance presumably symbolizes wealth here, with quantity being more important than quality.

It is no surprise then that it wasn’t the Victorians who invented the haiku! A lot of us were taught that the haiku is a 17-syllable poem of 3 lines, of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each. Actually that defines a senryu, which can be about any topic. Strictly speaking, a haiku needs to be about nature, the seasons, etc. But here is the problem that nobody explains. A 17-syllable poem in Japanese might have as few as 5 to 8 words. The word sensei, teacher, sounds like only 2 syllables in English, but in Japanese, it is 4 syllables: se-n-se-i. So those brilliant haiku poets, Basho and Issa? They are even more brilliant than you thought!

Similarly Japanese interior decoration is traditionally minimalist. A home might have a room where you would greet guests, and in that room is an alcove called the tokonoma where the family will display a scroll or flower arrangement or holiday decoration. Not ten. One. Keeping it simple and classy. Often the decoration will change with the seasons, making a small artistic statement about how we move through the year, and how the seasons move through us. I think poetry can be like that, a beautiful moment to acknowledge a truth about the world and ourselves. And to me, that kind of poetry is very useful, very practical.

In the introduction to her 1982 collection of poetry, Marge Piercy explained how she wanted her poems to be of use. “What I mean by useful is simply that readers will find poems that speak to and for them, will take those poems into their lives and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom w all and remember bits and pieces of them in stressful or quiet moments. That the poems may give voice to something in the experience of a life has been my intention. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses. We can hear what we hope for and what we must fear, in the small release of cadenced utterance. We have few rituals that function for us in the ordinary chaos of our lives” (xii).

This is what I look for in poetry that I read, and this is what I work for in poetry that I write.

Piercy, Marge. Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy. New York: Knopf, 1982.

The Benefits of Levitas over Gravitas

Dec6

About two centuries ago Napoleon said, “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a single step.” Well, actually, he said it in French, so it probably sounded more impressive, but my high school French is limited, to say the least, so were going to stick with English here. When I think about truly ridiculous poetry, I think of the greats: Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Shel Silverstein, Calvin Trillin, Lewis Carrol, J.R.R. Tolkien, Walt Kelly, and Edward Lear.

But poetry doesn’t have to be ridiculous to be funny, and often a funny poem can move someone who is leery of being moved by a more serious poem. And there are a lot of people like that. I blame fifth grade teachers.

Do not misunderstand me. I applaud the long hard labor of grammar school teachers. I admire their endless patience and willingness to work with Other People’s Children at an age when kids still have too much energy to sit still all day. However, as an English teacher in college for the last two decades, I have seen that a lot of damage gets done to kids by teachers who think they know what poetry and writing should be, even though by definition they probably don’t have time to do much of it themselves.

Whenever I teach a literature class, I first ask my students to raise their hands if they hate poetry. Usually a third raise their hands and one or two say, “Well, I don’t hate it but I don’t understand it.”

To them I promise that they might come to feel differently about poetry, hopefully better. The rest of the students I promise that they will not come to hate poetry because of me. Because I guarantee that if a person hates poetry, it is because a particular person made them hate it. Some teacher, most likely, either insisted that her/his reading of a poem was the Only One Allowable, or she/he insisted that a poem could mean anything at all (which any ten year old can tell you means that the poem means nothing). Neither of these readings is really useful.

And if I have students who Really Detest Poetry, then I give them a copy of Marge Piercy’s “Attack of the Squash People,” which begins:

“And thus the people every year

in the valley of humid July

did sacrifice themselves

to the long green phallic god

and eat and eat and eat.

They’re coming, they’re on us

the long striped gourds, the silky

babies, the hairy adolescents,

the lumpy vast adults

like the trunks of green elephants.

Recite fifty zucchini recipes!”

Now a lot of my students grew up in urban environments, but still most people know the trope of planting “a few vegetables” and ending up with a whole lot more than they bargained for, a whole lot more than they, their families, friends, and neighbors can eat. And the poem isn’t just about the humor of overabundance. It ends with something worth remembering:

“You give and give

too much, like summer days

limp with heat, thunderstorms

bursting their bags on our heads,

as we salt and pickle and freeze

for the too little to come.”

Another lesson that can be taught with a funny poem is how less is, yes, more. My favorite example of this is Lucille Clifton’s “wishes for sons,” which begins like this:

“i wish them cramps.

i wish them a strange town

and the last tampon.

i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early

and wearing a white skirt.

i wish them one week late.”

Understatement gets the job done. No extra details are necessary. We see the speaker’s sons learning the hard way what it is like to be a woman. This kind of gentle humor, stripped-down form and simple diction are characteristic of Clifton’s work. I love how the poem ends:

“let them think they have accepted

arrogance in the universe,

then bring them gynecologists

not unlike themselves.”

This one inevitably wins over the women. I have other poems to help with winning over the men.

Clifton, Lucille. Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988 2000. New York: BOA Editions, 2000.