- Welcome
- News and Jabber
- Regarding Stanley’s Question, “What is poetry?”
- From the Huffington Post
Poetry has the logic of memory, the spontaneity of dreams, yet is much like calculus--each line is, in a sense, an asymptote composed of and continually approaching the limits of language in an attempt to reach an infinitesimal, wordless realm. This is also one way of saying that a good poem is unpredictable and has something at stake. We teachers get our fair share of student poems about puppies, sentimental love pains, the general first person loving the general world and wishing for general peace and universal happiness. Poems that could be about anyone doing anything anywhere at any time. But poetry shouldn't run in place--it should be running towards a wall and then through it. Sometimes be specific isn't enough advice.
This year I'm teaching creative writing in English at Transilvania University of Brașov (and yes, it's really in Transylvania). My students are doing something regularly that seems nearly impossible to me: writing poetry in a second, sometimes third language. A few weeks ago I asked them if they knew what "at stake" meant. They didn't. We broke it down, delved into etymology: a pole, a stick. We discussed "burned at the stake," "impaled on a stake" (the latter is easily understood in Romania, whose history includes the likes of Vlad III of Wallachia). Sometimes language requires demonstration. I placed an assigned printed poem on the table, then held a mechanical pencil above my head. I stabbed the poem, pinned it to the table, tore a ragged gash through the middle of the page. I asked them to give me some words to describe what this poem just went through. Risk. Danger. Limit. Loss. Yes.
Last year I taught composition at a women's prison through Boston University's Prison Education Program. These students have everything at stake every single day. My sister, who has been incarcerated on and off for years, taught me that there are no words for how essential writing is in prison--especially poetry. "The art of losing isn't hard to master"--one evening I wrote this famous first line of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" on the board. We were about to read Hamlet, and I was introducing them to iambic pentameter. Who taught you that? said one student, and, when I asked what these two words made them think of, another said, iambic contamination. To overthink the language we use naturally could indeed contaminate its fluency for a moment, but it also may create new paths of clear, precise expression. Sometimes a path is a form.
Poet Jill McDonough, who taught incarcerated college students for thirteen years, visited my class one night and discussed how the villanelle is a great form for expressing circular thoughts and obsessions. Things that matter. The following week, over half the class turned in handwritten villanelles ranging from the desire to cook a single meal at home, the irony of having to sew American flags, the simple act of being able to shave in privacy, the feeling of having more than a monitored visit with a loved one. And, here's the best part: these villanelles hadn't been assigned. What was at stake formed a need to rethink the rhythm of language, choose the right rhymes, write these poems.
The short version of that semester's final paper was to diagnose Hamlet's madness and its significance, and to back it up with the text. The last two weeks, one of my most engaged students was absent. She was in solitary confinement, a place meant to drive anyone to temporarily lose a mind. (And this is where it's hard not to hijack my own blog post to write about the inhumanity at the core of our country's swollen prison system.) The night the papers were due I opened my desk drawer to find, covering the attendance sheet, several sheets of mismatched paper with a handwriting in pencil I recognized. This student, in solitary and without access to the book, somehow managed to write a paper that worked through the entire tragedy. (She even improvised a works cited page complete with Jane Doe Publishing Co.) And, the surprise ending: though the stakes were high, Hamlet hadn't lost his iambic mind after all. His logic--much like that of poetry--was driven by memory, was spontaneous yet calculated.
There's only one poem I can think of that comes close to defining the essence of poetry, and in it there's a literal stake. It's Heather McHugh's "What He Thought,"and at the end, Giordano Bruno, in an iron mask, is being burned at one in Campo de´ Fiori, 1600: "poetry is what / he thought, but did not say." This is the definition of poetry at risk: it employs the limits of language, endangers the realm of the comfortable, approaches a silence or loss we feel yet can't explain.
This essay originally appeared in Best American Poetry.
The poem referenced above:
We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the mayor, mulled
a couple matters over (what's
a cheap date, they asked us; what's
flat drink). Among Italian literati
we could recognize our counterparts:
the academic, the apologist,
the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib—and there was one
administrator (the conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated
sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic,
so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn't read Italian, either, so I put the book
back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans
were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there
we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
"What's poetry?"
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?" Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think—"The truth
is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
The statue represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All things
move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is
the soul of the soul of the world." Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which
he could not speak. That's
how they burned him. That is how
he died: without a word, in front
of everyone.
And poetry—
(we'd all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on
softly)—
poetry is what
he thought, but did not say.
Heather McHugh, "What He Thought", from Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 © 1994 by Heather McHugh and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
Source: Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994)
- This article highlights two things I find noteworthy
- The importance of being free to say what we want in poetry
- The goal of saying what cannot be said, that which we fear
- Do you want to schedule this meeting to run until 3PM instead of 2:30PM?
- Writers’ Roundtable?
- Thoughts?
- Julie suggested the Thu evening and Sat morning times since we have writers who work who want such a roundtable.
- The Current Assignment
- Who wrote about their bed?
In Praise of My Bed
At last I can be with you!
The grinding hours
since I left your side!
The labor of being fully human,
working my opposable thumb,
talking, and walking upright.
Now I have unclasped
unzipped, stepped out of.
Husked, soft, a be-er only,
I do nothing, but point
my bare feet into your
clean smoothness
feel your quiet strength
the whole length of my body.
I close my eyes, hear myself
moan, so grateful to be held this way.
Meredith Holmes, "In Praise of My Bed" from Shubad’s Crown. Copyright © 2003 by Meredith Holmes. Reprinted by permission of Pond Road Press.
Source: Shubad’s Crown (Pond Road Press, 2003)
Selection:
Jabberwocky
BY LEWIS CARROLL
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Source: The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983)
- The Next Assignment
- Write a funny poem
- This came from my thinking about the place of children’s poems at this table and I began to wonder about the number of humorous poems written by the great ones.
Examples:
Ancient Music
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm.
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
From T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
The Ad-dressing of Cats
You've read of several kinds of Cat,
And my opinion now is that
You should need no interpreter
To understand their character.
You now have learned enough to see
That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whom we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse--
But all may be described in verse.
You've seen them both at work and games,
And learnt about their proper names,
Their habits and their habitat:
But how would you ad-dress a Cat?
So first, your memory I'll jog,
And say: A CAT IS NOT A DOG.
And you might now and then supply
Some caviare, or Strassburg Pie,
Some potted grouse, or salmon paste--
He's sure to have his personal taste.
(I know a Cat, who makes a habit
Of eating nothing else but rabbit,
And when he's finished, licks his paws
So's not to waste the onion sauce.)
A Cat's entitled to expect
These evidences of respect.
And so in time you reach your aim,
And finally call him by his NAME.
So this is this, and that is that:
And there's how you AD-DRESS A CAT
- Next Meeting Date
- March 3, 2016
- Other Notes
- Meeting was great. The assignment went very well. Good poems all around.
