Bigelow Poets' Roundtable: 2017

These are the complete notes from "Tension in Poetry." They are rather randomly arranged but should cover evything we discussed. I don't think the links are all live but I trust you'll be able to track down anything you want. Put any questions into the comments section below.

Tension in Poetry

Ernest Hemingway's six-word story: "Baby shoes for sale. Never used."
Connotation vs denotation
- Connotation: an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.
- Denotation: the literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests.
  Anecdote of the Jar BY WALLACE STEVENS I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. This poem is meaningless without connotative understanding.
  - Comment
    Anecdote of the Jar From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Anecdote of the Jar" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1919, it is in the public domain.[1] Anecdote of the Jar I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. This famous, much-anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations, as Jacqueline Brogan observes in a discussion of how she teaches it to her students.[2] It can be approached from a New Critical perspective as a poem about writing poetry and making art generally. From a poststructuralist perspective the poem is concerned with temporal and linguistic disjunction, especially in the convoluted syntax of the last two lines. A feminist perspective reveals a poem concerned with male dominance over a traditionally feminized landscape. A cultural critic might find a sense of industrial imperialism. Brogan concludes: "When the debate gets particularly intense, I introduce Roy Harvey Pearce's discovery of the Dominion canning jars (a picture[3] of which is then passed around)."[4] Buttel suggests that the speaker would arrange the wild landscape into the order of a still life, and though his success is qualified, art and imagination do at least impose an idea of order on the sprawling reality. Helen Vendler, in a reading that contradicts Brogan's and Buttel's, asserts that the poem is incomprehensible except as understood as a commentary on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The poem alludes to Keats, she argues, as a way of discussing the predicament of the American artist "who cannot feel confidently the possessor, as Keats felt, of the Western cultural tradition."[5] Shall he use language imported from Europe ("of a port in air", to "give of"), or "plain American that cats and dogs can read" (as Marianne Moore put it), like "The jar was round upon the ground"?[5] The poem is a palinode, retracting the Keatsian conceits of "Sunday Morning" and vowing "to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness."[6] Wallace Stevens wrote the poem in 1918 when he was in the town of Elizabethton, Tennessee.
Intension vs extension
- Intension is connotative, extension denotative
  Intension: In linguistics, logic, philosophy, and other fields, an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another symbol.[1] In the case of a word, the word's definition often implies an intension. For instance, intension of the word 'plant' includes properties like "being composed of cellulose" and "alive" and "organism", among others. Comprehension is the collection of all such intensions. Extension: In any of several studies that treat the use of signs—for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, and semiotics—the extension of a concept, idea, or sign consists of the things to which it applies, in contrast with its comprehension or intension, which consists very roughly of the ideas, properties, or corresponding signs that are implied or suggested by the concept in question.
Binary thinking vs poetic language
- Politics has become binary in that binary thinking sees just two choices, one right, one wrong
- Poets, on the other hand face the perplexing reality that not only are there shades of meaning, reality is too complex to be contained within language.
  - The poet therefore relies upon implied meaning, fuzzy math, sort of; in fact, the poet relies upon connotation and intension
Tension in poetry does not denote only opposites
- It connotes other
- It may connote competing others, cooperating others, what some refer to as a co-presence of meanings, inplications,insinuations
For most of us denotative language is inadequate to the expression of complex truths
- This is why we and teens choose poetry
- Berryman
  Epilogue He died in December. He must descend Somewhere, vague and cold, the spirit and seal. Somewhere, Imagination one’s one friend Cannot see there. Both of us at the end. Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel.
Negative Capability
Negative Capability A term used many times on this website... 'The concept of Negative Capability is the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems.' Keats was a romantic poet, full of intense passion and desire, yet shy and reserved. He was a young man with all the determination and melancholy of a teenager on a romantic quest to be among the English poets when he died. He is an inspiration to all of us, full of colourful language and imagination. He battled through tuberculosis and only lived to be 25. He wanted to be famous, and he has well and truly lived up to his dream. Keats longed to find beauty in what was often an ugly and terrible world. He was an admirer of Shakespeare, and his reading of the Bard is insightful and intriguing, illustrating the genius of Shakespeare's creativity. In a letter to his brothers, Keats describes this genius as 'Negative Capability': 'At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' This description can be compared to a definition of conflict: 'An emotional state characterized by indecision, restlessness, uncertainty and tension resulting from incompatible inner needs or drives of comparable intensity.' These two definitions are very similar; the meaning of conflict sounds very negative and hopeless. However, Keats' creative concept seems positive and full of potential by leaving out 'restlessness' by avoiding an 'irritable reaching after fact and reason' From <http://www.keatsian.co.uk/negative-capability.php>
Questions about "The Groundhog" by Richard Eberhart
The Groundhog BY RICHARD EBERHART In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead. Dead lay he; my senses shook, And mind outshot our naked frailty. There lowly in the vigorous summer His form began its senseless change, And made my senses waver dim Seeing nature ferocious in him. Inspecting close his maggots’ might And seething cauldron of his being, Half with loathing, half with a strange love, I poked him with an angry stick. The fever arose, became a flame And Vigour circumscribed the skies, Immense energy in the sun, And through my frame a sunless trembling. My stick had done nor good nor harm. Then stood I silent in the day Watching the object, as before; And kept my reverence for knowledge Trying for control, to be still, To quell the passion of the blood; Until I had bent down on my knees Praying for joy in the sight of decay. And so I left; and I returned In Autumn strict of eye, to see The sap gone out of the groundhog, But the bony sodden hulk remained. But the year had lost its meaning, And in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing, Mured up in the wall of wisdom. Another summer took the fields again Massive and burning, full of life, But when I chanced upon the spot There was only a little hair left, And bones bleaching in the sunlight Beautiful as architecture; I watched them like a geometer, And cut a walking stick from a birch. It has been three years, now. There is no sign of the groundhog. I stood there in the whirling summer, My hand capped a withered heart, And thought of China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament. Richard Eberhart, “The Groundhog” from Collected Poems, 1930-1986. Copyright © 1960, 1976, 1987 by Richard Eberhart. Used by the permission of Oxford University Press, USA.
- Why the title?
- What differences are there among the sticks in the poem?
  - How are they used?
- How many different relationships are there in the poem?
  - The relationships vary
  - What is the relationship between the poet and the reader like?
- Why Alexander, Montaine, St Teresa?
  - St Teresa
    Around 1556, various friends suggested that her newfound knowledge was diabolical, not divine. She began to inflict various tortures and mortifications of the flesh upon herself. But her confessor, the Jesuit Saint Francis Borgia, reassured her of the divine inspiration of her thoughts. On St. Peter's Day in 1559, Teresa became firmly convinced that Jesus Christ presented himself to her in bodily form, though invisible. These visions lasted almost uninterrupted for more than two years. In another vision, a seraph[12] drove the fiery point of a golden lance repeatedly through her heart, causing an ineffable spiritual-bodily pain. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...
    - How does this information about Saint Teresa change the scope of the poem?
  - Of Alexander in his tent;
    Long-Legged Fly That civilisation may not sink, Its great battle lost, Quiet the dog, tether the pony To a distant post; Our master Caesar is in the tent Where the maps are spread, His eyes fixed upon nothing, A hand under his head. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. That the topless towers be burnt And men recall that face, Move most gently if move you must In this lonely place. She thinks, part woman, three parts a child, That nobody looks; her feet Practise a tinker shuffle Picked up on a street. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. That girls at puberty may find The first Adam in their thought, Shut the door of the Pope's chapel, Keep those children out. There on that scaffolding reclines Michael Angelo. With no more sound than the mice make His hand moves to and fro. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
- The layers of meaning as the poem moves are denser and denser. By the end, despite a somewhat satisfying conclusion, not much is really resolved.
First, notes about the last meeting
- I did not mean to short-change Frost's "The Road Not Taken" when I mentioned its intention as a joke. Frost held that when he began a poem he never knew how it would end. Thus I assume that he knew full well that by the end of the poem his intention had been subverted although I doubt he knew how important the work would become to his readers and those beyond. "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
- How does tension enter into our poems?
  - There is tension, simple tension, in the triggering event
    Ultimately, no amount of data can replace rigorous, flexible, imaginative human thought. Bernard Levin made a similar point almost 40 years ago in The Times (October 1978): “The silicon chip will transform everything, except everything that matters, and the rest will still be up to us.” Brendan Kelly Professor, Dept of Psychiatry, University College Dublin, Ireland I include the above thought because it implies the next point, namely that language is inadequate. James Thurber once lamented the existence of those things, actions, expressions, situations, etc, which exist but have not yet been named For twenty years I have been writing, writing, writing. It began after I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Suddenly I had something to say, and being Catholic provided the structure and foundation on which to say it. So the words spilled out. Twenty books or booklets, hundreds of essays for magazines, newspapers, journals, and newsletters. From the tapping fingers came film scripts, a bad novel, a book of poems, hymns, children’s stories, sermons, and plays. The internet became my friend. It was a many-mouthed monster hungry for copy, and editors seemed to want what my mind and fingers conspired to produce. I churned out three, four, five, or more essays a week. People asked whence I got my ideas, and I replied that my mind was always picking over something like a scavenging beast looking for a scrap on which to feast. But now I am weary. I am not weary of ideas or the need to communicate. Some complain of world-weariness. I have realized that I am weary not of the world, but of words. My heart echoes the feelings of my hero (that fragile, tough contemplative, T.S. Eliot) who wrote, “Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place.” It may be worse than word weariness. I read on in his Four Quartets and his sentiments startled me further: “So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres— Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a whole new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling. Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission has already been discovered Once or twice or several times by men whom one cannot hope To emulate… And I realize not only the inadequacy of words and worry at the waste, but also realize, with some hope that the word weariness may be a pointer to something better. It is a reminder and a pointer to the status of the soul which is at first sub-linguistic and later super-linguistic. What I mean, is that the human mind and heart is formed first in the nine months of wordless wonder in the womb. Then for another nine months the human child is weaned in a world without words. There in that foundational period the experience of the soul is sub-linguistic. It exists in an amorphous ambiguity of emotion. It exists in the inchoate ocean of emotion. It squirms in the clashing instincts of the animal and the aspirations of the angel. Then we enter the linguistic realm. We learn to listen and speak. We learn to read and write. We learn to filter our existence through the matrix and magic of language. Our world becomes words and our words become our world. The literature and liturgy of language become our means of existence and our means of making sense of the confusion that reigns around us. We philosophize with words. We theologize with words. We joke and jest and argue and debate with words. We murmur words of love and tenderness and scream imprecations and curses to our mortal enemies. Our tongues are flames that set off wild fires. Our words instruct and deceive, and with our words we sing praises like seraphim and howl curses like fiends. But I am weary of words and wonder why. It is perhaps because I want to ascend to that silence that echoes the innocence of the sub-linguistic bliss. I want to attain what the hymn writer called “the silence of eternity, interpreted by Love.” In other words I want to move from the literalness of the linguistic to the Love of the super linguistic. From <http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/12/t-s-eliot-inadequacy-words-dwight-longenecker.html>
    - The poem, beginning as a lump in the throat, by a moment we wish to consecrate, is already outside the realm of language and yet we are called to name it. This is not a small deal. Consider Rilke's ninth of the Duino Elegies:
      The Ninth Duino Elegy —Rainer Maria Rilke Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze) – : why then have to be human – and, escaping from fate, keep longing for fate?… Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which would exist in the laurel too… But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart. Trying to become it. – Whom can we give it to? We would hold on to it all, forever… Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing. The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness, and the long experience of love, – just what is wholly unsayable. But later, among the stars, what good is it – they are better as they are: unsayable. For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window – at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together, that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy? Threshold: what it means for two lovers to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door – they too, after the many who came before them and before those to come…, lightly. Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness. More than ever the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act. An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits. Between the hammers our heart endures, just as the tongue does between the teeth and, despite that, still is able to praise. Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one, you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him something simple which, formed over generations, lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze. Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile. Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours, how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form, serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing –, and blissfully escapes far beyond the violin. – And these Things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all. They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart, within – oh endlessly – within us! Whoever we may be at last. Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us, invisible? Isn’t it your dream to be wholly invisible someday? – O Earth: invisible! What, if not transformation, is your urgent command? Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over – one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first. You were always right, and your holiest inspiration is our intimate companion, Death. Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future grows any smaller… Superabundant being wells up in my heart. (Translated by Stephen Mitchell) Although he is telling us to say something, to name something, we are as Adam and Eve in the garden seeing things that are un-named, speaking their names for the first time. We discover, as poets, that the triggering event and the language available to us to sanctify it are both beyond our limits and yet are real beyond doubt.
  - There is tension in the inadequacy of language
    For twenty years I have been writing, writing, writing. It began after I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Suddenly I had something to say, and being Catholic provided the structure and foundation on which to say it. So the words spilled out. Twenty books or booklets, hundreds of essays for magazines, newspapers, journals, and newsletters. From the tapping fingers came film scripts, a bad novel, a book of poems, hymns, children’s stories, sermons, and plays. The internet became my friend. It was a many-mouthed monster hungry for copy, and editors seemed to want what my mind and fingers conspired to produce. I churned out three, four, five, or more essays a week. People asked whence I got my ideas, and I replied that my mind was always picking over something like a scavenging beast looking for a scrap on which to feast. But now I am weary. I am not weary of ideas or the need to communicate. Some complain of world-weariness. I have realized that I am weary not of the world, but of words. My heart echoes the feelings of my hero (that fragile, tough contemplative, T.S. Eliot) who wrote, “Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place.” It may be worse than word weariness. I read on in his Four Quartets and his sentiments startled me further: “So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres— Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a whole new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling. Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission has already been discovered Once or twice or several times by men whom one cannot hope To emulate… And I realize not only the inadequacy of words and worry at the waste, but also realize, with some hope that the word weariness may be a pointer to something better. It is a reminder and a pointer to the status of the soul which is at first sub-linguistic and later super-linguistic. What I mean, is that the human mind and heart is formed first in the nine months of wordless wonder in the womb. Then for another nine months the human child is weaned in a world without words. There in that foundational period the experience of the soul is sub-linguistic. It exists in an amorphous ambiguity of emotion. It exists in the inchoate ocean of emotion. It squirms in the clashing instincts of the animal and the aspirations of the angel. Then we enter the linguistic realm. We learn to listen and speak. We learn to read and write. We learn to filter our existence through the matrix and magic of language. Our world becomes words and our words become our world. The literature and liturgy of language become our means of existence and our means of making sense of the confusion that reigns around us. We philosophize with words. We theologize with words. We joke and jest and argue and debate with words. We murmur words of love and tenderness and scream imprecations and curses to our mortal enemies. Our tongues are flames that set off wild fires. Our words instruct and deceive, and with our words we sing praises like seraphim and howl curses like fiends. But I am weary of words and wonder why. It is perhaps because I want to ascend to that silence that echoes the innocence of the sub-linguistic bliss. I want to attain what the hymn writer called “the silence of eternity, interpreted by Love.” In other words I want to move from the literalness of the linguistic to the Love of the super linguistic. From <http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/12/t-s-eliot-inadequacy-words-dwight-longenecker.html> Frost also told us the poem begins as a lump in the throat. Add to that John Berryman's "nouns, verbs to not exist for what I feel."
  - The effort to express something will present the writer with the tensions that we are trying to attend to.
    - i.e. ambiguity and conflict are present from the start and, as with the leaves whose colors are there all along but are obscured by chlorophyll until the frost, you will find it
      When we start writing, then, the first draft is not only the first version of your poem, it is the first time anyone has tried to name what you are naming, if only since you experience life only as yourself. This is the call for the poem to be original, use new terms, combine words imaginatively to, in fact, excite the reader with a new dawn, a new paradigm of words. CF the poetry teacher who said there is one rule: Don't bore me!
    - The act of writing in and of itself changes the experience we try to consecrate since the experience is rooted in emotion, not language. Its nature is to be felt, not written, not said.
      In encouraging a niece who was challenged to write about her mother who died while the girl was young (12 or so) we came to the point where feeling was more effectively conveyed by saying that at Thanksgiving dinner her chair was empty rather than saying she was dead.
  - We can consciously insert opposites, conflicts
    Returning to "The Road Not Taken," we find the poet intentionally inserting opposites. Part of the reason is that he knows, as Frost was known to repeat, that poetry is what is in between the lines. He consciously inserts opposites, disagreeing assertions (Re-read "Directive") in order to sidestep the inadequacy of language to get to the truth, the emotion, the experience that occupies the starting point of the poem. The Road Not Taken Launch Audio in a New Window BY ROBERT FROST Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Directive Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry – Great monolithic knees the former town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. And there's a story in a book about it: Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest, The chisel work of an enormous Glacier That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. You must not mind a certain coolness from him Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. Nor need you mind the serial ordeal Of being watched from forty cellar holes As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. As for the woods' excitement over you That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, Charge that to upstart inexperience. Where were they all not twenty years ago? They think too much of having shaded out A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. Make yourself up a cheering song of how Someone's road home from work this once was, Who may be just ahead of you on foot Or creaking with a buggy load of grain. The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you're lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. Then make yourself at home. The only field Now left's no bigger than a harness gall. First there's the children's house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny's A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't. (I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. Robert Frost Dear Li Po, It’s no joke: I have to leave you to find Du Fu. He is fighting somewhere, nowhere to be found chasing the moon. I am told he is great, greater than you whose poems I have knelt before, whose wine I have drunk. There was a lover who bought me postcards from the Du Fu Museum in Chengdu twenty-two years ago. I looked at them yesterday for the first time. They claim to depict scenes he wrote of although the translations may be flawed. The paintings are of horses, soldiers, women; of partings, returns, heroes, funerals. It is the poems I want. I will accept the translations without question if my spine shudders at what I read as it does when I read your poems. My lover died shortly after giving me the postcards. I do not miss her much. We fell apart as lovers will when their poems seem to search for a different way to the end, never got to read Du Fu together on the Newgate Cliffs as we meant to. I will write on the postcards, short verses of love, war, the meanings of mountains, the eerie songs of the colluding stars that bring fateful ends to even important poems. I will write like Du Fu and dress as you, Li Po. When I finish I will step from the pier into the river. Your bright moon will wrinkle in the crazy water. I will wait until it stills then report to your swamped soul on my journey to Du Fu and the gift I have finally received from my dead lover. Unpublished work Copyright 2017 Emerson Gilmore
  - Furthermore, we don't know what we are saying anyway
    This means that we, despite our every assertion otherwise, cannot know what the reader will find in our poems. We cannot fully manipulate the reader to see exactly want her to. Take Trish's poem about riding a horse. Where she saw a poem consecrating the moment of horseback riding, many of us thought it very much a sexual encounter. The author didn't see that coming. Remember that the reader himself is entitled and expected to see the poem through his own experiential lens. This adds depth as long as the poet invites the reader by recognizing that the act of writing creates a relationship with the poem and the poet and the poem and the reader. Once the poem is turned over to the reader, it no longer belongs only to the poet. That very sharing adds layers of complexity to the poem that the writer has no control over.
  - This brings us back to Negative capability, the strength to let the poem be what it wants to be. This is the hardest part of writing poems: The ability to let go of what we want the poem to be so that it can become something greater. Don't resolve the competing tensions; don't choose "the right one." The reader can stand and the poem demands ambiguity. This is what invites the reader into the place where the writer stands, the point at which the lump in the throat is understood and the poem transcends itself into another experience that goes beyond words. The poem's job becomes one of leaving itself behind. It's not easy.
    - This is accomplished by using all the elements we already know of:
      The poem does not merely eventuate in a logical conclusion. The conclusion of the poem is the working out of the various tensions — set up by whatever means — by propositions, metaphors, symbols. The unity is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents an equilibrium of forces, not a formula. It is “proved" as a dramatic conclusion is proved; by its ability to resolve the conflicts which have been accepted as the donnees of the drama. From <https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.34395/2015.34395.Well-Wrought-Urn-Studies-In-The-Structure-Of-Poetry_djvu.txt>
    - "No one ever yet thought their way to a great poem." Campbell McGrath
      - Follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U00ybFDTRU for a great two-minute piece of advice
      - His point is that poetry comes from the writing of poetry.
      - You must write and write and write and learn to let the poem tell you what it wants to say and how to say it.
      - In the assignments I hope to prompt you to write outside of your normal groove, to get you to widen the horizons available to you
      - Make up your own assignments. Challenge yourself.
      - Write like a poet you like. Copy styles. Try styles.
      - Begin with a line you find really good, powerful and then riff on it for three pages
      - Never, never edit your first draft. Let everything go,let it all out. Make it a verbal jailbreak
        
        Then look it over and start selecting, choosing, seeking patterns
        
        Then, in the patterns, find what the poem wants to be
  - Regarding binary thinking, keep in mind that the poem is the result of the journey from data (facts) to information to knowledge to wisdom and you as poet are the charged with caring for wisdom. LIke I said, it's not easy.
- "this indifference and trust is in itself a mystical grace" Merton
- How to put tension in out poems?
  - DON’T DO IT
    The reason for this is two-fold: first is that tension exists already in whatever you are putting to paper. It just is. It becomes enhanced as you distill the experience you want to consecrate through the craft of poetry, that of selecting the best words in the best order, employing metaphor, simile and whatever devices the poet has at hand in her effort to say the unsayable. Second is that tension is a critic's term, one designed to enable us to understand the mystery of how the poet works, how the poem means. It is a lens for looking at how the poem comes to its truth, how it gets the reader to participate in that experience that prompted the lump in the throat that began the poem. Thus, the way to put tension into your poems is, initially to write poems. Preceding this is the self-aware journey through life that leaves you without the option to not wrote poetry because, as Wordsworth said, "“What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.” ― William Wordsworth tags: creation, poetics Read more quotes from William Wordsworth

Sunday, December 24, 2017

December 21, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

I don't go through Christmas without reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales." Here is a link to the entire thing, which, at 3016 words won't take long to read.

The Next Assignment

The Next Meeting

Other Jabber

Monday, December 11, 2017

December 7, 2017

December 7, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/us-poet-first-holder-of-fellowship-in-seamus-heaney-legacy-project-36384969.html

Mark Doty has just been chosen the first holder of a fellowship in the Seamus Heany Legacy Project. I haven't been a long-time fan of Doty but find him growing on me.

And here's a poem by Mark Doty:

Golden Retrievals

BY MARK DOTY

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention

seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh

joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue

of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,

thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning

—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

Mark Doty, “Golden Retrievals” from Sweet Machine: Poems. Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: Sweet Machine: Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1998)

The Current Assignment

Who did it? I found it challenging and actually more interesting than I expected it to be. The result is lengthy since it doubles the length of the original. Nonetheless, a worthy exercise, at least for me.

The Next Assignment

As the song says, "Watch out, Sally!"

The assignment is to write a Christmas poem but without any verbs.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on December 21, 2017. Same time, same place.

Other Jabber

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/books/review/poetry-children.html

An excerpt from the article:

and this:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree …

Monday, November 20, 2017

November 15, 2017