Practice & Craft

Night Vision: A Videopoem Triptych

2011-09-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

Night Vision Videopoem Triptych by Swoon

This summer, video-artist Swoon created a video based on my poem, "On Edward Hopper's Automat." He has now combined it with two other videopoems to make a three-part video triptych called Night Vision. The poems by Nic Sebastian, Sherry O'Keefe and me blend into a haunting exploration of nocturnal life.

I'm intrigued by the way this new form tears down the boundaries between poems. The film adds layers of visual and auditory friction; the three narratives create a back and forth conversation about fear, distance, and loneliness. They seem to ricochet and echo as if in the dense fog a lighthouse keeper's dream life. Night Vision reminds me once more that artists work in partnership, even when we aren't immediately conscious of it.

Handmade Boats

2011-08-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

Whale Sound published my chapbook, Handmade Boats in November 2010, and it is now available in a few new exciting formats. You can read more about it at Nic Sebastian's blog, Very Like a Whale.

To read to Handmade Boats:

listen to it online
download the ebook
or order a print copy

There is one other exciting bit of news: Swoon's film based on "On Edward Hopper's Automat" is going to be shown at the upcoming Word In Motion Festival in Latvia.

An International Collaboration: Videopoem of "On Edward Hopper's Automat"

2011-07-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

Swoon, a video artist in Belgium, recently created a cinematic interpretation of my poem, "On Edward Hopper's Automat." Swoon's videopoem was accepted into the Word in Motion International film festival in Riga, Latvia.

On Edward Hopper's Automat from Swoon on Vimeo.

The poem was first published in the chapbook, Handmade Boats (Whale Sound 2010).

Evoking the Columbia Plateau

2011-07-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

Twice this summer I've stumbled into conversations I'd been unconsciously wanting to have for a long time. One conversation took place when I sat down to breakfast with an old friend. Instead of the light chat over coffee that I expected, I found myself in the middle of an utterly open, heartfelt exchange about fear, loss, and faith. The second time happened when I opened up Paul Lindholdt's new collection of essays, In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau. As I began to read, I felt again like I was part of a necessary and revelatory narrative that was at once personal and public, regional and universal.

A reader doesn't have to be anchored in the Northwest to be moved and impacted by this collection. These stories are about the relationship one can have with a region, but they aren't fixated on one small place; they range from Seattle's urban watersheds eastward to Idaho's Silver valley, and they study the complicated overlay of narratives on a land that is both loved and polluted.

Lindholdt has carefully studied the regional stories about the landscape, history, inhabitants, and big-industry deceit, and he has made them his own. In Earshot of Water explores what it means to be intimately connected with the water of the Pacific and Inland Northwest. Lindholdt recounts what it was like to grow up along Walker Creek, to kayak the Salmon River, and to come to terms with the sometimes ferocious wildness of Bellingham Bay.

Lindholdt's knack for story-telling is clearly evident as he tackles everything from hunting and rodeos to invasive weeds and hydroelectric dams. But don't be mistaken: these are not simply stories of pleasure and adventure. Paul Lindholdt is a serious wilderness advocate and naturalist and essays like "In the Shadow of the Government's Blind Eye" and "Subliming the System" lay out painful evidence for making environmental change and initiating better stewardship practices in the region and beyond. We glimpse his days working ankle deep in the toxic drainage ponds of Western Processing, we feel his pain as his father suffers from prostate cancer, and we float with him on the languorous bends of the Salmon River as he seeks respite from the grief of losing his firstborn son.

In Earshot of Water is also, very simply, a good read. The style is lyrical and clean, and his description of the landscape is deft and sure. These essays build a satisfying narrative arc that show his skillfulness as a curious and observant naturalist, as well as his willingness to let himself be seen as well as heard. In Earshot of Water is a keen and empathetic study of the intimate connections between the wildlife and the people in Paul Lindholdt's community. Upon finishing it, I wanted to read it again.

Lindholdt, Paul. In Earshot of Water. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011.

A New Engangered Species: Our Teacher Communities

2011-03-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

In the mad fracas over the federal budget, our legislators have sacrificed the National Writing Project, a nonprofit that supports 130,000 teachers and 1.4 million students each year in the United States. As a result, university teaching centers across the country have been notified that they will receive drastically reduced funding that may disappear altogether. Sixty percent of the National Writing Project staff has been laid off.

I can accept all the compromises that my family has had to make because of the country's economic struggles these last few years. I can accept that my version of the American dream, like many other common Americans, has undergone drastic and humbling re-visioning. Practicality comes first: we pay the bills and skip the luxuries. We skimp and tighten the belt and stretch our little money a little bit further. I can be at peace with the austerity measures my family has made to survive, but I cannot accept the drastic measures that are dismantling the most vital parts of our educational structure. The National Writing Project has a simple but radical idea that has been wildly successful for 37 years: if we create a space for teachers to share, they will come together and teach each other. When teachers are given the opportunity to collaborate, they learn new tools, they study new practices, and they become better teachers.

I was like most teachers: I started out in my early twenties on fire with the passion and faith that with enough effort, I could make a difference in the lives of my students. After a few years in the classroom, I was bone tired, creatively tapped, and suffering a crisis of faith about my chosen profession. How does a teacher find the resources, energy and endurance to be effective--truly effective--in the classroom, day after day, year after year? How can a busy teacher find the time to research, learn more effective pedagogical techniques, create innovative assignments and genuinely support her students without sacrificing personal relationships, well-being and health?

In 2007, I stepped away from the classroom and joined the National Writing Project staff. I thought I might learn how teachers can serve their students with excellence and survive with their passion and faith intact. For almost three years, I supported the country's teachers by helping to create space for them to collaborate, question, research, and share. That old phrase from the classic film, Field of Dreams holds true with teachers: If you build it, they will come. If we carve out the time and space for teachers to improve their professional skills, they will come and work their damnedest to make things better for their students.

It doesn't matter if a teacher is in an elite university, a remote rural elementary school or in a rundown inner-city high school: the NWP network is robust and flexible enough to connect even the most isolated teachers with online technologies. And when they meet in person, it solidifies authentic, life-long professional relationships that can change the way they learn, teach and share for the rest of their career. With the National Writing Project model, we have a highly successful, functioning structure that improves teacher efficacy and classroom results.

Last month, when I was teaching poetry to recovering meth addicts, I walked around the room and listened with awe as people shared their painful, hope-filled poems. One by one, women raised their hands to ask a question, to give voice to their experience, and to affirm their recovery with powerful metaphors. I am a better teacher because I've been working side-by-side with some of the most thoughtful teachers of my time. My quiet years working away from the classroom and behind the scenes at the National Writing Project helped me to recover my own faith in the good and necessary work that can happen in a classroom.

I stand by my teacher colleagues who are facing little financial support and astonishing national criticism as they continue to step into the classroom each day and educate our students. I stand by my NWP colleagues who have lost their jobs this week. And I support the few remaining staff who are fighting with everything to keep the NWP network in place for the sake of the teachers and students. If we turn the lights out in the National Writing Project offices and close the 200 college and university-housed NWP sites, we disconnect and ultimately disable teachers all across the United States.

Collage Poems

2011-01-25T14:56:00.000-08:00

I recently read William S. Burroughs' essay, The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin. I wouldn't normally follow the advice of Burroughs, but one of the benefits of long writing retreats is that you get to goof around with experiments you normally wouldn't have time to try. This is how Burroughs explains the benefits of collage work: "You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors." His argument intrigued me, so I spent an evening cutting up a local Montana paper, and littering the studio with tiny words. I can't say the poem I made was worth keeping, and it looked like a poorly pasted ransom note by the time I was finished. But, I did learn something about local language. The newspaper was full of words I don't normally use in my daily lexicon. Words like: blowguns, mauling, outlawed, drake mallard, and near-fatal. The word safety popped up over and over again, and if you are talking about grizzlies, mauling, blowguns and snow-locked winters, it makes sense that safety would be a frequent concern. If we are bold enough to attempt to write about cultures or places where we aren't natives, how else do we learn the vocabulary but by playing with it?

Postcard from the Montana Artist's Refuge: Week Two

2011-01-11T10:25:00.000-08:00

Before I came to the Refuge last week, my grandfather-in-law gave me David Hinton's anthology, Classical Chinese Poetry. It feels exactly right to be reading the work of Cold Mountain (Han Shan), Li Po, and T'ao Ch'ien here, in midwinter. The translations are magnificent, and the selections are so, so good. I particularly delighted in discovering T'ao Ch'ien, whom Hinton describes as:

"the first writer to make a fully achieved poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism that became the hallmark of Chinese poetry. So T'ao Ch'ien effectively stands at the head of the great Chinese poetic tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting"

(110). In, "Idle 9/9 at Home," T'ao Ch'ien says:

My empty winejar shamed by a dusty cup,
this cold splendor of blossoms opens for itself

alone. I tighten my robe and sing to myself,
idle, overwhelmed by each memory. So many

joys to fill a short stay. I'll take my time
here. It is whole. How else could it be any less?

Today, in Basin, Montana, the thermometer is hovering at -3 degrees. A layer of ice frosts my windows. It is comforting to know the residents of this small community are going about their day, making pottery, painting, sewing quilts, rolling out dough. The woman in the front studio chops firewood to stoke her stove, and works on her sculpture. I chant mantra to summon the poems and relish the idle time to do so. There are so many poems to write.

A Postcard from the Montana Artist's Refuge

2011-01-03T18:49:00.001-08:00

I am settling into a month of writing in Basin, Montana. Although it has been twenty degrees zero, the Refuge lives up to its name; I have a warm and comfortable studio, perfect for contemplation. Hermited in the snow-covered mountains on the continental divide, I have begun turning inwards to the poetry and getting into the flow of the work ahead.

I've been thinking about Brenda Hillman's use of trance in her book, "Practical Water." While attending a congressional hearing, she focuses on a glass of water and enters a "trance" as a way to observe. Here, in this tiny writing studio, as I pace up and down the stairs and circle the kitchen trying to tease out a fragment of a poem, I can sense it in a new way by slipping into a less rigid state of consciousness and following the hum of the line. Perhaps these days we disregard such metaphysical, intuition-based approaches to writing, and are too inclined to intellectualize?

Reading the work of ancestors

2010-12-14T08:54:00.000-08:00

I recently found out that one of my ancestors, Norris Clarion Sprigg, was a poet. To my utter surprise, I found his large volume of work, Sprigs of Poetry, scanned in its entirety and available online. Originally published in 1907, it contains hundreds of poems about nature, people and humorous moments.

The only hard copy of this book that I am aware of is sitting on my great aunt's bedside table, on a snow-covered farm in rural Illinois. I've hundreds of poems to get through before I will truly have a sense of Norris C. Sprigg's body of work, but I am enjoying reading a bit of his light verse at the end of each day: it is comforting to connect to an ancestor who was busily writing odes to rock roses and towns without baths a hundred years before me. In his poem, "A Romance" it begins:

He'd nothing but his violin,
I'd nothing but my song;
But we were wed, when skies were blue
And summer days were long.

We sometimes sipped on dew-berries
And slept among the hay;
And oft the farmers' wives came out
At eve to hear us play.

The good old tunes, the dear old tunes,
We could not starve for long,
When my man had his violin,
And I my sweet love song.

It's good to meet an old relative on the great wide expanse of internet. And to read his lines of praise to sleeping in the hay and living well when the skies are blue? He was a man with my own heart.

The Collaborative Poem

2010-12-05T06:53:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most recent and well-known collaborative poetry effort is Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison's book, Braided Creek: A conversation in poetry. The collection of poems, amounting to more than 300, were written back-and-forth between the two poets as an ongoing poetic conversation. I've always liked the exchange of ideas as poets share work, but I've rarely attempted to write poetry with another poet. Lately, my friend Kate and I have been writing a "braided" poem together. One of us writes a stanza, then sends it to the other for the next stanza.

The collaborative exercise quickly reveals the ways we make poems turn. As we exchange the poem, there is time in the drafting process for each of us when the poem is suspended, and we don't know where it will go: when it comes back to our desk, the new stanza sends the poem in unexpected directions. We must then go with the turn, and deepen the idea, or spin the direction again. For poets with the tendency to tightly control the poem from the first line on, like I do, this exercise forces me to practice a more automatic kind of creativity that has to respond instead of plan. It makes the question, "What now?" more fluid by eliminating an agenda. It's not that poetic control is dictatorial, but sometimes the poem can stutter-start with too much expectation of what it must articulate.

As Kate and I go back and forth, adding to the poem one passage at a time, I have no ability to foresee where it will ultimately go, so the discrete images, ideas and curves that shape the poem manifest very clearly as distinct, singular moments. Experiencing the creative drafting process as half of a collaborative team allows me to re-learn about the drivers of momentum in a poem, and they way they can happen at the level of the individual word, the line, and the stanza; ultimately the structure of a successful poem is held together with binding energy like that of a nuclear particle: the stability depends on the momentum and strong attraction between the various spinning elements. By working on the poem together, we can maintain a high level of curiosity: what is next, what is next? The momentum of this curiosity, interestingly, is easy to carry over into the poems I am simultaneously working on by myself.

Handmade Boats

2010-11-22T06:38:00.000-08:00

Whale Sound just published an audio chapbook of my work, Handmade Boats, which includes a reading of each poem by the editor, Nic Sebastian and cover art by Maggie Taylor.

On Whale Sound's companion blog, Very Like a Whale, you can read the process notes from our collaborative editing experience as we prepared the poems for publication.

Nashville's Literary Scene

2010-11-13T07:24:00.000-08:00

In the last month, Margaret Atwood, Mark Jarman, and Billy Collins have all read in Nashville and more than 1,000 local writers are currently participating in the National Novel Writing Month extravaganza. Tourists have been pouring into the city in their fanciest cowboy boots and hoping for glimpses of stars at the Country Music Awards and I have been overwhelmed trying to fit in all of the literary opportunities. As my friend Michael would say, "It's a good problem."

Margaret Atwood proved to be as quick-witted and delightfully quirky as one might guess from her work. In regards to her novel, The Year of the Flood, she commented on the complexity of constructed communities: "Every Utopia contains a little dystopia in it, and every dystopia has a little Utopia." This thought-provoking remark has made me re-think the back-to-the-lander Tolstoyans portrayed in the 2009 film, The Last Station, as well as my own disastrous attempts at joining living communities. As many of the characters from In the Year of the Flood discover, periods of isolation can mean survival. Sphinx Productions made a documentary, In the Wake of the Flood about Atwood's wildly original, theatrical international book tour that looks quite funny.

Book-length poems & the lyrical life

2010-10-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

I generally have mixed feelings about novels in verse. At it's worst, a book-length poem can feel contrived and awkward. It can dissipate with tedium, like the 9-minute extended version of Don McLean's "American Pie." However, Mark Jarman's novella poem, Iris demonstrates the power of sustaining a poem and allowing it to slowly unfold and reveal a character's life.

Iris is an abused wife who returns to her family home on a rundown Kentucky farm. While living in a trailer with an alcoholic mother and drug dealing brothers, she escapes her circumstances by reading Robinson Jeffers' poetry. Even though she survives on poetry, she doesn't believe that she lives a poetic life: "She turned her right side to the mirror to check the bruise / mapping upward from / Buttock to ribs, charting Cale's last kick. Hardly the / heroine for you, she said to her poet."

The book is a struggle against the mundane. Despite decades of rough existence, Iris does not let go of her imaginative world; she lives inwardly, inhabiting Jeffers' California coast of pines and cypress.

The poem that resists ending resists failure at each turn. Instead of the epic poems of the canon that magnified the human to heroic levels, the modern book-length poem offers the chance to study human vulnerability that is heroically transcendent without grandiosity or magic. After a patient layering of hundreds of lines, we finally see the outwardly spare and difficult life of Iris holistically, as a shaped and intricately delicate form.

Discovering Marie Howe

2010-09-20T08:11:00.000-07:00

As my husband and I just relocated across the country and have been setting up the new place, we took the opportunity to combine our book collections for the first time. Alphabetically organized on the shelves, our poetry collection is much larger than either of us could have guessed: so much to browse, so much to explore.

The surprise I discovered on the shelf the other night was a slim black volume by Marie Howe. The Good Thief, Marie Howe's first collection, won the Open Competition of the National Poetry series in 1987, and I can't believe it just now found it. I sunk into the couch one sweltering evening, and as moths and fireflies flitted in the open windows, I read the entire collection, immersed to the end.

The first poem in the collection, "Part of Eve's Discussion," sparks anticipation with the line, "It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand." And second poem to the finish, we come full arc to "Mary's Argument," where Mary seems to earnestly whisper, "To lead the uncommon life is not so bad." Perhaps, unlike me, you read this in the 80s; if so, might it be time to rediscover it?

With a little dedication

2010-09-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

Sixteen Rivers Press recently put out a new book that deserves attention: The Place that Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed is an admirable collection of work and more so, a fine example of how poetic collections can present a deep and cohesive exploration of the plants, animals, water, weather, and humans within an ecoregion.

A few weeks ago, I was relishing the collection while lounging at the edge of Lake Anza, in Tilden Park, above Berkeley. Page by page, I was intrigued by the mix of voices, including Sandra Gilbert, Chana Bloch, Ursula Le Guin, Larry Levis and Thom Gunn. And then I turned a page to find Quinton Duval's poem, "One Bright Morning" and my understanding about the function of a poem's dedication completely changed.

I thought dedications had a purpose, but were fairly limited in power: a dedication could anchor a poem to place, time or person. But how much does this affect the audience? Duval's dedication memorializes another bay area poet, Loren Chandler, who passed away in 2006. "One Bright Morning" allowed a woman sunning at a lake edge to revisit a long lost friend and mentor. For twenty-six lines, I was with him and all the things he loved: herons in the slough and farmland bleaching in summer heat. I heard his gently wry sense of humor. The waters of Lake Anza glinted like glass chips, and I felt gratitude to have one more chance to sit with a poet who I'd sat with a hundred Friday afternoons as an undergraduate at UC Davis. Years and distance and mortality separated us, but here I was, again communing with the funny, dear mind of an old friend through a poem. Thank you, Quinton Duval: beautiful, powerful stuff.

The Substantiality of Anna Karenina

2010-06-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

During these last few days, I've been wandering through Italian cathedrals, contemplating hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and stained glass windows meant to reveal a deeper understanding of humanity and the divine. And in the evenings I've been reading Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of Anna Karenina.

Art--at its best--can elicit a flow state, and during these moments of flow, we are focused and sensitive to things we don't normally notice. Tolstoy succeeds in summoning the same sense of vitality and verity that made my head swim when I circled Giambologna's sculpture Rape of the Sabine Women in Florence. In the novel, scenes stir and vibrate with tensile power. For example, one can hear the rhythmic, sweeping sounds of the scythes as men glean a field, or the halting breath of Anna as she watches her young son approach her in the garden. As we breathe with Anna, we feel the substantial ache of her desires and her failures; we also learn something about humanity and the earnest yearning for the divine.

The Lessons of War & Peace

2010-02-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

For the last nine months, I've carried Tolstoy's War and Peace everywhere with me. I read the novel in the sultry summer heat of Wellesley, Massachusetts; I read it in a garden in Greenmount, Australia as parrots squawked overhead; I napped by a stream in the Sierra foothills with War and Peace as my pillow. Every sick day I spent in bed, Tolstoy's words were my tea and toast.

For nine months, I read little else, yet I was content. Tolstoy's work is not without flaw: he interrupts the story to editorialize about Napoleon's strategies. He has tedious monologues about historical disagreements. But, the story is written with such fluid beauty and such a nuanced observation of humanity that it makes the plodding parts a worthwhile trade. I can't say that I began my study of Tolstoy with any expectations: I started to read with curiosity, and I continued with pleasure.

In Tolstoy's concluding discussion about freedom, he expounds:

"Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness expresses the essence of freedom....Freedom is that which is examined. Necessity is that which examines. Freedom is content. Necessity is form. Only by the separation of the two sources of cognition, which are related to each other as form to content, do we get the distinct, mutually exclusive, and unfathomable concepts of freedom and necessity. Only by their union do we get a clear picture of the life of man" (1210).

This passage illuminates the reciprocal nature of creativity and structure that explains modern the artist's struggle. We all must contend with limitations and still find grace. Tonight, as I watch Shaun White flip the radical Double McTwist 1260, I understand Tolstoy's desire to comprehend the absolute capacity of human liberation, and I understand why Tolstoy's work is still important for us to read today.

Lambasting Salinger

2010-02-17T15:34:00.000-08:00

I can't say that I get worked up about editorials very often, but Leondard Cassuto's piece, "J.D. Salinger: An Unappreciation" (Published in Inside Higher Ed on February 9, 2010) is appallingly bellicose.

Cassuto argues that the "fuss" over J.D. Salinger's death is tired and undeserved. He skewers Salinger for abandoning his fame and choosing to live in seclusion and he seems embittered by an author who decides not to write "enough" for his fans. Cassuto offers a flippant nod to "his right to privacy" but he gives privacy about as much credence as Google. He goes on to bash the ones writing laudatory obituaries as being middle-aged, implying they are sentimental and out of touch.

I disagree with the implication that a writer must write for the world, and that a writer squanders their talent by not publishing until the day they die. Why must a writer, even an extremely talented writer, embrace the world of critics, fan-based pressure and the onus of fame?

One can pick up the works of Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins and read with appreciation; the fact that they chose seclusion over society is no matter to the modern readers--but it may have meant everything to the writers as they worked. Unlike Dickinson and Hopkins, Salinger knew success and then chose to retreat. His decision may have been antisocial, and it may have been his sacrifice for authenticity. I am one of those middle-aged readers looking forward to reading what Salinger wrote after abandoning fame.

A Fond Good-Bye to Lucille Clifton

2010-02-16T13:41:00.000-08:00

Sadly, Lucille Clifton passed away last Saturday, February 13, 2010.

Her reading voice was soft and mellifluous, and it revealed the benevolence that structured much of her life's poetic work. It is hard to understate the impact that she has had on poetry during her lifetime. For my own poetry, discovering her work was like walking down the street and stumbling upon Chartres Cathedral. When I read her poems, "Homage to My Hips" and "Wishes for Sons" my understanding of poetry, and the ways that feminists could write poetry, changed forever. For a teenage girl, these poems seemed shocking and brave. They still do.

Lucille Clifton's presence was the highlight of the 2009 AWP Conference event in honor of Geraldine Brooks. She spoke with brash honesty; she radiated humor and generosity.

Thank God she was a prolific writer: her books provide a wealth of work which will instruct people for years to come.

To watch an animated video of one of her poems, click here: "mulbrerry fields."

Foster & Guthrie's anthology, A Year in Poetry

2010-01-14T08:28:00.002-08:00

When a friend handed me a copy of the anthology A Year in Poetry (Ed. by Thomas E. Foster and Elizabeth C. Guthrie, 1995) I knew I was in trouble. The anthology is organized by calendar day, so that each day presents a poem, and each is often thematically related to the specific date. The premise is simple and straightforward, but there is an explicit challenge to the book: read a poem every day. I read poetry often. But every day? It doesn't happen.

When I cracked this collection I quickly discovered the poems are keen and frequently surprising. Consider a few lines from Tim Dlugos' poem, "Qum":

"A poet." Fine. But sometimes I feel like the wife
of a demented mullah, in my thick chador,
two eyes peeping out, no body curves or
smile or sense of pity.

The feeling of claustrophobia affects my breathing as I move from line to line. I drag forth in understanding and it reminds me why I read.

I've accepted the challenge of daily poetry like a resolution. There will be days that I don't get to the anthology, but I have a feeling I'll enjoy the catch-up the next day.

Finding Rhythm through Chant

2010-01-06T06:54:00.000-08:00

If you've ever listened to yogic chanter Krishna Das, you've heard how someone with talent can take a single line, repeat it a hundred times and turn it into a swirling vortex of music. Poets strive to create this same inward pulling spin that a good chant summons.

Now, I come from a lineage of rhythmically challenged people and this is evidenced in my struggle with everything from salsa dancing to singing happy birthday. But chanting can be basic enough that I often find myself playing with it.

The discoveries I find out about the natural rhythms of a line of a traditional Sanskrit chant are often similar to the discoveries I find out when I chant a line of one of my own poems. It's possible to have a line of a poem that I sense is right, but I can't immediately tell where it needs to be broken, or how it should be visually represented on the page. Chanting can help me understand the rise and fall, the turns and pauses, and the most natural utterance of the line. As you chant a line, it's like you spin the words: all the unnecessary clutter flies off; those extra words or clunky word forms take cleaner, sleeker shape.

The act of chanting is a curious gymnastic exercise with sound: when I throw the words this way, when I sound them from deep in my belly, when I roll the syllables like pebbles, what do I learn about the meanings of the sounds? When I say the words three hundred times, what do I learn about the way they make me feel? I think these are the same questions that teachers hope students will explore when they give them traditional chants, like "om mani padme hum" or "om shanti shanti." When we explore the words from every side and every shape, when we explore the words until we know them completely, we know their essence.

The Importance of Flow

2009-12-15T17:05:00.000-08:00

Oddly enough, spin class is the quickest route I know to feeling “flow.” I can climb in the saddle and be stressed out and scattered, and within two or three minutes of riding, I start to smile and focus. It feels good, so good that it keeps me going back to spin class as often as possible. Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, talks about how humans are compelled to do activities that alter consciousness. For instance, he mentions that starting at a very young age children will spin in circles in order to alter their sense of equilibrium. He likens this tendency to the same urge that compels people to try mind-altering drugs or activities like sky diving.

My spin teacher seems to be capable of tapping into great amounts of energy; I think she could teach a high-energy spin class, run up to Grizzly Peak, and then for good measure spend the evening singing karaoke. She is a live wire, a conduit that is fully open. And as twenty puffing, sweating middle-aged people pedal along with her in an exercise studio at the YMCA, she turns on a power ballad like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin,’” then lets out a few war-woops and what do you know? The whole class suddenly moves faster.

As good as being in the flow feels when one accesses it physically, it is also possible--and perhaps essential--to the parallel state of mind a writer enters when writing. Whether we call it “being in the flow” or “grooving” or “focusing” or “meditating,” the state of mind has to do with one-mindedness and complete openness to the activity at hand.

Whether one is a singer belting out a “power ballad” or a poet writing metrically precise work, we all need some level of flow; imagine a rock star who doesn’t harness that livewire current: they’d be pretty unconvincing. So too is the poet who is only half-engaged in the poem. Poets aren't rock stars and rock stars aren't poets; but, perhaps the ability to channel a particular focused energy is similar. I suppose it could be argued that there are exceptions: people can learn the routine enough to get by with grunt work and sweat. But when I think about it and am honest with myself, it is the sense of flow that I feel when I write (or read a good poem) that makes me return to it over and over.

Perhaps if I sang like Joni Mitchell I wouldn't write or spin? I doubt it--that seems to make our urge for the feeling too limited. After all, who wants just a little samadhi? But, I am curious if the simple act of practicing getting into the flow—whether it be with spin class or by singing rock songs or washing dishes can make it easier to find the flow later, say, when sitting down in a quiet room with a piece of blank paper.

Poetry of the City

2009-12-12T18:34:00.000-08:00

I have a poetic bias that is actually part of a larger bias I have about life in general: I am a nature lover, and it often makes me blind to the beauty of (and poetry of) cities.

However, I am currently a city dweller: I walk across my city in the morning, spend the day indoors in an office and even exercise indoors to avoid the rain. These days, instead of putting on hiking boots or running shoes and finding the nearest trail, I put on my holiday dress and meet my friends for mulled cider and evening parties in decorated hotels and restaurants.

Immersed in the urban structure as I am, I find myself looking for the wild coming through: the persimmons glowing brightly on frosted branches in the crisp mornings, or the illumined ginkgoes in rain-dark yards. As I search out cedar waxwings and chrysanthemums, I sometimes find evidence that reminds me wild poetics are not just in trees and birds.

Consider this sidewalk poem I found:

Smores fo'
breakfust
smores fo'
lunch

I like to know my city is populated with people like the artist who stopped in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk, crouched down with a piece of chalk and wrote this little ode of joy. It lets me know someone else is thinking of night under open sky and eating sweetness with both hands.

Running to The Teachings of Zen Master Dogen

2009-11-22T12:56:00.000-08:00

This morning I woke up at 5 a.m., ate a banana, drank a shot of espresso and grabbed a fleece hat, gloves and my ipod, then headed into the Philadelphia half marathon starting line. I have run three half marathons in the last year, and I have to say I wasn't quite ready for this one. First off, my usual running buddy was out with an injury. Secondly, I've only run a couple times in the last month, because I'd been trying to get over a hellacious cold-then-flu double-whammy. Thirdly, I've worked fourteen-hour days this week to pull off the biggest meeting of the year. I thought it might take a significant amount of caffeinated GU to survive the run today.

But, I added something different to the run: instead of loading my ipod with the Rocky soundtrack (we are in Philly after all), I downloaded Gary Snyder's reading of The Teachings of Zen Master Dogen. I was inspired by Snyder's 50-year celebration of Riprap last week, and thought his voice, paired with Dogen, might be just the mental pep talk I needed to survive 13.1 miles. And, damn if it didn't work. As I ran with thousands of others along the Delaware River in the early morning light I listened to Dogen describe ways of investigating "mountains walking" and time flowing. I ran in a tumult of humans acting just like a clamoring creek tumbling down a mountainside. And as Dogen encouraged investigation into a body's presence in time (a study of bone and marrow in the moment) I could do so with absolute focus. (What else was there besides the sudden pain in my left knee, and the tightness in the muscles surrounding my left clavicle? Nothing; the whole world became cartilage and blood flow). The recursive nature of the teachings--the ways the lines looped back and repeated with slight variations in meaning--matched the nonlinear, blurry thinking that one begins to think in after a few miles of stepping and breathing without change. Even Dogen's comparison between the human face and a painted rice cake made perfect sense when I passed a human-sized IHOP chocolate chip pancake dancing and waving at tired runners.

The surprisingly helpful way of studying Dogen made me think about how we might best study other writing without simply sitting at a table and reading. For instance, how would one understand Milton anew if they could gaze at a Hieronymus Bosch painting while listening to "Paradise Lost"? And what is the best way absorb Emily Dickinson? Perhaps by reading her in a cemetery at sunset? Or reciting her while baking bread? Would it make sense to read her poems only after taking a day or two away from all society?

Hmm. I think I have found a new kind of "active reading." Now, I'm curious about what will help me understand Joyce better. Is there a dynamic line of inquiry that makes sense of Finnegans Wake?

Billy Collins + 1,200 teachers

2009-11-20T17:42:00.000-08:00

It could have snowed in Philadelphia today and a thousand English teachers wouldn't have noticed. Billy Collins read poems from his newest book, Ballistics, to a captivated audience at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting. Please understand that this is not a small "meeting" with a plate of pastries and a pitcher of juice: there are so many people here that the event staff serves coffee 35 gallons at a time. Yet, the poet had the entire crowd elbowing each other and throwing their hands up with laughter. It was a true uproar.

It's a treat to be in a room of people that overthrow all decorum in enjoyment of a poem. And the wild thing is, the NWP network can spontaneously combust with this kind of energy on a regular basis. Even after Billy Collins stopped performing and headed quietly home, the teachers broke up into small groups and kept talking about how to teach writing better. In the hotel bar tonight, these firebrands will be talking about revision strategies and high-tech classrooms until the bartender orders the last call.

Collins made the argument that "poetry is a bird while prose is a potato." These teachers that have spent the last two days running around hugging and chirping happily about pedagogy are like a flock of flamingos winging over Tanzania. It's such a vibrant melee.

To watch the video of Collins' reading, go to: http://nwpbookgroups.ning.com/video/billy-collins-at-the-nwp

The Fifty Year Anniversary of Snyder's Riprap

2009-11-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the UC Berkeley Doe library filled to capacity as people gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Gary Snyder's book, Riprap. Many members of the audience sat on the floor of the balcony and watched through the railing; even in such uncomfortable positions, they had happy, attentive expressions. It was a treat to hear him read poems like "Hay for the Horses" and the title poem, "Riprap." Likewise, it was wonderful to hear poet Lyn Hejinian speak about the first time she read Riprap, and what it meant to her as a young poet.

Gary Snyder still taught at UC Davis when I was there as an undergrad in the English department. He only taught graduate level courses, so I never had the chance to study with him. But, I read Riprap along with his other books and essays and he often came into the restaurant I worked in: a run down and slightly funky but popular cafe called the French Bistro. Whenever he walked through the door, I would tell the cook that he was an important poet, and ask him to take extra care with his order. Even at the end of a long day in the middle of a icy deluge, Snyder carried about him a happy aura of gentleness and contentment.

Gary Snyder's poems and essays continue to mean a lot of things to me: it's as if he is still in my neighborhood, nodding to things I should notice and articulating on the abstractions I haven't quite got my mind wrapped around yet. But his presence, all those years ago in the dinky cafe, taught me something else altogether: it taught me about what a life could look like if one practices inquisitiveness, mindfulness, hard work out-of-doors, and poetry.

To celebrate the anniversary, Counterpoint Press has just released a new edition titled Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.

Asking the Right Questions

2009-11-04T19:12:00.000-08:00

In two weeks, Billy Collins will be the guest speaker at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. As part of the speaking engagement, he will do a brief interview. The NWP is humming with excitement. But, the question is, what shall we ask him?

The more I think about it, the more daunting the task seems that we have set before him. What helpful information can one successful poet share with 1,000 English teachers, all of whom want to return to their classrooms with witty, insightful writing advice for their students? You've got 12 minutes. Enlighten us.

BF Skinner's essay "How to Discover What You Have to Say" gives a series of suggestions for creating good "writing behavior" and then concludes by saying "it would be impossible to tell you all you need to know. No two people are alike; your personal histories will lead you to respond in different ways. You will have to work our your own rules."

Perhaps all writers can benefit from discussions about how to work out their own rules for creating good writing behavior. My guess is that Billy Collins has a pretty disciplined approach to writing. He is not lazy: he has 14 books to his name.

I think that's what I'd like to ask him: what are his personal writing "rules" or habits?

And, how does he keep it so dang funny?

Eavan Boland Reads at the UC Berkeley Lunch Poems Series

2009-10-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Eavan Boland drew a crowd to the Morrison Library. No matter how busy my day is, on the first Thursday of the month I make time for the Lunch Poems series: the poets never fail. My favorite poem that Boland read was "Quarantine." (It can be found on the poets.org website: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20089. ) Despite the dry California-in-October heat, and the unloving stickiness of the sweaty crowd, the desperation of the icy climate in this poem could be felt as she read. I think I will keep this poem with me for some time.

Writing in Australia: Week 4

2009-09-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

My final days as emerging writer-in-residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Center were filled with companionship and conversation. I visited a citrus grove with poet Mardi May and she taught me about the difference between a variety of oranges. Poet Glen Phillips kindly spent an afternoon showing me how to identify the local trees and wildflowers around the Mundaring Weir. And on my last afternoon, poet Rose Van Son took me for a walk along the Swan river where we glimpsed yellow-billed spoonbills and nesting black swans. At sundown, we lingered over a beer on the waterfront in East Perth. I couldn't have been luckier than to be introduced to the Australian landscape under the guidance of a community of poets. I didn't just learn about how to identify kangaroo paws, mari trees, and willy wagtails: I studied them with people who know them as filled with elements of the sacred, and the magic of home place.

Writing in Western Australia: Week 3

2009-08-23T04:03:00.000-07:00

This week, I visited the Perth Poetry Club, which meets on Saturday afternoons in the back room of a bar in downtown Perth. Disco balls, mirrors and neon lights create a funky, don't-take-us-too-seriously atmosphere which works well to ease any uptight poets. I enjoyed sharing poetry, conversation and coffee with the locals.

Despite rain and wind and generally ugly weather, a group of cheerful KSP members turned up for a literary dinner on Tuesday night. Sometimes, it rained so loud it was impossible to speak over the clamor. By the end of the evening, I had a long list of Australian writers to read, enough to keep me busy until December.

I spent a couple of jam-packed days visiting the WA aquarium, museums, and art gallery and I couldn't miss a quick trip to Kings Park for a glimpse of the boab trees. My head is still swimming with images of sea turtles, ship wrecks, meteorites and mega-mouth sharks.

The week wrapped up with an eight hour hike in the Serpentine National Forest with the Perth Bush Walker's Club. We climbed large granite outcroppings and trudged through sticker bushes; we watched red tailed black cockatoos and kangaroos. Despite spitting clouds, muddy trails and getting lost, it was a great day.

I've learned quite a bit in the last few days about the local history, environment, and community and I've been glad to join in and see "how it's going" down under.

Writing in Western Australia: Week 2

2009-08-14T05:11:00.001-07:00

This week began with a Black Truffle Festival in the Mundaring Shire (where I ate a truffle and arugula hamburger that almost made me cry with pleasure) and it only got better from there.

I spent two days exploring secluded beaches on Rottnest island, a few miles off the coast of Perth. It is home to a friendly marsupial, the Quokka, a collection of nesting bird populations, and a stunning wave break. I was so excited about the terrain, I wore myself out running from one gorgeous beach to another. Lucky for my tired legs, it rained my second day on the island, so I had time to linger over a mocha and work on poetry.

The writing groups at the KSP writing centre continue to be engaging and thoughtful. This week, a historical non-fiction group discussed nature writing and reminisced about eating grubs, spiders and mud pies as children; a poetry group wrote ghazals; and the Thursday evening anything-goes writing group shared a mixture of travelogues, science fiction, humorous poetry, and more over wine and chocolate.

It has been a week full of good conversation, bracing weather and inspiring landscape.

Writing in Western Australia: Week 1

2009-08-07T04:43:00.000-07:00

I am spending the month of August at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Center in Greenmount, Australia. It hasn't taken me long to find a sweet little routine: the day begins with tea and toast and a couple early hours of writing time. Parrots and magpies make a happy racket in the bougainvillea. Midday, I might take a break to read in the garden or join one of the writing groups. The staff and writers are both friendly and welcoming; some have been meeting here to write together for almost 15 years. I save the afternoons for exploring. A few blocks up the road is a national forest with miles of walking trails and a view of the Swan River Valley. Brightly colored birds wing past, and kangaroos forage in the underbrush. In the evening, after a simple dinner of Irish cheddar, apples and wine, I'm ready to get back to writing. This center is tucked away in a quiet and modest place, but it is very inspiring. I aim to bring home a little bit of the sustaining energy of the writing community, even if I can't bring home a kangaroo.

Cries for help from struggling independent publishers

2009-07-02T15:47:00.000-07:00

I have been worrying about independent publishers lately. I have nightmares about how our reading options will narrow abysmally if only the big publishing houses survive the economic crisis. Consequently, I have gone way over my book-buying budget as I've tried to support some of my favorite publishers that are struggling to stay afloat. Salt Publishing (http://www.saltpublishing.com/) and Tupelo Press (http://www.tupelopress.org/) are two independent publishers who do work that I admire greatly. I don't want to lose them. Can you buy a book and help them out? Come on, share a little. Please.

Red Hen Press Reading in Berkeley: Timothy Green & Joël Barraquiel Tan

2009-05-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

I have to begin by admitting that I am a seriously stubborn homebody. When I finally arrive home after a day at the office, a session at the gym, and a back-and-forth commute by bike, I'm happy to retreat for the last few hours of the day into my own private hermitage. It takes an event of potential magnitude to get me out of the house on a weekday evening. When the invite for the Timothy Green and Joël Barraquiel Tan reading arrived in my email inbox, I was excited about the possibility to hear the poets read--but wasn't sure I'd actually make it. The quietness of home is its own siren song.

A reading by Timothy Green, funny and amiable editor of Rattle, is worth a battle against the inner-hermit. And, although I wasn't already familiar with Joël Barraquiel Tan's work, I knew that Red Hen Press consistently puts out quality poetry books and I wagered it would be a reading that shouldn't be missed. And damn, these two poets did not disappoint me.

Green's work is humorous and compelling, and his reading style is impressive. Green knows his poems by heart, and he reads with just a touch of poetry slam performance in his style. His book, "American Fractal" has many poems worth reading, and then reading again. "After Hopper," "Pluots and Apriums," and "Saddle" are a few of my favorites. In a book about the recurring layers of order within our world, I appreciate the playful combination of form and disorder he intentionally allows for in his work. For instance, he admitted that his ordering technique for the book was to toss the pages of the manuscript "to the wind" and then pick them up as they scattered.

Joël Barraquiel Tan's poetry was a pleasurable surprise. He read from his latest book, "Type O Negative," a collection of poems about his family history in Manila. His poetry makes the listener lean in for every nuance. As you follow with him, you sometimes startle and shiver or flinch. His imagistic stories are blunt and lovely.

Thanks to Poetry Flash, Red Hen Press and Moe's Books for bringing us such poets.

Things That Go “Pop-Bang”

2009-05-08T16:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was in a clothing store and I overheard a woman asking for an accessory that would make her dress go “pop-bang.” Now, I could win awards for having the most boring wardrobe in town, and I can’t say that I have ever thought that I needed an item of clothing to pop-bang. But, as I listened to her, I realized that I am always looking for language that causes a little explosion. We all need to experience the spectacular now and then. Whether the spectacular manifests as a pair of metallic stilettos visually detonating on the dance floor or a poem is bursting like an English party cracker with surprises flying out, we like the spangled light and shocking clamor.

If you made a list of pop-bang words, what would it consist of? Perhaps more importantly, how do these words change the musicality, the rhythm, the kinesthetic experience and the impact of your poem?

A Glimpse from Carole Weatherford's New Book, Becoming Billie Holiday

2009-04-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

Carole Boston Weatherford, an award winning writer with more than 30 books to her credit, has published a new book of poetry about the life of Billie Holiday. Becoming Billie Holiday offers new angles for considering our historical inheritance. Here is an excerpt from "Coda: Strange Fruit":

After years of being barred
from entering front doors,
sitting on bandstands
and mingling at whites-only clubs,
how could I not headline
Café Society, one of the first joints
to let blacks and whites mix?
. . .

When the NAACP hung a flag
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday
from its 69th Street office,
how could I not long to voice outrage?

When schoolteacher Lewis Allen
showed me his protest poem
about a lynching and plucked
a somber melody on the piano,
how could I let that tune slip away
without passing through my lips?

When the waiters stopped service,
the room was pitch-black
except for a spotlight on my face,
and I stood completely still
performing "Strange Fruit,"
. . .
how could I not shed tears?

Weatherford offers this background to the poem:

In 1999, Time magazine hailed "Strange Fruit," a haunting hymn about lynching, as "the best song of the century" and vocalist Billie Holiday as "history's greatest jazz singer."

Strange Fruit not only saw Holiday hit her stride as a singer but also lend her voice to the struggle. That protest song is Billie's triumph. I chose to end Becoming Billie Holiday on a high note as she records her signature song because it is her grandest gesture. I think that's how Billie would want to be remembered.

Unearthing and honoring Holiday's protest song is a particularly striking act today. I appreciate the poetic illustration of how one woman's voice can be a powerful mechanism for change within a community.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to ask Weatherford a few questions about her work and I'm glad to share her answers with you:

HKH: I'm interested in historical poems, and the ways that they teach us about pivotal moments of change and growth for humanity. What do you think we might learn from revisiting the gutsy soulfulness of Billie Holiday?

CBW: Billie teaches us that we must overcome that which oppresses.

HKH: As a fellow writer, I am interested in your process. Can you tell me about your research process? What helped you learn your subject so that you could speak with her voice?

CBW: Billie has spoken to me since my father played Lady in Satin on the hi-fi in our basement. I know where she came from because I too grew up in Baltimore. Since age 16, I have been a diehard fan--buying records and reading bios. Her gripping life story resonated with me. When I declared myself a poet at age 24, Billie became my muse, singing her soul into my lyrics and popping up in a few verses. A couple years later, I bought my father a record that includes outtakes of Billie talking to band members. When I began in earnest write this book, I viewed performance footage and read biographies. I also listened to her early recordings and discerned a different Billie--one bubbling with jazz and enjoying life. Becoming Billie Holiday recreates her persona before heroin and hard living took their toll. Readers hear 25-year-old Billie, who has just recorded her signature song Strange Fruit, reflecting on her rise to fame and looking ahead with hope.

Here are a few links to follow if you want to see Holiday:

Billie Holiday sings "Strange Fruit": www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs
The story of "Strange Fruit": www.youtube.com/watch?v=isU_OjY94NY

Becoming Billie Holiday
By Carole Boston Weatherford; art by Floyd Cooper
Boyds Mills Press/Wordsong, October 2008; 120 pages, hardcover
ISBN: 1-59078-507-X ; ISBN-13: 978-1-59078-507-2
www.becomingbillieholiday.com

Letters to the World Poetry Reading in Washington DC

2009-04-05T16:22:00.000-07:00

Today, poets gathered for a reading from the anthology Letters to the World at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington DC. What to say but praise?

The atmosphere was warm and welcoming. Poets read not only their own work, but also the work of others published in the anthology (often strangers) whose poems they admired. The poem sharing was refreshingly non-competitive.

I read a poem titled "Let X Equal...." by a poet I much admire, Anne Haines. Another reader mentioned how good it can feel to have a stranger's poem in one's mouth. I agree. For instance, try this opening line from Haine's poem and say it aloud:

Let the woman wake

from sleep, as she does each morning of her life.

The softness is palpable; it offers itself like a blessing.

I was glad to spend the afternoon in the company of so many poets at the museum--both those present in the room, and those who attended in poetic voice only.

The Conversations We Haven't Had

2009-03-18T20:15:00.000-07:00

Last week, Robert Hass presented a lecture titled "Green Fire, the Still Point, and an Oak Grove: Some Reflections on the Humanities and the Environment." He presented research on the recent standoff between the tree sitters and the UC Berkeley administration over the fate of an oak grove which had, until recently, edged up against the football stadium.

He contemplated the ethics which guide our decision making and the aesthetics which form our emotional connections to a place. In the end, the tree sitters were ousted, and the oak grove was cut down. But Hass did not make a case for right or wrong; he made a case for how poorly we went about the business of debating such an issue. He lamented how many conversations we neglected to have. "Desire," he explained, " always tries to simplify what is there." Tree sitters might have only seen the gnarled, elderly grace of the "grandfather oak." Administrators might have only seen the utter necessity to generate university income. One-minded, we focus on a pinpoint and thus make our decisions.

His final conclusion was addressed to the teachers in the audience. He said that "we can give our students complexity. We can give our students the ability to see what is there before them."

I am interested in his refrain, "...and that was another conversation we didn't have." It's one that has continued to echo through my thoughts in the days since the lecture. How many conversations we leave unspoken. How many conversations we start but don't finish or hear but don't fully consider.

There are difficult conversations that we should begin. Brian Turner's award winning book of poetry Here, Bullet (2005) is one such conversation. The book offers a glimpse into the internal life of a soldier in Iraq. As readers, we shadow the poems' narrator, and consequently witness both the quiet, beautiful moments during rooftop surveillance and the nightmarish bombings. With him, we can grieve the dead.

One poem, "What Every Soldier Should Know," begins:

If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon,
it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you.

The directness of the address brings us into the immediacy of the danger, and envelopes us in a sense of fear that we might not yet know.

A poem called "Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Barefoot)" ends:

You carry the pearls of war within you, bombs
swallowed whole and saved for later.
Give them to your children. Give them to your love.

As in the previous poem, this one makes us taste the bitter contagion of fear and destruction and reminds us that no one is protected from war: the memories and hurt we experience get passed onto our loved ones.

I heard Brian Turner speak on a panel at the AWP conference in Chicago this February. He made the comment that as we go about our daily lives (here, in the U.S.) we don't see the war we are in, and it is "obscene." His comment articulated the accepted neglectfulness in our culture. We are able to go about our work and chores, and mostly, keep the conversation light.

I'm grateful when I hear those like Robert Hass and Brian Turner who enter into these complex conversations. They are conversations that most likely don't have conclusions. But they have complexities that we can learn from.

Shaping A Poem

2009-03-08T10:04:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Michael Hecht has an essay titled, “A Suitcase Disappeared, Not Mine” (American Poet, Fall 2007) in which she discusses what she calls “philosophical poetry.” She says:

“In the search for truth, it is good to let your subconscious do a lot of the talking. Our conscious minds have been sharpened for several hundred thousand years to keep us alive and procreating. We want to try to quiet that part of the mind. We want to stop seeing the world in favor of ourselves and see what we can see” (33).

The question is, what is underneath all of the clutter of our egos? The philosophical poem is one way she thinks we can find out. She explains:

“Compared to other ways of assaulting a philosophical problem, a poem has a lot of freedom and power. Why be stuck in grammar all the time? A philosophical poem can hone its ideas in a network of thoughts instead of a straight line. It can discover a problem’s shape instead of arguing a conclusion. Maybe the shape is all we need, and “conclusion” is a narrative fallacy” (41).

Hecht’s suggestion is an intriguing teaser. As much as a tied-up-neat-and-clean ending can feel satisfying (think Dlyan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” think Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”) we have a deep urge for the unending/infinite as well. No one likes goodbyes. But, Hecht’s suggestion is more complex than that: I think she hints at the Taoist concept of the “pathless path.” We can move forward with our work but do so without (so much) willfulness. We can move through a poem with certain direction, powerful rhythm, and clear intensity, but we can direct the movement by inquiry and not assertion.

Gary Snyder read at the UC Berkeley Lunch Poems this week, and he addressed how to “shape” open form poetry. An audience member asked, “How do you know where to break lines and arrange the poem on the page?” Snyder responded, “Nothing is ever formless.” He went on to say that open form requires the poet to find the music of the poem by listening intuitively, paying attention to the nuances of the utterance, and “tasting it” as you might taste something when you cook.

I’m often drawn to the non-linear conversation; I like the feeling of circuitous amblings that drift and come back, wander and return. Expansive movement can be seen in the recent books of poets like Jorie Graham or Ilya Kaminsky. For both poets, there is an oceanic element to their work which reveals a sense of the collective unconscious to the reader. The form of these multi-focused and layered poems ultimately reveals a montage of an entire historic moment.

If, like Hecht argues, a conclusion is a narrative fallacy, perhaps the appropriate way to end such a discussion is to look towards the discoveries that might be found in the surprising flips and slides of nonlinear poetry: explorations, for instance, about our own constellated networks of knowing. What shape might war poems take? What might a convincing and authentic poem about hope look like?