independent study

bread loaf, day one

2010-08-11T11:50:00.004-05:00

On the plane out, we sat two rows and across the aisle from Carl Phillips, Meryl's workshop leader. He has runner's legs, was reading prose and occasionally from the workshop packet.

When we arrived we stayed overnight with some of Meryl's old friends, off the grid, in a sense, and I found myself in love with wild blackberries and wanting to hear an owl.

This afternoon, we checked in--we are room mates, my good MFA friend and I, and are staying in the Annex this year, a room in the corner right above the bookstore, which is always dangerous for someone like me.

We had dinner, learned to navigate the system with as a vegan (Meryl will now go into the kitchen every day to see what the chefs have prepared), and after, the opening welcome, followed by a reading by Linda Gregerson (love, love, love) and Jim Shepard, who came to campus last September. You can see how beautifully Gregerson speaks:

She read from a series of poems about Dido, which really was gorgeous ("Dido Refuses to Speak," forthcoming in The Kenyon Review), and I was reminded as she read more and more, how deeply I love her images and her verbs. I devoured all the books of hers I owned just before the conference and am certain I will return to them again not long after returning.

** I will add photographs from each day on my return, I think, as I have tragically lost my camera battery charger and want to get through the ten days with a full string of photographs.

two anthologies

2010-07-31T11:40:00.000-05:00

There are two anthologies I want to call your attention to:

1. From Orchards, Fields, and Gardens, edited by Kerstin Svendsen, which will be available in mid-August and is $4 off pre-orders. Of course, I'm extra-excited about this project because I have three poems inside: the title poem to my chapbook (which is still making rounds, but I promise an update, even when it's a bridesmaid again) "The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake," as well as "Kitchen" and "Palming Earth."

2. The other is a collection being published by Harper Perennial, and my tattoo, done by the lovely and talented Shawn Hebrank, will make an appearance in its pages. You can read more about my specific tattoo in this post, and you can check out the book's webpage here. It will be released October 12th.

HOWL

2010-07-19T18:53:00.001-05:00

See also: Ginsberg Project + Ginsberg Project Blog

a few links

2010-07-16T13:04:00.002-05:00

- My friend Meryl's Virginia Woolf tattoo is all healed and gorgeous. Her husband did my arm tattoo, so I have a special affection for his literary artwork.

- The New York Times made a little page called Hot Type: Poems for Summer, featuring Tony Hoagland, Edward Hirsch, Carl Phillips, Sarah Lindsay, Robert Pinsky, and Claudia Emerson. (Emerson's Late Wife is one of my favorite books of poetry.)

- The recent issue of The New Yorker has a review of Anne Carson's Nox and a poem by Stanley Plumly. Not long ago, I wrote a review of Stanley Plumly, and a few days ago, I finally was able to see Nox in person and was inspired for my own thesis, which promises to tango with the fragment, the repurposed document, etc.

- I could gaze all day: bookshelf porn.

- New York Times article on WS Merwin becoming poet laureate.

2010-06-29T17:28:00.001-05:00

I often read with a pen, a habit I've had to instill in myself, much like one develops that first taste for beer or coffee. I resisted for so long, mostly because I loved to keep my books pristine, care for the bindings and smudge-free pages, and even as an instructor--five years now--I would use little flags or jot notes in a separate notebook, neither of which were very helpful as I'd forget what I meant with the flags and lose the notes in last week's essays or next year's plans.

Just now, my friend Meryl and I are finishing a shared reading experience, where we promised to write notes in the margins to Ellen Bryant Voigt's The Art of Syntax, little thoughts and doodles and agreements or disagreements. I've carried mine with me to doctor's appointments, so Meryl will also get the progress report of each visit.

And the there are the books with typos and mistakes. I keep thinking to myself, a job as a proofreader might not be so awful, though what pressure to catch every little slip. In the case above, though, the writer was referring to experiences without technology, and when people call the big green goon "Frankenstein," I simply want to cringe and rattle a cage and ask them what they are doing writing a book if they can't recognize a classic such as this. I remember listening to a book-on-CD in one of my commutes where the reader continually mispronounced "Kerouac," and I wondered how no one could catch it, correct her.

I realize my small complaints here are ridiculous, given my fifth-grade spelling capabilities and my shaking-fist struggle to pronounce words such as capuchin (thanks, Gerald, for making me enjoy this poem and stumble through it in poetry seminar--thanks, me, for not figuring out how to pronounce beforehand):

Spring
by Gerald Stern

The road the road just south of Frenchtown the poem

the one by Mordecai the river the river the

one on my left if I am travelling north the

car a box with wires loose on top of my

left leg the radio fine the light behind

behind the clock not working the rose so dead

I am ashamed the crows too shiny their feathers

too wet the cliff on my right too red the blood

the blood of an animal, a skunk, they bleed

and stink, they stink and bleed, the monkey on top

of me, a New World monkey, not a howler,

an organ-grinder monkey, a capuchin,

his small red hat is on my head and he’s

on my back, he’s dropping orange peels down my neck

March 22nd on the Delaware River.

intro to poetry 2

2010-06-24T17:13:00.003-05:00

I finished Triggering Town last night, and though I was not moved by oceans with this book, I did find a serious of bits I will want to share with my own students. When I consider the book as divided lectures, it's fine, a nice little slip into something comfortable, an essay to be read in the bubble bath. As earnest early-writing-course reading, I'm not so sure. It didn't cause me to want to run to my notebook and write (though more often it is reading full length poetry books that will do that for me than anything else). I didn't feel buzzy about it, the way I might feel so very inspired elsewhere, and that title has so much gorgeous promise. I had hoped it would be more about how to take triggers and turn them into beautiful poems, how to follow that poetic impulse, but I got lost along the way.

A few moments, comparisons, etc. that will help drive crucial points home to the students, or at least given them something wider to ponder:

Often if the triggering subject is big (love, death, faith) rather than localized and finite, the mind tends to shrink. Sir Alexander Fleming observed some mold, and a few years later we had a cure for gonorrhea. But what if the British government had told him to find a cure for gonorrhea? He might have worried so much he would not have noticed the mold. (7)

One way of getting into the world of the imagination is to focus on the play rather than the value of words-- (16)

Make your first line interesting and immediate. Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things. When the poem starts, things should already have happened. (Note: White unlined paper gives you the feeling nothing has happened.) If Yeats had begun "Leda and the Swan" with Zeus spotting Leda and getting an erection, Yeats would have been writing a report. (38)

When rewriting, write the entire poem again. If something has gone wrong deep in the poem, you have taken a wrong turn earlier. The next time through the poem you may spot the wrong path you took. If you take another, when you reach the source of your dissatisfaction it may no longer be there. To change what's there is difficult because it is boring. To find the right other is exciting. (38)

Use any noun that is yours, even if it has only local use. "Salal" is the name of a bush that grows wild in the Pacific Northwest. It is often not found in dictionaries, but I've known that word long as I can remember. I had to check with the University of Washington Botany Department on the spelling when I first used it in a poem. It is a word, and it is my word. That's arrogant, isn't it? But necessary. Don't be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don't love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem. (40)

Behind several theories of what happens to a poet during the writing of a poem--Eliot's escape from personality, Keats's idea of informing and filling another body, Yeats's notion of the mask, Auden's concept of the poet becoming someone else for the duration of the poem, Valery's idea of a self superior to the self--lies the implied assumption that the self as given is inadequate and will not do. // How you feel about yourself is probably the most important feeling you have. It colors all other feelings, and if you are a poet, it colors your writing. It may account for your writing. (67)

... the imagination's impulse to create unknowns of knowns... (73)

...memory and the imagination modify and transform experience... (75)

intro to poetry

2010-06-23T16:08:00.002-05:00

In the fall, I am teaching Introduction to Poetry, so I have been test-driving all kinds of books in hopes of finding a perfect fit. This year may be my only year to fill out those book-request forms with books I will actually enjoy reading; when I taught high school, I had little choice as to which texts I would teach, and when I taught the first two years at university, it was a professor who picked for me or it was composition, and really, who can get excited about a comp. textbook (unless it's written by Donald Hall).

Right now I am reading-with-a-pen Richard Hugo's Triggering Town, and though I probably will not opt to assign it (I'm not in love with it), I know I will pull a few moments from it to bring into the classroom. One is the struggle to practice daily writing, something a good friend of mine and I have been trying to do this summer, with limited success. Here is the paragraph that proves others use this analogy too:

Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is suppose to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.
pg. 27

2010-04-26T20:07:00.003-05:00

After a long break from bookish blogging, I am back now, very happily.

And while my blogging took a pause, my writing life did not. Here are a few lovely deatils:

- a field trip with my poetry girl friends
- AWP in Denver
- an artistic reading
- a poetry instructor's retirement

Currently reading: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Currently grading: nothing tonight, but tomorrow I will get 24 research essays
Currently working on: a presentation on the zuihitsu for my exegesis poetry class

2010-02-25T13:35:00.002-06:00

For now, I'm taking a little hiatus from this space.

HOWEVER, I will still be having lovely poetic conversations that need citations over on in conversation, and I will still be blogging about everyday life over on field | work, so it's not really a blogging break as much as it's simply a test run of consolidation. Simplicity, methinks.

xo

seminar study: george oppen

2010-02-15T19:50:00.004-06:00

Boy's Room
by George Oppen

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelley
At the lake, and saw 'they were just
Boys' rooms' and was moved

By that. And indeed a poet's room
Is a boy's room
And I suppose that women know it.

Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl's body.

There's a kind of quiet beauty in Oppen's work.

I also love Psalm, which you can read and listen to on the Academy of American Poets' website.

Here's also another gift: a talk (or, "poetry course," as it is listed on the webpage) given by Louise Gluck and Michael Braziller titled Our Life in Six Lyrical Poems: George Oppen.

Lucille Clifton, 1936-2010

2010-02-14T09:21:00.003-06:00

I just found out Lucille Clifton passed away yesterday. It's always sad when a laureate passes on, especially one still so active in the poetry community. She was scheduled to be a special guest at Squaw Valley this summer, among other engagements.

JD Salinger, 1919-2010

2010-01-28T12:34:00.002-06:00

It's amazingly strange when one of the heavy hitters passes away. Of course his novel was a long-ago favorite; in my teenage years, I always gave a copy of it to male friends who "weren't readers," and they promised they enjoyed it, though that may have been to appease me.

poetic line

2010-01-20T13:00:00.001-06:00

(image source)

I think of this class as a bit like looking up a poem's skirt, or if it were possible, that cliched x-ray that might lead us to a bit more knowing. I like the idea of examining a poem, part by part, and this week, we spend some time with the poetic line.

What surprised me, though, was that we spoke minimally about the line itself, a bit when we took a look at the short lines of WCW, but even then, the larger focus was on general explication.

Before class even began today, I had a few hours between teaching and studenting, so I did some google'ing (what else?) and learned a bit about what immediate search results have to say about "the poetic line," which I thought I would keep here:

This blog gives a nice introduction to the poetic line, particularly handy if you are teaching an introduction to poetry course or just need to warm your brain up a bit before delving further.

Denise Levertov's On the Function of the Line. This can also be found in her New and Selected Essays. I love her exploration of the musicality and tones of line breaks; it reminds me of an activity where one gives students a poem as a block of prose, then has students break it. So many variations and so many reasons--here is a place to springboard discussion. Also particularly compelling is the idea of how form becomes antiquated, almost" anachronistic," to use one of her terms.

Some excerpts from Claims to Poetry, edited by Donald Hall.

The first hour and a half, two hours of class was spent examining Wallace Stevens' "Of Modern Poetry." We opened with the metaphor and how we came upon knowing, how language can introduce a metaphor before the full reveal. We spoke of what we notice before we even read the poem, the shape of it, the blank verse (some slant rhyme, but mostly unrhymed iambic pentameter), the mid-break of lines and how that resembles the dialog in a Shakespearean play. Where does the temperature of the poem change? How do we know? We spoke of specific vocabulary--what is Anglo-Saxon versus "borrowed" language, such as the "souvenir," which brings to mind: snow globes, for one student, trinkets, for me, and an element of cheapness and trashiness to our professor.

In this poem, Watkins emphasized that "meaning cannot be disembodied from form," that opening a class with "What is Stevens saying about modern poetry?" would be a large misstep. He told us he believes, "poetry is performative."

We spoke of the other voices Stevens could be evoking--the recognition of Shakespeare, of course, and later what Watkins called the "syntax slip, evoking the opening lines of Paradise Lost and its fruit," we spoke at length about interpretations of Whitman and how Stevens' solipsism was perhaps oppositional to Whitman's--the containing multitudes versus the alienation and spotlit stage. He mentioned Wordsworth's "Prelude," and then returned us to Milton, in the end of this and the ending of "Lycidas," the elegy with a kind of cheery end, the echo of: "Isn't that nice? See what I can do! A taste of poems to come." And Eliot--how there may be an engagement with Prufrockian failure.

Time was spent discussing what he said was "a lot of pretended satisfaction in this poem." We get that repetition in the large middle, the Hamlet soliloquy, the risk of cliche and no chance for dialog.

If you want to read more about "Of Modern Poetry," there is a collection of analysis here.

The first class was wonderful, that puzzle work, the game of explication, though I felt humbled, so very out of practice, the need to revisit the grammar I learned so long ago, to open my eyes, to read and re-read and re-read.

while the syllabus prints

2010-01-18T20:58:00.003-06:00

Winter break is nearly over. I'm listening to the gears of the printer wear thin, I'm cursing the comp department for making us march too-far in the slush to make photocopies (having one in the same building can spoil a person so, and I don't get up early very well--and this class will have me rising before the sun this winter), and my syllabus is nearly done. I've winnowed it to six hearty pages, two and a half of which is the daily schedule, so much in the spirit of covering-all-bases.

I've been working at chipping away at my stack of books half-read, that sloppy bedside collection. I finished Doctor Zhivago, part of my winter of Russian literature, and I confess, I didn't mind those sprawling descriptions of snowy landscape, the feeling of being pent-up indoors with nothing but potatoes and vodka, and I especially appreciated that later manic passage where Zhivago can only reverse his days and nights in order to write poetry, but overall, it was a bit of a plodding experience. I have the 2002 British miniseries adaptation being sent here, which may help straighten out some of my plot / character confusions.

From these old, completed poems, he went on to others that he had begun and left unfinished, getting into their spirit and sketching the sequels, though without the slightest hope of finishing them now. Finally getting his stride and carried away, he started on a new poem.

After two or three stanzas and several images by which he himself was struck, his work took possession of him and he felt the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the relation of the forces that determine artistic creation is, as it were, reversed. The dominant thing is no longer the state of mind the artist seeks to express but the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the home and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of sonority but in terms of the impetuousness and power of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by virtue of its own laws, meter and rhythm and countless other relationships, which are as yet unexplored, insufficiently recognized, and unnamed.

At such moments Yurii Andreievich felt that the main part of the work was being done not by him but by a superior power which was above him and directed him, namely the movement of universal thought and poetry in its present historical stage and the one to come. And he felt himself to be only the occasion, the fulcrum, needed to make this movement possible.

This feeling relieved him for a time of self-reproach, of his dissatisfaction with himself, of the sense of his own insignificance.
Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. New York: Pantheon Books, 1958. 437.

spring semester

2010-01-12T10:37:00.001-06:00

To answer the question: What are you taking next semester? For those unfamiliar with our system, the U of MN has students attend half-time and teach the other half. Two classes counts as a half-load, and teaching assignments vary. Last semester and this semester I have a stand-alone comp class the university calls "First Year Writing" technically under the designation of "Writing Studies." Last spring I TA'ed two sections of Contemporary American Literature under a professor who had lecture twice a week and the autumn before, I taught the discussion section of Intro to Creative Writing, which was once a week and the lecture had rotating guest writers come in. Next year, I'm slated to teach two stand-alone classes: one semester will be Intro to Poetry Writing and the other will be Intermediate Poetry Writing. (I'm already dreaming up book lists.)

For now, these are the two classes I'm taking for the spring; I've opted out of an overload, though last semester I took three classes (Reading as Writers: Memoir with Trish Hampl, Poetry Thesis Seminar, and an Independent Study to cover my lit requirement on Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop) and survived.

I also intern with the department and am poetry editor of the literary magazine dislocate.

(Course descriptions from the website.)

1. EngW 5310: Reading as Writers: Reading Poetry

This is a course on poetry with a primary emphasis on lyric verse written in England, Ireland, and America from the end of the Middle Ages to the present. Our emphasis will be on prosody, craftmanship, versification. Literary scholars can hone skills of argument and exegesis answerable to an array of theoretical and historical perspectives and it will offer writers a chance to think about the aesthetic consequences of a variety of romal choices. We'll begin with a unit on poetic line in isolation before turning to questions of meter, scansion, enjambment, end-stopping, rhyme and free verse. We will move on to English stanza forms: couplets, quatrains, tercets, rhyme royal, ottava rima, Spenserian stanza. We will then move to sonnets, ballads, villanelles, songs, hymns, monologues, elegies. Our final unti will take up three poets who have a complex relationship to the poetic past: Yeats, Eliot, Stevens. Requirements; a journal that will include several exercises in versification and a final exegetical paper (10-12 pages).
Book: Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th Edition

2. EngW 8120: Seminar: Writing of Poetry: Politics of Poetic Forms

This course focuses on the current state of contemporary American Poetry and how its forms have changed. We'll discuss the evolution from deep image lyricism to language-poetic fragmentation to fresh approaches toward line, image, and phrase. We will debate the notion that American poetry has evolved into a "hybrid" form that bridges old schools of poetic thought. Close reading of texts by key poets, along with craft talks centered on poems each student will submit, should lead toward a deeper immersion into the shifting terrain of the modern poem. Each student will create and submit one major project centered on American poetry and its vast changes. This project will require a combination of written paper, performance, and media presentation. Required texts: American Hybrid: Anthology of New Poetry (Cole Swenson, David St. John); A Wave, John Ashbery; The Complete Poems, Elizabeth Bishop; Averno, Louise Gluck; Selected Poems, George Oppen; Hotel Insomnia, Charles Simic.

2010-01-11T15:17:00.002-06:00

It's interesting how I have such ridiculous feelings towards poetry: I hop onto Good Reads after I have finished Cooling Time, and I find a string of people have trod here before. How can this be? Reading this book was such a deeply private and glorious experience, secreted away like savoring good chocolate--how could it be that all of these Others have also read the book, most have loved it too? I thought poetry readers were declining, were withering away, and now there are all these kindred spirits I don't even know, I haven't even met. Shouldn't we gather more often?

Lately, my reading habits have been strange and sporadic. I have half a dozen books going at once, and my moods shift so quickly, I cannot keep up. I want to read the dense Russian novel, no--the nature notes, no--I must start an escape book, no--why haven't I finished the Dickinson biography? And on. And on. Ad nauseum. Is this what happens in winter light? Is this what stealing a set schedule does to a woman? My days and nights are returning back into their rightful compartments, though I am honestly tempted to clamor up those narrow steps to our bedroom, burrow into the down quilt, find myself lost in some strange world, fall asleep mid-day, leave the dogs to their own devices.

I return to campus in one week. It all seems so fast, and yet, being at university (and no longer teaching high school), I am spoiled with winter break. I need to remember though: double check the textbooks are ordered, revise last semester's syllabus to reflect this semester's goals, order in a few of those books my professors require that I don't have (strange to think this might be true, in a house weighted with books as ours is), email my poetry girl friends and demand we have a pow-wow and read cold poems to one another. Brr. January is an indoor month, though that generally doesn't apply--too much beauty has been found there (interesting how each of these is from Colville, and each from a different blog I have / have had).

cooling time

2010-01-10T00:09:00.001-06:00

photo: Marnie Crawford Samuelson

One of the beautiful things about having a poet-friend is that said poet-friend is often willing to let you tag along in her reading adventures. She's finished reading and I'm only a third of the way through, but we're discussing CD Wright's Cooling Time over on "in conversation," and I welcome anyone to join us as the more voices are always the merrier.

It's a really wonderful, packed book, even if it is incredibly slender. My brain is dancing and my little highlighter tags are flying. There is much to be brought to the surface here.

From the back of the book:

An unruly paean to American poetry, Cooling Time blurs the divisions between poem, memoir, and essay, while borrowing regularly from the peculiarities and backwards of the American idiom. The book's title derives from a line of legal defense, unique to Texas courts: if a person kills someone before having had time "to cool" after receiving an injury or an insult, he is not guilty of murder. Ever focused on possibilities, C.D. Wright--who was called "one of America's oddest, best, and most appealing poets" by Publisher's Weekly and who just received a MacArthur Fellowship--demonstrates that "the search for models becomes a search for alternatives." Filled with humor, eroticism, and an hypnotic fascination with language, Cooling Time is a prickly love-letter to the life of poetry. As she writes: "Tell me, what is the long stretch of road for if not to sort out the reasons why we are here and why we do what we do, from why we are not in the other lane doing what others do."

tattoo on christmas

2009-12-25T18:40:00.002-06:00

Happy Christmas! I had my mother take a shot of my tattoo, all healed, while visiting for the holidays, and I thought I would share it here.

I've also submitted the tattoo to this literary tattoos book, which is still accepting for the next week. Several people have pointed out the project, and I'm also sending it along to Contrariwise. May as well pass along the tattoo love, but I wanted to make certain I had a healed picture for sending it out.

As far as presents are concerned, I am now swimming in more books--books on Elizabeth Bishop, essays suggested by Ellen Bryant Voigt, plenty to keep my mind turning over for months.

good-bye office

2009-12-22T23:26:00.003-06:00

Oh, little cubicle space. I did a little swishing of the 2009-calendar, a little finger running along the tabletop--just before I went out for coffee with one of my favorite MFAers. The little quote is actually on the third floor bathroom wall, something I find charming.

the last memoir

2009-12-21T23:11:00.006-06:00

There were people there too, I promise:

A few images from our last memoir class, which met at Trish Hampl's beautiful St Paul home. I will share some of my best notes from the class, many of which will not live up to the experience. My honest opinion? If you have the chance to work with Patricia Hampl, do so. (Don't tell, but a good handful of these people aren't in the class due to a passion for memoir but for a realization that she is one of the best professors in the program.) (Of course, a great appreciation, if not love, developed from our studies.)

For me, it was a crucial class; my own work, poems and prose, have been approaching the self in such strange ways, so it was good to discuss and dissect from this perspective.

joyce sutphen at the anderson center

2009-12-20T23:03:00.002-06:00

Among others, here is one reason I am explosively blessed: I live in the same town as the Anderson Center. One of those coveted retreat-places, one that draws in talented writers and artists, and this winter, a few weekends ago, Joyce Sutphen graced us with her presence at the winter celebration of the arts, reading from her new collection, First Words.

She recognized me, from the Zagajewski event, from others, and we spoke of the toughness of getting into MFA programs, the retirement of Michael Dennis Browne, and she urged me to say hello when I saw her next. I will, and perhaps, I will gather up the bravery to tell her how much her books meant to me when I was an undergraduate, how much her memoiristic voice means to me now.

2009-12-17T16:31:00.002-06:00

I fell in love with Marie Ponsot at AWP last February, and whilst wandering strange places on the web, I found the above video from The Mom Egg.

This conversation is particularly interesting in how Ponsot speaks about rhythm and rhyme, particularly after my last independent study meeting with MDB and how I spoke to him about my aversion to the Dickinson and the Bishop poems that were most "sing songish." MDB loved Bishop's triple rhymes while I did not; I think learning to love that kind of controlled versification is something I'll have to put on my to-do list for the last year and a half of my MFA. I will learn to appreciate, if I cannot love. Admire what one can do with foundations.

on the occassion of emily's birthday

2009-12-10T23:31:00.004-06:00

illustration: isabelle arsenault

One hundred and seventy-seven is the rumor: and she looks so good.

1488.
Birthday of but a single pang
That there are less to come --
Afflictive is the Adjective
But affluent the doom --

2009-12-09T20:58:00.004-06:00

We had a blizzard all through the night, making driving after thesis seminar stretching time in strange ways, but I'm fortunately listening to a Benjamin Franklin biography that kept my mind contented.

At home, I've been reading through a book of poems a day, similar to something I did in May (oh, but May rhymes so much nicer than December!), and reading through Sophie Cabot Black's The Descent, reminds me of something I read in another book I'm paging through this week, The Wounded Surgeon: Confessional and Transformation in Six American Poets (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath)--something I should have already realized, but the concept of capitalization of that first word on each line, as in this dead bird poem in the collection, and how that act of capitalizing then emphasizes the line as opposed to the sentence.

I had always eschewed that capitalization as something basic, or Microsoft-Word-lazy.

I love having my eyes opened, even when those concepts seem elementary.

2009-12-04T22:05:00.002-06:00

In my thesis seminar, all of the second year students are to turn in five poems every handful of weeks, while the third years present us with a full manuscript on the first day. I was much more dry this summer than I anticipated, not leaving me with an arsenal of quality work to begin with, and here, at the end of the semester, I find myself veering into new territory: from that of the elderly body flattened by Alzheimer's and into the infertile woman's body. The poems are a bit more vulnerable, more teetering and uncertain.

I wonder if I am the kind of writer who writes in cycles--I have my chapbook-sized collection in one series and now, I embark one what could be a book-length intrusion. With this, I have no full-plan, no handrails. And there were some disappointing moments about critique, but I've got so much buzzing in my mind that I won't let anything not-so-helpful trip me up--not too much, anyway.

Right now, I'm working at a series of figures, coming mostly from the reproduction gallery at Bodies: The Exhibition at the Mall of America {shudder}, a place I've visited twice now. This recent visit was with fellow-MFAer Meryl, who also paused and wrote alongside me on the scattered benches and wore our pens weary. It's a good day when my pen-callouses throb.

Also fun in the world of poetics: I've started a collaborative blog called i love dead bird poems, a response with a back-story, but for now, you can enjoy a little Bishop and Zagajewski (and if you want to join in the fun, please let me know and I'll send along an invite!).

2009-12-01T13:52:00.002-06:00

I returned from Thanksgiving break to learn that one of my friends in the program lost a student yesterday--suicide. This friend teaches freshmen comp too.

My heart aches a bit for her, a fellow second year, a talented writer with a bright sense of humor. How does one begin to process this kind of blank spot?

I think to my own group of students and how incredibly blessed I've been. I have a group of charming, eager, willing students, students who, today, asked me what I was teaching next semester because friends and room mates were looking for a "good" first year writing studies teacher; apparently, I've already got at least two room mates enrolled for next semester's time slot. This makes my heart swell; I've tried to be fair and tough and laid-back and honest and caring, and though I know I've had plenty of weak points in teaching, I know it's the best job I've done since teaching at the university level. I don't know if I'm finally picking up a rhythm or if it's because I really adore teaching writing (of any sort), but at the close of this semester, I don't feel that cloud of guilt surrounding me, only, perhaps, a little wisp of fog, that says I could have done better. I actually feel complete and full: sad to see them go, but also glad, because I know they've worked hard, and they're ready to move on and move up. It's amazing how that feels.

2009-11-28T17:09:00.000-06:00

It's Thanksgiving weekend, and I'm in the home of my grandparents, the couple who have played a central role in my written work over the past several years. I find myself turning back to that chapbook-sized collection of poems, puttering, false-starting on the last few poems. I wonder why it is taking me so long: Is it because I burn myself out on Literature for short period of time (I am now fully and finally emerged from a month-long hiatus, which I know you must have noted when this blog fell silent for so long)? Or is it because I'm afraid I'll never be able to write about them again, once I've begun sending the book out as a whole? Or do I have that ridiculous psychological connection--that if I am done with "the grandfather poems," then I am finally letting him go, beginning some strange process in the mourning timeline?

I wonder about the subjects that draw writers. Ray Gonzalez, professor and poet who runs our poetry thesis seminar this semester, talks about how he believes poets have only a few subjects we continue to return to again and again.

For me, it seems, these days, it's the body. With the grandfather poems, it was about the mental disintegration and physical effects of Alzheimer's, and with this new series, I am writing about myself, but I am doing so in the third person, as if I can create a mirror-self, a self that isn't-quite-me, but close enough that I can write with authority and confidence and test out, tease out the meanings behind the failings.

And with this, as with the grandfather poems, I feel most energized when I am writing exactly in that moment: writing of an exact moment of observation that occurred within twenty-four hours. Some feel they need that space of time to process, but I feel most alert right then and there. My own mind has some deep leakage, some release of memory, and though the ethereal process of remembering is a curious one, a great subject, I know I cannot preserve the drama, the cusp, of the moment without being entirely present.

2009-11-10T12:47:00.002-06:00

I am still here, still plugging along, still overwhelmed with school. The thing that exhausts me the most is thinking about reading and writing, so it's difficult to come home and face a space that allows still more rumination about storytelling and pagination and all of that.

Last night, in memoir class, we ended with a sort of game. Trish Hampl, our instructor, is on the board of the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary, and she had a kind of survey asking if we felt certain word uses were completely / somewhat acceptable or completely / somewhat unacceptable, such as the use of "alright" versus "all right" and using the word "dialogue" as a verb. It was an entertaining way to end our session, with much passion around the table, a kind of nerdy debate. It was nice to be in that sort of company, where we can squabble over whether or not it's OK to pronounce "jewelry" with three syllables or two or how we might say "aberrant." It felt frivolous, but I agree with Trish--it's important to recognize the power and importance of being that sort of gatekeeper.

emily dickinson + anne carson

2009-10-22T14:20:00.003-05:00

It only makes sense, while I immerse myself in Emily Dickinson, that so much of my other reading is influenced by that dashing writer. In fact, linking Anne Carson, a figure who seems to prefer a poetic life outside of the direct gaze, one a bit shy during Q&A, is not so difficult a task--on the surface, there are the functions of punctuation (bracket, dash), the notion of breath, the intense scrutiny and diversion of form. There are differences too: Emily Dickinson seemed to work in seclusion, save reading and letters, whereas Carson's work, especially most recently, really emphasizes the collaborative experience.

When asked about her Sappho fragments, Anne Carson quoted the last stanza of Emily Dickinson's 1209th poem:

The Fruit perverse to plucking,
But leaning to the Sight
With the ecstatic limit
Of unobtained Delight --

Carson said this speaks to what she was doing with the Sappho fragments.

A bit earlier, in discussing the fifteen pronoun sonnets, she spoke of influences: Gertrude Stein and "On Poetry and Grammar" as well as Keats letter "On Shakespeare." Additionally, she referenced Dickinson's 1696:

These are the days that Reindeer love
And pranks the Northern star --
This is the Sun's objective,
And Finland of the Year.

I'm still lingering in a biographical study of Emily Dickinson, but I plan to move out of that and into the exploration of poets and work Dickinson influenced--looking at Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, the Adrienne Rich essay "Vesuvius at Home" and Lucie Brock-Broido's collection of poems called The Master Letters, among others.

congrats, u of mn!

2009-10-19T20:46:00.000-05:00

My school has been ranked #14 by Poets and Writers in the MFA Rankings.

when anne carson comes to town

2009-10-19T01:08:00.007-05:00

Anne Carson visited our campus via the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture series. The website blurb explains it best:

50 Year Anniversary of the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures in Literature
Sunday October 18, 2009 4:00 pm
Coffman Union Theater
Parking: See map. Plan your trip.
Admission: Free and open to the University of Minnesota community and the general public. No advanced tickets necessary.

Nothing seems more appropriate to celebrate the rich 50 year history of the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures in Literature than bringing Anne Carson to the the University of Minnesota campus. Since 1959, when the series was created to honor former English professor and chair Joseph Warren Beach, the endowment has allowed Twin Cities audiences to hear from some of the brightest luminaries in literature, from critics such as Lionel Trilling, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to writers such as Mary McCarthy, Robert Pinsky, and Tony Kushner. True to both sides of this tradition, Carson is a poet and scholar, translator and essayist, Classicist and experimental artist, often within the same frame.

Recently, Carson has exhilarated East Coast audiences with live mash-ups of poetry, dance, and performance art, drawing fans such as Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. This fall Carson, along with two of Merce Cunningham’s dancers, ventures west to bring a couple of her best-known such collaborations to the Twin Cities. With dancers Rashaun Mitchell (who choreographed) and Marcie Munnerlyn accompanying, Carson will read portions of her translated Sappho text further fragmented through the use of three other readers. Of this piece, titled “Bracko,” the New York Times wrote: “Sappho’s lush, often cruel observations on love were mirrored but not mimed in Mr. Mitchell’s choreography,” leaving the critic wanting more “such complicated marriages of movement and text.”

Originally created for a Harvard conference, “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture in the Form of 15 Sonnets” incorporates Carson reading, a projection of dancers with an audio track, and Mitchell and Munnerlyn. For Carson, noted Alex Dimitrov of Poets & Writers, “Poetry does not occur only on the page, nor the stage—it occurs as words flit through the mind and the body, as they engage with other bodies, dancing bodies, and the objects around them.”

Carson’s many publications include her latest translation An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides (Faber & Faber, 2009). Her written works, too, are complicated marriages of poetry and criticism, translation and fiction. She has won the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A Canadian, Carson is currently Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at New York University.

The Joseph Warren Beach Endowment is honored to welcome Anne Carson to the University of Minnesota for the 50th anniversary of the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures in Literature.

For more information, visit the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures in Literature section of this site or call 612-625-3363.

Choreographer and dancer Mitchell said during the Q&A that he was compelled by the bracket, considering things like the ties that bind us, using the silver ropes to take it away from something violent, and creating brackets with rope to interact with.

Anne Carson explained that "each time it finds its rhythm" when speaking of this complicated collaboration--not only were the Sappho poems translated (relationship between ancient and contemporary poet) but those poems were then restructured with partner Bob Currie (who spoke of the multiple voices by saying, "We do a lot by chance," and as the form becomes more complex, you have to simplify the message--focusing on the combination existing on the stage), then there is relationship of poet with dance, and finally, Carson also brings in members of the university community (in this case, the former department chair of the English Literature program, Paula Rabinowitz and a first year MFA candidate, Sarah Fox).

Maria Damon (pictured in the second to last photo with Paula Rabinowitz and the woman we can thank for all these events running so beautifully, Terri Sutton) asked a question regarding the most interesting question asked at a Q&A, which allowed Carson to speak of the moment, which is so important to pieces such as these, and how "questions come out of the ligature of the room." Bob Currie cited an instance in the 1980s after seeing a ghost-themed piece of John Cage's, where, given blank stares from the audience, he offered to do another piece, at which point the hands went up, and Currie spoke of how a ten-year-old asked the question, "Mr. Cage, do ghosts ever get lonely?" to which Cage replied, "Your question is too beautiful to answer, and we'll end there."

This wasn't, of course, the end of their Q&A--a few more questions revealed that the first piece, "Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture in the Form of 15 Sonnets" came from a request for a lecture on pronouns for Harvard, the Sappho star map worked by including yellow blobs which turned out to be from cloud formations over NYC, the stars helped choose how to plan the language, and generally, there was inclusion of a DVD that ended with 183 brackets bursting onto the screen in place of stars.

We also learned Carson sometimes includes musicians--and she was asked if there was an intentionality of pitches in voices when missing that music--to which Carson spoke of including a sound sculptor and having an attunement with the emotion of a particular sonnet which also was reflected in pace and cadence--they could stretch language to match better with the dance if need be.

Meryl also has a post regarding tonight's reading; please do go check it out.

when adam zagajewski comes to town

2009-10-17T22:25:00.008-05:00

Transcribing my writing notebook.

Reading Another Beauty:

The birth of a writer: a young man raised in the Catholic faith experiences a dazzling revelation. While praying, he suddenly realizes that he doesn't necessarily have to repeat what's printed in the missal. He can invent his own prayer. He can make up his own words. (pg 18)

A writer who keeps a personal diary uses it to record what he knows. In his poems or stories he sets down what he doesn't know. (pg 28)

Moments of revelation are like boundary stories, separated by several hundred yards of no-man's-land. The poet experiences an epiphany in setting down the key line of his latest poem. But days, weeks, even months of shadow stretch between those moments of majestic clarity. And here the poet plays the historian's role, sharing not just his ecstatic humanity with his readers but his dull, dreary, doubting humanity as well. (pg. 29)

Reading Eternal Enemies, "from 'Rome, Open City'", pg 36:

poems are short tragedies, portable, like transistor radios...

poetry often vanishes, leaving on matchsticks

forgive my silence. forgive your silence.

Interview with Adam Zagajewski:

Colleen Coyne, editor-in-chief of dislocate, and I spent forty-five minutes in conversation in a strange corner of Lind, where we discussed:
- what draws him back to the page again and again (the huge courage to write, the new tragedies and ecstasies to report, the ways in which youth plays into writing drive, the fact that there is no outcome but writing, it has become one's inner life)
- books to return to over and over (how poetry is not something you just read once, which is part of the contract with the book, he doesn't believe so much in the "great narrative," hates deconstruction, believes life can be lived as a narrative and as an instant--life in short moments, short moments of ecstasy, claims he is a library rat, a hunter of ecstatic moments)
- young writers to read (reluctant to name names--his encouragement was our finding, discovering on our own--but he did speak of coming not out of poetic ideology [he dislikes strong poetic fashions--interestingly, there's a conversation in the comments of this post regarding fashion, canons, and popularity in poetry--feel free to join in!] and dislikes the poetic aesthetic but instead looks to writing from an individual moment)
- what work is coming up (a book called Invisible Hand, just finished a new book and there is a sad feeling of a chapter that closed, after a book there are several months of poetic silence, has another book in computer which is a book of essays that combines elements of diary / essay / memoir, that time of silence contains contradictory feelings, feels it is bad when a writer is too prolific, which he later spoke about as watering down what a writer had to say, he spent five or six years on Another Beauty, spent a great deal of time defining the final profile of the book)
- his writing process (poems more emotional, more irrational, poet who writes any essay has the same relationship with the truth)
- writing in Polish or English (intuitive--doesn't believe in analyzing translation and trusts his translator, who is mainly Claire Cavanaugh, does write essays in English and not poetry, looks to an inner life that comes before the language, inner riches, fascinated by transformation of language--mentioned the way German on the street may sound ugly but on the page it is beautiful--Rilke)
- poetry communities (the New Wave is in the distant past, vibrant communities are given when we are young, emerge from the silence of childhood / imaginary childhood, form groups with our peers--a kind of love, growing older, solitude)
- individual versus political group (globalization, Poland is only twenty years of freedom after the collapse of communism, mass culture and entertainment, individual as almost heroic, love the neighbors' souls, responsibility to praise what's mine, privilege what is un-individual)
- what work he's most proud of (rarely thinks of past books, always concentrating on new books, small moments of poems having meaning)
- "by definition, you never find the truth in poetry"

Above I suppose I am transcribing some notes, and if you are interested in some kind of translation, you'll have to check out issue six of dislocate, which will come out next spring!

AZ stopped by MDB's class, where the discussion continued:

- as a young poet, AZ was too shy to speak to Tadeusz Rozewicz when he lived in Gliwice
- admires poetry in translation--mentioned how some cite poetry as being a casualty of the Holocaust, how poetry can be too prosaic
- a translator is someone who "must master the delicate layers of the language"
- at readings, he feels as if he is reading his poems, even when he did not translate and has minimal role in deciding diction for translation
- always in love with his most recent poem--this is the one that will change everything
- referenced his introduction to the Edward Snow translations of Rilke (essay written originally in English)
- MDB asked about writing post-9/11 and his poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" (if you aren't a New Yorker subscriber, you can read this Poetry Foundation article or read the full poem)--did this raise his fame? and AZ spoke of how luckily, he does not know--it might be hard to live with his own fame
- MDB responded by stating how perhaps we can't / shouldn't know--not important because what should matter is the work
- AZ: need of response--don't need fame but a group of friends / readers, trust self
- when asked about his writing and revision process, AZ spoke of poems that are most convincing are usually written in three or four days--has to be "hot"--may have twenty some versions--when it's cold, it won't change the shape--vision makes it exist--dies after those days--because an object is not mine
- AZ spoke of his work in Chicago, where he teaches for the Committee on Social Thought (and is relieved not to be teaching workshop)--before, he taught in Houston for eighteen years (eighteen autumns)--and there commenced a debate on the value of the workshop, which was interesting, given my fly-on-the-wall-ness in that very workshop--"workshop should be a festive movement for poetry" (he misses working with young poets, something he brought up several times over the weekend)--a dream of designing a new writing program which would include philosophy and history courses, more reading and less workshops--MDB mentioned how Auden wanted to have an academy which would include a plot of land to grow vegetables
- poetry only exists if we are in a special state of mind--headaches, bad days transform poems into "black specks on the page"
- likes team teaching--gives another layer--relieves nervousness
- can teach a poem entirely within a class (as opposed to a longer prose piece that requires outside reading, etc.)--likes to do detective work--focus on meaning and not form
- another MFA asked about nostalgia, which AZ turned into speaking about past and for geography, how he likes Houston looking back, Paris was a cold home for him, as sentimental--the distance we have when looking back, "cannot imagine this room because we are in it right now"--not being a place means the absences create a presence
- and a fiction MFA brought up highlighting the mundane or grotesque--AZ responded--has enemies of his work--especially in Poland--"some that reject what I do, which is only natural"
- he is distrustful of high rhetoric that doesn't refer to anything concrete
- MDB asked how poetry is different now from where it was when you began? AZ: linked to political movement; now, after so many years, takes poetry more seriously
- "poetry such a great river"
- looks at self with great humility but then MDB asked about being the center of the universe when writing, which AZ responded by saying, "on a day of writing, of course I am the center of the universe"

Thoughts after dinner with AZ on Friday night: "Last night's dinner, MDB mentioned (in response to Muller winning the Nobel) that there should be no awards, how we never agree with who wins--AZ said we should still have those awards, but they should be given by the gods. AZ talked about the anniversary of the wall coming down and how these choices are generally politically motivated as opposed to literarily."

Lunch on Friday:

- "no normative aesthetic"--to force AZ to write one way under communism
- Trish Hampl brought up Milan Kundera and the news of his having informed on someone, which resulted in something like 25 years of labor--Kundera denied it and the news cycle did not continue--rumor is he wanted to join Academie Francaise and to become one of the forty "immortals"--designed for writing in French
- AZ discussed more on the Committee for Social Thought, where he teaches poetry and is given liberties--the program itself is a 7-8 year Ph.D program--he gets students from all over the university and mentioned missing young poets again--spoke of how teaching at Chicago causes him to be more anonymous and Houston allowed for getting to know people over time
- Brian Laidlaw (fellow second-year MFA) asked how to enter the world of poetry and not be a part of the echo chamber but have work that ripples out: AZ emphasized ignoring fashions, not worrying to much about readership--"in the beginning your voice is very brittle"--return to impulse that is yours--protect that candle--and two best pieces of advice would be to be patient and to believe in yourself--Milosz called AZ after he won the Nobel and asked him, "Tell me, have I ever written a good poem?"
- when you are reading your own work, you are reading it from within and not from the outside
- Trish pointed out: if you want this something enough, life will open up a way to do it
- BL responded that he had a lurking fear that it might somehow be taken away--with it being a full-time mental occupation and have it become secondary to something else, which commenced a discussion on invisible hierarchies

After, I had a manuscript conference with Adam Zagajewski, and while I won't copy notes from that experience here, I will say it was a positive experience--Zagajewski gave me a level of confidence in what I am doing, which is always, always waning--and I'll have to go back to those words when I'm closer to bottoming out.

Most of these images are from Adam Zagajewski's reading at the Twin Cities Book Festival, to which I drove the famous Polish poet (and only got a little lost). He had a few side remarks I noted:
- "I will try to make poetry live. Poetry is usually asleep at this hour--wakes up at three, takes a coffee."
- "I hear Rain Taxi is changing its name to Snow Taxi."
- And a poem I'll need to find, an Alzheimer's poem, which is called something like "Now That You've Lost Your Memory" and recounts hiking with his

You can read a much more brief and a bit more organized reaction to AZ's visit on dislocate's blog.

happy edging-toward halloween

2009-10-16T11:17:00.000-05:00

question and answer: dickinson and form

2009-10-15T00:57:00.000-05:00

Dickinson wrote and sent this poem ("A Route to Evanescence") to Thomas Higginson in 1880.

Dickinson's handwritten manuscript of her poem "Wild Nights – Wild Nights!"

After a summer with Ellen Bryant Voigt's formal questioning, I find I cannot approach a body of poet's work without scrutinizing syntax and lineation. Equally compelling is the consideration of technology--the ways in which Emily Dickinson distributed her poems among friends and family in letters, her fascicles (chapbooks, in some senses) bound by hand, her distinctive handwriting and its changes, and here I am, a century and a half later, blogging about her work, this strange technology, where words do not breathe on the page but on the screen and enter the worlds of who-knows--this private consideration in a public place. Because of that idiosyncratic handwriting, some who reprint her work attempt to alter the dash to best represent what it is doing in the poem; some say the various breeds of dashes in her work change meaning. It's also interesting to think of how the work is arranged, but I think this is a topic for another posting.

A few questions have arisen while areadin' and I sought answers in the realm of the internet:

1. Those dashes: what is going on?

As I read, I think of the breath. My own poetry exists (mostly) within the poetic block--I have (recently) been told those nouns are housed within a box. It's interesting to consider restriction playing up against an opening and which is more successful and when.

Kamilla Denman writes about the dash on Modern American Poetry. (Originally published in The Emily Dickinson Journal with the title "Emily Dickinson's Volcanic Punctuation") She says:

Unlike the exclamation mark, the dash that dominates the prolific period is a horizontal stroke, on the level of this world. It both reaches out and holds at bay. Its origins in ellipsis connect it semantically to planets and cycles (rather than linear time and sequential grammatical progression), as well as to silence and the unexpressed. But to dash is also "to strike with violence so as to break into fragments; to drive impetuously forth or out, cause to rush together; to affect or qualify with an element of a different strain thrown into it; to destroy, ruin, confound, bring to nothing, frustrate, spoil; to put down on paper, throw off, or sketch, with hasty and unpremeditated vigour; to draw a pen vigorously through writing so as to erase it; [is] used as a euphemism for 'damn,' or as a kind of verbal imprecation; [or is] one of the two signals (the other being the dot) which in various combinations make up the letters of the Morse alphabet." Dickinson uses the dash to fragment language and to cause unrelated words to rush together; she qualifies conventional language with her own different strains; and she confounds editorial attempts to reduce her "dashed off " jottings to a "final" version. Not only does she draw lines through her own drafts but also through the linguistic conventions of her society, and her challenges to God are euphemistic imprecations against conventional religion. Even the allusion to the Morse alphabet is not entirely irrelevant: through her unconventional use of punctuation, particularly the dash, Dickinson creates a poetry whose interpretation becomes a process of decoding the way each fragment signals meaning.

Dickinson's transition from a dominant use of the exclamation mark to a preference for the dash accompanied her shift from ejaculatory poems, which seem outcries aimed with considerable dramatic effect at God or others, to poems where the energies exist more in the relationships between words and between the poet and her words. In this intensely prolific period, Dickinson's excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the result of great stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and as a mere idiosyncratic, female habit. Though these speculations are all subject to debate, it is clear that in the early 1860s Dickinson conducted her most intense exploration of language and used punctuation to disrupt conventional linguistic relations, whether in an attempt to express inexpressible psychological states or purely to vivify language.

And this, too--"Dashing Genius: Emily Dickinson and the Punctuation of Cognition," which opens:

Safely encased by the curve of bone, a palm-sized mass of wrinkled grey tissue throbs in the commotion of imagination. As tiny electrical currents spark, nerves burst into action along multiple pathways. Spider-shaped neurons pulse with messages throughout the cerebral cortex. Electric signals race down the axon of one nerve to the dendrite of the next, until even the most brilliant brain must pause for an infinitesimal moment, awaiting the leap -- the leap of embryonic, encoded ideas across the synapse, that tiny gap interspersed between membranes of adjoining neurons. Once past this cognitive divide, secreted neurochemicals wash through cellular landscapes and the brain registers human possibility.

Over one century ago in Amherst, Massachusetts, the particular brain of a gifted poet made precisely these synaptical connections, transforming reflections born from solitude into the actions of a pen on scraps of paper. And as Emily Dickinson scrawled her distinctive handwriting into the sloping curves of nonconventional verse, she chose to punctuate with the dash, perhaps in unconscious tribute to a gap and a leap within the mind.

Poets.org:

The punctuation is equally difficult to decipher; what is now known as Dickinson’s characteristic "dash" is actually a richer variety of pen markings that have no typographical correspondents. Dashes are either long or short; sometimes vertical, as if to indicate musical phrasing, and often elongated periods, as if to indicate a slightly different kind of pause. Poem 327, "Before I got my eye put out," the original manuscript of which can be found online, ends with one of these markings:

So safer – guess – with just my soul
Upon the Window pane –
Where other Creatures put their eyes –
Incautious – of the Sun –

In keeping with her background in church hymns, some modern critics have even discussed the upwards or downwards movement of a dash, as if it might correspond to a "lifting" or "falling" phrase. Dickinson uses dashes musically, but also to create a sense of the indefinite, a different kind of pause, an interruption of thought, to set off a list, as a semi-colon, as parentheses, or to link two thoughts together—the shape of any individual dash might be seen as joining two thoughts together or pushing them apart. One of the most characteristic uses of the dash is at the end of a poem with a closed rhyme; the meter would shut, like a door, but the punctuation seems open. In these cases, it is likely meant to serve as an elongated end-stop. The dash was historically an informal mark, used in letters and diaries but not academic writing, and removing the dashes changes, even upon first glance, the visual liveliness and vigor of her verses. While Johnson’s system of transcribing all dash-like markings as a printed "n-dash," or short dash (as above), is imperfect, in early editions, these dashes were replaced by more regularized punctuation, such as commas and periods. Poem 320, "We play at Paste," was changed in punctuation, capitalization, and even stanza form.

We play at Paste –
Till qualified, for Pearl –
Then, drop the Paste –
And deem ourself a fool –

The Shapes – though – were similar –
And our new Hands
Learned Gem-Tactics –
Practicing Sands –

The above poem, when published for the first time, looked like this:

We play at paste,
Till qualified for pearl,
Then drop the paste,
And deem ourself a fool.
The shapes, though, were similar,
And our new hands
Learned gem-tactics
Practicing sands.

Not only does the poem leave a completely different visual impression on the page, but the pacing created by the punctuation is distorted as well, causing "The Shapes – though – were similar –" to be compressed into "The shapes, though, were similar." Finally, a traditional period ends the poem with more certainty than the original would suggest.

2. The capitalization. This comes through not only in her poems but in letters too.

In conference, I asked MDB, and he pointed to poetic tradition, but also urged me to dig a bit deeper, and this is what I found:

Poets.org:

A typical manuscript for a poem might include several undated versions, with varying capitalization throughout, sometimes a "C" or an "S" that seems to be somewhere between lowercase and capital, and no degree of logic in the capitalization. While important subject words and the symbols that correspond to them are often capitalized, often (but not always) a metrically stressed word will be capitalized as well, even if it has little or no relevance in comparison to the rest of the words in the poem. Early editors removed all capitals but the first of the line, or tried to apply editorial logic to their usage. For example, poem 632 is now commonly punctuated as follows:

The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –

The Brain is deeper than the sea –
For – hold them – Blue to Blue –
The one the other will absorb –
As Sponges – Buckets – do –

The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound –

The above capitalizations, which include such seemingly unimportant words as "Blue," "Sponges," and "Buckets," capitalizing "Sky" but not "sea," were regularized into the following traditional capitalization and punctuation by early editors:

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

3. Oh those hymns.

Because Dickinson is using rhyme and and free verse (and ballad meter), the poems are easily set to music. I grew up hearing my father singing "Because I could not stop for death, death kindly stopped for meeee" to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." No, really:

Douglas Duncan: "Her metrical lapses, though sometimes astounding in a poet with such a naturally good ear, occurred most commonly in poems which for one reason or another were falling to piece in any case."

Poets.org:

Drawing from primarily musical forms such as hymns and ballads, and modifying them with her own sense of rhythm and sound, a Dickinson poem is unusual in that it both slows down and speeds up, interrupts itself, holds its breath, and sometimes trails off. The reader is led through the poem by the shape of her stanza forms, typically quatrains, and her unusual emphasis of words, either through capitalization or line position. The meter varies quite a bit even from the stresses expected in a hymn or ballad. Hymn meter differs from traditional meter by counting syllables, not "feet." Unlike ballad meter, quatrains are typically closed, meaning that the first and third lines will rhyme as well as the second and fourth. Some common forms of hymn meter that Dickinson used are common meter (a line of eight syllables followed by a line of six syllables, repeating in quatrains of an 8/6/8/6 pattern), long meter (8/8/8/8), short meter (6/6/6/6), and common particular meter (8/8/6/8/8/6). However, unlike writers of traditional hymns, Dickinson took liberties with the meter. She also allowed herself to use enjambment more frequently than traditional hymn writers, breaking a line where there is no natural or syntactic pause. For example, in the second stanza of "I cannot live with you," she writes:

The Sexton keeps the Key to –
Putting up
Our Life – His Porcelain –
Like a Cup –

Dickinson breaks the first line after a preposition and before a direct object; in both places, one would not traditionally punctuate with a comma, semicolon, or dash, and there would be no pause.

4. What was on her bedside table?

Poets.org Guide to Emily Dickinson shares:

Dickinson’s subject matter is best understood in how it reflects but also departs from her background and education. It is unclear to biographers and critics exactly what books Dickinson had access to, beyond the books that she makes mention of, often cryptically, in her letters. Among the 100 or so classic works found in her family library (some of which may not have been in the library during her lifetime) and a few hundred more mundane works and popular novels that she discussed in letters, it is unlikely that she had read more than a handful of philosophers, poets, and novelists. Influenced most by the Bible, Shakespeare, and the seventeenth century metaphysicals (noted for their extravagant metaphors in linking disparate objects), she wrote poems on grief, love, death, loss, affection and longing. Her presumed reading in the natural sciences, also reconstructed from studying her family library, allowed her to bring precision and individuality to natural subjects, observing nature for itself, rather than as a testament to the glory of creation, and touching upon the less beautiful aspects of nature, such as weeds and clover. Her forms were various and included riddles, declarations, complaints, love songs, stories, arguments, prayers, and definitions.

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning died, she wrote: “Her—’last Poems’—ended—Silver—perished—with her Tongue—Not on Record—bubbled other, Flute—or Woman—so divine.”

Other bits I'm picking up, synthesizing, considering:
- Some have discovered many of the poems begin with a declarative followed by a metaphor.
- She's also recognized with use of humor, puns, irony, and satire. (Ah, how I love a punny joke.) Douglas Duncan: "lowers emotional temperature to make possible a poetry of wit"
- She's been linked with Emerson and the Transcendentalists, though there is some objection to that.
- I will often think of Dickinson when I hear the word "slant" in connection to poetry--her slant rhymes, her "a certain slant of light," her "tell the truth but tell it slant."

This, I know: even though tomorrow morning is to be the last Emily Dickinson meeting with MDB, I am clearly far from done with her. I'm reading My Wars are Laid Away in Books, a biography by Alfred Habegger, and I want to take a closer look at the ways in which other poets were influenced by Dickinson--there is an Annie Finch anthology on formal poetry to read, Adrienne Rich's essay "Vesuvius at Home" to read, an anthology called Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson, etc. No, not nearly the last of Emily Dickinson.

on approaching dickinson

2009-10-14T22:58:00.006-05:00

"It seems wiser to begin and perhaps end with a recognition of the things that make Dickinson stand out--her genius, her extremely tenacious affection, her avoidance of public life, her reluctance to publish. Whatever her final intentions for the nearly eighteen hundred poems she left behind, the fact that a great many were not communicated to friends warns us that we cannot assume, as we of course do with most writers, that she meant to be read and understood. What George Steiner has said of a poem by Paul Celan applies even more exactly to a large proportion of Dickinson's work: 'At certain levels, we are not meant to understand at all, and our interpretation, indeed our reading itself is an intrusion.'

The tacit recognition that our reading Dickinson is an intrusion has all along contributed to her appeal. One of the reasons readers at all levels respond to her with passionate enthusiasm is that, knowing something of her life and character, they approach her work with these in mind. Again and again, readers feel that, remote and difficult as she is, they are on the track of knowing her. They feel a heartbeat; they receive the words as primal and immediate, as coming straight from life. Sadly, this way of reading is generally a mistake, especially if we succumb to the illusion that we can zoom into her life and penetrate her secret being. One of Dickinson's paradoxes is that she both invites and deflects such intimacy. 'Not telling' was one of the things she did to perfection. How that came to be is a part of the story this book attempts to follow.

Coming to this project after having written about the James family, I was struck by an assumption pervading a great deal of the critical analysis of Emily Dickinson. With almost anyone else--Charles Dickens or George Eliot or Henry James or James Joyce or TS Eliot--it is taken for granted that the life has some sort of shape or curve, however complicated, and that if we know where on that curve a particular work is situated we will probably come to a better understanding of it. There is development over time, in other words, and this directional trend becomes a map by which readers steer. With Dickinson, however, it is often assumed there is no map, direction, or development--that her art was static or airless and that we don't need to now about her stages, sequences, contexts in order to catch on. Her critical expositors habitually move back and forth between her writings of the 1860s and those of the 1870s and 1880s, as if to rule out in advance that a given work had much to do with the point she had reached when she wrote it, and that the points connected. It is as if this writer were freakishly unable to learn from experience, and wrote without traction all her life...

It is true and indeed notorious that Dickinson wrote in the same few verse forms all her life, and that she always sounds like Dickinson, and that readers are easily lulled."

-- xii-xiii of the Introduction to My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger

This parceled quote, this long stretch of text I typo-ed my way through, this something I tell my students not to do, not to rely so much on another voice (what do you have to contribute, anyway?) reflects, I think, the goals of this blog, which are to disorganizedly organize fleeting thoughts about the literary world, particularly focusing on the act of reading, though some writing-thoughts always trip along behind.

And Emily, she seems so right to be the poet with whom I begin this journey--the "Mother of American Poetry" as some like to say. It's precisely that, though: she is daunting. Her 1,775 poems, many a simple couplet or stanza, many not entirely fit for print but part of the curiosity (how would I feel if my writing notebook were laid completely bare for all to gawk at?) (what is a blog in relation to that, the writing notebook, the thinking place?)--are so much, and she is so widely read, so called upon in the American High School Classroom. There's always that fretting: am I reading correctly? What is it to read E.D. correctly?

And, of course, there is the idea of E.D. writing in that hermetic place, a near-vacuum.

Who are her influences, after all?

Here is what I have come up with, during an internet search:

influence of writers and ideas of the Romantic period like the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Brontë (author of the novel Wuthering Heights, 1847); her work shows Romantic ideals and desires mixed with struggles of religious belief and influence of New England Puritanism
- Dr. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta

(the ever-questionable curiosity) Wikipedia's entry:

Early influences and writing

When she was eighteen, Dickinson's family befriended a young attorney by the name of Benjamin Franklin Newton. According to a letter written by Dickinson after Newton's death, he had been "with my Father two years, before going to Worcester – in pursuing his studies, and was much in our family."^[35] Although their relationship was probably not romantic, Newton was a formative influence and would become the second in a series of older men (after Humphrey) that Dickinson referred to, variously, as her tutor, preceptor or master.^[36]

Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth, and his gift to her of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first book of collected poems had a liberating effect. She wrote later that he, "whose name my Father's Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring".^[37] Newton held her in high regard, believing in and recognizing her as a poet. When he was dying of tuberculosis, he wrote to her, saying that he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw.^[37] Biographers believe that Dickinson's statement of 1862—"When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned"—refers to Newton.^[38]

Dickinson was familiar not only with the Bible but also with contemporary popular literature.^[39] She was probably influenced by Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York, another gift from Newton^[21] (after reading it, she enthused "This then is a book! And there are more of them!"^[21]). Her brother smuggled a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Kavanagh into the house for her (because her father might disapprove)^[40] and a friend lent her Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in late 1849.^[41] Jane Eyre's influence cannot be measured, but when Dickinson acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland, she named him "Carlo" after the character St. John Rivers' dog.^[41] William Shakespeare was also a potent influence in her life. Referring to his plays, she wrote to one friend "Why clasp any hand but this?" and to another, "Why is any other book needed?"^[42]

I read to create a foundation for myself and find I am looking back still further, just to see what foundations were laid for them. It's endless. It's endless, and I love it.

first dislocate reading

2009-10-14T00:09:00.016-05:00

Tonight: (fiction MFA) Patrick Hueller, (poetry MFA and dear friend) Meryl DePasquale, (non-fiction MFA) Wilson Peden, along with U of MN professor and award-wining writer David Treuer.

Other figures in the pictures: Shantha Susman, dislocate Publicity Manger and that silly pair, Colleen Coyne (editor0in-chief) with Josh Morsell (managing editor), who run the show.

Coming soon: a post on Adam Zagajewski's visit and a post on my (hypothetical) Emily Dickinson anthology.

Of the == == == collective: Colleen + Meryl.

PS: If ever you wish to use photos I took, please email me or leave a comment for permission. (I have yet to say no, unless permission was not requested.) Thanks!

autumn -- anticipating visiting writers

2009-10-07T23:48:00.003-05:00

Autumn

by Adam Zagajewski

Autumn is always too early.

The peonies are still blooming, bees

are still working out ideal states,

and the cold bayonets of autumn

suddenly glint in the fields and the wind

rages.

What is its origin? Why should it destroy

dreams, arbors, memories?

The alien enters the hushed woods,

anger advancing, insinuating plague;

woodsmoke, the raucous howls

of Tatars.

Autumn rips away leaves, names,

fruit, it covers the borders and paths,

extinguishes lamps and tapers; young

autumn, lips purpled, embraces

mortal creatures, stealing

their existence.

Sap flows, sacrificed blood,

wine, oil, wild rivers,

yellow rivers swollen with corpses,

the curse flowing on: mud, lava, avalanche,

gush.

Breathless autumn, racing, blue

knives glinting in her glance.

She scythes names like herbs with her keen

sickle, merciless in her blaze

and her breath. Anonymous letter, terror,

Red Army.

Wait for an Autumn Day
Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly
weary sun, for dusty air,
a pale day's weather.

Wait for the maple's rough, brown leaves,
etched like an old man's hands,
for chestnuts and acorns,

for an evening when you sit in the garden
with a notebook and the bonfire's smoke contains
the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.

Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete's breath,
for a truce among the clouds,
for the silence of trees,

for the moment when you reach absolute peace
and accept the thought that what you've lost
is gone for good.

Wait for the moment when you might not
even miss those you loved
who are no more.

Wait for a bright, high day,
for an hour without doubt or pain.
Wait for an autumn day.

-- Adam Zagajewski

the complete poems of emily dickinson

2009-10-06T14:32:00.003-05:00

From introduction:

"Emily Dickinson, then thirty-one years old, was writing a professional man of letters to inquire whether her verses 'breathed.'" (v)

I love that the introduction states, "... the early 1860's, when she fully developed her 'flood subjects' on the themes of living and dying." (viii) I've never heard that term before--flood subjects. I suppose mine, just now, are memory and much more so, the body (especially in aging).

"Dickinson uses dashes as a musical device, and though some may be elongated end stops, any 'correction' would be gratuitous." (x-xi)

In my independent study with poet Michael Dennis Browne, he has asked me to assemble an anthology of sorts of poems from the collected that speak to me in whatever way, perhaps ten or fifteen. It's difficult to narrow, and this is something I'm working on still--there are those whose language appeals, those that seem incredibly teachable or ready for discussion, those that call to me because I can relate in my own everyday life.

I'm halfway through and plan a big post with the poems that stood out to me in myriad ways, but I wanted to pause here, think about the feelings I've had as I've plugged away at this daunting tome.

At first, I was certainly not in love. I chose Dickinson because she seems the obvious first to fit my criteria, as discussed at the MFA retreat: American, female, foundational (canonical), inspirational to other poets, ready with a body of work, letters or diaries to read, biographies, a decent amount of critical study. Emily Dickinson, mama of American poetry. Oh, and the biggest criteria: I wanted to feel as if I ought to have done a close study of this poet's work already and hadn't--a gap in my education, so to speak. And there are many.

But I picked up steam and rhythm, moving past those earlier poems and into where Dickinson herself became more dynamic, more confident in her voice.

Initially, I ignorantly felt frustrated at her cycles in word choice and subject, until I remembered the obvious: this isn't a collection she selected, not a carefully ordered book (as we are studying in thesis seminar), but her everything and her everything in chronology. Of course images and terms will cycle through; they do the same in my own work, whether purposefully (as is the case in building character in the grandfather poems) or accidentally (oh, how I have a fondness for certain words: loam, clot, etc.).

Curious, I found this webpage, a lexicon of Dickinson's poetry. (This, to establish what Dickinson's dictionary might have looked like and also to serve an excellent reference for translators.) It doesn't answer the childish curiosity: which word (noun, perhaps, to not include those pesky articles and conjunctions and whatnot) appears most frequently? I blame The Road, in which one student in the lecture I TA'ed for was able to tell us the number of times "ash" appeared with his Kindle reference. I refuse to collaborate via Kindle, particularly with Dickinson, which I realize is slightly ironic, given the lack of notebook-reflection in these entries, but still--here I am, curious about diction frequency. Bees? Immortality? Birds? Death? I won't go through all 1775 poems. Not for this--I plan to read the collection (this printing) once, then delve into biographies, letters, reactions from other poets, and at the end of all my further study, I want to re-read, only another edition with slight variance, just to see how these poems have changed after exploring more in depth.

I do admit to a bit of cheating, watching the two Netflix videos on Dickinson whilst reading the first go-round, but I wanted a bit more meat to bring to my first meeting with MDB.

event: dislocate reading october 13

2009-10-05T22:00:00.011-05:00

With my very not-so-much technological savvy, I did a trial-and-error poster for an upcoming dislocate event--our first reading of the 09-10 school year, which features one of my favorite fellow MFAers, Meryl DePasquale. So if you live in the area, you ought to come and check it out.

If, for nothing else, to admire my advertisement in person--since the photo is mine (from an Austin trip Ryan and I took this summer) and I even learned a little Photo Shop magic to get that darn logo on. This is coming from the girl who prefers the literal scissors-and-tape method of creating handouts. And overheads. No kidding.

mfa road trip + retreat

2009-10-04T23:05:00.017-05:00

Day 1 (Friday):

Day 2 (drizzly, drizzly Saturday):

Day 3 (Sunday):

Some may remember last year's retreat. Some may find that year a huge blur.

Some may find this year's a blur as well.

Because of current medication, I cannot drink, which means I become designated--I've been the designated boater, even. This weekend I was simply the designated-leaves-the-bonfire-first, which really meant I caught a whiff of the strangeness that can occur on these retreats--a splashing of five naked MFAs as they plunged into the freezing Lake Benedict, stories of too-much-alcohol and stump-tipping, late night fire songs, a sestina about Wahida and a Sasquatch, and the inevitable sickness that follows the passing of bourbon and rum.

Somehow, I did get a bit done--some writing at the picture window and some reading (Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski, who is visiting our campus this coming week), but what else is one to do when the day is full of cold and drizzle? Certainly not the boating adventure we planned, nor a long hike, nor a sprawling on the lawn with writing notebook and pen. Not even last year's football game surfaced.

But still, this last of MDB's retreats was a good one. Good food and plenty of it--soups and chili and eggplant and so much more. Fires were made, despite the cold, the skies cast in gray. We were up north, at the lake, content, filling ourselves up on Minnesota culture.

Oh, and the antlers? Those were lining the roof and rafters of "Fort Benedict," the local gas station and bait shop, and I took those for you, Shawn.

Some good news upon my return: two poems, "Breaching" and "Axis" now have homes at an online literary journal called The 13th Warrior Review.

maxine hong kingston

2009-09-30T23:06:00.016-05:00

While this semester is certainly proving to be the most stressful of any semester I've experienced, as high school student or teacher or undergraduate, M.Ed student or MFA student, it is also is perhaps the most satisfying. Gone, though nowhere near fully, is that heavy question: What am I doing here? Present, now, is a sense of belonging, of fitting into the grooves, of finding a rhythm, and look: last night's reading was a blessing, truly, and tonight's event was no less so.

I've been in love with Kingston's use of language since the eleventh grade when my mother's AP Language class (indeed, I was a student of my mother's in high school, and no matter what troubles we may have had in the past, I will always be able to say this: she's a damn good teacher) had Woman Warrior as optional summer reading. Oh, such magic!

Easily, she's been in my top ten, fifteen favorite writers of all time based on that book. I've met a few of the others on that list (Sharon Olds and Margaret Atwood and Maxine Kumin and Kimiko Hahn come to mind).

Meeting authors, too, can be such a precarious experience. We risk becoming disappointed with those we have been star-struck with. Some are stand-offish, not interested in their audience, in budding writers, in participating with universities and the public but have strangely arrived, zipping through a reading with hand outstretched, but Kingston was truly not a writer in this category. One needn't have the experience of shaking her hand to know this; one only needed to sit in the audience tonight at the Ted Mann Concert Hall, where she actually lectured (oh my! a lecture for the Esther Freier Lecture series! a novelty!) about peace and achieving peace through art. I could feel it too, that intense calm enter the concert hall, that goodness which has followed me home, has mingled with the atmosphere of last night, and has left me happy to face this overwhelming semester, able, just a little, to whisper: bring it on.

(Side note: in case you cannot tell, I do event photography for the English department.)

micawber's | kate greenstreet + norma cole

2009-09-29T23:57:00.004-05:00

There's something about this time of year, the swift switch from sweltering in bed to that collar tuggingly cold that is autumn, that makes sitting in one of the sweetest bookstores on the planet (we believe gnomes must live in the floorboards, truly) an incredibly cozy event. Top that with two of my favorite people, white holiday lights, the color of pumpkins, a stack of new books, and listening to two mind blowing poets read and with their own unique styles--it was a good night, a good end to a long day on campus.

I was first introduced to Kate Greenstreet's work via her first book interviews blog. Only tonight have I read one of her books, the now out-of-print chapbook Learning the Language, and I also picked up a copy of her first book case sensitive.

Her reading style was remarkable--she's so tiny and so quiet, the microphone needs to huddle up next to her, and the creaking of the music stand sounded like the creak of stairs late at night, only adding to that cozy ambiance I wish I could bottle up and return to when I need that happy-heart feeling.

Eric Lorberer introduced the second reader, Norma Cole, by talking about the blessing poetry has in small audiences (a sentiment with excellent timing for me as I spend my Monday evenings in memoir class being reminded that no one reads poetry, something I certainly struggle with as do all / most writers of poetry) because it "feels as if she is writing just for you." He was speaking of Cole, but I think this also wholly applies to Greenstreet's relationship with her audience; she read the poems as if they were a conversation and she knew we were speaking back, even if it wasn't out loud.

Norma Cole is both a poet and a translator, a combination which I've always admired, and she came to us with a selected works spanning 1988 to 2008, an amount of time I cannot imagine what might do to my own work. She had a stroke, which has affected her speech and stance, but not the power of her words.

Cole online: This poem reminds me a bit of the stairway installation at The Loft, and you can read some commentary over on Lemon Hound.

Here is a video of her reading. The sound is not wonderful, but you can get an idea of her work:

It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. -- Herman Melville (Moby-Dick)

2009-09-28T23:08:00.008-05:00

Ordinarily, I would prefer to not cross-post, but I couldn't help but truncate this post with two from my everyday blog. Apologies to readers of both.

A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.
~V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Modern Primitives

While I was at Bread Loaf, I met this girl, whose name I can no longer recall, who had the most beautiful tattoo--a pair of poems twined together on her arm. I marveled at the tattoo from a distance, and snuck this shot during the Robert Frost talk at his cabin in the woods.I already knew of Shawn through Meryl, one of my fellow poets in the program, and we'd been emailing, discussing a tattoo Kelly and I have been considering for much too long. It takes a while for two people to settle into something permanent such as this, though I think the friendship took a bit less time.But when I saw the above tattoo, my lack of patience went into hyperdrive, and I began a dialogue with the ever patient Shawn on how to do something like this on my own arm.First: settling on the poem. It had to be something I loved, and though some, who I've told I'm getting a poem tattoo, have asked if it would be one of my own, I cringed--it seems narcissistic, and somehow, I don't believe my own words are at a place that could claim that kind of permanence. Not on my own body, especially.

Sharon Olds has always been my favorite poet. Since I was a junior in high school. And this poem speaks to me on so many levels, and that last line, oh, that last line:

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

It felt so right. Which led to contemplation: what shape would this poem take? The above tattoo seems to be based on a flower, and I'd been hoping the poem I'd select would lend itself to something obvious--but no pillars, no paper dolls. Instead, Shawn suggested two of something, for the two figures in the poem, and if I weren't already talking birds with my friend Kelly, he'd suggest that one, which led me to wings--the poem in the end seems to be about a kind of freedom, a revenge to bad memories. Also, I read this from an interview with Sharon Olds:

What did you mean when you once said that your poetry comes out of your lungs?
[Laughs] Well, you know, it's curious where different people think their mind is. I guess a lot of people believe that their mind is in their brain, in their head. To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body -- the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done. But poetry is so physical, the music of it and the movement of thought. Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in. I find a tendency in myself not to breathe very much. And certainly I have noticed, over the years, when dancing or when running, that ideas will come to my mind with the oxygen. Suddenly you're remembering something that you haven't thought of for years.

Wings, lungs. The senses, which are so important to both her work and my own.

So he sketched this for me:

Shawn has a special knack, I must add, for what he calls "illustrative realism." He creates these amazing creatures with such imagination.

Here are some of my favorites he has put up on his blog: book birdhouse and the opposite arm's bird as well as these shoulder doilies. Some other clever designs: the bir d/swine flu, this crazed penguin, this brainwashed sheep, airline safety, the drag king and queen, and many others.

He added the words, and from a distance (hence, my keeping it thumbnail size), you can see the wings still:

But I also wanted to include the larger draft, so you could see the way all the words interact. My favorite about the top tattoo is the way the words interact, overlap, mingle.

Thank you, Shawn: for doing this in trade, for being so patient with me as I "line edited" the wings, for doing this on your day off, for being so encouraging, for having an awesome wife who was my own cheering section and reminds me how cool poetry is, for being so good at PhotoShop, for making art for all the world to see. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

(Need a tattoo and live in the area? Shawn's your man. Seriously.)

PS: All images, save the top one, and the one of him actually tattooing me, which was taken by Meryl, are copyright Shawn Hebrank. You can read Shawn's post about the not-to-be-repeated tattoo.

And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.
~Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

yesterday with jim shepard

2009-09-23T16:41:00.011-05:00

The creative writing program hosts a number of visiting writers through the Edelstein-Keller fund, and fiction writer Jim Shepard was our first.

Images: (top: department head Ray Gonzalez; bottom: Professor Charles Baxter)

As events intern in the office, it fell upon me to drive Shepard to his interview at MPR--my first visit to the swanky St Paul offices. I sat in the green room, leaning into the old Sony radio, listening to the interview on Midmorning. He was sandwiched between a nurse practitioner at the Children's Hospital talking about H1N1 and a university doctor who does regular medical commentary, which, no doubt, returned to H1N1.

His day was completely packed: on Monday, he had manuscript conferences and dinner with second and third year fiction MFAs along with the creative writing faculty at former-director Julie Schumacher's house, and today, after the interview, he had lunch with MFAs along with more manuscript conferences, visits to thesis seminars, an interview with dislocate, and, of course, his reading and Q&A and reception, where he signed my copy: For Molly, in honor of her dogs and her love of non-fiction--All best, Jim Shepard. Given my ridiculous level of gullibility, I decided his note of my non-fiction love was tongue-in-cheek and not that he forgot I was the only poetry MFA to attend all events. (After all, I never mentioned that I do prose writing as well. Best to keep it simple.) The dogs, of course, is in reference to my car's console, which collapsed when he elbowed it, as one of the dogs destroyed it in an anxious leap from one end of the car to another one summer long ago. I didn't point out the hamster-chewed spot he was covering as we drove around. Or the stain from the hot wings from the M.Ed party I attended one winter so many years ago.

Right now, I'm reading his National Book Award-nominated Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which is incredibly research-heavy, setting stories in the Chernobyl disaster, on planes with geologists in Alaska, amongst Roman battles, and as I read, I'm sussing out the essentials of the stories and wondering how imperative it is, this wonderful research and dramatic backdrop, to the story itself: if the characters were redressed and placed in a contemporary setting, as some of these stories are (in a teenager's home, on the football field), would the poignancy be lost?

Side note: As a kindness, please ask permission before you use any photos of mine. Thanks!

what is found there

2009-09-22T23:51:00.000-05:00

It is not for lack of topics or lack of movement and thought that this blog has so many gaping moments of quiet. It is from sheer exhaustion, from pulling myself along by inches, from one day to the next. Today's was no exception--starting with chauffeuring visiting writer Jim Shepard to his MPR interview and ending with handing out ziploc baggies to graduate students so they could take the leftover hors d'oeuvres home. (Hey, we haven't been paid since the beginning of June.)

I do want to show pictures I took from tonight's reading, want to share some thoughts about teaching freshmen writing, want to transcribe my notes from Trish's first two memoir classes, but tonight, before I stumble up to bed, confused at just how those stairs got to be so steep anyway, I want to share this: I have a little collective, a collection of four other women poets, and I am grateful for them. Tonight, we took a look at my haphazard chapbook draft and despite the clear indications of my eyelids that I am, indeed, very very tired, I also feel this strange sense of energy and purpose and excitement at sitting down and shuffling and clipping and tidying and generating and slicing and injecting. The work of revising terrifies me, mostly because I don't want to destroy a good thing or conflate a bad, but I'm gaining confidence, and with these four voices behind me, I feel almost brave, almost ready to polish and push this thing out into the world. A knock from the nest, so to speak.

2009-09-14T15:55:00.002-05:00

While at Bread Loaf, I eased myself into Dickinson studies by reading The Poet and the Murderer, which is deceptive with its Dickinson cover and double billing in the title, but I learned more on how to counterfeit rare documents and coins and the rejection of Mormonism by said murderer than anything else.

Despite this, I culled two quotes to keep in mind as I read that brick that is her collected poems over the next few weeks, the second being particularly significant as I am studying Bishop later in the semester:

[Dickinson's nephew Ned] lived next door to hear at the Evergreens, and Dickinson, who never had children of her own, adored him. The feeling seems to have been reciprocated. Ned frequently ran across from the Evergreens to visit his brilliant, eccentric aunt. On one occasion he left his rubber boots behind. Dickinson sent them back on a silver tray, their tops stuffed with flowers.

- Simon Worrall, The Poet and the Murderer, pg. 6

[Harvard scholar Thomas] Johnson's edition also plucked a shy girl from Massachusetts out of her self-chosen seclusion and turned her into the It girl of modern American Poetry. "I like, or at least I admire, her a great deal more now," the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell in 1956, "probably because of that good new edition, really. I spent another stretch absorbed in that, and think... that she's about the best we have."

- pg. 25

mfa launch party

2009-09-13T22:34:00.010-05:00

(Ray Gonzalez, current department head)

(Julie Shumacher, previous department head)

(Josh + Colleen, managing editor and editor-in-chief of dislocate)
(Colleen is also a member of the == collective)

second Colleen, also ==

At a space deeply ensconced in F. Scott Fitzgerald mythology, the MFAs of the 2009-2010 school year gathered for a bit of schmoozing. There was a bit of bobbing up-and-down as we introduced ourselves to the group, explaining our roles within this institution, and I tried to remember if I'd had caviar before this night.

Our first week is behind us and I'm still a bit worn at the edges, a weekend spent away with family and friends and a return to rigor, to three fully formed days on campus a week. Tomorrow: a four hour block of time as the creative writing office intern, a meeting with fellow MFAers to discuss the possibility of a joint critical essay which could take us to NYC, and an evening course on the memoir with Trish Hampl.

first day, squinty eyes

2009-09-08T21:58:00.004-05:00

I have that through-a-blender feeling of a long day well spent: I can tell my internship is going to be an actual learning experience for me, my class went smoothly despite the boring-the-snot-out-of-you aspect of syllabus day, and I had forgotten how nice it is to be in the company of my peers in thesis seminar (and out for a beer at the eclectically decorated Kitty Kat Club after).

The way our seminar, as run by poet and essayist Ray Gonzalez, works is this: third years bring in those bricks that are their manuscripts, and second years bring in collections of five poems at a time to be looked at. The result is a bit of terror on behalf of those second years, who somehow have to cobble together a draft that won't be entirely shameful in 365 days.

Ray, lover of lists, brought in some thoughts on manuscripts, professing his own view of the manuscript as a single poem made up of a collection of poems. We spoke of how the act of reading an entire book of poems can result in a satisfactory feeling, but when asked to select one or two gems to include, say, in a course packet for a poetry workshop, we might be at a loss. Carolyn Forche, who was my mentor a number of years ago, advised me to--read three books of poetry a week; every season study a new poet thoroughly; and read a book of poems in a single sitting. I haven't been faithful to this formula; perhaps this is the semester to make an attempt.

But instead of seasonal poets, I will have monthly poets--I am taking an independent study with Michael Dennis Browne where I will study the canonical American poets Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Elizabeth Bishop. We have our first meeting on Thursday where we will construct some sort of game plan that will allow my acquisition of credits for said literary exploration.

bon-fire

2009-09-07T03:11:00.014-05:00

(Shawn, who actually knows how to use Photoshop, spliced the above version)

(photoshop diptych tutorial)

L to R: Ryan, Bart, Colleen C, Amanda, Colleen M, Garrett, Meryl, Shawn

This weekend, Ryan and I were blessed with a series of guests--Saturday evening, full of friends from various aspects in life, and Sunday was dedicated to some of my favorite MFA people: Amanda (who is recently featured in Lit and will soon be in New Orleans Review) (and her boyfriend Will would be with us, but he is Ph.D'ing at Cornell), Colleen C (our fearless dislocate leader) and her boyfriend Bart (who is working on a lit Ph.D and is also poetry MFA), Colleen M (whose work has been featured in dear camera, among other places) and her boyfriend Garrett (who is soon to be speaking in Austin on the Politics of Naming, which sounds incredibly interesting), and Meryl (whose poetry inspired by the work of Virginia Woolf has inspired my own focus on canonical writers and her blog inspired me to start this one) and her husband Shawn (who is hugely talented and I will be selfishly taking advantage of said talent).

Amanda, Colleen C, Colleen M, Meryl, and I make up a loose collective within in the program. Last spring, we did a bit of collective reading, and this autumn, we'll work on chapbook manuscripts.

(The evening before, I allowed my husband and my friend's husband to lighter-fluid a book I'd been using to futz with, found-text-wise, as these two charming men, one a bit tipsy and the other equally giddy, were seeking something compelling to toss into our bonfire--and I took a few photographs, which somehow allowed this fahrenheit 451'ing of a biography on one of my favorite poets--this Plath biography, I must add, I picked up a library book sale for a few pennies and discovered I owned a duplicate, but still. Burning books? Then: I kept thinking of the beauty of altered books.)

It's strangely beautiful.

orientation irk

2009-09-03T20:15:00.003-05:00

This week has been so all-out flattening, I've forgotten what components of my life have been neglected. I come home, and if the rage at some particular point raised in orientation or frustration at the rush hour (part of being a college student generally means wonky schedule, which generally means the bonus of zippy traffic experiences, but orientation brings us firmly in the parameters of real-world scheduling, which is misery, particularly for someone like me)--if these burbling emotions have not dissipated, I stomp around a bit, and then Ryan settles me down with some ridiculous movie, or I read a book of poems whose clarity or language cheers me (Here, Bullet was tonight's reading, and though it is not flawless, there are points of buoyancy and it was enough to remove me from the funk--I also recently finished Old Heart by Stanley Plumly, which I adored).

Orientation for composition courses is nearly over, not without the requisite drama and doldrums.

But, I am amused at one of my fiction peers' characterizations of our sessions. I mentioned how the MFAs seemed to be the misfits in the back of the classroom, our arms firmly crossed, New Yorkers surreptitiously paged through. Being comp, the sneered-at division of language and humanities, known as a torture device for some MFAs (just to clarify: I requested comp--no lie), there is a motley mix of graduate instructors, ranging from the die-hard Writing Studies Ph.Ds, to American Studies grad students, to Lit grad students, to us (MFAs). My friend, whose swing-messing metaphor remains a vehicle for describing poor writing a year later, pointed out that the Writing Studies people loved talking in terms of rhetoric and Aristotle and ethos, the American Studies and Lit people loved applying their gender and socio-economic and post-colonial lenses, and the MFAs loved picking at the language and form.

Ah, predictability and your sweet little boxes you fit us into.

the night before the first day back

2009-08-30T20:19:00.004-05:00

(photo taken on Ryan's camera phone)

Tomorrow begins orientation for those teaching comp. I've got two semesters' worth ahead of me, and I think I prefer teaching any sort of writing to teaching literature, but I could certainly be wrong. Improving writing feels more tangible to me than improving literature comprehension, but I might just be saying that because it's what I face. It's a bit like the current season often being my favorite--we're facing autumn, so I'm in love with autumn; as winter approaches, I look forward to the snow; we live in Minnesota, so I yearn for spring long before we see evidence of it; summer coming means camping and hiking and Hay Creek.

Things this semester:
- Teaching comp. to first year students
- Taking thesis seminar with Ray Gonzalez, a memoir class with Trish Hampl, and an independent study that will focus on Emily Dickinson + Edna St Vincent Millay + Elizabeth Bishop with Michael Dennis Browne, who is retiring after this semester
- poetry editor for dislocate
- and a few mysterious projects I'm hoping to share in the near future.

Tonight is my last night of summer, always that strange portal of time, and after dinner, while listening to "Heart and Bones" by this local band, my husband and I held hands and watched the fingers of pink and blue mingle with the Mississippi River.

bread loaf in pictures

2009-08-28T00:01:00.003-05:00

Day 1: Depart Twin Cities to long delay in Newark airport. From Burlington, we take a shuttle onto "the mountain," as it is called, in cell-phone-less country. Dinner, settle into rooms, opening remarks with Michael Collier followed by a reading by Trish Hampl and Michael Collier.

Day 2: First workshops, readings by special guests Lorrie Moore (fell in love with Lorrie Moore when reading Anagrams and Self Help--these were my just-before-sleep books while at BL) and CK Williams, evening readings with Lynn Freed and Alan Shapiro.

Day 3: Second workshop day. Spent most of today exploring and even more: reading. And reading.

Day 4: Trish Hampl's lecture on memoir (which can be found in this collection), sat in on Copper Canyon press talk, first craft class on diction.

Day 5: Third poetry workshop, Charlies' talk on "Lush Life" as well as a panel on the editing process with Baxter, Thomas Mallon and their editor Dan Frank. Craft class on verb tenses, and more readings. I wandered across the field and into the woods that face Bread Loaf.

Day 6: Today was a "day off" (no workshops--fiction and poetry/non-fiction alternate days) with a "Writer's Cramp" race to begin the day. Lunch was a picnic at the Robert Frost farm where Middlebury professor John Elder gave a talk about Frost's experiences in Vermont and how that was reflected in his writing. The evening readers were Robert Cohen and Natasha Tretheway.

Day 7: Tom Sleigh gave a lecture called "Thom Gunn's New Jerusalem, or How to Voice Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll" (which EBV piped up during). I went on an afternoon Robert Frost trail walk with John Elder, went to a craft class given by James Allen Hall on adding the element of surprise, went to the book signing on Treman Lawn, then the reading given by Sigrid Nunez and Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Day 8: Fourth day of workshop for the poets. Today was the sit-down lunch served by faculty and fellows, which proved to be highly entertaining, as I suspect it is every year. Had a craft class on found poetry, went to a reading with Matthew Dickman, Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes, and Ann Hood, and in the evening, the readers were Vikram Chandra and Arthur Sze.

Day 9: Alan Shapiro gave a lecture on "Translation and 'Linguistic Hospitality'" in which there was a guest performance by Matthew Dickman. I sat in on a talk with Gary Clark from the Vermont Studio Center (and lusted after the idea of a month to write and nothing but), attended an excellent class on lineation, attended a panel with editors from New England Review, Ploughshares, and Atlantic Monthly.

Day 10: Last day of workshops. Sat in on Louise Gluck's talk on the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Craft class on revision with Tom Sleigh. Evening readers were Charlie Baxter and Ed Hirsch.

Day 11: I explored the woods at the back of the campus. Evening readers were Lisa Fugard, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and David Shields.

There were several events that I was either not present at or did not bring my camera. For a full list of Bread Loaf's 2009 public offerings, you can open this pdf file.

Check out my full Bread Loaf Flickr photo set, which has so very many more pictures. \

Also: If you want to use my photographs, please email me (acertainslantoflight at hotmail dotcom) for permission. I've never declined permission, of course, but it makes me feel a lot better to know. Please also make sure you attribute those photos to me (Molly Sutton Kiefer) and if you link, you can use my homepage, which is mollysuttonkiefer.com. THANKS!

bread loaf, saying good-bye to the mountain

2009-08-23T11:37:00.002-05:00

It's so strange, these past twelve days, which have seemed like both a dream and my entire life, mostly the whole-life, the way I've felt like I've known nothing else but this--the mountains, the fog, the conversation, the meals with small glasses and paper napkins, Ellen Bryant Voigt's coaxing yes, yes, the night-time readings, those damned mosquitoes. The rest of my life is a memory--at some point, I had a childhood, I grew up, there were fireflies and waiting for the bus and I remember, somewhere back when, wearing a big white dress and there's a place I know of as home with two floppy dogs, and it's there somewhere, I know it, but right now, all I can think of is the addictive local chocolate milk spouting from the fountain like an udder, the muffins in the barn, the streams flanking either side of the conference. These things have become everyday for me, and soon, I'll learn a new routine, one that begins with waking up in my own cotton sheets with my truncated windows and husband's soft breathing beside me.

It's been so good and I've felt so blessed; I hope I can return to my program maintaining this height of energy and passion, keeping those voices in my head, reminding me of figure and ground, of syntax and structure and line endings, of parsing and annotative lineations, of maintaining a poetic voice that belongs to me, of close examination, of essays and anthologies and reading up late into the night.

I will have perhaps one more Bread Loaf-focused post this week, one that focuses on all the photographs I took--my favorites, anyway--and a link to the flickr album where I'll dump too many photos to count.

For now: Farewell, farewell, sweet mountain.

bread loaf, craft classes

2009-08-22T14:47:00.000-05:00

- WORDS AT A COSTUME PARTY: ON POETIC DICTION with Peter Campion
This craft session consisted largely of Campion reading from an essay of the above title, a brief look at four poems followed by a writing exercise. In his talk, he spoke of editing according to diction as "minute, myopic," [like] "snipping and filing" [as in] "a poetic pedicure." Of course, as EBV pointed out, diction is a lens through which we can edit our own poems. Campion posited that "when we talk about image in a poem, we're almost always talking about diction." He reminded us of the piece by Ezra Pound: "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste." (Haven't read it? Go, now.) Campion spoke of melody and movement, of argument's tension between subject and style, and said he feels certainty ruins good poems. He said diction needed range and precision, inevitability and surprise--all at once. He told us, upon revision to see how the words "match the tones hanging in the air." We also learned the handy new vocabulary word catachresis, which he describes as using a logically "wrong" word where it might work, such as "the eggs fuddle in a pool." Perhaps the most helpful, and this, perhaps was simply the timing, was the time we had at the end of the class to write. He had us select five words at random from a prose passage we read (mine: remorseless, crouching, winter, shallow, polished) and write a poem using at least three of those words. And I wrote one of the bridge poems (whose working title is "Kitchen" and will change in time) for the grandparent collection. (Saturday, 15 August 2009)

- FEELING TENSE: THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE AS RHETORICAL STRUCTURES IN POETRY with C. Dale Young
I've been reading Avoiding the Muse on and off, so I am mildly familiar with C. Dale Young as a poetic figure (and remember his name being cited, along with WCW, in that connection of medicine and poetry). And straight off, he mentioned how, as an editor, he wished he did not see quite so very many poems in the present tense--he wanted to see poetry that goes "beyond the lyric moment of now." So how do the tenses work? "I was" gives us rumination, recounting. "I am" gives us immediacy, now (and, I would add, urgency). "I will be" is impending, a prophecy. He advised us a revision technique: try rewriting the poem in another tense entirely. This doesn't have to mean it is correct or there it will remain, but we might open up some possibility, some tension, or find some holes we might not have otherwise noticed. We took a look at WB Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole," and, after going through the tenses and shifts and tracking them, the conclusion: Yeats can get away with all the shifts in time because the scene remains the same--something needs to remain fixed (to keep the reader grounded). We took a look at Donald Justice's riff on the Vallejo poem, and one of the participants pointed out, while analyzing syntax, that the majority are lengthy, lines-long, with subordinate clauses and all else, and then there is that one simple sentence in both that "act as thesis statements." Also helpful: Young said, a "line has to oppose or support syntax." (Sunday, 16 August 2009)

- THE IRRATIONAL IN POETRY with James Allen Hall
I must preface this by saying: James Allen Hall is fabulous. He is charming and kind and attentive and smart and writes some pretty darn good poems. His first book, Now You're the Enemy does some awfully clever things, and I would recommend it. I also want to say this: I know a class is good when I walk away from the room, but the class does not leave me, its ghost trailing in my thoughts, especially, I've discovered, when those thoughts have opened up some serious things to consider in my own work (and, more often than not, involve me chastising myself: What the hell have you been doing all this time?). James, who is the John Ciardi Fellow and in EBV's workshop, started by telling us that he's a poet who "loves the dramatic situation and how the poem unfolds from there." He loves the metaphor, how "x has always had a y-ness about it, and y has always had an x-ness about it" and explained that metaphor is the reason why he is so fond of America's Next Top Model. James recommended Wallace Steven's "The Irrational Element in Poetry," which was originally an address at Harvard. James told us of how every poem has a subject pattern and a speaker who has a relationship to that element. He pointed us to Cate Marvin's "Teen Loves Horse Dick" and Tony Hoagland's "Jet" was also mentioned--the ways in which the irrational surface and function within individual poems, which is where James paused to give a few caveats to his discussion: the irrational points to the deep well of the imagination, the intellectual and emotional are vital to a poem, the intellect is mostly in the rational vector with emotion mostly in the irrational which creates tension, plot is not just the territory of prose, and that he recognizes poems as being read in different ways: moves across in line, moves down in progression (structure), and it circulates and moves back into itself and is a system in recollection. We took a look at Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses," which has the narrative surprise of the seals, and the way she can get away with this is in her artful use of repetition and preparation (we took a look at the way the eye moves--all the ups and downs--and the point of view, among other elements); we took a look at Sylvia Plath's "Tulips" (such an amazing poem) and how the only thing that happens in the poem is a woman crying in her bed, but it is the metaphors that make the irrational work--James discussed the transitive property of images, which is the province of metaphor, and how the images are both precise and strange, and the use of the comma splice, which allows for things to become each other very quickly--we also tracked the colors (white, red, black) and how that repetition can build within the poem. James said, "The best poets always give us more than one pattern" and when something irrational happens in a poem, the poets prepare us for it, they make that build up a part of the fabric by using scaffolding and repetition. He ended by recommending two more books (Barbara Hamby's Delirium and Susan Mitchell's Rapture) and saying you must prepare your reader, that "you can't cold cock him." (Tuesday, 18 August 2009)

- WRITING THROUGH ERASURE with Thomas Heise

Thomas Heise started his talk with confessing that these days, he is thinking less about craft and more about poetics. He's more interested in these questions: What informs my writing? What are the relationships between different forms (prose, etc.) and modes (discursive, etc.)? What are the relationships between reading and writing? Much of his talk was about how to utilize found poetry, and he brought in many examples of this--from Duchamp's urinal (taking an object out of context and into a new one) to William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say." Heise said that there is "new meaning caused by the destruction of sinews holding it together." The narrative logic is then replaced with an associative logic (a lens with which I will use to look at some of my fellow MFAers poetry whose form does not take on that column, that slender narrative). Ezra Pound's "In a Station at the Metro" (love) was once thirty lines, and Heise talked about the ghosts of those lines, how all of that lingers, informing associations. Think about the blackboard, take a look--that blackboard has a history of the written word, erased, some bits lingering, a palimpsest. This is where we took a photocopy from The Book of Knowledge (which Heist, who picked up an old copy of it in a used bookstore while in college, later discovered was John Ashberry's childhood encyclopedia) and this was our source text--we were to cross out words and create a poem from that. This then allowed a certain level of focus on the language of the text--the archaic vocabulary of Victorian children's encyclopedias, in this case. As Barthes discusses, it is a case of the reader activating the text. (Wednesday, 19 August 2009)

- THE LINE AS COMPOSITION with Paul Otremba
I discovered Paul Otremba was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota; I'll have to contact him at some point and ask him when he graduated--perhaps our paths crossed without our knowing it. This craft class was an impressive one, one that could have easily spilled over into another hour, and I would recommend working with Otremba if you get the chance--not only is he smart and aware, but he's also generous with his observations and willingness to share. He invoked various experts in the field to support his assertions--Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, James Longenbach. He spoke of the line as it relates to the breath--how Olson posited rhyme and meter might have been inaccurate to what we wish to convey in poetry. With the typewriter: "now we have a more accurate muscle." Otremba spoke of how he has files on his computer which he calls "notebooks," and this is where he collects bits of language and the plays with it, opening up multiple files and seeing the different ways a line can lie on the page. Denise Levertov says there is something in the line that indicates what we are to think and feel. And James Longenbach's Art of the Poetic Line was invoked (oh, Graywolf, the press you are getting!). We were prepared for looking closer at several poems: we were to look at the line as having its own semantic units. He gave us five "safe assumptions we can make about the poetic line when crafting our poems": "1.) The line--even in its absence--is fundamental to our understanding of what makes a poem a poem, 2.) The line is both a visual and an aural experience, 3.) The line has integrity of both sound and sense, 4.) The length of the poetic line doesn't carry innate qualities like making a poem fast or slow, or internal, social, or prophetic, and 5.) What gives the line its character is the relation between lines, diction, and the tension between line and syntax." He used recordings of the authors reading their poems, and recommended PennSound (see also, Robert Pinksy, The Sounds of Poetry), if we wanted to download our own. We started with "Directive," which I've posted below, and we took a look at the line endings; Otremba gave us renditions, trying it out in various meters or other methods of parsing the lines, telling us how Levertov calls the line an additional piece of punctuation. Take a look at how line breaks can increase or decrease momentum. One might think short lines gave us speed, but we looked at Robert Creeley's "The Langauage," which showed that lineation can rejuvenate what was once cliche, forcing the poet to take responsibility for the words using an lineation that disregards syntax. Additionally, in this particular example, the stanzas change the meaning--Otremba re-lineated the poem into more logical breath and the poem became sentimental and no longer worked. At this point in the class, we were running out of time, but we glanced at Rick Barot's "Elegy," which has end-stopped lines throughout, but doesn't lag and the fragments are still rhetorically complete (Otremba re-wrote using linking words and the poem became clunky); then we ended by looking at Ted Barrigan's "Sonnet XV," which is out of order and "Sonnet LIX," which is put together again, and a writing exercise: to look at William Meredith's "Crossing Over," to write a poem in response to that poem, and to try to separate lineations to see how meaning can change. If you are curious, you can check out Otremba's first book, or you could read this article in the Washington Post in what I believe is a section called "Poet's Choice." (Thursday, 20 August 2009)

ON REVISION with Tom Sleigh
He began with the question: So, we've all had about ten hours of workshop thus far, right? Tom Sleigh's craft class means to dismantle this workshop model of revision, or at least, complicate it: he said the idea of the workshop is that you have a poem and you want to make it a better poem, and the problem with that is there is a presumption of "mastery" that we will "use our instruments to embalm [the poems] accordingly." He cited the character Proteus, who is a god of the sea and a shape-shifter. Through this recounted allusion, Sleigh concluded that we need to look at revision as a collaborative process, not that one way street: collaborate with self, with language, with the subconscious. Sleigh referenced other poets: Allen Ginsberg, whose poems are a byproduct of meditative process, you can't control meditation, and Ginsberg was willing to "overthrow the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit"; Robert Duncan spoke of poetry as mapping the conscious and focuses on knowing when he as at the correct spiritual pitch; John Ashberry puts down a word and the feeling follows and knows ways in which registers of emotion disrupt one another; Elizabeth Bishop speaks of how poems dramatize the mind in motion as opposed to the mind at rest; Yeats would write an abstract prose precis before he would write his poem. Sleigh spoke of language poetry, which is not about expressing an emotion, but giving words autonomy over the lyric self's desire to "making meaning out of things."

So then we took a look at the packet. The fifty-page packet. Which I will make a small attempt to re-create here:
- Plath's "Blackberrying" and "Finisterre": these poems were written six days apart, Plath appears to be writing one poem in preparation for another, Sleigh points out that nothing is ever wasted in the writing process,
- Plath's "In Plaster" and "Tulips": written on the same day, keeps lineation similar, the way the conceit works its way through is also similar, similes show "this is how the world looks to me"--as opposed to metaphor, which makes more of a statement that says this is how the world is; Plath's best mode is quiet and in which she examines this second self
- William Carlos Williams "The Last Words of My English Grandmother": drafts of this poem are thirteen years apart, in the revision (there's a first draft version embedded in this essay, if you are curious for comparison), WCW removes the expository, removes the self, moves from meditative mode to dramatic (and this, I must add, dear reader, was when a great window-pane rattling thunderclap occurred in this rainy end of the conference, the perfect timing dropping my jaw), WCW has removed the value-laden adjectives and made the poem objective
- Robert Lowell has wrestled a prose piece into a poem, which we examined (NY Sun article)
- We took a look at a Frost poem: "In White," which became "Design," showing his imagist logic, the replacement of the abstract with detail, and putting the self into the poem--you can see both poems side-by-side
- As an example of bad revision, we read the versions A and B of John Crowe Ransom's "Here Lies a Lady" (which you can read, along with commentary on the Atlantic online)--A was full of rage, wringing the neck of eloquent language, and B had given up rage, grief, a sense of terror (and his notes on why the changes were made were particularly amusing) and within, Sleigh mentioned that "punctuation enacts vocal realities

Sleigh concluded: remember that the workshop might not have a very good ear, finding "faux sounds" and suggests compression as opposed to true language. In Sleigh's words, "the workshop may be bloody fucking wrong." He urged, "Don't let anybody sandpaper out your weirdnesses." Remember: "style is not decoration but quality of perception--how are you going to register your style?" (Friday, 21 August 2009)

bread loaf, louise gluck on the yale series of younger poets

2009-08-21T21:03:00.001-05:00

Some of the notes I took from a Q & A by Louise Gluck to a sparse audience on the Yale Series of Younger Poets:

- wants to read the book cold--that first year, there were graduate student notes and names and acknowledgment pages, but she's done away with that
- some books she's seeing are polished out of existence (can often tell if it's an MFA student, even can pinpoint some universities)
- electricity--would rather an uneven book--works closely with writers on manuscript
- she's only doing this one more year
- any book that was a finalist goes straight to her the next year, some finalists go on to be winners in later years
- she's willing to work closely with those who were finalists, often inviting them to conference in person with her
- she is moved by the ones who try repeatedly--a kind of toughness, perseverance

Ellen Bryant Voigt, that hero of the shy, piped up from the back, asking what Gluck's process was in selecting the book.

There are people who screen and send on about one hundred manuscripts to Gluck, who then has three piles: the "probably not," where, after reading the first 10-15 poems and some of the end, she sees the manuscript won't hold; the "needs further study" which haven't yet been read closely but she feels require a second look; and the top pile, which can range anywhere from two to ten manuscripts, some are repeat finalists, others are those she finds stunning. She'll then re-read those that need "further study," and either promote or move into the "probably not" pile. She re-reads everything, but doesn't think she's moved any ms. from the bottom though she has moved them from the middle to the top. And then she reads until she has three or four, and she reads those over and over again and finds there is one she looks forward to--others may be masterful, but she will find that she's thinking "I don't want to," and the one that she looks forward to with more is read with more greed and the others might diminish in luster.

She gave a few examples of what she's seen--one woman who submitted a book of short poems--some gorgeous but not all of them--she "needs to find a new matrix," "something to balance."

She spoke of Arda Collins, the most recent winner, and her book It is Daylight, which has a distinctive narrative voice. The original manuscript had some very strong poems, but Gluck admitted that there was padding, and because Collins had a particular voice, she couldn't just drop it and have a second section with un-related poems, so she had to re-work. Gluck suggested poems that were formally different--try prose poems--to get at new aspects of persona, and at first they didn't work, but she kept going at it, and eventually produced this book that won an incredible award, and Gluck says she didn't break character.

bread loaf, workshop five

2009-08-21T14:58:00.000-05:00

The training wheels now come off: we've had our final workshop.

Much on tropes: We spoke of poetic conceits, staying on something and developing. We spoke of being cautious, that we might cast about for a trope: "here's another one that has implications and another one that has implications..." It's all a part of the trigger, trying to find where the poem resides. A poem that is asking the questions Who am I? I don't feel like myself is justified in the trope-casting and there is no need for a great deal of ground. EBV told us, "if there is not a purpose to the order, something has to be pulled out." One can have a qualitative progression, which comes through with the images. David Barber, a fellow in the workshop told us that we have to "own your trope." She warned us to not put the trope in a dependent position. If we have two tropes, ask yourself: What can I gain from adding a second trope that you cannot gain from the first?

She said to us: "Structure is your friend, structure is your friend, structure is your friend."

While writing: Is there something driving the poem to the end? What is stable, what is recurring?

Consider the reconciliation of opposites.

In the poem, if the narrative and lyric are competing with one another, "run your Geiger counter over it and see where the poem is charged."

And this is it. I'll have her voice in metronome in my head: figure, ground, figure, ground, and I'll probably even envision her finger wagging back and forth in time. I'll consider lineation and syntax and line endings. I'll think, again and again, of structure, the order in which the information is conveyed. Figure, ground, figure, ground. Tock, tock, tock.

bread loaf, little glimpses

2009-08-20T20:47:00.001-05:00

In case you are curious about what this place looks like, here are a few glimpses into the buildings and grounds of Bread Loaf.

bread loaf, workshop four

2009-08-19T19:03:00.003-05:00

Today's workshop returned us to previous discussions and delved a bit deeper in the dramatic of poetry.

We clarified a few definitions, and in particular, our use of "end-stopped." EBV prefers to use it in a way that does not indicate punctuation but that the line has an ending, or pause. Thus, we speak of enjambed lines as being annotative and those that are end-stopped could also be called parsing or end-paused. EBV said she will often use the terms consonant and disonant, as in: supporting or not supporting the syntax. (Let's not forget her most recent book is not a book of poems, but one of Graywolf's lovely little volumes on writing.)

The discussion on structure brought us to the question in the poem: is it a dramatic enacting of the trope or an argument? One way to tell if it's truly dramatic (and working) is asking yourself if it's filmable. EBV: "If you are going to give us a scene, give us a scene"--because that is where the tension is. Watch the dramatic moment and ask yourself: how are you representing it? In the poem we were workshopping, EBV said the "predicates imply the poem wants a narrative."

In this particular poem, we were also able to discuss competing tropes--this poem had a great deal of Christian language competing with mythology (James Allen Hall described some of the lines as having "carbuncles of language"--a lot of moving parts and a reverberation of connotations). So then, if a poem has competing tropes, can that work? Yes, but we need to examine how those tropes interact--do they complement one another or compete with one another? Be wary of everything being a trope but only in passing.

bread loaf, robert frost cabin and trail

2009-08-18T12:38:00.007-05:00

Yesterday was the annual picnic and Robert Frost lecture, given by Middlebury professor John Elder (whose books Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature and Reading the Mountains of Home I picked up at the bookstore in the afternoon). It was a leisurely tour of the first floor--the slow train of writers trekking through bedroom, bathroom, pantry.

Elder told us about Frost's poems, which are "steeped in the natural world," but we mustn't mistake him for being "sentimental"--he was "a shadow figure in a real world with real stones and real wood." He read poems to us, pointing to the Vermont landscape to enhance the meaning, or correct in some cases--where some poems might mention empty cellars, it was a sign of the landscape and not as deeply symbolic as, perhaps, some critics might want us to believe. Elder read us "Directive" and told us how the steeple brush is what grows in an abandoned meadow, after the farm has been left behind, implying a haunting and its ghosts. (Philip Booth's AAP's article about "Directive")

Directive
by Robert Frost

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.

The hike today was to look at the natural world, to read a few poems aloud, and to learn bits about the landscape, naming things. I collected facts as I could:

- It takes about three years for a leaf to become soil. The first, the fisting against the earth, the second coming back as a skeleton, and the third becoming dust.
- We were now in what was a third growth forest.
- Vermont is often dominated by rocky soil, white pines, hardwood.
- The way to tell the difference between two maples is with the leaves: a sugar maple has a u-shape between the three major points, and a red maple has a v-shape.
- He showed us moose wood (as in, the cookbook) and hobble bush, which another hiker called "Indian toilet paper."
- We learned to identify spruce and feel the triangular shape of the needles. The Norway spruce that dominates campus are actually ornamental (not native).
- We learned that some identify beech by its smooth bark and it is sometimes called "elephant legs." Elder told us the bears love the nuts, and they are also sometimes called "nursery trees" because mama bear will send baby bear up to safety as the male bears tend to eat the young in spring.
- We learned of the nectria which is destroying the beech--brought in from Nova Scotia, this insect infestation is working its way south, burrowing and laying eggs, leading to what is called "beech snap," where the weakened tree simply cleaves.
- He showed us the club moss, which, in dinosaur-times was tree-high.
- He shuffled off the trail to show us an old hemlock--a tree whose tannin was used for tanning.
- He told us how the sedge is a sign of (lime/calcium) rich wood, and often we'd also find sugar maples nearby.
- I tucked a piece of balsam fir in the pocket of my notebook for its smell.

This is the sort of nature walk I love the most--perhaps there are some moments of true hiking, but the pause to examine surroundings, to copy down observations, to save those pieces somehow.

I admit to having dismissed Robert Frost for his dominance of the middle school English curriculum (and the misery I had in the Midwestern middle school--my one year in an arts & sciences middle school in Chattanooga was wonderful with an emphasis on wonder and discovery and curiosity as opposed to textbooks and exercises and worksheets), and I also struggle with the swinging rhyme.

Now, I promise to give him a second chance. He seems to be a good one to study in the autumn.

If you feel so inclined, you can find Middlebury's archives of Frost's lectures and readings, which I plan to peruse when I return: Robert Frost at Bread Loaf.

(Aside): New Yorker Article: "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught?"

writing lectures on audio

2009-08-17T14:03:00.004-05:00

Bread Loaf's lectures are becoming archived (when it's up, check out the one EBV did our first morning as well as Charlie Baxter's called "Lush Life") and I discovered recently that you can purchase CDs of the lectures at Warren Wilson's MFA program. When I had been accepted to low-res programs (I ultimately went with regular-res), some would woo me with audio versions of lectures, which I've kept in my car, sometimes listening to the lectures on my commute to campus. I think I might have to start a collection.

(Much of what I have been thinking about, in a panic, is: what next? I let my first year in the MFA program be essentially about the program, but I have to remember that so much of why we stop to get an MFA is the time. I need to take advantage of this, focus, focus, focus, and one of those ways is above.)

bread loaf, conference with ebv

2009-08-17T10:35:00.005-05:00

One of my greatest stumbling blocks is getting from that first draft to the second. I cannot seem to distance myself from the trigger, which is something Ellen Bryant Voigt and I talked about in our one-on-one conference.

Some elements, some lenses, that can take me into the second draft more smoothly:
- Consider the structure. Is this the order in which I want the information to be received?
- Consider the frame. I have a tendency to over-explain, to use exposition, which makes the actual poem itself become subordinate. Remove the frame, see what's there. She called it "bullying exposition" and referenced to how it was "imprisoning."
- Imagine the poem as a film: what is being seen and when? From whose p.o.v.?
- Economy. Economy, economy, economy. It's not just about diction but about geographical location, about characters (see, even if the trigger is memoir, a poem can shift to get to the story), etc.
- In some of my poems, the emotions (forgiveness) seem misplaced, come to soon.
- Who has the agency in the poems?

bread loaf, workshop three

2009-08-16T21:33:00.006-05:00

My notes for today's workshop are scant, mainly because we did both my poems back-to-back, and so much time was spent scribbling as much as I could, between writing notebook (general notes) and poem drafts (specific notes); also, we are getting the hang of some of the language EBV wants us to use in workshop, ways of seeing, and so we are beginning to branch out a bit more.

How did we begin to talk about Kay Ryan? Perhaps about readership, and how slim and chancy the whole venture can be. EBV speculated Kay Ryan was not a popular poet until her laureateship vaulted her to national attention because, in the time she has been writing, the movements have not always matched up with her dry, slender poems: she is not confessional, she is not discursive (Pinsky), she was not part of a new narrative, she was not connected to Ashberry and surrealism.

This brought us to a discussion of discursive (wandering around the thing without going straight toward it) and non-discursive and simultaneity. Susan Langer was mentioned, and she referred to how in a newspaper or as she was speaking to us, we were forgetting right after hearing because we needed to get the gist, but "poetry does not want that to happen" (unless skillfully--you see, rules can always be broken).

And outside, during break, I realized, indeed, not smoking has kept me from the interesting conversations again--why is it that we are so often silent when we linger behind, but when we are huddled in a small group (and we huddle, in Minnesota anyway), we speak more openly?--and EBV came to me, asking if it was helpful, and I nodded like a bobble-head, not mentioning that it was explosively helpful, my workshop, and she said she suspected that, at some point, I was told my poems were "too obscure," and I've begun the habit of over-correcting with the discursive, you see. (And if M-W's thesaurus entry is anything like EBV's, then I am discursive in just about everything I do.)

Some bits I copied down:
- "Don't let yourself be satisfied with the surface." (See notes from workshop one and two on figure and ground, etc.)
- On working syntax (see later post on verb tense craft class also), EBV recommended going beyond just putting your poem in a prose block for the sake of revision (ah, that word, so tricky, the re-vision) but to write them out as sentence lists. We'll be able to see if there is a pattern and if we want that.

She reminded us something that, I think, lifted a bit of a pathetic weight off my chest: you see, the idea of revision terrifies me. I'm afraid of one, changing the wrong thing and two, not seeing how it needs to be changed in the first place. I've been staring at those first drafts dumbly, not knowing what to do. I would envy my friends, who would say they love the revision process the most, because it's like solving a puzzle. My own puzzle came without the instructive box, I would think.

But now, I'm reminded of the trick I learned when teaching literary theory to my (former) high school students: just use lenses. In this case, read through the poem look just at syntax, just at diction, just at figure and ground. It's not all zinging and magic, but a series of careful steps and analysis, techniques we are learning to organize in our chaotic (Dionysian) brains.

bread loaf, copper canyon press

2009-08-15T18:32:00.002-05:00

I sat in on a special talk given by Michael Wiegers on Copper Canyon Press, which, interestingly enough, started by a handful of poets who won $500 for a college magazine (Tree Swenson, who runs the Academy of American Poets, and Sam Hammill being two of said poets). Thirty seven years ago, they took that $500 and invested it in a platen letterpress, bought type and furniture and a printmaker joined this team, setting the roots firmly in independent and non-profit production.

Now, Copper Canyon prints 18-20 books a year (a third of which, in answer to my question, indeed come out of the slush pile).

Wiegers spoke a lot about how Copper Canyon is not a corporate press, and he spoke of how 90+% of publishing is in the hands of three or so giants--what does that say about our national culture? He spoke of how he is interested in the private act of reading and how that translates to a public discourse. He referenced CD Wright's "sacred cone of light over a reader."

He also used the words "privashing," recognizing that as a non-profit, Copper Canyon has a duty to the public, and is funded partly by sales, by grants, by donations. This year's saving grace, interestingly enough was sales, and that was mainly because of Merwin's win of the Pulitzer, and Stone's nomination.

It was also the story of twins, both poets, who are being published, and the attention they are getting. I hate to be someone interested in its curiosity--but of course, as a voyeur (look at the url!), I am curious as to similarities and whatnot, not because of the twin ness, though this is compelling, but simple genetics. The offspring of writers are sometimes writers, but not often as good, and siblings (major exception: Brontes) may have similar careers but not always so.

PS: One of the twins is here.

dreaming at bread loaf

2009-08-15T10:24:00.004-05:00

It's the strangest thing, the way our dreams seem to elongate and surprise us while travel--is it the ghost of writers past? Is it the inspiration of the mountain? Is it the way our brain is attuned exactly to these strange thinkings and images? One night, I dreamed I was working at the independent bookstore in town (where I worked over the holiday season)--C.K. Williams came in (as he came into the campus bookstore while I was there) and needed to order two obscure books, and I kept fouling up the process, nervous; he had an antsy assistant with him (because, you see, Williams is a celebrity, after all), smaller in stature, wearing black, allowing his charge to stand back, aloof and distant.

Last night's dream was less a flight-of-fancy and more grounding: after the publishing panel, I submitted a few poems to an online magazine, then began research on chapbooks. Those grandfather poems I mentioned not so long ago? They've been trailing about, slowly morphing into stronger poems, and there are a dozen, eighteen of them, something like that, which is not quite enough for a chapbook, but nearing. I thought of my other poems--I have a few about family, mostly about parents, but the range is fairly thematically broad--and as Rhodes said, they don't need to be together, not yet anyway, so it doesn't make sense to shove them into Part II of the manuscript just so I can have enough material to submit a manuscript.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, depending on how miserable the reading experience is for these poems, I feel as if I've come to the conclusion of my grandfather poems. I don't feel the drive to write more to fluff out the collection, and I want to follow my impulse.

Last night's dream was fretful and sad, but it gave me a suggestion as to what direction I might go with my work: I dreamed my grandmother, who is nearing end-stage kidney disease, had passed away. I dreamed we were in her old house, the one next door to the one she lives in right now, on that gorgeous lake, the colors no longer that shag orange and lime but all white, white and beige, and my father was speaking to her ghost. I could see her too, but I pretended not to, lest I was thought as insane as he, and it broke my heart to realize she was gone already, that the last time I saw her, it was the end of winter, that time when the snow is nothing but dirty crust-banks, the world is more muddy than anything else, and I was struck by how very lonely she was now that her husband was gone.

She's still here, my grandmother, and the "grandfather poems" actually have two that dance in and out of the collection--one about his quirky proposal (or her interpretation of what she believed was a proposal) and one about my childhood at the lake, which is really a portrait of her, a glimpse really. Those poems wanted to be with the others, but I couldn't justify it. Unless.

Unless this collection acted as a hinge--a dozen, fifteen of the sharper poems about him, a dozen, fifteen about her, a few that bridge the two, and it becomes a portrait on aging, on the love of family, on the body, on memory, on loss. Perhaps the poems I wrote at the end of my grandfather's life weren't it, but only a part of it. Perhaps they were singing out for her accompaniment all along.

bread loaf, afternoon talk on publishing poetry

2009-08-14T15:40:00.004-05:00

Martha Rhodes of Four Way Books stopped in to talk to the poets about "publishing," which is another one of those gut roiling conversations. Much of what was asked, I knew the answer for, partly from experience editing for Dislocate, but also from other sources, from meek personal experience. So what I have jotted in my notebook may not be useful to every reader as it was for me:

- There is no longer a need to be wary of reading fees. Funding for publishing houses is tight.
- In ordering a manuscript, follow your intuition--make the book the tightest book you can. "I will find the weak poems. They can't hide behind the stronger ones."
- On thematic links within ms: "There has to be some reason why these poems have to be together."
- Consider temperature, thermostatic control--hot poems and cold poems
- (Don't give the editor whiplash)
- Places to search for reputable publishers: AWP, New Pages, CLMP
- It's nice to have a manuscript clipped together (rather than stapled or in a folder, etc.) and mailed in a protected envelope
- Find good readers who are unfamiliar with your work to read through the ms--they won't be as invested and won't already know your "tricks"
- Make sure the contract is legit--run it by someone who might be familiar--know how many books will be published, if it will be kept in print, what the dates and deadlines are, what the marketing plan is, what kind of production input you might have

Her big emphasis was this:
Don't define yourself by the "career stuff"--the bile will rise. If you feel that bile rising, write poems. Focus on writing and growing as a writer. She cited an example of a poet who had all sorts of prestigious awards but shopped his book around for seven years (he ended up winning the Bakeless Prize) and in those seven years, instead of shuffling and reshuffling and focusing on that one book, he kept writing, so that when the ms. was finally accepted, he had three more manuscripts ready to go and has since published a total of five books of poetry. Don't let those other books go because you are being driven to distraction trying to get published.

bread loaf, workshop two

2009-08-14T12:59:00.006-05:00

Today's workshop continued the conversation on figuration and grounding. I am beginning, more and more emphatically, to agree with those that posit MFA programs ought to focus more on the ability to read and comprehend, more so than the workshop-based model. Or, as I'm discovering here, use the workshop as a place to train writers to become better readers. She threatened an air-horn noise if we wander off to things that resemble suggestions, bits that reflect our own aesthetic. I believe I was beginning to do this more after Kimiko Hahn's Palm Beach Poetry Festival workshop; my comments on peers' poems were often reflective of my own tastes or these line-edit reactions as opposed to: This is what I see and this is how I see it and you can use that as you see fit.

Questions raised during discussion (and of course, there was often reminders that these were not judgement questions, as whenever there is a rule, there is often a writer who can break it in an incredible manner and even more often, these questions don't imply judgement or rule-making but ways to tease out what's going on with the poem--how it's working, how it should work harder):
- What's competing with the surface? Is there anything underneath?
- Is the figure or the ground controlling the structure?

We started class looking at moments from the past day and a half--discussing tone in relation to different readings and lectures. We also took a look at an excerpt from the daily newsletter ("The Crumb") which are excerpts from manuscripts:

"I pushed up my sleeves (having mistakenly worn long sleeves and long pants), scrubbed my arms clean, and then plunged them into the warm liquid whey. The sweet, tangy aroma enveloped me as the curds slipped around my skin like tiny minnows. We gently stirred, using the age-old method, as opposed to paddles or automated blades employed by many cheese makers."

-- From Lessons in Cheesemaking by Sheila McGrory-Klyza

This piece is focused on the ground, so when the simile comes in, it's figuration to get to the ground, and because it is passing (as in, not part of the pattern and variation), it is texture as opposed to form.

She quoted Robert Frost as saying, "Tone is when you can hear the neighbors through the wall." You may not hear what they are saying, but you can certainly get the tone.

And a list, of sorts, to categorize:

FIGURE & GROUND
figurative - literal
interior - exterior

invented - accessible
vehicle - tenor
trope - (literal)

So then, if we are unsure where ground or figure is within a poem, it becomes difficult to parcel out the rest.

How then, do we know if punctuation, for example, fits under the category of "form" or is that a part of "texture"? She explained: If there is pattern and variation, then that is form; if it is without but still pleasing, still noticeable, then it is texture.

Another larger discussion was on these three sorts of poetry: dramatic, narrative, and lyric. The dramatic is a form that now belongs mostly to drama and prose, an element rife with conflict and protagonist-antagonist relationships. The narrative, once our epic poems, are steeped in time. And if a poem does not have a clear narrative, Voigt explained, you have an opportunity to get the reader to see what you want them to see when you when them to see it. And with Sappho began lyric poetry. The lyric, she said, takes us out of time and is "singing out of a single moment."

A few other bits:

When we read the poems aloud, she wanted us to "read the lines"--as in, how the poem was lineated--to exaggerate those pauses, in order to "hear" the pattern. When we read final drafts, she told us, read as we pleased. But while revising, this is incredibly helpful. Her variation on the who-reads-the-poem was to have one of the people who didn't write the poem to read it first, then discuss (for something close to an hour, forty five minutes per poem), then have the poet read the poem as a way to "sew things up."

She spoke of recoverable and non-recoverable syntax, especially in regards to Emily Dickinson and the dash. There is a book called A Poet's Grammer which she recommended. She recommended reading Brenda Hillman in regards to dismantling syntax.

She said, "The pleasure of enjambment is being pulled across the page."

Consider difficulties in point of view (and consistency within): where would the camera be pointing?

In closing, Voigt gave us another real-world example to help smooth out the vocabulary she's trying to build in us: A grocery list. The list itself is form, but the order of the food is the structure, and often it is a dysfunctional structure. As poets, we might impose form on it--organizing it by geography or alphabet, say.

It looks like I might be up first in our next session, which is on Sunday. Two days to roil my gut.

bread loaf, workshop one

2009-08-13T20:43:00.001-05:00

Despite a bumpy travel day, I am here, tucked into a slim room with a single lamp that cannot be on at the same time as my laptop. There is lace on the bathroom curtains, the sound of glass and silverware beneath my window, and creaky floorboards abound.

I've made it to Bread Loaf, that mythical place, and perhaps I've discovered a bit of its secret--you see, from conversations we are having, it seems as if the staff at Bread Loaf hire writers who are not only stunning in their field, but, and here it is: they are also stunning in the field of teaching. So the names might be dazzling, yes, but subsequently, the pedagogy matches up.

My own instructor is Ellen Bryant Voigt, and in just the two and a half hours we had workshop, I have fully fallen--my brain was buzzing, and I thought it would be such a shame, given the sloppiness of my charming memory, to not jot what I can down here, though some of it might not entirely make sense:

Voigt started, of course, with the requisite introductions, and what she was most interested in was how we came to poetry, who we were working with now (especially if we had a peer group), and who our mentors / teachers in the past might have been.

Then, we discussed how we needed this to be a descriptive workshop as opposed to a prescriptive workshop. You see, we've only just met; a group of students in, say, an MFA program might benefit from the "I love..."s and the "I would change..."s because we've known each other and know where those lovings and changings have originated; our aesthetic has been established. But here, she did not want to "make this the auto body shop" but instead help the poets with the next poem they will write. She likened it to saying, "This neck is way too long and it's strange and ... it's a giraffe."

We discussed the notion of figuration and asked: How deep can a figure go? The discussion returned to this again and again. What's on the surface? What's beneath the surface? We used the terms "figure" and "ground," how one is the foreground and the other is the background (and its the poet's job to determine which is which, though it needn't be obvious).

She expressed the importance of our asking questions. When she was a young poet, as all these instructing poets seem to have been, though I can't imagine any of these poets I've admired and studied with or read essays by ever being "young poets," and this is from someone who rarely had trouble imaging her parents as young and as ridiculous as I was--so when she was a young poet, an instructor told her that her poem wasn't working because "the form and the structure did not match." And everyone nodded. Ahhh. This makes sense. She nodded too, though it didn't make sense, and later she looked it up in one of those little poet-dictionaries and saw that these words were nearly synonymous.

But they're not. If we think of it in terms of prose, they are easy to differentiate. The structure is the order in which the information is released to the reader, and the form is the use of those elements such as stanzas, etc. You see?

She asked us questions, easy ones, to get us going: What do we notice first about the poem?

This brought us to form: pattern and variation. She said we need sufficient pattern--"otherwise it's just a pile of words"; we need pattern and variation--"otherwise, a computer could have wrote it."

It was easy to talk about the first (couplets, which one fellow noted was a form of declaration with its opportunity for obvious end-stops) and the second (tercets, whose function seemed mostly to be slowing the reader down, though there are, of course, plenty of other manipulations). We additionally spoke on how couplets give us focus, which may make us miss the patterns in syntax.

We spoke of the use of mirrors and repetition. She used the word "lexical repetition." I wrote it down. She said the reason we turned to poetry as opposed to prose is that we have "a formal appetite." I wrote that down too.

She asked us: "Is this poem Apollonian or Dionysian?", referring to Apollo's clarity and Dionysus's' chaos.

Then the use of tone: How does the speaker feel toward the subject? What is the affect? (Always: how do we know?)

Specificity: (I remembered the importance of verbs here, though it was not discussed, what implications are brought to the table with verbs.) What other connotations are brought with the word? Is it blatant? Does it need to be? How does that work?

This was where she recommended Jim Longenbach's The Art of the Line, which explains what is called "the parsing line" whose end reinforces the syntax (where there is a natural pause, be it a full end-stop, or a comma, or a breath as in a clause), and "the annotative line" whose purpose is to add commentary, another value (an enjambed line, one example of purpose being to mis-read the line, to question what comes after that hang to the next).

In closing, she reminded us of the three important tools we need to hone in our craft: texture, form, and structure.

In closing, she told us she wanted us "not to read as a reader but read selfishly, carnivorously, and as a poet." Ask ourselves: what is the poem doing and what can I use?

See everyday-type post about first day here.

[ ... ] poems

2009-08-10T12:37:00.002-05:00

While reworking my bookshelves these past few days, attempting to make room for my bulging collection, I've been drawn to a few titles: Morning Poems (Bly), Lunch Poems (O'Hara), Chicago Poems (Sandburg). Selected Poems.

The first two come from a pattern in writing, a kind of methodical progress. Since I left high school teaching and started the MFA program, I've lost my pendulous routine--I would write during my prep hour, one poem, send it to a friend, who also would send me one poem a day. Now, each day is shaded differently from the one before, my wake-up time off kilter, and with classes, there is no promise from one day to the next.

I've been carrying a sheaf of poems with me, enough for a chapbook, that has begun to be referred to as "the grandfather poems." This can't be the title; I can't imagine how many people who would turn away from such a collection. But for now, I have my own little collection with a unifying title. Many of which came from those poem-a-day practices while still teaching high school.

Aside: See what Obama has been caught reading. I especially appreciate that on my birthday last year, he was reading a book of poems.

the lure of plath

2009-07-29T00:45:00.001-05:00

When I was fourteen, I used to think Plath's life was a template: live romantically, write a beautiful novel with fashion and numbness and pills, write poetry, angry and curious and angled, fall in love with a poet, marry, have two children, and by thirty, have achieved enough to die.

It's awfully morbid, my introducing Frank and Plath as my touchstones, a quick succession of poor role models, as timelines go.

But again, here we have a writer who started something in me: a curiosity to learn more of the life behind the words. To learn the words entirely, a comprehensive study of poet both publicly and privately.

I have yet to read every Plath poem and I still haven't opened one of her biographies, but I do have a shelf at home, collecting dust. I have a bookcase of critical studies on other poets' work, of biographies and memoirs and collected letters.

This is my place to center all that, to pause.

And this autumn semester, I opted for an independent study with MDB, who is retiring after this semester, and this study will fulfill a literature requirement for my MFA. I felt I ought to pause and take a close look at poets whose work I know only peripherally but ought to know more intimately: founding American poets Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Elizabeth Bishop.

But why stop there, of course? Why not center myself, study as many poets as my lifetime permits?

There are two issues I seek to resolve with this space: 1.) My memory is a bit more faulty than the average nearly-thirty-year-old. It's a bit disturbing, actually, just how much leaks out, and it's strange what sticks and what doesn't. Here's my attempt at making more of the good stuff stick. 2.) I need accountability. I have a charming tendency toward distraction, finding myself trotting off to knit a small army of dishcloths or photograph the entire baking process of a zucchini loaf. My distraction holds hands with my procrastination, and I hope to sever that, if only briefly, if only here.

I intend to take a close look at the lives and work of the poets. I intend to keep that experience here, preserve it, let it become a way of seeking out what came before.

the book that started it all

2009-07-28T23:54:00.002-05:00

I suppose it would make sense that the person who inspired me, who woke me up from the string of professions every little kid wants to be (lady police officer being the very first, when I was in pre-school), would be someone whose only published book was also a diary.

I remember there was this scene from My So-Called Life where her social studies teacher asks something like what might be a word to describe Anne Frank, and Angela, looking all dreamy-eyed, murmurs, "Lucky."

-------------------------

INT LIBERTY HIGH - ENGLISH CLASS

Brian: Because it's written in the first person.

Mayhew: Thank you. Does it say, 'She was forced to go into hiding'? Somebody else besides Brian... Brian?

Brian: No.

Mayhew: No, she says, 'I', 'I was forced to go into hiding.' [the buzzing
of a fluorescent light increases as it comes into view] It's called the
first person, okay? This will be on the quiz. So how would you describe
Anne Frank?

Angela: [staring at the light, unconciously speaks outloud] Lucky.

Mayhew: Is that supposed to be funny, Angela? How on earth could you make a
statement like that? Hmm? [Jordan comes into class late, Angela watches him
behind the teacher] Anne Frank perished in a concentration camp. Anne Frank
is a tragic figure. How could Anne Frank be lucky?

Angela: I don't know. 'Cause she was trapped in an attic for three years
with this guy she really liked? [glances at Sharon behind her, Bell]

From: MSCL Transcripts

-------------------------

When I was a kid, I used to think lucky too, but not for those reasons. I was envious because Anne Frank's writing was so good for her age, and because her words, her book became symbolic of a moment in history, would be read on by so many generations. Because I wanted to write something so important it would be published and exist forever too.

It makes sense that The Book That Started It All (and by "it," I mean so many things, but most notably, that itch to write) doubled as a peek into the life of the author. I'm a voyeur, it is true. When we walk the dogs in the evening, I gaze in at open curtained rooms, the soft yellow glow of a living room at night, the man in an easy chair, the woman sponging at the sink, the patter of children's feet, the news flickering at the window. What will become of the receipts, the yellowing love letters, the photo albums? What choices are being made to lead us down these roads we take? Who holds our hand as we fall asleep? What's beating in those hearts inside?

Lucky: Yes. I am.