bread loaf, workshop three

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

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 twinness, 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

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

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

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

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

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.