bread loaf, saying good-bye to the mountain

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

- 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

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

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

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

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

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?"