Hillsdale

I've signed up for a course at a nearby community college. It's a poetry workshop. On the first day the instructor gave to those of us who were there for the first time (only a few of us, in a class of returnees) a writing exercise consisting of a series of eleven prompts, like "Name something you can hold in your hand," "What scares you?" and "Quote a line from a song.")

It was suggested that we might try jotting down quick answers to each of the questions, and then attempt to make a poem out of the raw material that appeared on the page. I've done exercises of this kind before—and asked my students to do them as well—but not one with these particular questions. So this afternoon I gave it a shot. My first draft wound up being something like 16 lines, which was close enough to sonnet length that I figured cutting it back would give me something to work against. Here, FWIW, is the very wet draft:

Hillsdale

Pen in hand, she sits at her desk by the window, watching the sun

descend toward the woods behind the house. She is waiting

for the words that might express her heartache, her fear that

the willful disregard for facts she sees in the lives of her friends

and neighbors will only increase in intensity in the coming months

and years, even as the west coast burns, the midwest dries up,

the east coast drowns, home-grown refugees by the millions

take arms against whoever has food or water left to steal.

She recalls her years in Honolulu: once the city of sunshine

and clean air, now choking on traffic, streets awash in homeless

people displaced by entrepreneurs looking for the quick kill.

Wishing she could be invincible, she sits, simmering in onyx anger,

pen poised over the paper, waiting for words. Outside, crows

caw out their warnings. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Process Reflection: The list of questions gave me a word bank to work from, and there were enough different kinds of questions to introduce the same kind of randomness that I sometimes find interesting to work through when I do collages. There's of course a tendency for these elements to pull in different directions. For example, Honolulu would not have shown up in this poem if it wasn't the answer to one of the questions. The challenge was to find a way to have it arrive in a form that fits the emerging narrative, so I had it be the narrator's recollection. The first question had to with owning a large estate, and that provided my frame: from the time I was twelve until I was fifteen I lived on a farm in Hillsdale, New York. So even though Hillsdale and Honolulu are poles apart in any normal geographical or cultural sense, they are both part of my experience. And, as my legions of long-time fans may recall, the existential angst that haunts the poem's narrator is not exactly foreign to me either. It did give me pleasure to tip my hat to Brother Bob, another long-time mentor of sorts, there at the end...

Also, to perhaps belabor the obvious, the poem wound up being a piece of writing about a writer, who inevitably, I suppose, is sort of a stand in for me, in that her concerns as she sits at her desk waiting for the words to come are pretty much the concerns that I have when I sit at my desk waiting for the words to come. The dilemma being that the words, whatever the turn out to be, must necessarily always fall short. I was reading Stephen Dobyns yesterday, his introduction to his second book on craft, Next Word, Better Word, and I think he about nailed it: "The main problem with turning the world into language is that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become,  it is always a diminishment of the reality described." Or, if you want to go back 160 years or so, Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, famously put it this way:

As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.

PS: Two late emendations: after writing and posting the first version of this poem, I went back and changed the word "invisible," which is the word that came up in the original list, to "invincible," which is close in sound but closer to what turned out to be the controlling idea in this poem. And then I was thinking about the word "olive," which came from the list of questions ("Name a color") but didn't feel right here. So I changed it to "onyx." And tinkered with the line about the crows as well. In short, it's still falling into place.




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American Originality

I've been reading American Originality: Essays on Poetry by Louise Glück, one of the most formidably intelligent and articulate poets writing in America today. In the middle section of the book she includes the introductory essays she wrote for various volumes in the Yale Younger Poets series, for which she was a judge for eight years. One of the writers she introduces is Peter Streckfus, and what she had to say about his work sent me to my computer to see what sort of sampling might be available online. While I was looking, I stumbled on podcast in which Streckfus was interviewing... Louise Glück. I had not heard her speak before, and was very much taken both with what she had to say and with the thoughtful, graceful, self-effacing way in which she said it. I was particularly gratified to hear what she had to say about teaching writing. She talks a little bit about how it happened that she came to be a teacher, despite her own early resistance to the idea, and then about how the teaching wound up, against her expectations, having a salutary effect on her writing. Here's the passage that spoke most directly to me, which occurs at somewhere around the 21 minute mark in the half-hour podcast:

I felt passionate about my students' work... Oftentimes students were not very good, especially at the beginning. And they did write... hopeless poems. But if you could hear how they spoke in class and if they could think critically and if they said surprising things, then there was something in the brain that could be harnessed. And in each person it was different. You tried to sniff out the genius in each person. And maybe someone would come in with a poem completely void of action, or image, but it might be that the person wasn't going to get to those things the usual way. And part of the task was to figure out alternative approaches. Or is there a way to turn that sort of thing into a piece of magic? Over and over and over you're dealing with different kinds of problems, and I learned things I would never have learned just sitting at my desk looking at my white paper...

I think that's an eloquent and accurate summary of what the role of the teacher in a writing class ought to be. It's not about a set of rules. It's not about telling students what to do and how to do it. It's about—and I love this formulation—"sniffing out the genius in each person." And if it turns out that someone is trying to write something that doesn't fit in any of the received categories, so much the better; it's an opportunity to invent Something Completely Different.

I also understand and respect what she has to say at the end about how that kind of attentive engagement with student writing can wind up being good not just for the student but for the teacher as well. "Teachers as learners" has been a buzzword for decades now. But what exactly might that look like? Glück provides us with a compelling example.

The Great Wave

One of the gifts I got from my family for Christmas was a jigsaw puzzle version of Katsushika Hokusai's iconic woodprint the Great Wave of Kanagawa. Of all the works of art that I have seen in my lifetime, it is the one which resonates the most with me, so I was happy to have the chance to spend some time with it each day over the last few weeks, especially since the cold and rain have been keeping me mostly indoors anyway. Took a while to complete the 1000-piece puzzle, and I was convinced at many points along the way that there were pieces missing, but no, I finished it up this morning:

The Great Wave is an image of artistic virtuosity that works both as a dramatic image and as a philosophical allegory of sorts. It's made up of essentially four elements: the sky, which takes up fully half of the picture; the three boats in the foreground, with the oarsmen—more than twenty of them—huddled against the force of the waves; the great wave itself, looming large and about to break over the boats; and—off in the distance, framed by the sky, the boats, and the water— snow-covered Mt. Fuji.

The drama of the image is explicit. It's a bad day on the water; the waves are threatening; the men—presumably fishermen out trying to wrest a living from the water—are in mortal danger. The looming blue wave itself—and its somewhat smaller echo below— is rendered in stylized detail, its myriad little white fingers reaching  out like talons as the wave begins its precipitate descent toward the sailors bowed helplessly against its power. The wave is terrifying, but it is also very beautiful: Hokusai has gone to extreme lengths to render the wave's colorations, including long curling arcs of royal blue to help define the shape of the otherwise nearly jet-black water. Even the sea-spume is rendered, thousands of little white droplets of water and mist pervading the air over the boats, frozen just before the moment of impact.

For me, this picture has always seemed an allegory the human condition. Life is always to some degree a matter of turmoil: work to be done, food to be procured, challenges to be met, dangers to be confronted. The daily vicissitudes of life can be pleasurable, but they can also be painful, and at times overwhelming. The wave is for me the emblem of imminent danger, the reminder that at any given moment failure is possible, and even total destruction not out of the question.

And yet, that's not, as they say, the whole picture. In the midst of turmoil, we are also surrounded, and grounded, by something else, something which is not usually at the forefront of our consciousness but which nevertheless exists and endures. In this picture that presence is represented by Mount Fuji, dwarfed by the wave, occupying only about one twentieth of the overall image. But we can recognize that as a trick of perspective. In reality, of course, Mt. Fuji is larger than the wave by many orders of magnitude. If the perspective were reversed and we were looking at the wave from the summit of Mt. Fuji, the waves would be barely noticeable, and humans in their boats not visible at all.

I see the presence of Mt. Fuji in the picture—Hokusai could just as easily have left it out—as being symbolic of that which is permanent, changeless, and enduring in the world, both in the physical sense (the waves will break and dissipate, the mountain will likely be there forever) and in the spiritual sense (in the midst of turmoil of human life, and even perhaps beyond the life of the body itself, there is nonetheless a locus of centeredness, of stillness, of peace.)

Mt. Fuji can thus be seen as representing a kind of spiritual ideal. Pretty much all of the many forms of Buddhism make reference to the concept of the Buddha nature: the potential we have within us to achieve absolute happiness. If we assume this to be the case, the obvious operational question to ask would be "How do we manifest our Buddha nature? How do we bring it forth?" Each form of Buddhism has its own answer to that question, its own practice. Some Buddhists meditate, some chant, some take vows of poverty, some garden, some write, some retreat from the world, some go into the world to do good works.

Hokusai himself had something to say about the nature of practice. It's one of my favorite passages of any kind in literature. (It's been on the sidebar of this blog since its inception.) I've seen various translations of it, but this is the one that I think is most relevant here.

From the age of six I was in the habit of drawing all kinds of things. Although I had produced numerous designs by my fiftieth year, none of my works done before my seventieth is really worth counting. At the age of seventy-three I have come to understand the true form of animals, insects and fish and the nature of plants and trees. Consequently, by the age of eighty-six I will have made more and more progress, and at ninety I will have got closer to the essence of art. At the age of one hundred I will have reached a magnificent level and at one hundred and ten each dot and each line will be alive. I would like to ask those who outlive me to observe that I have not spoken without reason.

The passage dates from 1833, as Hokusai indicates, he was 73 years old. He lived another 13 years, so he clearly never reached the final pinnacle of artistic excellence as he himself envisioned it. Nor—and this is perhaps not obvious, but crucially important to understanding his point—did he expect to. That's what I love about his last sentence: "I would like to ask those who outlive me to observe that I have not spoken without reason." He knew he wasn't going to live that long. And he knows we know it as well. How long one lives is not what matters. Hokusai became a master of one of the most difficult of artistic mediums* and left an archive of artworks which will continue to inspire appreciation and contemplation for as long as humans walk on this earth. That's perhaps as close to transcendence as any of us might hope to come.

* Special bonus: Here's a fascinating process-analysis video showing the work of a contemporary master of the woodcut.

Sonneteering

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping. (Marianne Boruch)


For the last maybe six months I've been concentrating on writing, poetry mostly. There are always essentially three questions to be worked out in the writing of a poem: where to start, how far to go, and where to end. Ken Ronkowitz, a teacher and writer I admire who lives in New Jersey, maintains a whole bunch of web sites that have to do with writing and education and life. I've had fun with a form he invented, based loosely on the Japanese form of the tanka, which he calls the ronka. The formal rules are simple: five lines, seven words per line. It's an interesting form to play with, because once you write your first line you only have three lines before whoops, it's over. Like this:

There's a logic to all this, first
the leap into space, then the
attempt to see something quickly enough
that the last line (coming up fast)
doesn't cut you off before you're done.

It happens just that fast. The challenge is to see how much work you can get done in a very short space. Imagery can help:

Another April opens up, hummingbirds and bees
flitting in the branches of the cherry
trees, a restless breeze stirring the air.
The worst of the winter is behind
us, the sidewalks flanked with new flowers.

I found, after working in that framework for a while, that when I turned to writing sonnets, they seemed luxuriously roomy. I think that's been one of the enduring attractions of the sonnet in English: it's long enough that you can sink your teeth into a subject, but it's short enough to demand a certain amount of compression and attentiveness to each syllable. It's also very versatile in terms of the structural possibilities it presents, familiar to anyone who had to endure high school English: Octave and sestet. Three quatrains and a couplet. Seven and seven. Five and five and two. And of course the history of the sonnet is rich with examples of poets who just made up their own patterns within the fourteen-line constraint.

In any case, I'd say that something like eighty or ninety percent of the poems I've written of late have turned out to be sonnets, or at least sonnet-ish. (While I sometimes like to work with strict iambics and regular rhymes, more often I don't.) It's not like I started out any of these poems with the intention to write a sonnet; it's more that if the challenge is to open a topic, develop it, and then close it down, I often find myself in the neighborhood of 14 lines anyway, and thinking of it as a sonnet gave me something to work against: I need to cut two lines. I need to add a line and a half. That line is too long. That line is too short. This is of course one of the reasons that poets choose to work in forms in the first place: the form gives you something to work against; it forces you as a writer to come up with something just slightly—or maybe completely—different than what you might have said if you were just spooling out words as they came to you. It gives you the opportunity to surprise yourself.

So here is a sampling from the current body of work, now closing in on 30 sonnets. Got a ways to go to catch up to Uncle Will, but hey.

Waiting

Swabbing the decks. Mending nets. Sewing patches

on torn sails. Polishing the brass fittings along the rail.

Ship at anchor under still black clouds. Clusters of seagulls

screech in the rigging, cruise over the dark water

in search of scraps. The captain has gone ashore,

for how long no one knows. Ripples of water lapping

at the hull. Smell of salt water and rotting seaweed.

The beach by the pier deserted but for two homeless men

in skull caps warming their hands over a driftwood fire.

The storefronts along the boardwalk shuttered, the streets

empty. The flag in the town square limp against the pole.

Distant ringing of bells from the churchtower somewhere

near the hills. On the afterdeck men sit and stare out to sea,

the first mate whistling softly as he sharpens his knife.

 Fever Dream

Enter reluctant disparities in keen-edged thwarted
restorations, relentless gravel and rock grinding,
storm-wind caterwaul, pellets of rain pounding
down, what we never expected, after cross-stitched
emendations, to be cast again back into hard weather,
notions ridiculous and scorned actualized, weaponized,
hard now at work, seething, stamping, spewing bits
of bone and hunks of flesh, smoke and stench roiling,
rivers of gravity-based black ink everywhere, recoiling
wretched malodorous eddies swirling, swallowing
whatever you make of them and spewing it back out
on blacktop do you remember what you thought
you had got before it all exploded and the smoke
came rolling down from the hills and choked your eyes.

Questions about Art

Painting is still the material form of desire.

                    - William Logan

Supposing this to be true, what kind of desire
might we be talking about? Sublimation? The yellows
and reds and blues inviting, as flowers do, bees,
the oblique mechanics of pollination and sex?
Is it a desire for self-transcendence, the urge to make
something to stand in for us when we are gone, to speak
for us once we can no longer speak for ourselves?
Or to evoke the viewer's desire to possess this work,
the pride of owning objects we have coveted, and won?
Or perhaps simply the desire to have, for as long as
we hold the brush in our hand, a focus, a reason to hope
that at the end of the day's work there will be something
real, something created, something visible to justify
the hours of our life given over to the making of it?

Intersection

Four way stop at Maple and Main. Betty's Better Donuts:
red and white awnings, wrought-iron tables and chairs.
Round-topped blue post office box by the door. Lonely-
looking dog on a leash. Next door, two rundown houses,
porches caved in, ivy tendrils climbing the walls,
growing around and into the wheels of a rusted tricycle.
In the next lot, bounded by barbed wire, a swaybacked
bay mare swishes her tail, nibbles at weeds. In the oaks,
three crows stare off into the fog just starting to burn off.
Across the street, at the playground, two mothers sitting
side by side on a bench watching their kids chase each other
around the jungle gym. Up above the clouds, a white needle
pulling thread: vapor trail of a jet too high up to see. Me,
I'm looking out the window of the bus pulling out for Ames.


Take That

The light aggressive, intrusive, squinting
a stratagem, but only against perhaps a half
of what might effectively be blocked. Then
that noise, no longer white but burgeoning,
like motorboats growling on the mirrored
skin of the lake, or warrior ants sowing
trepidation and deliverance. What next?
Odor of skunk and lemon under the boughs
of the pin oaks. Working from outside in,
you whisper as if in supplication the words
of a nearly forgotten prayer. Overhead
a plane circling, circling, just audible above
the dripping leaves and the hum of the cicadas,
looking for some trace of human life.

 - - - - -

PS, several months later: I wound up compiling 28 of these sonnets (two sets of 14) into a little digital chapbook that you can see here if you are so inclined.