What to Take and What to Leave

After having poems rejected from a journal that apparently prefers to publish more experimental work, I've started to ponder the progression of my style, now that I'm essentially finished with the M.A. program and about to turn in the final draft of my thesis.
Is my style "traditional" now? Well, not really. It's certainly not formalist, but then it's certainly not experimental, either.

I don't feel that my content was ever compromised in the program, but in a way my style has been molded as a sort of compromise between adherence to forms that don't feel natural to me and a more freewheeling style that is usually frowned on in the program.
So what I tend to write now are free verse poems in couplets, slightly musical, with lines that end on strong words, with regular punctuation. The musicality is something intrinsic to my style, I think; it's the "meter" I hear in my head, and I can't seem to shake it, and I guess that's okay. I love couplets, and they'll probably always be my favorite stanza pattern, but I think I have come to overuse them as a fallback pattern, an old stand-by. The program has taught me never to use irregular stanza lengths, although many published poets do this, sometimes to decent effect. This is something I may start to reconsider.
Dashes are strongly discouraged, and I've reluctantly dropped them for commas, semi-colons, and periods. Sure, too many dashes can be distracting and annoying, but once in a while they're just the thing. So I'm going to probably bring them back, too, little by little.
Ending lines on only strong words (never an article, rarely a pronoun, and reluctantly an unevocative word) is something I hadn't given much thought to before the program, and it's really helped my poems, I think. However, doing it without exception may not always be the best thing for a particular poem.

In the end, though, if I had to go back and choose between a program that was geared toward formalism and one geared toward experimentalism, I'd choose the former. It's easier to teach oneself to break the rules than to follow them. If I wasn't dragged kicking and screaming to sit down, scan a line, and count the feet, I doubt I ever would have. No regrets. It's been a good education. But I think the time's coming to let myself off the leash again, maybe double-indent a couple lines. Nothing too crazy.

Why Revise

Just found this line scribbled last March, and it seems apropos for thesis season:

The better the poems are, the more they will feel like art rather than raw grief, which is no doubt what they are, dressed up and taught to talk nice.
Nobody wants to see raw grief, but if it can hold a fork right, tell a few jokes, possibly...

The Forest for the Trees

Writing. Why do I do it?

This semester, for the thesis course, we've been discussing something I'd already assumed but was nevertheless discouraged to hear confirmed: the world of "serious" literature these days, especially poetry, is all about who you know. "Incestuous" was the word used.

It's about where you get your degree, what writer's conferences you frequent, who you schmooze with, who takes a liking to you. In short, an introvert's nightmare.

Sure, when it was all theoretical, the idea of doing readings and interviews and meeting a few people seemed par for the course, but is that really all it's about?

Can you truly not get published without knowing the right people and pulling the right strings? That notion is intolerable to me. It's just not who I am. My thoughts stray to Emily Dickinson, until I remember, She was never published in her lifetime. I want to be published in my lifetime. (There's still debate in some circles as to whether an online venue "counts," even if it involves wider readership.) But, that question aside, I'm no Emily Dickinson, either, and don't hope to be.

I read something this week that certainly did nothing to boost my confidence as a fledgling in the poetry world. A former instructor from the program I'm finishing this semester (very former, and very eager to kiss-and-tell, so to speak) wrote a piece in a respected literary journal about her experience in our program, and spoke very unflatteringly of what I pieced together was almost certainly the class I had taken with her.

It was a sardonic piece in which the author took the ax she had to grind and used it to bludgeon, in my opinion, the trust and confidence of her former students. I would say it verges closely on libel, with the program in question thinly veiled and easily Google-researched. She referred to the program as "ghetto" because it happens to be part-time and classes (in one of the two locations) are not held on the main campus. Sure, I've used the term jokingly myself, but here there was a mean-spirited, derisive air that discredited the whole existence of part-time programs, as if people who can't quit their jobs and take a teacher's assistant salary for a year just shouldn't bother, that we did it merely for vanity and were only trying to add another line to our pedestrian resumes in search of a teaching job, and that the other instructors in the program (people I profoundly respect) are simply humoring us and wasting their/our time.

I was not amused. In fact, I was pissed. Reading that article, after beginning with a genuine smile to see a familiar name on the byline, I felt slapped in the face, almost as if someone who might have lent a hand into the club (if that's the way it must be done) -- the tight little circle of the contemporary poetry scene -- was instead slamming a door in my face, saying I wasn't worthy. It felt a bit like being told, in the second grade, that I wasn't allowed on the jungle gym. Funny, since my precious feelings survived the course in question fairly well, and I even counted it a good class, all in all. I can take constructive criticism, and I'm sure it improved my poetry. But this was different. This was personal, and petty. I just hope, if I am ever in the position that the author finds herself in, (where she's quickly made herself cozy, as if she was never one of us) I will have a bit more grace.

So, back to that question: Why do I do it?
To be part of some scene? Hell, no.
To win the best prizes? Ditto.

For a while the other day, I was thinking, well, why, then, other than some delusion of grandeur or dislike for honest work?

Fortunately, I remembered why. It's that girl who wasn't welcome on the jungle gym at seven, now struggling through puberty, leafing through her eighth-grade lit textbook and, for an hour or so, forgetting herself, meeting people from other times and places and feeling that sort of human sympathy and kinship with them that neither death nor schoolyard disgrace can diminish.
Sitting at my desk then, in gratitude to those people I would never meet, I decided that one day I wanted to be the one extending a hand forward through the years and the continents, and I still want that.

So fuck the rest of it. I'll write, and if it all ends up in a desk drawer, and even if the house burns down, desk and all, it's been its own reward to me.
Because that's the other thing. It's just fun.

One Thing at a Time

Well, I've finally accepted the fact that it won't be possible to submit a manuscript this fall contest season at the same time as I'm completing my thesis collection. I'd wanted to do both simultaneously, just because of the fact that so many good contests do have fall deadlines and I didn't want to wait another year to submit the manuscript, but I'm just not enough of a multi-tasker to work on two different collections, one with 32 poems and one with the required 45-50 pages, and with different poems chosen for different reasons (I need to dig up every formal poem I have for the thesis, even if they're not my best or as fitting with the theme, and with the would-be book, I have to keep in mind that it will -- hopefully -- be "out there" in the world, to some small extent, and that at least my mom will be probably reading it :)
So I'll just focus on the thesis now, celebrate the completion of three decades of education, and then get the collection together for the few winter and spring deadlines. And then, barring happy news from one of them, get it ready again next fall...

Prose Break

First it was rhyme; now my recurrent funks are inspiring fiction!
Today, climbing out of a funk, although I was relatively cheerful and well-caffeinated, if a bit sleepy from early rising for a car repair errand, I wrote a page or two as a downpayment on my long-planned novel.
Now, the actual writing of this novel has to be mostly on hold until I finish my degree in December and get the poetry book together, and even then can't start in full force until I've put out the debut issue of the lit mag I'm working on a few months after that, but it's okay to start in bits and pieces, now that those goals are well under a year from completion.
What I wrote was the opening piece of the kernel of my story. It's not a central part of the plot, in terms of what I'd include in a synopsis, but it's the kernel of the story because it's the kernel of my character's psyche, if not her "character," so to speak.
I was surprised as well as thrilled that it flowed pretty well. And encouraged.
There's something really satisfying about fiction that is lacking in poetry. Things can be said outright rather than hinted at because there's more space to develop thoughts... they're stretched out, so there's less need for strict economy.
It's true that things can be said outright in a poem now and then, but only a very few things per poem, and then the rest of the poem must work around those things and shroud them with a bit of mystery. With fiction, one can use style to create some mystery, yet things can also be said outright much more often, which is both more cathartic and also just plain easier than the restraint that poetry demands.
I have to say I'm kind of looking forward to my fiction-centric sabbatical from poetry next year. I've had this novel brewing for a long, long time.

On a happier note...

It must be that time of year when poets get confused as to whether they should be skipping through the fields like Wordsworth or sticking their heads in the oven.
Even so-called moderate ones.

But here's a much Spring-ier poem from my old friend Rumi, via Coleman Barks:
What Was Told, That

Now I know how Keats must have felt.

I was having such a rotten day, I just wrote a poem that rhymed. It didn't start out rhyming, but by the time I woke up in the middle of the night and tweaked a few lines, I realized it was well nigh a sonnet. If I can just manage to sustain this mood all weekend, I could have a terza rima. And if not, well, it's a win-win situation.

But I think I really needed this for my thesis, having chosen (what I'm coming to realize) is probably the only poetry program in the country that favors form over free verse. But it was a good program; and I probably needed that rhythm in my head. Who wants to learn stuff they already know? That's depressing enough to inspire a sonnet.

Wouldn't it be funny if I wound up a formalist, after all?
Nah, 'twas a passing fancy, I think.

Mark Strand

I saw him read at Politics & Prose last month, a tall man with a presence to match his voice, on the page and off. He signed my copy of Man and Camel.

Many of the poems he read displayed his dry, at times black, sense of humor. The following isn't one of those, though I still think it's lovely, if stark, like the landscape it describes.

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

Plath-o-Rama

From Bookslut on Girlhood Plathophilia: Rereading Sylvia

By the way, I just realized that SP was born on the same exact day, month, and year as my father. One of those not-improbable yet nevertheless odd-seeming coincidences. But, no, my dad doesn't write poetry (that I know of.)

Quote: Katrina Vandenberg...

... the author of Atlas writes in the latest issue of Poets & Writers, in a great article about putting together a book of poems, this prosaic yet perfectly succinct summary of what a poem is:

A poem is an accumulation of different kinds of repetition. When you repeat a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, you get meter; when you repeat sounds you get alliteration, rhyme, assonance; when you repeat images, you get a motif; when you repeat an idea, a theme. A poem's natural compression heightens these sensations of repetition.

Poetry Humor

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

Spring poem

A.R. Ammons: Eyesight

Reading List: Jane Mead, Dorianne Laux, Michael Dumanis

As thesis time gets closer, I've been reading more poetry, as well as writing more.

See my post below for highly understated fawning over Dorianne Laux. Her newer one is Facts about the Moon, but I'm reading What We Carry.

Also reading Michael Dumanis, My Soviet Union -- really original; good stuff.

And Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World. Some of it's really amazing. I don't think her more recent stuff is as powerful, although she's honed her craft to perfection. But I like poetry with urgency and "teeth."

Antilamentation

It's been a while since I posted a poem (or a link to someone else's, that is) on here. We read this one in class last week.
Don't know what else to say about it, except that I just ordered one of her books.
By Dorianne Laux.

Even Poets Have to Grow Up Sometime

When I was younger I used to write poems that used the word "fuck," just to prove that I knew what it meant.
And write about drugs I had never used (and never likely will) as well as ones I had, and about Lacanian psychology and esoteric critical paradigms.
Now that I've been writing for a while, and reading for a while, I've learned to relax and write (not always, but often) with everyday words, on everyday things.
With much better results, too, but that's in part due to age and practice, as much as the subject matter. I'm sure I'll find a home in some poem for the "F" word again, some day, some way, as well as a stray paradigm or two.
Like everything else in life, writing doesn't get simpler; it just gets a little easier.

Poetry and Ghosts

I was just thinking about ghosts and how they can only communicate through sound, and not through any of the other senses. Poetry, likewise, was originally exclusively oral, and only recently has become a visual phenomenon. The ancient sort of chanting verse was closer to music in giving off vibrations that approach the tactile. (The deaf can dance to music, even though they can't hear it, because they can feel it.)
Does this mean hearing is our crudest sense, since it's permitted to ghosts, who are, according to most conceptions of earthbound, once-mortal spirits, damned? And hence no doubt stripped of their most valued privileges?
Such musing doesn't discourage me from poetry, since, after all, I don't literally believe in ghosts, of course. It just makes me want to work harder at making my poems seen, felt, smelled, tasted.
That was always the most evocative realm of the Tibetan Wheel of Life to me, the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. Since they have no stomachs, what are they hungry for? Expression, of course. Connection. An audience. Even hunger itself. Poets all, perhaps.

Reading List: Kim Addonizio and Cate Marvin

It's taken me awhile to find poets who are kind of doing the same thing that I'm trying to do, only doing it better (and selling books :)

Successful hometown poet Kim Addonizio, in her latest volume What Is This Thing Called Love, and Cate Marvin, another hometown poet with a critically acclaimed sophomore effort, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, are such ladies. I will sit at their feet and take notes (not literally, of course, lest I unwittingly lift something ;)

Even Atheists Write Poetry

... and some of it is pretty good.
I'm thinking of submitting something myself.

The Eloquent Atheist

Reading List - Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times

I found this book at Barnes & Noble tonight. As a customer mentions in his Amazon review, the title and cover art may turn some people off, and he does have a point; the suicidal-looking high school girl on the black and white cover does make it seem, in combination with the title, like a narrative of a psychiatric disorder -- something poetry has had enough difficulty in distinguishing itself from...
And other reviews accused the editor of selecting poetry for "the lowest common denominator" -- i.e. that the average person would be touched by (oh, the horror! ;) And we wonder why the average person doesn't read poetry anymore, with these kinds of attitudes abounding.
The book is actually a British import, which explains, I guess, both the somber look and feel and the bravado of the publisher to actually try to market poetry to the masses... and with success, it appears... The book is a bestseller over there. Good for it.
I've been reading through it and I find the selection quite meaty... maybe not in an academic sense but in a visceral sense, which is really closer to the point of it all, at least, in my opinion.