OT: Poetry in a Bottle P.2

My new second favorite beer: Orange Blossom Cream Ale by Buffalo Bill's Brewery
It's one of their seasonals (actually, their pumpkin one sounds kind of intriguing, too.)

New workshop

Much to my surprise, it's going well, at least so far.
Since this was the same instructor I'd had two years ago, who had been less than impressed with my style, even giving me an A- because it was "less polished than some of the others" (I think this was her polite way of saying it pretty much sucked) I'd had very low expectations for what she'd think of my new stuff, just hoping I'd learn some things about meter and form that would be useful, and of course, that I'd get that last workshop credit I need.
I guess she appreciated that my first submission was a ghazal (although not in the strict back-to-the-Arabic style that is the new model for ghazals in English) and in general, she seemed to dig it. I was shocked and relieved. I know that she's very accomplished with that particular form, and I trust her judgment in all technical matters; she's very meticulous and thoughtful; so it was a nice way to begin the semester.
And I was inspired to try to work the ghazal into a "true ghazal" for one of my revisions, since I guess, when it comes to poetry, I respond more to positive reinforcement than negative... playing right into the formalists' hands, aren't I? ;) Nah, to be fair, I think I really have improved since that first workshop and the one I took the following year (owing partly to taking a break from workshops, reading a lot of poetry, writing a lot of to-heck-with-it free verse stuff, and getting some of my confidence back) and maybe she's become more open, too, over the last two years. I think we'll get along swell... which is good, because I need to choose an adviser for my thesis soon.
And since any possible defensiveness I might have been harboring has dissipated, I'll be more open to "constructive criticism" on the next submissions. Like I said in the previous post, I've developed a pretty thick skin, anyway, based on the last workshop I took with an instructor who was less polite than this one (although also more of a character and more open to experimentation, which kept things interesting at least... I liked her better than most of my classmates did.)
But I guess it's nice to feel that there's not anything to prove now and it can just be about the work itself, which is the point, after all (and what I'm paying the big bucks for, not my precious little ego :)

Lines that knock my socks off: A. R. Ammons

from Corsons Inlet (Thanks to my workshop instructor for choosing this as one of the first two discussion poems for the class... The other one is this, equally amazing in an entirely different way, although both are perfect unions of form and function... bodes well for the course.)

the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness

and later in the poem...

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes:

A little madness in my method

I've found lately that my poems have been originating in two distinct ways: from free-associative/stream of consciousness writing (I got this from Julia Cameron's Morning Pages idea, although being more of an afternoon/evening/middle of the night person, I just call them "rambling rites" and do them whenever I have a free 15 minutes and something to write about it. And of course, I use the computer. This is the 21st century, after all. So yeah, basically, it's nothing like Julia Cameron's Morning Pages, but that was the genesis of it, anyway.)

After the free-writing, the next step in this method is to highlight the better parts and then delete the parts between; then start moving lines around, coupling, quatraining, or otherwise stanzafying them and seeing what fits where, before finally trimming around the edges; letting the finished piece sit for a day or two and then re-reading to see if it resembles an actual poem.

And the other method is just writing down two or three lines that come to me and then expanding and building a poem around it. This is the way I wrote for my entire life (well, ever since I started writing poetry regularly, about age 14, I guess) up until I first tried the rambling rites about three years ago. But it was still my primary method up until this year. Now, I'm leaning toward the other.

I think the reason I'm leaning this way is that the free-associative method tends to yield a more dreamlike, lyrical product, whereas the latter produces more narrative stuff. And since the writing program I'm in strongly favors more formalist work (neither too narrative nor too lyrical) I've naturally rebelled and wanted to run in an even more informal direction than I was already headed. We'll see how well that goes over with this summer workshop (I'm guessing not that well. But this is my last year and my skin's grown pretty thick. Nobody's going to beat the free verse out of me and turn me into a meter-head.)

And a little poetry humor...

I didn't expect to see Robert Pinsky hosting Stephen Colbert's metaphor match with Sean Penn on Thursday's Colbert Report. It was pretty funny.

A Good Day

I woke up with a hangover this morning, but the sunshine lured me out of bed. It was 81 degrees today! This after it being like the middle of February for most of the last few weeks.
I wrote a poem, one that doesn't particularly suck (it seems odd that, on the past two occasions of having hangovers, I've written poems that I'm happy with. What's up with that? Did I kill off the brain cells that were getting in the way of my poetic process?)
Anyway, then I went outside and tilled the soil for the garden, and D. and I planted the tomato and basil seedlings, and sowed the seeds for the cucumbers, lettuce and dill. Also, he put up a fence so the dog can be outside unsupervised now, without getting into mischief. And right now, he's making us boiled red potatoes with olive oil, sea salt and dill (I loves the dill), and my head will soon be aching less.
A good day.

The last word on Spring?

I came across this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay on another poet's blog, but here's a link to a copy on Poetry Archive:

"Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I guess the answer to my question is no, because The Waste Land wasn't published until the year after Millay's collection Second April, available online in its entirety, appeared, and as unfashionable as it is to admit, I love The Waste Land. But notice the congruence of themes between this short and sweet number and that tortuous epic: a zeitgest of the cynical times, I guess, a time in which "signification" was everything, because it was still expected that there just might be something hiding around some corner, hope against hope, waiting to be signified. I guess it would be a relief to find out that there was nothing after all.

In any case, Millay's poem just seems to sum up the season so well in a 20th-century nutshell that it makes it that much harder for those who come after to say anything original about it.

What would a 21-century poem about Spring sound like? Many have been written and published. I've tried a bunch myself (none so far published.) But with any success? I dunno.

So yeah -- a daunting task, the April poem, but not one poets will give up very easily.