6 posts tagged “poetry”

April has been declared National Poetry Month by poets.org, and a week into the month Chris Lott described how he planned to write a poem each day in line with NaPoWriMo.  The name NaPoWriMo is lamely appropriated from NaNoWriMo, the generally obnoxious National Novel Writing Month wherein artistic conflates attempt to burn through writing a novel in 30 days.  While the energy of  NaNoWriMo inspires me in the same way the discipline and fervor of Ray Bradbury's practice does, the idea of an organized, collectively proceeding writing effort frustrated and annoyed me, particularly since it clearly valued quantity over quality.  It certainly favored people who had no jobs (a surprisingly large crowd, by the way).  Add to that the vocal dominance of NaNoWriMo participants who are either self-aggrandizing or self-degrading, and I knew this was not an activitiy to me.

But Chris Lott's engagement in NaPoWriMo intriguiged me; a poem-per-day struck me as do-able, and Chris's very practical list of self-imposed "rules" demonstrated that he, at least, wasn't afraid to do his own thing, independently.   The idea of joining him in this effort also provoked some vague feelings of comeradery, so I chose to do the same though I rejected the name NaPoWriMo and simply called my efforts "poem-per-day".  My hope was that I would stick to the schedule and thus forcibly return myself to writing poetry, a pasttime that I've sorely neglected in the last 6 years.   The goal of writing one poem per day would be rigorous, but not so difficult as to negate the quality of the poems I was working on.  I soon realized that quality could be a priority, but in the confines of whatever hour or two I had each day to put a poem together, it was impossible to make each poem "good".

Though I can't speak to the quality of my output during April, I did hit quite close to the mark in terms of quantity: from April 6th through April 30th I wrote 26 poems, and posted these on my web site, What I Assume.  I wrote nearly every morning before work, and spent a few evenings catching up.  On several days what I wrote were more poetic exercises than full-fledged poems.  A couple of the poems I thought were good at the time of writing, and I know most of the poems had at least one good line, but I think only in retrospect, some months later, will I be able to look back with any sort of objectivity.

Another interesting phenomenon had to do with my choice of subjects.  I began with a string of fairly gloomy, stereotypical subjects for a poetaster, but soon found myself terribly bored and in fact embarrassed with the uniformity.  So I urged myself to change subjects, mash-up exclusive ideas, and write on things I really wasn't comfortable writing on.

 

To add to the excitement of writing a poem-per-day, in the first week I also threw down the gauntlet and challenged Chris to write a villanelle sometime during the weekend.  We both did, then he reciprocated my challenge with the torturous ghazal.  I returned the final weekend with the deceptively simple-looking bref double. These excursions into poetic forms was both frustrating and delighting; I've always loved poetic forms, and in college fancied myself apt at writing formal poetry.  But either I oversupposed my abilities back then, or I've lost quite a bit of of ability since then.  What fascinated me in writing these forms is despite their apparent artificiality, their formal elements help, or rather, force the author to carry through certain themes, ideas, images, or resonances.  And while I've often thought that formal meter and rhythm risked neglecting meaning or intent, I found the limitations--particularly in length of lines and stanzas--directed me to focus on my meaning and intention more precisely, and with less waste. 

At least that was my perception during the writing; what the final outcome is, I'm too timid to suppose right now.  But this very strong and impactful month is an experience that I intend to repeat--not next year, probably not the year after, but not too far in the future.  It is a precious, exhausting experience that was worth every ounce of extra effort, but that I do not want to normalize by making it an annual tradition. But some year, some day, I will sit down again and decide, "Poem-per-day, for the next thirty days."

Through Chris Lott's recent reminiscence on poetry, which was referenced on Twitter, I discovered a new blog post by Gardner Campbell, an professor of English lit and adventurer in new media.  Mr. Campbell has made available an audio file of his reading of several Samuel Taylor Coleridge poems, including "Kubla Kahn". 

I myself have a working memorization of "Kubla Kahn", and have recited the poem aloud dozens of times over the last dozen years. It's not an easy poem, but it gets easier each time you read it.  And because I don't recall anyone else ever reading this poem to me aloud, I've tried various oral interpretations of the sometime befuddling language.  Particularly curious to me was the following:

And all who heard should see them there,
And all who should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

You've probably noticed what I notice every time I read it: the "who" in the second (quoted) line is confusing.  For a long time I've read it as if there were a comma after "should", making the "all who should" refer back to the "heard" or "see".  This invisible comma also causes an awkward pause which I've capitalized on to catch my breath before bellowing "...cry, Beware! Beware!"

In terms of comprehending Coleridge's unusual phrasing in this line, I'd blamed the anomaly on archaic usage, or else opium.

Those who know this poem are already giggling at me, for my memorization is erroneous.  Listening to Mr. Campbell's reading, I listened anxiously for his interpretation of that line, and was stunned to discover my memorization of "Kubla" embeds an invention: the extra (and confusing) "who". 

The Old Main Amphitheater at USUI have to wonder if it wasn't a bad text that incurred this extra "who" in my long-term memory.  In retrospect, I imagine I memorized it off of an early Project Gutenberg text from the mid 90s while I was in college, and a handful of friends and I would print off poems to compile our custom reading lists for oral delivery at the Old Main Hill amphitheater.

So by happy chance Gardner Campbell's eloquent reading has enlightened me to the error in my memory, and we have yet another instance of Twitter as a catalyst for learning.

P.S. I can't help but notice that, in listening to Mr. Campbell's reading, the line "As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing" still makes me chuckle after all these years.  Apparently C.S. Lewis wondered to his pupils about the pants in question:  John Dougill's Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of 'The English Athens' notes that Lewis's pupil John Betjeman complained peevishly that his tutor had forever ruined Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' by wondering whether the 'pants' in the line ... were made of wool or fur.

Based on the earth's reaction, I say wool. Or else chain mail.

This is my first revision of the first poem of 2008. It has gained a title (the parentheses added at the last minute).  It has gained an ending (though I fear it may be too simplistic).  It has gained a more rhythmic patter of line spacing (line spacing flow consciously inspired by Donald Hall's very natural style). 

Exempting Everything (For Ever and Ever)


What can a soul see in a black hole?
To that's where we're all spinning
Wrapped up in the gravity of the situation

The inevitable "To Be..." of this event horizon

Round it churns like some galaxy 
Flushing dust and chaos 
Down with you and me

But dizzy we're not
None of us
numb-brained as we freeze
All of Us

Tugged further from the sun

Oceans of intelligence turn to orbs of ice, 
All the seeds we've thrown and sown
Tamed as they grow, densening to mere debris

the ever-increasing clutter

Our only hope is in the hole
And towards it we invertebly sputter
About it we only can stutter

  A stream of light?
  A spat of disorganized matter?
  Evaporate in a singularity?
  Reborn through divine charity?

Or Alpha 
the Above, 
as my father and his science said,

  Stretched, compressed, singularized, 
  Expunged, expelled, reorganized

That must be the worst lie I've learned

The omnipresent torment I've earned
For seeing the other side of the black hole

Gazing straight through the Rent Veil: the whole

World As We Know It emptying
Prince Hamlet's dreams cemented
Our ignorance exempting
Physics and philosophy equally contempted

The Inevitable Tomorrow impending
Death Himself suicidally tempted
Both God and Man repenting
And Life Itself resented

For seeing the other side sees nothing
Feeling nothing
Voided in the voidless something

Rounded up and corralled in
the diaphanous Om 

of Amen.

Room

Cream swims through coffee;
Black bitterness queers
the sequins of fat.

Haiku's are fun. Haiku's are zen.  Therefore, I try not to think about them too much upon completion, but I must admit the egotistical part of me is fantasizing that my mundane use of the verb queer causes a row amongst future students of literary criticism. You can parse the many assumptions in that statement.

What began as two lines for a longer poem that I never was able to finish have become two lines of a short poem.  Is doing so a "cop-out"? Or a service to prospective readers?  I prefer to label this edit the latter, if only because it increases attention to the first line, which (as an alternative to "I wish I had spent more time at the office...") could acceptably constitute my Dying Words:

Riddle


I'm the tangled rope you wish to cut,

The minotaur's snort in the morning;

    Without trying, just by 
    Being I untwine
    the labyrinth of sleep.

No where near refined or publicly readable, I post this to remind myself how the year started, and how I need to hack, chip and sculpt continuously if I'm going to succeed.

What can a soul see in a black hole?
To that's where we're all spinning
Wrapped up in the gravity of the situation
The inevitable "To Be..." of this event horizon
Round it churns like some galaxy 
Flushing dust and chaos down with you and me

But dizzy we're not
None of us
Our brains grow numb
As we're pulled further from the sun
Oceans of intelligence 
Turned into orbs of ice
/Watching all the other formulated formalators/
Densen their debris
And all the seeds we sow grow
Into ever increasing clutter

A soul's only hope is in the hole
And towards it we invertebly sputter
About it we only can stutter
  A stream of light?
  A spat of disorganized matter?
  Evaporate in a singularity?
  Reborn through divine charity?
Or all of the above, as my father said,
  Stretched, compressed, singularized, 
  Expunged, expelled, reorganized?

That must be the worst lie I've learned
The omnipresent torment I've earned
For seeing the other side of the black hole
Gazing st through the rent veil: the whole
World As We Know It emptying
Prince Hamlet's dreams cemented
Our ignorance exempting
Physics and philosophy equally contempted
The Inevitable Tomorrow impending
Death Himself suicidally tempted
Both God and Man repenting
And Life Itself resented

For seeing the other side sees nothing
Feeling nothing
Voided in the voidless something