Insights

There is a Zen story about working very hard wherein a young student (in some versions, an American,) approaches the master and asks how long it will take him to become a master himself. The master replies, “ten years.” The student emphatically explains that he will work twice as hard as any of the other students, pushing himself to the limit to master his teachings more quickly. “In that case,” replies the master, “twenty years.”

For me, poetry is like this. Usually, when I find myself wanting to work very hard, it is because I have not been writing consistently. You see, I have waned in my discipline of getting up early before work to write. And, as a result, I notice myself daydreaming about dramatic change, such as a fellowship with a great expanse of uninterrupted writing time stretched out before me. Yet, invariably, I find that when I start writing consistently again, I become more satisfied and accepting of my present situation. My careerist thoughts subside. I enter back in to the vocation of poetry, the lifelong pursuit.

The art of not pushing, but rather focusing on consistency, is alien to our fast-food culture. And yet, writing something daily is actually a form of instant gratification as well — a true and lasting gratification of actually having written, good or bad. It is also, ironically, good for one’s career. That is because publication and awards are a numbers game. And writing consistently produces a greater volume of higher quality work than an approach of fits and starts. At least, that has been my experience so far.

So, it’s off to bed for me, and up early to bang something out — good or bad — for sake of staying in the flow.

Multiple friends on separate occasions mentioned the news that a collection of William McGonagal’s poems had been auctioned for £6,600. He was, apparently, to poetry what Florence Foster Jenkins was to classical song: an unintentional laughing-stock. Unfortunately, this is the poetry news that reaches my non-poet friends: that old bad poems get sold for lots of money.

New bad poems, unfortunately, won’t fare so well. Like classical song, nineteenth-century verse requires certain talents. Reading through samples of McGonagal’s poems, his lack of talent, particularly with regard to scansion, is evident. He hurls headlong with great effort toward each end-rhyme and, in the process, makes statements and observations so obvious and banal as to be surprising, almost childlike, in how unremarkable they are. In fact, many of his poems read like children’s attempts at formal verse. Furthermore, such “innocent” poetry stumbles in to unintentional humor.

Contemporary poetry is irrevocably different than nineteenth-century verse. This semester, Marvin Bell has been been encouraging me to attempt to write “bad” poetry, to “fall on my face” linguistically, to get myself into situations where I am “hopelessly lost but still typing.” It has been an invigorating antidote to my tendency to write neat, short poems. But it is precisely because contemporary poetry seeks to break rules (and thereby discover more interesting territory) that we will never again see a single, definitive “worst poet” in our time. In the absence of a centralized governing aesthetic, we no longer have a stick by which to measure “worst.”

Believe me, I am not saying there aren’t a lot of bad poems out there — genuinely bad poems, written by poets equally lacking in self-awareness as McGonagal. People are still writing awkward verse. Others are trying to pass off prose as poetry. Still others will try to convince you that their cerebral and wholly unmoving twelve-line exercise in linguistics can be justified by a several-hundred-page dissertation. But audiences no longer feel sufficient confidence to hurl rotten eggs or fruit. They hesitate. This may be due to a certain mystique in which contemporary poetry has managed to defensively enshroud itself. But also, the line between “bad” and “great” (not good, but great) seems thinner than ever in this iconoclast medium.

Even, for example, in Flarf, the deliberate attempt to write indisputably bad poetry, interesting nuggets often emerge which, taken up in the hands of a talented writer, can lead to remarkable poems. As Marvin says in this video, “sometimes the worst part of a poem contains the seeds of something that will be terrific if the person would just push it further.” In this sense, the creative, generative act of writing a contemporary poem is one in which “best” and “worst” must cease to exist for awhile, in service to a kind of exploration I call spelunking in consciousness.

In order to write, we must be willing to explore, and we must be willing to fail. We must be willing to write our McGonagal lines - what Ellen Bass calls “platforms” — because without the McGonagals in our creative process, we end up settling for good instead of great or, worse, being gagged by the inner critic and ceasing to write at all. In this sense, while there may never be another McGonagal per se in post-postmodern literature, there is, perhaps now more than ever, a little McGonagal in us all.

I value concision. I have told myself this value is the reason that I often prefer shorter poems. And I have told myself this preference is the reason that I have tended to write poems under one page (~40 lines) in length. All that, however, is changing.

I now recognize that in my work I have had a tendency to want to end a poem after delivering a few good lines, to “look ahead” to the conclusion and shape the direction toward that end. Reading Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man” poems, which always appear in two parts, helped me recognize just how much can still be said even after the conclusion of the first part of a poem. In some ways, every poem could be said to be just the first part of a poem on that topic.

Reading other longer works has also helped me understand how I might go about resisting conclusions in the effort at arriving in more interesting poetic territory. Being halfway through my third semester in the Pacific University MFA program, I have now read over fifty books of poetry and poetry criticism in the last fifteen months of study. I have learned a lot. Perhaps more importantly, I have absorbed a lot, imbibing poetry as much as analyzing it, and letting it shape my aesthetics from the inside out.

Most recently, I have been reading David St. John’s Study For The World’s Body. I am struck by the success of his longer poems. Comparing his work to another poet whose longer poems I also admire, Li-Young Lee, has helped me to understand some of the qualities of longer poems which I hope to deploy in my own efforts at breaking the single-page barrier.

Foremost among them seems to be a tone that reflects confidence. This sense of confidence about the speaker, and by inference the author, helps me as a reader to give the author permission to dwell on unfolding details, provided they remain grounded in concrete images, interesting language, music, or other elements of good craft. Careful examination of details in this way produces the actual poetry, and gives a sense of focus and precision to the work, despite its length.

The stand-up comedian Billy Connolly is a master at delivering humor through seemingly endless digressions. When he finally comes back to the main topic, long since forgotten in the audience’s mind, he earns not only laughs but trust that he knew what he was doing all along. Good long poems can also function in this way — taking time to deliver poetry through the details, but retaining a sense of focus and direction all along.

In some ways, it seems to me that longer poems do not necessarily have to end on lines as spectacular as those required for the success of shorter poems. A rider who has hung on to a bucking stallion with dignity and tenacity need not necessarily dismount with great flourish to win cheers. The sustained quality and duration of the work is a feat in itself. Such feats I look forward to attempting in practice soon.

It is fitting that National Poetry Month begins with April Fool’s Day. Poetry is, in fact, the most “foolish” of literary pursuits.

I live in a country founded by Puritans, immigrants, and pioneers. These groups hold in common practicality as a crucial value: the best work is useful work. In fact, this value took on mythic proportions over time, culminating in what is sometimes called the “Protestant work ethic.” But it is more than this. It is a mythos of practicality shared by many groups. Max Weber points out in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism that even in Japan, a nation that is not predominantly Protestant, the idea of working hard toward a practical, material end has become an intrinsic cultural value.

Faced with survival, individually and as a group, it only makes sense to channel one’s energy into material results. In Abraham Maslow’s model of hierarchic human needs, such groups function on the levels of physiology and safety, deriving their sense of love, belonging, and esteem from their contribution to the material needs of the group. In the case of many religions, morality and sense of higher purpose are also aligned with practical material work.

Poems are not edible, and one can not take shelter under a poem, unless we are speaking metaphorically. In Maslow’s model, poetry exclusively serves the need of self-actualization, which depends on other needs being met. Ironically, in a society that has struggled so long to build up each successive generation with greater capacity to fulfill the lower needs, self-actualizing behaviors often end up being seen as frivolous. We work so hard to maintain all the other cultural elements that ultimately enable self-actualizing behavior, and in focusing on the other needs so intently, often forget how to be creative, spontaneous, and solve problems of language and insight for the sheer pleasure of expressing the wondrous complexity of being human.

Poetry is the fool in King Lear’s court, pointing out where society has picked the wrong daughters to trust. We celebrate in Spring, when nature puts on its display of gratuitous beauty. Surely there are more practical ways to exchange pollen and ripen fruit. But the lilac and poppies and orange blossoms here in California are all saying: poetry, poetry, poetry.

Happy National Poetry Month, to all you hardworking “fools.”

“Every evening / words / — not stars — light the sky. // No rest in life / like life itself.”

“I hear that the axe has flowered, / I hear that the place can’t be named, // I hear that the bread which looks at him / heals the hanged man, / the bread baked for him by his wife, // I hear that they call life / our only refuge.”

I find myself drawn to poets who survived The Second World War. This, in combination with frequently watching the remarkable BBC series Foyle’s War in the evening, as well as, on a more personal note, the recent passing of my wife’s uncle, Sven — a Marine who was at Normandy, and a man of whom I was fond — has got me thinking about the profound and continuing impact of WWII. Even as Czeslaw Milosz says that Communism was the only possible response to the atrocities of the Industrial Revolution, so, too, it occurs to me that Postmodernism may well be a kind of understandable, almost logical response to the atrocities of WWII.

Part of my thinking has been fueled by researching Seamus Heaney, including a number of essays in The Art Of Seamus Heaney wherein various critics attempt to place him, as an accessible, intelligent, lyric poet, within the context of the Twentieth century, and the decline of centrality, gentility, and structure. These abstract thoughts have gained specificity through reading selected works of Paul Celan and Umberto Saba. Both men, in the face of profoundly difficult personal circumstances, heightened their attention to language in their poems. Yet in the case of Celan, the attention presses ever more inward, into a symbolic and even cryptogrammic relationship to German; whereas with Saba, his Italian becomes more specific and spare in a way that promotes universal resonance.

Reading the admonitions against earnestness from the old ghost that appears in Heaney’s “Station Island” part XII brings to mind Patrick Kavanagh. Whether or not Kavanagh was the conscious model for this character in Heaney’s poem, the by turns severe and antic nature of this individual has Kavanagh written all over it.

In his poem, “Prelude”, Kavanagh condemns “Card-sharpers of the art committee / Working all the provincial cities, / they cry ‘Eccentric’ if they hear / A voice that seems at all sincere.” (Collected Poems, 132) “Eccentric” was no doubt an epithet with which the iconoclast Kavanagh was familiar. Yet Heaney’s Kavanagh-esque figure, in arguing against orthodoxy, is not necessarily arguing against sincerity. He is arguing, instead, against earnestness. The difference is more than just an exercise in semantics.

Earnestness is a kind of sincerity, or endeavor toward sincerity, marked by gravitas. It is a determined manner, one that weighs consequences soberly. In this sense, earnestness finds itself at odds with mischief and irreverence. It is different, I think, than sincerity, which can include mischief, irreverence, and other forms of impolite honesty — modes Kavanagh embraced in his work. In differentiating, I would say earnestness involves a serious attempt, whereas sincerity involves a state of unvarnished being, and a willingness to look unflinchingly at what is.

Consider, for example one of Heaney’s most controversial poems, “Punishment”:

In Seamus Heaney’s long poem sequence “Station Island,” the speaker, on a pilgrimage, is visited by ghosts who rebuke him in an almost Dickensian fashion. “Part XII”, the final poem of the sequence, rouses me like a bugle call:

Then I knew him in the flesh
out there on the tarmac among the cars,
wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, ‘your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

It was as if I had stepped free into space
alone with nothing that I had not known
already. Raindrops blew in my face (Opened Ground, 244-245)

The terza rima structure immediately calls to mind Dante, and in his essay “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet,” Heaney acknowledges this influence directly.

In the first part of this essay, he points out how other poets have written their own poetic projects into their translations of Dante. In the second part, he notes Dante’s influence on Eliot’s “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets, wherein “the poet exchanges intense but oddly neutral words with ‘a familiar compound ghost’” (242) and Heaney concludes “as a matter of literary fact, that the lines are more haunted by the squadrons of Dante’s terza rima than by the squadrons of Hitler’s Luftwaffe” (243) Heaney further points out that a major part of the poetic influence was that “Dante was actually giving Eliot the freedom to surrender to the promptings of his own unconscious.” (249) The parallels here, between Dante’s influence on Eliot, and both Dante and Eliot’s influence (as well as Dante’s influence through Eliot) on Heaney himself, could not be made more clear.

I have heard, from multiple sources, that there is a movement afoot, especially within academia, to rebrand what I have known as avant garde or experimental poetry as “innovative poetry.” The phrase strikes me as redundant, if not tautological. All poetry worth reading innovates in some way upon language. Furthermore, the four-thousand-year history of written poetry has been punctuated and advanced almost exclusively through innovative techniques. The differential between the poetry of forbearers like Walt Whitman or Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the majority of other Nineteenth-century verse, is far greater than that of any contemporary experimental project as it is compared to mainstream poetry.

While contemporary experimental projects, which often pursue a particular aspect of poetry in the extreme, do advance the art — even as exercising isolated muscle groups improves fitness — labeling such efforts “innovative,” with all this implies about other projects, is the worst kind of synecdoche — as absurd as defending thumb wrestling as the ultimate sporting event. Allowing experimental poets to call themselves “innovative” is like allowing a political party to rename itself — not as Democrat, Republican, or Tory — but as “The Party Which Stands For All That Is Right And Good About Politics.”

Repackaging postmodernism is not the great project of our time, nor is narrowing the scope of poetics down to a few theoretical elements. We must call such bluffs. Any art, in fact, which requires hefty intellectual defense, is unlikely to weather the common sense of individuals who know, on instinct, what moves them. Certain forms of experimentalism do provide a valuable antithesis to traditions like lyricism, but it is only an emergent synthesis — a whole-body poetics, that stands, like a body, complete and functional without explanation — that can truly be called innovative. Making a play to label one’s project as representative of the most fundamental aspect of poetry — innovation — amounts to a dangerous kind of wordplay, if not an all-out attempt to legislate taste.

The aims of the stichic and lyric forms are not mutually exclusive. But when the successful elements of the stichic — such as a sense of plain speech, teleological design, and a surprising or revelatory conclusion — can be reconciled with the successful elements of lyric — such as the dense aural pleasures of rhythm and rhyme, and the compounded significance of the broken line — a rare kind of fusion takes place. Consider Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Mint:”

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

I turned back to Heaney, like an old trusted friend, to see what I could learn about lyric poetry, and found this excerpt compelling:

… there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry. This has to do with the ‘temple inside our hearing’ which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called ‘the steadfastness of speech articulation’, from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the poet’s truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet’s ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.

It would seem Heaney is advocating, to alter Dickinson’s famous quote, that poets can only “tell all the truth by telling it slant.” Or, as Ella Fitzgerald has been wailing at me through speakers of the coffee shop in which I find myself typing this now, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”