Books

Friend and MFA classmate Michelle Bitting just published her first chapbook, Blue Laws, with Finishing Line Press. I have pored over Michelle’s poems-in-progress during workshop, but it was a very different experience to regard this outstanding collection of finished poems, carefully arranged.

From the opening poem about her brother’s suicide, I was riveted. Michelle knows how to make a strong impact by staring life squarely in the face. However, in this collection, she also demonstrates great focus and care, commitment to each aspect of each story as it unfolds — line by line, and poem by poem — into something far more expansive than any straight narrative could hold.

In a poem like “The Sacrifice,” Bitting realizes some of the best results any single-stanza, free-verse poem can aspire to achieve — the careful build-up to a remarkable conclusion, a human revelation. She addresses the memory of her mother sewing costumes for her junior high play — “diaphanous number cut from a swell of black crepe,” building up to address her mother “in the hushed cool of your reserved seat, … the little bobbin of your heart / spinning inside its quiet nook while you watched me / do the hard, privileged work of feeling for both of us.” The poem is as tight as her mother’s stitch work, spoken with veracity and the best kind of sincerity — the kind that looks unflinchingly at the complexity of what is.

I am also invested in the themes explored in this book: grief, parenthood, and the trials of a a sensitive consciousness in the mundane brutality of this world — from dental surgery and her son’s autism to the horrors of the nightly news. This is a praiseworthy collection, sparkling with observation — worth picking up and taking in. A quick search of the blogosphere shows that one poet has already, in reading this book, identified Michelle as her hero. Bitting has accomplished what I hope one day to emulate: a remarkable, even heroic, debut.

My friend and colleague Kelly Forrister (née O’Brien) stopped by this evening to hand me an autographed copy of Seamus Heaney’s New Selected Poems: 1966-1987. She studied with him and several others on a summer course at Trinity College, Dublin, and had pints with him after class. This was just after his appointment at Oxford, and before his Nobel Prize. I am touched that she would give me something so personally meaningful.

Funnily enough, although we only live a few pretty blocks apart in the sleepy idyll that is Ojai, she found out about my rekindled interest in Heaney from this website. Who says blogging doesn’t have its rewards? In the end I have only to say: thank you, Kelly. I will use it well.

“Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!”

Reading “Poems 1876-89” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Fourth Edition), it struck me how much of his verse was not necessarily much more technically interesting than other poets of the Nineteenth century. What remains remarkable are his most famous poems, which seem to typify and embody what he strove toward in other works. Most of his poems employ what he calls “sprung rhythm,” which is simply a dense clustering of stressed or non-stressed syllables in a way that was not typical at a time when two- and three-syllable feet, and especially iambs and trochees, ruled the day. Yet this particular break from convention is not interesting in itself. Hopkins’s work gets most interesting when he focuses so intently on the music of the poem as to push the literal meaning aside, and further compounds, enhances, and transcends any such meaning with revelatory line breaks.

Consider one of my favorite poems:

The Windhover:
To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

In my lecture on “Emulation, Originality and the Writing Tradition,” I drew on Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook discussing a quote by Flaubert she keeps close to her writing desk, and which she originally came upon in Van Gogh’s letters: “Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.” I like this quote, because it implies that not only talent but originality are functions — not of innate gift, but of learned behaviors such as patience, will power, and intense observation. I would contend, also, that Oliver’s ability to write successfully about as timeless and universal a topic as nature depends upon, and is a function of, her own powers of intense observation.

Grief is also a timeless and universal topic. In Without, it is Donald Hall’s keenly remembered details which strike me with a harrowing veracity. He demonstrates so many of the nuances of grief through carefully chosen details, bringing me in to each experience almost tactilely. The poems in this collection work together to form a compelling narrative, however nearly any one of them could also stand alone to illustrate a variety of points about how Hall treats such a difficult subject with such startling honesty. Consider the title poem, “Her Long Illness:”

Daybreak until nightfall,
he sat by his wife at the hospital
while chemotherapy dripped
through the catheter into her heart.
He drank coffee and read
the Globe. He paced; he worked
on poems; he rubbed her back
and read aloud. Overcome with dread,
they wept and affirmed
their love for each other, witlessly,
over and over again.
When it snowed one morning Jane gazed
at the darkness blurred
with flakes. They pushed the IV pump
which she called Igor
slowly past the nurse’ pods, as far
as the outside door
so that she could smell the snowy air.

Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires is a meditation on solitude and loss. In fact, it contains many of the elements of the medieval Christian meditative tradition. In his introduction to The Meditative Poem, Louis L. Martz describes this tradition as producing a poem “in which a man projects a self upon a mental stage, and there comes to understand that self in the light of a divine presence.” For Gilbert, this presence is God, whom he addresses directly in colloquy, and also the presence of Nature. I find some of these poems bold, compelling, and strange. Others I find somewhat generic in their philosophy, or vague. Others still are mixed.

Gilbert takes on a difficult subject: the loss of his wife, Michiko. Because of the deeply personal nature of this topic, Gilbert must find inroads to describing his grief in ways that will render these feelings accessible to his reader. One technique that seems to work particularly well is his focus on nature. Consider the movement of the poem “Betrothed”:

You hear yourself walking on snow.
You hear the absence of birds.
A stillness so complete, you hear
the whispering inside of you. Alone
morning after morning, and even more
at night. They say we are born alone,
to live and die alone. But they are wrong.
We get to be alone by time, by luck,
or by misadventure. When I hit the log
frozen in the woodpile to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of the twilight that awakens
me in the middle of a life. The black
and white of me mated with this indifferent
winter landscape. I think of the moon
coming in a little while to find the white
among these colorless pines.

We went up to Hertfordshire to visit Val’s parents yesterday. On the way to our train in King’s Cross station, we passed a bricked-in archway with half a luggage trolley stuck into it, as if passing straight through the wall. Above the trolley, a standard train station placard announced: “Platform 9 3/4”. That’s right - the magic portal to Hogwarts from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. England has a history of celebrating the blurred boundary between fiction and reality. In Old Hatfield, when we arrived, Val’s mother pointed out the Eight Bells pub - where Bill Sikes ostensibly sheltered after killing Nancy in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.Val was also delighted some years ago to discover a plaque inside The Church of St. George The Martyr in Southwark purporting that Little Dorrit sheltered there one famous night in the Dickens novel by the same name. Clearly, the English have a long and continuing tradition of literature informing life. I was hard pressed to find analogous American examples.

After lunch in Covent Garden, we went into the bookstore district of London today and had a look around Foyles. While the poetry section was not as physically large as Powell’s Books, it was well appointed with contemporary poets, including several feet of Ashberry. It also had all the old warhorses on the shelves, and Stephen Fry’s book on becoming a poet, which, on brief skim, seems to set the cause of non-metrical poetry back by a hundred years. Overall, there seemed to be a strong focus on verse and intricate lyric - though they did feature a number of free verse American poets, and prominently displayed Allan Ginsberg’s Howl. Still, the selection was noticeably different from independent bookstores I have perused in the U.S. - and certainly better equipped to meet the needs of a literate, poetry-loving people than your strip-mall Barnes & Noble or Borders chain store.

Off to visit Cambridge tomorrow.

Although Charles Simic was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, that is not the kind of title I want to write about right now. In fact, there is so much to admire in his Selected Poems 1963-2003, that examining his choice of poem titles almost seems myopic. It has often been my experience, however, that honing in on a very specific element of craft can provide the necessary level of detail to illustrate more universal points.

The entire book, once I began reading it that way, became a lesson to me in how to write a good title. Titles are a kind of meta-line - a line that hovers from the very beginning over every other line of the poem, coloring it. It can be a key to understanding what’s going on in the poem, a one-stroke scene setup, or even perform double-duty as the first line of the poem. Simic rarely uses it in any of these ways.

Instead, his work explores the tension created by pitting a compelling title against a compelling poem. He seems well aware that this discrepancy can create a kind of titular anxiety, as the reader keeps referencing back to the title mentally through out the course of the poem, searching for a connection. What Simic gives us, however, is rarely a key or answer in the title, but more often something like a question that is actually more interesting than any neatly-tied-up statement.

There is much to admire and learn from in Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing In Odessa. Above all, there is bravery. Kaminsky weaves through a hybrid of forms and - more than just precluding poetry sections with introductory prose - in this book he includes anecdotes, recipes and even a list of new “definitions” for English words. What emerges is a kind of personal and cultural impasto - broad, thick strokes of lyrical “thoughts.”

Proofs & Theories is a remarkable collection of essays in which Glück speaks candidly about her experience and thoughts on writing. I want to read these notes on craft not so much because she is a great essayist or critic, but because I value illumination into the mind of such a remarkable poet. Most striking to me was her essay, “Against Sincerity” - the very title seemed designed to shock. After all, I found myself ruefully laughing along with Li-Young Lee in an interview he gave with Rattle when he said:

I heard a poet say to me, ‘Oh, I hate sincerity.’ And I thought, oh, what do you like? Insincerity? I don’t get it.

I didn’t get it either. Perhaps partly because the title is so iconoclastic, Glück begins by defining terms, equating her use of the word sincerity with “telling the truth.”

Clearly, the truth is not always interesting. Nor can a poet force a reader to like a poem simply because “it really happened.” This seems to be the single greatest mistake of poets engaged with the personal lyric in our time.

I did it - I survived my first semester in the Pacific University MFA program. Actually, I thrived. Some days, the prospect of reading and writing at this level is what kept getting me out of bed in the morning. Joe’s insights into my work have been outstanding, and I have fallen in love with poets like Li-Young Lee and Louise Glück. Grief and loss have been major themes in my work this year, and to that end I am looking closely at the tradition of elegy and the contemporary relationship to the timeless theme of loss.

So, here are some of the books that have surfaced - I would love any thoughts, suggestions or tips on other potential authors in this vein, great poets tackling the timeless theme of loss, scholarship in that regard - anything you care to throw out there. The books:

Criticism

• Max Cavitch, Ed. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman
  
• Jahan Ramazani, Ed. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney
  
• Louise Glück Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry
  
• Kim Addonizo and Dorianne Laux The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
  
• Stephen Dobyns Best Words Best Order

Poetry

• Zbigniew Herbert The Collected Poems: 1956-1998
  
• Adam Zagajewski Mysticism for Beginners
  
• Charles Simic Selected Poems: 1963-2004
  
• Li-Young Lee Book of My Nights
  
• James Wright Above the River - the Complete Poems
  
• Stanley Kunitz Passing Through
  
• Jack Gilbert The Great Fires
  
• Linda Gregg Too Bright to See & Alma
  
• Adrienne Rich Diving into the Wreck
  
• Adrienne Rich Atlas for the Difficult World
  
• Marvin Bell The Book of the Dead Man
  
• Edward Kamau Brathwaite Born to Slow Horses

Obviously, not all of these are about elegy - a lot is about filling the gap in my education between a decent background in pre-Modernist poetry from my undergrad. days, and my voracious intent to bone up on contemporary poets.

Here’s to the wisdom of poetic crowds - long may it not be an oxymoron! Discuss.

Related Posts:

• Help Me Find Poets
  
• Surviving A Low-Residency MFA