A Poetry Lab (12)

For our meeting on 11/27, we discussed rhyme and distributed villanelles that we’d written. Our discussion of rhyme centered around the following passage from The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:

More broadly, however, we must say that r. is the phonological correlation (see EQUIVALENCE) of differing semantic units at distinctive points in verse. It is essential that the definition not be framed solely in terms of sound, for that would exclude the cognitive function.
        R. calls into prominence simultaneously a complex set of responses based on identity and difference. On the phonic level, the likeness of the rhyming syllables (at their ends) points up their difference (at their beginnings). The phonic semblance (and difference) then points up semantic semblance or difference: the equivalence of the r. syllables or words on the phonic level implies a relation of likeness or difference on the semantic level. Difference and identity are thus made antinomian in r.: they mutually entail one another. (1053)

The passage took some puzzling-out, and the students seemed a little put-off by the language, but they seemed willing to accept the basic premise of the quotation.
        There were two especially interesting poems for this meeting. Meg’s poem “Reason” benefits from very good refrain lines:

        Reason

        A restless man cannot just simply sit
        He had. to find love with any other
        Give me one good reason not to say it

        How should I make an of the pieces fit?
        When I choose to be one with another
        A restless man cannot just simply sit

        I've mulled it around; for years I have bit
        My lip. Wonder if it hurt my brother?
        Give me one good reason not to say it

        I have tried to bandage the wound with wit
        Malting fun of it all with my mother
        A restless man cannot just simply sit

        All the tangled webs that I poorly knit
        With all the men I have seemed to smother
        Give me one good reason not to say it

        Thanks to you, my ideals have gone to shit
        And often, I wonder why we bother
        A restless man cannot just simply sit
        Give me one good reason not to say it

The enjambment “I have bit / My lip” resonates well with the overall theme of “keeping my peace” or keeping shut-up, and its violence resonates also with the outburst that this poem is.
        Bret, who has previously described the source of his poetry as a struggle with “a part of me I do not like to deal with,” here bashes his lines against the villanelle form, intentionally creating a sense of vertigo by extending the lines to delay the refrains’ return and by choosing abstract words for the same effect. The result is a cracked villanelle, a form bursting under the weight of its content:

        A PIECE OF HEART IN TIME

        Holding my thoughts and memories tonight;
        Knowing the times and the ways that sedate
        Surrendering with victory held by all my might.

        Not seeing into the blackness given so little sight,
        Knocked back by tons but needing nothing to alleviate.
        Holding my thoughts and memories tonight.

        And feeling the only way is to help the other's fight
        By making it my own because it is ours to create.
        Surrendering with victory held by all my might.

        Holding what I have needed still so still and tight;
        Foreseeing the departure ahead but willing to wait,
        Holding my thoughts and memories tonight.

        Yet in this there is no end when it burns so bright.
        No way for itto end it when it can only elevate.
        Surrendering with victory held by all my might.

        Seeing in mind's eye the moment and the light,
        Knowing again taste and feeling that encapsulate;
        Holding my thoughts and memories tonight
        Surrendering with victory held by all my might.

A Poetry Lab (10)

For our Poetry Lab this week, we were to write small essays about the sources of our writing, after having read the first ten pages of Robin Blaser’s essay on Jack Spicer, “The Practice of Outside” in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. Most of the students responded in a way that indicates some frustration with “academic” or intellectual models of poetic inspiration, perhaps the most impatient of which, Meg’s, began “My initial idea of where poetry should come from is a lot less complicated.” The response to authority here is obvious in should, as Blaser’s essay is not proscriptive, and as his essay even acknowledges the authoritarian and difficult side of Spicer’s personality.
        The source of poetry as a response or challenge to authority was a running theme in these essays. My favorite challenge to authority in them emerged from Kassia, who chose to write her essay in verse, eschewing what seems to her to be the authority of essays, which she associates with the eye of authority: “i stopped writing essays / i mean i / stopped turning them in classes.” There is a disconnect, it seems, for her between interpretation and evaluation; she writes

———[. . .] i speak
in a sign language palm handed
cut from the rest and posed
on a wire in the art building. i write in sign
language gleaned from a smattering of
glances.
all these
references to greats-- what do they
mean to me? i’ll start speaking to
them when i've got my
shit together, poetically, when i've
gotten great. to now i write in
sign language what i glean
blind from——this————place
i think i live in
————now. [. . .]

Her “sign language” is distinct somehow from the discourse of greatness. A time will come for her when she has “gotten great”; then she will speak to the greats. In the meantime, she is something of a prisoner, caught in an exemplary position like an exhibit Tony Bennett would describe for his exhibitionary complex. She is also in flight, yet her position is not entirely subaltern: “i write never for anyone. / all the instructors / remain puzzled off my trail.” At first glance Kassia’s attitude is quite a contrast to Meg’s “I believe that poetry should first look at its audience.” But Meg goes on to say that

The only thing I believe a poem should do is connect. If 5,000 people reading a poem and 4,999 people hate it, it doesn’t matter, because it meant something to that 1 person.

Meg goes on to arrive quite close to Blaser’s claim that “Jack’s lively and storied language pushes us into a polarity and experienced dialectic with something other than ourselves” (275). Because, for her, “Poetry [. . .] should open a dialogue about itself, its subject, and its context.”
         The two men in the class were more assertive than the women; that is, their essays seemed to be less concerned outwardly with negotiating a relationship with authority. Bret, for example, advanced a therapeutic, purgative notion of poetry that situates inspiration in his unconscious. He claims that the “ideas that are coming out are suppressed and buried, hidden treasures for art to clam and use for its own expression.” (I leave his typo clam intact because it goes against the grain of his assertion, and I enjoy tweaking him here with his own psychoanalytic petard.) Bret continues in a vein somewhat like that Duncan pursues in his darker moments “I know what the poem is feeding off of to make it. And in every instance it uses a part of me I do not like to deal with, at least on a regular basis.”
        Derek provided the most free, perhaps even Whitmanic, of our reponses. And since we all enjoyed reading it so much, I will post it here in its entirety for your enjoyment as well:

From the Heart
An essay about where Derek gets his poetry

        Where does my poetry come from? Almost every orifice of my body produces some form of poetic information. My ass, eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Wherever, it doesn’t matter, it is my brain that controls the fingers that do the selecting and producing of the written words, forming them into poems, short quips of prose, and the occasional line of eloquence sitting like a cherry upon a pile of white fluff.
         So, where does my poetry really come from, the outside world touching my skin and alerting my senses, or the internal matrix of my firing synapses? I think it is a mixture of the two, but more so from the internal processed thoughts. A good thought will arrive, and I’ll suck on it like a lozenge for a while before actually writing it down, but most of the time I simply forget it. Which is a sad rap, cause I have some poignant things rocket through my skull, speeding by untouched. I should be more proactive about chasing thoughts down and ripping them out. I might even become a better poet for doing so, or at least I’ll have more words to dick around with.
        Yes, my subjects are almost always abstract, more like the rising humidity than the hot concrete. This realm of ideas I function in is highly susceptible to my opinion. Then again, what words coming out of my mind aren’t? Well, let’s admit it, no one is truly “objective” in the unbiased sense of the term (which is a glaring contradiction cause terms are VERY opinionated). Yet there are those that approach things with a much broader view and a loose grip, aspiring for the “hands-off” feeling. Writers like photographers using words to get at images. I’m not much like those people, but I’d like to be. I grew up with sermons upon sermons of therefores, thuses, and becauses, and I see age as a metaphorical freezer solidifying the water in my mental ice cube tray. So these ingrained habits are hard to break, but I want to change.

A Poetry Lab, week 9

For this week, we all worked on slam poems, following examples at Poetryslam.com and the National Poetry Slam website. Three of us made it to the poetry slam at The Mill (11pm on the 2nd & 4th Wednesdays of each month), and one of us got up and read, and from what I hear got a lot of positive attention from the reading. That untitled poem begins “today I changed nothing—” and follows another good poem written for this week, “Bagels,” which addresses the workday life of Bruegger’s Bagels’ employees (NB: “slacking” is rolling the bagel dough):

“Bagels”

Today, I blinked
——and the world changed
I could no longer put
——faces to names
——logic to the pain
——vanity to the vein
it just didn’t pertain to
———this
—————work
I am a clean slate
—chalkboard on a Saturday
—or a letter unfolding before him
“Do you love me? Circle yes or no.”
—I hear only disgust
——in the chattering
the pot-and-pan clattering
the “atta-boy” flattering
it’s mindless & maddening.
——there is no sincerity
——in a slackee’s dexterity
and our drum beat repetitions
—echo George Washington’s
——war cry—
————freedom isn’t free
—and cream cheese costs
————$2.99

“untitled”

today i changed nothing--
today i gave a homeless man my change and i said
have a good night—i changed nothing—i sounded
like a cashier at the end of an order
ringing up and watching the clock, making another
dollar in worldly goodliness
but he said thank you three times after
i touched his rough hand accidently in exchange.
change—i could spare more than that
instead of putting it into some useless public
ticking away system designed to expel
people like me or, worse, pass me along like a ball
like all the others, tripping through cracks no one cnecks
despite promises. well all i want is
someone like my second grade teacher who gave out
chalk stars and always said i'd be the first female president,
i'rn sorry but it doesn't seem i will make it through
politics of human interaction, less the world-changing
earth-shaking type as queen of the world (if america
as we know it exists still)—
but—i may yet turn out a passable piece of writing
or at least all right, and popular, for a time,
passing me pennies per word (but no skin
contact, no accidental brushes through a check).
i want to get out of here already, to the
wide world and start my can collection—
i'm tired of private office hours with
secret second chances, i don't want your confidentiality
or good will i want to learn how to, even,
start the first time. support myself so when I
am rarely confident, really, i will not look
so hollow later. but i'm coming to the end
of my second chances and want to change something
but also just to be myself and have a holiday like
holden, run away like huck with a slave more human
than churchgoers, fuck it all, today
i changed nothing. myself nor a homeless old man
in a blue coat and grey beard i gave my change.
if i really wanted to give a gift and change something
i'd have sat next to him and listened to his stories but
all i did is dig in my purse for preperatory change,
passed it on and turned away from
thank yous before i saw myself reflected
in his tired eyes.

A Poetry Lab, week 8

This week in the poetry lab our experiment was to try out the technique Tom Phillips used for Humument. (You can see more examples of this sort of work at Altered Books and at the other Altered Books.) The composition, the visual layout, of the following example from out class is really nice, and I like the effect of the pen-scratching as a method of selecting and deselecting text.