It's All Gotta End Sometime

A large theme of the discussion last week between Todd and I was purposefulness. More specifically, we started talking about choices in poetry. I believe I was the catalyst for such a discussion, contemplating the idea of spacing in poems. A trouble I often have is reasoning or justifying my choice to indent a line or word, or to otherwise make the page “more busy.” With left aligned poems, the majority of what I write, linebreaks themselves come to me for reasons of sound or emphasis, typically. But, the whole business of pushing a certain word over to the one side or excessive tabbing has yet to find a place in my style, if it even should.

I’m reminded of a sentence towards the end of Pinsky’s book, where he says, “What must be pointed out is the horrible ease with which a stylish rhetoric can lead poetry unconsciously to abandon life itself.” It seems more in the context of language use, but with this statement, Pinsky is also making a point about purpose. Where does a choice overtake the reason and become a stylish element?

I’ve heard the question raised about the aforementioned Daniel Bailey and his choices with the Drunk Sonnets, especially in terms of writing his versions of the sonnet and the use of capitalization. For me, these choices are justified because of the tone, lonely and angsty, that Bailey utilizes. Frankly, they are love poems written while drunk, hence sonnets disobeying many of the “rules” of sonnets written in all caps.

Todd mentioned the poem “America” by Claude McKay. I’d read it in the past, and after re-reading it, I find great depths in his choices as well. A black man writing about America in the form of a sonnet certainly has a special agenda behind it. Similarly, his language evokes thoughts of strong purpose and statement. As Todd pointed out, it is as if McKay is pointing out how he can play America’s game, writing solid traditional poetry.

I’m not sure how unconscious or conscious these types of decisions are or should be in poetry. Rather, I’m pointing out that in one shape or another, they’ve come to work. In my writing, my aesthetic as taken me towards discursiveness in my poems, a focal point of discussion as Pinsky’s book comes to a close. The problem I’ve encountered lately is turning it on and off, finding the purpose in my actions. As I progress forward in this study, I’ll continue to keep in mind these types of main ideas Pinsky has imparted.

IMPATIENT POETS?! NO WAY?!

Poem
by Frank O’Hara

The eager note on my door said “Call me,
call when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and

headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was

there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.

In the first section of “Conventions Of Wonder,” Pinsky takes to task the descriptive styles of Louise Bogan and Frank O’Hara. More specifically, the two poems, one from each, seem to do a flip-flop of typical modes of description, as Pinsky says, “both avoid the convention of words telling-about a physical reality…each deflects our feelings…away from wonder, and towards impatience.” Bogan’s poem “Simple Autumnal,” as her poems often do for me, strike as flat because of their method of putting themselves on a pedestal of sorts before attempting to reach back down to the reader, so to speak. O’Hara’s poem, to me, does a much better job accomplishing what Pinsky says both do, in a way that is accessible, purposeful, and poignant.

Sure, the emotion is less defined by words, as Bogan uses words like “sorrow,” but O’Hara puts himself on the page in other ways: with the action, with the speaker, with the voice. While Bogan’s undoubtedly has those elements, O’Hara’s uses are, for me, more aligned with an aesthetic of approachability and engagement. Where Pinsky claims that this poem “quarrels with our sense of how poetry treats experience,” I certainly agree, but I’ll also point to that quality as one of the major contributors for the engaging quality of the poem, as in much of O’Hara’s writing.

Such a trait, I might add, could be one of the reasons O’Hara continues in popularity with my generation of writers and poetry readers. As Pinksy does so well to point out, O’Hara uses phrases and specifics that “insist upon the unique, unpredictable character of experience…warning the reader that his generalities and expectations are likely to prove irrelevant to these irreducible particulars.” In this quote and in O’Hara’s poem, I see a point about my developing view of poetry that at once points at my extreme preference of O’Hara over Bogan and my deep affinity with indie/small press lit.

This element of broken expectations and approachability adds energy and emotional movement to O’Hara’s poem that I don’t find in Bogan’s. Additionally, my favorite pieces of indie literature ride on similar mechanisms. I’m reminded of Daniel Bailey’s Drunk Sonnet 14 because of it’s refusal to be anything expected or emotionally worded:

Drunk Sonnet 14
BY DANIEL BAILEY

IF ANYONE KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON EVER THEN HEY
I AM HERE IT WOULD BE NICE TO TALK SOMETIME
INFOMERCIALS HAVE STARTED AND I KIND OF WANT TO DIE
I’M PRETTY SURE THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY FOR A MORGUE

OK SO ACTUALLY IT’S FOR THE BIBLE OR SOMETHING
SO IT’S A COMMERICAL FOR TRYING TO BE HAPPY OR SOMETHING
BUT I AM NOT HAPPY TONIGHT NO I AM NOT JUST HERE
IF HAPPINESS EVER WORKED THEN HOW—I DON’T KNOW

HAPPINESS IS A LIZARD IN THE SUNLIGHT GETTING WARM
AND THEN IN THE NIGHT BENEATH A ROCK EATING FLIES
AND SWALLLOWING THE MEAT OF THE TRASH OF THE DIRT

AH, SO TONIGHT IS A LITTLE DRUNK AND OK OK OK
THAT IS GOOD SO LET ME BE—THERE IS NO LOVE TONIGHT
GOD IS LIKE BONO—SOME DICKWAD NO ONE WILL EVER MEET OR LIKE

While it uses words like “happiness,” this poem takes that abstract word and other emotions and puts them onto the page, a page that steamrolls over itself. That third stanza is a great example of this. The poem starts with the speaker, the situation, the direct address of the openness. Then, boom, the turn in the third stanza pulls the poem, and more importantly the feeling, into description, but beyond that it busies its way through the image. The ending, for me, seems like a fuck-you to this whole discussion, going from “THERE IS NO LOVE TONIGHT” immediately to the last line, a seemingly unrelated commentary on both God and Bono. This last part is a good example of both this poem as a even more modern example of Pinsky’s thoughts on description going beyond wonder to impatience and the idea that my favorite kind of poems don’t hide behind their language but reach out for the reader and their true selves.

Where are these voices coming from?

In Pinsky's chapter titled "Voices," he takes a closer look at modernism's "new direction," one that is "cooler and quieter, suggests the paradoxical, essential, historically recurring poetic aim of sincerity." In doing this, he focuses on persona, moving from Lowell to Berryman, which leads to a final section cross-examining Berryman's masterwork The Dream Songs with earlier poems by Thomas Hardy and John Crowe Ransom.

The section where he solely focuses on The Dream Songs and Berryman's persona of Henry was the most enlightening for me. Over the summer, I had read, or should I say attempted to read, this series, stopping after the first volume, 77 Dream Songs, due to what I'll call an overwhelming feeling of what?. It's not that I didn't enjoy these poems or understand why they are important (the mixture of dictions, perspectives was both exhilarating and awe-inspiring). Rather, I could not grasp the understanding of what was going on (both in terms of story and style) enough to latch onto these poems in any self-respecting way.

Here, I am reminded of something W.S. Merwin said on a video interview I watched last night. He said something along the lines of the emphasis when reading a poem being too much on the interpretation and not enough on the reaction. I take this to mean what I encounter many people say:"I think it's neat, but I don't know what's going on." Reaction to me, as I hope to talk more about here soon, is the most important thing to art, I believe; as I told Todd recently, a poem doesn't mean anything if no one gets stoked about it. And, why certainly I don't need to know what's going on at all times in a poem, my lack of comprehension of the larger roles the language played in the dream songs left me tired, frustrated, and confused.

This is where Pinsky stepped in; this section about Berryman opened my eyes and my mind to a different way to understand and appreciate what Berryman is doing in these poems. Now, I think it best to work through a few of the key quotes of Pinsky's in order to get a better sense of where I am coming from.

The opening sentence of the Berryman section is "[t]o assign part of the poem to a voice or protagonist gives the attributed element a kind of autonomy, however illusory or conventional." I immediately thought of the links I had discovered and heard about between Henry and Berryman's real life self. With this method of speaking, Berryman allows himself to use his own life and feelings in way that might come off negatively or even unpoetic otherwise. By allowing this Henry character to speak and be spoken to, he gives himself more room to work, a smart and rewarding tactic, which likely aided him in producing the 385 highly-praised dream songs. Later in the paragraph, Pinsky takes this idea a little further suggesting "the quasi-autonomous element in the poem supplies a way to have one's self-dramatization and yet to judge it--or at least to stand a little apart from it."

Further complicating me during my first reading was the diction and syntax in the poems. While I enjoyed the playfulness and feeling they compelled, I was again lost in why they were used for the story/collection as a whole. Pinsky's explanation about the possible origin of this use was the final point needed for me to appreciate these pieces differently:

So, though the syntactical eruptions of baby-talk or ministrel-talk may seem to have some particular, special implication, Berryman's language seems to me to grow first of all from the poet's need for a vocabulary that does not restrict him or embarass him. And weight and strength therefore depend not on the words, in a way, but on areas between the words, on the disparities and oddball vacuums.

This new way of seeing these poems is applicable and helpful to this study and my overall growth as a poet, I think, because as both a reader and a writer, it broadens my understand of purpose behind voice. Persona poems are ones that I often have difficult with, unlike in prose, because often the story and the language (my favorite part of poetry: the leaps and risks one can take with this category) collide differently than I'm used to. Further, my own personas can be strengthened with this understanding by being more careful of and purposeful with my poetic mannerisms, an underlying point Pinsky seems to be making, as to enhance and make pop my sincerity, one of my most valued poetic elements.

Influence Vs. Imitation Vs. Showing Off

For my Independent study with Todd, I'll be reading a series of poetry books that have won awards early in writers' careers, are first books, or are early books on presses I dig, along with the Robert Pinsky criticism collection, The Situation of Poetry. We have decided to begin the semester with the Pinsky collection, using different elements of craft and style discussed in the book as possible conversation points for the poetry collections and my own poems. After reading each book or section, I'll blog in some manner about my reaction, my application, or something else about it.

The Introduction to Pinsky's book sets the stage for the rest of the book by explaining his usage of "Modern" and "Contemporary" in regards to the poetry in point. The main sketch he makes is about influence, with the primary example being two excerpts, one from Stevens and one from Moore, as examples of presenting metaphor and images in a direct, sincere way, a trend that came into being, Pinsky says, in the Modernist era. Furthermore, he uses images/metaphors from a poem by Robert Bly and another by Mary Swenson to discuss what he calls an "exhibitionist" approach to such poetic devices, how he contends that "the aggressive yoking of unlike things can sometimes amount to little more than showing off." To the first by Bly, he labels it "a kind of gaud or badge" the writer employs to establish oneself as a writer, exploiting "an inherited mannerism without full understanding it." To the second, it sees it as a sort of begging for admiration "of the writing for its own sake", void of a solid subject.

To me, Pinsky, already, makes several valid points, at least valuable to think about in my own writing. For instance, where in my aesthetic does the practice of images/metaphors fall, and with what methods/style? I'm of the mind that one thing writing needs is an excited audience, one who wants to read more, wants to buy books, wants to talk about the writing, wants to let the writing be purposeful and helpful in some way in their lives. While I see many approaches to do this, the importance of metaphors/images, certainly a large part of our current society's everyday life, seems a valuable avenue (I'm thinking of TV in particular). Pinsky admits that the way Bly and Swenson use these devices does not necessarily need to be a forbidden practice, but one acknowledged. It is often easily "identifiable when least assimilated," and holds importance and familiarity in contemporary poetry writing, which helps point to influence.

For my own writing, my main way of attempting to get people excited about writing is to capitalize on the elements that my readers find most engaging and thought-provoking. Today's reader, or at least the ones I see my poetry most fit to connect with, are flooded with poems, not to mention all of the other, likely higher-prioritized, means of interaction with the world. The poems I've been writing lately seem to be finding the balance between attention-grabbing, often startling or thought-provoking, and tightness, in terms of language use and "point." In this way, I believe my influences will be intact and honored, while still assimilated in a manner that adds to the complexity and excitability of the piece.

After reading this intro, I sat down to do some writing, and one poem in particular struck me as in need of some serious editing, though I do feel like it is worthy of being included in this project, if I work hard enough on it. It's the poem "This Is So Romantic," which appeared late last year in Novelletum, in an admittedly less-tight and sometimes superfluous version. The part that startled me, as it threw up the Pinsky flag, was the beginning of original published version:

Ride bikes with me
with our helmets like oyster shells
protecting our pearl heads
with our feet hugging metal pedals:

After not reading this poem for awhile, coupled with Pinsky's poignant discussion, the metaphors and images jumped out as over-the-top and useless, especially in the context of the rest of the poem. The use of "like oyster shells" and "pearl heads" was weightless, lacking the purposefulness, like what does this say about the characters/speakers/the situation?, and irrelevant, as it's talking about riding bikes in the suburbs. The last excerpted line seemed way to dramatic, an attempt perhaps, with the affection theme, to get "hugging" into the poem. I felt that the beginning lacked the directness and relevancy to push the poem to the point of connecting with the reader, an valuable part of a good opening.

After tinkering around with it, the newer draft, though certainly no final draft now, appears as such:

Ride bikes with me!
Our helmets protect our heads
soft from the fossil fuel burgers:

I made the decision to cut the metaphor about our helmets/heads to a more direct line, complemented by the (hopefully) weightier and more poignant "soft from the fossil fuel burgers," a line that is not nearly as direct but also holds some connotations, with the bike riding, the suburbs, and other images that have been reworked or added into the poem. This change, I hope, starts the poem off on a different foot, adding to the focus and hopefully impact the rest of the poem shapes into being. While I certainly think the type of images/metaphors Pinsky describe Bly's and Swenson's as have their place and purpose, the biggest thing I take from this introduction is to be more careful and considerate of my image/metaphor usage.