Brevity

I am writing a lot of short poems this month at the recommendation of my advisor; he liked one I did last month and suggested I do more. It's been a very interesting experiment.

In a short poem, you have to nail the image/metaphor. If you miss, you can't wave your hands ("Look over there—kittens!") or paper it over. There's nowhere to hide in a 5- or 6-line poem. But it also takes a lot of the pressure off, since getting the image right is almost the only thing you can do. There's no complicated structure to manage, no elements or themes to be brought into balance, and questions of cutting an revising are all necessarily at the micro level.

My advisor said the nice thing about short poems is that you can work on them in the car. I smiled and nodded and thought, "You have no idea what my commute is like." But this turns out to be completely true—even on I-93 at 8:00AM. It's possible to hold an entire short poem in my head, revise and rearrange it many times, and still have the whole thing available to write down when I arrive at work. The distraction of having to pay partial attention to the road achieves the same kind of self-hypnotized state I'm always trying to induce when I sit down at my desk: the conscious mind is there, but far enough off to one side that more interesting and unexpected associations can make themselves heard.

The trick is having an image to start from, and since image and metaphor are a focus for me right now this is a particularly useful exercise. I find I look at the world around me more closely, trying every day to find the image I will start from in the car the next morning. This is a good habit for writing any kind of poetry.

Best of all—at least for someone like me who tends to put a lot of pressure on herself over every single poem—this is very a low-stakes endeavor. The poem works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't I can just throw it away. I don't even count the hour lost, since I still got to work on time.

A Compliment, of Sorts

KT: Can I read you a poem?

Ben: Sure.

KT: (Reads poem.)

Ben: Hmm, that's pretty good. Who wrote it?

KT: I did. You mean you thought somebody else wrote it?
      (She means: You thought a real poet wrote it?)
      Why?

Ben: Nobody died.

KT:

What I Learned This Semester

A few weeks ago I completed my end-of-semester self-evaluation. Although I turned it in on deadline, I'm still thinking a lot about what I learned. None of it is new, or even new to me—I'm apparently a slow learner—but I think it's worth saying as many times as it takes to grind it into my inexplicably resistant brain.

About halfway through the semester, I wrote a poem that what I think may be my best so far. (Note that I'm not saying it's a great poem, just an improvement on my previous output.) Like a lot of my poems, it was written very quickly, but only after it rattled around in my brain for a couple of months. The way in which it finally came together together is a case study for what I learned this semester.

At the last residency I attended a student lecture on surrealism. As the audience was gathering, the speaker showed the short surrealist silent film, Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.¹ The film features a famous scene in which a woman's eye is apparently sliced through with a straight razor. Buñuel told people at the time that the scene was accomplished using an elderly, blind dog, and that that's how the film got its name. I saw it in a French class in college and was suitably horrified. This time, I turned away before the scene came on the screen.

Even after I got home from the residency, I couldn't stop thinking about the film. I'd find myself dreaming about it as I was falling asleep or stuck in traffic or making dinner. I wanted to write a poem about it, but I resisted. What did I have to say—"Boy, I sure hated that film"? I pushed the thought aside and got to work on my semester.

Reading for my first packet included The Selected Levis, and I fell hard Larry Levis. In my very first critical essay, I examined the way Levis handled time and narrative in "Slow Child with a Book of Birds." Because I was supposed to relate the subject of the essay to my own work, I concluded with some ideas about how I might push my writing towards a more sophisticated intertwining of the lyric and the narrative.

And then I kept writing the same old stuff in the same old way.

Two months passed and I had exhausted my backlog of ideas for poems. Luis and Salvador wouldn't leave me alone. I sat down at the dining room table on a Monday morning at 6:00 AM, opened my notebook, and wrote: "Once is enough for the chien andalou...."

I kept writing for an hour. I got to the point that I now think of as the hinge of the poem and had to put my pen down because I was shocked to discover the reason that image would not let me be. I wrote a little more, and when I was done I had written a poem about time, about love, about memory. I had written my best poem yet.

Here's what I learned this semester:

1. Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.
2. Write the terrible poem that wants to be written.
3. Never underestimate the power of giving voice to your aspirations.

Booklist #5

Last list of the semester:

• In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990, by Frank Bidart
• The Radiant, by Cynthia Huntington
• Letters to a Stranger, by Thomas James
• The Light the Dead See, by Frank Stanford
• Ill Lit, by Franz Wright

Love, loved, loved Cynthia Huntington. She and Larry Levis are the two finds of this semester for me. Perhaps I should not therefore have been surprised when I realized that The Radiant was the winner of the 2001 Levis Poetry Prize. You can read her work on Terrain.org, Verse Daily, and Orion Magazine, and there's a great interview on the National Book Foundation web site.

Booklist #4

It was prose poem month for packet #4:

• Moments without Names: New and Selected Prose Poems, by Morton Marcus
• Selected Poems, by Mary Ruefle
• The World Doesn't End, by Charles Simic
• Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writer, edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand

The prose poem kind of mystifies me. I thought I'd have a better understanding of what it does and how it works as a result of reading so many and writing about one of Simic's, but I don't. I wrote two of my own this month, just to try something new, and they were both pretty terrible. All the decisions I made about htem felt arbitrary.

I imagine this is how writers of formal verse felt when free verse showed up...

Booklist #3

It was apparently "women poets" month for this packet. I'd never heard of any of them (no surprise, I guess, since I am such a comparative newcomer to poetry):

• Rouge Pulp, by Dorothy Barresi
• The Dig and Hotel Fiesta, by Lynn Emmanuel
• The Work of a Common Woman, by Judy Grahn
• Housekeeping in a Dream, by Laura Kasischke (not pictured because I had to return it to the library before posting this)
• Misery Prefigured, by J. Allyn Rosser

I wrote papers on Barresi and Rosser and read most of Grahn. I only read a little of Kasischke and wished I'd had time for more; she's on my list to read again in the future.

Barresi was by far my favorite. I love her statement on PoetryNet (probably because it confirms so many of my own prejudices) and there's a very nice interview with her on "The Creative Community." If this interests you, you can read some of her work on West Branch and Poetry Daily.

Hi there!

Remember me? The one who was going to blog her way through her first semester? The one who disappeared in September?

What the hell happened?

I'm still not sure, but I think it involved the trifecta of life, work, and the semester. My plan is to make up for it in December (a plan that also extends to exercise and eating something besides takeout) and try to do better in the new year. I turned in my last packet on Monday and I've got a few end-of-semester tasks to do this week. Once that's out of the way, here's how I plan to spend my "free" time:

• Organizing. Organizing my office, my filing cabinet, my jewelry box, my sock drawer. Nothing in our house doesn't look like a hurricane hit it. I don't care if everything's filthy, but clutter drives me crazy.¹
• Cooking ahead. Making and freezing spaghetti sauce. Making and freezing chicken and vegetable stock. Making and freezing chili². Making homemade granola.
• Reading for pleasure.
• Reading prose for pleasure.
• Sleeping. This weekend, for example, I have not ruled out the possibility of going to bed tonight and not getting up until Monday morning.
• And, of course, blogging. First up: my reading for the last three packets.

Talk to you soon!

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¹ My friend Hal likes to say, "But, Kathleen, why drive when you're close enough to walk?"
² Reorganizing the freezer.