Shove and Tumble

Happy National Poetry Month!

Last week I got my first-ever dog: Rosie, a golden retriever, rescued from Tennessee. Since I married a dog person, I knew this would happen eventually, but I was unprepared for the magnetic love in this creature's eyes, or for the energy it requires to walk her enough so that she'll go to sleep at night!

Mark Doty has been writing about dogs for decades, so he does it better than I. Here is an excerpt from a wonderful poem that I heard him read at Smith College. The entire poem appears at Salon.com

Shelter

They shove and tumble around us
on the concrete floor, the little ones,
just as they must have crowded
around the gates of this world,

eager to live. So much
to be licked, on earth,
what work! All mouth,
sure of their reception,

they've hurried to a realm
they know will feed them,
and they open their new faces
to us, tongues and teeth

apprehending our sweetness and pity,
smells and salts. This is here,
the minds register, yes,
and this, and this is good....

Poets Should Give Encores

I think that as poets and consumers of poetry we can be entirely too sedate. Thus, I want to propose a new aspect to poetry readings: encores. Even at quieter readings of "page" poems (as opposed to "spoken word" poems), when there is a good connection between reader and audience, that energy should be recognized and honored with an encore. Musicians give encores. The whole idea of an encore is for the audience to let the performer know how much they loved the performance and don't want it to end. When Mark Doty read at Smith College a couple weeks ago, he said, as he neared the end, "Ok, I think we have time for three more poems." Someone in the audience yelled, "Could you make it four?" When Doty was done reading, we clapped and clapped and clapped and he did stand up again and take a bow, but it would have been so much more gratifying if he had given an encore.

The other thing I think we should embrace more is applause, which is another great way for the audience to interact with the reader. Normally at poetry readings, the audience behaves like concert-goers listening to sonatas: remaining silent through everything, no matter how moving. All the emotion stays inside the individual listeners. Sometimes, this is appropriate. The poems are more quiet, or they require some pondering before they sink in. However, certain audiences tend to break into applause more easily at poetry readings. This gives the evening more of the lively feel of a jazz show, in which audiences applaud throughout in appreciation of the artists' virtuosity. When Sharon Olds read at Smith College last week, people applauded after every poem. The part of me that was raised going to Classical music concerts with my family thought, "How uncouth!" but the part of me that loves spontaneous expression thought, "How wonderful!"

Reviews in Brief

Notes on a few of the good books in my library:

Elizabeth Bishop. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. The long periods of time Bishop spent crafting her poems is evident in their careful construction. She creates subtle rhymes and meters within both traditional and invented forms. The poems tackle subjects such as loss, disconnection, and foreignness in a controlled, perceptive voice.

John Cage. Silence: Lectures and Writings. These lectures are not called poems, yet they have much to teach the poet about how the arrangement of words on a page can be seen as a performance of the work. Cage, a composer, describes the “chance methods” through which he creates work based on his Zen beliefs. The result is a bizarre beauty.

Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1999. Carson transforms narrative into lyric with her consistent use of rich and unusual figurative language. The ebb and flow of the lines evokes the inconstancy Geryon experiences as a depressive artist and particularly as a lover of the elusive Herakles. The standard plot provides a sturdy structure for Carson’s quirky, memorable characters and her bold revision of an ancient myth.

Lucille Clifton. Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2000. Clifton’s poems are admirable for their brevity and taut potency. Simply constructed and easy to read, they convey brave and unabashed messages about life’s essential duality of creation and destruction. Clifton does not shrink from ambivalence; rather she sees it everywhere and renders it affectingly, without gratuitous explication.

Robert Creeley

Creeley is one of those fabulously unclassifiable poets. I have heard him compared to other poets, even seen him labeled and placed in a "school," but I still think his work is in a class of its own. Some of it is clear and simple, some of it is obscure. Much of it is heartfelt, much of it is reserved. Even the more opaque of his verses seems to contain their own logic, like a painting that is well made but whose meaning is a mystery.

Who was it who said, "A poem should not mean, but be"?

Here is the Robert Creeley poem that showed up yesterday on my Poetry Daily desk calendar:

Dreams

Tunneling through the earth
this way, I didn't know

the surface was where
I had come from. Dreams.

Quotes of the Month

"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades."
- Boris Pasternak

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" - Emily Dickinson

Poetry Videos

Ok, so even though I'm a blogger, I'm not the most tech-savy poet around. I hardly ever visit YouTube, except when my partner has me watch rap videos from the 90s. So, excuse me if this is late-breaking news, but I recently discovered the coolest thing. Poets are making videos of their poems. The written word is coming alive in yet another new way: portable, transmittable, and off the page.

According to Patricia Smith, "Words - in particular, words laid down in hopeful, lyrical lines - don't even begin to approach their potential until they reach the open air. There, anyone can snag them, dream on them, memorize them, twist them to fit their own lives."

There must be dozens, hundreds of websites out there featuring video poetry. I'd love to hear of more. For now, check out my friend Cara Benson on The Continental Review, as well as several famous page and slam poets at Open Door Poetry.

Onward!

Wonders of the Babelfish

Who remembers the Babelfish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which translates every language when inserted into a person's ear? Today's circuitous route of wordplay began when I logged into www.gazettenet.com and read a story about an exchange student who became malnourished while overseas. The boy's father suspected Stockholm syndrom. I didn't know what this was, so I looked it up online. I found a block of text where the content was emotional but the tone very dry and clinical. I wondered about the text's potential for transformation.

When I was in high school, I was friends with a couple of exchange students from Germany and France. I loved listening to them speak because their near fluency caused them to use English words in uncustomary ways that made literal sense but were not colloquial. They seemed to refresh the language.

Juliana Spahr used the Altavista Bablefish while composing her chapbook about Hawaii, things of each possible relation hashing against one another. She wrote poems in English, then translated them into other languages and back into English. Since the translations are literal, word order gets mixed up. Syntax is skewed. Some nuances are lost and others created.

This is a way of using chance to refresh language, one of the many ways a writer can mitigate her tired language assumptions. What I did, after translating my block of text into Russian and then back again, was to pick out the best, most surprising lines and arrange them into a poem. Maybe I didn't completely "write" it, but I did make artisitic decisions in arranging it.

strategies for to remain living

They focus on kindness’s captors. As a result,
victims know much about captors, less about themselves.
An honest reaction to the destructive working,
victims are encouraged to begin
psychological characteristics pleasing to captors.
Both feel the fear also as love in these high anxiety acts.
Victims from the existing versions
know the impossibility to act, decide, think, etc.
Perceiving their victimizers as omnipotent,
victims fasten psychologically to captors.