an escape...

from “Tradition and Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberations.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

*

applause

How very like Eliot to want an escape from emotion. To want an escape from the prison of his own stiff and choking personality. That would certainly make living through the day possible for him – but, I think he’s correct even if the reasoning is wrong – wrong in the sense of being focused on turning away from rather than turning to. Murder in the Cathedral is a good example of writing that springs from this war with the self ... doing the right thing, but for the wrong reason. It is, in fact, his escape, his turning away from, that makes possible The Waste Land – a necessary masterpiece bent on a looking back.

This is not to say that that riding the emotion will not allow the writer to reach greatness. Example: Kerouac. But the same emotional forces that pushed him there tore him to apart in the end. If On the Road had never been published, Kerouac would have continued to experiment and to explore new rivers of prose and poetry. The result, in my opinion, would have been greater than Shakespeare or Melville. He would have continued his literary quest – a quest for no one other than himself – as did Dickinson.

Being snubbed by publication and public readers was, in truth, the greatest gift Dickinson could have hoped for. Her genius, no doubt, would have allowed her to overcome a weak and parasitic public, but the work and the gain would have been much more difficult and much less satisfying to her.

a quiet, unremarkable existence...

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Charles Simic

Description of a Lost Thing


It never had a name,
Nor do I remember how I found it.
I carried it in my pocket
Like a lost button
Except it wasn’t a button.

Horror movies,
All-night cafeterias,
Dark barrooms
And poolhalls,
On rain-slicked streets.

It led a quiet, unremarkable existence
Like a shadow in a dream,
An angel on a pin,
And then it vanished.
The years passed with their row

Of nameless stations,
Till somebody told me this is it!
And fool that I was,
I got off on an empty platform
With no town in sight.

*

This recent Charles Simic poem from My Noiseless Entourage encapsulates all the effective qualities of his approach to poetry: uncertainty, humor, juxtaposition. His best work tends to defy explanation. The reader knows, and the reader doesn’t. His poetry is for the corners of one’s existence.

Simic refuses, and correctly so, to identify the it of the poem. To do so would eliminate all impact in this piece, and the inexplicable ending would shrivel on the page:

And fool that I was,
I got off an empty platform
With no town in sight.

The wonderful shift in setting – very dream-like – puts me in mind of Jean Cocteau’s use of landscape in films such as Orphée and La Belle et la Bête. Note the poem’s second stanza with its horror movies, all-night cafeterias, poolhalls, barrooms and rain-slicked streets, adding a very filmic and sinister ambiguity to this work of poetry noir.

Time is stretched to a meaningless state – the rows “Of nameless stations”. Points of departure and destination. An outside force, never named, tells the speaker, emphatically, this is it!, and a realization occurs. But this realization is in the spirit and tradition of Dickinson’s truth told “slant”. The speaker’s status as fool for “an empty platform” is both humorous and pathetic. “No town in sight,” Simic writes, creating a marvelous sense of oblivion to end the piece.

A poem that will never exhaust its possibilities.

which will you go for...

Pink Moon

Nick Drake

(Hannibal, 1972)


...music to live by...


*

A fabulous recording – Drake’s last. Pure music. The voice and guitar – drenched in mood.

When lifting the mask from a local clown
And feeling down like him
And I’m seeing the light in a station bar
And travelling far in sin
And I’m sailing downstairs to the northern line
Watching the shine of the shoes
And hearing the trials of the people there
Who’s to care if they lose.
                 – from “Parasite”

*

“Place to Be”...

something essential...

A meme from They Shoot Poets - Don't They?: “Give us at least 10 quotations pertaining to poetry - from 10 different writers &/or poets which best coincide with your philosophy vis a vis ars poetica. They can be posthumous or otherwise. The order is not important - unless it is to you.”

If the number ten is too daunting, go for less.


I, too, dislike it...
        “Poetry,” Marianne Moore


“With Poe words were figures; an old language truly, but one from which he carried over only the most elemental qualities to his new purpose; which was, to find a way to tell his soul.”
        In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams


I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
         “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” W. B. Yeats


“An oar moves a boat by entering what lies outside it. A poem, like an oar, extends inner life into the waters of story and things, of language and music.”
        “The Questions of Originality,” Jane Hirshfield


A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?
         The Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 3, R. M. Rilke


“It is nothing new to say that all utterance is erotic in some sense, that all language shows the structure of desire at some level.”
        Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson


A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
         #1212, Emily Dickinson


“Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye…. It’s like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can’t see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there.”
        Writing the Australian Crawl, William Stafford


“Everyone knows that poets are born and not made in school. This is true also of painters, sculptors, and musicians. Something that is essential can’t be taught; it can only be given, or earned, or formulated in a manner too mysterious to be picked apart and redesigned for the next person.”
        A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver


A hand moves, and the fire’s whirling takes different shapes,
Triangles, squares: all things change when we do.
The first word, “Ah,” blossomed into all others.
Each of them is true.
         “Singing Image of Fire,” Kūkai (9th century)

Tag: Liz, Stu, Greg, Kate, and Pris

...and anyone else who wants to tackle this one...

don't invent... listen...

From Nick Bruno's blog - They Shoot Poets – Don't They?:

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. – Jean Cocteau

True enough. Actually, the poet finds whatever is there, writes it down, trying to stay as close to the vision as possible – but that most likely will only approach what’s there.

Like a sculptor who finds in a block of stone the face, the shoulder, the arm and breast, the knee. The form emerges – but it’s already there. Waiting.

So it is with the best of poems.

*

A passage from Jelaluddin Rumi:

The center clears. Knowing comes:
The body is not singular like a corpse,
but singular like a salt grain
still in the side of the mountain.

        (Trans. John Moyne and Coleman Barks)

part of the machine...

Overlord, 1975

Stuart Cooper, Dir.

We all think the invasion can’t be far off. It’s like being part of a machine which gets bigger and bigger… while we grow smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left.

These lines from Overlord carry the full weight of the destructive force of war – in terms of the film, the D-Day invasion of 1944 – but that force cannot be confined to any one moment in history. Cooper, who wrote and directed this film at the end of the Vietnam War, stated that though the politics of conflict may change, the nature of war never does. Sound familiar? Loss is loss.

The point of the film is not to instill or exploit heroism, and not to delineate the impact or outcome of the invasion. This is a unique approach. The storyline shows the tragic nature of war – and without being an action film. Cooper, weaving amazing archival footage from the Imperial War Museum into his fictional narrative, creates a seamless story: one young man’s preparation for his tragic end, an end made all the more impacting because of Brian Stirner’s believable interpretation of a young British soldier who knows he is going to die but can only be swept closer to his own inevitable death.




I can think of few films more directly relevant to our set of circumstances in the world. This is a haunting work – a grand mix of beauty, terror, waste, and tragedy.

*

In April 2007, Overlord was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection.

a vagueness over everything...

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Amy Clampitt

Fog


A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands' spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
                              Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season's rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
                             Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O'Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.

*

I’ve always believed Amy Clampitt to be the complete package – beautiful lyricism with meditative intensity and a strong painter’s touch with imagery, most often centered in nature. A metaphysical poet of the highest order. Mixing the best of Bishop with the best of Donne. Clampitt’s first published poem was in The New Yorker. Her first book, The Kingfisher, published when she was 63, is as strong a debut as American literature can hope for.

In the late winter of 1986, I was sitting in an ICU waiting room at Emory University Hospital – had been there for days – fearful tension had closed to numbness – and leafing through an issue of Vanity Fair, I came upon an essay about Clampitt. The focus was her approach to suffering and letting go in her poem “A Procession at Candlemas”. Enlightenment. I was hooked. As roads lead on to other roads – in 1990, it was my fortune to have dinner with Clampitt – there were four or five poets gathered around the table. Her voice was compelling. Every word was – or at least seemed to me to be so – a lesson, an instruction, a phrase that gave way to understanding the self. Most likely, I was just ready.

“Fog” is a poem that shows off Clampitt’s strengths. A music that will make one dizzy, but the dance leads to an awakening ... the ticking, linear filigree of bird voices. Her language is beautiful in its detail, as shown in the opening stanza:

the islands’ spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean

It’s a stunning, intense view of specificity. Her word choice – stanza two, for example – is rich and impeccable: banished, tassel, panicled, needlegrass, furred hawkweed, vested, and clearest. Strong music with a painter’s brush: “as Georgia / O'Keefe might have seen it”.

Reading Clampitt is like opening your eyes to find yourself standing in the deep center of a great forest. Her words are the path.

"something is happening here"...

The clearest thing I could say is that poetry is a waste of time. But then - it wouldn't have it any other way. Nor would I. Let it be a waste of time. And move on to other things, I say, like ...

Given enough time, everyone will hate me. Simply for the stupid things I say or write. Things I believe, things I want, a dream I still hold to. Things I think are true, things I think are false. Things I know, don't know, have forgotten, have refused to learn, refused to build. Blame me for the known, for the unknown, for all answers, questions, memos, e-mail. Blame me for the math.

Everyone will hate - not because of what I do, or who I am, or where I've been - but simply because they can.

What's stronger than love? That's easy. Hate. Water kills fire every time.

Two out of three?

the dark, waiting presence...

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Jeff Daniel Marion

Tight Lines


First read the water,
then cast toward pockets,
the deep spaces between
the cold print of rocks.

It’s the flow that beguiles—
what’s beneath that lures.

But when the line goes
taut,
a dark, waiting presence
will flash
and weave its way,
throbbing, into your pulse.

*

Marion’s poem is, of course, about fishing and has nothing to do with fishing, and in tone and style, a typical piece from his oeuvre that shows a full, lasting panorama of Appalachia. His works for me exemplify the term a poet’s poet. His craft is drawn with deceptively simple strokes – the brief push and tug of words that open the mind.

“First,” the reader is told, one must look outside the self. This, as Marion understands, is possible because the self has been explored though never exhausted. In this regard, a strong connection is made for recognizing one’s part in the universe. Note the “throbbing into [the] pulse” at the end of the poem. “Tight Lines,” from Vigils: Selected Poems, is a work in the tradition of Whitman’s “noiseless patient spider,” launching its filament “out of itself” into the unknown.

The beauty at the structural center of the poem is the surface “flow that beguiles” and the lure of what is beneath that surface – the discovery. The river’s continual flowing is a strong likeness for the ebb of existence. The “dark, waiting presence” is what allows us to find the full potential of the creative life – a life that certainly will incorporate an artistic way of moving and being in the world but should also touch every aspect of daily living, both the extraordinary and the mundane. Let me add that the waiting presence is all around us. Always.

The river is a journey. We place ourselves in the context and borders of that journey – we must be part of it. First a flash. Then a weaving of the way. But there will be a throbbing into the pulse.

Springs from the mountains have no thoughts of ocean. The move in the now. Oceans will come, but later.

thoughts of wind...

Bamboo

Su Shih, 1036-1101

*

A break in silence.

finding a place...

Poet on the Mountain Top

Chen Zhou, 1427-1509

(Chinese hand scroll, ink on paper)


*

There’s a place of enlightenment. The wind has its own vocabulary. The mountain, its own sense of breathing. You can watch the chest move – in & out, in & out. What you learn there will stay with you. You can try to give it shape with a pen – a story in words and lines. You can describe it, but you cannot write it.

And that should be enough.

*

A poem by Cold Mountain – a reprise :

#16

People ask the way to Cold Mountain
but roads don’t reach Cold Mountain
in summer the ice doesn’t melt
and the morning fog is too dense
how did someone like me arrive
our minds are not the same
if they were the same
you would be here

        (Trans. Red Pine)

a stem of gestures...

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Tory Dent

Palea


Only my mouth taking you in, the greenery splayed deep green.

Within my mouth, your arm inserted, a stem of gestures, breaking
        gracefully.

Into each other we root arbitrarily, like bushes, silken, and
        guttural.

Palaver, we open for the thrill of closing, for the thrill of it:
        opening.

The night was so humid when I knelt on the steps, wet and cold,
        of prewar stone.

A charm bracelet of sorts we budded, handmade but brazen, as if
        organic.

I cannot imagine the end of my fascination, emblazoned but
        feather-white too.

The gold closure of this like a gold coin is, of course, ancient.

Why can't experience disseminate itself, be silken and brazen yet
        underwater?

A miniature Eiffel Tower, an enameled shamrock, a charm owned
        by its bracelet.

*

Author of three essential collections: What Silence Equals, HIV, Mon Amour, and Black Milk – Tory Dent is a necessary voice in American literature. Her early death was such a loss. “Palea” – a work that is typically Dentian – expresses the poet’s focus on the beautiful and the terrible – a poem about identity that is reluctant to give itself over to commentary. So many strong phrases live in this poem: the greenery splayed deep green ... into each other we root arbitrarily ... gestures, breaking gracefully ... emblazoned but feather-white too. The syntax, the word choice, the sounds of the phrasings are effective.

For all who love poetry, Dent’s line, “I cannot imagine the end of my fascination,” speaks to those fragile aspects of literature and life that we are drawn to. The stories that are fragmented. The great works, unwritten, unfinished. Devastatingly painful moments expressed in words. A truth that is real in every sense.

The wonderful barrage of images that fill this brief poem – in some way – defies us or dares us to consider the real world outside our doors of safety and perception. There is pain, to be sure. But there’s also an essence, a chord that once heard, we cannot escape – a moment that completely alters our ways of thought, feeling, expression. Dent’s writing speaks to that part of our lives.

A poem that is deeply felt on many levels, but also a work that is elusive with its logic and made all the more appealing for that.

conditions of remoteness...

In one of her essays, Jeanette Winterson explores the notion of identity and craft – specifically the work of Gertrude Stein – and comments on Wordsworth’s often misquoted and misrepresented mantra ... emotion recollected in tranquility:

Tranquility is not the cozy atmosphere of the fireside pencil, it is the condition of remoteness that allows the writer artful access to her work. ‘Write from your own experience’ is fine for the writing class, useless to the writer. What the writer knows has to be put away from her as though she has never known it, so that it is recalled vividly, with the shock of memory after concussion. In the act of writing the emotions of the writer are returned and recharged.

       from “Testimony Against Gertrude Stein,” Art Objects

*

I agree with Winterson – experience, autobiography, and history do conspire against the writing potential. They get in the way – clutter the voice with noise and weight the truth with propaganda – albeit well-intentioned ... but misinformation nonetheless.

       * * *

Experience, certainly, will enter the writing process, but it should not be the genesis. Raymond Carver, near the end of his life, read a biography of Chekhov, and became fascinated by a seemingly insignificant but unusual act carried out by Chekhov’s attending physician, just prior to the writer’s death. Carver then set out to write about that moment in a short story, “Errand”. He does have the experience of his reading and his knowledge of Chekhov’s life and death – but the story begins with Carver’s connection with a moment. It’s not the life or even the death of Chekhov that is vital to Carver; it’s the emotional connection that Carver makes – or finds is a better word – with that that moment, that act … with words on a page and a world inside his own head.

trembling already...

W. S. Merwin

Language


Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest.

*

The strength of Merwin’s piece, for me, rests in the day of witness. The need for expression, for understanding, for getting at the truth. Or at least as close as possible – given what can be known.

And who can say when that day of witness is – Some words are buried with us... some rise with the rest. What a wonderful wholeness.

what is and is not...

The most significant poetry in our culture is, of course, the poetry that refuses to announce itself. It’s what we love to kill. It’s the poetry of the uncommon – not popularized by media blitzes, not by all those who would remove the poem from the poetry. And they certainly do.

We’re left with words... and a host of skeletons, dragging from long chains, across worn, wooden floors – dust-bound.

What remains is dribble, is insignificant, is splashed across the air waves as though it were real. But, of course, it’s not.

It is what we’ve settled for.

What we say and what is ... don't agree.

Don’t ask me for models, for examples. If I have to say, there’s no way for you to read.

That’s my view from the bottom.

*

Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
When you know that my poems are not poems,
Then we can speak of poetry!

          Ryōkan (Trans. John Stevens)

into the woods...

Ryōkan / 1775-1831


When all thoughts
Are exhausted
I slip into the woods
And gather
A pile of shepherd’s purse.

Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.

          (Trans. John Stevens)

*

This untitled piece by Ryōkan, a master Zen poet, focuses directly on the relationship between human being and universe. To begin, the mind must be emptied – exhausted – before enlightenment is possible. “Turn[ing] clear and transparent” illustrates the self’s passing form a state of “in the world” to “of the world” – a part of the living system.

In the first stanza, the shepherd’s purse is rooted in the ground, but it flowers into the outside world – connecting both. The stream in stanza two cuts into the ground, touching each crevice. And like the stream, the self connects with its universe, becoming transparent – again emptied – for the journey.

To touch the world is to find the way.

the presence...

Ant on a Stone Mill

Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768)

*

There is power in small. Less is more.