Counterbalance

Finally, at the Heart of It All - Does Poetry Matter?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: we have this notion that poetry is somehow only for academics. Only for those properly schooled in the art of verse and its various forms. What I've seen these past two weeks has not surprised me. A great number of intelligent readers and writers who have a so-so relationship with poetry have said that they simply don't feel qualified to participate on anything more than an overview level. The truth is, I don't either.  Yet we are the shrinking few that enjoy the written word in the first place -- what better audience could there be than us? We spend our days talking of 900 page novels and how many we'll read in the next few months. We are an audience painstakingly dedicated to the written word and we make sure our lives pivot around this point.  Yet, when it comes to poetry, we still we peck at it, taking what we need and moving on.  Never really committing to it in a substantial, ongoing way.  Why?

We bemoan the closing of small presses, the lack of proper advances for struggling writers, the lack of book fiction coverage in major newspapers and the shrinking amount of ink new fiction gets unless its sensational.  We should understand better than any other group how important it is to celebrate artists of the written word. Yet it's not on our radar. It's certainly not on mine.

In my searching for an answer, I came across this well-known article by Dana Gioia that you may already have seen. It's a tad dated, but it highlights what I think we've all been dancing around & this feeling that poetry flourishes only in academic communities. Here's an excerpt:

"American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible. "

Most importantly, Gioia hits on the shift from poetry once being an outward expression to it becoming an insular, inward expression to a select few:

"Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. "

The article is long, but well worth your read. It is also featured in a book (also published a while ago) I picked up last night: Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture.  I'll be back with more later today as I struggle to wrap up this week in a meaningful way.

Allen Ginsberg's Song

A simple, powerful poem that recurs and recurs with me. Phrases, lines, a word pairing or two, spring forth in my mind when I'm going about my day. I don't remember when I first encountered this poem and I'm not sure how it made its way fully into me, able to make itself known whenever it wants.  No matter the day or time or year. 

Song
by Allen Ginsberg

The weight of the world
       is love.
Under the burden
       of solitude,
under the burden
       of dissatisfaction

       the weight,
the weight we carry
       is love.

Who can deny?
       In dreams
it touches
       the body
in thought
       constructs
a miracle,
       in imagination
anguishes
       till born
in human----

looks out of the heart
        burning with purity
for the burden of life
        is love,

but we carry the weight
        wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
       at last,
must rest in the arms
       of love.

No rest
       without love,
no sleep
       without dreams

From The Collected Poems of Allen Ginsburg 1974-1980

What always sticks with my is the rhythm of this: the weight, the weight we carry is love.  The weight, the weight, the weight we carry is love.  A nice (or not so much?) chant, no?

Adrienne Crew's Morning Poetry Ritual

Adrienne Crew of the lovely, quirky and always-informative LA Brain Terrain, offers her thoughts on poetry and her current favorites.  Her post reminds me that some of the tried and true "greats" are called so for a reason:

Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip. People read poetry the same way they say their prayers because, in essence, poetry is a prayer. Religion evolved from a whispered wish to a full blown incantation. Therefore, I take a spiritual approach to poetry.

I start each morning with a poem--a puja in Sanskrit, really, that starts with "Atma tvam girja matih sahacarah/pranah sariram grham..." Like most poems, it's a song of the self that translates as "You are my Self, Parvati is my reason/My five pranas are Your attendants..."

I also read Rumi on a regular basis. His poem "Guest House" is pinned to my bulletin board at work. I read it every day.

I like to consider the force and rhythm of a poem. I admire poets because I don't write poetically. It's a struggle because i'm writing a novel and I always think my prose should be more poetic and lyrical. I like poets who play with language and include lots of images.

Although she's a musician, I've always considered Joni Mitchell as a poet. I like reading the works of Mary Oliver, Amy Gerstler, and Langston Hughes. My current favorite is:

Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.

To some people
Love is given,
To others --
Only heaven.

"Luck" by Langston Hughes, 1946

Billy Collins - Introduction to Poetry

Poetry Appreciation (less spasmodic, of course) continues this week as I've not even scratched the surface of what a "proper" down & dirty poetry week might consist of......and there are still so many of you that were interested in contributing. So, just when we thought we were safe and could shrug off that poetry nonsense (complete with eye-roll) to get back to more bookish pursuits, the week claims another week for itself. Should be fun, let's see where this goes.

While it seemed far too obvious to begin the first poetry week with a poem by our poet laureate, eight days in seems like a fine time to point you towards one of Billy Collin's poems that captures the very reason I wanted to have a down & dirty poetry week in the first place:

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside a poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Copyright 2001 Billy Collins
Excerpted from Sailing Alone Around the Rom, New and Selected Poems

This sums up my academic poetry experience quite well.  You?

Matthew Tiffany's Poetry for Dummies - With a Powerful Twist

The ever-insightful & always-frank Matthew Tiffany, of Condalmo, shares his insights about a poetry appreciation that starts off "vanilla", veers towards poetry for dummies, and ends up being just what he needs: something that resonates within him throughout the day.  Isn't that what we all hope for with poetry?:

My relationship with poetry is pure vanilla - plain, unadorned, no surprises.  I went to University of Maine at Farmington, a school with a good creative writing program, a good English major, good liberal arts in general (I think it's been rated top liberal arts college in the Northeast many years in a row now).  Wes McNair teaches there, or did; same with other well known poets, the names of which escape me, because I never took any classes with them.  My major was English, and I have no memory of any classes in poetry, which is sad.

My extracurricular poetics lead to some overheated stanzas here and there.  I worshipped at the altar of Bukowski, like any good English major.  (I was accused once of only liking Bukowski because of the U2 song about him, on their Zooropa album.)  I liked his poems, bought a book of his letters, thought Post Office was dynamite.  (Not poetry, I know.)  Dead Poets Society - yep, loved it times ten, but was wise enough to know a bad idea when some guy tried to start a DPS at our school.  Towanda, indeed.  I joined the writers' guild; I liked e.e. cummings, or E.E. Cummings, depending on who you asked.  Liked him enough to buy the $60 Complete Poems book, which I immediately filled with little scraps of paper, marking the ones I liked the best.  Soon after buying it, I received a birthday present copy of it from an ex-girlfriend with a slightly randy inscription.  My inability to tell her I already had it, and my unwillingness to move all those pint-sized paper scraps, lead to both volumes being shelved, and I've rarely opened them since.

In the past few years, I've come back to poetry for the briefest of periods - probably far less than anyone else that will contribute other, better posts to this subject.  I very much like William Stafford's work, "An Introduction to Some Poems" in particular.  I've printed poems here and there that I thought spoke well of the human condition, especially in our modern times, etc. blah blah.  I posted them at workplaces; nobody cared.  I retreated and bought Good Poems - both paper and on CD, read by Keillor and others - which I suspect puts me at the equivalent of reading John Grisham for Dummies on the train, but I don't care, because I like what I see in there.  Something about those small poems, most a page, two at the most - I read them right before bed (though not for a long time now), just one a night, and it settles me.  It does the job.  Fiction - prose - I need to interact with it, immerse myself in it, feel it surround me, feel the weight of it in my head when I am working and can't get to the book.  Poems are a break.  The only poem with one of those little slips of paper is Marge Piercy's "To Be of Use", which I am glad to discover tonight, opening this book after a long time away from it, because it speaks well to my mindset these days.

Lit Bits & A Bit About LAist

• Poetry Appreciation Week continues with more posts forthcoming from some of your favorite litbloggers.  In fact, it seems that the "week" might spill over into next week.  What does that meant to you? It means that if you are lurking in the shadows and have only now gotten up the courage to share your thoughts on poetry (surely the Clash post set the bar very low, did it not?), there's still plenty of time. Please comment or email me about your desire to share and I'll make it happen.
• Michael Redhill's Consolation is now in bookstores stateside! I had a chance (thank you Michael!) to get an advance copy of this (my very first, i must school myself on how to do this better in the future) and it was a moving read that I keep thinking about weeks after finishing it. It lingers in the mind.  My full report on it will be up next week. In the meantime, do check out what the blogcritics have to say. No NYT or LAT love just yet...hopefully we'll see something soon.
• Ed points out a Birnbaum interview with Heidi Julavits which perfectly illustrates the point I'm planning to make in my final Julavits post in the coming days.  She is smart, possibly too smart to seem down-to-earth enough during a reading, but she is a writer who captures the true essence of human beings and all of our faults and pretend non-faults.  Stay tuned.
• Condalmo shares what could be one of the top highlights of my 2007: Twin Peaks, Season Two. On DVD. April 10, 2007.  Mark your calendars and ask for the week off!
• Kensington Gardens is slowing a bit for me, despite my intense praise (which still holds). Reaalllly slowing. Anyone else experiencing the same?
• And finally, I've just been added on as a contributor to the LAist, the premier metroblog for Los Angeles!  Very exciting stuff -- and a huge thank you to Carolyn Kellogg for kicking me in the butt and telling me to go for it.  They cover it all and do so with an attitude seen nowhere else.  I'm so new (and green?) that I won't be on the staff pages for awhile. Have to build up the blog cred and all that.  But, I will be able to cross-post here 48 hours after posting there.  So, watch for that and do check in at the LAist on a regular basis.

A Different Kind of Poetry

One of my first introductions to poetry of an altogether different kind (but, really, how different?), was through the music of The Clash.  It wasn't until college that I discovered them -- I know, a crime. I was a child of the 80's and you know what that meant....big hair, big earrings and terrible music.  A dear friend of mine loved The Clash and had a marvelous story about using their lyrics for a junior high assignment. (Thank you Steve, wave hello, you're on camera.) 

I don't quite remember the details -- did the teacher ask them to write a poem, or just summarize their summer vacation? -- but Steve came in, stood at the front of the class and read the lyrics to "Lost in the Supermarket" by The Clash:

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

I wasn't born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see

I heard the people who lived on the ceiling
Scream and fight most scarily
Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling
That's how it's been all around me

I'm all tuned in, I see all the programmes
I save coupons from packets of tea
I've got my giant hit discoteque album
I empty a bottle and I feel a bit free

The kids in the halls and the pipes in the walls
Make me noises for company
Long distance callers make long distance calls
And the silence makes me lonely

And it's not hear
It disappear
I'm all lost

Quite powerful lyrics now matter what age -- but particularly poignant coming out of a 12 year old's mouth, no?  Apparently the teacher was very concerned that Steve was experiencing abuse at home, or at the very least, had some abusive neighbors and was suffering from loneliness. She was also a bit stunned at the poetry coming out of this kid. So worldly, so mature. One can almost imagine her sighing "ah, they grow up so fast."  In reality, he was just a very hip kid who knew a good poem when he read it.

While not an example of the most poetic Clash lyrics ever penned, and there are many in my opinion, these words do capture a very specific kind of feeling, a mood. "I wasn't born so much as I fell out" is very powerful to me and is, again, an example of how the right combination of words packs a punch.

I always smile when I hear this song and imagine Steve's teacher being both horrified and, I suspect, a tad jealous at his early poetic skill.  It reminds me that poetry can be found anywhere...in anything...especially outside the turreted castle walls of academia. 

Escapegrace Finds A Way Back In...To Poetry

The very clever & cunning Chris from escapegrace has graced us with her thoughts (post birthday rock & roll karoke hangover, no less! happy birthday!) on her on-again/off-again affair with poetry.  She mentions one of MY most favorite reads for 2006 by Maggie Nelson -- please run to buy this and read this! She also explores the idea that I think we're all secretly laboring under -- when did poetry get so damn serious and how can we make it fun again?:

When I was in third grade, I transferred to a brand new elementary school designed on the classrooms without walls model. If you were bored, you could look through the bookcases at the grade next door. I don’t think I was bored very often though, because I spent much of my free time that year composing an epic poem in rhyming couplets. (This was years on from the early experiments of “I see a flower in a tree/I see a flower on a bee” with illustrations.) To remember this shocks me because I feel so estranged now from poetry as a way to express or entertain myself. Callie’s request for poetry reflections made me wonder why this is.

Often times when I read poetry, I can’t find a way in…someone to talk to, or more specifically, someone to tell me a story. My first reaction is to describe this as a lack of “voice,” but the problem may be that I’m just not listening closely enough. Reading a novel is relaxing – the narrative is usually clear in even the most avant-garde fiction – but with poetry, the meaning and movement are more subtle. Frankly, you often have to work for it. Having spent the entirety of my adulthood pursuing a doctorate and “working” on literature, I didn’t want to work for pleasure. As a result, I read less and less poetry as time went on. In my few attempts to write poetry, I felt I was writing a story with line breaks and sadly, I am no Robert Browning.

Now that I’m through with school – walled and unwalled classrooms alike – I’m finding my way back to poetry slowly through the incredible privilege of having poets as friends. Jean Gallagher came out with two volumes in the past year or so – both of which are stunning: This Minute and Stubborn. Ali Liebegott won a Lambda Award for her prose/poetry hybrid The Beautifully Worthless last year, though I have to say old habits are hard to break – I’m even more excited for the new novel, The IHOP Papers. My excellent advisor and two former classmates also have recent collections worth checking out: Wayne Koestenbaum’s Best-selling Jewish Porn Films, Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder, and Geoffrey Jacques’s Just for a Thrill.

In considering the titles above, I think that part of the reason I’m being drawn to this poetry (aside from knowing its creators) is that the genre is becoming more fluid, allowing bits of prose to poke through without somehow undermining the seriousness of the poetry. Perhaps it’s an image problem. Somewhere along the road – taking the long way to avoid Bukowski’s house after the Beats off-ramp – poetry got so serious. I’m glad to see there’s some play at work in the genre, making it more available to be the voice of serious times.

Ai's Salome

Another poem that immediately comes to mind for me when I remember poetry is out there and mine for the reading, is Ai's Salome. What struck me most about her work when I first read it was how brutal it was. How frank and honest.  At the time I was so used to the flowery poetry of sonnets & more canonical poets I was supposed to find interesting.  Instead, I was drawn to Ai's powerful, almost gut-wrenching poetry. It was like nothing I had ever read before. I didn't know poetry could be like this and it fascinated me.

The collection that I always come back to is Sin. In it (and several of her other collections), she writes her poems as dramatic monologues by assuming the persona of a historical or fictional character.  Something else I had never seen in poetry before I read her work.  As a writer of fiction, this immediately appealed to me and I marveled at how she pulled it off. What she imagined them to be thinking, what she invented and made her own. The poem I found most powerful (and shocking and altogether, what the hell?) from the Sin collection is Salome. The first four lines in particular have always been an example to me of how powerful a few simple words can be when arranged in a specific manner.

Brief bio from another outstanding poetry anthology - The Before Columbus Foundation Poetry Anthology:

"A true child of America's multiethnic and multicultural drift, Ai's father was Japanese and her mother was part black, Choctaw, and Irish. Just as she refuses to compromise her particular vision by writing from some preordained 'women's' point of view (a fact which draws criticism from some), she refuses to be placed into any ethnic pigeionhole.  Ai's poetry relentlessly goes for the jugular. Critics have commented on the knife-like quality of Ai's writing; and her poems do slash sharply -- through history, across contemporary cultural divisions, and deep into the consciousness of the reader -- to lay bare the profound disorder that lies just beneath the surface of things."

Salome:

I scissor the stem of the red carnation
and set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way your head would,
if I cut it off.
But what if I tore you apart
for those afternoons
when I was fifteen
and so like a bird of paradise
slaughtered for its feathers.
Even my name suggested wings,
wicker cages, flight.
Come, sit on my lap, you said.
I felt as if I had flown there;
I was weightless.
You were forty and married.
That she was my mother never mattered.
She was a door that opened onto me.
The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence
and musk, the musk of Sundays. Sweat and sweetness.
That dried plum and licorice taste
always back of my tongue
and your tongue against my teeth,
then touching mine. How many times?--
I counted, but could never remember.
And when I thought we'd go on forever,
that nothing could stop us
as we fell endlessly from consciousness,
orders came: War in the north.
Your sword, the gold epaulets,
the uniform so brightly colored,
so unlike war, I thought.
And your horse; how you rode out the gate.
No, how that horse danced beneath you
toward the sound of cannon fire.
I could hear it, so many leagues away.
I could see you fall, your face scarlet,
the horse dancing on without you.
And at the same moment,
Mother sighed and turned clumsily in the hammock,
the Madeira in the thin-stemmed glass
spilled into the grass,
and I felt myself hardening to a brandy-colored wood,
my skin, a thousand strings drawn so taut
that when I walked to the house
I could hear music
tumbling like a waterfall of China silk
behind me.
I took your letter from my bodice.
Salome, I heard your voice,
little bird, fly. But I did not.
I untied the lilac ribbon at my breasts
and lay down on your bed.
After a while, I heard Mother's footsteps,
watched her walk to the window.
I closed my eyes
and when I opened them
the shadow of a sword passed through my throat
and Mother, dressed like a grenadier,
bent and kissed me on the lips.

Ai, “Salome” from Sin (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986).
Copyright © 1986 by Ai. Source: Sin (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986).

See what I mean? I cringed just now while re-typing it.  Sheesh. Heavy stuff.  Not where my usual interest in poetry lies. Yet there is something so sinister and dark -- so strongly stated -- that it's always stood out for me as an excellent example of what poetry can communicate. Perhaps I also have a soft spot for her because she is both Choctaw Indian and Irish, as am I.

A brief insight into why she explores such dark topics, is her response to why she changed her name to Ai: "Ai is the only name by which I wish, and indeed, should be known. Since I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop, and I was forced to live a lie for so many years, while my mother concealed my natural father's identity from me, I feel that I should not have to be identified with a man, who was only my stepfather, for all eternity."

Other Ai links to check out:
Critics & Her Response

PBS Interview with Ai
Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth of the Jim Lehrer News Hour

Lauren Cerand's Cosmic Poetry Connection

The lovely, delectable, and intrinsically stylish Lauren Cerand of Lux Lotus offers her views on poetry & mentions some great poets and new books (books! new books!) I cannot wait to check out. She also makes the first stab at what I had hoped this week would be all about -- making the connection between poetry and the world we're living in at this very moment:

It's rather cosmic that you asked me about poetry because it's a subject that I've been thinking about a lot lately. Whenever I'm feeling busiest in my day-to-day life as an arts publicist, I often find myself turning to the compact intensity of a poem during the brief moments I have to read for pleasure before bed or in transit.

Not too long ago, I found myself carving out a new identity following the demise of a long-term relationship that defined most of my twenties... perhaps this explains my awakened interest in the sort of furtive, grasping love that poets seem to capture so eloquently!

The Stray Dog Cabaret, recently published by NYRB Classics, is my idea of a perfect volume of poetry. Loosely gathering work by poets active just before the Russian Revolution, it conjures a sense of place in the reader's mind that is at once enchanting, doomed and austere. It's hard to imagine while we're young that long after we're gone the only image that might remain, if any, is of a shawl slipping from a lover's shoulders; that truth and beauty fade. And yet, it is what it is, unabashedly ephemeral and ever more wondrous for ever having existed at all.

Other stand-alone poems I've been returning to repeatedly lately, all classics: "The Young Fools" (Les Ingénus) by Paul Verlaine, "Dear Miss Emily" by James Galvin and "The Métier of Blossoming" by Denise Levertov. In  a more contemporary vein, I love "Deer Quake" by Aase Berg and Robert Baker's "your limbs are like the cranes, my little fascist" the latter of which Michelle Lin of New York Brain Terrain turned me on to not long ago.

It would seem that my love of all things poetic has even crept into my professional life, given two of the books that I'm publicizing at the moment: David Breskin's Supermodel, an epic poem that tells the story of an archetypical supermodel in one sentence, interspersed with found text from the Internet (Soft Skull Press), and Gayle Brandeis' Self Storage, a novel about a woman whose habit of buying and reselling storage unit contents sets her on a path of self-discovery inspired by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. While very different in many respects, both books are extremely culturally relevant and firmly place poetry in its most resonant context: commenting on the world around us, right now. I am grateful for it.

Lauren Cerand writes about art, politics and style, broadly defined, at LuxLotus.com.