mjh's blog

Size matters … in poems

Here at the Café Poetica, where the wireless is ethereal, the server sets down a small plate with a little morsel I pop into my mouth. These appetizers are almost always "good enough." In the worst cases, they’re gone before I think about spitting them out. In the best cases, I ask, "May I have some more, please?"

Next up: a large plate. This is no empanada: it’s a calzone. I take a bite as Walt Whitman looks at me from the pass-thru, smiling expectantly, wiping his hands on an apron. I stall, "h-h-hot." A few bites in, I’m enjoying this. Before long, I’m stuffed and the plate is still half full. No matter how good this dish is, it’s more than I want at one sitting. And if it’s an off day, I wouldn’t give the leftovers to my dog.

My metaphor is as tart as a lemon (and my similes juicy). You take my point and yet I go on and on, testing your resolve. Let me be brief: be brief. I do not offer advice, especially to poets, whom I have nothing to teach. I’ll just say what I like: a tasty morsel. If I can’t stop my eye from wandering ahead — just how long is this? — I probably won’t get to the end. (Haven’t you already scanned ahead? Would your patience increase if these lines didn’t reach the edge of the page?) There’s a difference between rhetoric and poetry. Get a blog. Keep a journal. Pour your heart out in detail — that could produce great writing and surely produces cheap therapy. But if you have 10 things to say or 10 ways to say one thing, consider which is "best" (don’t ask me) or write 10 poems to figure it out.

That said, please yourself first. If you also please someone else, that’s gravy. Not that everything is better with gravy.

Raven’s Rule: If your poem is longer than The Raven, it should be better. Good luck with that.

Poetry Daily: Buddha in Sunlight, by Red Hawk

Nice. I like this one a lot, once I get past the misuse of ‘further.’ (OK, call it ‘common’ or ‘colloquial’ usage.)

Poetry Daily: Buddha in Sunlight, by Red Hawk

“As thought shapes the shaper” — Now I Become Myself, by May Sarton

Sarton nailed it, including the landing (metaphorically speaking, of course). [via walkingraven]

Happy Birthday, Robert Frost!

3/26/1874.

The End of National Poetry Month

For the record, I posted one of my poems every day during the month of April, except for one day, when a technical glitch stopped me. Moreover, I have 47 poems on my blog at this time (one is up twice and I don’t want to delete the duplicate).

http://www.edgewiseblog.com/mjh/category/poems/

Our New US Poet Laureate

Even dim Duhbya supports poetry, when the chimps are at the vet. A hearty welcome to Kay Ryan! peace, mjh

Dana Gioia Online – Kay Ryan

Here is “Paired Things” from Flamingo Watching in which image and abstraction dance so consummate a pas de deux that one wonders why modern poetics ever considered the two imaginative impulses at odds:

Paired Things

    Who, who had only seen wings,
    could extrapolate the
    skinny sticks of things
    birds use for land,
    the backward way they bend,
    the silly way they stand?
    And who, only studying
    birdtracks in the sand,
    could think those little forks
    had decamped on the wind?
    So many paired things seem odd.
    Who ever would have dreamed
    the broad winged raven of despair
    would quit the air and go
    bandylegged upon the ground,
    a common crow?

“Paired Things” displays Ryans characteristic style: dense figurative language, varied diction, internal rhyme, the interrogative mode, and playful vers libre, which elusively alternates between iambic and unmetered lines. One of Ryans signature devices is the counterpoint of sight and sound in the placement of her poetic language. Her hidden rhymes and metrical passages only became fully apparent when the poem is spoken aloud. “Paired Things” also hovers, as so many Ryan poems do, on the edge of allegory.

Dana Gioia Online – Kay Ryan

PS: In farewell, thanks to her predecessor, Ted Kooser.

After Years

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer’s retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Blow Up Your TV

I’m very lucky to have grown up with poetry from the crib. I have a few friends who write poetry and many more who reference poetry and poets in casual conversation. Poetry is not distant nor academic. (Lest you think we are the new Bloomsbury Group, we also talk about TV and the rest of modern culture.)

I found the following article thought-provoking (hat tip to Dangerousmeta):

Why Poetry Matters – ChronicleReview.com
By JAY PARINI

Poetry doesn’t matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.

In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. …

I question much that Parini writes in his entire piece. I live in the 21st Century among poets and appreciators. I see poetry in many, diverse publications, including the infinite Web. Parini completely ignores “spoken word,” slams and rap. Our country, which pours money into violence and destruction, has crowned great poets laureate, though many people cannot name one.

Strangely, Parini goes on to blame poets for making poetry hard by demanding a level of literacy the populace once had (not really) but now lacks (also not true). He blames the poets, instead of society and education. In fact, he congratulates the Academical Village for “domesticating” poets. (Those same “hard” poets?) I can’t cogently respond to this portion of Parini’s essay because it scarcely makes sense to me.

To their credit, the domesticated poets grazing in English Departments surely have helped their students appreciate the deeper meanings in poetry. “Publish or perish” and conferences and competition do not necessarily produce popularly-known poets, but it’s a living, which is hard for a poet to come by — at least, as a poet. (Ironically, I am a poet who works for a university, but in a field not-often associated with poetry: I teach computer classes.)

Still, any academic worth his or her salt can toss off an essay replete with informed references worth pursuing. I enjoyed Parini’s compellation of ‘beware of poets’ references — those alone are worth reading. A Defence of Poetry, by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Frost’s “Education by Poetry” warrant more consideration.

In the end, thinking about poetry is a far better use of one’s mind than so many alternatives. I agree with Parini’s assertion that “poetry can make a difference in the lives of readers.” If only we gave a fraction more of our time to poetry — reading and writing — than we do to everything that is so ugly, cruel and mean. That’s a wish you won’t hear the self-serving bloviators bray to the numb mobs that hang on their invective. peace, mjh