On another look...

Last Thursday night, I picked up Donald Hall’s The Painted Bed when I couldn’t sleep. I shuffle through various poetry books on my night stand, even after reading them, going back to them again and again usually proves to be worthwhile.

I read three poems that night at random. All poems I have read multiple times before. That night there were things that resonated in two of these poems that simply did not do the same for me in earlier reads.

In Wool Squares where the voice talks about going through a “muddled heap of women’s work and finding wool squares she used to knit while he sat opposite. And this is one of those poems that one assumes Hall is writing from his own persona. Jane has succumbed finally to leukemia and he does a most interesting thing. He evokes Young Caitlin, wife of Dylan Thomas. It is so odd that this did not strike me as particularly profound in earlier readings. Hall finds himself in Caitlin here the widow with the “leftover life to kill.” His final stanza…

“At seventy I taste / In solitude / Starvation’s food, / As the land goes to waste / Where her death overthrew / A government of two.”

My recollection is that in earlier reads I focused on the wool squares themselves and the visual of the two of them sitting in the same room, he recalling her work on them. I also connected with his solitude. It is hard not to read Halls late work especially and not feel the grayness. But in this last read I was struck by his metaphorical view as the two of them a unique government that was overthrow by her death. These are not profound discoveries in this poem, but they provided a more salient view for me then before.

The other poem was Ardor. Hall unleashes all the accompanying feelings; the outrage, the desire. The inability to work, to love or die. “Each day lapses as I recite my complaints / Lust is grief that has turned over in bed / to look the other way.” A very strong final line in the last stanza. The magnitude of it seems so real in my latest read.

People will often say that Hall is a downer to read. Certainly, isolated to an individual poem or two, one can easily reach this conclusion. But even in Hall’s later work, the underlying motive is love. There few contemporary poets that have the command of love either in abundance or loss that he has.

What Makes a Successful Writer?

#links

What budding writer is going to pass up a headline like that? I couldn't. Besides the fact that I've often found the source (Kelli) to be an informative and positive reinforcement, it is just one of those lines I gravitate to no matter how any times I see it. I suppose it is the perfect pickup line for writers.

What is often the case when we read something like this, is it's really something we already know deep down inside. It is also quite often something that in spite of such knowledge, we need to keep hearing it and seeing it because it is something that is so simple in concept, that we make it hard to conform to.

I've come to the conclusion for instance, that forcing yourself to write through blocks is good, even at the expense of writing poorly, I've also fount that it is good to read some poetry every night before retiring, and often at least five minutes or so before writing, read a poem or two. Such exercises help me to see the magic of others in their words. I have several specific poets that I like to use in this capacity because of their particular talent as wordsmiths.

Playing with words, reading, these are certainly very basic and fundamentally easy things that writers can do. That so many believe in their link to successful writing is reason to take them seriously and make sure that they are integrated into the day-to day efforts of anyone who is wishing to improve his or her writing for whatever reason they write.

Last Day of Survey On Rewrites

Today is the last opportunity to participate in the survey of poets on their revision practices. See the left sidebar and take the survey if you have not already. There are about 12 hours left till it closes. Thanks!

Dana Goodyear - Kansas City - September 5th

Dana Goodyear - Poet & senior editor and staff writer at the New Yorker will appear at the Kansas City Public Library in the Halzberg Auditorium - 14 W.10th St. - Kansas City, Missouri on Wednesday - September 5th. Reception is at 6:00 PM and program begins at 6:30PM.

Goodyear will discuss her debut book of poetry, Honey and Junk. Goodyear first hit my radar screen when she became one of the 18 debut poets of 2005 that were featured in Poets & Writers.

I've read a few of her poems and she is remarkably impressionable with creating an undercurrent to her often melancholy voice.

I beseech you, don't make me beg...

I’m scaling down this weeks summit and being careful, but not particularly graceful in my descent. Monday and Tuesday were relatively speaking manageable days. Wednesday was on the other hand, one of those days where it all falls apart and topples down on you. So today, I continue down the incline, but with concern as not to create an avalanche behind me.

There are but two days left for people to respond to my survey on the sidebar about rewrites. I want to blog some next week on revisions and while such a survey is of course not scientifically representative of the poet population as a whole, it will give me some idea as to what readers here might consider their norm. So please, don’t make be beg, (I look so undignified) if you haven’t done so already, take a moment to respond.

Couple of bits from my journal this week:

• The lady up the street powered up her nose / in a mammoth snub / I flashed an Indian corm smile / like I wanted her approving curtsy
• Afternoon slumps / Holding its hands in its pockets
• I would watch her sleep / Sometimes in silent fog
• You popped my bubble wrap / In italicized arrogance / I popped yours in return

Poet's Pulpit

So you wake up one morning and "poof" you're the poet laureate. Okay, it didn't quite happen that way. First you get a call from out of the blue and you mull the offer around in your crowded head, bounce the idea off family and finally call back and say, "yes, I'll do it."

Then comes that fateful morning when you realize "you are it!" This has come and passed for Charles Simic. So what's going on with him?

For all the fan fair and hoop-la about raising the interest in poetry in this country by recent past laureates, Simic is not as passionately optimistic. He views Americans as a people who are not particularly proud of our literature and he is not inclined to believe you can force the issue. Oh, I'll admit that a part of me wants to be more idealistic about the picture than that, but perhaps Simic is more reality grounded here. At any point, we all really do know that the evangelism of poetry is not going to bring everyone the their knees in verse.

If I were asked to do a state of the union on poetry, I believe first of all, not a lot of people would tune in. There is a large segment of society who really could care less. Still, for a good many people poetry remains a valued commodity. And like the American economy, the leading indicators here are truly mixed.

It seems fewer presses are turning out poetry. Yet we are seeing poetry all over the Internet. There are few economic success stories among contemporary poets, yet MFA programs are everywhere. To be sure, there are a significant number of people who do in fact turn to poetry, but it is also true that this is a representatively low percentage of the American public. Simic is right, as a nation we do not proud of our literature, poetry or otherwise. Our interests are splintered and divided among so many possibilities it is like vying a piece of the Nielsen ratings.

Of course I want to see poetry promoted. And I am already pleased to know from things Simic has said that he is not about to set out to define what poetry is or should be to readers or poets. To create "ramps for poetically handicapped people" (borrowing a phrase from Billy Collins) is not going to bring America to some profound awakening about poetry. The best we can do is to support the art, gain exposure for it, and let it reach those who are receptive to it.

Simic is in his own right a very talented poet. I believe he can be a outstanding ambassador for the art. Like everyone else, we'll have to set back and give him time to develop his methodology.

Right Hand Pointing - # 16 With 2 Of My Poems

Right Hand Pointing 16: "the paradox of going on" here

• Animal Instinct here
• The Cousin here