What Is Poetry?

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My daughter just finished a unit on writing poetry with her middle- and high-schoolers. Last night she read one of their poems aloud to me. If you teach poetry, the prompt may be familiar to you (I think it must have been this one, or one like it: https://englishlinx.com/poetry/i-am-poem-part1.html). The student’s refrain is:

“I am someone dreadfully tired of my cat.”

It goes on, filled with weird specific outrages committed by the cat. My teacher-daughter, her sister, and I were all cracking up by the time it ended. (Perhaps you had to be there to “get it.”) Trust me, the poem was hysterical (and, if you are worried, it was obvious that this student was all wrapped up in her relationship with her kitty).

Our conversation led me to think about the poetry books I’ve read—or am reading—lately. So I’m interrupting my poetry-book-a-day binge to share those with you. Two of the books were recommended by Sharon Bryan in her Hugo House course last fall. And the third was an impulse buy, the last time I visited an actual bricks-and-mortar bookstore.

Poem, Revised, edited by Robert Hartwell Fiske and Laura Cherry (Marion St. Press, 2008), collects 50+ essays by poets about their revision process of a specific poem. Mark Vinz’s poem “The Penitent” began as prose, an attempt to get down on paper a memory that had come to him on a sleepless night. It went through many drafts before it appeared in Prairie Schooner. He cites another much-loved poetry book on my shelf:

As Richard Hugo says in Triggering Town, poems tend to have two subjects—what triggers or generates them and what the author discovers they’re really about, which is what emerges through the process of revision. (p. 46)

I found Kathleen Flenniken’s essay especially useful. I’ve been rushing—driving myself—to get a manuscript together, but she writes about setting aside a poem for eight months: “it didn’t have the power I hoped for,” and only then coming back to it, slowly, letting it find itself. The process included her readers, “mentors, more precisely” (p. 300).

The second book is Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1968). I’ve been reading a few pages a day of this book and, initially, I wasn’t sure it would be helpful (much emphasis on centuries-old poems). But it has won me over.

First of all, a poem cannot be regarded as totally independent of the poet’s and reader’s extrinsic experiences—not if we recognize that our experiences include language itself, and that it is upon our past linguistic experiences that poetry depends for its most characteristic effects. Moreover, a poem does not, like the proposition systems of mathematical logic, make its own rules; it adopts and adapts the rules (i.e., the conventions) of nonliterary discourse, so that the principles which generate and conclude the one are conspicuously reflected in those of the other. (p. 97)

Herrnstein Smith’s book is not a light read, but it’s now filled with highlighted passages like this line: “successful closure is never a matter of merely gratifying the reader’s conditioned expectations” (p. 138), or—I might add—our own expectations. As Mark Vinz observed, we discover what the poem is about as we revise.

It is not likely that my daughter will be reading either Poem, Revised or Poetic Closure. But a third book is very likely going to be passed along to her: What Is Poetry: The Essential Guide to Reading & Writing Poems, by Michael Rosen (Candlewick Press, 2016).

What Is Poetry is illustrated by Jill Calder, and illustrated in another way by nursery rhymes and ditties and short poems that do what Rosen feels poetry must always do: surprise. (No surprise that the other two books emphasize this as well.) It is pretty obviously aimed toward a younger audience, but I loved it.

Under the heading, “Poetry Can Give an Impression,” Rosen offers this poem, right out of my own childhood:

From a Railway Carriage

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle;
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

 

 

Solstice: Light & Dark of the Salish Sea

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Tomorrow evening — Sunday, 11 April 2021, 7 p.m. PST — I’ll be participating in the launch of Solstice: Light & Dark of the Salish Sea (Chuckanut Sandstone Press), a delightful collection of poems, selected (solicited!) and edited by Carla Shafer. The collection features the work of 29 poets in two sections, Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice.

The reading is on Zoom, hosted by Village Books. You can find a list of the poets and register for the reading,  here.

This is my winter solstice poem:

Solstice Song

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
—Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

At the winter solstice, darkness
falls early, thin band of copper

as the sun winks out.
No matter how faint the light,

I walk the shore,
hands in my pockets, my hood

pulled up against the wind.
I might be a witch,

muttering incantations.
I might be a raven,

dreaming of spring.
The year turns, indigo,

burnt umber. My words

rhyme with the green weeds,
thick tendrils that lay in windrows

along the dark shore.
What chains are these, light

and lengthening?
What song is this, the sea

bids me sing?

      —Bethany Reid

Sharon Bryan

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Last fall, on the recommendation of Kathleen Flenniken and Holly J. Hughes, I decided to take a Hugo House course from poet Sharon Bryan. Wanting to get to know her a bit, first, I purchased three of her books—and plunged in.

Sharon’s Flying Blind (Sarabande Books, 1996) is, itself, a plunge. It drops a reader not so much into the tangible stuff of a life, as into language. And, from there (because from where else?) we swim back into life. I knew right away that I wanted to write a blog post about this book. Its 40-some poems are arranged without sections. Titles point us toward the book’s obsession: “Be-,” “Conjugation,” “-Esque,” “Ode to the OED,” “Subjunctive.” The last begins: “If only”—in a book where nothing is quite what it seems. As the poet writes in “Dissembling”: “Let’s keep an eye / on what’s impossible, its friction // with what is.”

Beneath this layer of playful verbal acrobatics, there is another layer. As Frederick Busch says in his cover praise: “behind the brainy and considering voice-in-the-poems is real woundedness, real and interesting experience, a particular history and earned awareness that refuses to let the book be ‘abstract.’…It’s felt thinking.”

I emailed Sharon and asked how Flying Blind came into being. Her response was a master-course:

After my second book came out, I knew I wanted to make a different kind of poem from the ones in those books. I didn’t think they were bad, but I knew they didn’t reflect my sense of the relationship between language and the world, which is that language creates the world we live in and move through. In those first books, the reverse is true: the poems describe the world as if it were a given. I was determined to find a way to write new poems grounded in that sense of language as shaper of what we see and feel. So I took a deliberate six-month break from writing poems to get the old voices out of my head, and during it read and re-read books from philosophy and anthropology about language. When I started writing again, I wrote poems that started with language as subject matter. I was also able to draw on humor—something central to me—in a way I hadn’t before.

I’d written maybe a dozen or fifteen poems before I discovered the order they should be in. I was keeping them in alphabetical order in a folder so I could find them easily when I gave a reading, and one day I joked to myself that maybe that could be the order. But then I thought, “Wait, it’s all about language. I can use that order.” It wasn’t a strict sense of writing a poem for each letter of the alphabet—I didn’t. But it gave me ideas for some poems. And I knew that I wanted the last one I wrote to be the first in the book, so I gave it a title that would put it there: “Abracadabra.”

But the biggest discovery of all for me didn’t come until the manuscript was almost finished. Only then did I see that while the surface of the poems was all about language, the emotions that drove the poems came from the deaths of three friends a decade earlier. The three were Richard Blessing, Richard Hugo, and Hugo’s stepson Matthew Hansen. All three had died of different kinds of cancer within a two-year period. All three were poets, they knew each other and had many friends in common, so it was a community event, very intense and moving. I came to realize that in my grief I had thrown myself on the mercy of language as if it were a safety net—and it was. I would never have presumed to tell their stories myself, but those three told them through the poems I wrote.”

That line, “I had thrown myself on the mercy of language” made me decide to use almost all that Sharon emailed to me. It’s the answer to a puzzle I’ve been stymied by while working on a book of elegies about my parents. “We can’t quite see / the world,” she writes in the title poem, “but we have it / in translation.” Reading this book made me think about how my usual reliance on the concrete, the event exactly as it happened, is a sort of crutch, a nostalgia. To paraphrase Richard Hugo (a quote she deployed more than once in our class): you owe reality  nothing, the poem, everything. [Or, as Sharon elaborated in another email exchange, “we write to get at the truth of how we think and feel”—not that we don’t revere the truth but that “reality” can get in our way.]

What to do with this insight? Well, she has a poem for that, too:

Minutiae

Having things is a way to forget
about them: straight teeth, enough
food, the midnight blue silk dress.

As if memory and longing were kissing
cousins, and to have were to quench
the light and heat of desire.

So writing things down, love
or the list of groceries, is a way
to leave them behind, perfused

with a certain day that will rise
like ether from the wrinkled page
when you come across it. Forgetting

keeps things whole by letting them
go—the woman become a tree,
for example, or the man a constellation.

What clings to us is incidental,
dust too fine to cohere
and become forgettable.

—Sharon Bryan

You can read more of Sharon’s poems under the poems tab at her website, and I especially recommend the video at the bottom of the page (look for “from Eureka”).

Don Mee Choi

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Don Mee Choi is a citizen of our troubled world. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, lived in Hong Kong, and now lives in the United States, in Seattle, Washington. Reading her newest book, DMZ Colony, challenged me to throw out my lens on the crises in global politics, particularly immigration, and try on a new perspective. The Academy of American Poets site addresses her multi-form, surprising art by quoting Craig Santos Perez:  “Choi translates feminist politics into an experimental poetry that demilitarizes, deconstructs, and decolonizes any master narrative.” It is hard for me to say more.

I am reading DMZ Colony for a Hugo House class this spring. All by itself, it is an education in global politics. It was published by WAVE books (2020), and is the 2020 winner of the National Book Award for poetry. The NBA judges hailed DMZ Colony as a “tour de force” of personal reckoning, and also wrote of this moving interweaving of poetic forms and translation:

Don Mee Choi’s urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but “during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.” Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all “victims of History,” so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.

“Migratory latticework” and “bricolage” do much to help us imagine this book. And do explore the Poetry Foundation and other sites. But much of DMZ Colony is in images, and you really have to hold it in your hands to experience it.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to one section:

One starless night, I was stranded….I decided to translate the stories of eight girls who survived the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre, which took place in Gyeongsangnam-do, a southern province of South Korea, in 1951. My decision to translate the girls’ stories wasn’t entirely mine alone. It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving. So it’s most likely that the decision, seemingly all mine, was already made years ago by someone else, which is to say, language — that is to say, — translation — always arises from collective consciousness.

And here’s one poem (printed in white lettering on a black page):

We too were born under the bridge. Every night, we listened to the whispers of the angels bathing in the river. They too cried and sang, Sky, sky, sky. Our lullaby. They didn’t blame our nations. Migrating from pole to pole they watched our falling stars, our failing planet. They too were hungry. They too were homesick. We the fatherless watched the angels depart. Our farewell. In reality, we were all motherless.