2003
Tollbooth Press
Exposition in a poem is giving up. It is laziness. It's a gutless shrug, an obligatory nod towards making a smooth bridge from consciousness to consciousness. By making pre-digested sound bites of stanzas, it pretends that gap between mind to mind is easily crossed.
People explain in the poem, which is prose, or explain before the poem, which makes the poem pointless.
The poem should have metamorphosis and action, and should pack a punch. Meaning should be in the poem the way a tree exists over time.
"But what is it ABOUT? "
As if every symphony must have a theme as hummable as a nursery rhyme!
On the way to a new place I am sublimely happy. I've never been there and I'm open. It can't disappoint because I don't know what to expect. Getting lost on the way is the best part. All the winding streets want to be followed and I am sure there are small discoveries that will be useful later. A park, a cafe, an unusual place, a hiding place for treasure. Knowledge of these lost roads will turn out to matter. I store away the places I get to when lost, like a squirrel burying acorns. We might forget where they are but if they are scattered thickly enough, forgetting won't matter, because there will always be something to find.
In the poem I enjoy making mistakes. My own bad handwriting and misreading often calls up a better word. I get echos and unexpectedly winding paths and gaps to be jumped by new leaps or new bridges. What in the world was I thinking? Retracing the path is difficult and I get lost again. A detective and a spy and a bold explorer who is not out to conquer or claim territory. If my thinking is wooly and the map uncertain, the roads are twistier;I look back and history changes. If the fog sets in, anyone who goes outside to walk across the street will end up in a different universe.
Sometimes getting lost with other people I see their agitation and uncertainty. By god, they want a map, and directions. Do you really know where we're going? my hapless, unnerved passenger asks. "Of course,"I reply, grinning insanely. "You don't actually know, do you? " they quaver. "We'll get there eventually, no rush. " Any attempt I make to comfort or placate my passenger, or the reader of my poems, is insincere. Meander with me or don't get in the car, buddy.
Poets: I recommend that you get lost for a good long time. All the focus on the destination, on the point, the point on the map, the precise route that is well defined, is getting in the way of the poem. And when you get to the end will you look back and report, "I drove down this street, and then turned left at the light, and went 0. 3 miles to the house with the blue door" ? Or will you have a more complex and labyrinthine story to tell? Is your poem a path, or a world?
How about ambient poetry as a means to freedom?
Artists and people of all description listen to music to free up their creative energies. If you want to free your verbal mind, surround yourself with poetry read out loud.
A message communicated directly is not the point. A poem reduced to a sound bite cheapens poetry, cheapens the liberating power of words.
The confessional style currently popular - and by confessional I do not mean to invoke the sexist backlash against women poets like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath who pioneered speaking the unspeakable - is done. It has developed along many paths. Anything unspeakable is now speakable. The hidden life of family, of relationships, of private life, has been exposed. A little sound bite, a log turned over to expose the crawling grubs or wrap up the family into a neat package of feelings - chopped up and then carefully prepared to be neatly bite size and sweet like sushi - no matter the depth of the emotion, perhaps its day is done. All that can now be integrated into the poet's pursuit of wholeness.
I prefer making the cryptic. Swimming in the unknown depths of the sea rather than sitting around on my ass eating sushi. I am deriving equations of words, vision and emotion from a cryptoteleologic calculus.
Listening to an unfamiliar language can free thought from its ruts.
The listener does not have to understand to enjoy the wash of words and jazz. A coincidence of understanding can satisfy, but is not necessary. The mind should fly off on its own tangents of inspiration. Is this true? What has been understood should not be misunderstood: if language is music then the speaker is a subject of the imperial ear. Appropriation, used inappropriately, can be beautiful and inspiring and yet also it's like the antivenom of empire; innoculation against real listening. Maybe my advice to be ambient crosses this line. It bears thinking about. Perhaps it devalues the skill of listening, of holding forth extended attention.
Poetry read out loud that roams free can hypnotize us . . . The words should burst like fireworks or smears of paint vivid or cool across the glass of vision like the eye's private phosphenes.
I am not saying that the poem must be or can be nonsense.
The printed page, or repeated listening, can lead deeper into understanding of the poet. But requiring the poetry to lower itself to the level of quick understanding is to cheapen us all.
What do I want from poetry?
Metamorphosis. I want the poem to change me. I want to discover.
I think the poem is done. That, say, would make a good ending. It has the homey ring of finality.
Why am I stopping here? This is not the place to stop. This is a comfortable place. I've been here before. I'm at home at the end of this poem. I am afraid to jinx the poem by not stopping. It seems sufficient. And that seems terribly wrong. . . I have become complacent. This poem, stopped here, pats itself on the back smugly. A smug poem should be shot and put out of its misery. There is no reason to end here. It is possible that I should keep writing until completely exhausted. Anything unnecessary can be deleted later.
Keep going. Go further. But where?
I am afraid. I have stopped the poem at an obvious place. I am a coward.
I push. Something new happens. The poem goes somewhere. Part of it sticks out funny. It's dislocated. I push the poem. There is a pop and a snap and a warp and a settling. The poem assumes its place in some extra-dimensional plane. Without dislocating that comfortable joint, it wouldn't have gone there. The poem wraps up in itself. Its end leads the eye back into the loop. It's warped into somewhere unknown like a Moebius strip or a Klein bottle. I become the poem. There is no stopping.
A friend read the poem and said "Huh? " Then he said, "Wait. . . " and read it again.
Good!
What has happened here?
There at the gauntlet the poem trembles before its captors. One person doesn't understand the line about fire and flood. Another likes the fire and flood, but doesn't get the next line. Why is it there? Why not further down? Maybe it should be organized differently. How does it all connect? Isn't this poem really about your relationship with your dead mother? Maybe you should bring that out more!
And what happens is this. The mysterious movings in the depths of the poem -- assuming it started out with some depth -- are exposed and explained to the meanest intelligence. The poem becomes prose. It becomes mush; it tries to please everyone -- cafeteria food.
If you want to write something full of nuanced emotions about human relationships, your philosophy of life and how you arrived at it, if you want to describe your epiphanies so that anyone could understand them, write prose. Prose is paced for understanding. Prose paces so that anyone can catch up to it.
Poetry swirls and leaps and turns in on itself. It should be dense, rich, layered. Dense poetry rewards study and thought. It should not pace -- not even long narrative poetry. It changes state. It boils and sublimates.
A prose poem is something different; a vignette, or a collage, not an excerpt from a novel.
Look at the poem. If it can be written out as a paragraph -- with a paragraph's pacing and sensibility -- then make it so.
I keep hearing it and reading it. Memoirs and explanations; bad poetry that stinks of the thesaurus.
Possibly it's the lack of direct conversations about emotion that create these "poems". There is no place for it in conversation. Love, meditation, grief -- they are not public. Thehumdrum poem is greeted at the poetry reading by a polite murmur of appreciation. Repression and secrecy have created a world where the most banal of thoughts becomes a hidden treasure. Thus the bad poem with sincere emotions is applauded for the poet's courage in opening the treasure chest. The poet is certainly courageous, and sincere, but the poem is still a bad poem!
If your poem says, with all the tarting up that a thesaurus can provide, "I drank coffee; I brushed my teeth; I thought of my mother and my childhood; I had an epiphany," then it would be better writing if it were written as something else.
And about workshops -- it is exactly the unformed, least experienced, most vulnerable writer who should go of into a corner -- who should lock themselves into a cork-lined room -- who should live on a desert island, reading and writing until they are sure they know what they are doing.
Huh?
Harsels are the alien creatures from her newest book. For months or years she has been dreaming of its smooth flanks and its sailfin membrane -- its language & customs. Now she has finally seen one.
Her description of this experience jolted my thoughts onto a parallel track. When another person hears or reads my poem it brings it a degree closer to reality. Recently I brought a sheaf of translations to show to my friend Walter. "Read it," he commanded. "Uh, I can't. . . " I was evasive. He read it and I can still hear his voice on the words bringing them to life. Better than I could!
And Ted Gehrke reading Greg Hall's poem at the San Jose Art League reading. "Chorus of Benzedriiiiine. . . . . " he droned with his teeth together. He intoned it solemn & edgy & on fire with the physical memory of taking a lot of speed at some point in the haze of his beat-hippie past. I could see the words on the page in a distressed cruddy typewriter font, blurred and jarred almost off the page.
Jeannie Watson read a poem that impressed me deeply. I itched to see it on the page. "You read it," someone said. As I read the now familiar words out loud they became at once unfamiliar and profoundly intimate. It was a completely different poem that I made as I read.
As in love, for a moment I felt sorry for the rest of the world because they were not us. They were not in that room hearing this burst of word-reality becoming more real.
Not for the first time I thought of how a playwright must feel as actors meditate on the characters of the play and bring them a step closer to being real. Maybe the playwright feels betrayed. . . Gerry Hiken wrote a book called Afraid to Look: The Voice Project, about his life as an actor in repertory theater. As I read it I was slightly in awe. He has been all those people -- Uncle Vanya and the others. He knows them more intimately than I know my own family.
From a messy sheaf of loose leaf legal paper I typed all of Greg Hall's poems from Inamorata, to publish them. Another astonishing intimate act. The poems flowed from my fingertips. I felt as if I were writing them. They flowed through me as if I were perched on a tripod above a crack in the earth, breathing fumes, ranting, holding muscular snakes in my arms, the oracle, the Omphalos. . . Midwife to poems. I was honored to be their channel. And how different they look now in their little book!
I now challenge myself to read aloud. There is no more "Uh, I can't. . . " in me. Alone or to other people I will read out loud even if I'm somewhat incompetent. Read from a book of poetry, read my friends' work, read work I admire. Publish all of it aloud to the treetops. It becomes part of me like food eaten.
We should all be collaborating with artists of every form, dance, painting, music, theater, sculpture, movies. Isolation has nearly destroyed poetry's reality. Poetry slams, those entertaining game shows, are not the only answer. These somewhat dull boxes of the more serious academic style poetry readings, with a little murmur of polite appreciation after every humdrum poem, are also not a path we need to go down any further. Words are cheap. Paintings cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The other arts may be afraid we poets will cheapen them. The serious poems perhaps have some stake in their isolation and seriousness and humdrumitude -- afraid of the jolly roger of prostitution that entertainment would bring to their work. What else is there to fear?
Two kinds of bad poems I have been noticing lately, heard at readings, read in journals, and, most unfortunately, out of my own pen.
One kind is a poem about a moment that COULD be a poem. Doing a nurturing yet humdrum task; cooking tomato sauce or making a salad. Thought of and composed during some time that's boring. I have to wait in line at the bank while holding my struggling toddler. I must change the oil in my car. Well, this could be a poem. I could be experiencing this moment as a poetic moment. This greasy car battery could be a metaphor for something.
The other time I notice a bad poem committed is during a moment that SHOULD be a poem. Ah, my humdrum life. I have left it behind. I am walking on the beach. The ocean is surely poetic.
Surely, if I walk, and wait, and look with all my attention, a poem will come. But it doesn't.
There is no flash of thought. The poet is hoping that careful attention to the setting will make a poem.
Turn your attention to what is before you, and transmit it to the page. Your attention to the moment is filtered through everything that is you. Which theoretically should be enough to make a great poem - if you are Buddha. But most people aren't.
The poem is invited in. But all that comes out is prose - the prose juice squeezed out of a common experience. The pacing of that humdrum experience is the pace of prose. It is a paragraph in a book about someone's middle class American life.
When I write a poem like this, and realize it, I don't burn it. I keep it and look at it every so often to remind myself of how humdrum my writing can be. I keep it to remind myself to be kind to other people.
The ever-moving landscape is saying something even when no one is listening. That we see it means something to us but nothing to it. It is only one of many landscapes in the world. Its beauty and its meaning are meaningless to its consciousness. It just is. We can look at pictures frozen in a moment of time and know the landscape is still there and changing -- perhaps changed beyond all recognition. The glacier continues to make its slow voyage, observed only by birds, who aren't really looking. The fact that we see it now in photographs or in paintings does not stop its celebration of death. We might think that, because of the photograph, if we can't see it, it's not important. The 99. 9% of the glacier fields up in the mountain are unseen; we can observe only the surface, maybe from a helicopter or a ship. Underneath, it has the form and structure, the stratification of its ice and rock skeleton. The edge of a landscape is the cut edge of a fruit exposing its secret, of a pomegranate's bloody kernels or the star-heart of an orange sliced across its segments. The cut place where the glacier blooms and dies -- it is the violent death of the ice that attracts our looking. Breathlessly we wait for disaster. We want to witness death, to see the iceberg fall into the sea.
Rafael was talking the other day about good silence and bad silence. "The bad kind of silence, like not speaking up when you should be, about the war," he said, "and the good kind, the deep silence at the heart of everything, that you hear when you Really Know, the silence at the heart of the universe. "My heart flamed up instantly in protest, perhaps because I'm just ornery.
I took a good look at my fundamental disagreement. Silence, by excluding noise, is a hollow lie as an object of contemplation. Noise includes silence.
At the heart of things is noise like cosmic background radiation noise. And when you Really Know, then you can speak as well as listen. Otherwise, your Zen just sucks. The poet's job is to hear that cosmic noise. You realize the music in the noise and make way for it. Your moment of realizing it is transmittable across the vast gulf that separates people from each other across space and time. Fuck the silence. Otherwise, why be a poet?
One of those muses was hanging around a little too much. I thought I'd kick her ass. She was jumping around with her robes on fire. What the fuck! Why'd you light my ass on fire?
Get up old muse! I'm freaking out, the quince trees are blossoming somewhere in the wet morning and I would like them for my newspaper instead of this newspaper. Get up! And mercilessly I flick the lighter in front of the can of aquanet and blowtorch her ass again. But I miss, because now she's jumping around like a squirrel with its tail in a mousetrap. I keep trying to light her robes on fire, whatever they are, some kind of chlamys or peplos or something or other.
She's swinging wild with both fists. Is she drunk or what? The fire goes out. "Quit writing in your lap while you're driving 70 miles an hour, you fool. "
But I want to get to where there won't be any pigeons on your head, statue-muse. Don't just sit there in that fakey "The Thinker" pose. I'm in this room and all you can do is sit there. I would rather be a brain in a jar than be sitting here in this room with my knees aching and my stomach rumbling and my mouth wondering what a quince tastes like - pink? sour? bitter? grainy or crispy? Snakey cables would lead into the jar and bring me sensory input in a very high speed data feed. They'd be whipping around madly with sparks flying out. My captive brain would be flying, swimming through space. Words fly out.
"You call yourself feminist? You're attacking me! We're sisters, you fucked up bitch! "Exactly, that's why I keep trying to light your ass on fire. I don't even care which muse you are, I got Erato whipped long ago and you're next. Why do I keep waking up covered with bruises?