Anita’s Poetry Blog

And there they play for evermore

At battlecock and shuttledore

                  –Edward Lear, “The Daddy Long-Legs and the Fly”

Writing a poem can be very like a game.

I’m calling it battlecock and shuttledore. If you look up “battledore” on Wikipedia you will start to see what I’m getting at.

As in most games, there’s a two-sided-ness to any kind of writing. Physically, writing entails a flat little trail of black print moving slowly from left to right across a white page – with an ENORMOUS UNIVERSE of everything else pulsing around it. Among the “everything else” are your thoughts, ideas, passions, visions, hopes, fears, etc.– all of which must squash themselves down into this flat little trail, as if the words are gate-keepers, and only they are equipped to siphon all that pent-up energy inside you out into the physical world where it will make sense, even to you.

“There, there, what happened? Just tell Grandma, she will understand. . . .” croons the Gate-keeper, as you stand there sagging under the wriggling contents of your entire mind, body, and imagination.

And because Grandma speaks only one language, the language of words, and because she seems to offer you quick relief – you waste no time before you start to shrink down from your hyperactive state of highest enchantment where you jolly ought to remain, your entire self inflated like a balloon with plenty of room inside, and instead you collapse back to your normal, everyday shape. You act like she’s merely asking you something simple like “How was school?” or “What’s your favorite color?” Your head was just now filled with ten-dimensional dreams; you opened your mouth to donate these dreams to the universe, but only invisible bubbles came drifting out and floated away, twinkling. Then—because Grandma-Gatekeeper is so encouraging– you try to write exactly what you remember from your recent brush with full-bore experience. You write one thing after another, the way things happen in the normal world.

Except in a poem.

Real poems have shape, and heft, and elasticity. They sometimes squish when you squeeze them, or shatter into tiny droplets. Some poems you can mold like taffy or clay, or knead like bread dough. The point is, there’s room inside a poem: a poem is not flat.

And one reason it’s not flat is that it is made up of many parts, some of which you supply from your own little Cabinet of Ideas, and some of which you have swept up from the various bits and pieces leftover from the necessary explosion that got the whole poem going in the first place.

Every poem is like this – a collation of elements that would never, under the normal conditions that Grandma-the-Gatekeeper is in charge of – would never come together inside the same space. This is battlecock and shuttledore, that mysterious game between imagination and reason, between chaos and order, which are forever skating around in a magical rink somewhere, waiting for the poet to come in and turn the whole thing into a game. To make a poem. Again. A thing that was not in the Universe at all, previously.

                                    Noticing in Poetry

           Poets define themselves by what they notice. If several people are present at the same event, a poet will likely notice fewer things than anyone else, but will notice them a whole lot more intently. Readers are not always aware of everything that the poet has noticed—in terms of making a list—and sometimes so little is mentioned that the reader’s attention is forcibly drawn to what is left out. What is mentioned or left out, in a well-crafted poem, becomes a third thing in itself, a “what-is-said-and-not-said,” which rises like a mist above the words. The quality (and perhaps quantity!) of this ‘third universe’ emerging from the poem (to use a term from Wilhelm von Humboldt, the 18^th century linguist, who was speaking about the non-physical nature of language as a whole), is part of every individual poet’s style, and learning to read for mist, so to speak, is a necessary skill for the full enjoyment of poetry.  

          Poetry is very different from prose in this regard, since prose tends to fill up all the space it can inside a chosen subject, “furnishing” a situation like a familiar and comfortable room for the reader. Let me digress briefly into an explanation by experience, and then give some poetic examples.

            I was sitting on a rock one recent August morning listening to the slow gargling of a mostly-dried-up brook, the same brook that by November will be flowing fast and loud. Still, I expected the quiet little noise to be continuous, so my attention wandered, and was drawn back quite suddenly when I realized the water volume had cut back to a whisper, as if somebody had turned the spigot down. My first thought was “the creek has changed rhythm,” but “rhythm” seemed too simple for what had happened. “The creek has changed its song,” I said, trying out a metaphor to see if it rang true. But no— to say “song” here was like putting the cart before the horse. The variable language of the creek is what it does, and I was privileged to be hearing what I now realized was happening almost privately, out of the usual range of “creek sounds,” and thus much before it ought to be labeled a song.

            In some similar way so must the original planets and stars have formed. What is said in a good poem, is essential. What is not said (a great deal) is not missed, nor even implied, but fallow.

            The human equivalent of creek-speech is poetry. This is what we do with our voices, mouths, and tongues when we are physically producing words rather than inarticulate noises. Speaking is more than just sound, of course (as it is, also, with the creek), but poetry brings us into the larger world by the way it allows our speech almost literally to “touch upon” a few things here and there that have made themselves urgent. Poetry is like the “first response” of the human body to the cogent world.

            A couple of examples of this touching-upon: First, the opening two stanzas of a poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly “Of Ancient Origins and War.”

 And briefly stay, the junketing sparrows, briefly,

Briefly, their flurries like small wine spills,

While the one divides into two: the heart and its shadow,

The world and its threat, the crow back of the sparrow.

          The “scene” here is a garden of fruit trees and birds, and the poem announces the theme by calling up the sparrow and inviting it to bring along all the poetically-embedded roles the small ubiquitous bird has seen fit to assume over the centuries. “Briefly,” she begins, hoping to impose some discipline, and later “the one” to keep the flocks from darkening the entire sky. Chiefly I’m thinking of Yeats’ “the brawling of the sparrows in the eaves,” but further back, I believe the lines acknowledge Bede’s Anglo-Saxon poem about the sparrow passing quickly through the mead hall on a bitter winter night. She proceeds to interrogate the sparrow for its own version of that story. And already in the first stanza, the wine has spilled in the mead hall (meant to be a sanctuary from outer darkness).

          “Alarm begins its troubled shoot” she says in stanza 3, moving us into a garden, where the static fruit trees give us the message that all is not well, not even inside our warm and civilized space, and not even briefly. In the second stanza she has begun to lead us gradually into the complex of darknesses that the original fable and image could not fully display. Here the world seems to divide neatly into the familiar dark and light, with the crow as a shadow double to the light and innocent sparrow. But wait—the sparrow, with its “crow back”, is already part crow. And here is a good example of how scientifically accurate can be a poet’s noticing: some species of sparrow are so dark brown on the back that they could be mistaken for blackbirds. We dimly recall that we have—likely more than once—had that reflex response and been temporarily bewildered 

            By deftly interweaving a vocabulary of violent words: scattershot, tearing, shoots, broken, threat—with a lulling collection of more “poetic” ones: moon, shadow, heart, dream, dark, singing, she touches, rather tenderly in the overall, upon the baffling human fate to be destructive even among our birds and fruit trees (Garden of Eden anyone?) For the time being we must comfort ourselves by listening to the trees singing in the dark, and watching our children grow up. “And so now./ And so that now” she says near the end of the poem, as if the brief “now” of the sparrow might, after all, be an indication of something we have not yet seen come to pass.

            I’d like a second example to be a narrative poem, just to show that gaps do exist even when a poem seems chock full of sequence. But most story- poems take a long time to unfurl. Here, instead, is part I of a seven-section poem by Galway Kinnell, “The Shoes of Wandering,” in which the simple act of buying a pair of shoes at the Salvation Army store spins out into a dark tale of enchantment.

            Squatting at the rack

            in the Store of the Salvation

            Army, putting on, one after one

            these shoes strangers have died from, I discover

            the eldershoes of my feet,

            that take my feet

            as their first feet, clinging

            down to the least knuckle and corn.

            And I walk out now,

            in dead shoes, in the new light,

            on the steppingstones

            of someone else’s wandering,

            a twinge

            in this foot or that saying

            turn or stay or take

            forty-three giant steps

            backwards, frightened

            I may already have lost

            the way: the first step, the Crone

            who scried the crystal said, shall be

            to lose the way.

            This is a poem by a person pre-disposed to see the world as innately enchanted; thus, he is going to notice things that will contribute to his ongoing inner fairy tale. Yet the poem actually begins with a somewhat scientific comparison. Trying on the shoes of people who have left them behind (not necessarily dead, but “died from” their former shoes), he has a flash of insight into the basic nature of feet, how ancient they are. And with the single word “eldershoes,” the reader is graced with the entire capsulated history of the evolution of our species, who became fully human only when we could walk upright.

            In the second stanza the old shoes themselves, like the Red Shoes of the ballet story, flex their power, and the poet becomes the archetypal wanderer, the pilgrim, the necromancer, the exile, the hapless fool of fairy tales who is in thrall to the story. All of this because he has bought a pair of old shoes. So many different directions he could have gone with them—sordid, humorous, pathetic, cynical, political. But this poet chose to trust the structure of the fairy tale to carry out his initial gut response. And many of those other elements do make their appearance later in the poem, though still in disguise.

     One of the ways that poetry differs from prose is that poetry makes “leaps.” At least that’s one explanation for why we don’t always write in complete sentences. After all, humans don’t dream in complete sentences, nor do we take in the world that way.
     But even poets have their leaping limits. “Poetic logic” has a structure of its own that transcends the arbitrary quirkiness of individual minds. So, I want to give an example of what I think is poor poetic leaping. It’s a very small poem to beat up on, and I realize that context makes a huge difference, especially with small poems.
     This poem was sent to me upon the occasion of the sudden death of a mutual friend. The poet could not be present at the memorial, and asked me if I would read the poem aloud for him. I agreed, but with misgivings. When I returned home I wrote the following letter to the poet (I include the poem first):
                         A leaf falls

          and we all

                                             are less.

Dear X:
     Your poem arrived today. Being the philosophical scamp I am, I have been unable to close out the questions it raises for me.
     Aren’t leaves supposed to fall? Even if we make ourselves small enough to mourn a leaf (since people are supposed to die, too)–even then, isn’t the supposed to fall of leaves fundamentally different from that of people?
     Different leaves come back, but in a sense they are the “same” leaf, aren’t they?
     Different people come back, but we don’t think of them as replacements of the ones who died.
     Are we actually “less” because a leaf falls? This is a terrifying thought. It could be true, although it would signify an appalling abundance to be so continuously reduced and for so much to remain. Besides, if you apply the vegetation analogy, then every time a leaf grows out we must be “the more.” If loss is balanced by renewal (in the matter of leaves), how can we become “less” whenever a single leaf falls?
     I guess I’m saying I don’t believe the assertion in your poem. Meaning, it’s not my philosophy, not meaning that you were speaking falsely.
     I think we silly humans are made of moons, and each of our moon systems is in a complex of phases. My moons simply don’t allow me to believe I, or my kin, are less because a leaf falls. Quite the contrary! But if I were sitting on the porch, as you were, grieving over the loss of our friend, and possessed of your particular moon system, I might understand. Is there a way your poem could be expanded to overcome that saucy moon of mine that sticks out too far?
Anita

“I think there are certain thoughts that can emerge only in the space between a wolf
and a man.” (Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf)

     Writing a complete poem from start to finish can be a clumsy process. Like an agreement about appropriate lovemaking times (not to mention strategies) between lovers, the urge to write a poem can come independently of any ideas about what to write. That’s when you must go out into the world and find a wolf.

     What do I mean by “a wolf” It’s the core feeling that deeply initiates and propels a poem. It’s the pre-word desperation, a creature-like entity that the poem ultimately captures and encloses, intensifying the anguish-energy of both poem and “wolf”, so that finally a consummation can occur through the ministrations of the words.

     Regularly, then, you the Poet will go out looking for your desperation, again. Surely, you have not finished with it yet, nor it with you.

     Mostly I find my “wolf” when I listen to certain music, or when I’m walking in the woods or in the desert. But it can turn up at home when I’m reading. Recently I was leafing through my many folders of poems randomly cut out and copied over the years–going clear back to my teens–and I came across one that had been brought to a poetry group years ago to be crititiqued. The poem completely grabbed me and started making those wonderful, odd stirrings inside my body that tells me I need to pay attention. Some kind of evoking was in progress.

     Without divulging the name of the poet, here is the poem, and a few brief reasons why I found a wolf in it–mine and the author’s both.

     In nisus, I am unselfed, most awfully.
     Unblunted by sanctimonious offerings
     of soul or blood, offerings
     to an idle, self-referential god,
     I stand, unbent, uncollared, precise.

     No less strong than the thrust and spread
     of a maple’s leaf turned in
     to stone, to knot, to christ,
     this hand, raised to break
     the stained glass of ego.

     The shattering, like radiant oil,
     is beautiful.

     Right away the critical reader says, “What’s ‘nisus’? It’s not capitalized. . .” And that is the first claw on the wolf’s paw. How many poems begin this way, with a real evocation? The poem, for me, gently brings up the magic of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which begins “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan. . . .” But Xanadu was a real place, or at least it’s capitalized.
     Once you discover that “nisus” is an abstract noun that means “a striving toward a particular goal,” the poem begins to be exposed as a bit stiff and self-consciously full of Idea, especially the words “raised to break the stained glass of ego.” Nonetheless, it’s not what the poem means that brings the wolf out for me, but a kind of naive audacity in its mixture of diction, that permits a “shadow poem” to build behind it, independent of what the front-line words actually say. Because the poem is not “set” anywhere (except maybe “in nisus,” which might be equivalent to the imaginal realm of magic or Sufi mysticism, a perfectly legitimate place to go), my hard brain remains softened and weakened and willing to be led astray. In the line “I stand, unbent, uncollared, precise” I hear an echo of John Donne that comes back again with the uncapitalized “christ.” Logic leaps in here and sneers, “Well, if ‘christ’ is not capitalized, doesn’t that mean ‘nisus’ is a place after all?” I snicker. Yes, Old Fool, that’s precisely the point.
     I found this poem–despite its rawness, its obvious flaws–haunted me enough that I laid it on my desk as part of a “deep model” for future writings. There is a beautiful severity here that part of me resonates with. Poems do that, they enliven aspects of yourself that normally lie dormant. So, my advice is: read for desperation, then howl!

       Poetry is huge. It’s a black hole. It’s about as easy to define as language or love or religion, and related to all of those. So, my intention with blogging is not to turn Poetry into a “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees” (i.e. try to surround it with definitions), but to open up the Idea of Poetry in new ways.
[Which reminds me, I recommend taking time to look up the poem "To Paint the Portrait of a Bird" by Jacques Prevert, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti]

     Poetry is definitely a “feel” thing. This is not just my opinion, it was said in the 9th century by a Kashmir poetry critic named Anandavardhana (sorry, I can’t do proper accents in this program!) He believed emotion was the soul of poetry, and as such, was more important to its core essence than formal features such as length of lines, repetitions, similarities of sounds, and even metaphorical language.
It was also said as recently as the 1970′s by a professional storyteller in South Africa, where improvised poetry-tales were still a favorite form of public entertainment: “You begin with the remembered image,” she said, but then added, “If I have to find one really crucial aspect of storytelling, the one that has to do with the ultimate meaning of the story, then that’s feeling. . .Without feeling, there is only talk.” (Harold Scheub, The Poem in the Story).
And finally, a drama historian who wasn’t even talking about poetry said, “Feeling is the nub of all structures expressed in drama; in fact, feeling lies at the core of all mental operations and external acts.” (Richard Courtney, Drama and Feeling).

     All of this is handpicked evidence to help reinforce my own similar conviction, that basic raw emotion (not sentimentality, which is miles different) is necessary to kick start a poem, and to sustain it. Coffee is not enough. Writing a good poem–one that is likely to attract the elusive nymph Poetry to grace it with her presence–takes focused thought, to be sure, and imagination and word skills. But what I think is the most difficult is that you need more than the memory of feeling when writing a good poem; you need the raw hit of the original emotion that you had when the subject first caught your attention.

     And raw emotions can’t be called up at will. They are natural forces like volcanoes and hurricanes, devastating and unpredictable. Humans seem to be constructed much like the earth itself: we have a seething central core, well insulated from the surface by various levels of relatively opaque matter (our brains, for example?) There are vents through which steam regularly comes up. Poetry may be one of those vents.
So, in writing poetry you’re caught in a paradox–you need a good dose of the same emotion that accompanied and thus also generated what you now want to say–and you need it before the words close in and start to shape it. But at the same time you need the words to evoke and coax that feeling to find its way through layers of volcanic ash, or your stomach (sometimes a poem does seem to come from the stomach!), from wherever it is lying about. So, you silly poet, you start dancing, flailing your dinky word-sword around or muttering to yourself as you drive the kids to school, or taking a walk, or sitting obtusely at your computer writing words, words, words–all the while hoping the right feeling will be pricked and come roaring up to make you just that teensy bit of crazy you need to be in order to, eventually, say something that’s a lot more than “only talk.”

                        The Line

            Poems come easily to me. It is the making of a poetry that is

            difficult. The telling of the truths.

                                                Nikos Gatsos

I used to think Poetry and Prose related to one another like horizontal and vertical axes on a graph.

Later, I further thought:  Yes, but. . . . .

            Can any group of words be a poem if it

            looks exactly like one? This means, if the words STOP before

            they get to the edge of the usual 8 ½ x 11-inch page, leaving white space. . . .

                        line breaks.

Well, no—you can’t open the phone book or a history textbook, or write down a  conversation and Bing! turn it into Poetry (a Poem) just by giving it a snazzy figure.

This brought up a sub-distinction: Poetry and Poem. Maybe they don’t mean the same thing.

After all, Poetry does appear in prose form. This relentless and spontaneous phenomenon confuses us a little, because here comes something shaped like prose (no line breaks)—but when you listen and think, you notice

it has—we-don’t-know what—special rhythmic patterns, little knots of meaning—somehow it’s more intense, (beautiful? surreal?) than ordinary prose. Yet it’s resting comfortably and even stubbornly in its paragraph form. To cover our unease about the missing telltale line breaks and lack of consistent standards, we coined a handy term “prose poem.” It should be written as one word: prosepoem.

Some people choose to assume such a phenomenon does not actually exist.

In other words, (I further thought) “Poetry” is like Dionysus, the “god who comes in.” Poetry is either present or not, ultimately independent of form.

The original grid has become more complicated. No longer should we say Poetry and Prose, but rather

 Poem/with and Poem/without   Poetry

 Prose/with and Prose/without   Poetry

Poetry is an independent variable.

A poem can exist by decree, poetry cannot. (Why do I capitalize Poetry sometimes? I don’t know. It seems holy.)

I thought I had settled something. But there remained the niggling matter of

            the line.

Is the line also an independent variable?

Because of the line, words can say something extra that they would not say if the same words

were robbed of the space around them.

Because of the line, even poems-without-poetry are able to say something that prose poetry cannot say.

But the line itself doesn’t make a piece of writing into either a poem, or poetry.

This little essay called “The Line” is being constructed in

lines for a purpose other than to make it a poem.

It is neither poetry nor a poem. It is prose with line breaks.

All of this will be coming into a new focus as we begin to put poems onto E-Readers.   

             How important is the white space on both sides

                        of the words?

Is the line, with its breaks,

 its visual mix of white space and words,

 an essential tool that we need to make a different kind of sense of our world?

I don’t know where the line belongs.

I think there must be a third axis for it.