BLOG YEAR ONE (2020–21)

ONE OF THE ODDEST POEMS I’ve written from the viewpoint of pure process: I wrote it backwards. (I confess this happened also with number 9421|Cold Equations; but it remains unusual in my work.) I woke with a line, a rhythm so final it demanded pride of place: the last line.

             . . . still remember / how to play.

An echo of—what? Ah yes, Abe Lincoln:

             . . . shall not perish / from the earth.

Even now I don’t quite know what to call this connection; but there they are, insistent pair. 

I work with words to tame them, contain them in lines—ferreting out the rhythm underneath. Ah yes, ferreting out the rhythm underneath. So, if that’s my ending—“how to play”— I have my rhyme, the first of the two or three I need for a tercet, a three-line stanza. Grave presents itself. Uh-oh, pretty strong . . . 

Then son shows up, and I have two lines of the first tercet: 

             This—shadow: how that late-adopted son,

             half maddened, chose to enter his own grave. 

The second tercet starts unrhymed—pure content:

             Broken pieces fit once more.

Then take—ironically, a “mistake” in that the rhyme’s too close to play/grave: the rhyme’s gotten away from me.

Rhyming rules work both ways: not too far, but also not too close. Here we see the exigencies of writing in the dark. For those of you just coming in, I write in bed, in the dark, that place where the images can rise as in a darkroom or a projection booth. So, rhyming insane with take (and forsaken thrown in for good measure), I have my sestet, two tercets emerging from the darkroom exposed—perhaps even overexposed—with repeated rhyme. 

How to build the poem’s other half, the octet? I want it to have an arc—narrative arc; I want that arc to land where the second half, the sestet, already begins; I want it to steer clear of the sestet’s insistent rhyme. Once more unto the breach . . . 

Working backwards, I search for an image that will earn the poem’s last word, play. Ah, this is how the mind stays fresh: master the form, then work it every which way, then— finally, relax and play with it. Play with it. 

Form, yes; but not just ordinary form, linear form, no. This time I have something more, that meta-rhythm from Mister Lincoln:

             . . . shall not perish / from the earth.

How to mix that in as well? What fun!

The sestet contains it twice, in the last lines of each tercet; I achieve it once or twice in the octet, as foreshadowing (“how far / these children have to go”).

My writing technique plays on the tension between remembering and forgetting. Since a primordial discovery that I wanted to cross the gap between dreams and reality, that I wanted to bring dreams back from Dreamland to Realand, my writing has been the glass between the projection booth and the screen. As my mother, taking refuge in her darkroom, had her fixer and developer, I have rhythm and rhyme to capture dreams—a cloud chamber sensitive to forces otherwise invisible. 

Every age has its ghosts and its gods—even ours. My poems, my songs, are an attempt to invoke them. ❖ 

9452|Bring Fire Back

posted September 20th, 2020

HERE WE HAVE A SCENE  from a search undertaken some years ago, a search for images to describe—to express—a growing sense of loss over my own poetic powers. Bit by bit, I have felt that tide going out. So I’ve written numerous poems (as it turns out) to express my inability to write poems. Such are the convolutions of art.

Here we have the image of a planet drying up, of volcanic hardening—a perspective from space. Previously, the search took me from the equator to the pole, from the torrid to the frozen, heat to cold. As the tide went out, the speaker walked that rocky western shore “north and norther,” anticipating the pole. 

For instance, arbitrarily, poem number 9311, “Undertow”:

It’s months, now, since she wandered on this shore, 

listened to the murmur of the waves, 

and, high above, the cries of gulls. Once more, 

she gazes out to sea where pale sun braves 

November sky. Oh, she’s stood here before, 

ten thousand times, and every time her gaze 

went out to sea, what’s at her feet ignored. 

Whole worlds passed over, brushed aside. She braves 

her own resistance, looking down, around. 

Takes the primal tug of vertigo.

How beautiful these worlds she’s brushed aside . . .  

She feels her wave unwinding, undertow, 

her own cry rising, high, inhuman sound. 

Carried on the wind, receding tide.

IN “BRING FIRE BACK,” I recycle two lines, one my own and one from Randall Jarrell, in the epigraph. We are the planet art evolves on came to me back in the nineties, when this blog had the form of a newsletter, the Mad Manor Monthly. Jarrell’s line on lightning illustrates the rich imagery he brought to his criticism as well as his poetry.

Here they return to rescue me—and the poem’s sestet—from what Roman Catholicism calls the sin of despair. Here they claim that even a dead planet, or one reduced to “mere scattered ponds” can still support life. Here they remind this poet that however much she's lost—oceanic abundance, volcanic heat—she's not dead yet.  And, at the end, they remind her she might play Prometheus after all, and “bring fire back.”    ❖

9463|Hot-Air Balloon

posted September 13, 2020

AN ATTEMPT TO HEAL A WOUND. By now, I’m old enough to have helped clean out the possessions of the dead, to have seen how suddenly, priceless treasures are reduced to trash.

My poems’ home’s a bookcase that threatens to become their coffin as well. While I have indeed written more lines than Homer, he did a much better job of selling his door to door. 

Perhaps I thought it beneath me, selling, proselytizing; I got the image pearls to swine. My stuff was too “good” for the hoi polloi, the many; Homer’s wasn’t. His was of, by, and for the hoi polloi; it went from mouth to mouth, alive. Pinned safely to the page, poetry dies.

So, mourning its death, its devolution into body bags, perhaps I can find another way . . .  

For instance, sharing my lines here with you.

544|Across Imagined Noons

posted September 7th, 2020

In 2014, I took a trip to Spain. I’d been teaching Spanish in a public middle school, where half my students were Spanish speakers, so I wanted to strengthen my spoken Spanish. Specifically, I told my friends, I wanted to take it to that point where I in a sense forget it, don’t think about it, speak without thinking—what we do in our native language.

Self-consciousness is what makes us human; it’s also what makes us suffer, a division we might personify as the Watcher versus the Warden. The watcher sees without judging; the warden judges without seeing—and we bounce between them until we learn to see the warden without judgement, let the warden judge the watcher’s worth, a balancing act neither wants initially to engage in, the watcher scared of the warden, the warden dismissive of the watcher. “The worm in the ground . . . / the bird in the air—all creatures the same / except her.”

More and more, as I grow older, I understand I can’t see where instinct rules me, where, in millenial parlance, I stop and automaticity, the deep algorithms, take over. My practice of poetry—scrawling words down in the dark—shows me exactly where I’m blind, where I only think I know what I see, where I don’t see what I know. 

While we too can be said to have instincts or drives, we alone have something else: psychology. Specifically, a psyche manifest in language. We can talk about watchers and wardens, earthworms and birds, we can explore the space, the tension, between them. We can take tea on the patio, taming our own wildness just enough to see it, to bear witness to both the watcher and the warden, to look down at the prison of psyche itself and see how we dream them up, all our heavens, all our hells.    ❖

posted August 29th, 2020

THE POEM "COLD EQUATIONS" appeared to me piecemeal, a process that catches my attention: I have to figure out how to fit the pieces together. Typically, my process gives me pieces on a just-in-time basis, pieces and plot, as it were, appearing together, or rather, molding themselves to each other line by line, rhyme by rhyme—with the rhymes being especially determining. 

My favorite point of origin is a dream. In this case, the dream came with a line attached: Funny, isn’t it, how someone can become your whole damn life. So, once more, the gift, and a gift even wrapped in words. 

Lying motionless, waiting, clipboard parked on my chest, I think of Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey. One day, listening to the radio, I heard a line from that book, a line I liked enough to go out and buy a copy, wanting to know the context. Turned out I had to read the whole book to get that line, the last line: There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge between them is love. The whole book is the context for it. (This is part of our problem: our whole lives are the context for our lives, and they arrive piecemeal. How to assemble the pieces, see them as a whole?)

But accepting these thoughts, how to connect San Luis Rey and my dream? All right, let’s make our line the last line. Wow, how’s that for piecemeal, beginning at the end? 

Painters say that the painting comes to life when you put in the eyes; in this case, it’s the “I,” putting a speaker—the most intimate of speakers—into a lifeless line, a prosaic line, changing Funny, isn’t it, how someone can become your whole damned life into Funny, isn’t it, I say . . . 

But not quite there. Now, meter. The exigencies of meter, the demands, the requirements, not just the suggestions, the requests. I like to say, that meter is best which is heard the least. Not mine, actually. Consider: this is how actors approach meter every time they perform it: they break it, deny it, destroy it, play with it—in short, honor it best in the breach. Nonetheless, it’s there, as in the opening lines: 

In those few weeks away from you I found 

Insistent rhythm: that’s meter. Or better put, persistent rhythm, but flexible: this line pushes on to the next:

I got to do a thousand things would bore 

Consistent meter, yes. But once again pushing on:

you stiff.

I use meter as a constant companion—always there yet never obtrusive—a path to memory, to unconscious memory, where it makes lines memorable. (By contrast, meter heard consciously is a path to mockery.) 

So, we’ve put life into our first/last line, and we’ve established a meter steady as a heartbeat. But we’re still not there. How about the exigencies of rhyme? Ay, there’s the rub. “Life”—the last word in our last line—is a strong rhyme word, with a long vowel to entice the ear; how to build in another one?

Funny, isn’t it, I say, ______?

how someone can become your whole damned life. 

I let my thinking play with alternatives, various options, without judgement, then notice that one of these suggestions blossoms into internal rhyme:

Funny, isn’t it, I say, undone,

how someone can become your whole damned life. 

So that clinches it: in my practice, rhyme decides all uncertain choices. My job is to surrender to it, incorporate it into the poem, and make it work.

Let me remind you all this takes place in the dark. I have to maintain my meter—the horse the poem rides on—and remember key things: the two rhymes of the quatrains, and the two or three rhymes of the sestet; I have to keep my geography straight, know which stanza I’m in, which line I’m on. (In a closed form like the sonnet, every line plays its part according to the whole.) I have my tricks for this, but reversing them, working from the bottom up, well, that will put my technique to test—a test I like to think I passed with “Cold Equations.” ❖