Relief!

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Crisis over, I think. You must have all prayed hard!

At the new blog, Project 365+1, I decided not to be all serious and formal but to say hello to the others there and talk about the quadrille form I used for my first post. There were warm responses from nice folks I'd never heard of, either as Old Mates or Intimidating Reputations. I liked their poems too, and said so. Suddenly it feels like a friendly place after all.

Playing with the Big Kids

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I've been invited to be a guest poet for the month of June at a blog of Aussie poets and artists, posting daily drafts. There's a core of regulars, and sundry guests. The idea, I'm told, is to keep up the habit of writing, and for potential discussion. They don't have to be first drafts, just not published elsewhere. But personal blogs and private groups are OK.

I accepted of course, flattered. The regulars are pretty serious names in Ozpoetry. Some of them are old mates, so that's OK. Others are distant, intimidating figures. Well, I expect they'd be surprised to be considered intimidating, but I feel intimidated. Trying to write my first poem tonight (having decided it's most practical to write them the night before they're due) I went into writer's block!

Usually I am prolific. Usually I am playful about writing poetry. I respond to prompts from various groups, and have little trouble writing a poem a day, though it's usually only three or four a week. And I write outside the prompts at times too, from that other thing called inspiration. How come I suddenly dried up?

It must be that famous 'Now they'll find me out' syndrome.  Who do I think I am, playing with the big kids? This regardless of the fact that I play with superb poets all the time.  Ah, but the ones I am about to play with have Reputations. And they have them in my country. And they had them when I was just starting to make a name for myself.

But I said I would do it, so I have to. I did a lot of Tapping tonight (no, not on keyboard; I mean a technique for quickly dispelling unwanted emotions). I was able to write a poem at last, after discarding several atrocious false starts. It's not world-shaking but it's respectable enough.

I have to shake off this paralysing fear! 'Respectable' is not a word that I think should be applied to poems! I'd rather write wild, zany, outrageous things.

Pray for my soul!

A Wonderful, Beautiful Interview!

with Mary Oliver

I was enthralled.

Remixing

Oh dear, I'm having another of those 'everything I write lately is mediocre' times. Which is perhaps a good thing, as I did plan to focus on revision this year. And I've embraced some tools I've given little attention to in the past, so as to not merely revise but remix.

I've suddenly fallen in love with things like the erasure and the cento, using my own poetry as source material, and sometimes coming up with what I think are improvements to the originals. My readers say kind things about them, so I could be right.

I like the way it puts a bit of mystery back into my poetry. After years of trying to acquire limpid clarity through practising haiku and the 'small stones' mindful writings, I think I'm in danger of achieving banality!

I look at my best friend Helen's poetry, with its masterful use of metaphor, and remember that I too used metaphor once upon a time. I seem to have lost that art along the way, but perhaps my current revision tools will give me equally interesting effects.

Interesting to me, I probably mean. I guess we have to remain interested in our own art in order to keep creating it with joy and passion, and that's why artists in all genres go through different phases or 'periods', abandoning their successes to try new things.

Anyway I recognise that for me, the only person I can really speak for, the process has always been where much of the fascination lies.

Upliftment, or ... ?

Australian artist Ken Done makes art, he says, to lift the spirits of those who see it — so reports The Sydney Morning Herald today, featuring some of his (and others') paintings for Australia Day. The article goes on:

'"I think in the time we live when you can see suicide bombers on the TV at night or on the front-page of the paper, art has a different role to play," says Done. "I hope that these kinds of pictures give people pleasure over a long period of time. For me, art should be more like poetry and give you pleasure."'

Gee thanks, Ken. Yes, I hope a lot of my poetry gives a lot of people pleasure, in various ways. Yes, I have derived intense pleasure from many poems I have read. But, such a sweeping statement! 

I dislike pronouncements as to what poetry (or any other art form) should be doing. OK, he qualifies it by saying, 'For me ...' And so he should.

Let's stick to poetry, since that is what I do, and make some claim to know. My point is that some poetry may disturb, irritate, shock, outrage ... and that it's perfectly legitimate — even at times essential — that it should do so.

I like escapist reading, and often prefer it these days — but that's prose. In poetry I have broad, eclectic tastes (though within that context I'm very fussy, with extremely high, if idiosyncratic, standards). I can certainly confront the shocking, appalling, horrifying or merely annoying in verse. 

If it's wonderfully written, it may indeed give me pleasure in that aspect, but I don't demand that it uplift my spirit. Sometimes it may be more appropriate to leave a reader cast down, and/or to set them thinking.

The "Nonce" Poetic Form

I just discovered, via this excellent article by Jeanette Ostermeyer, that this is a name given to self-created forms — that is, where there is some regularity or pattern of metre, rhyme, syllables, whatever.  The specific form is created because it seems to fit the needs of the particular poem. Sometimes, we're told, one of these may take on, be used widely by other poets, and acquire its own name.

The term can also apply to variations on traditional forms, such as rhyming sestinas and unrhymed odes. (I have also come across 10-line sonnets.)

I think maybe we all do a lot of this without even regarding it as anything special. I, for instance, like my stanzas to be the same length even in free verse — whatever length, or variable pattern of lengths, happens to suit the poem. I'm not sure that's sufficient to constitute a new form, however.

One of my widely-published early poems, The Day We Lost the Volkswagen, has a pattern all its own (as far as I know) because it just seemed to need it. It's basically a rhyming ballad (abab quatrains) with an extra line added per verse, and the extra lines rhyme with each other — in a four-verse poem, the last lines of verses 1 and 2 rhyme with each other, and the last lines of 3 and 4 have a different rhyme with each other. (It's a lot more complicated to describe than to read!) I've never used the form again, though. I never felt any need.

(Funny — I once read it to a group of writing students by way of example of something or other, and one who had been listening with an expression of rapt delight, said afterwards, "And not a rhyme in it!"

"Excuse me," I said, "It has a complex scheme of full rhymes."

But I decided to take it as a compliment. I guess that for her the rhymes were unintrusive and the language just seemed natural. That's gotta be good.)

Recently, members of the dVerse online poetic community were invited to create a new form. Because I like to play with a non-traditional or "free" version of the ghazal, and because I also like playing with American sentences, which Allen Ginsberg invented as a Western style of haiku, I combined them both. You're welcome to read the result.

I found that the sentences went neatly into 3-line verses, and the whole had some of the features I like in a ghazal. I called it Ghazal-type 17-3 — which I think a clumsy name, but I hoped it would suggest that there might in future be other, different ghazal-type poems. (Because of my departures from the strict form of the traditional ghazal, I think it's more accurate to say "ghazal-type".)

But I haven't used it again. And I haven't made up any other ghazal-type forms. I make poems in whatever way seems right at that moment, then go on to the next moment.

Ostermeyer, whose article focuses on metrics, alludes to Peter Davison's book, Breathing Room, in which, she says,

"... nearly all the poems conform to twenty-five lines cast in seven tercets and a closing quatrain. These lines are set in a flexible pattern ..."

Perhaps it would be fun to create a form (or even adopt an existing one) and then stick with it for a whole book.

How Do You Title a Poem?

Brian Miller, over at dVerse Poets Pub, raised this question, which led to an interesting discussion. This is my take on it:

For me titles are among the most difficult pieces of writing. I usually find them last – except when prompts from some sources suggest them at the outset.

I used to leave some pieces untitled if nothing suitable occurred to me, but then John Hewitt at PoeWar Writer's Resource Center insisted poems should always be titled, to help oneself and more importantly the reader identify, recall and locate them. He said, if all else fails use the first line as title. So now I do, and agree it’s preferable to having numerous pieces called ‘Untitled’. Sometimes, using half the first line is effective.

I have found that very general titles don’t work well. It’s not much use calling something ‘Autumn’ or ‘Bird’; it doesn’t identify the particular poem sufficiently. Even Keats said ‘Ode to Autumn’. I was guilty of a lot of very general titles when younger. If you’re prolific like me, you can find yourself using the same general title several times over for different pieces; not a great idea. (Also, such vague titles are pretty boring, aren't they?)

I agree with those who say that you don’t want to give away the whole poem in the title.

What do you think, dear readers?

Formal Versifying

I’ve been going through one of my phases of, ‘Who am I kidding? I’m a terribly bad poet!’ I’m told it happens to all of us. My present phase was initially triggered by seeing the movie Camino, which I loved. When someone asked me about it, I began by saying, ‘It was complex.’ It was, and that was one of the things I loved about it. It dealt with a complex situation and didn’t attempt to over-simplify, but to lay out all the complexities for our view. This interested me. For years now I have been aiming for simplicity in my poetry, training myself by practisng haiku and tanka. I realised I’d like to get back to some complexity now.

Then I began looking through this year’s work with the idea of putting together a little collection for xmas presents to family and friends. I was shocked to see how prosey my language has often become. That is not necessarily a side-effect of striving for simplicity, clarity and accessibility — but in my case it’s obviously a danger I have to watch out for. Time for the wheel to turn! I don’t want obscurity, would still like to be clear and accessible, but just ... well ... not so straightforward as to risk dullness and banality.

As I don’t happen to have any complex ideas burning for expression, I decided I’d better try for complexity of form. I find this also leads to heightened language. Restrictions can act as a sort of crucible! If I do enough experimenting with form, perhaps that language will extend to any free verse I might be inspired to create meanwhile.

It’s not an absolutely new thing for me. I have always played with form, whilst preferring free verse and using that most of the time. Now I’m going to focus mainly on form for a while. I don’t know how long — until I get sick of it, I suppose. I’m sure there’ll be some free verse as well, now and then.

The prompts at the wonderful dVerse poetry community are helpful. Some are for specific forms, others suggest particular approaches and techniques which I can use to the same end. I think particularly of a recent prompt on the technique of conflation. The responses to these prompts indicate that there are plenty of others out there who are interested in playing with form, not just me. Some are beginners; some are very accomplished poets indeed. Many of the participants also frequent the (similar) Poets United and imaginary garden with real toads sites.

I was surprised, then, on suggesting to the Free Verse Weekends group on facebook that we might start another group for formal verse, to discover that it is evidently not an activity the excellent poets there usually engage in. (Except for haiku and tanka; many of those same poets are in the facebook Haiku on Friday and Tanka on Tuesday groups as well.) Several expressed themselves willing to give form a go, but I was more looking to see if there was an existing need/desire. Apparently not. So I’ll just continue to play at dVerse etc.

'River of Stones' — the Process

I’m participating in this month’s ‘a river of stones’ over at my Stones for the River blog. I did it in January too, with great joy, and intermittently between then and now. This time around, I’m noticing more about the process, probably because my husband has joined in this time and his approach is different from mine. Well for one thing, I’m a poet and choose to write my small stones in verse; he’s a story-teller, whether in fiction or memoir, and naturally seeks to make stories out of his small stones. But it’s more than that.

I love his writing, so what I’m about to say isn’t a criticism of that — but I notice he has real trouble simply paying attention to the world around him. He produces lovely pieces that don’t end up on his blog because they’re not actually small stones. They are diary entries, records of events and the way he feels about them. He talks, for instance, of running into a couple of old friends in town yesterday. After reading what he wrote, I know that this event happened and who the people were, what he felt about the exchange, and a little of what was said between them. I know nothing of the surroundings, or what the people looked like, or how their voices sounded — no description. The ‘small stones’ idea is all about getting outside oneself and noticing the world around us. I think it’s OK to bring oneself in if necessary, but from the outside, dispassionately observed. He manages it, but it’s often a struggle.

Back in January Kaspalita, who co-founded the river of stones, posted a piece on just this. It seems many people have the same difficulty. I don’t seem to have quite as much trouble with it, and I put that down to a few years of attempting haiku, tanka and other short forms which train one to pay attention to the world. However I worry that I‘m ‘doing it wrong’ in a different way. Although there isn’t any obligatory length, I keep thinking mine are too long this time. I was convinced that I wrote much shorter ones in January, until I went back and had a look. No, they’re about the same. 

I notice, too, that both my husband and I keep falling into the significance trap. What do I mean by that? I’ve been in a long-term writers’ support group (often by email) with Jennie Fraine and Leah Kaminsky for — good heavens! — 20 years. We are devoted to what we call ‘the anti-significance factor’. One of the earliest things we identified was that trying for deep significance is death to poetry. Or, as my friend Philip Martin used to remark, people don’t like to be buttonholed by a poem and told what to think and feel. Personally, if I try to write something deep and meaningful, it paralyses me, whereas if I just play with words or forms I produce poems — sometimes even deep and meaningful ones. It’s essential to remember that art is play. I think, with a small stone, the thing itself is what matters; no need to weight it down with any extra meaning. But human beings are very good at trying to add extra significance to everything, even the simplest things.

Difficult or not, I think the task is worthwhile, not only for the writing it can produce but even more so to have us engage with the world around us. It even led to me watering my geraniums, which badly needed it, because I stopped to take a good look at them. 

Initial Capitals in Poetry

I asked a friend to do me the favour of casting a critical eye over my latest manuscript before I submit it. One thing she queried was my practice of not capitalising the initial letter of every line of my poems. Evidently she is more comfortable with the convention of initial capitals.

For the sake of others who may be interested in this question, here is my reply to her:

Many poets still use the convention of capitalising the first letter of every line. At least as many, if not more, no longer do that. There's an interesting discussion of the matter here, amongst poets.

The practice of initial capitalising in English poetry began in the 16th Century. This changed with the advent of free verse in the 20th Century, as initial capitals would have been intrusive to the flow and to the various ways that poetry can now be arranged on the page. It is very common now for formal poets, too, to dispense with initial capitals, though some retain them. On the other hand, some practitioners of free verse, when using a fairly conventional arrangement of lines on the page, like to adopt initial capitals — but have to abandon them when they venture into things like shape poetry or prose poetry.

I write mosty free verse, but like to play with form sometimes. I don't want to be inconsistent within my own work so I adopt prose rules for capitalisation, whatever kind of verse I'm writing.

When all's said and done, these days it depends on the personal preference of the poet.

Poetry and Other Adventures

At a recent session with PsychLady I spoke of my passionate love of beauty, all kinds of beauty, and my sorrow at not being beautiful myself. I explained that this is why I began writing poetry when I was very young – I wanted to add to the beauty of the world, and for me poetry was the most beautiful thing a human could create.

She pointed out the obvious: that poetry is my beauty, and the expression of my beauty. I had to admit that if I could swap right now and become a famous beauty for the way I look but lose the poetic talent, I would not swap, not for a moment. For homework she gave me an assignment to write a poem about poetry being my beauty. I didn’t write it until a week later, just before my next appointment with her, but it had been germinating away in the subconscious all the while.

What I wrote was Living Beauty. I was very pleased with it. It didn’t need revising, and I had done risky things with repetition and made them work. In various ways it felt like a quantum leap. Other people liked it too, and “got” it – even poetry haters in my writers’ group. All very satisfying!

Perhaps, after that, the only way was down? Anyway, a couple of days later I started looking through the last four years’ output (since publication of the last book). It was horribly disconcerting! As described in Crisis, I had suddenly lost the ability to “hear” my own poetic voice. I knew I’d been in a rather plain and prosey phase for some time, but I had thought it was still working as poetry. Now, it was as if I was coming to the poems as a new reader – and I couldn’t find any rhythm in them, any music. The language seemed ridiculously banal. Flaws leapt up and hit me in the eye. I realized that I’ve been churning stuff out quite prolifically, posting first drafts and never going back and working on them further. As for the things I had filed as drafts for later revision, they seemed pathetic, not worth trying to do anything with.

This was of course horrifying. My identity and self-worth are bound up with the poetry. And I wondered, in shock, if the friends who had made positive comments on my efforts were just being kind. You must have had the online experience of seeing some self-deluded folks who write atrocious verses, and all their friends rush to comment how wonderful their work is! Could that be me too, after all?

Then I noticed that I was pretty apathetic about things in general. None of the things that normally bring me joy seemed even vaguely interesting. I recognized what I was feeling as the way other people have described bouts of depression – something I have been lucky enough to have avoided so far. I don’t know which came first, the mood or my inability to like my poems. (“So,” said PsychLady yesterday, “You have gone from denying your beauty to denying your poetry too, which is the expression of it.”)

I’m grateful indeed for friends who read Crisis and rushed to disagree with it! Canadian poet Pearl Pirie said particularly wise things:

yeah, that's a familiar sensation/perception for me.

sometimes it's lasted months but it passes. generally means I'm breaking thru to some new inner level, a reorientation as part before growth phase.

a lot of stock is placed in the world poem. communication matters. call it what you will in finer level after that.

Finally some perspective re-emerged, and I realised that many of the people who praise my poetry happen to be poets whose own work I admire. That has to count for something! It’s a very different thing from lovers of the trite and sentimental praising doggerel. And my non-poet readers are people whose taste and intelligence I respect in other matters. Sorry, everybody, for insulting your judgment even briefly (not to mention your authenticity).

That being said, it wouldn’t hurt at all to go into a revision phase now and get some of those poems to the absolute best they can be. I thought I would take a sabbatical from writing new stuff (apart from the haiku and tanka, which whole groups of people use to spark their own). But PsychLady said the same as some of my friends: “Write about the emptiness, the nothing, the no-words”. Well, I would if I could, but I think it might have gone already!

And the other adventures? We’re liable to be moving house again real soon! But this post is long enough. I’ll write about the move tomorrow. Suffice to say, we’re excited. This shift is the one we’ve been waiting for.

How Do You Tell If It's Poetry?

I guess any writer of free verse faces this question from time to time: "What makes this poetry and not just chopped-up prose?" After participating recently in the latest April Poem A Day Challenge at Poetic Asides, I was asked it again by a friend who read all my entries. The funny thing is that she herself is a poet (and a very good one too) who writes only in free verse. Maybe someone had asked her and she was hoping for a few clues how to answer.

If anyone else wants to express an opinion on this issue, please do!

Here is our email exchange:

Her:

Bin reading your poems. Hate to be an ignoramus, but what makes them poems, rather than journal entries broken up into shorter lines? Citing 'Andrew's 80th' and the one about the angel voice that came in this morning.
love, Me


Self:

Legitimate question. As I've said in one of them, I wonder myself at times about the plainness of the language. My Muse seems to want me to be particularly colloquial of late.

However, the answer to your question is, in most cases, form. "Andrew's 80th" was a double Anacreontic verse – and I know I said so, and even gave a link. It's a particularly suitable form for the subject matter, being traditionally used for festivities, everyday life, and love.

The others include acrostic, pantoum, sestina, shadorma.... Also I often create my own forms, sometimes with verse structure, often with syllabics, and quite often both at once. And I still sometimes use a loose metric pattern instead of syllabics. Today's "Farewell" uses caesura throughout, and linked verses (by carrying sentences over). There is also always attention to the sound when read aloud, which among other things dictates where and how lines end and begin.

That last applies also to free verse, and indeed needs even more attention there.

At this point, let me say I think it's more useful for this discussion to distinguish verse and prose rather than poetry and prose. "Poetry" can mean an innate, ineffable something, an essence hard to define (though it may be easy to recognise). It's the question of what makes something Art with a capital A. In that sense, prose can be poetry - and, alas, vice versa. So let's talk about why I think my pieces have a claim to be considered as verse, i.e. non-prose.

If there is a verse form I'm seeking to follow, that covers it. Even if I do it badly, it's still a pantoum for instance, if it follows the rules – it's just a bad pantoum. (Haiku is a different story, as many great haiku break the "rules", but we'll leave that aside. Some haikuists say it's not poetry anyway but a genre in itself.)

Free verse is trickier to defend. Again it lies in the crafting. Even a found poem is crafted to some degree. Although I like to think I can write quite well naturally, a journal entry is not crafted in that way, any more than this email is. The angel poem is free verse, as are some of the others.

There is always some sort of rhythm or pattern singing in my head – though, (ha!) as I am fairly unmusical, this could be suspect! Still, it's there, from the beginning. I know that prose can be highly crafted, and the best prose is supposed to have its own rhythms, and the boundaries can blur as in prose poems – even so, a thing will present to me as clearly one or t'other.

There is also crafting in the form of revising and tweaking after getting the first draft down. It is VERY important to say free verse aloud, just to make sure it is distinct from a chopped-up journal entry. It's important to weigh every word, every piece of punctuation, every line ending and beginning, every space, every verse break... That is important for all poetry, but ever so much more crucial in free verse.

You're not a spoken-word poet, so I wonder if you don't know to make a slight stop at the end of a line even if there is no punctuation there, and to give each piece of punctuation that is there its due weight (one beat for a comma, four for a full-stop, and so on). These things must be taken into account when reading prose aloud too (except of course for line endings – prose being that stuff where the lines go right to the end of the page regardless of what word happens to fall there). In poetry these considerations are even more vital, if that's possible. By those criteria, the angel one is definitely verse! (Also my grammar would be different for prose.) I actually thought I had succeeded in MAKING the reader read it in the way I intend – but of course that only works if they are going to observe the conventions of reading poetry, not if they ignore them.

I read an article a while back by an American poet (alas, forget who) on this very question. She was invited to a Book Club or something and the people there didn't know why her book was poetry – until she read it to them, and then they could hear it the right way. She said that the general public don't have the cues for reading free verse on the page, as they get in more formal verses, so they automatically read it as if it was prose. So for them, I guess, it becomes so.

And then ... there is also the fun of pushing boundaries, exploring how far you can take something before it turns into something else. I don't necessarily want to remain frozen within the accepted criteria. I'm interested that my Muse is directing me to be more and more plain and colloquial for the most part! At first I was disconcerted and uneasy, now I am rather liking the experiment.

Love to You!

Free verse or chopped-up prose?

In my last post I skited that my free verse is not mere chopped-up prose. Almost immediately I had occasion to wonder if these were famous last words.

I've been doing the "30 poems in 30 days" project over at Writer's Resource Center. Luckily they don't have to be consecutive days! I got a bit fluey for a while and couldn't keep up the pace. Or is it that I'm getting poemed out? For whatever reason, the last couple have dealt with whatever's just happened in my life. Imagination not required!

One assignment was to start with a negative statement and finish with a positive. You can click on the link to see what I came up with. All absolutely factual, I promise you. A good read, some people think – but is it poetry?

I wasn't at all sure myself, so I decided to set it as prose and see if it made any difference. Answer: not a lot; but yes, some. I saw that if I'd been writing it as prose, I'd have been more expansive and I'd have punctuated it differently in some places. There were phrases that seemed to ask to be set as verse – but not so many as I'd have liked.

So then I tried the same thing with a piece of free verse that was clearly a poem, my Imagist piece from the 30 days. To my surprise and relief, it was the same with that one. Setting it as prose did make some difference, but actually not a lot. Some phrases demanded to be set as lines of verse, but by no means all.

I took these differently set out pieces to my writers' group to show them just how little difference there is ... and then again, how much. One thing they noticed is that when you see something set as verse, it sets up a particular expectation in your head. The setting does dictate the way the words are spoken – which I always put a lot of thought into – and you can't really get the full effect of any poem without reading it aloud.

In a strange way, the prose versions proved less interesting to me as a reader.

But it's a fine distinction indeed!