It’s a mystery to me how poems come into being. I look at poems I’ve written, especially those that have been published, and I am dumbstruck. “How did this happen?” I think. “How can I possibly do this again?” I don’t know.
I do know that poems, for me, have been hard won. I know a poet who once said to me “writing is the thing I hate the most that I love the best.” I know what she means. For years my writing came in brief spurts, followed by long periods of daily (and dull) writing and patient gathering of material. Then would come urgent composition. Preparation was everything. The poems themselves came only after long intervals.
During the last year I have written over a hundred poems. They have come quickly and without gathering or scribbling. Not all of these texts are worth anything, but some are poems I’m glad I wrote. There is new satisfaction in watching the pile of drafted poems grow. Since craft is pure pleasure, the task of taming these rough beasts is thrilling and satisfying.
So now the question –what has made this possible – beyond my own frustration at the preciousness and scarcity of my production? And am I any closer to understanding the sources of my own work?
Enter “The Grind.” Created by one Ross White, “The Grind” is a group of dedicated writers who, on a monthly basis commit to writing each day. There is no judgment, no commentary; no opinions are ventured. The un-workshop. Grinders are placed into what I call “pods” with a small group of other podsters who are working in a similar genre or in no genre whatever (“Manic Mix.”) The writers are from all over the country (foreign lands, too) and of every age and ilk.
The deal is simple: you write each day and before midnight in whatever time zone you happen to fall, you e-mail your work to the pod. End of story. At the end of the month everybody thanks everybody and either you sign on for another month or you take a month off. You can’t join unless you’ve been recommended by a successful grinder and if you’ve completed one successful month you can take a break one night a week. Simple.
So why does it work? To answer this question I introduce the great psychoanalyst of play, D.W Winnicott, who makes some simple observations about the capacity to be alone. He says that we develop that capacity by “playing in the presence of others.” The trick about these “others” is that they must be “noninterfering.” In human psychological life that “other” is usually the mother. But it doesn’t have to be. So, there it is. Writing is, of course, a form of play (nothing more serious and less solemn than play.) It’s a form of play that demands the capacity to be alone, and a form of play that requires an internalized audience to grant permission. After all since “poetry makes nothing happen,” we need all the permission we can get. Winnicott also distinguishes between “play” and “game.” The latter is done for reward. the former for its own sake. Play is a non-competitive activity. We can leave, thank God, the contests at the door.
The funny thing is that for years I’ve been teaching writing as improvisation using these principles. My students play in my presence. I observe but don’t interfere. I’ve been told that what surprises people are that my classes are so non-competitive. I’ve gotten good at the Winnicottian paradigm. I can create playgrounds for others.
What I couldn’t do was create the playground for myself. That playground– Winnicott calls it “potential space” — is what the grind has given me.
I took September off. Signup will take place in the next two days. I still have no idea where poems come from. But I trust that if I enter the place of play, I will find what I need.
Welcome. This lawn is restricted to picnics and passive recreation. Please be courteous and respectful to others, and keep the park clean. Rules prohibit:
Active sports
Dogs and pets
Amplified sound
Barbecues and open fires
Illegal drugs and alcohol
Littering and glass bottles
I am pondering the phrase passive recreation. I have walked by this sign for almost eight years but only noticed it for the first time last week. Apparently, I can admire the trees while sitting on the lawn but if I stood and performed jumping jacks, this would be prohibited. If I wrote a poem I could tell people that I had written it as an exercise in passive recreation. I don’t think one would be allowed to move very quickly either. Walking might be OK but running would be considered active. I am considering how the creation of such space in a public park corresponds to the creation in one’s mind of quiet, private areas. This seems to be one of my ongoing jobs as a poet: to continually create such space in order to be able to write and have a poem connect to the world at large.
It is a basic tenet of literary modernism that the acts of articulation and explanation can displace the matter being related. We can take as an example Conrad’s and Ford’s best work, where the drama of the narration supplants—becomes—the subject matter itself. The same holds true for Eliot’s landmark modernist poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” where the anguished voice of the dramatic monologue demands a stronger hold on our attention than the more elusive subject matter. Criticism that articulates the effect and meaning of this displacement ordinarily takes us out of that drama, insofar as criticism is not literature.
Of course, literature itself can act like criticism. Poems about poetry or the writing of poetry —including Artes Poeticae—are termed “meta-poetry.” We can call poems that comment on commenting on poetry meta-critical. Consider this poem by J.V. Cunningham, entitled “To the Reader”:
Time will assuage.
Time’s verses bury
Margin and page
In commentary.
For gloss demands
A gloss annexed
Till busy hands
Blot out the text,
And all’s coherent.
Search in this gloss
No text inherent:
The text was loss.
The gain is gloss.
With that final pun, Cunningham equates all “commentary”—including that of which this poem consists—with “gloss” in the sense of sheen, transparent polish, nothingness. Given its wit and compression, the work nevertheless seems to profit from the irony that, as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, “There is no there there.” Still, irony alone does not a poem make. Is there enough here in the way of emotional disclosure? The key lies in the assertion of the first line (which ends with a period instead of a comma, suggesting that it should not be read only in apposition to the phrases that follow): “Time will assuage.” Assuage what? The answer seems to come in the penultimate line, where we expect to hear “The text was lost,” but instead are told that “The text was loss,” which is something different. Cunningham does not appear to be speaking of a particular loss but of the experience or process of loss in general, which we might expect we could come to terms with through the distancing lens of interpretation and reflection. But we cannot: the gain—including the displacing commentary in the poem, and even this blog—is only gloss.
Has the teacher bird always known in singing not to sing of what to make of a diminished thing? We take it as a given that, even when it retains some of the old formal virtues, as the poetry of Cunningham and Frost does, modern and postmodern literature often “goes meta” in a particular way that earlier poetry did not. Eliot’s narrator Prufrock thinks in a poignantly self-defeating way, one that affirms Wittgenstein’s claim that the greatest burden of ineptitude is self-awareness. When self-reflection becomes the object of contemplation, attempting to achieve wholeness by seeing the object in terms of the subject, the external in terms of the internal, only opens up the possibility of further fragmentation, yet another consciousness of consciousness. It is with painful self-consciousness that Elizabeth Bishop concludes her famous villanelle “One Art” with the lines “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” The poet knows that mastering her form demands that she conclude with the word “disaster.” The art of writing (along with, for Bishop, the arts of living, traveling, and loving) is part-and-parcel of “the art of losing.” Her parenthetic, italicized command to herself—“Write it!”—is a master stroke because she also wants us to hear the homophone “Right it.” She knows that proceeding to “write it” cannot “right” the wrong, given that, as Cunningham puts it, “the text was loss.” Bishop can only, in passing, frustratedly pretend to pretend otherwise, and with considerable self-conscious irony. In comparison, Pope’s much earlier, more sustained meta-poetic reflection entitled AnEssay on Criticism—even given its self-reflexive wit and sundry famous lines—is too dazzlingly self-assured, too full of technical bravado, too inclined to delight and instruct in the old Horatian sense to move many a non-academic modern reader. Pope’s immensely skillful, socioculturally informative meta-poetry has experienced a revival among scholars in the era of new historicism, but for many others, as Terence Des Pres has put it, “Further adventures of the self-delighted self are not what’s wanted.” In short, there are clear differences between modern and older meta-poetry—and between modern and older meta-critical poetry. Unlike Pope’s work, modern meta-critical poetry like Cunningham’s, in reflecting on how we read it, may propose to burn away whatever lies under its lens, including the critical process.
Still, well before Cunningham, the roots of trenchantly disconcerting meta-critical poetry were visible. Consider “A Poet’s Fate” by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), whose work has inspired many spin-offs (Pinsky’s poem “The Shirt,” for instance, seems to derive much of its content from Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt”). Notice how modern Hood’s Poem is for a nineteenth-century piece. And notice that it begins with a question that turns out not to be one:
I draft poems and rewrite poems by hand and my process is messy and, I admit, I am a little disorganized and chaotic. I was sure I had this particular poem in a particular pile written on card stock (for some reason). But I can’t find it. I’ve looked everywhere and even looked (yes) in my computer with the idea maybe I already put it into an electronic form by accident. But I can’t find it anywhere.
I never dare put a poem in electronic form until I am sure I am close to done, at least for the solid first draft. As I rework the poem I edit by hand and again, when I am sure, I commit to electronic form. I always have felt it is a betrayal of the poem to put it into the computer before I have worked with it a bit. Guilty? Yes, I feel guilty if I don’t work with it by hand.
Now…I have lost a poem and I know I have also lost other poems in the past as I have also lost other things in life – as Elizabeth Bishop of course would understand – but I was quite sure this poem was in a specific pile. I need to look at the pile again and maybe turn each sheet upside down in case my lines were on the back of the paper, not the front, as I first assumed.
Nope, there are no edited poems on the back of these pieces of paper. There are other places to look also – even though I know the poem isn’t there. I’ll look in my desk and under the bed. Under the bed is highly unlikely but if I was working with the poem as I was going to sleep it might have slipped underneath.
It isn’t in either place. I’ll look again in the pile and maybe again in my computer in another folder thinking maybe I did decide to put it in electronic form already and may have misfiled it under another folder. For instance, instead of the folder for poetry maybe under ‘Finances” or “Photos” or “Resume”. But no, it is not misplaced in a folder.
I had rewritten the piece substantially and now I am not feeling so much defeated as annoyed. On the surface I would claim mild defeat but inside it is more annoyance, irritation. And if I can’t remember all the edits (I know there is a stanza three quarters of the way in that is lost to me) so I will begin to rewrite.
I know in the past I have lost poems and little pieces of paper with snippets of lines or images written down quickly. My filing system used to be messier but I do think when it was messier I actually lost less. I am trying to be more organized and was sure that poem was in the pile. I think I will look again.
Congratulations to Marie Ponsot, recipient of the first N.Y.C. Literary Honor for Poetry! The work of this extraordinary poet and teacher has been vital to many. Here is the New York Times article announcing the awards. Find poems by Ponsot here and here and in her books (also here). The poet talks and reads here, here, and here (sound recordings) and here and here (conversations in print).
On Leap Year Day, February 29, several of us Urban Rangers leave New York for another urban range, this one in Chicago, the location of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference. AWP is to literary writers what a Honolulu orthondonture conference is to orthodontists—the cultural and social culmination of the year. Unfortunately, AWP conferences tend to be held in cold months in cold places, so not much Honoluluing is involved. Instead, poets, novelists, and creative nonfiction writers haunt a hotel, roaming the halls sometimes as lone wolves, sometimes in packs, on the hunt for… what exactly?
What does a writer want from other writers? Attending AWP demands you answer that question. Poets and serious prose writers are not necessarily sociable, conference-ready creatures, happily schmoozing over cocktails, backslapping each other, or joking like pharmaceutical-sales conventioneers. In fact, the traits that make a successful writer—the necessity of doing solitary work, sustained attention paid, the pleasure of being distinct from the pack—are antithetical to those of a successful conference-goer. We literary types aren’t (yet) used to functioning in packs. I’m reminded of the Jules Feiffer cartoon featuring his famous leotard-clad modern Dancer, who (as I remember it) performs her “Dance to Art”—a dance to music concerts, a dance to theatre, a dance to dance, a dance to all the arts except literature: “It’s not group.”
AWP is a manifestation, and an agent, of a new system that mainstreams writers and makes literary community a vital aspect of literary identity. Back in the olden days, we could remain in our garrets easily enough, emerging only to go through other people’s trash in search of breakfast, make fresh blankets out of old newspapers, give poetry readings in downtown bars, and teach composition. Today we are denizens of workshops and writing programs and public readings, defining ourselves not just by what we write but how (and how well) we come together.
To succeed as an author these days, you are encouraged, even required, to advertise yourself—to create a persona that defines (and perhaps limits) your aesthetic associations and your voice, to engender your own creative opportunities, and to woo your potential readers. Publishers large and small, literary and nonliterary, can be reliably expected only to print and distribute a few copies of your book on paper and/or on a screen. The rest is up to you, the entrepreneurial writer, with your firm handshake and shiny smile—so you’d better be as gregarious as a Chicago city councilmember.
The imperative to present a socialized literary self—to have a Facebook page, to pepper the Internet with tweets, to maintain a personal website—has become almost as essential to the success of a literary writer as literary quality. Nowhere else is this imperative enacted as it is at AWP—and nowhere else is it as vigorously resisted. One of the conference’s compelling characteristics is the stress between a writer’s desire to be a solitary singer and his or her efforts to be a distinctive voice in a larger chorus.
You make your way through the hotel hallways and lounges, the cash-bar receptions for MFA programs and magazines celebrating their 17th anniversary, the ballroom-sized poetry reading, and the aisles of the book fair showcasing the small presses or magazines you should buy books or journals from, whose publishers just might take your business card (don’t you have a business card? Of course you have a business card) and remember you a year from now when you write to offer your new manuscript and resist the urge to remind them that you were the one with the madras headband who discussed Sara Teasdale with them, the one who could not stop trembling.
Confronted with aisles and hallways and readings and lobbies and bars full of voluble poets and prose writers, no matter your steely resolve, no matter your level of accomplishment, no matter your Zen resolve, you compare and despair (as they say in AA). You wonder if like Thomas Pynchon you could fetishize your reclusiveness, but decide sadly that if you took to your bed and ordered room service for four days, appearing on Sunday only to disappear in dark glasses, no one would notice. Becoming famous for your anonymity would be like trying to get a reputation for always writing in black ink.
Wandering lonely as a cloud outside the Anne Carson megareading, you imagine Emily Dickinson at AWP, hiding in the 19th-floor linen closet and sliding breathless notes under the door, wafting like a bat after hours through the darkened book fair, stroking the spines of the books, helping herself to the complimentary Tootsie Rolls.
Yet you feel a peculiar rush. Here are 9,300 writers doing what you are doing, all of you extracting yourselves from your isolation. You are reminded, early on in the weekend, that you all share the same insecurities and reservations about being a writer among writers; in fact, that’s one of the things that you talk about most and that brings you together. Beyond that bond, you are united in love for the worthy written word. Your daily literary life may usually be a convention of orthodontists, but not this weekend; you are surrounded by people committed to your same misunderstood, often undervalued, and usually unprofitable enterprise.
So you make conversation, fearful and excited. You buy more books than you will have life enough to read. You attend AWP’s reading and its panels, which cover everything from prosody to pastiche to book promotion, and which serve as an MFA refresher course, and where you are a listener and student, all by yourself. You slap a few backs; you exchange a few cards; you maintain eye contact. You are a lone wolf pretending to be a dog. And maybe at night when the conference lapses exhausted into silence, you write a poem.
