Ponder

[michaelmingo]

In 1983, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) discovered unsafe concentrations of radioactive dirt at several homes in Montclair. Three years later, DEP announced plans to m...

A few days ago, I had a poem published over at Cross Review, an online literary magazine dedicated to New Jersey and New York writing.  It’s called “Hell No, We Won’t Glow,” and it’s about the time the state of New Jersey tried to turn my hometown into a waste site.  Special thanks to Jen DeGregorio, editor of Cross Review, for accepting the piece!

[michaelmingo]

Not Novel, Yet Original

"I have no proof, but I'm sure That someone--let's say it's you-- is thinking exactly what I'm thinking..."

I talk about poetry a lot here, but I also write it.  I have a new poem that’s been published over at Chicago Literati as part of their “starving artist” issue (linked above).

Also, in the near future I will have another poem due out in Cross Review, a new lit mag focused on cross-Hudson literature.  I hope you’ll enjoy both.

[michaelmingo]

This week’s book haul:

1) Rhinoceros and Other Plays, by Eugène Ionesco

2) The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

[michaelmingo]

Poem of the Week: “The poet has come back...” by Margaret Atwood

This week, we engage in some navel-gazing with a poem about what it means to be a poet.  From her 2007 collection The Door, this is Margaret Atwood’s “The poet has come back...”  (The link is to an article in the Washington Post by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, highlighting two of Atwood’s poems: “The poet has come back...” and “Heart”.)

“The poet has come back...” belongs to a genre  I like to call the “thesis poem”.  In a thesis poem, the poet presents a philosophical position at the outset and then expands on that position as the poem progresses.  This kind of poem is characterized by a detached, omniscient speaker and the use of rhetorical devices in addition to poetic ones.

The first stanza of “The poet has come back...” certainly feels like a thesis statement, one that clarifies the title:  “The poet has come back to being a poet / after decades of being virtuous instead” (lines 1-2).  The poem establishes its theme immediately: “being virtuous” is incompatible with “being a poet.”  

This is, admittedly, a vague thesis, but it at least provides a jumping-off point for the discussion.  In the following paragraphs, I will both clarify the argument of the poem and note the devices that the speaker uses to convey the thesis.

Based on the poem’s text, Atwood appears to use “virtuous” to mean “comfortable” or “nice.”  She implicitly links “virtue” to greeting card images and sentiments: “deferential smiling,” the “baking of cookies,” and saying “I’m a nice person really” (lines 13-14).  That last item says a lot, phrased in such a way to suggest insincerity.  If there’s one thing poetry shouldn’t be, it’s insincere.

The poet’s proper disposition, this poem would argue, is more confrontational.  To this end, the reader is presented with the imagery of Old Testament justice.  Back in the time of “thundering vengeance,” you could “hymn the crushed skulls of your enemies / to a pious chorus” (lines 6, 11-12).  Verse ought to be powerful and purposeful, befitting of battle.  This is how the poet should think.

So how does the speaker convince the reader to see things her way?  She uses plenty of rhetorical devices, imitating the manner of a delivered speech.

One of the speaker’s first moves is the use of a rhetorical question: “Can’t you be both?” (line 3).  This question occurs immediately after the thesis; the speaker raises a potential objection--that the thesis presents a false dilemma--so that she may respond to it.  In this case, her response is a quick qualification: it’s impossible to be both “in public” (line 4).  Now the poet can pivot.

Second, the piece uses tons of repetition, building momentum along the way.  Four lines begin with “and,” and the description of “virtue” uses “no” before each and every item.  These are examples of polysyndeton, or the use inclusion of multiple, normally omitted conjunctions.  Repeating “and” or “no” not only helps build rhythm, but also lets the speaker emphasize each item in a list, giving the argument more apparent heft.

Repetition factors into the third, and most inspired, rhetorical device: the closing call to action.  Tired of the niceties, the insincerity, the speaker encourages the audience to seize this moment, this opening for powerful poetry: “Time to resume our vigil, / time unlock the cellar door, / time to remind ourselves...”  Like a politician riling up the base, the speaker brings the audience to elation.

Whether “The poet has come back...” presents a compelling argument is up for debate, but structurally it is a model for using poetry to present a thesis.

[michaelmingo]

Even Early Focus Groups Hated Clippy

Women in early focus groups said the animated paper clip was leering at them. Microsoft moved forward with the feature anyway.

Writing for The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer discovers that the much-maligned Microsoft Word assistant Clippit owes its reputation in part to male-centric design sensibilities.  Women in the focus groups thought the assistants “were too male and that they were leering at them.”  Yet the brass ignored their concerns and--voilà--we were given Clippit.

[michaelmingo]

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia seem unlikely friends.

In an era of increasing polarization, bad faith and general hostility, it’s always good to be reminded that friendships can transcend politics.  I was aware of Scalia and Ginsburg’s frequent outings to the opera, but this article by David G. Savage from the Los Angeles Times traces their friendship back over three decades, before either was on the Supreme Court.

Also: now I want to go to a Nationals’ game just to find John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy in the stands.

[michaelmingo]

The parties set no end date for royalties, apparently contemplating that they would continue for as long as kids want to imitate Spider-Man (by doing whatever a spider can).

Elena Kagan’s majority opinion in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment

[michaelmingo]

With this week’s poems setting up rendezvous with Life and Death, how about a song about confronting some other abstraction?  Here’s Guster’s “Come Downstairs and Say Hello.”

[michaelmingo]

How is it that more women are participating in sports, yet they are receiving less coverage from television news?

For Pacific Standard, Maya Dusenbery looks at how television news covers women’s athletics in the United States.  Although the ongoing FIFA Women’s World Cup has drawn respectably-sized TV audiences, outlets such as ESPN’s SportsCenter do not provide viewers much exposure to women’s athletics.

[michaelmingo]

This week’s book haul (yay library book sales!):

1) Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton

2) Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson

3) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by David Hume

4) Women in the Middle Ages, by Frances Gies and Joseph Gies

5) Still Foolin’ ‘Em: Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys?, by Billy Crystal (a gift for my brother)

6) Jazz, by Toni Morrison

7) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, by John W. Dower

[michaelmingo]

Poem of the Week: “I Have a Rendezvous with Life” by Countee Cullen

For this week’s analysis, I’ll be looking at a piece by one of my favorite poets, Countee Cullen.  “I Have a Rendezvous with Life,” one of Cullen’s earliest poems, gives me the chance to discuss how one poem may respond to another.

Cullen’s poem is a response to “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” the best known work by the WWI poet Alan Seeger.  As such, it would be helpful to briefly consider Seeger’s poem first; that way the foundation of the response may be firmly established.

The speaker of Seeger’s poem is mentally preparing himself for a battle (which, given the poet’s biography, is not surprising).  The speaker is not itching for battle or seeking glory.  However, the speaker knows that he has no choice in the matter–he is morally obligated to press forward.  Thus, he concludes by saying he “shall not fail that rendezvous” (line 24).

Cullen’s speaker, meanwhile, faces not heated battle but an uncertain future. The speaker is maturing, slowly growing older, and it’s not clear what that mean for him.  In this regard, the speaker’s “rendezvous with Life” is more philosophical than his counterpart’s “rendezvous with Death,” but it is no less inevitable.

Now that we’ve got a basic understanding of the two poems, we can turn to the specific ways in which Cullen responds to Seeger.

First, Cullen’s poem incorporates some of the same structural elements as Seeger’s poem.  Both poets repeat their title phrases to build a rhythm, and in both poems the speakers conclude by affirming their dates with destiny.  Note that Cullen does not completely mimic Seeger’s form. Instead, he chooses a few key elements, which is all that is needed to draw a connection.

Second, Cullen makes reference to some of the images that run through Seeger’s poem.  “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” consistently draws on the images of spring: “apple blossoms,” “blue days and fair,” and “the first meadow-flowers” (lines 4, 6, 14).  The season of rebirth will mark his meeting with death.  Once again, Cullen makes the connection to Seeger’s poem simple: “I have a rendezvous with Life / When Spring’s first heralds’s hum” (lines 5-6).  One quick reference, and the connection is clear.

Finally–and this is where Cullen’s poem truly becomes a response to Seeger’s–we have how the two poems consider more pleasant possibilities.  Seeger’s speaker is certain that a comfortable life would be preferable: “God knows ‘twere better to be deep / Pillowed in silk and scented down / Where love throbs out in blissful sleep” (lines 15-17).  This scenario is not accessible to the speaker, but it’s one he clearly wishes he could.

Cullen’s speaker, though, is not so sure that his counterpart has it right.  He raises the speaker’s position from “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” in such a way as to encourage doubt:

Sure some would cry it’s better far To crown their days with sleep Than face the road, the wind and rain, To heed the calling deep. (lines 7-10)

Simply prefacing a proposition with “sure” prepares the reader for a “but” or “however” down the road.  Also note how Cullen uses the exact same “sleep / deep” rhyme as Seeger, making clear that he has Seeger’s poem in mind.

Where Seeger’s poem presents certainty (unappealing as it is), Cullen’s poem seems more ambiguous, the fears presented more abstract.  In fact, I believe one of Cullen’s craft decisions which diverges from Seeger’s original highlights this difference in approach.  It’s all in the meter.

“I Have a Rendezvous with Death” is written in iambic tetrameter; with a healthy of dose of irregular feet, every line of the poem consists of eight syllables, alternating unstressed and stressed syllables: “I have a rendezvous with death / At some disputed barricade” (lines 1-2).  The meter here is unrelenting, driving the reader to the battlegrounds and the speaker’s inevitable fate.

On the other hand, “I Have a Rendezvous with Life” uses ballad meter.  In other words, the poem alternates between lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter: “I have a rendezvous with life / In days I hope will come” (lines 1-2).  Although ballad meter is often used for narratives, when compared to the forceful iambic tetrameter of Seeger’s poem, the metrical structure seems more reflective, more lyrical.  It seems more fitting of Cullen’s philosophical approach to the inevitable.

I hope that this quick exploration of “I Have a Rendezvous with Life” will encourage you to few more poems as conversations between poets; understanding those conversation can help one appreciate the craft of poetry.  At the very least, I hope you’ll read more of Countee Cullen’s work, because it is uniformly excellent.

[michaelmingo]

I made a poem going to sleep last night, woke in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Offering”

[michaelmingo]

Since the most recent poem of the week dealt with unconventional uses of sand in verse, I felt like sharing a song with a more conventional approach: a religious one.  Here’s Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand.”

[michaelmingo]

Unless our waiting implies knowledge and action, we will find ourselves waiting for our own destruction and nothing more.

Thomas Merton, "Letter to an Innocent Bystander"

[michaelmingo]

This week's book haul (from the library):

Raids on the Unspeakable, by Thomas Merton

[michaelmingo]

I feel this comic hits the implicit feeling behind 90% of all conversations.

(Source: Wondermark, “One Easy Trick to Make Any Conversation Interesting”)

[michaelmingo]

Poem of the Week: “How to Write About Sand” by Jessica Wiseman Lawrence

For this installment, I’m going to highlight a poem that was published just last week in Jersey Devil Press: “How to Write About Sand” by Jessica Wiseman Lawrence.  As the title suggests, the poem is concerned with how one might convey an experience through poetry.

“How to Write About Sand” is structured into five couplets.  The first two couplets present ways of talking about sand that the speaker rejects, while the last three couplets present options that the speaker finds more compelling.  The speaker does not state explicitly, however, what distinguishes the one group from the other, or why that distinction matters.  Finding that out is an exercise left to reader.

So let’s run through that exercise, shall we?

The ways of talking about sand mentioned in the first two couplets are all clichés.  Sand is routinely connected to “time,” “sunsets,” and “sinking” (lines 1-3).  These are connections that are made so often that they don’t impart any strong emotions onto the reader.  They aren’t striking visuals or witty turns of phrase; they’re just overly-repeated words.  If the speaker wants to use sand to convey an emotional message, such commonplace tropes will not serve her purpose.

How then should one write about sand?  I see two threads running through those last three couplets.  The first is an emphasis on sand as a tactile substance:  it is “in her hair, on her scalp” (line 5).  In fact, the poem keeps returning to sand’s relationship to the body, how it gets beneath your nails and past your lips.  Getting a feeling from sand almost requires actually feeling it.

The second thread is the notion that sand a substance that refuses to leave.  The speaker finds the sand in her nails and bed “a week later,” and she “will never forget the sand in [her] mouth” (lines 7, 9).  Sand stays with a person not just physically but also mentally, as memories, as ideas of a past impressions.

So now we have two aspects of sand the speaker wants to draw out: it is tactile, and it is constant.  We just need to determine to what end these aspects of sand are employed.

The most likely answer is that the speaker is using sand to express her feelings about a past relationship.  For one, relationships tend to both be physical and have lasting emotional impressions.  For another, it helps explain the “her” in the third couplet, a figure distinct from the speaker’s “I.”

What are the speaker’s specific feelings regarding this past relationship?  Those are harder to pin down–and, given the title, perhaps not necessary to know.  However, the final couplet might offer a few clues.  

For one thing, sand in the mouth is an unpleasant feeling.  It dries your tongue and tastes terrible.  From this we can guess the relationship left a bitter impression.  For another, after biting on the sand, the speaker “remembers that it is not a fragile thing, at all” (line 10).  Biting sand suggests resistance, but sand–the memory of a relationship–does not give way easily.  This is a relationship that the speaker wants to move past, but the nature of the relationship will not permit her.