On the subject of making....
This is an essay from last year's poetry portfolio created in a workshop taught by visiting poet, Maureen McLane. Rereading this today, I was struck by how relevant it remains to my current work; my thesis, our online journal, and in my personal relationship to writing. I hope that this essay and some of the poetry and prose discussed strikes you.
It’s very difficult to separate the idea of project and poetry, of poetry and prose, when a writer is trying to understand what writing is, and how to make more difficult distinctions between writing and life. The idea of work can feel like the work of projects and less like the learning how to build habits of intuitive writing. I appreciate Dorothea Lansky’s directive in Poetry is Not a Project to think of poetry as a habitual and ongoing process and above all, a journey, apart from the constraints of end goals and notions of careful planning. The idea that “poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up,” demonstrates a kind of organic style to poetry and prose alike.
Pablo Neruda contributes to this dialogue in 'Toward an Impure Poetry,' with an exploration of the underbelly of poetics, urging would-be craftsmen to allow themselves to be “splattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.” It is a call to wear who we are honestly, and to revel in the most wretched part of ourselves, in spite of the constructs of societal and cultural niceties. Frank Bidart also questions this notion of self versus culture when he notes in 'Stardust,' that although our ‘culture’ gives weight to “specific kinds of making,” that culture does “not understand how central making itself is as a manifestation and mirror of the self, fundamental as eating and sleeping.”
My earliest question is this: how do you honor both the instinctual nature of creative inspiration, the earthiness of duende, and the idea of man as creator, homo faber, working within a society of creators? Where does the work of the worker intersect with his “Fine Work With Pitch and Copper,” and how do I begin that kind of work in prose and poetry?
For me, the original drive to study poetry came from a desire to strength my prose by learning how to be concise. I liked to think of it as taking up the art of woodworking to improve my carpentry skills. The idea was to learn how to avoid long-winded, Whitman-esque strategies for expression, and to become economical and punchy. I now see that I although I came in to the discipline with pure intentions, I was operating under the misconception that ‘long’ always meant ‘frivolous,’ or worse, ‘self-important.' In re-reading Whitman, I can see the each line as its own kind of microcosm of expression, managing to be both self-contained and transcendent.
Allen Ginsberg brings some of that same sensibility to the work of 'Howl.' It was inspiring to hear about his struggles to create “short-line patterns” that honored his “imagist preoccupations,” and how this work came into being as a result of freeing himself from that constraint. Ginsberg notes that the structure of the piece “depend(s) on the word ‘who’ to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention." Gwendolyn Brooks’ 'The Pool Players Seven at the Golden Shovel' utilizes ‘we’ in much the same fashion, creating a similar effect. Brooks’ work differs from Ginsberg’s in its stark precision. The compactness of each image demonstrates a kind of restraint- wholly different in style than the audacious bursts of thought and description that characterize “Howl”. Both works demonstrate the skilled work of thoughtful poets. The trick is how to find the method that best serves the expression of your own thoughtfulness.
Writing in centos was an excellent discovery of how different I could be with my self-expression. I enjoyed the opportunity to utilize lines I had long coveted from other creative works in a piece that represented not only my particular aesthetic taste, but also the works that resonate most with me.
Of all of the formwork I undertook during the last year, I felt particularly engaged with the sestina-reading them, studying them, and discovering my own work in them. As many of my colleagues have noted, the magic of Elizabeth Bishop’s work in ‘Sestina,’ the work of the form itself and her mastery of it, lies in the ‘low frequency’ of repetition, allowing for the development of narrative. Unlike the obsessive repetitions of the villanelle or the definitive rhyme scheme of the sonnet, the sestina has a misleading kind of ease to it. It feels, on first glance, freer than other classic modes of form. But the sestina is anything but easy- it is complicated and demanding. Bishop remains committed to following form to the letter. Each end-word remains consistent throughout the poem, concrete nouns that do not allow for shifts in connotation. The specificity of each word makes the Bishop’s work all the more noteworthy. As my colleague Danielle Loughran pointed out, words like ‘almanac’ present such a challenge in being repeated because the meaning cannot be changed. It requires a different kind of effort to reinvent that image so that each time it occurs feels fresh and new, allowing the narrative ‘story’ of this poem to be carried through. Although the literal meaning of each word may not change, as Denise Levertov tells us, the “method of apperception” utilized by reader, and to a larger extent, the characters themselves, is continuously changing. “House” begins as a literal dwelling in which the child and the grandmother carry out their days, and by the end the image of a "house" has come to represent a yearning for family and a sense of loss as the child longingly sketches out a memory of what ‘home’ used to mean.
The construction of my own sestina did begin as Levertov says, with myself being "brought to speech”. Using ‘found’ work in the form of an old free verse poem I wrote a few years ago, I did what I could to bang and shape those “inscapes of experiences” into something more precise. I first had to determine the work of the ideas I had presented-if Frank Lloyd Wright observed that “the reality of the building is the space within it, to be lived in,” then it was clear to me that the first draft of this poem was just wallpaper without a wall to hang on. My poem needed a foundation and quite a bit of drywall to make itself be heard. Implementing those ideas in a sestina gave the poem the structure it was craving, allowing me to condense ideas and images that weren’t packing enough punch, and to elaborate on those that were. In working ‘organically,’ I allowed myself the leeway to play with the ending words in ways that changed and broadened meaning. I was surprised by the result. It was an education to see my little free verse riff stretch itself into a full-blown work of organic poetry with its intrinsic form fully asserting itself.
Having been preoccupied with all things form, both organic and otherwise, closed and open, free and formal, I found Henry Matthews’ 'Histoire' to be a refreshing and witty satire on the systematic institution of form itself. When Lyn Hejinian tells us in her essay, 'The Rejection of Closure,' that “two dangers never cease threatening in the world: order and disorder,” Matthews’ illustrates this idea by fashioning a poem in form that tears at the fabric of its own being.
This sestina is presented much like a prosaic scene-a man and woman, ‘Seth’ and ‘Tina,’ meet for at date “in the midst of an overcrowded militarism.” The names of the characters act as a nod to the form itself, with the remaining six words, ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ ‘Fascism,’ ‘Maoism,’ ‘Racism,’ ‘Sexism,’ repeated in classic fashion until ‘Seth’ and ‘Tina’ come together, “gasping with appreciative racism, both together sink into the/revealed glory of sexism.”
What’s novel about this work is the narrative capability of the underlying story, the way it unites both form and idea while the other hand breaks it apart. When the poem begins, we, as readers, witness subjects who step around these end words like land mines, giving the customary weight of each word the kind of significance we associate with the ‘isms’ of our culture. At the same time, this doesn’t feel like a sestina at the moment; the syntax and diction are simple but with elongated lines, the tone is conversational. As the narrative continues, the meaning of each individual word and its connotations and implications breaks down, with each word acting as both symbol and a stand-in for another, more literal object. When Seth and Tina have progressed from bar, cab, apartment, to “Fingertip sliding up his nape, nails incising his soles, teeth nibbling his/fascism,” a breakdown of the ‘ism occurs, and a sense of intimacy takes hold beyond the pre-fixed boundaries in place of the beginning poem. These words exist only to serve the work of the form, and nothing else, and are therefore, free of their original constructed meaning, while Seth and Tina have both literally and metaphorically united to create disorder in ideal and order in poetic form.
There is something profoundly liberating about watching the constraint of language transform idea and story in such a way. I think Denise Levertov would agree that Matthews has succeeded in utilizing form to make his content feel like a revelation.
Translation has of late acted as a kind of practice for working with and against the bounds of expression, not only though the thoughts of another writer, but also through my own unique way of communicating through my understanding of another language. George Steiner was a believer in the idea that “all acts of communications are acts of translation,” and it was in this spirit that I delved into the work of German poet, Rose Ausländer, endeavoring to discover what I could communicate of her strong, stark verses. Playing with the language led to me to older works of language in the English family, investigating the style of an Angle Saxon Bee Blessing, its old High German derivative, and Ausländer’s undertaking of similar thematic elements.
The bee itself has long represented the value of hard work, of the value of making. It seems fitting to call forth its blessing for my poesis, that it may guide me, and charm my “fine work with pitch and copper.”
A final charm for the making of the work we second years undertake this semester, courtesy of Tom Pickard, from The Ballad of Jamie Allan:
