On a Lighter Note

I did watch the Academy Awards last night. You could say my recent comments on celebrity and groupy-ness were well-timed, though I can't say I intended a connection.

Onward. Bearing in mind that birds, dogs and horses cannot tell you what month it is, here's a warm fuzzy for Monday and the conclusion of this particular February:

YouTube - Puppy vs. Cat

And in case you missed this kid on TV, as I did . . . . (You might want to turn your volume down a notch if you're not at home alone. Are we watching a maturation from the first clip to the second or is it something else?)

YouTube - Crazy yodeling

YouTube - Taylor Ware 2010 - He Taught Me How To Yodel

Here's a calmer voice on a different subject entirely:

YouTube - Epic and Honest Mobile Home Commercial


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GROUP POETRY, Conclusion

Left: A Writing Workshop Round Table

Here again is Grace Paley's humble, strong, dignified, soft-spoken "Walking in the Woods." After reading it a dozen or so times for its own sake, try substituting "writing" or "art" every time she says "tree" or "life." It would conclude, "If you've liked art, you do it."

Grace Paley: Gone | The Ruth Group

As for M.F.A. programs, many people serious about writing have expressed concern about the formation there of a single, homogeneous brain and spirit, formed perhaps by a single megalomaniac of a poet-professor’s influence on (intimidation of?) vulnerable students and colleagues. Maybe a single jackass in authority or widespread neglect cannot kill the future of an acolyte if he’s a genuine writer-in-waiting. Emily Dickinson. Gerard Manley Hopkins. J.D. Salinger. But what if that’s not true? What if he can be killed?

And even if those three icons and other soft voices survived some tyrannical authorities and doctrinaire influences—teachers, peers, pillars full of migrating ideologies—why should they have to? Conversely, why should a bellicose, doctrinaire student be permitted to make life more complicated for honest, earnest classmates or a well-intentioned, competent teacher, who might be the next Hopkins but is working here to pay the rent, along with spreading The Word?


Left: Walt Whitman?


There’s no magic formula for the right mix of community and solitude in improving artistic expression. My concern about an excess of community and fawning over celebrities as well as each other is based on impressions I’ve gathered at dozens of readings and several conferences over the last two or three decades.

However, I’ve also met some very nice people at various levels of experience in the writing game. I entirely understand and cautiously agree with the arguments for a greater sense of community among writers; it can be educational and good for the enterprise. But it’s also important to keep our eyes on a prize that's a shape shifter. One thing seems certain: it does not need to include so much Hollywood hero worship and poetry circle chit chat in the garden club tradition.

Now listen, for I mean this: I have been very pleasantly surprised by the relative absence of flagrant egomania I’ve perceived among celebrity writers. When I was just starting to attend these affairs, I expected to see a series of wannabe Hemingways strutting in with a big game rifle in one hand, a fifth of whiskey in the other, and boxing gloves draped around his neck. His reading partner might be Sylvia Plath, hands tied behind her back so she could not get to the oven gas.



In fact, I’ve seen almost none of such histrionics,

(left: histrionics)

at least from the writers themselves--almost no Famous Dude Syndrome and lot of Agreeable Regular Folks looking for the right porch swing. (Though I do wonder what the writers think about each other and The Work once the gatherings and fawning are finished).

So it’s apparently the “students,” the apprentices (again, ages 18 – 80), at these venues that make me need to play Killjoy and re-assert the obvious: real art is not a party. It's lonesome, hard, painstaking work. Like caring for a child, you do it out of love more often than you do it for fun. For occasional, exquisite hours, it's both. But worthwhile talk about writing is more likely in living rooms and coffee shops than self-celebrating galas. When wine, cheese, clatter and flattery enter the room, good thinking, talking, and writing run the other way.

Grace Paley: Gone | The Ruth Group



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Donald Hall, "Names of Horses"

Name of Horses - A poem by Donald Hall - American Poems

There's one more installment to go, probably tomorrow, on poetry conferences and M.F.A. programs. But in the visitor comments last time, K gave us a fine poem by the late Jane Kenyon. In response, I offer this one, by her surviving husband, Donald Hall. For me, it has something important in common with Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays."

It's possible that Hall doesn't need every detail prior to the final line; but rhythm, music, along with timing and preparation are subtle matters. If you listen for places where his vowel sounds and meter really enhance the showing and the telling, I think you'll find some. I'm willing to pay tribute to these horses for the fairly short time Donald Hall asks of me. In the poem as a whole, I find an unusual dignity, decorum, elegance, and much of that has to do with the solemn pacing of Hall's tribute.

Besides, the last line has always given me shivers. The list of names strikes me as a daring move by Hall, but I still think it works perfectly as an elegiac conclusion. In the end, how much more praise can we offer than naming the departed? At some point, reciting a list of honors becomes a tedious show. Whatever else the guy was, he was James. Pointing out that he was summa cum laude might almost be an insult. He was not some Latin phrase; he was not Vice Present of Trinket Manipulation; he was James.

Name of Horses - A poem by Donald Hall - American Poems

I came across "Names of Horses" around 1980, which, I think, predates Donald Hall's meeting and courting of Jane Kenyon, never mind her illness and death; so those with a penchant for the biographical should not try to read the poem as a tribute to her. (For that, by the way, Hall has an entire book: The Best Day The Worst Day.)



I cannot explain away the misuse of "lay" just before the final line. It should be "laid"; there is a direct object. I cannot attribute the mistake to poetic license. License to do what? In three decades, shouldn't someone have caught it and changed it?

Tidbit: Bob Dylan's "Lay, lady, lay" is equally at fault grammatically. For reasons I'm unable to articulate, I can give Dylan the benefit of the doubt, but if we had never heard the line as we now know it, how un-musical or un-horny would it have sounded had Dylan given us "Lie, lady, lie/Lie across my big brass bed"?

Oh, I get it! Bad grammar is sexy. Without "lay" as a copulatory connotation and a demonstration that this guy is a man's man right out of the hills near Elkhorn City, Kentucky . . . without the cue of "lay," the girl might have thought he wanted her to take a nap. She might have wondered where the milk and cookies were. But no. This guy is no dreary philologist or that there girl would not be a layin' 'cross no brass bed, big, little or medium.

Gracious, one can miss so much in the pursuit of appropriate language.

Tidbit: in case someone is interested, we looked at another, very different Donald Hall poem here on November 10, 2010.

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'THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS.' GROUP POETRY, Part Two

Pix: Pie in the Sky




It's a winter Sunday, and it's been awhile since I've posted Robert Hayden's classic, "Those Winter Sundays," which is about humility and quiet, solitary work that goes unappreciated.

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

I also see or imagine a disproportionate amount of talking about writing as opposed to writing. “Talk, talk, talk” can infringe more than it should on “write, write, write”—which means, “revise, revise, revise.” Poet Linda Pastan once said she never considers sending a batch of her work to a magazine until she’s gone back to it at least 50 times. Long ago at a reading, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. informed the audience that his 200-page masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, was originally over 1,400 pages in typescript. And there is Faulkner’s famous dictum: “Kill your darlings," in which case your darlings are your words.

Poet Thomas Lux speaks of “boiling it down.” When a student returns with a rewrite, Lux often says, “Boil it down some more.” I suppose that might be bluster, but I doubt it; Lux strikes me as an honest, hard-working guy. Also consider: if an honest, earnest, smart writer can bear to cut something, it most likely needed to be cut. (And you don’t burn the old version; you put it in your junkyard drawer and, maybe, return to it someday for potential spare parts).

I also wonder if the kind of celebrity attached to professional writers at these affairs amounts to The-Poet-as-Rock-Star more than the poet as monk or mentor. In any case, Famous Dude Syndrome infringes more than it should on the actual work of any headliner poet.

It’s the work that needs to be studied, the work on the page more than the work at a reading, the work in solitude, along with other writers' commentary have said about that work or that poet. The only justification for readings is the fact that readers might get a glimpse of writing they didn’t know and will want to explore it further.

The value of a reading has little or nothing to do with the intended or accidental meaning injected into the work by the writer’s speaking voice. Homer’s been dead awhile now, yet mavens of the reading scene speak reverentially about the importance of the oral tradition begun by Homer. Should we quit reading Homer because we can’t hear him read aloud?

For several centuries now, writing has occurred on the page—and recently in cyberspace as well. If someone can’t connect to it there, hearing it read by its creator cannot rescue the essence of that work for that reader. Thinking that it does converts the text to a performance, a theatrical event. A typical play has two or three hours to get itself into an audience’s head and heart, after which it might not outlive any transitory enchantment that it caused. That should not be the case for poetry or fiction, which should be absorbed by the ounce, read and re-read, silently or aloud, in bed or in a coffee shop, one line or sentence at a time. The work can be memorized for its healing powers. It’s not fast food or a strip tease. It's a little jar of Truth and Beauty. Apply slowly. Repeat.

A reading, no matter how artful, is oratory more than writing; it’s a little like a night at the movies. Yes, of course, there’s some connection between the written text and what audiences hear at readings. It’s not an either/or proposition. I get that. But I’m not sure that those disagreeing with me—the majority, it seems—get the fact that one’s final, meaningful response to the written word is a private, quiet affair, a romance, or a battle, perhaps, between the written words and a reader.

My concern is that, in our Attention-Deficit, YouTube culture these days, the reward of a party atmosphere and instant gratification, the sense of the conference as a social club . . . all that eclipses the benefits of absorbing legitimate views, both the friendly and the challenging, from peers and celebrity teachers, about the work of both student and headliner. Workshops and readings can be helpful, to be sure, but it’s also easy for the face-to-face and voice-to-voice to override the eye-to-text experience. In a workshop we might remember the person who made the comment more than the comment itself. We might remember the celebrity’s hotness factor without remembering five words or two ideas from his reading.

Back to Hayden's winter Sundays . . . maybe I think of the polished shoes as the father's poems. They are what he made. I picture them sitting in a corner, near the door, not in the center of the living room where they deserve to be, but that's the way it is with so many labors of love, objects of quiet pride, products of our work. It's one more reason that isolation and alienation are such dominant themes in literature.

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden


to be continued . . .

Coleridge Again and the Question of Group Poetry

So much for Elkhorn city. Back to poetry we go. I intend this to continue some of the ideas posted last Tuesday, February 15, so here again is Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight."

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

How important are quiet and solitude in the self-exploration and study of the world required for creative writing? After all, serious writers—even the funny or entertaining ones—are aiming for some kind of larger Truth, among other targets. (Don’t ask them to admit that; it sounds embarrassingly self-important. But good writers and good readers alike know it’s a fact).

So I guess my concern grows from the groupiness I see—or imagine—in today’s American literary scene, where M.F.A. programs and writers’ conferences proliferate like bacteria. Some bacteria are good for us, and I’m not about to argue against pairs or groups thinking and talking about what writing should and should not be. If you hear enough responses, your own amorphous answer will be forming, whether you want it to or not. (If it’s not amorphous, if you think it has solidified, it’s not the answer).

Also, I’m hearing over and over at conferences and readings how writers gathering at a site form a “tribe.” I’ve heard “You are my tribe” more than once in the last few years. I guess that’s guess cozy and supportive, but it also feels uncomfortably trendy.

(By the way, I'm not very worried about these tribes being exclusive—it’s anybody’s guess which came first, the tribes going off to their own corners, or mainstream society’s drop-kicking them there).

So, yes, writers and artists are isolated, under-valued people who need group support, a sense of family, and a community of benevolent but frank critics. What I see or imagine at these events is a social bonding that might be worthwhile and reasonably honest, but is also deceptively kind—students and teachers alike. It feels like collective flattery, an inflated, artificial sense of excellence and self-importance among beginners and veterans alike. I'm not sure when meaningful collegiality becomes frat-boy chumminess, but I think we ought to be asking the question.

Can I prove it's a problem? No, but I try to remember that the prolific Yeats, who is surely on everyone’s Top Twenty List, probably has no more than 20 poems that are indisputably great. Of the writers who are celebrity teachers at these events, how many have produced a body of work or single poem that will be read, remembered, studied, admired 50 years hence?

I say that only to add some realism and perspective to the discussion, not to be mean. The writers themselves are probably all too aware of how tenuous their current status is, but I'm not so sure about the students, who might be ages 18 - 80 at conferences. Are they grounded in the reality of how mortal their work probably is? And even the work of their esteemed mentors?

Around ten years ago, in some office, I came across a year's worth (1969, I think) of Poetry Magazine, then and now one of America's most prestigious places to be published. I was amazed to find that only about 5 - 10% of the poets represented in that year's twelve issues were names I recognized. Other, more serious poetry scholars and zealots might spot more, but even so, it's bitter food for bitter thoughts.

More tomorrow or soon.

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TIDBITS: ELKHORN CITY, KENTUCKY

From Wikipedia, about Elkhorn City, Kentucky, hometown of country singer, Patty Loveless: "On October 16, 1882, the post office was renamed Praise for 'Camp Praise-the-Lord', a tent colony that was established by evangelist George O. Barnes for a revival there in August 1881."

I find that fascinating, and for some time, I've been considering a periodic Tidbit post like this, apropos of nothing. It could be one way to offset any excess of attention to poetry. But is it interesting to anyone else?

I've driven around several times in those mountains traversed by Interstate 81, so I must have been close to Elkhorn City.

In Wytheville, Virginia, I just crossed I-81 on I-77 while driving to and from Florida. I find it easy to romanticize the Blue Ridge in spring, summer, and fall,, including bluegrass music and rural living. Winter is another matter. In southbound snow flurries and, a month later, a northbound threat of icing, I just wanted the damned mountains to end.



It was a comment by some female country singer, possibly Loretta Lynn, that first made me re-think my idealization of that area. She, or her song, said the days were shortened a lot in the hollers--you're that deep down; it's that skinny in there. If there's any sun, it's on a mountaintop, and who can live there? Maybe the owner of a coal mine, with his a private, heated road upward?

One time in south-central Kentucky, a little west of I-75, I asked a gas station guy about a two-lane route I'd planned to take into the mountains and on to the coal country of Hazard and Harlan in eastern Kentucky, Loretta Lynn country.

"Is that road just too full of curves? I don't want to spend a whole day going 50 miles."

"Oh," he said of my road marked narrow and grey on the map, "I wouldn't go that way. If you break down, you don't who's gonna stop. Or why."

It was the kind of advice I was used to hearing about pockets of danger in urban blight. So, as I processed the unexpected info over days and weeks, I decided to call it justice: there are vicious people everywhere and the inevitable fear of the Other. And how about the way we all groove on fear, the dirty little secret that makes local TV news stations happy.

Yes, yes, I already knew all that, but the gas station guy gave it new life, made it palpable. In one of the areas I'd nominated to myself for the title of Paradise, or at least a Praise tent camp of my own making, not everybody was Doc Watson or Earl Scruggs. A native of the place had said so. For all I know, Doc and Earl are mean too, and that guy would be the first to tell me so.

But I'll go back. In southwest Virginia, even in winter, there are sloped pastures among the mountains, and they're dotted with cattle, including a lot of Black Angus. A few years ago on that stretch, I hit a pothole and lost a hubcap. I need to go fetch it, and that could take a awhile.
















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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight" : Solitude and Creativity

In the spirit of yesterday’s talk about poetry and art as more selfless, solitary activities than they seem to be in these days of bountiful M.F.A. programs and writers’ conferences, here is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s major poems, “The Frost at Midnight.”

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


I’d intended to post Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” in which the central metaphor is a stringed instrument that sits in a window, inviting the breeze to play upon its strings. So an Eolian harp poses a literal and a symbolic question central to Romanticism: who or what is making the music? The human who designed the harp and placed it there? The harp itself, unmanned? Or the wind?—which of course can be one of the gentlest or mightiest forces in the nature the Romantics so wholly revered.

In re-reading “The Eolian Harp,” however, I found it just too full of itself. Hamlet's line came to mind: "Words, words, words." I think “The Frost at Midnight” is a far more beautiful, elegant, and simply better poem. And like “The Eolian Harp,” it celebrates quiet observation, sitting back, noticing an infant, noticing the midnight hour and the world outside, letting the mind drift beyond rationality and consciousness into free association and the sleeping or waking dream states the Romantics valued so much. I've heard some of today's poets say that Witnessing means paying attention, really, really paying attention." The intent of the comment is to honor the act of witnessing. I like that, all of it.

A central concern of the English Romantics (1798 – 1830, give or take) was the extent to which the poet, or simply the human, could and should lie back in passiveness, give up the awareness of and attachment to Self, let Nature wash dreamily over him and fully experience the comingling of the human with the “one soul within us and abroad,” as Wordsworth called it.

That's somewhat similar to witnessing, and it raises a question from yesterday’s post: How important is the human? I remember one professor’s position: the first, older generation of Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge—could not part with, surrender themselves and their self-awareness the way their younger followers, Keats, Shelley, and Byron did. Keats, for example, seems entirely ready to leave his earthly self to join the eternal life he sees on the Grecian Urn or hears in the song of the nightingale; however, he cannot sustain the required act of imagination.

More tomorrow or soon. In case I end up changing it for some reason, here is the concluding sentence I plan for that post:

When wine, cheese, clatter and flattery enter the room, good thinking, talking, and writing run the other way.

Talk about self-indulgence and self-importance! But aren't I just smelling the roses? And I am a rose. Aren't you?

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